iterativelearning

I’ve been working through David McFarland’s book on JavaScript and jQuery the last week or so and while the book itself is great (e.g., clear explanations, good tutorials), I’ve got a usability quibble with it.

I bought the digital version from Amazon. However, with no Kindle Reader, that meant the experience would be delivered through Amazon’s Kindle-for-Mac tool. But when I got to the sample code snippets, the font size was so small that it rendered it practically invisible.

From a learning standpoint, the code samples seem just about as important as the explanations that surround them. I guess in this sense, maybe it’s more than just a (usability) quibble.

Perhaps this is just a Kindle-for-Mac issue, but it would be nice to at least have a toolbar option for modifying point-size.

Ars Technica has an interesting piece on the potential for Amazon to use it’s next version of the Kindle to coordinate with digital textbooks. There’s talk that the new model will mimic a traditional hard-copy spec of 8.5 x 11. Price, as Cheng notes in her article, will play a significant factor if this rumor proves to be true.