Dan Maharry

APress Ebooks

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Apress have started putting their entire catalogue online as e-books, available from their home site. I’m not sure if I’d laugh or cry at this. It’s great to see them offer another way of selling their books to the public, especially as the prices are significantly lower than their paper counterparts. I also like that the books I’ve written for them are given another way to finally make back the advance they paid me and get me some royalties. On the other hand, seeing them back as files again (albeit laid out pdfs) is a bit like they never went away to be printed. Ashes to ashes, doc file to pdf..... One thing they haven’t done though is rework the index or table of contents - paper book page numbers don’t help here lads. We need Chapter number, and then page number within that chapter. Oh and the download page has a fairly obvious flaw at the mo.

Anyway, here are the links to my Apress e-books

BAND Sample Chapters and Competition

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DMXZone is the first site to have put up a sample chapter for Beginning ASP.NET Databases. The one they have is Chapter 6: an introduction to DataSets and DataReaders. Other sites will get Chapter 9 on Stored Procedures. DMXZone is also running a competition to win a free copy of the book. Good luck if you decide to have a go and enter it. I'll also be writing some Dreamweaver-based articles based on the book for DMX Zone in the coming weeks so look out those there as well.

If you'd rather pick up a copy of the book online, here are the places to buy it that I've found so far.

Missed A Few Things

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Never judge a book by its cover. Kimberley Tripp has a post on her blog called A Simple Start - Table Creation Best Practices. I thought that it might not be a bad idea to see if her wise words tallied with those in BAND. Judge for yourself. There's table design and then there's table design it would appear. I don't think I'll need to cover this in the Whidbey update. Interesting to read though. Reminds me of building structs in VB6 and C++.