As we grow up and get more mature some things become taboo and thought childish if to be partaken in as an adult, LEGO building being one of these activities. Let’s be honest, every time you see a pile of LEGOs all you can really think about is digging in and seeing what you can build in the time available. Maybe a car, maybe a house, maybe the final battle of Mordor from Lord of the Rings? But alas, this is taboo.

In the fight against adulthood No Starch Press has come forward with a beacon of hope, a shining sword thrown directly into the heart of the beast that is adulthood, and sent it running, that sword? LEGO Technic Idea Books. A three part series that simply shows you more about LEGOs than you really ever thought about.

The three books are Simple Machines, Wheeled Wonders, and Fantastic Contraptions. They focus heavily on the Technic line of LEGOs but a lot of the stuff in all three books can be done without any Technics pieces at all. Read more

I was recently given the opportunity to fly to Florida and hire people to clean up oil from the BP spill. Given that I had some long flights (I live in Salt Lake City, UT) I picked up a Nook from Barnes and Noble and had on my computer a copy of jQuery: Novice to Ninja. What better way to spend my flight time than reading a jQuery book! So I dug in.

I have been using jQuery both professionally and personally for about a year now but this book still brought a lot to the table.

Earle Castedine and Craig Sharkie have a great sense of humor, and obviously know their way around jQuery, CSS, HTML and the likes. The book uses some real world examples of creating image galleries and user interfaces. They break down the jQuery code to it’s basic forms, and then explain why things work the way they do. They don’t get too deep into Javascript except to note that jQuery is nothing more than a fancy framework on top of Javascript and uses Javascript for everything! I thought it particularly neat when they would show the “hard” way to do things, then the better way to do them, and then finally a plugin that made all the work you had just done seem useless, but it isn’t useless because you now understand how the plugin works better than if you had just slapped it in place in the beginning.

The book is quite deep about animations, AJAX actions, DOM manipulation and the sort. Even if you know Javascript and you have been using jQuery there is something in here that will make you go “ah ha!”.

To the folks over at SitePoint (an O’reilly company) good work!

So a while back I found a cool little site called Glyde, and their About Us page really sums up what they are all about:

Glyde.com is a new marketplace that combines the great deals of a person-to-person online marketplace with the ease, simplicity, and safety of a retail store.

So I think the best thing about Glyde is they already know 95% of the details for anything you want to sell on their site, and they make doing business super easy.

Start a Sale

Getting started is easy, simply sign up (free), and start listing products. You can sell DVDs, CDs, Games (console) and Books. Listing is as easy as typing in the title of the product, or ISBN (or other unique identifier). They will load your store with all the images and descriptions you need.

Price to High?

One thing I find particularly handy about Glyde (beside their very easy to use interface) is the notifications that my products are not within market price. Let’s say I list a book for $25 (market value) and two weeks go by and no one buys. As time goes by books lose value and so prices in the market adjust. Glyde doesn’t auto adjust your price, but they do tell you what the system considers fair market value and you can decide to accept that and change your price, or ignore it and try to sell your book for more.

Shipping Sucks

Now let’s admit that we all hate having to deal with shipping details and figuring out pricing for books etc. Well Glyde makes this easy too! When you sell an item on Glyde they handle the shipping. What they do is mail you an envelope ( or other mail package ) which you put your item into and drop in the mail. That’s it! Your item you sold is then sent to the purchaser and all is grand.

Glyde Fees

So how much is this awesome service? Well cheaper than some, and more than others. Glyde takes 10% of the sale (not bad), plus the cost of the shipping materials. The listings are always free.

Go Glyde!

Glyde is really a great way to look at purchasing new media, and I hope to see good things from them in the future.

Head on over to Glyde now for the Utahcon.com Book Sale!

I’d like to first thank the team at InformIT for making books like Making it Big in Software. I love these titles!

Making it Big in Software is a great read, it is something I think that every software developer would have loved to have had when they were breaking into the software world. I know I would have loved to have had it.

Sam Lightstone has put together what could easily be called the blueprint to a successful career in software. He covers college, post-college pre-career, interviewing, resumes, fitting into the work environment, salary discussions, and more, much more.

The book is broken into three parts each covering an aspect of the flow of becoming big player in software, or at least a medium sized player in software.

The book is spattered with great interviews with some of the greatest minds of our time, including:

• Marissa Mayer, Google VP, Search Products and User Experience
• Linus Torvalds, Creator, Linux operating system kernel
• Steve Wozniak, Inventor, Apple computer
• John Schwarz, CEO, Business Objects
• James Gosling, Inventor, Java programming language
• Bjarne Stroustrup, Inventor, C++ programming language

Sam keeps the tone of the book very light, and I found it quite entertaining.

The chapters are broken into sections and each section is only a page or two long, which makes this a great short reader.

I have praised the writers of interview books before, and I will do it again, I think you can learn a lot from the old dogs (and some new dogs). I think that hearing the war stories and the victories and defeats are important in knowing where you are going, and where you are coming from. I love books like this one.

So again thanks to the team at InformIT and Sam Lightsone for taking the time to write Making it Big in Software.

Beginning Blackberry Development

When Apress asked me to review Beginning Blackberry Development I jumped at the chance, a free opportunity to learn more about Blackberry and their SDK and way of doing things. I also thought this a great chance to open myself to the world of mobile OS comparison, as I have been tinkering with Android over the last few weeks.

The book arrived a few days later, and I dove right in.

Anthony Rizk, the author, kept things in this title really to their roots, beginning. Most pages were covered with larger than needed screenshots of extremely similar screens, which cut down on the amount of space available for extended explanations of why things worked (or didn’t). Something I found to be handy, in the beginning sense, and annoying in an intermediate to advanced programmer.

The book is a quick and easy read, skimming the topics of storage and connectivity. Anthony supplies the book with a few walk through coding examples, but hardly suggests ways to improve upon the skills learned.

Surprisingly the book covers layout and design of the applications quite well, and may be worth picking up if your design skills on Blackberry are slacking.

Anthony does a great job explaining what techniques work on each version of the Blackberry OS, and even expresses why it is sometime advantageous to just drop support for older versions and focus on the future of the OS.

If you are looking to get your feet wet in Blackberry OS development then Beginning Blackberry Development is a great book to start with. It will quickly get you setup with an IDE, and using the shortcuts to coding working examples.

I would have liked to seen the book be a little more in depth, but for beginning it is a great knowledge base for diving into other books like Advanced BlackBerry Development.

Available now at Amazon.com, and Apress.com pick up Beginning BlackBerry Development.