APRESS has been discounting a single eBook to $10 for a 24 period for a couple months now, that I know of.  They're calling it the eBook Deal of the Day:

At 12:01 AM PST, a different Apress or friends of ED eBook will be priced at $10 US for a 24-hour period. Check back everyday for a new deal. If you have any further questions, please contact support@apress.com.

Awesome, $10 for an ebook is a good deal, even if I can't read one cover to cover digitally I can still search through it as a reference.  I end up just printing ebooks, which probably defeats the purpose, but oh well.  Maybe when the Kindle or another reader is up to the job for technical books it'll be a different story.

Anyway, I like to keep my eye out for a deal so I'll just subscribe to the RSS feed and check my reader for ebook goodness.  Except there is no RSS feed.  Come on, APRESS, this just screams for a feed.  I dropped an email to everyone I could think of, my UserGroup liaison, her boss because she was on vacation and had a responder, support and suggestion links on the website, everyone.  Still no RSS feed.

So what's a geek to do?  Try one of the several "create a feed for non-RSS enabled sites" services and get the information that way.  I tried a couple but either I or they were obtuse and impatient and I couldn't get what I wanted.  In retrospect, I could have used that time with a bit of Hpricot and probably had exactly what I need.  I might do that later, look for another post on that.

I then turned my attention to the always reliable Firefox extension community and found Update Scanner.

After you install the extension, press ALT+U or select "Update Scanner" from the tools menu:

That will open up a sidebar with pages you're interested in scanning for updates.  Click on the far left button to start scanning a new page:

It's smart enough to fill in some defaults for the active tab in Firefox.  If that's not what you want just make the changes.  Title could be cleaned up a bit: "Apress eBook deal of the day" maybe?

I put the threshold fairly low for changes as they only change about a paragraph of text every day. I'm also only scanning their site every day, let's try to be courteous users and not hammer their site.

Now all you have to do is wait until tomorrow for something that looks like this and you'll know that there's a new deal (or that something has been updated if you're using this for other pages).  Update Scanner can also open all updated pages in new tabs, handy if you're diffing the net during morning coffee or something.

So why the post?  Most of the deals I've seen so far have been for older material, this doesn't mean they're not good, some texts are classic and their content might always be relevant, but books about version 1 of the .NET framework probably aren't.  Today's was actually published mere months ago on SQL Server 2008 XML (hopefully not the single row, single column XML blob that I've actually heard people talk about as a good idea! ).  In the future if I'll pass along other "good deals" in my opinion.

I have no affiliation with APRESS, just think of this as a PSA.