 Tried and tested
This area of my site is dedicated to all the books and products that I use on a daily basis. I've read a lot of books and used trial or beta versions of many products that didn't make it - what you'll find here are the best I could find. I highly recommend that you try them on for size..
Books
All my favorite books are here, categorized and sorted by how good they are. The best of the best are truly must-have books - some are life-altering, I'm not joking!
Software
Amazing software that works beautifully. These are what I use everyday to develop and maintain my web sites. I only endorse products that I have used extensively and can recommend personally.
 | RichTextBox Professional A very important part of a major new site I wrote, RichTextBox adds a rich-text editor to your ASP.NET web site. Forget the impersonators.
|
 | Proposal Kit Brand yourself as a top professional: create quotes and amazing proposals and get many legal documents free! The latter saved me 3 times the purchase price on the first day I owned it!
|
 | aspNetEmail Another component used on every ASP.NET site I write now. The best email component available today. Period.
|
 | XCompress CoverYourASP uses this as well as other sites I own. It was recommended to me by the best IIS admin I know, and I can see why! It sped up my pages a lot.
|
 | Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7.0 Cheap, easy to use and with more effects than you'll probably need.
|
 | Microsoft Visual Studio .NET What can I say? Microsoft trumps Visual Interdev and Frontpage and has the best editor and mind-blowing debugging capabilities.
|
 | Microsoft Windows XP Professional The world's best operating system comes complete with IIS so you can develop full-scale web sites on your PC.
|
 | SmartDraw This is what I use when I need to create flowcharts to design or document my applications - highly recommended. Download it now and try it free for 30 days!
|
Hardware
Stuff I own and love (and couldn' t do without). In many cases these are my second or third attempts with similar items. These are the ones I found that worked for me. These are not expensive or frivolous items!
 | Linksys 4-Port Cable/DSL Router I've tried dlink (they hang up regularly) and always come back to linksys. This model is now ridiculously cheap and has cool firmware upgrade for more features. Easy, reliable and fast.
|
 | Palm m125 Handheld Not a fancy $600 PDA with color and wireless email - I just want a good address book, calendar and notepad. Amazingly cheap !
|
 | Fuji FinePix 2300 Digital Camera If you put pictures on a web site, you'll need to buy a digitial camera. I also bought 128mb RAM so I can take 600+ pictures at high resolution!
|
 | ViewSonic VE170 17" LCD Monitor You might think this is frivolous, but if you're using a CRT you won't believe how much better the picture is on an LCD. Your CRT will look out of focus after this.
|
 | Logitech TrackMan Marble and Trackball Mice will give you RSI after 20 years. Within a week of using a TrackMan Marble I was so glad I made the change. Highly recommended!
|
|
| 
