Skip to main content

It's so cool!

I'm a real fan of MIT Press books, and have been for years. Lots of interesting stuff for me in Computer Science, New Media, Electronic Music, and all are well designed, beautiful books, which also matters to me. I have a bunch on my shelves, and more on my "buy someday" list. And this week, we have the public announcement of the Tizra-hosted MIT Press CISnet site.

This makes me feel really good because it's very much something that came from a daydream I had last year. I was up at MIT to talk with the (excellent) Venture Mentoring Service, and stopped in at the MIT Press bookstore after the meeting. As I was looking around, but not quite able to find one volume to buy, I thought that I'd pay right then to have access online, like the ACM digital library. I'd happily pay to browse around, search and use books for reference, and then later I might buy volumes that I really wanted to dive into.

So we approached MIT Press with the idea, and now there's a great electronic library subscription -- less than a buck per book/year of access. Even the pricing is on the order of magnitude of my daydream.

Thank you MIT Press, for doing such a great job!

Time for me to buy my subscription!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Technical Podcasts

If there is something the web as surely changed, it was the way that software engineers need to work. It is now a crucial aspect of our work to be able draw from the huge internet knowledge base out there in an efficient way to get to the right answers. Part of that information extraction is related to the keeping-up-to-date effort that every developer is required to accomplish to continue to be productive. While previous a software engineer could rely mostly on print material, nowadays we need to rely as well on content available on the net. Podcasts are such a source that can bring an amazing amount of information to the mix of knowledge one needs these days. If you are a software engineer and have not jumped into the podcast wagon yet, I suggest you do so. Here is a list some technical podcasts that we hear at Tizra: The Java Posse : a fantastic podcast on Java development. Containing news info update, analysis of tools, overall software development discussions. Software as She Dev...

Using XML to Create a Better Online Reading Experience for the American Payroll Association

Congrats to the American Payroll Association on their recent launch of XML-based publications on Tizra!  Thanks to this collaboration, APA's authoritative books for payroll professionals are now available in crisp, reflowable HTML, creating a user experience that feels like a truly digital native product, rather than a conversion from print. XML-based publishing also creates a better mobile reading experience, supports more precise search and navigation, and opens the door to better accessibility for users with low vision and other disabilities. Our partners at  Scribe  did a great job supporting APA through the process of producing the XML for loading into Tizra, and we’d definitely recommend them to anyone interested in such a transition. It’s hard to overstate what a big step forward this is for Tizra as a platform and a company. XML has long been planned for in the product's architecture, but now for the first time, we have a working example that demonstrates t...

The importance of continuous integration

Leading a team of developers in the effort of building a robust, quality software product should involve the establishment of some process and tools to assist the team effort and serve as a safety net for the errors of getting people to work together. Continuous integration is, I believe, a crucial element of that process. Introduced by Martin Fowler and Matt Foemmel (see article Continuous Integration ), continuous integration establishes the practice of frequent integration of work developed by the several team members verified by automated build and testing of integrated code within a clean sandbox. This practice is valuable for several reasons: It promotes the development of a clear process of building/deployment independent of any specificity of developer's platforms. Code that exists on a single platform only is bound to become dependent on specific aspects of that platform without anyone really noticing the dependencies until trying to port to other platforms. The existence ...