Inundation of content dealing with reflections from the past year is nothing less than expected this time of year. Guess what? Here’s some more! Following are the Most Popular Products on InformIT.com from 2008.
10. 
Upgrading and Repairing PCs, 18th Edition
Upgrading and Repairing PCs is the definitive guide to the inner workings of your PC. Whether you’re adding a faster processor or bigger hard drive, tracking down a problem, or just want to understand how the components of your computer work together, this book explains everything you need to know. Trust the one book that has become the de facto standard among PC professionals and enthusiasts around the world.
World-renowned PC hardware expert Scott Mueller has taught thousands in his week-long seminars and millions through his books, videos, and magazine articles. Major changes in the PC hardware industry–including coverage of new Core 2 processors from Intel, Socket AM2 processors from AMD, and significant advances in motherboard chipsets, Blu-ray, and HD-DVD–make Upgrading and Repairing PCs, 18th Edition, an indispensable addition to every serious computer user’s bookshelf…that is, if it ever leaves their desks. Readers from around the world trust their computers to Scott. Upgrading and Repairing PCs is found on the desks of teachers, students, hobbyists, repair technicians, and even law enforcement agencies that use this book to aid them in tracking criminals.
9. 
Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web, 3rd Edition
Direct from the creators of CSS, this is the definitive guide to CSS, today’s indispensable standard for controlling the appearance of any Web or XML document. This book doesn’t just show how to use every significant CSS 1 and 2.x feature; it carefully explains the “why” behind today’s most valuable CSS design techniques. You’ll find practical, downloadable examples throughout?along with essential browser support information and best practices for building high-impact pages and applications.
Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web, Third Edition covers every CSS 2.1 improvement and fix, from new height/width definitions in absolutely positioned elements to new clip property calculations. Clear, readable, and thorough, it’s the one must-have CSS resource for every Web developer, designer, and content provider.
8. 
Formulas and Functions with Microsoft Office Excel 2007
Most Microsoft? Excel users learn only a small percentage of the program?s features. They know they could get more out of Excel if they could just get a leg up on building formulas and using functions. Unfortunately, this side of Excel appears complex and intimidating to the uninitiated?shrouded in the mysteries of mathematics, finance, and impenetrable spreadsheet jargon.
Sound familiar? If you?re a businessperson who needs to use Excel as an everyday part of your job, then you?ve come to the right book. Formulas and Functions with Microsoft? Office Excel 2007 demystifies worksheet formulas and presents the most useful Excel functions in an accessible, jargon-free way. This book not only takes you through Excel?s intermediate and advanced formula-building features, it also tells you why these features are useful to you and shows you how to use them in everyday situations. Throughout the book you?ll find no-nonsense, step-by-step tutorials and lots of practical examples aimed directly at business users.
In this book, PHP 5′s co-creator and two leading PHP developers show you how to make the most of PHP 5′s industrial-strength enhancements in any project?no matter how large or complex. Their unique insights and realistic examples illuminate PHP 5′s new object model, powerful design patterns, improved XML Web services support, and much more. Whether you’re creating web applications, extensions, packages, or shell scripts?or migrating PHP 4 code?here are high-powered solutions you won’t find anywhere else.
Review PHP’s syntax and master its object-oriented capabilities?from properties and methods to polymorphism, interfaces, and reflection.
If you’re a software developer new to PHP, you’ll leap quickly into PHP and its new object-oriented capabilities. If you’re an experienced PHP programmer, you already recognize PHP’s convenience and simplicity. Now, discover all of its extraordinary power!
6. 
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
Capturing a wealth of experience about the design of object-oriented software, four top-notch designers present a catalog of simple and succinct solutions to commonly occurring design problems. Previously undocumented, these 23 patterns allow designers to create more flexible, elegant, and ultimately reusable designs without having to rediscover the design solutions themselves.
The authors begin by describing what patterns are and how they can help you design object-oriented software. They then go on to systematically name, explain, evaluate, and catalog recurring designs in object-oriented systems. With Design Patterns as your guide, you will learn how these important patterns fit into the software development process, and how you can leverage them to solve your own design problems most efficiently.
5. 
Podcasting with Audacity: Creating a Podcast With Free Audio Software (Digital Short Cut)
Audacity is universally recognized as the number one software program for creating podcasts. Hundreds of thousands of amateurs and professionals alike have created podcasts using Audacity.
This Short Cut is designed to get you podcasting as quickly as possible. The first few chapters show you how to install Audacity, plug in your microphone, record your first podcast, and get it online as quickly as possible. The following chapters cover podcasting-specific topics, such as adding background music or conducting interviews. Finally, the remaining chapters focus on how Audacity works, with lots of tips and tricks to make complicated editing even easier.
4. 
C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3
The first official Trolltech guide to Qt 3.2 programming! Straight from Trolltech, this book covers all you need to build industrial-strength applications with Qt 3.2.x and C++–applications that run natively on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, and embedded Linux with no source code changes! The book teaches solid Qt programming practices; it is not a rehash of the documentation.
It includes information on how to: Build powerful C++ GUI applications quickly and easily; Design dialogs and main windows visually and in code; Learn Qt’s innovative typesafe signals and slots mechanism; Use layouts to create forms that automatically size and scale; Utilize 2D and 3D graphics, multithreading, and networking; Write database and XML applications; and much more!
Already using Qt or just starting out? Evaluating Qt or managing it? Building open source applications–or commercial applications? Want to develop for Windows without buying an expensive compiler? Whatever your goal, this is the only book you need!
This popular tutorial introduction to standard C++ has been completely updated, reorganized, and rewritten to help programmers learn the language faster and use it in a more modern, effective way.
Just as C++ has evolved since the last edition, so has the authors’ approach to teaching it. They now introduce the C++ standard library from the beginning, giving readers the means to write useful programs without first having to master every language detail. Highlighting today’s best practices, they show how to write programs that are safe, can be built quickly, and yet offer outstanding performance.
Examples that take advantage of the library, and explain the features of C++, also show how to make the best use of the language. As in its previous editions, the book’s authoritative discussion of fundamental C++ concepts and techniques makes it a valuable resource even for more experienced programmers.
2. 
iPhone Developer’s Cookbook, The: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK, Adobe Reader
This is the eBook version of the printed book. If the print book includes a CD-ROM, this content is not included within the eBook version.
The iPhone and iPod touch aren?t just attracting millions of new users; their breakthrough development platform enables programmers to build tomorrow?s killer applications. If you?re getting started with iPhone programming, this book brings together tested, ready-to-use code for hundreds of the challenges you?re most likely to encounter. Use this fully documented, easy-to-customize code to get productive fast?and focus your time on the specifics of your application, not boilerplate tasks.
And the No. 1 most popular product on InformIT.com in 2008 is… (insert clich? drumroll here)
1. 
Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program (Digital Short Cut)
Inkscape, An Open-Source Vector Drawing Program is THE GUIDE to the Inkscape program. The shorter, web-based, version is linked directly to under the program’s Help menu. This book is both an introduction and reference for the Inkscape drawing program. With Inkscape, one can produce a wide variety of art, from photo-realistic drawings to organizational charts.
Inkscape uses SVG, a powerful vector based drawing language and W3C web standard, as its native format. SVG drawings can be directly viewed by web browsers such as Firefox and Opera. A subset of SVG has been adopted by the mobile phone market.
Inkscape is available free for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and Solaris operating systems. The first third of the book is devoted to eleven tutorials that progress in difficulty from very basic to very complex. The remainder of the book covers each facet of Inkscape in detail. Advance topics covered include the use of Inkscape’s powerful tiling tool, built-in bitmap tracing, and SVG use on the web. The book includes plenty of tips (and warnings) about the use of Inkscape and SVG.
Congratulations to the winner.
Inkscape is great and so is SVG.
See the diversity of things SVG is used for.