Jay Smith

I received this book from INETA several years ago and it has been one of the most useful resources on building and growing community I have ever read.  I keep coming back and re-reading it every year, and every time I learn something new.

Dr. Greg Low does an awesome job of giving very sound advise and practical approaches to many issues faced by communities.  Topic covered in the book include why to start a technical community, finding speakers, how to start and grow user groups, recruiting members, how to organize your meeting or conference, and tips for presenters.

There are also two whole chapters dedicated legal and finance, and funding.

If you are a user group leader, or have thought about starting a user group this is a must read. I highly recommend it for anyone that is a leader of a user group or technical community, presents to communities, or just a community member.

If you see me at a conference ask me about this book, you might be surprised at what happens. 

Tags: Books, community

Microsoft Press is offering a free download of the entire e-book Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 by Peter DeBetta and Mark Whitehorn.

Learn about major new features in SQL Server 2008 including security, administration, and performance.

Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008:
Chapter 1: Security and Administration
Chapter 2: Performance
Chapter 3: Type System
Chapter 4: Programmability
Chapter 5: Storage
Chapter 6: Enhancements for High Availability
Chapter 7: Business Intelligence Enhancements

Click here to download

Tags: sql server 2008

This is a re-blog of a post by Christian Liensberger, that was posted on Microsoft Channel 8 website.  I usually don’t subscribe to repeating others blogs but thought this one was worth breaking that rule.

Always wanted to learn C#? Never wanted to buy a book for that? There are great news for you! Rob Miles, a professor at the University of Hull and .NET Micro Framework [2] addicted, released his C# teaching materials for free.

He called it the "yellow book", since it is structured like a normal book, and made it available from www.csharpcourse.com.

The book contains 185 pages and covers everything from how to start with C# (like the basic language constructs) to how to create user interfaces, components and even how to encapsulate the logic of your application into business objects.

After having read the book you probably want to try what you learned. To do that you might download the Visual C# Express Edition package. It is a free version of Visual Studio and comes with everything that is required to develop programs in C#.

Thanks Christian for posting this awesome resource,  you can read Christian’s post here, or head on over to http://csharpcourse.com for Robs original post and to download it.

Tags: books

How important are foundations?  Well, have you ever spent any time around a construction site?  You should sometime,  it is amazing the amount of work that goes into just getting the foundation setup.  They move or level ground, bring in support, cut rebar, dig out where the supports needs to be.  A lot of planning and thought, not to mention sweat goes into preparing the foundation to support the building or home that it will eventually hold.

Every developer should strive to have a foundation that is as thought out, sturdy, and planned as that and this E-book from Karl will developers build that foundation.

Karl Sequin’s blog series on the Foundations of Programming has been one of my favorites.  The insight and practicality of what he teaches has touched me and my coding habits in an exponential way.  I downloaded and printed the a PDF that Tim Barcz created that included everything up to Part 7 – Active Record.  I have carried that copy with me everywhere.  Oh yes, I have printed this one and replaced my worn short version and am prepared for to read it through again. 

Download it from http://codebetter.com/blogs/karlseguin/archive/2008/06/24/foundations-of-programming-ebook.aspx.

Tags: books