With that in mind, this week I selected three books to recommend for holiday reading. One is a certification book, one a technology book, and the last is an overview of the biggest buzzword in IT for quite some time: social media. From all of us at CertCities, have a happy holiday season.

Certification Book: MCTS 70-680 Cert Guide
Windows 7 is here to stay and getting adopted by more large businesses each day. Many of those businesses are making the transition from Windows XP after foregoing Windows Vista years back. With Windows XP having been around for so long, this means that for the first time in many years, administrators are looking at large desktop OS rollouts that often entail replacing hardware, reconfiguring applications and much more.

To make all of this happen, the demand for certified administrators in Windows 7 is growing, and the best certification exam to start the pursuit with is 70-680 (TS: Windows 7, Configuring). To address this exam, Don Poulton has written MCTS 70-680 Cert Guide: Microsoft Windows 7, Configuring, and it is exceptional. The 18 chapters cover what you need to know -- for the real world as well as the exam world -- with plenty of tables and figures to make it understandable the first time you read it. The quizzes appear at the beginning of each chapter rather than the end, so if you know all the answers you can elect to skip that chapter. Each chapter then ends with a list of key topics and terms you should know. If I have any complaint it is that I would like to see the definitions for the key terms at the end of the chapters and not just the terms themselves. Yes, I can look them up in the glossary or look back for them in the chapter, but the lazy side of me wishes they were there.

Technology Book: Embedded Linux Primer, Second Edition
Christopher Hallinan's Embedded Linux Primer, Second Edition  takes an incredibly difficult topic and makes it comprehensible. Instead of wondering how you're ever going to get through this, you'll find yourself rubbing your head and muttering, "ah, ha!" as the topics become clear. What makes the difference is the writing style and the plethora of examples.

As you read, it is abundantly clear that Hallinan isn't just talking about embedded Linux from a lets-rehash-the-manual perspective, but has actually lived in the trenches long enough to have mastered this topic. If you're a developer, the odds are good that you'll find yourself needing to know something of embedded Linux if your market involves smart phones, PDAs, televisions or almost any other interactive device. When that day comes, grab this book from the shelf, breathe a sigh of relief, and get lost in the pages.

Buzzword Book: The Social Media Bible, Second Edition
Think what you will of social media -- it is a revolution, it is nothing but a fad, it is a bandwidth hog, it is the answer to every problem ever known to man -- you can't help but confront it. No matter where you weigh in on the discussion, the truth of the matter is that it can hold promise for administrators of systems large and small. Even if you think tweeting is nothing more than a novelty, if the tweets you send get users to change their passwords and follow security rules with more success than those antiquated system policies printed in the corporate handbook, then do it. If a Facebook group is all that is needed to make users interact on IT when the first problem occurs -- instead of waiting until no one can print -- then create the group and give them what they want.

Lon Safko's The Social Media Bible, Second Edition is far from the only book on the topic, but it does a great job of introducing you to all the options, walking you through the features of them and allowing you to make your own decisions about which ones are right for you. Once you've narrowed the list of those that you might implement down to a handful, then you'll need to do further study on legal issues, security concerns and such, but this book is a fine starting point.