will_work4tears

Sandman Slim was surprisingly good. His attitude did start to get on my nerves near the end, but not enough to ruin the series.

It's also free on Kindle Unlimited. The whole series IIRC.

Dune, sure, I get it (especially when his son took over). Hyperion though? If you count both parts as one series it's 4 books. Even at pretty respectable page contents, they don't compare to a series with 11 (? or more) books, many of which came pretty close to 1000 pages!

It did get a little weird there at the end, but still pretty good books. And nowhere near as bad as WOT, or hell, not even as bad as the Sword of Truth series.

Is this constrained to Fantasy? I have a lot of Science Fiction recommendations too, but here's a small list:

Riftwar Cycle (several series) by Raymond E. Feist. - high magic, great overarching themes, enjoyable all around. Most of the characters are exceedingly interesting and many are extremely high powered.

Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross - More of the multiworld thing, but a great twist, also what would you do if you could introduce technology into a medieval world.

Deverry Cycle by Katherine Kerr - Rebirth cycles, immortal main character watches and guides several characters through multiple lifetimes.

Dark Tower series by Stephen King - Great story, ties into almost all of SK's books at some point.

Earthsea by Ursula le Guin - A classic story, epic for sure.

Scavenger Trilogy by K.J Parker - Dark and mysterious. Main character might be good, might be bad, but doesn't remember anything.

- -

A couple good series I ran across on Kindle Unlimited are:

Wayward Pines Series by Blake Crouch. - Like a post-apocolyptic Twin peaks, at least at first. A bit dark, the story bothered me near the end, but still worth the read.

Belial Series by R.D Brady - didn't know what to make of this one at first, "alternate history" (aliens and pyramids type), but it turns out pretty good. involves "Angels" though maybe not in the conventional sense.

Magic 2.0 by Scott Meyer - two books, both very good, highly recommend.

Travelers Gate series by Will Wight (surprisingly good)

Silo Saga by Hugh Howey - currently reading, but great writing, IMO.

There are even more Science Fiction books/series I'd highly recommend, but if you aren't into it, I won't bother you with em.

Personally, like your suggestion for Gaiman, I highly recommend anything written by Roger Zelazny.

If you enjoy the Chronicles of Amber, you might also enjoy Jose Farmer's World of Tiers series. Along a similar vein but dissimilar enough that it's worth the read.

Great series, I highly recommend it. And if the parent poster likes a bit of humor, I recommend Cook's Garrett P.I series. A lot of humor and easy reads.

I hope you realize that dolphins are not fish...

Nope, just checked and it's up for me. (Tacoma/Lakewood area - WA USA)

It's a strong implication.

Kiro quotes two items from the parent, and says he doesn't want to be bothered with "those" things.

Kinda implies he doesn't use git, since that was one of the two items quoted.

That workflow is pretty outdated, you know. It's about akin to using tables for layout, and about as much of a no no. I know, git can be pretty confusing, but using version control, even in a one man shop, is a huge boon.

Hah, this. I thought it was pure magic being able to play Doom with a person not the the same room/house (we had a LAN setup for playing against people in different rooms), but it was so laggy.

Also, I played a lot of MajorMUD and LORD.

Nice. I actually sent her a couple job postings for 23andme (not Microsoft, but somewhat related to Google). Her PhD was in Virology. Not quite as much as a fit to CS as Physics though.

Haha, I think she'd be happy with something in the more median range, but her PhD is less math, more biology (Virology).

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, she's got no experience, but I did suggest a code camp, and there are a whole lot of them in the SF area, so she's got that advantage. Not to mention unemployed, so I suggested just learning on her own too, and building some portfolio level items to get her in the door.

It's pretty unrelated - Virology, but she's pretty sharp and was always mathmatically inclined. More so than me, and I've been pretty successful in the programming 'field' (though different versions of "success" are stressed).

I think you underestimate the number of consumers and how little many people need mental stimulation. In today's world, it's easy to stay occupied with nothing more than the content on a typical cable subscription.

I'm not one such person, even though I'm much more of a consumer than a producer (I read 4-5 books a month, watch probably 15-20 hours of TV a month and 2-3 movies a month), but I know people that watch 4-5 hours a night! It doesn't even have to be good content. Instead of going "I've seen this movie/show, or it's not very good," turning it off and doing something productive, they watch the lest boring thing on, even if it's a movie they've seen 3 times, and it's halfway over. It boggles my mind.

Lending library, though, only allows you to check out one book a month, and you have to have a physical Kindle device. The Kindle unlimited, it seems, allows you to use any kindle app, which is a nice change. I did just recently get a Paperwhite, so it doesn't affect me as greatly now.

I don't see "big publishers" either, but I own many of the books listed there (just after a preliminary glance), and I paid as high as 9 - 10 dollars for many of them (and quite a few of the 1.99 - 4.99 books were quite good). I think this service would fit me rather well.

I wonder about the average use specifics for kindle users. Obviously Amazon has insight into this and would set their pricing appropriately.

Assuming the kind of books listed here are the kind on the daily deal (1.99): The average user would have to read only 4-5 books a month to break even (say 9 books every two months counting taxes).

I doubt most users would read that consistently. Maybe the first month, but usage would likely drop, and the deal works out better in Amazon's favor until they quit. Which for many users could be until their credit card expires.

I probably only read 6 books a month at the most these days, and some months I probably drop down as low as 1 book every month several times a year. I'd probably enroll in this service so even if they have 9.99 normal cost ebooks, I think overall it'd work so Amazon doesn't lose much more than they would with their current structure.

It's best to keep the eggs in the carton they came in anyway[0]. Do refrigerators there still come with those silly egg "holders?"

[0]-http://eggs.ab.ca/recipes-tips/handling-storage

I found this article to be quite interesting, even though I do not follow soccer/football (fútbol?). I find this sort of data analytic to be fascinating. It almost seems like art, what data sets to pull from, how to compare it, etc. How would one, other than brushing up on statistics, get into this sort of field? It seems much more interesting than basic web development.

Dune is great, but don't stop there. Read the rest of the series (I don't care for any of his Son's books though, so not going to recommend those, but there are those that like em).

I enjoyed it. I also finished the other two books in the series which ties it all together. I can see where the reviews would be very binary though. It brings up some possibly controversial scenarios which requires some suspension of disbelief. It's almost Fantasy more than Science Fiction in that regard.

Confederacy of Dunces was a very good read. I recommend this to all of my friends, but few ever bother. I'm not entirely sure why they are so put off.

I just finished Alan Dean Foster's "Taken" Trilogy and really enjoyed it. It's probably "not as bad" as Dan Brown (opinion only, possibly), but it's what most here would just classify as escapist trash.

Also Scott Meyer released a sequel to his "Off to be the Wizard" book (Spell or Highwater) and I finished reading it soon after the Taken trilogy. It's a great series too.

I bought the "Everything is Bullshit" book and I'm on a plane tomorrow, so I'll probably finish it during the flight.

Oh wow, I was talking about this book the other day with a coworker, but for the life of me couldn't figure out the book's name. Thanks for posting this.

How are you currently finding ad deals at other schools? Have you thought about affiliate style sales? You promise a cut to affiliate members of those ads to the member that brings in the ads. Maybe too much overhead tracking all of that, though.

Ah, thanks, I didn't catch that MonoCross required Xamarin - it's not obvious from the homepage at all (or even looking for it on any page).

Was hoping to use it to learn some C# (beyond the simple hello world type of thing) - Xamarin's pricing is pretty steep for an amateur/hobbyist.

How does Xamarin compare to a more open (and free) solution like MonoCross?

Yeah, same here, I got 89% of the real words, but messed up with 4-5 non-words which lowered my score to 76%.

How far just south? Rolla, or Jefferson City? My wife is from Rolla, and I know several people that went there. I don't know anybody that went to Lincoln though.