The Sherpa Project

Windows Developer Power Tools is up on Amazon and ready for pre-orders. The book hasn’t been released yet (it’s currently slated for November 1st), but it can be pre-ordered. You can find some sample chapters on Jim’s page for the book. The book was written by James Avery and Jim Holmes with a variety of contributing authors (including myself). I’m obviously biased, but I love what I’ve seen of the book up to this point.

There are a lot of great freeware and open-source tools out there and the book helps you navigate, evaluate, and see them in action based on the current task(s) that you are trying to solve. I wish this book would have been written a couple of years ago because it could have saved me countless hours in discovering tools and libraries that would have been a tremendous help.

It has been interesting going through the process of submitting articles for the book and reviewing others. In the process of helping do some light-weight reviewing I’ve learned about a lot of interesting tools, libraries, and concepts that I hadn’t previously been exposed to (and I spend a lot of time playing with development tools).

Simply put, this book is long overdue. Although there is a lot of content, it does a great job of giving you enough information to determine if the tool or library is a good fit to help in your project (or future projects). When you look at the number of tools covered and realize that they are all free, you realize how valuable the concept is.

The book has also has a rough cuts version posted at Safari.

If you want an idea of what the book will cover, check out the table of contents.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 3:04 pm and is filed under books, devtools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.