::McTechBooks - Wrox and unwanted .NET books:: [/tech/books] (13:28)

I read the yahoo computer book authors group. The signal to noise ratio is EXTREMELY low, but there are occassionally some interesting posts there. This weekend there was an interesting post quoting a Wrox employee:

"We did a lot of .Net books that no one wanted to buy and were being returned in large quantities."

Lately I've been referring to these as McTechBooks, books with no nutritional content and almost nothing to distinguish themselves from any other book on the same topic. For .NET, this seems particularly foolish since the .NET market really has yet to see any real traction. In simpler terms, .NET just isn't popular enough yet for all the attention it's received from publishers. (and training companies, and conferences, and ...) These are the companies that need .NET. Now that they've sold you "Java with some generic concept" they need to sell you ".NET and that same generic concept".

I've made a decision recently to try to focus my reading more towards general concept books rather than language specific versions. Of course there is always room for a good book on a specific technology I'm using, (I've gotten good mileage out of the struts and the JSTL books I've recently read) but I plan to make even those the exception rather than the rule.

One book that I'm excited to see come out is Jack Herrington's Code Generation in Action. (disclaimer: I was a technical reviewer for this book, and I have a related book from the same publisher coming out this summer) I do have a difference in opinion with Jack about the level we need to be doing code generation at, (Jack takes the handcrafted approach whereas I prefer to work with code generation frameworks where possible) but I think this is a great concept book. The code generation techniques described are applicable to both Java and .NET development. (or any other language) I think this is much better than trying to pawn of a "Code generation in Java" and then a "Code generation in .NET" book.

My current tech book queue is:

• Learning Cocoa with Objective-C
• Translucent Databases
• Free Software, Free Society
• How to Solve it: Modern Heuristics
• The Future of Ideas

::Back in Action :: [/general] (11:15)

I seem to be having some really bad luck lately. About 3 weeks ago, the machine that I hosted my weblog on died. As I was searching for another host, my iBook died again. Apple managed to fix my laptop in just under 2 weeks this time, which is really good compared to the repair fiasco I had last time. I really hope I don't have any more downtime because right now this is the only machine I have access to.

I've moved the weblog over to the CapMac members site. I would have moved sooner, but they were having problems enabling CGI. Fortunately, I was able to help them get it enabled, and I finally have a working weblog again. Hooray!