Make Smarter - Free Books, QT Creator, PDF Webinar

If you’re sitting in your dreary cubicle rather than in temperate San Diego at the ESRI UC*, never fear. I ran across a few items that will help you unshackle your brain from your daily drudgery.

First, the only things better than books are free books, and the good folks at GNU.org have a solid list of free technical tomes you can grab, including books on PostgreSQL, Python, R, Subversion, and a lot of other stuff. For a monster list of free programming books, check out the Free Programming Books section of E-Books Directory.

QT Creator is a free IDE for QT (pronounced “cute”), which is a cross platform (Linux, Windows, Mac, etc.) application and UI framework. If you’re a Linux user, you know KDE uses QT in much the same manor Gnome uses GTK. QT is C++, which normally gives me a headache, but QT Creator is offers a slick interface and visual designer that is a tremendous help for noobs like me. And there’s a great YouTube playlist put out by the QTStudio folks like the one below to help you get started.

You have to squint through the web browser one, but it’s amazing how you can make a basic cross-platform Webkit browser in just a few minutes. If you’re interested in QT or C++, it’s worth a look.

Finally, AnyGeo links to a webinar on the new geospatial features in Adobe Acrobat 9, and particularly how they work with ArcGIS. It’s free and is being held on July 22, 2009 at 10aM LA time. You have to register for the event here.

*My summary of the summaries I’ve been reading can be summarized in the same way I would surmise every ESRI UC: The coming <fill in release number> release of ArcGIS will be the greatest thing ever. The open API for the file geodatabase would be nice in lieu of an open standard, but they’ve been promising that since 2006.