Turn over a new leaf every day of 2007

Steve Caplin and Simon Rose, authors of Be the Coolest Dad on the Block and Stuff the Turkey: How to Survive Christmas with your Family, have proposed a top ten list of books with a new leaf (with a page on either side) to turn over every day of the new year.

Among their list of 730-page books:

Euclid 5 LDT Tractor Chassis Only Service Manual
Euclid Tractor Co, Part No: EU-S-1-33 LDT, 730pp

In the 1950s the Euclid 5 was to serious earthmovers what the Aston Martin was to James Bond, except with bigger tyres. They both had massive pulling power, a huge throbbing tail pipe and headlights that flipped down to reveal ground-to-air missile launchers (except for the Euclid 5). While the Aston Martin brand has been bought by Ford, though, the Euclid badge was sold to Hitachi.

The Nepticulidae and Opostegidae (Lepidoptera) of North West Europe
Johansson, R et al, Fauna Entomologica Scandinavica, 1990, 730pp

A hefty two-volume guide to the butterflies and moths of Scandinavia, with 54 colour plates. Most interestingly, this pair of books also includes 936 line drawings of "veins and male genitalia". Essential for those who wish to be shown what a REALLY tiny penis looks like.

Click here to read about their other eight titles.

Clever enough, but their picks are too old or Euro-centric for American readers to locate should they be interested in turning a leaf-a-day. Therefore, I propose:

Songwriters on Songwriting, (paperback) - Expanded Ed., by Paul Zollo

"[The] brand new fourth edition ... contains even more great interviews with legends who have defined and re-defined the art of songwriting. No gossip here, nor probes into the love-lives of stars, rather, these interviews get to the heart of the creative processes which possesses these gifted songwriters."

Cisco Qos Exam Certification Guide (IP Telephony Self-Study), by Wendell Odom and Michael Cavanaugh

Official self-study test preparation guide for the Cisco QOS 642-642 exam. The official study guide helps you master all the topics on the QOS exam, including: :

• QoS concepts, tools, and architectures
• Modular QoS CLI (MQC), QoS Policy Manager (QPM), and AutoQoS
• Classification and marking
• Congestion management
• Traffic shaping and policing
• Congestion avoidance through drop policies
• Compression tools and link fragmentation and interleaving (LFI) tools for link efficiency
• LAN QoS
• QoS best practices

Note: get the first edition as the second has 768 pages...and you don't want to spend New Years Eve 2007 turning over an extra 19 leaves.

--Marshal Zeringue