In which I contrast the Kobo Touch, Sony Reader and iPad 2 in terms of reading books.

Let me cut to the chase: If I was forced to choose only one of these devices, it would be the iPad. But for the purposes of exclusively reading books I would choose the black Kobo Touch.( No photos, sorry. I can't capture the bedazzling effect of the Sony Reader's shiny bezel. )

Due to my weak and undisciplined nature I have succumbed to "more shinies syndrome" and now I have a Kobo Touch. I have a large collection of O'Reilly books in ePub format, which work just fine on the iPad, but crash the Kobo. So I set out to massage my O'Reilly books to the point that they are usable on the Kobo.

( Details of my book massaging behind the cut )

Here are some ways that Kindle (App for Mac OS X) fails me:

• Does not support code blocks (i.e.: pre formatted text)
• Has poor widow/orphan control (i.e.: page breaks between headings and the subsequent paragraph)
• Touching my scroll wheel will send me many pages back or forth through the book, leaving me to waste my time getting back to where I was.

( Read more... )

So you're responsible for maintaining some code which has a significant amount of technical debt. You're looking at this great big mess of spaghetti and wondering where to start.

These two books can help you:

• Working Effectively with Legacy Code
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

These two books have helped me with my work, and ( Read more... )

If you use Stanza and have an account with O'Reilly Books, you'll be able to download all of your purchases directly to Stanza.

Just open Stanza, tap "Get Books", then tap "Catalog" up the top, tap "O'Reilly Ebooks", tap "My oreilly.com Bookshelf (My Purchases)" and log in (the first time). There's your list of O'Reilly publications!

If you buy (technical) books from Pragmatic Publishers, and you use Stanza, here's the guide on how to get Stanza to see all the books you've purchased from Pragmatic:

http://pragprog.com/frequently-asked-questions/ebooks/ipad-how-to

Nifty!