EOG - Ruby

I always knew this guy would make a good teacher/trainer. Hell I even told him. Looks like he's well on his way...Edward Ocampo-Gooding with his book: Rails in a Nutshell.

Free Book: Star Wars - Legacy of the Force: Betrayal

There's another FREE PDF version of, "STAR WARS: LEGACY OF THE FORCE: BETRAYAL" available from the publisher's site.

Kindle

It's hard to justify the price of an eBook reader but Amazon has recently introduced the Kindle.
Given there was a push of eBook readers a few years ago and they failed for several reasons (price being one of them) it will be interesting to see what happens with this. My first impression - way overpriced.

Book: Adobe AIR

"Mike Chambers and the Adobe AIR crew have generously released the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide under a creative commons license.

The pocket guide covers:

* Introduction to AIR
* Getting Started with AIR development
* Working with JavaScript and HTML within AIR
* AIR Mini Cookbook
* Command line tools
* Aliases
" --- http://ajaxian.com/...

Book: The Software Conspiracy

Looks like an interesting book, "The Software Conspiracy" and it's FREE!

Book: Dreaming In Code

Just finished the book, "Dreaming In Code" - by: Scott Rosenberg. If you are well read in 'pop' culture computer history then a lot of the side stories will be familiar. For those that are not it's a brief look at software development specifically focusing on the Chandler open source project. The book also has a website.

Book: Children of Hurin

Came out yesterday and there was a nice piece on the radio about the preparing of this book, Children of Hurin Originally written by the, "Lord of the Rings" author J.R.R. Tolkien.

"There are tales of Middle-earth from times long before The Lord of the Rings, and the story told in this book is set in the great country that lay beyond the Grey Havens in the West: lands where Treebeard once walked, but which were drowned in the great cataclysm that ended the First Age of the World.

In that remote time Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, dwelt in the vast fortress of Angband, the Hells of Iron, in the North; and the tragedy of Turin and his sister Nienor unfolded within the shadow of the fear of Angband and the war waged by Morgoth against the lands and secret cities of the Elves..." - Official Tolkien Website

Currently #2 on Amazon's sales list!

WPF Books

Having looked at Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (aka: WPF) recently here's 3 books [in order of preference] I can suggest looking at. Please note the 3rd book by O'Reilly has examples that seem to be outdated and therefore I don't recommend it:


See also the Amazon List Mania.

The pace of technological change in computers has slowed down tremendously. Don’t think so?

"The pace of technological change in computers has slowed down tremendously. Don’t think so? Stop and think about it. As I write this sentence in early 2006, there are people, lots of people, still running Windows NT 4.0 domain controllers because they still haven’t gone to Active Directory. Windows NT 4.0 was released in 1996, ten years ago as I write this in 2006. Heck, you may know someone still using Windows 95! That would be like someone running Windows 3.1 in the year 2000, or, to choose amore ancient example, MS-DOS 3.3 in 1992—examples that would have been practically impossible to find in those days. While I personally wouldn’t want to have to live in 95-land, I can understand why people do—it still gets the job done. They can surf the Web, get email, play a lot of games. That would, again, not be a possibility in the past: someone using Windows 3.1 in the year 2000 would find that virtually not a single application on the shelf would run on 3.1. But computing is tending to plateau these days, as hardware vendors are hitting limits in at least two ways. First, Intel has said that it’s not possible to create a Pentium chip faster than 3.8 GHz and, second, hard drive vendors claim that they’ve nearly hit the wall on data density." - Mark Minasi ("Mastering Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Upgrade Edition for SP1 and R2")