Packt publishing have a rather nice line in technical guides to a wide range of software applications, with a particularly strong list of open source titles. A couple of new titles look interesting, and I hope to include reviews when I've had chance to read them. 

Michael Badger's Scratch 1.4: Beginner's Guide, covers the basics of Scratch, covering some elementary programming concepts in the process: "This book provides teachers, parents, and new programmers with a guided tour of Scratch's features by creating projects that can be shared, remixed, and improved upon in your own lesson plans. Soon you will be creating games, stories, and animations by snapping blocks of "code" together." [Sample chapter]

Also of interest is a book, Mahara 1.2 E-Portfolios by community member and unconference presenter Glenys Bradbury and others introducing Mahara, the popular e-portfolio, blogging, social networking software that, thanks to single sign on with Moodle, is the platform of choice for many institutions: "This book will introduce to the exciting features of Mahara framework and help you develop a feature-rich e-portfolio for yourself." [Sample chapter]

Other useful titles from Packt by community members include Mary Cooch's 'Moodle 1.9 for teaching 7-14 year olds' and Bill Fitzgerald's 'Drupal for Education and E-Learning'. The former went down very well with my second year 'web based learning in the primary school' students, the latter was invaluable in building this site.

Packt titles are available on dead trees, as electronically, which I know isn't quite the same, but does have certain advantages as well as being somewhat cheaper. They are eager to enlist more authors, and have a fairly generous approach to royalties for authors, and for open source projects on which they write. 

O'Reilly too have a long tradition of publishing excellent technical books, and again have very strong open source lists. As well as Jason Cole and Helen Foster's authorative Using Moodle, my top picks at the moment are more general titles, Andrew Hunt on 'Pragmatic Thinking and Learning' and Jono Bacon on 'The Art of Community'. I've also ordered an inspection copy of Hoover and Oshineye's 'Apprenticeship Patterns'. Back in '99 when I'd just started learning about open source, Eric S Raymond's 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' was a great influence on me, as I'm sure it was on many others.

So, what are you reading at the moment? What are your favourite Open Source titles?