Two Microsoft Press e-books for free until April 22 (PDF)

[IceHand]

I just stumbled across this news over at golem.de. I don't have any use for the books, but I thought some of you might have.

2009 is the 25th anniversary of Microsoft Press! The press's first book was published on March 22, 1984: The Apple Macintosh Book, by Cary Lu. For 25 years, Microsoft Press has described Microsoft products and technologies like nobody else.

To celebrate, we’ve been offering free e-books to our readers, and I’m happy to announce that April’s e-books are now available:

* Windows Small Business Server 2008 Administrator's Companion by Charlie Russel and Sharon Crawford (27 chapters, 3 appendices, 712 pages)
* Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now! by Patrice Pelland (9 chapters, Glossary, 254 pages)

Grab them now because this offer ends on April 22. And, as always, enjoy!

Link: http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_pres...-in-april.aspx

[daffy4u]

Am I the only one who finds it funny that the first book produced by Microsoft Press is a book about the Apple Mac?

[Gaurnim]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

Am I the only one who finds it funny that the first book produced by Microsoft Press is a book about the Apple Mac?

No !
It's exactly what I told my colleagues after reading this news item.

[=X=]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

Am I the only one who finds it funny that the first book produced by Microsoft Press is a book about the Apple Mac?

Not really when the Macintosh came out Microsoft fell in love with it. They thought it was a great platform an developed several applications for the Mac.

They then used that knowledge to build windows.


=X=

[rjh]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

Am I the only one who finds it funny that the first book produced by Microsoft Press is a book about the Apple Mac?

Well, Microsoft Press also published books about OS/2 for a little while. At least Microsoft has a relatively long history of writing software for the Apple Mac. It's OS/2 history was very transient.

[Mike L]

Originally Posted by rjh

Well, Microsoft Press also published books about OS/2 for a little while. At least Microsoft has a relatively long history of writing software for the Apple Mac. It's OS/2 history was very transient.

Hmm. Not sure I agree with that. For quite a while, Microsoft was the driving force behind OS/2. And OS/2 in turn was the force behind several leading Microsoft products. I remember Microsoft's original involvement with SQL Server, for instance, which was intended mainly to propel OS/2 into the database server market.

As for the Mac, Microsoft has a long history of Mac support. Long into the Windows era, they were writing versions of all the Office apps for the Mac, not to mention many of their developer tools.