programming

What is a good example project?   What do you look for when you are reading documentation?   Are you looking for a project that almost exactly resembles the problem you are trying to solve?  Or, are you looking for something that is going to get you interested even if it might not seem directly relevant to your problem?   These are some of the questions I'm asked by startups looking to seed a new project with compelling documentation.   What examples should we use in our documentation? 

Here are some strategies that I've seen (and some I've used) in my time writing documentation:

There's been a lot of buzz around Guice for a while, everyone seems to be interested in the technology for dependency injection, but I still haven't seen any simple tutorials for using Guice with Maven.   In this series, I'm just going to provide the basics, how to start a Maven project to support a simple command-line Guice application, how to organize projects containing different implementations of common interfaces, etc.   This first installment really just provides a simple example project and walks you through the component parts of the application.

You can try to follow along, step-by-step, but you'll probably have an easier time if you checkout this example from GitHub here: https://github.com/tobrien/guice-series-1 

Prerequisites: Apache Maven 3 (Maven 2 might work, no promises), a JDK (I'm using OpenJDK 6 on Ubuntu), and I recommend you run Eclipse (Helios) with m2eclipse 0.12.  

A few people noticed that the PDF for Common Java Cookbook was removed from the site a few months ago, and I've been getting a steady stream of emails requesting access to these file. If you want to download the PDF for the Common Java Cookbook, sign up for an Account on this site, and go to the book download page. You can also signup for a mailing list if you are interested in updates. Happy reading.

Here's a graph of the traffic breakdown by OS from Google Analytics of the Common Java Cookbook:

Can you guess which colors represent which operating systems?

Edition 0.7 is out. You can read it on Scribd or online at the Sonatype site. This edition saw a marked improvement in the rendering of the PDF version of the book with the move to the newer docbkx plugin and the integration of the fop-images-pdf library to allow direct embedding of PDF vector art as figures.