books

A few days ago, fantasy author Terry Pratchett announced some sad news on Josh Kirby’s blog (in a post titled “An Embuggerance”). Apparently he has been diagnosed with a rare, early onset form of Alzheimer’s. His blog post sounds optimistic under the circumstances: Folks, I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my > publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news....

Dave Thomas just announced a new Pragmatic Bookshelf series called Pragmatic Fridays. I have no idea what inspired the name “Friday” in this context, but a Pragmatic Friday is a short (60 - 100 pages), low-cost ($7.50 - $10), and focussed book on a specific topic. The books are available for download in PDF form only, and as with all downloadable Pragmatic Bookshelf titles, they contain no DRM. The first Pragmatic Friday title Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby by Caleb Tennis is available for download now, at the price of $8....

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy movie (which I didn’t care for all that much, as I previously wrote), prompted me to pick up a copy of “Don’t Panic”, Neil Gaiman’s guide to the guide. The original version came out in the late 80s, but it has been updated several times since then to keep up with all additions to the increasingly inaccurately named trilogy, as well as the unfinished work that Douglas Adams left behind after his death in 2001....

The upcoming Make: magazine from O’Reilly sounds very interesting. It is published as a “mook”, a magazine / book hybrid, and covers a wide array of technology and what people can do with it. It sounds like the focus will be on concrete consumer projects, including things like kite aereal photography, home entertainment, websites, etc. This sounds like the ultimate geek magazine and I’m curious about the first edition. There is also a section on user reviews, for which Mark Frauenfelder, the Editor in Chief of Make:, is currently looking for writers in this BoingBoing posting....

Out of curiosity I just did a Google search for “digitalhobbit” to find any references to my site (not that I really expected any…). One of the links that was returned among the top search results was this one. It points to a site called All Consuming, which apparently monitors blogs for Amazon book links and uses this information to generate a page of the most discussed books, along with links to Amazon, to blogs discussing the books, etc....