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06.23.06

The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

Posted in Computing, Books at 12:46 pm by leingang

Prompted by several ads in Harper’s and a love-to-hate attitude to PowerPoint, I finally checked out The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint by Edward Tufte. A fun and thoughtful read.

Tufte, a professor emeritus of Statistics (i.e., not some crackpot) has strong ideas of how to convey information visually. He has a number of very highly praised books on the subject, too.

The author’s thesis is that PowerPoint actually obscures rather than improves communication. As a case study he details how poorly-constructed PP slides reporting on danger assessments of Columbia’s last flight may have led to an underestimation of the risk of reentry. Tragically, Columbia burned up attempting to reenter. On a much lighter side, Tufte points to the famous Gettysburg Address PowerPoint by Peter Norvig.

I won’t go far as to say PowerPoint is evil. But I agree with some of Tufte’s points. Starting with blank slides and filling in bullet points puts structure into your presentation where there is none and loses it where the relationship is more complicated. Because of the low screen resolution, presenting data in tables with PP is next-to-impossible, and visual representations of data have to be chosen very carefully to convey the proper message. If you must use PP, read this essay as a guide to make your presentations better.

12.05.05

Review of “No Nonsense XML Web Development with PHP” by Tom Myer

Posted in Books, PHP at 7:36 am by leingang

XML is, depending on who you ask, “One file format to rule them all”
or “most hyped technology” ever. One way to describe it is a
self-documenting file format with a simple syntax inspired by HTML.
But what is it good for?

What isn’t it good for? Anything can be stored in an XML format,
whether it’s web site content, data from an experiment, server logs,
whatever. Word processor and spreadsheet files saved by OpenOffice
are gzipped XML documents. XML can even be used to prescribe how one
XML document should be transformed into another, giving a nice
cross-platform method for (say) converting an OpenOffice file to HTML.
This is XSLT. With a few shell scripts and utilities, an entire web
site can be managed, publishing content in different formats, without
a full-featured scripting language.

But the base XSLT can’t do everything (for instance, insert the
current date), and so it’s nice to have the support of a scripting
language like PHP. PHP has its fans and haters, but its popularity
cannot be denied. It has a simple syntax and data model (in
particular, hashes and lists can be treated pretty equally), it’s easy
to learn, and it has tons of libraries built in, or able to be added.

Combining the strength of XML with the simplicity of PHP, here comes
the aptly-titled No Nonsense XML Web Development
With PHP. The book is by Thomas Myer and is published by the good
folks at SitePoint (The book is generally not available in stores,
but can be purchased through their website). The author aims to
introduce the power and versatility of XML to the beginning web
professional. It’s a fun read, and although the average übergeek
may not learn much from it, it’s certainly worth recommending to a
newbie.

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