Drupal: December 2008 Archives

I'm not one to be enthusiastic about Web-site redesigns. I've gotten used to what happened at ZDNet, and now I even like it. Not so much with O'Reilly, which used to have everything organized into categorized, named blogs but which now just dumps it all in one bucket and relies on "popular topics" tags and a topics tag cloud to parse it for the reader.

Still, O'Reilly continues to publish the best tech books out there — including a new Drupal title I'm dying to get my hands on. I wish they'd update their OS books more often, but I guess there's a lot more of a market for books on how to write code (for the Web or elsewhere) than there is for how to set up and run operating systems. I understand that.

What O'Reilly does have is a fairly steady flow of good, provocative blog posts that really make you think (and often teach you something, too). I took a look today and want to read all of the following:

• How I Ended Up in the Cloud
• Practice, Play and Computers
• The $5 Self-Publishing Workshop
• But What Exactly "Is" Cloud Computing?
• The Beatles of Programming Languages
• Craig Newmark Interview: A Brief History of Craigslist
• Everything You Wanted to Know About Drupal but Were Afraid to Ask
• The New Newspaper Editor: Your Neighbors and Some Python Code
• Why Are Newspapers Dying?
• Is Apple OS X More Secure than Windows?
• Hard Work and Practice in Programming

Clearly that's a whole lot of intriguing entries, and it means that I need to get to the O'Reilly Web site a lot more often. Maybe if I use my Jedi skills, they'll do a revised edition of Carla Schroder's "Linux Cookbook." .. If I knew what was good for me, I, too would be focusing on books about coding and not OS implementation ... so O'Reilly is probably more of an oracle (not to be confused with Oracle) than I'd care to admit at any given moment.