A few days back I went to the 32nd Chennai book fair held at St George’s Anglo-Indian School, Poonamallee High Road. It is an annual event held during the first few weeks of January. This year it is being held from 8th Jan to 18th by BAPASI.

I went and got a few books and have set my eyes on a few more books. I also got a membership for American Library – but later found that it is open only in the weekdays.

Here are the books I bought:

Programming Erlang

Programming Erlang

I was searching for this book for many days in Landmark and other book stores in Chennai, but couldn’t find it. Erlang is a high level dynamic language for writing concurrent programs which can run on multiple machines. Very important factor when you want to write a high traffic web application. Written by Joe Armstrong, this book is a highly recommended for people who want to start with Erlang. Though I had a ebook of it, I got this one.

jQuery Reference Guide

jQuery Reference Guide

jQuery is the best thing since sliced bread. It is a small but powerful javascript library. It is well documented and has an active user community. jQuery includes support for manipulating the DOM, supports AJAX and it provides some basic graphical effects. The functionality can be also enhanced with plugins. Though the docs are easily accessible over the web (they improved the API docs page the next day I got the book) I wanted a reference which can be kept on the table. Flipping the pages of the book, I got to learn lots of ways to manipulate the DOM and other effects which I wouldn’t have cared to read while using a search engine on the docs page.

Stick to drawing comics, Monkey Brain

Stick to drawing comics, Monkey Brain

I was lucky to find this book. This is by one of my favourite author and famous cartoonist, creator of Dilbert – Scott Adams. I have read his previous books – Dilbert Principle, Dilbert future, Dilbert: Joy of work. Majority of the chapters in this book is from his blog where he discusses about the various funny stuff. I have started reading the book while travelling in the bus and I keep smiling and laughing. Hope I can finish it without any incident in the bus. Some of the stuff that he writes in the book are: adopting a human embryo (just like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie adopting African kids), narscissistic murderer, hygiene (Hi Jean), Jet lagged babies, phrases he had invented, thieves who steal your purse and return it back in your house, etc. He even explains why newspapers don’t publish some of his original comics and how he had to change them. You can read this in any order as each chapter is very short and discusses only about one thing. This is one great book which wouldn’t bore you even if read it again.

Next

Next was the last book by Michael Crichton published before his death. I have read many of his books Jurassic Park, Lost World, Congo, Andromeda Strain, Sphere, etc. I haven’t liked his recent books much, but would love to read this one though.

I have to go for a second round and get some more books. Would probably go tomorrow as it is the last day. If you are in town today and tomorrow, please do go to the book fair and see the various books and buy some. Also please comment and suggest books which you think I would like.

PS: Man, it is difficult to link all these books to affiliate link page. Hope somebody buys a book from the link – would love to get an extra dollar or two.