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Amazon.com: Your Order Has Shipped - Joy to Book Rats

I, like Bill Gates, am hard to buy gifts for.  Mostly because I just go ahead and order what I want for Christmas, not because I already have everything, although in my world I want for little.  At the moment I am struggling with tech envy and saving up my American Express Reward points for a Nikon digital, or a digital video camera, or a pod-cast quality portable recorder, or a SanDisk MP3 player or … and fortunately  I am hoarding my points and that is keeping me from foolish impulse purchases.  Well, that Sansa e280 is giving me the eye and it takes courage to ignore it.  I wonder if it qualifies as a thumb drive for Vista ReadyBoost? …

Then there are books.  Books are my downfall.   And certain software.  Books and software.

{tags: orcmid software books Charles Petzold Jeffrey Richter Kathy Sierra Bert Bates Raymond Chen}

Two days ago I received one of those wonderful non-spam notices that a book order had shipped.  I was particularly thrilled because I had it in my mind that Raymond Chen’s new book, The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows must have shipped early.  Not so.  But I forgot about the other books that I had gleefully ordered and that had been consolidated in one super-saver shipment.  They arrived this morning via an early USPS delivery:

• Charles Petzold, Applications = Code + Markup: A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation.  I’m a big fan of Petzold’s minimalist approach to mastery of foundation concepts and this is one of those “kids, collect the whole set” exercises on my part.
• Jeffrey Richter, CLR via C#, ed.2.  As much as I may understand the CLR intellectually, I need someone to hold my hand through the reality of coping with .NET development of deployable software, and this looks to be exactly what I need.  I ordered the book entirely on speculation based on the glowing recommendation of Charles Petzold.
• Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates, SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide (exam 310–055).  I have not managed to get my head around Head First.  For me the Java documentation and tutorials are perfect.  Exam study guides (when they are not terrible) are some of the best resources for technical mastery of a subject that I have found.  Now that Java 6 is shipping, it is time for me to get on top of Java 5.  I trust Kathy Sierra and the amazon.com customers on this one.

This may give you some sense for the variety of my interests, but probably not much insight into what I might actually be working on at the moment.  And if my sponsor is reading this, be assured that I took time out to blog with one ear tuned to a webcast on 2007 Office System server-side capabilities.

According to another friendly announcement in this morning’s e-mail, I am about to receive delivery of Microsoft Expression Web (upgrade edition).  This will be the test for whether Vicki and I can really abandon Microsoft FrontPage for our various web sites.  They’ve all been rehosted on Apache servers recently, so it will be interesting to see what works (although the development server is still IIS with FrontPage extensions and Visual SourceSafe).

I will be excited to report on what I’m busily at work on at another time.  I needed mostly out-of-print books for the project (and Raymond’s blog, of course), and those I didn’t have already were found through amazon.com referrals to sellers of remaindered and used books.