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To be honest, good programming books are very rare. I doubt it would take more than two digit number to count great ones. If you think about it, with thousands of books coming out every year (or maybe even month) - that is very, very few. The bookshelves are mostly bloated with wanna-be magicians, promising all kinds of bullshit theories and frameworks that do nothing, except making existing mess even messier.

So, every time I find one of these rare great books - it brings a lot of joy. It happened again, recently and I wanted to share.

Especially large portion of stupid programming books come on those dedicated to software architecture and various frameworks, design practices. SOA and web-services in general are very popular among such books (great buzz words), of course. Huge majority of them are a waste of time, both reader's and author's.

A wonderful exception and a terrific book about SOA; or more generally - pragmatic, well-thought-through approach to designing enterprise systems is a book by Dirk Krafzig, Karl Banke and Dirk Slama - Enterprize SOA, published by Prentice Hall.

I loved the book. I think it makes complete sense. And I think the authors really know what they are talking about. That's a very pleasant change from all the shallow talk you hear in so many books. The book ends with real-life case studies, which makes it even more interesting.

Two thumbs up and very much recommended.

What will happen if you buy many SkypeOut minutes? You think, what happens everywhere else - Skype will reward you as a loyal customer, right? Nope! Don't even dream about that. THEY WILL BLOCK YOU.

The following is Skype's "justification" of why:

"In order to reduce fraud we restrict the number of times you can use a specific payment method per month. The reason for this is that the most common method of fraud is to use a stolen credit card or Paypal account many times in a short time span. By limiting the number of times you can use these payment methods per month we can significantly reduce fraud."

Rarely heard anything more stupid.

Dude, wake up! Half of world's business is online, nobody denies frequent customers!!!

WHAT THE F... is wrong with you guys? Obviously you have issues but are you completely retarded?

*sigh*

She's real cool :) One of those rare comedians who manage to be funny without overdoing the stupid part.

However, if you use your terminal to log into Linux boxes over SSH and then edit files there using "vi" (very typical purpose) - you have to configure key bindings properly or you will get into a lot of pain. The thing is - none of the pre-configured bindings work properly with "vi".

This is what I do:

• Use "Linux" keyboard configuration as the starting point but edit it as follows:
• Remove all cursor bindings (e.g. num+left cursor etc.)
• Remove bindings for "del" and "delete" and substitute them with:
• del - bind to Hexadecimal 7f
• delete - bind to Hexadecimal 8

Enjoy, and spread the word for web 2.0 :)