Recent E-Book Purchases

Packt publishing, Manning and APress have been key sources of software related books for a variety of topics. Lately they’ve also been pushing out daily deals on eBooks that have grabbed my attention in a number of cases. Packt in particular has deep discounts on selected books (and often even deeper discounts if you buy all four on a given day) so they’re over represented in my list.

I tend to buy on a wide range of software topics as my preferred roles touch on all aspects of the engineering process and having some background across that range improves my effectiveness immensely. I’ve listed my purchase prices to give an idea of how deep these discounts go.

  • Game Programming using Qt 5 Beginner’s Guide – Second Edition ($8.00) Aug
    QT keeps coming up in discussions of C++ based UI programming. It is cross platform and seems to be well supported while the Microsoft specific alternatives all have limitations and most are seriously showing their age.
  • Hands-On GUI Programming with C++ and Qt5 ($7.20) Aug
    Another QT book covering core QT programming (the games book sounded interesting as it likely covers more graphical and interactive QT). I’m going to have to find time to do some sandbox programming with QT sometime soon.
  • Qt5 Python GUI Programming Cookbook ($8.00) Aug
    Combines python and QT as an interesting mix. Python also keeps showing up out there and being able to build QT UI tools with python on the back-end would be quite useful in places.
  • Fixing Bad UX Designs ($6.40) Aug
    I’ve tended to operate mostly in the middle and bottom ends of software stacks in the past. I’m trying to improve my feel for the user experience end of things and the UX books on my list support this effort.
  • Hands-On UX Design for Developers ($6.40) Aug
    A more general purpose UX book.
  • Unity 2018 By Example – Second Edition ($7.20) Aug
    I’d love to find time to build some simple games…particularly if I can combine interesting game play with a networked back end. Unity seems like one of the best ways to make this happen so I’ve been slowly reading enough to find my way around (also one of the reasons for my blender reading).
  • Unity Virtual Reality Projects – Second Edition ($8.00) Aug
    I bought an HTC Vive quite some time ago and while it has been fun to play with (though currently buried in the basement as I sort through years of various items) I really want to do some programming. Unity and VR seem like a good combination…with C# on the back end even better.
  • Hands-On Full Stack Web Development with Angular 6 and Laravel 5 ($10.00) Sept
    I bought this because Angular is high on my ‘web UI’ list and my web hosting here is PHP only. This stuff could give me the ability to break free from WordPress a bit and put some more interesting content on the site.
  • React Cookbook ($7.20) Oct
    React (and Vue a bit) is the other web UI framework that seems to be popular. I’d like to become a bit more familiar with it when time permits.
  • React and React Native – Second Edition ($7.20) Oct
    Another React book with (hopefully) broader coverage and some React Native bits along the way. Web UI for the win?
  • D3.js Quick Start Guide ($2.40) Oct
    Part of a set of four (thus the very low price) covering some odd corners of the web UI universe.
  • Learn WebAssembly ($3.60) Oct
    I have been hearing about webassembly from a few people at work as an interesting technology. Hoping this book gives me some more depth on this front.
  • Learn Three.js – Third Edition ($3.60) Oct
    I’ve been poking at three.js and WebGL for a while now. Another book on the three.js side can’t hurt and for the price I couldn’t turn this down.
  • Mastering SVG ($3.60) Oct
    SVG also keeps coming up at work and while I’m aware of the technology and its basic outlines, I’ve not dug deeper to date. Going to read through this one and see what I can pick up.
  • Kotlin in Action
    Kotlin seems to be an interesting attempt to end-run the conservatism of the Java eco-system. I’ve been looking at it a bit for some time. So far I haven’t found time to do more than some reading though.
  • The Java Module System
    Java 9 feature that I’d like to know a bit more about.
  • The Joy of Kotlin
    More on Kotlin.
  • Web Components in Action
    More web UI advanced topics.
  • Clean C++
    Hoping for some additional insights into modern (2011/2014) C++ usage.

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