The team I work with at Mantra Group have a bit of a ritual regarding birthdays, everyone puts in a small amount of money and we organise some cake and a present for the birthday person. My birthday of course doesn’t fall during the work year, so when I joined the marketing department at the start of the year and was introduced to all of these new rituals – I thought I stood a reasonable chance of missing out on some level. However, I was very pleasantly surprised when I had a belated birthday when we returned to work after Christmas.

I asked for a gift voucher and I was lucky enough to receive a $70 voucher for Borders books. Even more fortuitous, only days after receiving the gift voucher – Borders had an enormous sale – the more books you buy, the heavier the discount. I scampered off to the technical section of Borders, followed by the crime section and came away with:

1. Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer by Bryan Eisenberg & John Quarto-vonTivadar
2. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
3. Angels & Demons by Dan Brown

All up I spent about $60 of my voucher and considering Always Be Testing was $55 – it makes the two Dan Brown novels and absolute bargain. If anyone is looking for a new book to read, I recommend getting down to Borders and taking them up on their sale offer – 40% off for three books is hard to pass up!

While at the Garden City Shopping Centre in Brisbane today, I ventured into a Borders book store and it was a treat.

The first thing that I noticed when I walked into the store was that it was big, much bigger than most of the other book stores I’ve been in. As it turns out, the further I walked into the store – the more of the store became visible and it was much larger than I had initially thought. Next up the store was very clean, wasn’t cramped within the isles and was well organised. Did I mention that they had a coffee shop inside the book store; I had to indulge.

After getting a large, double shot espresso I promptly found my way into the computer section. While it wasn’t the euphoric event that is the technical book store in the Brisbane CBD, there were a hell of a lot of technical books in the section and they were quality books – not the standard ‘learn x in y days’ crap that most book stores stock.

I felt I showed great restraint not to pick up at least one of the following for some light reading:

• Programming Erlang: Software for a concurrent world
• Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
• Numerous high end Python books