Monday, December 10, 2007

Books from Manning

It has been a long time since I have not bought a book, in fact, a printed book. This blog today is to talk about books.

In my library I have had the pleasure to be able to buy books, not merely a photocopy or any other media. I buy these books and read them a little but the work absorbs most of the time and it is scarce to read about all the information needed to make oneself job much better, but knowing information is there no matter if it is as a reference pays the bill.

Fortunately, I have those books about literature, computers, in both English and Spanish and the preferred way of reading them are is in printed form, the classic way, but as internet and the technology permeates our lives it becomes more and more necessary to use other ways to acquire knowledge in an evolution manner to which the PDF has universally been the master for delivering a printed book to the digital era, which let's say, it keeps the earth from losing trees to make paper to make books, other materials are used to get a digital book to your hands (the use of computers to materialize them, in fact, a book is first drafted in a computer, then goes to printing in paper and printing electronically).

In the past I have been a little reluctant to buy complete books in Electronic book for copyright reasons and other facts, they don't allow me to read in any computer I wish, and I bought some, but as it is a little harder to read in a computer screen, it was left aside. Other they are password protected and unless I do not forget the password, I can read it anywhere I like. But, like or not, it is a cheaper way to have books and the space required to shelve them is minimal, only a few gigabytes of your computer hard disk space is required. And I have also to admit that I now collect any PDF or electronic book (in a way it can be read with a portable reader like Adobe Reader or PDF Reader) to have a full reference of data whenever I need it most.

All of this leads me to this final paragraph. Last Saturday I spent some bucks buying PDF books. They are entitled:

  1. Spring in Action, second edition by Craig Walls with Ryan Breidenbach

  2. Test Driven -
    Practical TDD and Acceptance TDD for Java Developers
    by Lasse Koskela


I bought these books to leverage higher my knowledge to Spring Framework, and TDD; and again, to be a better software developer and craftsman. There are times when a book must be bought because, specially these books, are not available, pity me, the-free-electronically available-book-resource, that is, in Internet; and one honor is to buy and respect the resources and time spent by the authors to get those contents to you, but as said, there are times when one needs that resource for free due to limited money to spend (if one could buy all one wish, there could be not enough money to get them), thus, if I need something the most, I must buy, and if it was get for free, the a share of gratitude and debt is granted herein.


I will, to the public, keep informed with my readings about these books, to start sharing my knowledge to the Universe.

No comments: