Attention Prospective Web Nerds

[cleversticks]

If you've been thinking you wanted to do some web programming, and you like working from books, and you don't care if the book is made of paper, then look at this. Apress, the tech book publisher, has a daily deal where one of their titles sells for $10, and today that book is a guide to PHP and MySQL 5. The book listed for quite a lot more,

Comments

[cleversticks]

Yeah, I have a hard time with the ebooks too in terms of the reading experience, although for the tech books, I like spending less on them (and not wasting trees) since they go out of date faster than regular books. And, of course, they're searchable.

[cthulhie]

Man, yeah. I like everything about that but the password-protected pdf thing. Password protected? Gah. I love the idea that I could sit down to a copy of Pride and Prejudice that I bought six years ago and be prompted for a password to read it. And by love, I mean that other thing. Its opposite.

[cleversticks]

It is kind of annoying, I will admit that. Not quite enough that I've gotten rid of the passwords on the ones I've bought, but it is kind of silly.

That said, the password they use is the email address you used as your userid, so as passwords go, it's at least easy to remember.

[cthulhie]

Actually, that's pretty nice. I've been recently fetishizing the idea of an ebook reader simply for heavy tech manuals. I read a lot on the bus, and I'm driven largely to paperbacks for ergonomic and chiropractic reasons. The idea that I could collapse a five-or-ten-pound monstrosity into an ebook is appealing.

The main thing that keeps me from being really interested is the prospect of the price for each digital book--there's not really a good market in place to keep the price down without used versions of the books. (Which, to be fair, isn't really an issue with tech books--they're hideously expensive no matter what, and they're not the best purchase when they're a decade out of date.) Basically, I want an ebook/library affair.