Color for Programmers

Good visual design matters in software and in visualization. Sadly, most of us engineers are lucky to put on two matching socks in the morning, much less master the subtle art of graphic design. Fortunately, there are resources for the rest of us.

• The Non-Designer's Design Book
• Color Scheme Designer 3
• Colors on the web
• Adobe's Kuler
• One Photograph, Five Color Schemes
• 0 to 255
• COLOURlovers
• net tuts
• Designing for the web
• ColorBrewer

...or just google for color scheme

Closure

I've heard nice things about Clojure. Stuart Halloway has a book (Programming Clojure) out through the Pragmatic Programmers. The book grew out of Stuart's Java.next series of articles. There's also a podcast.

Clojure, like Scala, is functional programming for the JVM. Scala (which I fooled around with a little) descends from the ML/Caml/O-caml family of languages with an emphasis on pattern matching and static typing with type inference. Clojure is a dynamic Ruby-influenced dialect of Lisp specifically targeted to the JVM (hence the j). Yet another programming language on the digithead's cool-technology-I-want-to-play-with list.

Update

• Clojure elevator pitch
• Clojure tutorial slides and video
• Matt Sears' Clojure links
• Mark Volkmann's Clojure tutorial
• Incanter is a Clojure-based, R-like platform for statistical computing and graphics
• Labrepl is an environment for exploring the Clojure language
• Clojure links from a commenter on Hacker News
• Thoughts on Clojure
• Book: Joy of Clojure