Thanks to Alessandro Gallo and Manning Publications, I am happy to announce that I’m going to be giving away three copies of ASP.NET AJAX in Action this week in celebration of my blog’s one year anniversary.

If you haven’t read ASP.NET AJAX in Action, you really owe it to yourself to check it out. The book does a great job of helping you understand what’s actually going on under the hood, not just the syntax of the controls. That sort of intimate understanding of the fundamentals is crucial when creating real-world AJAX solutions.

The book goes on to explain all of the ASP.NET AJAX server controls and show full examples of their use, while continuing to keep you aware of any consequences that a particular strategy might have. It also delves into more advanced topics a bit, like building AJAX enabled controls, the ASP.NET AJAX futures, and how to maintain unique URLs for intermediate points in your AJAX application’s workflow.

I don’t generally read technical books about practical application, but I couldn’t put this one down. If you’re reading my site, there’s an awfully good chance that you’d enjoy this book.

Now, on to the fun stuff. I’m going to select winners for the books in three different ways:


First way to win: Comment

The first book will go to a commenter on this thread. Post a comment about what post topics you’d like to see in the coming year, what aspects of the site you’d like to see improvements to, or just about the weather. Comments on this post will be closed at midnight on Thursday* and a winner will be randomly selected.

Make sure that you comment with a valid email address, so that I can contact you if you win.

Second way to win: Read RSS

Later this week, I’ll be making another post about the contest. In RSS readers only, that post will have extra information in the footer with instructions on how to enter in the drawing for the second book. So, if you aren’t already subscribed to the Encosia RSS feed there is still time to get subscribed in time for the entry.

Third way to win: Subscribe via email

The third and final winner will be chosen at random from the list of confirmed email subscribers to my blog, midnight on Thursday*. If you aren’t subscribed to email updates yet, you can click here to sign up.

Thanks and good luck

Again, I’d like to thank Alessandro Gallo and Manning Publications for making this possible, and I’d like to thank all of you for reading the blog, linking to it, and generally making this thing a lot of fun for me during the last year.

That’s it. Good luck in the contest!

* What’s a contest without fine print, right? Midnight on Thursday refers to midnight Eastern time (GMT -5), the night of Thursday 12/20/2007 or morning of Friday 12/21/2007.