Cheaper Developer Book Resources
Posted on | January 1, 2010 | No Comments
iPod Touch
As a web developer, you rely on your reference books to solve problems, look up functions, syntax, terms, etc., and to learn about new technologies. Trying to keep up with the number of new books that come out and the cost can be overwhelming on the psyche and hits the pocketbook hard. At $35-$50 a book, that’s nothing to sneeze at. I’ve found an alternative resource to buying retail books that I wanted to share.
One of the gifts that I received this Christmas was a gift card to the iTunes App Store. I do a lot of things with my iPod Touch, from keeping track of finances to social networking to even updating and administering my web sites (including this one). I never thought of the iPod Touch as a book viewer (because it’s not a Kindle or Sony eReader) as the screen size is limited. Anyway, back in the iTunes App Store, armed with my gift card, I started doing searches for web development tools. I already have some quick reference apps for CSS and Javascript and WordPress and Joomla admin apps, so I was looking for more resources along those lines. A handful of O’Reilly programming books popped up and I dismissed them initially. But when I took a closer look at an iPhone Apps book, I started to delve a little more into it. The name of the book is “Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript” by Jonathan Stark and the print edition (pre-release) pricing is $29.99, in the Apps Store it’s $5.99! I did more searches for other books and came up with some that were $4.99! Compare that price with the print price and it’s a no brainer.
But wait–is there stuff missing? Without going through both books, print and iPod Touch versions, I honestly cannot say if it is the same word-for-word. But, I did verify the table of contents and both match. As far as any supplemental materials, you can download the files from the O’Reilly site. So, it looks like the content is comparable. I’m not saying that this is a substitute for a printed book, because, of course, there are advantages to having a printed book over a digital version. That is not the purpose of this post, but I think that in these tough times, low cost alternatives to really expensive computer books should be considered and if you can deal with reading from a smaller screen, the $5-$6 cost is worth it!
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