the heap

I’ve got a thing for books. Computer books in particular are my interest. For the past few years, I’ve been a bit removed from convenient access to a book store with a decent stock of good computer books, but with the recent move I suddenly find myself within arm’s reach of a good supply. The funny thing is that about the same time that I got a store that I can go visit, I discovered alternatives that are about as convenient.

The first alternative was The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Discovered while Googling for an Objective-C reference, The Pragmatic Bookshelf is a book store for programmers. They offer an interesting collection of titles, without a strong focus on Microsoft topics, which is kind of a nice change. The coolest thing is that all their titles are available as e-books, and when buying the hard-copy along with the e-book you get a big discount and instant gratification. You can download beta versions of upcoming books, which is pretty cool.

The second site that has caught my interest is apress.com. I’d actually purchased from them in the past (Rocky Lhotka’s CSLA.Net books), but never really returned. Reminded that they were still there by a message in my inbox the other day, I went back and gave them a second look.  They have a bigger collection of books, but I want to say that The Pragmatic Bookshelf has better prices. They also have an alpha program where chapters of some of their books are available prior to the book’s release date.

I’m actually kind of on a big kick with this stuff now, so I’ll post more information if I turn up anything else that’s relevant.