Book Review: People Shots That Sell -- How To Succeed in Stock Photography by Tracey Tannenbaum and Kate Stevens

Creative Ideas

People Shots That Sell is an inspirational overview of stock photography. The book's authors have been editors and agents in the industry and their perspective is clearly from that standpoint which can be a good thing for photographers. However, that also accounts for why the book glosses over many details and how-to information that photographers getting started in the stock business will want to know. There are no technical details on how the images in the book were produced, and none of the images have accompanying sales figures on how profitable they have been. Neither are any of them credited, not even in the back of the book, and that's an oversight that any photographer would cringe at. I suspect that nearly all of them were licensed from royalty-free libraries. I still recommend Photos That Sell by Lee Frost as the best book that I've found on this topic. People Shots That Sell is a beautiful book with wonderful photographs that can be very inspirational and idea generative for staging lifestyle people shoots to generate stock images. Most experienced stock shooters will not learn anything new from this book, but it can be a great resource for those wanting to start licensing their work as stock.

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... And you can quote me on that

I received a free copy this week of Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition by Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman, Devin Rader, Farhan Muhammad, and S. Srinivasa Sivakumar. I'm very grateful to the publisher for sending me a free copy in exchange for permission to quote my review on the previous edition of the book. I'm quoted on the inside cover of this new edition.

Since taking the book out of the shipping box yesterday I haven't been able to read all 1541 pages yet, but it appears to be fun for hours! :) The previous edition came in at 1253 pages by the way. Just thumbing through it I can see that new material was added in addition to some very helpful class diagrams. My copy has a hardcover which is great since I still refer to the previous edition as a reference book and will be turning to this one now instead.

New chapters have been added on "Introduction to the Provider Model", "Extending the Provider Model", "Localization", and "Instrumentation" as well as an appendix on "Migrating ASP.NET 1.x Projects" and another on "Using Atlas". Also, "User and Server Controls" and "Modules and Handlers" have been split into two chapters from a combined chapter in the previous edition.

Unfortunately, the Atlas appendix is only 14 pages long and a very brief introduction only; however, in the authors defense Atlas hasn't been officially released at the time of this publication. Also, from what I've seen of Atlas so far another 1500+ page book will probably be needed to cover it all.

If you are looking for a great ASP.NET book I would high recommend this one.

So if this second edition is called "Special Edition" I wonder what the next one will be called? "Even More Special Than The Last Edition"? Or maybe we will be on ASP.NET 3.0 by then...

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