Applepie

Technology Books Online

There a few new, and some old, technology books that I would like to read. Often, I will read a book once and never refer to it again. I have known about O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf for some time, and finally pulled the trigger on subscribing.

The Safari Bookshelf is an electronic reference library for programmers and IT professionals. A Safari subscription gives you complete access to the electronic versions of over 3,600+ of the latest and greatest books from O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, Adobe Press, Cisco Press, Java Press, Macromedia Press, Microsoft Press, New Riders, No Starch, Novell Press, Peachpit Press, Premier Press, Prentice Hall, Prima Publishing, Que, Sams, SitePoint, Syngress, and Wharton School Publishing.

Search across the full text of thousands of the best technical books available today.

Read books cover to cover online, or flip directly to the code sample or example you need.

Download whole chapters for printing and viewing offline.

Safari Bookshelf makes it easy for me to explore various books without incurring the expensive price for a technical reference book.

First of my new reading list are:

Head First Design Patterns

and

The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers

Cristiano Pierry

Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac

Take Control EBooks has an ebook on "Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac". Since I am bed-ridden for another 2 days, I thought this could be an interesting read. I bought it and read it in about 1 hour. I thought that being new to Macs and all that I might learn a thing or two from this book; and in the process, ensure that my Macs continue to run smoothly.

Unfortunately, the ebook is not worth the $10 or the 1 hour it took to read it. Very basic information that any Mac user will already know by their 3rd month of use.

My opinion - save your money. If you really want to learn more about Mac, buy this book instead Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Ed.

Rant: Amazon Prime

I have been an Amazon Prime user ever since they launched the service earlier this year.  On the surface, it is a great program for my family as we tend to order books, electronics, and computer accessories quite frequently.   I figured we would easily make up the $79 program cost over the course of 12 months by saving on shipping, and we would have benefitted from two-day "free" shipping throughout the entire year with no $25 minimum purchase.

But the reality of Amazon Prime has been quite different.  I have not been able to count on them meeting their delivery times, and now on three different occasions, Amazon Prime has failed to deliver a package on the date specified. 

The first occurrence was soon after Amazon Prime became available, so I figured they were just getting over some initial bugs.  However, it happened again, and yet another time.  If I can't count on the package arriving on the expected delivery date, then I have no use for Amazon Prime anymore.