O'Reilly Wish List (or, I like free books)

O’Reilly is running a contest to give away $500 of books. I don’t have $500 to spend on books, but I want books, so this is the best contest ever! If I win, I’ll take Print/E-books please, my Kindle needs some sweet sweet loving.

Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript This is a classic combination of technology for web development. I don’t know PHP, but I would love to put some time into learning it and how to use it with MySQL and JavaScript.

Head First Python Everyone loves Python. I know enough Python to get stuff done with my geoprocessing services using ESRI ArcPy. Becoming more of a Python expert is one of my goals for the year.

Hadoop: The Definitive Guide Cassandra: The Definitive Guide The above two titles I chose because I am fascinated by the idea of working with large amounts of data and being able to mine that data. I don’t know if I’ll ever have the opportunity to use something Hadoop or Cassandra in my work environment, but I would be more than happy to see if I could use these tools for GIS somehow.

CouchDB: The Definitive Guide MongoDB: The Definitive Guide. These two titles are something I’m currently excited about, as I know MongoDB has spatial query capabilities, and I already have some ideas about how I might be able to use it with Python in caching Geoprocessing results.

HTML5: Up and Running I’m no HTML/CSS guru, but I’m about tools and if I can learn to use Canvas or other HTML5 tools to do some cool stuff, I’m all over it.

Programming Android Developing Android Applications with Adobe AIR: Rough Cuts Programming iOS 4 Mobile development is part of my goals for this year, and these titles would be a big help in that goal.

Algorithms in a Nutshell I wasn’t a Computer Science student, so anything that can help me get a better grasp on algorithms, I would love to have.

So that’s my O’Reilly wish list. It’s a shot in the dark that I’ll win, but hey, you never know. Free books are the greatest books ever!