Have you heard about the free e-books offered by Syncfusion – http://www.syncfusion.com/resources/techportal/ebooks. Well I figured they would be some half-hearted whitepapers without any real meat. You know the fluff companies release to lure you into buying something from them. When I cracked open the first book I was pleasantly surprised by the wealth of knowledge and the quality. I mean I have paid  good money for similar books and came away with a lot less than I have learned from these books.

I haven’t had a chance to read many of them, but my favorites so far are:

Unit Testing Succinctly
Data Structures Succinctly Part 1
TypeScript Succinctly

The fact that I was able to immediately apply concepts I learned in these books at work and in my personal development is a big plus for me. Most books I have read lately have rehashed concepts I am already familiar with or are talking about new concepts that I can’t use at work. Granted  these books also rehash concepts I am familiar with, but they included nuggets and new perspectives that gave new light and understanding to those concepts.

Anyway, if you build software you owe it to yourself to check them out. You have nothing to loose.

By the way, the books actually did get me to look more into the Syncfusion product line. I won’t do a review, but if you are into cross platform development you should check out Orubase – http://www.orubase.com/. It makes a compelling case as a development platform as it enables you to use your current ASP.NET skills to build business application across iOS, Android, and Windows Phone platforms.

Lastly, if you need icons, especially Metro-style icons, check out their free Metro Studio library of 2,500 icons plus icon editor at http://www.syncfusion.com/downloads/metrostudio. The editor even makes sprites. Did I mention Metro Studio is  free too, because its free…no cost. Syncfusion is really giving back to the development community.