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My brother wanted to be a writer when he finished university, and for 6 months, he sat and wrote a full novel, but never did get round to publishing it. The ones he took it to didn’t like it all that much, because, if I remember correctly, it was not African enough (a very annoying thing about living in SA, is that it is the politically correct thing to make everything ‘African’).

Well, the problem of getting published for a writer is no longer that much of an issue. that is all thanks to a really innovative site called lulu.com.

What they are, are an online publishing company that lets you publish your own book, and gives you the freedom to control every aspect of the book, from the design, paper format and price, to how you would like to sell it.

The reason why Lulu works so well, is that books are only printed on demand. That means there are never any large runs with 1000 copies of your brand new book gathering dust in your cupboard under the stairs.

So, how do you sell your book then? Well, Lulu interfaces direct to Amazon, so if a copy of the book gets sold on Amazon, it is printed off and posted along to the buyer directly. And if you would to sell your book in a more conventional way at bookstores, then you are free to order a batch, and then distribute it. Lulu also makes it very easy to distribute your book as an ebook as well.

There is a downside too though. With a traditional publisher, you would get a marketing campaign and solid distribution network behind you. Thus, it is quite likely that an established writer would not benefit too much from taking advantage of Lulu. For a new writer who is struggling to get published, or someone who is not seriously into writing, but has a book they would like to publish, the business model of Lulu is a much better fit.

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This is one big and comprehensive book, but do not let the title fool you. This book is about both MySQL and PHP and how to use them, but the real strength is how they work together.

It is most convenient to have both these technologies in one book, since in modern PHP programming, it is almost inconceivable to use one without the other, so it makes a very handy reference.

The book also includes tutorials and case studies to show real world examples.





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Git is a rather complicated version control application that I still, after 5 months of working with, still do not fully know how to use. I keep forgetting all the different commands, which at times can seem quite arcane.

This is where this book comes in. It is one of the most comprehensive guides to using git, and covers just about everything you would want to know in how to use it.

The nice thing too, is that it explains what everything is, so for example, what a branch is, in a clear and easy to follow way. Most other guides I have found have been rather lacking here where either they are too brief, or else go so over your head that it sounds like gibberish.

The other nice thing about this book is that it is fully available online for free at www.progit.org, although there is also a print version available.

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This is a very in-depth book, which guides you through the limitations and features of Javascript, giving it a good and proper treatment.

It is aimed at web developers, and focuses a lot on DOM interaction. Some of the advanced things the book covers is creating custom frameworks and dynamic front ends, and object-oriented Javascript.

It is easy to relate to this book as a programmer, since it is written by one of our own kind, so it is written in a way that I could jsut get to grips with easily.





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This book makes it sense of the minefield that is working with CSS.

As a reference to quickly find a solution on how to do something specific, this book does a pretty good job. It is laid out well, and the “recipes”, as a solution is called, are categorised nicely into convenient chapters for easy searching.

The real benefit of this book is that it highlights the difference between all the major browsers, so that cross-browser support moves out of the realm of fantasy, and into the realm of the possible.

I think this book is a must-have for every web developer.



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This book was one of my second year Maths textbooks when I was studying 10 years ago, and of all my textbooks, this is the one that I keep referring to the most.

This would seem kind of odd, since as a programmer, you would expect it to be one of my computer science books or something. Well, the thing is, almost everything I have learned about programming 10 years ago, is not much use today since the landscape has changed a lot since then, and all those books are hopelessly outdated.

What does not that much over 10 years is Maths. And while in my normal day-to-day programming tasks, advanced maths is not needed at all, if you want to do anything even remotely touching 3D graphics, then a book such as this is an invaluable resource. In fact, I used it just this week to help calculate the normals in the one O3D tutorial I wrote.

It centres on manipulating vectors and matrices, which 3D graphics relies very heavily on, and is clearly laid out with plenty of examples.

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Javascript is a minefield of a language. It has grown in importance with the advent of Web 2.0, even though most programmers used to other languages don’t know all the common pitfalls of Javascript development.

This book by Douglas Crockford covers a lot of the aspects of Javascript which make it so good at what it was intended to do, while also including a few chapters on the bad parts of Javascript too.

Rather than being a guide to the language itself, this book is best used as a reference for programmers experienced in other languages who have to make the jump to using Javascript in a way which uses it to its full potential.

If you hate Javascript because you think it is difficult to use and is just plain bad, then maybe this book might make you change your mind.

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