Gadgetopia: Books http://www.gadgetopia.com/Categories/Books.html This is a sub-feed of the main Gadgetopia RSS feed. This feed displays entries from the "Books" category. The main Gadgetopia feed is available at http://www.gadgetopia.com/index.xml. en-us deane@deanebarker.net Copyright 2008 2008-04-20T04:46:32-06:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 The Incredible Shrinking Computer Book Section http://gadgetopia.com/post/6359 Let me ask you for your opinion here: do you think that the computer book sections at your local book store are shrinking?

Five years ago, the local Barnes and Noble in Sioux Falls had a majestic computer book section. I don’t know the official names for these things, but it was at least two rows, filled on either side — four or five shelves long.

Then things started shrinking. A whole row-side disappeared one day, replaced by science books. Then a year or so later, another row side vanished, replaced by philosophy books. Today, the computer book section at my Barnes and Noble is half the size it was five years ago — one row-side, perhaps four vertical units long, and maybe three on the other side.

This weekend, I’ve been in Kansas City for a soccer tournament. The KC metro area is almost two million people, comprised of about 50 cities. Compare this to the Sioux Falls metro of just over 200,000 people.

I’ve been in two Barnes and Nobles here. Both were at least double the size of the Sioux Falls store. One was an urban-style store in The Plaza comprised of four stories — more vertical than horizontal. Both impressive.

Total computer book shelves in either of them: four. Seriously — one side of a small row in each case.

Why is this?

]]> 6359@http://gadgetopia.com/ Let me ask you for your opinion here: do you think that the computer book sections at your local book store are shrinking?

Five years ago, the local Barnes and Noble in Sioux Falls had a majestic computer book section. I don’t know the official names for these things, but it was at least two rows, filled on either side — four or five shelves long.

Then things started shrinking. A whole row-side disappeared one day, replaced by science books. Then a year or so later, another row side vanished, replaced by philosophy books. Today, the computer book section at my Barnes and Noble is half the size it was five years ago — one row-side, perhaps four vertical units long, and maybe three on the other side.

This weekend, I’ve been in Kansas City for a soccer tournament. The KC metro area is almost two million people, comprised of about 50 cities. Compare this to the Sioux Falls metro of just over 200,000 people.

I’ve been in two Barnes and Nobles here. Both were at least double the size of the Sioux Falls store. One was an urban-style store in The Plaza comprised of four stories — more vertical than horizontal. Both impressive.

Total computer book shelves in either of them: four. Seriously — one side of a small row in each case.

Why is this?

]]> Books 2008-04-20T04:46:32-06:00 High Performance Web Sites http://gadgetopia.com/post/6317 Steve Souders is Yahoo’s “front end engineer.” He’s the guy who wrote the article we discussed a few months back which brought us back to all those old “tricks” that make your Web site load faster.

Consider this: say your page takes 700 milliseconds to load from request to final render. As developers, we tend to obsess about the server-side time involved with this, but there’s a good chance that’s only, say, 300 milliseconds or so. This means over half the time is spent getting the page to the browser, and rendered in the browser. It’s this time which is a much juicier target for optimization than the back-end of the app.

But we tend to ignore this time. We tell ourselves how awesome we are that we can get a page “out the door” in 3/10ths of a second, meanwhile our users are sitting around waiting for four stylesheets and nine background images to load.

Souders rolls up his prior article and expands on it quite a bit to lay out 15 rules of good front-end engineering. Simple things like:

  1. Reduce HTTP requests
  2. Minify Javascript
  3. Add an Expires header
  4. etc.

The Expires header is interesting, and plainly obvious. You can make all your Javascript and CSS completely cacheable on the client, so that their browser doesn’t even ask for it from the server. Yes, we’ve all done If-Modified-Since headers, but even those force a GET request to ensure the target isn’t new.

Souders advises configuring the Expires header so the browser doesn’t even ask for the page. This isn’t new, but I’ve always been reluctant to do it because I feared that I couldn’t get the client to refresh their cache when I really need them to. The solution? Use your file names to “version” your Javascript and CSS to ensure the browser will refresh it when you need it to — when you have actually changed something. Did you ever wonder why all of Yahoo’s page components include the version number in their filename?

It’s a short book — less than 200 pages — and you could read it from cover-to-cover in an afternoon. In a way, it will bring you back to the days when we all had dial-up and we had to squeeze every last bit of performance out of our pages to avoid 10-second page loads, before the fat pipes of broadband made us all lazy.

Odds are that you could make a handful of changes to the front-end of your app that would be worth dozens of hours of re-engineering on the back-end to get your pages to render faster.

]]> 6317@http://gadgetopia.com/ Steve Souders is Yahoo’s “front end engineer.” He’s the guy who wrote the article we discussed a few months back which brought us back to all those old “tricks” that make your Web site load faster.

Consider this: say your page takes 700 milliseconds to load from request to final render. As developers, we tend to obsess about the server-side time involved with this, but there’s a good chance that’s only, say, 300 milliseconds or so. This means over half the time is spent getting the page to the browser, and rendered in the browser. It’s this time which is a much juicier target for optimization than the back-end of the app.

But we tend to ignore this time. We tell ourselves how awesome we are that we can get a page “out the door” in 3/10ths of a second, meanwhile our users are sitting around waiting for four stylesheets and nine background images to load.

Souders rolls up his prior article and expands on it quite a bit to lay out 15 rules of good front-end engineering. Simple things like:

  1. Reduce HTTP requests
  2. Minify Javascript
  3. Add an Expires header
  4. etc.

The Expires header is interesting, and plainly obvious. You can make all your Javascript and CSS completely cacheable on the client, so that their browser doesn’t even ask for it from the server. Yes, we’ve all done If-Modified-Since headers, but even those force a GET request to ensure the target isn’t new.

Souders advises configuring the Expires header so the browser doesn’t even ask for the page. This isn’t new, but I’ve always been reluctant to do it because I feared that I couldn’t get the client to refresh their cache when I really need them to. The solution? Use your file names to “version” your Javascript and CSS to ensure the browser will refresh it when you need it to — when you have actually changed something. Did you ever wonder why all of Yahoo’s page components include the version number in their filename?

It’s a short book — less than 200 pages — and you could read it from cover-to-cover in an afternoon. In a way, it will bring you back to the days when we all had dial-up and we had to squeeze every last bit of performance out of our pages to avoid 10-second page loads, before the fat pipes of broadband made us all lazy.

Odds are that you could make a handful of changes to the front-end of your app that would be worth dozens of hours of re-engineering on the back-end to get your pages to render faster.

]]> Books 2008-03-22T08:09:02-06:00 Freakonomics http://gadgetopia.com/post/6316 I’ll admit that I thought economists really dealt with just, well, the economy. But they don’t. To be an economist really means you kind of just figure stuff out.

Steven Levitt is such a guy. He teaches at the University of Chicago, and when writer Stephen Dubner wrote a profile on Levitt in 2005, the two of them decided to write a book together.

Levitt admits that he doesn’t understand much about the economy. But he does know statistics, and he has a lot of questions that he wants to answer. Questions like:

  • Do teachers help their students cheat on standardized exams?
  • If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers?
  • Are real estate agents always acting in your best interests?

To solve these questions, he analyzes massive amounts of statistics, and writes papers about them. Freakonomics is a roll-up and commentary of many of those papers, and the results are fascinating.

I listened to the book during a drive to and from Des Moines, and I was utterly captivated by it. I spent 40 minutes listening in rapt attention to how Levitt dissected the results of thousands of matches to prove, seemingly beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Japanese sumo wrestlers collude to throw matches.

He went on to explain how the drop in crime in the 1990s could have been caused, in large part, by the legalization of abortion 20 years prior. This is one of his more controversial findings, and as uncomfortable as the idea made me, it was hard to argue with how he arrived at the conclusion.

Then he dug into excrutiating detail on the question of how giving your baby a “black” name like “Deshawn” would affect his life over a “white” name like “Conner.” The statistics show that new baby names are pioneered by rich folk, and they filter down to the non-rich folk over a decade.

Freakonomics is a celebration of patience, logic, disappassionate thinking, and a guy who just won’t take “I don’t know” for an answer. I loved it, and when it was done, I was ready to listen to another 10 books just like it, had they existed.

I put this book up there with “Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea,” and that’s saying something.

]]> 6316@http://gadgetopia.com/ I’ll admit that I thought economists really dealt with just, well, the economy. But they don’t. To be an economist really means you kind of just figure stuff out.

Steven Levitt is such a guy. He teaches at the University of Chicago, and when writer Stephen Dubner wrote a profile on Levitt in 2005, the two of them decided to write a book together.

Levitt admits that he doesn’t understand much about the economy. But he does know statistics, and he has a lot of questions that he wants to answer. Questions like:

  • Do teachers help their students cheat on standardized exams?
  • If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers?
  • Are real estate agents always acting in your best interests?

To solve these questions, he analyzes massive amounts of statistics, and writes papers about them. Freakonomics is a roll-up and commentary of many of those papers, and the results are fascinating.

I listened to the book during a drive to and from Des Moines, and I was utterly captivated by it. I spent 40 minutes listening in rapt attention to how Levitt dissected the results of thousands of matches to prove, seemingly beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Japanese sumo wrestlers collude to throw matches.

He went on to explain how the drop in crime in the 1990s could have been caused, in large part, by the legalization of abortion 20 years prior. This is one of his more controversial findings, and as uncomfortable as the idea made me, it was hard to argue with how he arrived at the conclusion.

Then he dug into excrutiating detail on the question of how giving your baby a “black” name like “Deshawn” would affect his life over a “white” name like “Conner.” The statistics show that new baby names are pioneered by rich folk, and they filter down to the non-rich folk over a decade.

Freakonomics is a celebration of patience, logic, disappassionate thinking, and a guy who just won’t take “I don’t know” for an answer. I loved it, and when it was done, I was ready to listen to another 10 books just like it, had they existed.

I put this book up there with “Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea,” and that’s saying something.

]]> Books 2008-03-22T07:47:12-06:00 Smart and Gets Things Done http://gadgetopia.com/post/5934 Joel Spolksy has a reputation for hiring great people. He made a movie about his intern program, in fact, which cultivates the best of the best.

He’s distilled all of this hard-won knowledge in a new book, which is titled for his theory of good programmers: Smart and Gets Things Done. This is a reference not to the David Allen book, but to an old essay Joel wrote in which he stated that a lot of really smart people don’t really get much done.

At Blend, our biggest problem is finding good people — it usually takes us six months to hire, from start to finish — so I’m on chapter two of Spolsky’s book now. It appears to be a collection and reinterpretation of his great essays about managing people. He goes back to his central principle: provide a great place for people to work, and great people will want to come work for you.

God willing, that’s just what we’re going to do around here.

]]> 5934@http://gadgetopia.com/ Joel Spolksy has a reputation for hiring great people. He made a movie about his intern program, in fact, which cultivates the best of the best.

He’s distilled all of this hard-won knowledge in a new book, which is titled for his theory of good programmers: Smart and Gets Things Done. This is a reference not to the David Allen book, but to an old essay Joel wrote in which he stated that a lot of really smart people don’t really get much done.

At Blend, our biggest problem is finding good people — it usually takes us six months to hire, from start to finish — so I’m on chapter two of Spolsky’s book now. It appears to be a collection and reinterpretation of his great essays about managing people. He goes back to his central principle: provide a great place for people to work, and great people will want to come work for you.

God willing, that’s just what we’re going to do around here.

]]> Books 2007-06-21T08:45:35-06:00 Library Drops Dewey Decimal System http://gadgetopia.com/post/5922 Gilbert library to be first to drop Dewey Decimal: The ghost of Melvil Dewey will haunt these people until they drop off the face of the Earth. They don’t know the powers they’re messing with here. May God have mercy on their disrespectful souls.

When the new Gilbert library opens next month, it will be the first public library in the nation whose entire collection will be categorized without the Dewey Decimal Classification System, Maricopa County librarians say.

Instead, tens of thousands of books in the Perry Branch library will be shelved by topic, similar to the way bookstores arrange books. The demise of the century-old Dewey Decimal system is overdue, county librarians say: It’s just too confusing for people to hunt down books using those long strings of numbers and letters.

The Dewey Decimal System is really the genesis of modern Information Architecture. It’s obviously moved beyond Dewey by now, but it stills owes Melvil quite a bit.

Via MetaFilter.

]]> 5922@http://gadgetopia.com/ Gilbert library to be first to drop Dewey Decimal: The ghost of Melvil Dewey will haunt these people until they drop off the face of the Earth. They don’t know the powers they’re messing with here. May God have mercy on their disrespectful souls.

When the new Gilbert library opens next month, it will be the first public library in the nation whose entire collection will be categorized without the Dewey Decimal Classification System, Maricopa County librarians say.

Instead, tens of thousands of books in the Perry Branch library will be shelved by topic, similar to the way bookstores arrange books. The demise of the century-old Dewey Decimal system is overdue, county librarians say: It’s just too confusing for people to hunt down books using those long strings of numbers and letters.

The Dewey Decimal System is really the genesis of modern Information Architecture. It’s obviously moved beyond Dewey by now, but it stills owes Melvil quite a bit.

Via MetaFilter.

]]> Books 2007-06-11T00:06:56-06:00 I'm reading. Seriously. http://gadgetopia.com/post/5797 Why does "reading" get confused with "surfing the Net" so much?

I'm struggling lately with the concept of a hobby, and why I don't have one. It seems that everything I do is in some way connected with my company. I have no balance.

I got to wondering the other day if I had ever had a hobby. Then I remembered that, at one time, I liked to read. I still do, however, I really only read books that have to do with work. Looking over at my nightstand, I have Design Patterns (dense), Managing the Professional Services Firm (also dense), Communicating Design (unexpectedly tedious), The Myth of the Paperless Office (stone-cold fascinating), etc. The only two books not specifically related to work are Mere Christianity (great) and You on a Diet (weak and pandering).

It's 4 a.m., and I can't sleep. Just before writing this post, I read through a great Time magazine series of shorts on the Top 25 Crimes of the Century. I felt vaguely guilty while I was doing this, because there's always work to do and I should be doing it instead of screwing around surfing the Net.

But was I? Or was I reading? God forbid, was I actually reading for pleasure about something not somehow related to work? Cripes, I think I was.

And that's my point, really. Where did the assumption come from that if I'm sitting down in my recliner with my trusty laptop, I'm just screwing around on the Net or working when I shouldn't be? Why is it inherently more noble if I have some black marks on wood pulp sitting on my lap? (thanks Corey)

A few years ago, I read Bill Bryson's entire A Short History of Nearly Everything on ebook and then I wrote about the experience. Was that reading? Of course it was, but it seems less so in retrospect since it was on a Toshiba Satellite rather than hardback.

Does it have something to do with length and depth? My experience with Bryson aside, most reading on the Net is more like my experience with the Time series -- short nuggets of information that you can hit and run. This is because our attention span is inherently shorter on the Web. I touched on this some years ago when I tried out software for reading print publications electronically:

While this stuff is cool in its own right, it highlights one of the big problems with the Web: it's tough to keep your attention on Web content, because the Web is ever-changing and it's so easy to get distracted. Hyperlinks beckon you on to more content and you know that different...stuff, is just a bookmark click away.

What I found when reading content designed for print, was that I spent more time reading it. I would actually read an entire article, rather than just skim it, and I could actually be semi-contemplative about something, instead of rushing to finish so I could move onto the next thing. There was an unmistakable sense of peace about the entire process that I've just never gotten from Web content.

I still think this way. It's tough reading something while hyperlinks fight for your attention. Ironically, it's even tougher to read something when there are no hyperlinks in the text. I've always thought that hyperlinks in text provide a "relief valve" of sorts for long stretches of text that somehow makes them more palatable. Yes, there's a lot to read there, but look -- hyperlinks! If you get stressed in the middle of it, there's somewhere else to go.

I've totally lost my point now. I think I'm just irritated that my wife thinks that me and my laptop equals "working" or "screwing around surfing the Web." Why can't it mean "reading"?

Next time you're sitting somewhere with your laptop, looking intently at the screen and not typing, and someone asks you what you're doing, why can't you just answer "reading" and not feel like you're making an excuse?

Or is it just me?

]]> 5797@http://gadgetopia.com/ Why does "reading" get confused with "surfing the Net" so much?

I'm struggling lately with the concept of a hobby, and why I don't have one. It seems that everything I do is in some way connected with my company. I have no balance.

I got to wondering the other day if I had ever had a hobby. Then I remembered that, at one time, I liked to read. I still do, however, I really only read books that have to do with work. Looking over at my nightstand, I have Design Patterns (dense), Managing the Professional Services Firm (also dense), Communicating Design (unexpectedly tedious), The Myth of the Paperless Office (stone-cold fascinating), etc. The only two books not specifically related to work are Mere Christianity (great) and You on a Diet (weak and pandering).

It's 4 a.m., and I can't sleep. Just before writing this post, I read through a great Time magazine series of shorts on the Top 25 Crimes of the Century. I felt vaguely guilty while I was doing this, because there's always work to do and I should be doing it instead of screwing around surfing the Net.

But was I? Or was I reading? God forbid, was I actually reading for pleasure about something not somehow related to work? Cripes, I think I was.

And that's my point, really. Where did the assumption come from that if I'm sitting down in my recliner with my trusty laptop, I'm just screwing around on the Net or working when I shouldn't be? Why is it inherently more noble if I have some black marks on wood pulp sitting on my lap? (thanks Corey)

A few years ago, I read Bill Bryson's entire A Short History of Nearly Everything on ebook and then I wrote about the experience. Was that reading? Of course it was, but it seems less so in retrospect since it was on a Toshiba Satellite rather than hardback.

Does it have something to do with length and depth? My experience with Bryson aside, most reading on the Net is more like my experience with the Time series -- short nuggets of information that you can hit and run. This is because our attention span is inherently shorter on the Web. I touched on this some years ago when I tried out software for reading print publications electronically:

While this stuff is cool in its own right, it highlights one of the big problems with the Web: it's tough to keep your attention on Web content, because the Web is ever-changing and it's so easy to get distracted. Hyperlinks beckon you on to more content and you know that different...stuff, is just a bookmark click away.

What I found when reading content designed for print, was that I spent more time reading it. I would actually read an entire article, rather than just skim it, and I could actually be semi-contemplative about something, instead of rushing to finish so I could move onto the next thing. There was an unmistakable sense of peace about the entire process that I've just never gotten from Web content.

I still think this way. It's tough reading something while hyperlinks fight for your attention. Ironically, it's even tougher to read something when there are no hyperlinks in the text. I've always thought that hyperlinks in text provide a "relief valve" of sorts for long stretches of text that somehow makes them more palatable. Yes, there's a lot to read there, but look -- hyperlinks! If you get stressed in the middle of it, there's somewhere else to go.

I've totally lost my point now. I think I'm just irritated that my wife thinks that me and my laptop equals "working" or "screwing around surfing the Web." Why can't it mean "reading"?

Next time you're sitting somewhere with your laptop, looking intently at the screen and not typing, and someone asks you what you're doing, why can't you just answer "reading" and not feel like you're making an excuse?

Or is it just me?

]]> Books 2007-03-04T04:36:26-06:00 Used Books? http://gadgetopia.com/post/5658 My office is moving to a new building in a few days. We have at least 100 programming books of many flavors which we have accumulated and for which we have no more need. One of them, Teach Yourself Web Publishing With Html 3.2 in 14 Days by Laura Lemay, is available at Amazon starting at a whopping $0.33.

Is there a better alternative than just throwing these books away? Sure, I could post them individually or as a group on Amazon or eBay. However, I am not sure I want to administer that.

I did find Eco Encore that accepts recent technical books and software. I am going to contact them, but I am wondering what other options are there?

This also got me thinking how production of technical books can even be profitable anymore. When was the last time you bought a technical book? If you have a question on a particular topic and you have a book about it on your bookshelf, do you grab the book or hit Google first?

]]> 5658@http://gadgetopia.com/ My office is moving to a new building in a few days. We have at least 100 programming books of many flavors which we have accumulated and for which we have no more need. One of them, Teach Yourself Web Publishing With Html 3.2 in 14 Days by Laura Lemay, is available at Amazon starting at a whopping $0.33.

Is there a better alternative than just throwing these books away? Sure, I could post them individually or as a group on Amazon or eBay. However, I am not sure I want to administer that.

I did find Eco Encore that accepts recent technical books and software. I am going to contact them, but I am wondering what other options are there?

This also got me thinking how production of technical books can even be profitable anymore. When was the last time you bought a technical book? If you have a question on a particular topic and you have a book about it on your bookshelf, do you grab the book or hit Google first?

]]> Books 2006-11-29T09:11:32-06:00 Time Management for Geeks http://gadgetopia.com/post/5496 Fraser Speirs on "Time Management for System Administrators": You know time management is in short supply when O'Reilly is writing books about it.

Thomas A. Limoncelli's book Time Management for System Administrators is perhaps the first example I've seen of a book which advocates a GTD-style workflow with some modifications specific to the system administration "lifestyle".

Joe and I were talking just yesterday about how we live and die by time management these days. Essentially every minute during our days is accounted for, and we can't cruise Bloglines without some serious background guilt.

(And before you all say something -- Gadgetopia belongs to my company. So I'm really working right now.)

]]> 5496@http://gadgetopia.com/ Fraser Speirs on "Time Management for System Administrators": You know time management is in short supply when O'Reilly is writing books about it.

Thomas A. Limoncelli's book Time Management for System Administrators is perhaps the first example I've seen of a book which advocates a GTD-style workflow with some modifications specific to the system administration "lifestyle".

Joe and I were talking just yesterday about how we live and die by time management these days. Essentially every minute during our days is accounted for, and we can't cruise Bloglines without some serious background guilt.

(And before you all say something -- Gadgetopia belongs to my company. So I'm really working right now.)

]]> Books 2006-08-29T11:47:11-06:00 Off The Map... http://gadgetopia.com/post/5480 ... And Not In The Guidebook is the new book being put out by those responsible for googlesightseeing.com. Actually it's one book with two different titles for different markets — US and UK — from different publishers.

We've got almost 100 of our favourite sights from the last year, licensed high-quality satellite photographs and fully re-researched each one.

A coffee table book? No way. As if I don't waste enough time on Google Maps and Google Earth. My latest near obsession is with WikiMapia; "Let's describe the whole Earth!" Who needs sleep anyway?

]]> 5480@http://gadgetopia.com/ ... And Not In The Guidebook is the new book being put out by those responsible for googlesightseeing.com. Actually it's one book with two different titles for different markets — US and UK — from different publishers.

We've got almost 100 of our favourite sights from the last year, licensed high-quality satellite photographs and fully re-researched each one.

A coffee table book? No way. As if I don't waste enough time on Google Maps and Google Earth. My latest near obsession is with WikiMapia; "Let's describe the whole Earth!" Who needs sleep anyway?

]]> Books 2006-08-21T10:27:36-06:00 Computer Book Trends http://gadgetopia.com/post/5409 I was in Barnes and Noble tonight, and I noticed a few things.

  1. There were four books on the shelves having to do with Mambo and/or Joomla (I refuse to add the exclamation point). This is the first time I've seen books on those systems in my local store. I tried Mambo once, but didn't care for it. However, I have friends who swear by it.

  2. I found the first book I've ever seen on WordPress -- a Visual Quickstart Guide, no less (a good series of books, by the way). According to Amazon, this is one of only two books dedicated to WordPress. We've done a bit of WordPress development lately, and had good luck with it.

  3. Our friends at Packt have suddenly hit the shelves. I thought they were strictly mail order. Good for them. (And why does Packt rule, you ask? Here's why).

I've always thought you could gauge platform adoption by how much shelf space it's getting at Barnes and Noble. This is how I knew Python wasn't just a flash in the pan, and -- more recently -- it correctly predicted the rise of Ruby (I found about seven different books on Ruby tonight).

If this idea interests you, O'Reilly recently did an extremely in-depth series of postings about their view of the computer book market. Not surprisingly, they have all sorts of facts and figures to back it up.

]]> 5409@http://gadgetopia.com/ I was in Barnes and Noble tonight, and I noticed a few things.

  1. There were four books on the shelves having to do with Mambo and/or Joomla (I refuse to add the exclamation point). This is the first time I've seen books on those systems in my local store. I tried Mambo once, but didn't care for it. However, I have friends who swear by it.

  2. I found the first book I've ever seen on WordPress -- a Visual Quickstart Guide, no less (a good series of books, by the way). According to Amazon, this is one of only two books dedicated to WordPress. We've done a bit of WordPress development lately, and had good luck with it.

  3. Our friends at Packt have suddenly hit the shelves. I thought they were strictly mail order. Good for them. (And why does Packt rule, you ask? Here's why).

I've always thought you could gauge platform adoption by how much shelf space it's getting at Barnes and Noble. This is how I knew Python wasn't just a flash in the pan, and -- more recently -- it correctly predicted the rise of Ruby (I found about seven different books on Ruby tonight).

If this idea interests you, O'Reilly recently did an extremely in-depth series of postings about their view of the computer book market. Not surprisingly, they have all sorts of facts and figures to back it up.

]]> Books 2006-07-17T01:09:39-06:00 eBooks Not Selling on Campus http://gadgetopia.com/post/5018 Despite youths' tech comfort, e-textbook demand slow: Ebooks aren't selling well as college textbooks either.

But after making the purchase, [the student] noticed a few things amiss: He couldn't run a highlight marker over key points or jot notes in the margins, nor could he curl up with the tome without printing out the pages.

He won't rule out another e-book, but he's not completely sold, either.

I had a great experience with a couple ebooks a while back, but there's was also a great book I read once that argued against them ever hitting the mainstream.

]]> 5018@http://gadgetopia.com/ Despite youths' tech comfort, e-textbook demand slow: Ebooks aren't selling well as college textbooks either.

But after making the purchase, [the student] noticed a few things amiss: He couldn't run a highlight marker over key points or jot notes in the margins, nor could he curl up with the tome without printing out the pages.

He won't rule out another e-book, but he's not completely sold, either.

I had a great experience with a couple ebooks a while back, but there's was also a great book I read once that argued against them ever hitting the mainstream.

]]> Books 2006-02-16T01:04:57-06:00 Practical PHP Programming http://gadgetopia.com/post/4980 Practical PHP Programming: An entire book on PHP has been posted to the Web, free of charge. Apparently this book was edited and revised to become the O'Reilly book "PHP in a Nutshell."

I paged through the book. It's quite comprehensive, and I learned about a bizarre function set I didn't even know existed and can't figure out how or why I would use.

]]> 4980@http://gadgetopia.com/ Practical PHP Programming: An entire book on PHP has been posted to the Web, free of charge. Apparently this book was edited and revised to become the O'Reilly book "PHP in a Nutshell."

I paged through the book. It's quite comprehensive, and I learned about a bizarre function set I didn't even know existed and can't figure out how or why I would use.

]]> Books 2006-02-04T14:53:30-06:00 O'Reilly Books Digitally Altered in Microsoft Ad http://gadgetopia.com/post/4955 Afraid to tell people what books their developers are really reading?: O'Reilly finds a magazine ad for Microsoft showing a developer sitting at his desk. Apparently the books sitting on the developers desk have been altered to downplay O'Reilly's domninance of tech publishing. There's a picture.

The ad, with the caption, "Find tools and guidance to defend your network at microsoft.com/security/IT" features a developer at his desk. On the desk is a shelf full of books. Leaving aside the fact that most of them aren't security books, what caught our attention was that the three books on the end were O'Reilly books, with the cover of the book visible on the end photoshopped to take the animal off the cover and to modify the title on the spine.

]]> 4955@http://gadgetopia.com/ Afraid to tell people what books their developers are really reading?: O'Reilly finds a magazine ad for Microsoft showing a developer sitting at his desk. Apparently the books sitting on the developers desk have been altered to downplay O'Reilly's domninance of tech publishing. There's a picture.

The ad, with the caption, "Find tools and guidance to defend your network at microsoft.com/security/IT" features a developer at his desk. On the desk is a shelf full of books. Leaving aside the fact that most of them aren't security books, what caught our attention was that the three books on the end were O'Reilly books, with the cover of the book visible on the end photoshopped to take the animal off the cover and to modify the title on the spine.

]]> Books 2006-01-27T15:24:55-06:00 O'Reilly's Rough Cuts http://gadgetopia.com/post/4934 O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf: This is part of Safari Online, of which I'm a member and big fan.

Sometimes you just can't wait for the book. When you need to learn a new technology right now, turn to the Rough Cuts service from Safari Books Online. You'll get early access to books on cutting-edge technologies-you can literally read them as they're being written.

It's essentially a look into the "beta" versions of books. The authors of "Agile Development with Rails" did this with their book -- I paid a fee for the pre-production PDF, and got the actual book when it shipped. They did this to pre-sell copies, but they ended up getting over 100 corrections from readers.

Look at these titles:

This very well may be the future of technical book publishing. Beta periods are a good thing.

]]> 4934@http://gadgetopia.com/ O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf: This is part of Safari Online, of which I'm a member and big fan.

Sometimes you just can't wait for the book. When you need to learn a new technology right now, turn to the Rough Cuts service from Safari Books Online. You'll get early access to books on cutting-edge technologies-you can literally read them as they're being written.

It's essentially a look into the "beta" versions of books. The authors of "Agile Development with Rails" did this with their book -- I paid a fee for the pre-production PDF, and got the actual book when it shipped. They did this to pre-sell copies, but they ended up getting over 100 corrections from readers.

Look at these titles:

This very well may be the future of technical book publishing. Beta periods are a good thing.

]]> Books 2006-01-24T12:13:11-06:00 O'Reilly Hacks + Google Book Search = Free Books http://gadgetopia.com/post/4823 Read Most of O'Reilly's Hacks Books for Free Using Google: This works. I tried it for curiosity's sake, and, sure enough, you can read page after page of tons of O'Reilly books. How is this not a huge hole?

Anyway, I have found a way to read most of their terrific hacks for free using Google Book Search - at least for now. This trick, by the way, works for lots of books, like travel guides. See the end of this post for how I hacked the Frommer's travel series.

Reminds me of Google-hacking. When does the power of something get so great that it can be used against itself?

]]> 4823@http://gadgetopia.com/ Read Most of O'Reilly's Hacks Books for Free Using Google: This works. I tried it for curiosity's sake, and, sure enough, you can read page after page of tons of O'Reilly books. How is this not a huge hole?

Anyway, I have found a way to read most of their terrific hacks for free using Google Book Search - at least for now. This trick, by the way, works for lots of books, like travel guides. See the end of this post for how I hacked the Frommer's travel series.

Reminds me of Google-hacking. When does the power of something get so great that it can be used against itself?

]]> Books 2005-12-28T11:21:01-06:00