Some Books
The purpose of this page is mainly to show off all the books that Jon has been involved with, in the hope that some kind of spurious veneer of credibility will rub off on the rest of the JPA operation. It's also an attempt to make a small amount of £££, because readers in the UK can also click through to amazon.co.uk and buy all of these wonderful books for themselves. Honesty requires us to report, however, that this operation has not been a massive success to date, in that we have, in the entire lifetime of this site, sold one listed book and two completely unrelated ones, making a grand total of £6.92. This is, of course, commercially sensitive information, and we would appreciate a certain level of confidentiality about reporting this. However, we would be very keen to meet whoever it was who bought "Professional Linux Deployment", so that we can shake their hand, and perhaps buy them a (very small) drink.
In the meantime, here they are in all their magnificence:
What a bunch of hunks, eh ladies? Reminds one of that quiz where you have to guess which ones are the computer pioneers and which ones are the serial killers. Ah well.
The first of these books, Professional DCOM Application Development , was the first book to bring together all those exciting emerging Microsoft DCOM technologies, from MTS, MSMQ and Active Directory through to Clusters and the MMC - in fact, everything you need to build your enterprise solution for the new millenium. Even Bill liked it - so much so that he put three chapters of it onto MSDN. If you haven't got the CDs, take a look.
Jon's chapter in the second one along, Professional Linux Deployment , is one of the more unusual, being a hands-on investigation into the wonderful world of Linux DCOM. Yes, it exists, and yes, it does work. It also contains the shortest introduction to COM and DCOM ever, which more than justifies the price of the entire book. (By the way, Jon is one down from the top in the right-hand column of postage-stamp pictures, in case you're wondering.)
Surfing the crest of the zeitgeist, the third one along, Professional XML , contains pretty much everything you wanted to know about the technology of the moment, including Jon's SOAP case study (one of the first, incidentally ...).
The next one along, Beginning XML , is an excellent way to get into XML if you're looking for a slightly more gentle introduction. Apart from reviewing pretty much every single word of it, Jon's main contribution to this one is the chapter on SAX. The really good thing about this book is that there's no trace of Jon on the cover. It's some guy called David Hunter, who apparently wrote most of it.
In the next one, Professional XSL , Jon covers transformations using DOM and SAX. This turned out to be a great opportunity for getting in the "Safe SAX" joke that he failed to sneak past Wrox's editors last time.
No 6 (a phrase that always gives a slight frisson to fans of a certain '60s cult televison show) is the second edition of Professional XML . Jon's main complaint is that he wasn't allowed just to coast along by updating what he did last time; instead he got lumbered with writing about WSDL and UDDI ...
Jon has also made his contribution to the ever-growing mountain of words written about .NET in Professional VB.NET . Well, apparently it's de rigueur these days.
The next one along is a really interesting one - Early Adopter Hailstorm . This was the first-ever non-Microsoft book on Hailstorm (a.k.a. Microsoft .NET My Services). Jon contributed a case study.
Next along, there are a couple more second editions: Beginning XML and Professional VB.NET .
The next one along is the Visual Basic .NET Remoting Handbook , which Jon co-wrote with (amongst others) David Curran, who just happens to be a JPA associate. .NET Remoting actually brings us full circle, as it kind of brings the DCOM story to a close. It was also one of the last books published by Wrox before they went under; please be assured that this is a complete coincidence.
After that we come to the third edition, hot off Wiley's presses, of Professional VB.NET.
And finally (for the time being), we see the forthcoming Apress edition of Pro .NET 1.1 Remoting, Reflection and Threading (crazy name, crazy book), which includes most of Jon and David's work on Visual Basic .NET Remoting.
Some Foreign Books
If English is not your first language, there are even some translations lurking around. Here are just a few ...
Some Articles
If you're still in need of a fix of Jon's marginally off-centre views on COM, take a look at COM For Control Freaks , originally written for FatBrain.com, or The Very Basics of COM , originally written for COMdeveloper.com.
More recently, Jon's been writing for Developer Network Journal. Take a look at his article on Microsoft .NET Alerts (and check out the cool meerkat picture). There's also one on SAX, called The Joy of SAX . You won't believe how pleased Jon was when they decided to use the name he proposed for that one. Unfortunately, it's only available to DNJ subscribers. Shame.
Some Other Peoples' Books
Jon can also recommend all of these books, which he had a hand in (more like the tip of a little finger in, actually), being a member of the reviewing team:
- Sing Li and Panos Economopoulos' COM Applications With ATL
- Richard Grimes' ATL COM Developer's Reference
- Mark Wilcox's Implementing LDAP
- Ian Blackburn et al's Professional Visual InterDev 6 Programming
- Simon Robinson's Professional ADSI Programming (in the acknowledgements of which, Jon is described as "Evil"; he thinks this is a compliment)
- Neil Matthew and Richard Stone's Professional Linux Programming
- Burton Harvey at al's C# Programming With the Public Beta
- Professional XML Web Services
- Professional ebXML Foundations
- Professional XML for .NET Developers
The Joys of Being Published
Of course, the only reason anyone really wants to get published is to get their name plastered all over the place, so that you can get into the game of Google vanity searches, like this or this. And every now and again, you come across something like this. Aw, come on, wouldn't you be proud to be mentioned in the same breath as Anais Nin and Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Particularly pleased to hear about the lack of bod mods.