Tech books

A year or so ago, I wrote about my dead tree web 2.0 reading list, which was all about what books were being published about the interactive web. I’ve bought most of those on the list, plus a bunch of others that folk suggested.

There are other books one can buy about this stuff though, which don’t just talk about the issues and culture of the web, but which actually tell you how to do things.

I don’t tend to buy too many of these, as a lot of the help one needs one can get from the web itself, but I got a couple through the post from Amazon the other day.

Using Drupal is a really good entry level guide to what is a fiendishly complicated, but amazingly powerful CMS. It’s genuinely readable and am really pleased I got it.

Ning for Dummies is a guide to using and setting up your own networks on Ning. As someone who Ninging is entirely based on playing with stuff, it’s great to have a resource to pick up and find out what some of those options I dare not touch do. Again, recommended reading.

One book I have had for a while, which I have to mention here, though, is WordPress for Dummies:

Which isn’t for Dummies at all, in fact it’s for very sensible people. It takes you right the way from setting up a WordPress.com blog to writing your own themes and plugins – awesome stuff.

What techie books do you swear by?

What do people want to know?

I am planning a series of posts on this blog that will go right back to basics on a number of social web topics, partially just to be helpful but also to help develop the documentation for some workshops I am planning.

What I would like to know is what sort of topics people would like covered in terms of social media tools and services. Which services could be of most use in your organisation, but are really hard to explain?

Some ideas I had were for simple stuff like RSS, tagging and social bookmarking.

What would you like to see me write about here?