In the second quarter I didnt spend as much time as I wanted in reading books mostly because I found some really nice video training courses. Video courses is hot at the moment and every day “virtual teachers” popping up. Some of them are great, I have to admit, but others are rather poor. Anyway in my opinion books are still the king when it comes to learning. Lets see my thoughts on the books I’ve read below.

Javascript – The good parts 

Probably the book that most Javascript developers have read. It comes from Douglas Crockford who has deep knowledge in JavaScript. Definitely not a book for beginners. It spends quite a lot of pages about javascript patterns something that makes sense considering how big the javascript apps are these days. To be honest at some point I found it really difficult to follow. With only one sentence he may describe a term that other books spend pages. The best thing I learned from this book is the way of thinking on how to construct your javascript code. Mark 4/5  Price:~20$ on Amazon

Effective Monitoring and Alerting

Another brilliant book! Very well written with plenty of information on how to monitor servers in a business environment and how to set up alerts in order to get notified when something goes wrong. I really enjoy books that authors goes into details but without leaving the readers with the sense of  “Oh probably I missed something”.  If you are working in a big corporate environment that has a proper IT department then probably you know most of the things from this book but again it doesn’t harm to revise useful technics and practises. Mark 4/5  Price: 13$ O’Reilly Media

Beginning ASP.NET MVC 4

We already have MVC 5 but since I bought this book some time ago I thought that I should read it because most of the things between mvc4 and mvc 5 are still the same. Well what a bad decission… Probably I should have never bought this book. It is very poorly written and clearly the author is not a proffessional writer. I would say probably a developer that in his spare time wrote this book. Plenty of mistakes, code that is not working and bad critics in amazon… Do I need to say more? I always had the feeling that I skipped pages! Some parts(very few) have nice thoughts but this is not enough to get a good score. Mark 2/5  Price:30$ Barnes & Noble

Arduino Workshop: A Hands-On Introduction with 65 Projects

And last but not least! Arduino Workshop book! I left the best for the end. By reading this book you will get a solid understanding on how Arduino works and you will be able to work any possible project that involves an Arduino microcontroller. You will also learn basic electronics, something that is usefull for other small projects or even for everyday diy. I really like the way it is written and it looks that the author has plenty of expertise in this area. The only thing I’d like to add is that you don’t have to buy exactly the parts he is suggesting. Nowdays with all those chinese eshops you can find similar for 1/10th of a price. Mark 4/5  Price: $14 Overstock.com