Joe asks 'Is it me or what?'

Secret to Success

I’ve been asked to update Beginning XML, one of the books shown in the left column. XML and its uses have changed so much since the last edition some five plus years ago. Over three-quarters of the content will be new and there’s only two authors this time, myself and Danny Ayers.

Wrox have tried to give me a few pointers on how to promote it, blog posts, Twitter etc. My own contribution is to write under a pseudonym, anything written by a Swede seems to sell well so I’m going to write as Henning Larssonquist and see if that increases sales.

Professional ASP.NET Design Patterns

I recently finished a technical review of a new book on Design Patterns for ASP.NET. It’s just out on Amazon and should be in shops too.

The author Scott Millett has done a good job of explaining what design patterns are and how to apply many of them to ASP.NET, especially using the MVC design.

My ambition is to get a project done using these patterns and without the usual hacks/compromises that are so often made…

Kindle Review

So I finally gave in to the gadget urge and bought an Amazon Kindle last week. So far it looks good so here’s a mini review for those thinking of buying. (I bought the one with Wi-Fi connectivity which costs £150 as opposed to the standard one at £100.)

On the plus side it looks good and is light and easy to hold, it’s bigger than a standard paperback, more like those special editions you get at airports. I didn’t get a choice of colour, it’s a sort of slate-grey. It charged in a couple of hours and seems to draw very little power. I left it on for ages and it recharged in minutes. It’s certainly easy to read content, it comes with just the user guide and I then copied some free books from Free Kindle Books to see what they looked like. Once that had gone smoothly I tried the Wi-Fi connection, worked first time, and also the text-to-speech converter. This enables you to have books read to you which is great if you’re driving or are in the middle of reading something and want to listen whilst doing something else. It’s not a patch on a real audible book though, the synthetic voice can be wearing, God help Mrs. Hawking, and there’s no infusion of dramatic sense and different accents for the various characters. It also plays music files and has a basic web browser, black and white obviously. You can also bookmark, highlight and annotate, useful for technical books.

I then took the plunge and bought something, the latest Shardlake adventure, Heartstone, for which I have the previous four in paperback. This downloaded in under twenty seconds whilst I was at the railway station. The idea of having a dozen books loaded up for holidays etc. is one of the main reasons for buying, so much easier than lugging around the traditional versions.

So much for the good side, what about the bad? Aside from the price you really need a cover and at £50, with a light, to £30 without, these are not cheap. I only looked at Amazon though, perhaps there are others elsewhere. The price of eBooks is also annoying. They come out on Amazon quickly, alongside the hardback and seem to be a few pounds cheaper than them. This seems a bit unfair but the fact that digital books attract VAT whereas paper ones don’t doesn’t help. Given that you can easily pass a read book on this is the biggest downside in my mind. This comes to another problem, if you go on holiday with someone you can’t easily share reading matter, you need two Kindles and swap them. My wife has already hinted at her next birthday present... Finally there’s the security issue. If I’m reading in public I’ll often leave a book on my table while I go to the bar, you wouldn’t risk this with the Kindle; likewise if you leave a paperback on the train it’s not the end of the world. All in all I’m happy, I’m going away this week for a long weekend and will certainly take it with me, I’m also keen to try a technical book to see how that looks with code listings and diagrams etc.

If any other pros and cons appear I’ll let you know and I’m happy to hear yours too.

P.S. Since looking at the Kindle again and being a bit more scientific about its measurements I realise that it’s about the size of a normal paperback with the screen displaying about one third to one half of a page of text if you’re using the default text size (which can be changed). I’ve also found that ebooks do seem to be cheaper once they’ve been published in paperback, not sure what the rules are for this. For example the book mentioned above, which is just out in hardback cost me about £10 whereas an old Harlan Coben I bought cost about £3.

What’s Your Style?

I’d never heard of Cory Doctorow until recently. He’s quite a prolific author of books, blog and newspaper articles. The reason I discovered him is this site, http://iwl.me/, which aims to take some of your prose and tell you who your writing style resembles. All I can say is that Cory’s books must be somewhat - shall we say unusual to be charitable? The reason – I pasted half a chapter that I wrote for Beginning Xml some years ago and this is who the site came up with.

Next time you get a long rambling email from someone you’ll know what to do with it.

Pride Comes Before a Fall

I was pleased when a colleague wanted to borrow my book, Beginning XML, the other day. It’s a hefty tome, nearly 1000 pages and probably needs an update in some areas but it’s still a good introduction to XML and how it’s used. My sense of pride however turned into one of disappointment when I discovered that they needed it as a stand for their monitor…

More Word Coincidences

I wrote some time back on how one often comes across a new word and then it appears again. In a similar vein have you heard of Ignaz Semmelweis?

I hadn’t, until recently, and then two people gave me books for my birthday that featured him. Semmelweis lived in the 1800s and was puzzled why the cases of women falling ill and dying whilst in hospital to give birth were much higher when the medical students and doctors tended to them than when midwives did it. You can read the full story elsewhere but he came to the conclusion that it was connected with the fact that the first group also handled dead bodies. He prescribed basic measures such as hand washing that today are taken for granted. At the time he was ridiculed and disbelieved by many, not until Pasteur showed the existence of germs did people realise why he was right.

The two books were both very good, only really using Semmelweis as examples in a larger picture. The first was called Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute. Now I don’t know how you’d feel if you were given a book with that title by a direct report. I was a bit miffed at first. I shouldn’t have been, it’s an excellent book on how we can’t often see a problem when the problem is, and is hidden by, self-deceit. I can recommend it to anyone, not just those aspiring to leadership.

The second book was Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. This book really shows how science is misrepresented in the media as well as how many alternative therapies, homeopathy and the likes of nutritionism advocated by Gillian McKeith for example, are not in anyway based on open scientific research. By open I mean that the studies’ methods and raw data are open to inspection and by scientific I mean that there are control groups and other standard research techniques. It’s a great read and you’ll look at science journalism in a new light.

For those of you interested in new words I can suggest iatrogenic, a word Semmelweis could have done with.

Asleep at Work? - Blame Pinker

I've just started reading The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker the noted cognitive scientist and linguistic expert. I've read most of his other books, some more thoroughly than others, and this one has re-awakened a longtime interest in language, I might even say it's his best yet.

The early part concentrates on whether humans have an innate sense of what things mean or is it acquired, the old nature versus nurture argument. That's not to say they are born knowing a specific vocabulary but do they have a sort of internal concept of words that is mapped onto the language that they actual learn in their first few years?

Later topics explore why children's names go in and out of fashion and why swearing involves sex, bodily functions and religious entities.

He explores in depth why you hear:

The dog bit John on the leg

but not

The dog bit the table on the leg

I am really finding it hard to put down, I could have been found reading it at 5:00am this morning, sad eh?

Anyway, as you can tell, I highly recommend it - a real bargain at about £5 from Amazon, and it assures Mr. Pinker of an invite to my hypothetical dinner party of interesting guests.

 

Two serious posts on the trot, I really must get out more.

Plugged By Wrox

I have worked with Jim Minatel at Wiley/Wrox for a number of years. He wrote recently about his fifth anniversary with them. I was pleased to get a mention, my chief regret is that we've never met, if you don't count his point about the weak dollar that is.

I'm in discussions with him at the moment about a new book on a topic I've been interested in for some time. More anon if it comes to fruition.

How does he do it?

Dr. Shahram Khosravi is one of the most prolific Wrox authors I have read. The first book I read of his was Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Server Control and Component Development. It's an essential read for anyone who wants to develop production quality server controls in ASP.NET. It goes way beyond the Hello World ones that most tutorials cover and shows how to manage view state correctly, how data binding works and how to add design time features.

His latest two books are equally impressive. ASP.NET AJAX Programmer's Reference is an exhaustive coverage of Microsoft's Ajax offering. It details all the client-side library and then deals with the server-side components. It's over 1400 pages long and although there's the odd bit of repetition you certainly won't need another ASP.NET Ajax book with this on your shelf.

The latest book I'm reading is Professional IIS 7 and ASP.NET Integrated Programming. It covers the latest version of Microsoft's web server that has been completely rebuilt and now integrates properly with ASPNET. No more battling with two authentication methods, you can also pass requests from IIS to ASP and back as well as customise the IIS manager to add extra features. The book also explains the new XML based configuration which can be included in the web.config file, enabling much easier deployment from development to stage and live etc.

I just don't know how Dr. Khosravi manages to have a full time job, keep up with so many different technologies and write such huge tomes on them, I struggle with a few chapters now and again.

Second Skin Diver Starts Blogging

Competing for the dubious honour of least-read is my friend Ian Payn's new blog.

He was one of original Three Skin Divers quiz team which made no impression in the pub quiz world of London about ten years ago, now occasionally seen on Wandsworth Bridge Road as I wrote about here.

His blog specialises in reviews of less well-known detective fiction, amongst other worthy topics, but his first post contains a reference to someone whose posts concentrate on whingeing, surely he can't mean me?