Before the fall of Wrox back in 2002, an erstwhile attempt was made to produce monthly books on new cutting edge topics. Java Server Faces, Hailstorm, XQuery and more were all covered in hastily put together 200 page tomes. It being 2002 though, the number of topics you could write a book on were limited and the EA series became the Handbook series before Wrox fell into liquidation.
With a new owner, it looks like Wrox v2 are taking another crack at the early adopter series but in a more sensible form. From Jim Minatel,
Wrox Blox are short, electronic-only, downloadable, and typically going to be on hot cutting edge topics. For short, these first few range from about 20-40 pages. Electronic only and downloadable: they’re PDFs available from Wrox.com.
And, here’s something I think you’ll find cool: they’re DRM free. If you’re paying $3.99 (US - which is the introductory price for these) that’s low enough that we don’t want to hassle readers with DRM.
The launch Blox are:
And new ones are due approximately every week. I almost really like this approach. it’s a median between ASPToday’s daily free (when I was there) content and the untenable EA concept.
It has been a funny week. One of those seven days when more than a few things have happened that I wasn’t quite expecting. Monday had me at Mike Keneally’s first ever UK gig - a Taylor guitars demo at a music shop - which I only found out about twelve hours before. Thank heavens for the web. Tuesday was Anthrax. These guys were the second band I ever saw at a concert over ten years ago and they still go at it like demons. It was truly awesome to watch. Wednesday saw me finally give the TwentyTwoOverSeven guys their EP just moments before their last ever gig and break up and it wasn’t until Thursday, I actually managed to sit down and chill.
Then of course, Friday saw the dissolution of Wrox Press. It’s very sad to see the company you grew up in go the way of the dodo, but at the same time sixteen months of freelancing has kind of numbed me to the announcement of its demise. Post mortems are irrelevant - they were in process over eighteen months ago. Time to move on.
There we have it- the end of an era.
Wrox Press has died - it went into liquidation today.