Dark SEO Programming
SEO Tools. I code ‘em.

Before I post my next post I’m going to make a little list of books which I think are amazing reading.

Persuasion
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I find this stuff amazing, there’s only one book I recommend but here’s why. It’s literally a study of the way people react under very similar situations with perhaps a small change to the way you phrase something, with statistics on the differing reactions of groups of people to the new phrase. For instance foot in the door technique is the process of making a small request such as to sign a piece of paper to show they support they would support the local blood bank, and then asking if they would now be intereted in donating blood. On average it is likely to increase the response rate by around 10% to asking the second question only. This is the type of thing this book is about.

Sales/Marketing
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I think learning this stuff is essential if you’re doing anything PPC or generally advertisement related. And it’s also extremely interesting.

I recommend this book for the simple reason that the guy who wrote it sold over 20 million pairs of blublocker sunglasses. He must know something about his trade. I’ve read some reviews on this book by people saying it’s only good for direct response. They’re right but PPC and the web is very similar to direct response marketing. Now you could walk into PPC or advertising totally blind without a clue what you’re doing and pick everything up as you go along but when you’re putting hundreds of dollars of your own money on the line you’ll admit that’s a little more than scary? In this book Joesph Sugarman writes about his experiences in producing effective sales copy which should give you a good grounding. Most of the reviews on this book praise it pretty highly.

Coding Techniques
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These are intense reading about very defined topics. You’re going to need a ton of caffeine but I’d be amazed if you don’t come away feeling like you’ve truly learned something. (At the moment there is only one in this section but I will probably add more )

Natural Language Processing is extremely interesting because it involves the computer attempting to give the impression of being able to talk as if it understood the world it is trying to describe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing explains the basics of it. The fundamentals of natural language generation involve taking some basic information and forming a natural sounding sentence from it. To do this we can use statistics to analyze the probability of a word appearing after a word or set of words. There are markov classes on the Internet which use basic statistics to rewrite content. It’s a complicated subject by any stretch of the word.

PHP Newbies
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If you are new to coding I suggest you only learn one language, PHP. With PHP you will be able to do almost everything you will ever need to and you will be able to write powerful database applications on the web as well as write scripts that run on your own desktop. I think there is only one way to learn to code. Promise yourself to write a little script and work on it until you pull it off. A book is useful to grasp the basics and act as a reference so you don’t have to google every two minutes.

Social Engineering
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How to break through many impenetrable security systems with simple phone calls. Certainly makes you think. The whole of the book describes building trust with members staff by gaining different small pieces of information from different departments/staff until the product of that information supplies you with enough credibility that they will believe you are who you say you are. I don’t recommend or do any of this it’s just an interesting read.

Next post will be the Java thing.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.