Essential Reading
Here's a selection from our favorite bedtime reading. Each book is a classic in its own right.
These books are selected for compactness, appositeness and lucidity. Rather than wading through weighty tomes full of flabby text you should just be able to pop down to the local coffee shop and read (very carefully) the relevant sections.
PDF Reference
| The definitive guide to the PDF specification. There are lots of books about PDF but if you're serious this is the one to have. Why have a potted summary when you can have the real thing? Once you appreciate the way that PDF works you can start using the low level functionality within ABCpdf to operate on the raw PDF structure. You can create any kind of PDF at all using any feature within the PDF specification. The raw power of this is incredible but passes many developers by, simply because they don't take the time to appreciate it. There's more in this book than you'll be able to get through in a few trips to the coffee shop. The subtlety of the content is something that may elude you until you need to look up a very specific detail. |
C# Essentials
| This book covers everything you need to know
about C# in a compact format. If you are programming C# on a general basis it forms an invaluable reference. If you're programming in VB you'd be well advised to skim though it to get a feel for the C# language. The core chapters to read are: 1 - Introduction 2 - C# Language Reference 3 - Programming the .NET Framework |
HTML & XHTML Definitive Reference
| If you don't have this book you need it now! It really is the definitive guide to HTML and after you've got it you'll wonder how you ever did without it. We recommend you skim the whole book and then put it aside for reference. O'Reilly produce a similarly definitive book on JavaScript. |