A while back a company called Syncfusion contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in trying out one of their Metro Studio, which is a brilliant tool for anyone doing “Modern UI” development (WP7/8 or Windows 8 Store applications). It is basically a massive icon library that fit straight into the Modern UI look and feel, and offers some cool abilities to resize them and so on. And to be completely honest, if I did a bit more WP dev than I am at the moment, I would not want to spend a day with out it. As soon as I do any WP8 development, I keep starting it up to quickly get some icons for my app.
However, that is NOT the reason I am doing this blog post… While browsing around their website looking for a simple way to download Metro Studio after a re-install of my machine, I stumbled upon a “Resources” section of their web, which is great. It includes a bunch of free whitepapers about different things, as well as a bunch of free e-books.
The cool thing about their e-books series called “Succinctly” is that they are really small. They cover a topic in approximately 100 pages, which is perfect. I love picking up new things, but I rarely have time to read a 500 page book. So getting an introduction in 100 pages is awesome.
The topics are very varied, so most develppers will probably find something to read in there. So far I have downloaded the JavaScript one and the Git one and put them on my Kindle.
I must admit I wasn’t TOO impressed by the JavaScript one, but that is probably because I had quite a good grasp on the subject before I started to read it. And on top of that, I have tought software development full time for 2 years, so I have a pretty good grasp on the ins and outs of coding. However, I still enjoyed reading it, and even if I didn’t pick up too many new things, it didn’t matter too much. It was only around 100 pages, so it only took a couple of evenings to read through (I’m a slow reader that reads very little normally). So even if I hadn’t picked up a single thing, it wouldn’t have been too much of a waste.
The Git one on the other hand, I have high hopes for. I have a fairly good grasp of that subject as well, but I’m pretty sure I will pick up a tip or two from that. And as soon as that is done, Knockout.js and F# is heading to my Kindle…
The series is constantly growing, allthough to me it can’t grow fast enough. I whish more companies would release short e-books like this. Like little nuggets of information that can teach you a thing or two, or at least open your eyes to something new, without me having to commit to it too much.
I don’t quite know the difference between their e-books and whitepapers, but it might have to do with the length of them, but the important part is that there are some good things to pick up there as well. Their “Just Enough TypeScript in 30 Minutes or Less” gave me a really good introduction to TypeScript. Just enough to get me going and pique my interest, and more importantly enough to be able to make a slightly more informed choice about whether or not to use it if I ever got into a project that needed a lot of JavaScript.
Well, that was another short post that turned way too long. But I hope that it got you curious enough to go and check out if there is something for you in that library…
Cheers!