Free Book Giveaway

Last year Apress ran a very cool Reviewer Program: you’d pick one book, read it and publish a review on your site or Amazon. In token of appreciation Apress would send you a couple of books of your choice! Now, isn’t it a great deal?

Back then I picked Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional. This book teaches how to build e-commerce stores in ASP.NET. It guides you through every step of planning, development and deployment. I can vouch it is very thorough.

As you can tell from its title, it is a beginner level book. If you are a novice ASP.NET developer or a recent .NET convert, you’ll have no problem making heads and tails of the content. Not to be fooled by the title, though: there’s a chapter on setting up a PayPal account, one on credit card transactions, and even a home-made "search engine".

The Problem

The problem is as soon as Apress shipped it to me, I got sidetracked on other projects and never got to read it. Thus it’s been sitting on my shelf all this time. I figured someone would benefit from it more than me dusting it off once in a while.

The Solution

I’m willing to give out this book for free. To make the giveaway a little more fun I’m going to post a trivia question on Wednesday, May 18, at around noon EST (9am Pacific). I will mail the book to the person who provides the most detailed and quickest answer.

Two requirements to enter the race:

1. You must not use search engines to dig out an answer;
2. You must reside in the U.S. I apologize to my non-US readers, but shipping costs overseas have become simply ridiculous. :(

Whether you are a designer or developer, US resident or not, please stop by!

At risk of getting off topic, why are shipping costs so high from the US? US Mail seem to consider anything outside North America to be forn parts and I can fully imagine maps complete with sea monsters and "here lie dragons" in their offices.

Sea monsters would be cool, actually, but it boils down to quite trite issues: greedy jacking up of oil prices which leads to higher transportation costs. Cap that with workers' unions and their retirement and medical insurance costs and there you have it.