Alex Russell points out that the the latest edition of Python Essential Reference is available.

The fine people at 37signals (42nouns?) have a new book called Getting Real. Here’s the official blurb:

Getting Real details the business, design, programming, and marketing principles of 37signals. The book is packed with keep-it-simple insights, contrarian points of view, and unconventional approaches to software design. This is not a technical book or a design tutorial, it’s a book of ideas.

Sample chapters and $19 PDF downloads are available on the site. Might be interesting.

Update: Jason Kottke notes that it looks like DIY publishing is working out quite well for them, with over $33,250 in PDF sales on the first day!

Quoth Adrian on the Django weblog:

As we announced at PyCon today, lead Django devs Jacob and Adrian are working on a Django book! We’ve been working on it for the past couple of months and already have (the first drafts of) a couple of chapters done at this point.

Apress is the publisher. We’re excited to be in the fine company of Dive Into Python and the Joel on Software book. Both are fantastic reads, by the way.

As I’ve mentioned before, I my experience with Apress books has been very positive. I’ll be looking forward to this one with anticipation!

It seems like more and more I’m reading that the Pragmatic Programmer series of books is choice of geeks rather than the standard O’Reilly fare. Here’s an example:

While I start working on this project, I have two books that I’m going to be keeping handy, in both their print and PDF forms:

• Programming Ruby
• Agile Web Development with Rails

Both of these are titles released by the Pragmatic Programmer, which has taken over from O’Reilly as my main book source for this field. Their books are well written, edited, and most of all, the examples and methodology are focused on delivering a high density of knowledge in a minimum of space.

For what it’s worth, I haven’t been overly impressed with O’Reilly’s Python offerings. Instead I’ve become a fan of the Apress books instead. Beginning Python and Python Network Programming are two of my favorites.

It’s official. Kevin Dangoor and Mark Ramm will be writing a TurboGears book for Prentice Hall.

Quoth Kevin:

After a month of discussions with two different publishers (both of which sounded quite excited about the project), Mark Ramm and I have agreed to write a TurboGears book for Prentice Hall. Prentice Hall is the largest technical publisher in the world and will provide excellent marketing and distribution support for the book. The worldwide reach is important, as TurboGears has many users outside of the US.

This is certainly great news for the TurboGears community, providing the project with a ton of exposure. And as someone who’s written a technical reference book, I can appreciate the huge amount of work that Kevin and Mark and in for. Best of luck to both of them. I’m sure it’ll be a tough but rewarding experience! Congrats!

While checking out the computer reference section at Borders over the weekend, I saw a book called Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job. Although I have absolutely no intention of interviewing for a programming job, I thought it might be a worthwhile book to pick up.

The first chapter covers the application process, so I can ignore that one. The next chapter covers different approaches to solving programming problems. Subsequent chapters cover various fundamentals of programming (e.g. linked lists, trees, arrays and strings, recursion, etc.). After that, there are two chapters of programming puzzles, and then two final chapters of general programming knowledge questions and answers.

I think this might be a very handy book to get me up to speed with “real” programming in a short amount of time.

Decent reviews on Amazon so far… hopefully I’ll agree after I’ve had a chance to read through the book.