Sogeti Phoenix Blogs

I read a lot of books.  At one time in my life I was spending at least $1000 per month on books...back before I had a mortgage and two car payments and a wife that goes crazy for Coach purses.  I rarely read productivity books about applications that I use.  It's not that I don't think that I can be more productive, but a lot of them just aren't written with me in mind.

Back at the Microsoft PDC conference in 2005, I was walking through the Microsoft book store and came across the first edition of a book titled Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson.  Beyond Bullet Points was about making your PowerPoint presentations better and improving how they're written.  Mr. Atkinson talked a lot about making your presentation into a story, and turning that story into a PowerPoint.  I liked what I saw as I scanned through the book and bought it.

Fast forward a couple of years, and out comes the second edition of Beyond Bullet Points, this time targeting PowerPoint 2007.  Same great book, and a lot of improved and refined content.

I can honestly say that I use the story templates for Beyond Bullet Points on every PowerPoint presentation that I do today.  It has revolutionized how I go about planning my presentations.  My presentations are no longer about throwing a couple of slides together.  Each slide is planned and documented to present the story that I'm trying to share.

I highly recommend this book for anyone that does PowerPoint presentations, or for anyone that really wants to learn how to do PowerPoint presentations.

ASP.NET AJAX in Action by Alessandro Gallo, David Barkol, and Rama Krishna Vavilala, is one of the best books that I've seen covering AJAX from the Microsoft perspective.  Their book is wonderful at giving the reader the exact details that they need to know about how to take advantage of Microsoft's AJAX technologies on both the client and the server, as well as getting the client and the server to work together.

When you think of Microsoft AJAX, most developers would probably think first of the UpdatePanel control in ASP.NET.  Using UpdatePanel is easy.  The developer drops it onto a page, adds one or more ASP.NET server controls as content for the UpdatePanel, and instantaneously those nasty page refreshes go away.

What most developers, in my opinion, are not thinking about when they hear the term Microsoft AJAX is the rich client-side library written in JavaScript that allows developers to do so much more on the client side.  The authors recognize this problem and spend significant time explaining the richness of the JavaScript environment before introducing the concept of the UpdatePanel control.  The end result of this book is that the developer has started to master the client-side development aspects of developing with JavaScript and calling web services on the server by the time the developer starts looking into the server-side aspects of AJAX.

Special attention in the second half of the book is placed on the component and control model of the Microsoft AJAX library.  Developers will learn how to create new non-visual JavaScript components, behavior extenders in JavaScript, and new JavaScript-based HTML controls.  Once the client-side aspects of these components and controls have been covered, the authors then explain and demonstrate how to wrap your new JavaScript components in ASP.NET server controls to enable the drag-and-drop designer experience.

This book is easy to read.  I found very few errors in it (none that I can actually recall).  Overall, this book really helped me to better understand and advance my use of Microsoft's AJAX technologies and pushed me into spending a lot more time learning how to develop in JavaScript on the browser, something which I admittedly was not very good at.  I definitely recommend buying this book the next time that you're at Borders.

Most people make fun of me when I travel.  No matter where we go, or for how long we go for, I always have a travel backpack with me that is filled with books.  Reading is my passion, and I admit that I really love reading books about software topics and learning new things.

One of my latest acquisitions for my library is LINQ in Action by Fabrice Marguerie, Steve Eichert, and Jim Wooley, and published by Manning.  I have to say that at least over the past year or so, Manning has become the best publisher out there.  They fill a niche that I fell that O'Reilly has stepped away from.  O'Reilly used to have the best books in the early days of Java, but then they got caught up in a "publish before it's ready" phase, probably due to competition from Wrox.  Wrox, and this is my opinion, probably has the lowest quality of books of any publisher that I've seen.  Anyways, back to Manning's excellent book...

LINQ in Action is an excellent introduction to LINQ, or Language INtegrated Query, that was introduced with .NET 3.5.  LINQ has promise to completely revolutionize development in .NET to make it easier to interact with data of all sorts.  LINQ provides support for querying and manipulating collections of objects, processing and transforming XML documents, or querying and interacting with persistent data in databases.  To go a step further, LINQ is also extensible to allow developers to add LINQ support to other data sources such as WMI collections, event logs, or other custom data sources.

While I haven't made it all the way through the book, I do have to say that what I've learned about LINQ and .NET through the first few chapters has opened my eyes to a lot of new features of the .NET Framework.  I can't wait to start using them in my own programs and blogging about them here.