Books Books Books

I'm sorry! I've been so busy, posting has suffered.

I am now the Lead Developer for our primary Business Intelligence product at Zap Technology. My 3 month review at Zap resulted in this promotion which I happily accepted. Those who know me know that I was in a Lead Developer position prior to Zap.

This post though is more of an encouragement to all you fellow Australian developers. The Australian dollar is doing quite well against the US dollar. Now is a great time to buy those technical/reference books you always wanted! My recent Amazon order went in when the dollar was at USD $0.92. Normally I purchase theory related books but saw this as a good opportunity to get some reference books as well. Here's my order, some of which have already arrived:

• Implementation Patterns - Kent Beck
• LINQ In Action - Fabrice Marquerie, Steve Eichert, Jim Wooley
• ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts in Action - Darren Neimke
• ASP.NET AJAX in Action - Alessandro Gallo, David Barkol, Rama Vavilala
• Programming WCF Services - Juval Lowy
• Programming WPF - Chris Sells, Ian Griffiths
• C# in Depth - Jon Skeet

Hopefully you recognize some of the names. Kent Beck has been around the code quality scene for ages, and this new book of his is due out in January. Darren Neimke works for Readify, a Microsoft Gold-Partner consulting firm in Australia. Jon Skeet is a Microsoft MVP based in the UK. I respect Jon's commitment to the community and enjoy is writing style in news groups, and am looking forward to his first .Net related book in January.

So get those orders in! Create yourself a wish list and get your family to buy you some books for Christmas.

This will be the last blog post until after the Christmas season, so happy new year to you all!

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