Site Offer The Register bookstore is pleased to offer readers 18 Kick Start titles all with 30 per cent off. Kick Start books offer a casual, task-oriented approach for programmers, web developers and administrators. These books are written by experts who teach you the fundamentals as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

Kick Start titles are practical, with examples that are based on real-world uses of the technology. They're concise, with background information and digression is kept to a minimum. And they're very thoughtfully organised, based on the most likely path a developer will take in applying the technology.

We've selected some of the most popular Kick Start guides below, or you can click here to view all 18 titles.

Microsoft .NET
RRP £25.50 - Reg price - £17.85 - Saving £7.65 (30 per cent)
The fastest and most practical way for programmers or administrators to learn the ins and outs of .NET programming and architecture. This title provides experienced professionals with a quick and easy way to learn the basics of .NET programming and enterprise servers.

Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003
RRP £25.50 - Reg price - £17.85 - Saving £7.65 (30 per cent)
Visual Basic .NET Kick Start is a rapid-progression tutorial that presents Visual Basic .NET to working programmers already familiar with another programming language or tool.

Microsoft .NET Compact Framework
RRP £25.50 - Reg price - £17.85 - Saving £7.65 (30 per cent)
The primary goal of .NET Compact Framework is to bring the familiar experience of developing .NET applications for the desktop to the device world. This book bridges the gap between .NET and .NET Compact Framework development.

Microsoft Visual C#.NET 2003
RRP £25.50 - Reg price - £17.85 - Saving £7.65 (30 per cent)
C# Kick Start is a rapid-progression tutorial that presents the C# language to working programmers who are already familiar with another programming language tool.

ASP.NET Data Web Controls
RRP £25.50 - Reg price - £17.85 - Saving £7.65 (30 per cent)
Utilising the more advanced features of the data Web controls has many developers stumped. This book is likely to be an indispensable item in every ASP.NET developer's toolbox.

ASP .NET
RRP £25.50 - Reg price - £17.85 - Saving £7.65 (30 per cent)
While other books discuss building ASP.NET pages using text editors, this book concentrates on the tools and features built into Visual Studio .NET.

Tomcat
RRP £25.50 - Reg price - £17.85 - Saving £7.65 (30 per cent)
A fast-paced concise developer's introduction to Apache Jakarta Tomcat, the official reference implementation used to build Servlets and JSP applications.

Mono
RRP £25.50 - Reg price - £17.85 - Saving £7.65 (30 per cent)
Mono is an open-source implementation of the infrastructure upon which Microsofts .NET Framework is build. Providing a compatible option with all of the technical features of .NET without the restrictive licensing and prohibitive costs that Microsoft imposes

XPath
RRP £28.99 - Reg price - £20.29 - Saving £8.70 (30 per cent)
Explains XPath in-depth and its connections to related XML technologies.

XQuery
RRP £25.50 - Reg price - £17.85 - Saving £7.65 (30 per cent)
As more developers use XML to store and define data in their applications, they need tools to process and manipulate it. XQuery is the official World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specification for an XML query language.

And if that's not your cup of tea, why not check out one of these further bargains:

• Should I Stay Or Should I Go?
  RRP £12.99 - Reg price - £9.09 - Saving £3.90 (30 per cent)
  So, you've been headhunted for a new job, but you don't feel you've achieved all you can where you are right now? What you need is impartial and authoritative guidance. This book will help you work out where you are in your career, and whether it's time to head for the door or buckle down and work at moving up where you are.
• Complete Leadership
  RRP £16.99 - Reg price - £11.89 - Saving £5.10 (30 per cent)
  Everybody can use more of their potential to inspire and empower others to achieve better results. Great leadership isn't formulaic, nor is it easy, but it is learnable.
• Lincoln
  RRP £16.99 - Reg price - £11.89 - Saving £5.10 (30 per cent)
  Winner of the 2003 Lincoln Prize, this book is an analytical political biography. It recounts a compelling personal and public story: Lincoln's winning the presidency, his wartime leadership, and his role in turning the war for the Union into a war for emancipation.

To search or browse other discounted titles available to

readers click on the links below:

• The Reg Bestsellers
• Last week at The Reg
• Great new releases
• This week's book bag