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I'm sorry that they've stopped selling ebooks. It's really convenient to read reviews of an ebook, check out a few pages of it, pay for it, download it, and start reading it. I"ll do a free trial of Safari, and see if I like it.

Another option for buying ebooks is Peachpit Press. On the bottom right corner of each page, they put "From the Library of (your name)", which isn't too distracting. However, I haven't been able to find as many technical books that I want by Peachpit as by O'Reilly.

The old PalmOS devices had options to select which battery chemistry were in use. If I remember correctly, support for recharable batteries such as NiMH cells was added somewhere around PalmOS 3 or perhaps 3.3. A reference page indicates that Alkaline, NiCad, Rechargeable Alkaline, and NiMH were supported.

If you didn't select the correct chemistry it could report the batteries as being dead or almost dead when they still had lots of life left.

I had a Palm IIIx that I used for many years and I ran it almost exclusively off of NiMH batteries with no problems. If I remember correctly I had the charge the batteries around every 2 weeks or so.

I find strange that the article talks about the upgrade path, but doesn't mention that Drupal 7 includes a modules and themes auto-update feature: "Update Manager: Building on Drupal 6's Update module, which keeps site administrators informed when new module and theme releases are available, the new Update Manager module can also install and upgrade modules and themes."

There's also an interesting link not included to TFS named Top Ten Changes That Make Drupal 7 the Best Version.

I have an interest in Drupal, since I'll be moving Slashgeo.org from Slashcode to Drupal in the coming weeks (here's why).

If I read the question correctly, you've already written a fair amount of the book already, yes? If so, stop writing. Find the publisher first, then work with them on producing the book.

There is no such thing as a generic book, especially in technology instruction. Peachpit, Apress, O'Reilly, etc. all publish very different sorts of books, with different styles and audiences. Adapting from one to another is more work than writing it "to fit" from the beginning.

I'm currently working on Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide for Peachpit, which has a strict style based on step-by-step instructions and very little narrative writing. If I were writing a generic book, it would be all narrative, and I'd never have gotten this contract. (The Peachpit folks have been wonderful, by the way.)

So why do you upgrade? Not that I'm agreeing with the article but if you have a computer and software that does everything you need it to, then why upgrade? No one is forcing you to buy a new version. From the quotes you showed of the article it seems like the writer is just making the argument that it's no longer cost effective to try and write the most compact and efficient code as possible.

I could be wrong because I'm just going from memory but doesn't Excel 2000 do far more than Excel 5.0?

There isn't much info on this subject but according to this article on what was new in Excel 2000, the short answer is: virtually nothing. The open and save dialog box got some tweaks like "now display 50 percent more files", the right click menu started displaying frequently used commands, it got more clipart and it started supporting hyperlinks in the excel 2000 spreadsheets.

So, to put it bluntly, it went from 15MB to 150MB and all it got was a fancy file handling dialog box, useless menu entries in the right click menu and it brought teh interwebz to the spreadsheets.

Chris Crawford tried for a "highbrow" commercial game with "Balance of Power" in 1984-1986, an "Un-war" game about thermonuclear cold (and hot) war. He wrote a book about it later, and this experience lead to the founding of the first (that I know of) newsletter for computer game designers, and then to the founding of the Computer Game Developer's Conference, still running today.

If you want to use a C# stlye language, simply use Java on OS X.

If you want to build more performant apps, use Objective-C.

I've used Visual Studio and many Java IDE's. I think XCode is one of the nicer IDE's around (it also has code completion and other modern IDE features), and as others have noted the Cocoa approach to GUI development is really, really quick.

Frankly I really like the message-passing style of Objective-C as it's a very pleasing mental model for interapp data flow. People who are complaining are generally just too used to a C++/C/Java stlye language, and need to broaden horizons a bit... yes having no garbage collection is a bit annoying but there are autorelease pools you know.

The final word on how useful Objective-C is comes down to Apple applications themselves. Look at the size of Apple and the broad range of pretty impressive applications they are able to develop. It speaks louder than any other argumnet as to why Apple should keep Objective-C as a preferred base for development, as they have had great success with it thusfar.

Besides, don't we all want real choices as opposed to everyone developing in various flavors of Java across every OS?

There are very few ideas that need to be expressed graphically

This may be true for you but there are some who prefer graphical or visual guides. Jus tnow I did a search on Amazon using "visual guide" and came up with more than 300 results. Using just "visual" results in more than 15,000 however because some of are for VB or Visual Studio without going through all of them I don't think it's a very good indictator. But adding "quickstart" results in more than 400 results. Publishers like Peachpit Press publish a number of visual guides and they wouldn't if there weren't a market for them. Fact is is that different person best learn using different methods, some learn by reading, some by watching, and others by practicing.

Access should not exist. Period. Leave it to the experts to work with DBs and your data will be fine.

Many not only need access to a db but also need to add records to one. Should a user be required to be an expert to do so? All they need is how to do it.

Surely Apple could claim prior art? ;-)

Sad Mac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Mac
Happy Mac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Mac
Sad iPod http://www.peachpit.com/content/images/exr_0819ipo d/elementLinks/figure7.8.gif

Of course, this being Microsoft, the bomb might be more appropriate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(symbol)

I agree completely - most of the beginner HTML books I've read seemed bent on teaching that content and layout go together, exactly the opposite of what the W3 advocates. Luckily there are a few beginner books that teach HTML and CSS side-by-side, but, as an instructor, I'd like to see this approach adopted by all instead of a few.

The Semantic Web sounds great, but I really don't trust people creating websites to include pertinent and accurate metadata about their site. If someone creates a site and simply wants to drive traffic to it, they're going to include whatever will facilitate that in their metadata.

Failing that, at least read The Non-Designer's Design Book. The concepts in this book (page layout and design) apply to software design too.

Unfortunately, this casemod is not going to help the case of this book.

The new Apple Training Series book is not only a brilliant to learn the basics of Logic, but also comes with a demo. Upon buying the book you can go to Peachpit's website and order a free XSKey that lets you use Logic and all its plugins uncrippled for 30 days.

While Logic itself can have a bit of a steep learning curve, there are now brilliant books and active, friendly mailing lists available to help you out. And the notation part of the program has always been pretty intuitive. Plus, as an organ player, you might appreciate that Logic has what I feel is the best B3 plug in ever made (Logic comes with a 30 day demo of this, and all its virtual instruments for you to mess around with). And if, down the road, you decide you want to take your notating to the next level and produce/mix/record/arrange/whatever, Logic will be able to take you there.

There are three different versions of Logic,

• Logic Audio
• Logic Gold, and
• Logic Platinum

They differ mostly in how many audio tracks you can arrange with, what DSP effects ship with each one, and other minor stuff like being able to draw automation curves. Feature comparison charts are available. For what you describe, you would need nothing more than Logic Audio, but the upgrade path to Gold and Platinum is clear and affordable should you decide you need more later on.

I swear, the technical publishing community must assume that programmers were born with C++ knowledge, because every book in creation assumes that one has that.

Two decades ago, computer user and programmer were pretty much synonmous. But today, things are different. Believe it or not, there are a lot newbies that are just now getting interested in software development after being computer users for quite a while. Looking for a book on Java programming that assumes no programming experience? You can probably find it, but it's not exactly easy.

Want a book to learn Mac OS X Cocoa programming? You better hope you have C++ or Java experience, otherwise you're simply out of luck. There are no entry-level Cocoa books. Same for WebObjects. Developers themselves aren't at all concerned about this, of course. They expect everyone to follow the same path they did.

Believe it or not, a lot of people do not want to read a *full* book before even cracking the book actually pertains to Mac OS X development. Additionally, not everyone is interested in become career software developers. They may just want to try it out as a hobby first. I hear from all sorts of people that just got Mac OS X and want to learn how to use those free development tools that Apple provides. There's no well-suited path for that. Why should you have to learn all sorts of general C theory when all you want to do is learn the stuff that pertains to Mac OS X development? This turns potential developers off, which is sad.

The Visual QuickStart series by Peachpit Press is the only series that I have seen that is consistently good at addressing this problem. As far as I can tell, the series is rapidly expanding.

Here's a crazy idea: how about a book that teaches you Java or C with the intention of writing Mac OS X apps? How about a Java servlet book that doesn't assume you're transitioning from C++? How about making this books readible and more practical than theory-oriented?

Lower the barrier to entry.

- Scott

WEll they wouldn't try to "crush" that site. MacFixIt is one of the largest and most-respected Mac sites on the Internet. It's also probably saved Apple tens of thousands of dollars in support costs due ot the help posted on that site everyday.

MacFixIt first was an web-update site for Ted Landau's Sad Macs, Bombs, and Other Disasters book. Since then, it has grown to be quite popular and well-known--#3 out of 56 sites on a recent survey.

This isn't Apple sending a harsh letter to some corporation in Asia ripping off its iMac or a letter seeking to shut down someone's domain that infringes on copyrights--it's Apple's lawyers politely, but firmly, explaining their problem with the update (the legalese is what makes it seem a bit...shall we say...stern?) to a website that is well known both inside and outside of Apple.

These two books were a huge help when I started.. Red Hat Linux 6 and UNIX both of these books are very easy to read and I've seen them at Borders and Walden Books or even order off the web site. They are very well worth the money.

These two books were a huge help when I started.. Red Hat Linux 6 and UNIX both of these books are very easy to read and I've seen them at Borders and Walden Books or even order off the web site. They are very well worth the money.