> Mockups: Photoshop (or Pixelmator for really tight budgets)
Only thing with Pixelmator is it's Mac only (unless I missed fine print somewhere). You might not have Macs laying around if you're on a really tight budget. Gimp might be good to throw out there since it's free and works on multiple platforms.
This is of course a subjective opinion, but something doesn't quite feel right about HP making a tablet PC. They seem to put out quite a lot of things without much of an overall guiding principle. HP PCs, laptops, printers, servers, now tablets. I ask myself "Why HP?" and can't seem to come up with a very reasonable answer. Nothing jumps out at me as seeing this as the best thing ever.
With Apple they have the whole underlying principle of "Think Different" or something along the lines of changing the status quo. Apple didn't really do anything new with the iPhone and iPad in essence. Smartphones and tablet PCs were already out there. However because it went with their overall message, it made sense. People wanted to include it in their "Apple Lifestyle" so to speak.
Point 2 is somewhat of a difficult area on my opinion. When looking at programming books, I usually have the following process in mind:
* How in depth are the official docs? If you're going to read a book on a language, you need a way to validate the book's contents. How else will you be able to tell the book is not leading you down the wrong learning path? This also gives you a chance to check on if the language is right for you.
* How old is the book? If the book is talking about the language 5 years ago, chances are syntax and ways structuring your program (object oriented features may have gotten better for example) have changed. Make sure you have the most up to date edition, and complement it with checking the API docs. Well written API docs will generally indicate if a way of doing something has changed, or will no longer be supported.
* Look at the author of the book, and see how close they are to the community of the programming language in question. Are they the creator? Contributor? Someone else?
* What is the book trying to achieve? Some great books expect you to have basic knowledge of the language, or some other specific concept (MVC for example). Make sure you know what you're getting into. Some books also act as "desk references" that could be potentially replaced by more up to date API docs on the language's website.
There's probably much more that can be added to the list, but I think these provide a basic sanity check.
It depends on the topic of the book, of course, but some of the best computer science books I've read were written in the 70s and 80s (SICP, Dragon Book, etc.). The C programming language, one of the most popular languages in use today, has not changed much since the 80s.
How do you tell the good tech books from the bad? Ask someone who is good at that technology. Too shy? O'Reilly and Pragmatic Programmer books are generally good, and you can often get good recommendations by searching on StackOverflow or SearchYC (http://searchyc.com/rails+book).
Amazon book reviews and never buy a book you haven't held in your hands, are pretty much the two rules I follow. The idea is basically widen what books in the field you have heard of through amazon, then get a hold of them some how(I usually get an inter library loan for a few weeks) to check depth and writing style. So far skipping step two has stuck me with books I didn't really appreciate.
The potential bias causes me to doubt the article statistics. Take for example:
"More broadly, a recent survey of executives, managers and recruiters by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) found that 64% of them plan to hire new MBA grads this year, an increase from 60% last year."
The GMAC administers the GMAT, a test used by top business schools as a means of evaluating potential candidates. With this in mind, a positive looking survey would be favorable to them. "Look here! MBA hires are up! Now's a great time to get an MBA! You'll want to take the GMAT before you apply!" type of thinking comes to mind. I'd rather see someone besides GMAC or an academic institution doing these studies, but the question would be who.
Thanks for this link, I would have otherwise skipped this article for now. I received a warning that nyt was trying to store data on my system "for offline use."
The link above is to a page intended for the NYT's Google Chrome App. It does indeed cache articles and the like in your browser as per the HTML5 spec, so that if you were to lose your connectivity (say on a mobile device) you could continue to browse and review stuff the app has cached.
I happen to think that this layout is considerably less annoying than the NYT's main site.
Wow, splitting this up 8 pages was really unnecessary. If you view this I think it's best to click the print view, as the article really isn't that long.
That's one way to increase page-views. In fact, I would consider building this into the CMS. If pages per visit is below the goal, adjust the page break factor to create more pages. If the server is under load, make it generate less pages. If the user has a history of not clicking "next page", make his web experience show less pages per article.
There is a lot of fun stuff that can be done with these idea.
Yea, like getting rid of refreshes and swapping content, counting that as a pageview. Or measuring if user is gradually scrolling, as you'd have to for reading. Or swapping display ads and counting that as impressions, which is what they really want.
I tend to click print-view (if I can find one) each time I see multiple-page article. I'm not sure why anyone designing those websites thinks that paging articles is a good idea, but even if it is, it's probably not intended to benefit the readers.
Only thing with Pixelmator is it's Mac only (unless I missed fine print somewhere). You might not have Macs laying around if you're on a really tight budget. Gimp might be good to throw out there since it's free and works on multiple platforms.