Starglider Systems Blog
Building an App Business, by Derek Clark, is a short book (122 pages) which has as a lot of interesting advice for anyone that wants to start building apps for smartphones.
Topics include validating the market, how to monetize your apps (paid, ads, in-app-purchases, etc), how to design your app,
Well worth the price, recommended.
Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture Volume 1: A System of Patterns is an interesting book on patterns, with a few patterns not in the classic GoF book (Design Patterns).
At times, it really felt a little outdated (would love to add more details, but I procrastinated this review since the beginning of the year, when I finished reading the book).
Still, very useful and I'd recommend it for people interested in patterns.
Become a SuperLearner is a course on speed-reading and memory skills.
I finished it several months ago, so I'm going to keep my review shorter than usual.
The memory and reading skills that are thaught here seem all very useful, but you do have to spend time practicing them. When I read an article using these techniques, that definitely improved my retention, but I didn't do all the practice recommended so far.
I didn't improve my reading speed with this course (around 600WPM). If you just want to improve your reading speed, get Ace Reader for PC, or even better, for the iPad (which is much cheaper and has all the same content).
Overall, recommended, but make sure to take the time to do the exercises.
Developing Android Apps is a course by Google on Udacity that covers a lot of what you need to know to start developing for Android on Android Studio.
I took the course several months ago, but procrastinated writing about till now (I really wanted to go through my review backlog before New Years). I did the free version of the course – not because it was expensive, but the extra benefit seemed negligible for me and I was afraid that I might have to drop out due to my very poor Java skills (not an actual problem).
Thus, my impressions are definitely fuzzier than they should be.
The course was pretty good. Thankfully, I didn't start it just as it was released, but rather like a month after. So a lot of the initial problems were taken care of. Still, a lot of the time you'd have to read the instructor notes, and ignore most of the video as it was just plain wrong.
The course starts at installing Android Studio and setting up your Android device, all the way to developing a weather app that uses best practices to cache and download its data.
As an aside, I really enjoyed using Android Studio, despite some minor problems (including a time where it simply started complaining about nonsensical problems with my code until I forced a rebuild).
Overall, recommended.
The Pre-sell Course by Sean D'Souza is an interesting book, with plenty of useful advice in the art of Pre-Sell – how to slowly interest your potential customers in your product way before it is available, and get major sales from it.
Sean is no doubt a master of the subject, as I have bought many of his books after getting interested in his pre-sell campaigns.
While the book is good, is it US$229 good (price I actually paid – I understand it would be much more expensive now, if it was available)? Not for me – I personally asked for a refund (and promptly got it).
I believe it would be much more useful for people that actually have regular new product launches or expect to do one soon, however.
C# 5.0 in a Nutshell: The Definitive Reference – by Joseph Albahari and Ben Albahari – cover most of the language specifics of C# 5.0, with plenty of chapters covering the new async, threading, etc.
A lot of people seem to see this as more of a reference than a tutorial, but I didn't know almost anything about C# and still found it competent as such (I do have plenty of experience in other languages, though). The use of LINQPad for quickly being able to quickly try out samples (and change them as you want) is pretty great.
It is also quite impressive how many of the newest C# features were available in Chrome back in 2005 (a pascal for .net by Remobjects, now called Oxygene).
I highly recommend the book, but keep in mind that it only covers the language, not the other framework you will probably need (such as Winforms, WPF or ASP.NET).
The Critical Website Components Series, by Sean D'Souza, consists of 3 short e-books:
The About Us Page—Why You Need To Throw Away Your Brown Paper
This is an interesting view into the About Us page. Sean is clearly a big fan of personality in this page, as well as having a photo or photos here, so that customers feel more confident and are more likely to trust you. There is a lot of interesting advice here.
The Home Page—How To Put Sparkle And Pop Into Your Home
A view into how to create your home page. A couple of general layout options as well as graphic advice (the usual – create focus on what you think is important using space, contrast and direction).
Some more interesting advice on how to present your solutions on a way that will grab the attention of your potential customer. Plenty of examples.
My package also included a video with a short case study, that I didn't feel to be very useful (I have used heatmaps on my page before, and read articles on the subject, so it had nothing new for me).
Getting To Sign Up—How To Create A Clear and Simple Route For Subscribers
I thought this would be near useless (Sign ups are a whole lot less useful when you have a bunch of unconnected niche software like me, than sites like Sean's with new products that can be sold).
However, it has plenty of interesting details on not only squeeze pages, but also on creating reports – and packaging – and also on make engaging audio or video presentations.
How To Maximise The Power Of Bonuses
This was a bonus (ironically!) to the package, that covers why and how to make product bonuses, while making they seem as valuable as possible. Very interesting views and tips! I also like the view of avoiding discounting your products and using bonuses instead – there are several places where I will not buy unless there is a discount as I know they have them frequently.
Conclusion
The home page and About us books had some interesting information, but for me the Sign Up and Bonuses ebooks were the most useful. As most of Sean's e-books, all were very fun to read and quite short and to the point.
Overall, at US$49 the package value was acceptable considering the bonus e-book, but I wouldn't recommend it otherwise.
I have just released version 4.10 of STG FolderPrint Plus.
Changes:
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You can get it at http://www.stgsys.com/fpp.asp, or just run the program, and use Menu Help, item Check for new version.