Category: books

ACM

A few months back, I blogged about ACM’s deal with Safari and Books 24×7, where ACM members can access a subset of these online libraries. At the time, the book selection on both sites seemed to be a bit out of date. Well, they’ve updated the selection on both sites today, and there’s definitely more useful stuff up there now. They’ve (finally) got some ASP.NET 2.0 stuff, including the “ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference” book by Dino Esposito, which is pretty useful. They even have some stuff on WCF and WPF.

The printing capabilities on Safari have gotten a bit more useful, too. I don’t remember exactly how it used to work, but it’s definitely easier to print a big chunk of text than it used to be.

I’m not sure that much has changed on the Books 24×7 site, though. I think there’s more .Net 2.0 stuff than there used to be, but I did a search on “Vista” and found nothing at all, initially. That’s not good. (I later found two Vista books that inexplicably did not show up when I searched for “vista”.) The Safari site has about four Vista books, which is OK, but not great.

Amazon history

I read a post on someone’s blog today that made me a bit curious. He mentioned that some other bloggers had been posting their first Amazon.com purchase. I decided to go back and check mine. It was on June 26, 1997, and I ordered two books: Mort, by Terry Pratchett, and the Sybase DBA Companion. Mort was a great, and very funny, novel. It was out of print at the time, and didn’t actually ship until May 17, 1998. At that time, Amazon had a service where you could order a book, and whenever a used copy became available, it would be shipped to you. I’m not sure if they do that anymore. So many people are selling used books through Amazon now, that it’d be pretty odd to find something that you couldn’t get from a secondary seller right away.

The other book I ordered, the Sybase DBA Companion, was pretty useful at the time, since I was just getting started on Sybase. I’ve since moved to Microsoft SQL Server, but a lot of the skills I developed working on Sybase are still useful, since Microsoft’s product was kind of a spin-off from Sybase, though it’s diverged a lot over the last ten years.

My second order with Amazon was on August 15, 1997, and was for a book called Programming for the Newton Using Windows . That sure brings back some memories! I don’t think I ever got around to writing anything more that a couple of trivial programs for the Newton, but it was fun to play around with Newton programming for a while. I’ve since given away my first Newton, and sold my second. I’m using a Palm PDA now, the i705. I still haven’t gotten around to giving it up in favor of a smartphone or anything like that. Maybe I’ll get an iPhone, and then I’ll have come full circle, in a way, back to an Apple PDA of sorts.

cataloging stuff

I just bought a license for Delicious Library, as part of a bundle of Mac apps from MacHeist. I haven’t really tried to catalog my CDs, DVDs and/or books at any time in the last twenty years, but I’m always at least slightly tempted to give it a go. If I did, I’d want to be able to sync my library to LibraryThing.com, so it’d all be out there on the internet too.

ACM

I’ve been playing around today with the online book access I can get through ACM. You can get access to about 500 books from Safari and 400 from Books 24×7. Mind you, there are thousands of books on the main Safari site, and thousands more on the main Books 24×7 site. A regular Safari subscription is $20 per month, and Books 24×7 is about $450 per year, so both those options are a bit expensive. There are some useful titles among the limited library of books available through ACM, but not too many recent ones. For instance, there’s a good bit of stuff on .Net 1.1, but very little on .Net 2.0. I don’t think I could just stop buying computer books, based on the selection available through ACM, but there is some good reference stuff there. There’s also not much you can do in the way of printing from either service, within the ACM section. Still, I’m going to try to keep this stuff in mind before running out and buying any more computer books, and I’m going to try to remember to seach these services the next time I’m trying to solve a programming problem.

Code Complete

I bought Steve McConnell’s Code Complete about 10 years ago. I never quite finished reading it, but I dusted it off at some point last year, and I’ve been reading a chapter every once in a while, when I get the chance. I just finished chapter 18, on code layout. Most of the stuff he’s writing about is stuff I know from experience at this stage in my career, but it’s still worthwhile to reinforce good habits occasionally. And, sometimes, he points out something that hadn’t occured to me, or brings up something I’m not familiar with. There’s a second edition out now that’s probably worth getting, but I think I’ll just try and finish the first edition before I worry about that.

Girl Detective

While googling for reviews of Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier series, I stumbled upon Girl Detective, a fairly interesting blog. It’s written by a young woman who does a lot of reading and, apparently, a fair amount of cooking. I noticed her making a number of mentions of a 50 book challenge. This is a pretty interesting concept — the idea that you should read 50 books over the course of the year, and blog on all of them. Maybe I’ll try that next year. Thinking over the books I’ve read this year, I don’t think I’ve come close to 50. If you count graphic novels, then maybe.