Books, Books and more Books - but is Amazon always the right choice?
I've decided to get involved with .Net programming with the immediate goals
of integrating the Domino and .Net environments and making Calendar2Calendar
available for Outlook users. While there is a lot of information on-line
- tutorials, code snippets, I feel that I also want to have one or two
books, and maybe some CD - based training. I already have Programming Microsoft
Visual Basic .Net, and Programming Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange,
both from Microsoft Press.
My immediate instinct was to go to http://www.amazon.com and check out
their selection. I happened to be looking at specific titles and had the
ISBN numbers, so I searched by those. What I found when searching by ISBN
number were links to other sites. Even though I had restricted my search
to amazon.com, the search engine searched the web and returned links to
all non-amazon entries.
One link was for Quantum
Books. A number of years ago
I used to frequent a book store in Cambridge called Quantum Books. They
specialize in technical books. I either had no idea they were discounted,
or I had since forgotten that fact. Anyway, now they have a web site so
anyone can take advantage of their extensive inventory and great prices.
I've bookmarked the site and will have to make a point of going over there
in the near future. I really prefer to buy technical books in a store where
I can thumb through them and see what they really have to offer.
The other site I found was Campusi.
Although geared towards college students looking for textbooks at competitive
prices, it did a fine job of locating the ISBN numbers I fed it in both
used and new conditions.
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