Jason Mauss' Blog Cabin

Next month, when Amazon's quarterly period for their Associates program ends, I'll be getting a gift certificate for about $70. I figure this is enough to buy at least 2 books, maybe 3. I'd like to get back in the habit of reading some technical books, so I figured I'd ask for some recommendations from my readers. Here are some titles I'm considering:

I happened to be checking my blog url (http://weblogs.asp.net/jamauss) tonight over at Technorati (a bit of ego-surfing if you will) and noticed I had an inbound link from the man behind VbCity.com and DevCity.net, Serge Baranovsky. Upon further inspection it turns out that Serge has set up blogs for the VbCity community here, using .TEXT. If you've done VB development with any regularity (like I have) I'm sure you've stumbled across VbCity while finding answers to your problems. Both VbCity and DevCity are great resources and both are part of the CodeWise Community of websites. Give them a look if you haven't already. And if you're interested in keeping up with the latest on VB, subscribe to Serge's blog. I'm sure he'll be posting interesting VB information in forthcoming posts. (Don't worry Serge - no pressure!)

For those of you that worry about spam and your e-mail address being publicly visible on the internet, this one is dedicated to you.

A friend of mine that works at the California State Bar IM'd me today to tell me about a GMail client that a co-worker of his Johnvey Hwang has built. I downloaded and installed it, and lo and behold, it works great! I had tried a couple of different GMail clients before, but they all had little annoyances with them that lead me to uninstall and stop using them. So far though, no annoyances detected with this one. Good job Johnvey!

I noticed over on Jason Bock's blog he had been writing a little bit about some PDF development he'd been doing - so I thought it might be appropriate for me to chime in with a little helpful info of my own involving PDF development.

A couple days ago I received my copy of this book from Osborne/McGraw-Hill. (X)HTML/CSS/JavaScript (a.k.a “DHTML“) isn't going away any time soon so I felt now was as good a time as any to start further educating myself on one of the most used languages of the web - JavaScript. I've previously read a couple of Thomas Powell's web development books and I really like his style of writing. It's clear and concise and he rarely leaves pertinent information uncovered. This book has been no exception so far. I've read through the first 4 chapters and it's already taught me a few things about JavaScript.

After reading Carl's thoughts on this page, and then LazyCoder's comments, it was Rory's post that finally provoked enough emotion in me to want to weigh in with my 2 cents. And Rory, don't worry man, I fell for the whole Nike Swoosh gimmick too - and I'm far too embarassed to mention how old I was before I came to the same realization you did.

I know this doesn't exactly qualify as “.NET” knowledge but, it's something I've had to battle with for a while so I thought I would post it in case anyone else finds it as helpful as I have.