Joe Lennon

GrabMyTable is a new website that aims to provide visitors with access to customer reviews for restaurants across Dublin. It is elegantly designed and very simplistic in terms of what it displays to the visitor. Finding restaurants can be quite tedious however, unless you know the name of the restaurant you are looking for. You cannot browse by cuisine, for example, or find restaurants in a certain price range. Worst of all, you can’t see restaurants by area or location. Although I understand the minimalist approach the site owners are trying to take, it’s almost a bit too minimalist to be all that useful. There is no way of booking a table and there is no rewards scheme, like the one offered at rival site Menupages.ie. The nail in the coffin for me is that the site only lists Dublin restaurants.

Pros:

• Elegant Design
• Quick Sign Up
• Lots of Restaurants
• No ads

Cons:

• Dublin only
• Lack of Information (Opening Hours, Website, Facilities)
• Poor Navigation
• No bookings or rewards scheme

Score: 6/10

Visit GrabMyTable

I recently posted a short blog entry about my forthcoming book on CouchDB. A lot of you have been asking me for more information about the book, so I decided to put together a page with much more detail about it. The book is titled “Beginning CouchDB” and is going to be published in December 2009 by Apress Publishing. The printed version of the book will sell for a RRP of $34.99 in the United States, with the e-Book selling for $24.49. It will be roughly 300 pages in length, spread over thirteen chapters and 2-3 appendices. Its target audience will be people who have very little or no experience with Apache CouchDB, and will guide readers through getting the software installed on their computer, creating their first database, managing the database, using the tools that come with CouchDB and other basic topics. It will also explore some of the more advanced areas of CouchDB, such as Map/Reduce, the JavaScript View engine, replication and scaling a CouchDB deployment. The book’s cover image is shown below. I will post a larger image as soon as I get it!

As for how the book is coming along, it’s going very well! I’m not a full-time writer so all of my writing is done in the evenings or over weekends. I’m learning things I never knew about Couch all the time, and with each passing day I grow fonder and fonder of this excellent database server. The book’s page is up on Apress.com at the following URL: http://apress.com/book/view/9781430272373. This page can also be found through a CouchDB.org link - http://books.couchdb.org/beginning – thanks to @CouchDB on Twitter! It’s not currently available for Pre-Order but it should be in the not too distant future. It should also become available on Amazon.com soon.

I’m currently working with the guys in Apress to get the book into their “Alpha Program”, which allows you to purchase the e-Book now and get access to each draft chapter as it becomes available. When the book is complete you will of course get access to the finished work as an e-Book. Purchasing the book through the Alpha Program will likely cost $24.49.