Computer books are dead. Well, some of them, anyway.

BuckWoody — Tue, 10 May 2011 13:58:23 GMT

I read a lot. I mean a LOT. It seems that computer professionals have much in common with medical professionals – we have to read in order to stay on top of our game. For me, this used to mean web sites, magazines, and other print medium, and of course lots of books. I’ve even written several computer books myself and had them published.

Whenever I teach a class, do a presentation, or hold an architectural design session on a new (or new to that person) technology, they usually follow up with “what’s a good book for learning X technology?” This happens so often that I have a list I keep of the titles I like for a particular subject – you probably have similar book lists.

Windows, SQL Server, and other Microsoft products change on an average of around three or four year cycles. That’s enough time to play with a beta product, wait until it releases, and write a solid book about it, and have that in a decent market for sales, and allow people to read and recommend it.

Enter “the Cloud” – Distributed Computing.

Windows Azure and SQL Azure don’t release every three years. Changes – some of them dramatic – release every three or four months. You can’t even write a book that fast, much less update it that quickly and re-sell it. So what is a technical professional to do?

Well, although I really like a couple of books I’ve read so far (especially this one, print and e-book version here), they are out of date almost by the time they publish. Instead, I rely on blogs, the web, documentation from the vendor and how-to articles published online. Many of these, ironically, are stored, hosted or delivered using – wait for it – Windows Azure. That’s interesting because it’s a medium that describes itself – “reflection”, anyone?

This brings up an interesting conundrum. Books have a version, are arranged, thought-out and categorized. Since I’m now getting information off of the web, it’s difficult to figure out whether that material is correct at the time, what level it’s aimed at – and forget about any coherent structure. It’s topic-by-topic.

So, like most of you, I use links and favorites to arrange things. And I found myself making “virtual books” by essentially creating my own Table-Of-Contents. I’ve shared some of those, such as my Windows and SQL Azure Learning Plan. The key is that I have to update that to ensure that the latest information is there – otherwise it becomes an organized list that is not authoritative.

Don’t get me wrong – I still have tons of (e-book format) books, especially on “conceptual” topics like development paradigms and so on. But when it comes to specifics and how-to’s – electronic medium is best for me. It’s more current, adaptable, searchable, interactive and immersive than books. But how long will I retain regular print-type books? We’ll see. Times, they are a changing – fast.

iPad Update and Answering Ray Ozzie

BuckWoody — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:27:55 GMT

This is an odd post – I’ll say that from the outset. It really combines two topics, and both have to do with the cloud, at least a little.

Some time ago I posted that I bought an iPad to demonstrate a cloud application. True, anything that runs a web browser is “cloud-ready” – Azure is a platform, and any web browser will display a well-constructed application. I got it because I wanted the pure “shock value” of a Microsoft employee demonstrating our platform on a product we don’t make. Simple as that. It’s been fun watching people’s faces as I drag it out and run an Azure-backed application on it.

I was asked by a friend to comment on how the experiment with it is going – how I like it. And then, in a seemingly unrelated event, our Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie left Microsoft. He also published a blog entry, from which many news organizations are trumpeting the comments he made for Microsoft to “move on past the PC”. While my iPad experience and this comment might seem disparate, they are linked, at least for me.

First – let me address the comments made by Mr. Ozzie. He’s a very intelligent person – Bill Gates regarded him as one of the premier developers of our age – and of course he knows Microsoft much better than I do. I think the comments he’s made are true, but I don’t view them as a rebuke – not at all. In fact, I think they are both cautionary and encouraging. You see, we’ve adopted many of the concepts he espoused. We’re in the cloud – and that’s not marketing-speak. We have properties in almost every avenue of our business that are either completely on the web or positioned to be both web and on-premise. From systems in the cloud like Hyper-V and System Center to software in the cloud like Office 365 and many other properties, all the way to Windows Azure.

In fact, we’re moving so fast to the cloud that many people are still trying to learn to code not just local systems, but in Windows Azure – not worrying about controlling the operating system or delivery mechanism. If anything, we’re moving too fast for some people away from the PC. And that’s why I think Ray’s statements are encouraging – and I agree with them. I think we’re headed the right way, and I think at some point we will all worry more about what the code does than in the platform that supports it. It’s a device-independent strategy, and I’ve bet my career on it.

However….

I’ve owned LOTS of tablet PC’s, from some of the earliest model. I still have a (broken) HPT1100 sitting somewhere around here, and I loved it. Used it on the bus to work my first couple of years here. And I do like the iPad. I’ve downloaded lots of apps, mostly book readers and financial news channels, and of course it’s primary role is as a TED player J. I got games for my kid to play with on it, and my wife looks up things in the yellow pages and keeps lists on it. I bought my very first pay-for app last night, an outlining tool for the writing and teaching I do.

But I wouldn’t replace it if it broke.

For one thing, it’s just too expensive. It really is. Without the gift card I had to get it, I wouldn’t have paid that amount of money for it. I could have gotten a laptop for that price. And it’s way too “closed”. I can only get apps from Apple, and only the ones they want me to have. It’s a brilliant model, and I congratulate them on it. But I don’t like it. And the coup-de-grace is, well, I can do everything on the web that I can do on the iPad. All of it. The only difference is the experience - the buttons are larger, and I can work offline (on some apps). Fix those things for a web site, and I really only need a web-browsing device. That’s it. Then the form factor (tablet, phone, laptop, TV, whatever) doesn’t matter. Build in a standard web browser to a device, and the “cloud” becomes the back-end – where it should be. And that’s Windows Azure.

So how do the two tie in? Well, I still need a laptop to do my job. I still need to code. I still need a keyboard. I still need an offline experience. So while Microsoft (in my opinion) is leading the way to the post-PC world, we’re not there yet. We’ll get there. But in the meantime, I like the ability to have both. I like my iPad just fine, but I need my laptop to make money to eat. Simple as that.

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Computer books are dead. Well, some of them, anyway.

iPad Update and Answering Ray Ozzie