[.NetWire:] "O'Reilly's recently released ADO.NET Cookbook contains over 150 solutions and best practices for everyday dilemmas. This week, we're excerpting three recipes from the book that show how to asynchronously update data in a database, how to protect login credentials during network transmissions, and how to enforce a business rule with column expressions"

God I love free information. Ain't it just fun to look at a page\book and think to yourself, "After I read this block of text I will have gained another ounce of knowledge"?

The other day I came across the book "Computer Organization and Architecture: Designing for Performance" by William Stallings. How I came across it? it was lying there on my employer's shelf. I was never any kind of hardware guy. Sure, I can detach a CD ROM but I have no idea how a CPU works and although I tried mastering Assembly language  I never did get to a point I "got" it.

Anyway, I was looking for something interesting to read when I came across this book. I opened it and started leafing through the pages. I could read the names of the chapter titles, I could see the complex diagrams, but, much like a little boy looking at a world atlas for the first time, all I could do was look with big eyes at all the information my brain just can't contain at this moment. It was one of those times, when I got that feeling; "I'm holding a whole lot of knowledge in my hands right now. If I could just concentrate enough I could transfer it into my brain". But all I could do was continue leafing through the chapters, one by one, getting more and more amazed at the amount of complexity that lies in the machine I am using every day. It is truly an amazing piece of work. The complexity and the size of the indirection to which humans have come to in this machine in almost godly, yet we scream for more. Smaller, faster,sharper. We have no idea just how amazing all this already is.

But I digress :)