Teleidoscope

Thu, Sep 27, 2007

Tech Books

Posted at 11:37 pm MDT to Media

I went into the office briefly and stopped at Borders on the way home. I picked up two technical books, spending nearly $100.00. I don't buy as many technical books as I did a few years ago: on-line information is generally much more current, and technical books are too heavy and bulky to take with me when I am travelling.

But reference books are still useful when you may need to check a lot of related facts and flip back and forth between them. Computers don't really yet provide a functional equivalent of little slips of paper with notes on them stuck in as bookmarks in a reference book.

One book I picked up was MySQL in a Nutshell, which will be useful in setting up the database side of the CustomerPortal project. It's an O'Reilly book: according to the colophon, the animal on the cover is a pied kingfisher, the largest bird capable of a hover in still air.

The other book is Fedora 7 & RedHat Enterprise Linux: The Complete Reference. Not an O'Reiily book, so it doesn't have a totemic critter: The cover is just boring text.

This one is for the server project: it includes coverage of the tools used in setting up and monitoring modern enterprise-grade Linux servers. This way I won't need to have the laptop on the table where I am trying to set up the server so that I can look up settings and parameters. (Much safer not to overcrowd the work space with things that will break if they are dropped... or have things dropped on them.) I'll still supplement the text with a bit of Googling, but sometimes you just can't beat 972 pages of reference materials inscribed on a dead tree.

According to the tracker numbers, all of the pieces of the server have Commerce City, Colorado as their next stop. The 'from-vendor' package turns out to be coming from Dallas. The packages coming from Memphis have passed through Kansas City and Salina Kansas And the California package left form Baldwin Park CA.

Part of the server may arrive tomorrow, after all.

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