All the little things

Purchases, 

Head first SQL, I read the reviews and liked the idea of the quirky style of learning which does seem to work for a lot of people, just not for me. 

The book just didn't work for me in the way I found it confusing about what I was actually supposed to do and actually a little bit of set up to get everything running. Perhaps for us more visual people picking a db with some sort of GUI would have been a lot of help. 

For next time I would pick a book that would err towards ms SQL, the book in it self was not a complete bust, I can now use select statements well which is helpful for digging out details. 

Note: I take pictures of the books to prove I read them, to jog my memory when I review my posts for learning and I am visual thinker, images break up the text.

Things learnt this week, 

ctrl + f5, to do a full refresh of a page, the browser will get new copies of images and does not rely on any caching.

When using selenium IDE, select will work, when brought across to NUnit c# via selenium IDE this will not work, the correct command is SelectElement.

Click before SelectElement works in selenium IDE, in NUnit all this does is end up highlighting the selection in the drop down not selecting the item. 

I often use ctrl + k + f to clean up selected code in visual studio 2013, just use ctrl + k + d and clean up the whole document. Code is often moved around without any formatting applied which makes it harder to understand, especially nesting. 

A c# operator I was not familiar with is the null coalescing operator, I can see how to it could be handy it is new to me so very clunky. The idea is nullable types can be checked for null whilst their value is being assigned, otherwise we can set a default value.

Object someObject = null;
Object anObject = someObject ?? new Object();

The above assignment to anObject reads as if someObject is not null assign anObject the value of someObject else anObject is assigned the value of newObject(). 

Use space bar to pause play any media in ff seems to work in chrome, handy for pluralsite.