The free pdf deal is over. Hope you got it if you wanted it.

I just found out about this and it is only good for a couple more days. I read about it over at Whatever. Scott Sigler’s Infected is available as a free download in pdf format. I haven’t read it, just downloaded it now, so I have no idea what it is like. But it is Sci-Fi and it is free. The site said the download will be available until March 31st. That’s Monday, so get hopping.

I remember the first time that I read “Childhood’s End”, the classic by Aurthur C. Clarke. Clarke wrote the story well before I was born and I came across it at a young age. This tale of the end and beginning of the world had a profound effect and I was entranced. As I recently read Robert Charles Wilson’s “Spin”, I was reminded once again of that same sense of awe and the weight of humanity and its dreams. It was just as I finished the book that I saw in the news that Clarke had died, and I guess that cemented the association in my mind. “Spin” is an incredible tale, and not just a copy or derivative of Childhood’s End. In fact what they have in common is a mood or sense of gravity, not plot or devices. That Wilson won the Hugo Award for Best Novel with this book is absolutely no surprise.
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When I first started working with Linux just a short 10 years or so ago, it was a little more difficult than now to get going. I remember the difficulty I had, wrestling with my first Slackware install and getting all the floppies together to get the packages that I needed. Today, a person who has never set on eyes on Linux before can have it installed on it’s own system or alongside another OS in almost no time with a very nice graphical installer walking them through the process. I also remember the hours I spent looking for the little piece of knowledge that I needed to conquer my next problem. Now, someone new to the community has a vast array of resources available on the web, or if they are inclined to begin with Ubuntu, they can literally find almost every single thing they will need in the single volume of Mark Sobell’s “A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux.”

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Much like anyone else who spends a decent amount of time on the internet, I find myself turning to Wikipedia quite regularly. I am unaware of any resource as thorough or as quick for many of my information needs (or whims) on a day to day basis. Detractors point out that anyone can edit Wikipedia and this can lead to inaccurate information. For me, the open editing is one of the draws. I’ve been reading Wikipedia for some time, and each time I find myself thinking that it would be fun to be more than a passive consumer. There are a few topics where I might be able contribute in a meaningful way. A brand new addition to the O’Reilly Missing Manual series, “Facebook The Missing Manual” was the last nudge to push me into full involvement.

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I read this book after receiving a free copy from Tor’s program giving out an e-book a week. Sanderson has gained quite a bit of attention recently after being named the author that would finish Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. I never got into the Wheel of Time books, so I wasn’t so hot to find out about the writing of the person who would be completing the saga, but I was interested a little more, knowing that Sanderson’s work was going to be even that much more under the watchful eye of a large set of committed fans.

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“Head First JavaScript” is one of the latest entries in O’Reillys Head First series. Like the other Head First books, it takes a somewhat unique approach in conveying information. The stated intent of the series is to help readers learn and retain material by formatting it in a manner that assists in meeting those goals. This means that the book is full of graphics, exercises and humor. There is also a refreshing note on who will benefit from the book. I’ve pretty much always thought of these sections in books as entertaining, in that I get to see what new way a publisher has found to say, “Everyone should buy this book!”. Head First Javascript actually does a decent job of describing who this book will help, and who it will not help. That alone had me intrigued right from the start.

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Throughout much of his life, J.R.R. Tolkien worked on a series of stories set in his well known middle earth. A few he considered his “Great Tales” and he would return to them often, writing them multiple times and in multiple forms. One story that he worked on often over many years was the tale of Hurin and his children Turin and Nienor. Following his death, Tolkien’s youngest son Christopher has worked to collect, edit and publish much of what his father wrote but never published. The tale of Hurin’s children has been told in part already in some of those works. But it is in this book that for the first time the complete tale is told from start to finish of “The Children of Hurin.”

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