Category: books

Computer Books

After finishing the Drupal 7 book I bought a few weeks ago, I decided, for some reason, to get back to a book that I bought back in April 2010 — Dino Esposito’s “Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX.” I started reading it not long after I bought it, but I put it down after reading the first few chapters and just never got back to it. It’s somewhat out of date now, but it’s still got some useful info in it.

I just finished the chapter on the Ajax Control Toolkit. Now, I’ve been using the ACT a lot at my current job, but it turns out there are several controls and extenders in there that could be pretty useful, and of which I was completely unaware. I’ve tended towards doing client-side stuff with jQuery, like pretty much every other web developer on the planet, but there are times where I think the ACT could have made things easier.

Drupal 7

This is one of the books I bought in ebook format from Packt last week. It’s a beginner/intermediate level book on Drupal 7, covering installation, configuration, and administration. It covers all of the basics (as far as I can tell) along with some of the more interesting parts. I’m about halfway through it. I find that I’m skimming over parts of it, since some aspects of Drupal are pretty obvious, if you’ve ever used a CMS before.
The formatting of the epub file, which I’m reading on my iPad, leaves a bit to be desired. I’m pretty sure that some special characters were lost in translation somewhere. There are a lot of places where there should probably have been an em-dash, and there is no em-dash, for instance. And I just came across a table that got screwed up so the text that should have been in the second column is instead just superimposed over the text that should have been in the first column. (The PDF file for the book looks fine though.)
I think I’ve been spoiled by O’Reilly’s ebooks. They generally have accurate and reasonable formatting for their PDF, epub, and mobi files.

Borders

I’m really sorry to see Borders going into liquidation and closing all their stores. There’s a good article about this on AnnArbor.com. (Ann Arbor is where Borders started out.)
Our local Borders, in Bridgewater, has been around for about 10 years, I think. I’ve spent a lot of time in there, poking through SF novels, computer books, comics, and CDs. I will admit that I’m one of those guys who often looked through books at Borders, then bought them through Amazon. I did buy a fair amount of stuff in-store though, especially when I had 30% or 40% off coupons from Borders Rewards.
There’s a Barnes & Noble at the Somerville circle, so I guess that’s where I’ll be going when I want to actually look at a hard-copy book before buying it.
There used to be a Waldenbooks (or maybe B. Dalton) right here in downtown Somerville, along with two different used book stores. Now, there are no book stores at all in Somerville. (One of the used book stores moved to Raritan, I think, and is probably still in business, but I haven’t checked lately.)
I can’t help wondering if brick & mortar book stores (and even hard-copy books) are on their way out. I like my Kindle and my iPad, and I like Amazon, but I’m not sure I’m ready to start buying and reading everything electronically.

Borders Stores Closing

I don’t see my local Borders on this store closing list. I buy most of my books at Amazon these days, but it’s nice to have a bookstore where I can go to browse through actual, physical, books, on actual shelves.

Around here, we’ve got one Borders and one Barnes & Noble, and not much else. In Somerville, we used to have one small bookstore for new books, and two used book stores. They’re all gone now, though I think one of the used book stores just moved to a different town.

I do hope Borders survives. I try and buy stuff there once in a while, even if it’s more expensive than Amazon, just to help keep them afloat.

Libraries

Mark Evanier on libraries — I too was issued an adult library card before I was old enough to have one, mainly because I’d outgrown the stuff in the childrens library. One of the first things I remember checking out was a science fiction anthology that contained Harlan Ellison’s story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”. It was the scariest thing I’d ever read, by far. (Up until that point, I’d mostly been reading Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown books.)

Somerville to join county library system

mycentraljersey.com is reporting that Somerville will be joining the Somerset County library system. I don’t know enough about the history on this to know why we weren’t *always* part of the Somerset County system, but it seems like a reasonable enough thing to do.

I only got my library card a few months ago, despite living in Somerville for more than ten years. And I haven’t actually used the card yet. I have a kind of sentimental attachment to libraries, since I used our public library in Roselle Park quite often as a kid, and because my brother Pat was a librarian.

I get most of my books through BookMooch or SwapTree now, or on the Kindle, so I don’t actually have much use for the library, but I’m glad we have one.

C# 3.0 Unleashed

I’ve been doing a lot of supplementary reading to try and get myself to the point where I can pass the 70-536 exam. I’ve found a couple of books on Safari that have been pretty useful. C# 3.0 Unleashed: With the .NET Framework 3.5, in particular, has a lot of useful content. I’m putting an Amazon link below.

I link to Amazon frequently on this blog, but I never got around to signing up for an affiliate account, so I just went ahead and did that, so if you buy the book from this link, I’ll make a buck or two. Oh, and I just figured out that ABP was interfering with the fancy Amazon links, so I had to go ahead and tweak that again. I like ABP for blocking the really intrusive ads that some sites have, but I’m finding lately that it’s blocking stuff that I actually do want to see. I may have to look into tweaking it a bit more, to let more stuff through.

Big books


Big books
Originally uploaded by andyhuey

I just got the last of the three books that I need to read to get my “Web Developer on Visual Studio 2005” certification. I bought the first book at Borders, new, but the other two I got used from Amazon, really cheap. And they both still have the 15% off exam coupons in them, so I’m actually saving more money on the exams than I paid for the books. So, good deal, assuming I follow through and take all three tests!

Catcher in the Rye

I finished reading Catcher in the Rye last night. I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to reading this book. There are a lot of other great books that I’ve never gotten around to reading. I think next up is maybe Catch-22 or For Whom the Bell Tolls. I’ve actually never read any Hemingway, and it seems like I should. I vaguely recall having a conversation with my father about a particular Hemingway novel that he liked. I can’t remember which one it was though.

Well, now that I’ve read Catcher in the Rye, and Salinger’s short story Laughing Man (which I read a year or two back), I should probably re-watch the Ghost in the Shell: SAC anime series. There are various references to Salinger throughout the series, and I think the series as a whole might make a little more sense, having read a bit of Salinger.