I absolutely love old computer books…
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
Tag: books
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My Tech Reading List for May
I got a number of books for free this past week:
- Head First PMP – When my friend Leigh Honeywell heard that I was taking a project management course later this month, she told me that she got this book for free at a conference and had no use for it. So she gave this book to me, and I’ll be reading it so that when the course comes around — it’s May 21st through 23rd — I’ll be at least familiar with the material.
And four books from Apress, courtesy of Julie Miller:
- Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More
- PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice, Second Edition
- Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP
- Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails
I’ll be reading them this month and posting my reviews here in Global Nerdy. Watch this space!
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A New ActiveMerchant Ebook
[Via Ruby Inside] ActiveMerchant is a new PDF-format ebook covering the ActiveMerchant Ruby library for handling payments. It supports a number of payment gateways, including PayPal, Authorize.Net, and TrustCommerce. It’s a brief 74 pages long and sells for a dirt-cheap $9. I’m going to order myself a copy later today.
John Resig writes about how much money he made writing his book Pro JavaScript Techniques (which, as of this writing, boasts a five-star rating on Amazon.com): after collecting a $7500 advance, which applied against future profits, it took him a year’s worth of sales for him to make an additional $246.30 in profit.
He also writes about other things he learned in the process. I’m reminded of what Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood wrote in a Twitter message — that for all but the hottest of tech topics (in which you are an undisputed master), rather than write a programming book, your money-out-to-work-in ratio might be better if you write about your topic in an ad-supported blog.
I’ve been quite impressed by the “Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby” series of books (I’ve got The Ruby Way and RailsSpace) as well as the work of series editor Obie Fernandez, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at RailsConf 2006. That — along with glowing reviews for both books plus my serious immersion into Ruby and Rails at TSOT — is why I’ve got Design Patterns in Ruby and The Rails Way on order. I’m looking forward to getting my paws on these books, and I’ll post reviews shortly afterwards.
(I’m normally pretty conservative when it comes to spending on computer programming books for the past little while, but that’s because evangelism rather than programming has paid the rent. That situation has changed somewhat.)
Both Design Patterns in Ruby and The Rails Way are in Antonio Cangiano’s set of recommended Ruby and Rails books. If you’re looking to get into either Ruby or Rails (or if you’re already into either and just looking for related reading material), check out his list.