On finding the time to learn

Zen and the Art of Programming: Antonio Cangiano, Software Engineer & Technical Evangelist at IBM: “The Pursuit of Excellence in Programming”

Related:

rc3.org: “Becoming a better programmer takes exercise”

Derek Silves: “After 15 years of practice…”

Peter Norvig: “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years”

Parsing HTML with your favorite language

This thread at Stack Overflow is just terrific. One for your bookmarks.

Related:

help.hackshackers.com: “What are the best tools for “scraping” data off a Web page for analysis in Excel or other software?”

Will Larson: “An Introduction to Compassionate Screen Scraping”

Michelle Minkoff: “How to Scrape Websites for Data without Programming Skills”

Firefox plugin: Outwit

Dan Nguyen: “Coding for Journalists 101 : A four-part series”

Prog-a-Month: “Easy HTML web scraping with Groovy and Java. (w/XOM)”

hacks/hackers teaming up with Mozilla on a course

This sounds like a fantastic opportunity for programmers who want to become familiar with journalism, and journalists to become familiar with programming.

Matt Linderman – “Mistakes happen. Character is revealed by how you handle them.”

37signals: Bad call, great apology. It should be something we all learn as children, that our culture should encourage, but somehow, that’s not the case, and so this speaks to us a special lesson.

YouTube: “Jim Joyce Tearfully Accepts Lineup Card From Galaraga”:

If you make a mistake, admit it. It doesn’t make you a mistake. By admitting it you can learn from it. Others can learn from it. And hopefully, there is growth.