Web / Programming / Excerpts

Over the years, we've collected book excerpts on a wide variety of programming, graphics and other topics. If you know of an excerpt you'd like to have us carry, or you've written a book and you want to have us promote an excerpt, send us an email.

WebReference Book Excerpts

Ajax

Introduction to AJAX Technologies: If you're not familiar with the technology or are new to AJAX, it's important to take some time and understand where AJAX fits into the big picture of Web development. This article helps bring you up to speed with AJAX's place in your Web development toolbox. By Robert Foster. 0126
Anatomy of an Ajax Application: This week you'll learn about the individual building blocks of Ajax and how they fit together to form the architecture of an Ajax application. Later on, you'll examine these components in more detail, finally assembling them into a working Ajax application. By Phil Ballard and Michael Moncur. 1013
Software Engineering for Ajax - Part 2: Eclipse provides a nice environment for debugging a running Java application. When launched, the application runs in the hosted mode browser. In Debug mode, the hosted mode browser is connected to Eclipse and can use Eclipse's debugging commands. By Ryan Dewsbury. 0519
Software Engineering for Ajax: A great advantage of using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) when building Ajax applications is leveraging advanced software engineering. This week you'll learn how to use the Java software engineering tools in GWT to build high-quality Ajax applications. By Ryan Dewsbury. 0512
Transparency in Ajax Applications - Part 2: Beyond the general danger of revealing application logic to potential attackers, there are specific mistakes that programmers make when writing client-side code that can open their applications to attack. By Billy Hoffman and Bryan Sullivan. 0324
Transparency in Ajax Applications: An average user might not be aware that the logic of the Ajax application is more exposed than that of the standard Web page. It's relatively simple for an advanced user (or an attacker) to "look inside" and gain knowledge about the internal workings of the application. By Billy Hoffman and Bryan Sullivan. 0317
AJAX Components - Part 3: In the last part of this series, you'll learn how to build a declarative component for an application with a list of customers which is populated from a server-side data handler using AJAX. By David Johnson, Alexei White, and Andre Charland. 0910
AJAX Components - Part 2: This week you'll go through the steps of building an AJAX DataGrid control, which is used to iterate over a list of JavaScript objects. Other topics covered are the behavior component, databinding, templating and the declaration. By David Johnson, Alexei White, and Andre Charland. 0904
AJAX Components: This week we look at the process of building a user interface. You'll learn how to encapsulate AJAX functionality into both imperative, as well as declarative, components. By David Johnson, Alexei White, and Andre Charland. 0827
Our First Ajax Application: This week you'll learn how to construct a complete and working Ajax application. As with any Ajax application, it will make use of an HTML document, JavaScript routines, a server-side routine (in PHP) and a callback function to deal with the returned data. By Phil Ballard. 0806
Anatomy of an Ajax Application: This week you'll learn about the individual building blocks of Ajax and how they fit together to form the architecture of an Ajax application. Subsequent lessons will examine these components in more detail and will create a working Ajax application. By Phil Ballard. 0730
Creating Responsive GUIs with Real-Time Validation: This week you'll learn about real-time validation, when and where to inject this functionality into your own applications and how to validate popular data types such as phone numbers, dates and email addresses. By Michael Morrison. 0712
Introducing Ajax - Part 2: This week we look at the role of XML in Ajax. Topics covered include the tree data structure, well-formed XML documents, the XMLHttpRequest object, XSLT and plenty of coding examples. By Ed Woychowsky. 0319
Introducing Ajax: Ajax is the acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. This week you'll learn about the practice of updating web pages with information from the server, done so that the entire Web page doesn't need to be reloaded when users request a change. By Ed Woychowsky. 0312
Understanding Ajax: Getting Started: Part 2: This week we continue with our exploration of Ajax. Topics covered are sending a request using an IFrame, creating a hidden IFrame, creating a form, sending a request using a cookie and more. By Joshua Eichorn. 1016
Understanding Ajax: Getting Started: What makes Ajax possible is the communication layer with the server. The most complete option is the JavaScript XMLHttpRequest object. If XMLHttpRequest is not suitable, hidden IFrames and cookies can also be used. Both will be examined here. By Joshua Eichorn. 1009
JavaScript and XML: Part 3: This week we conclude our three part series. Topics include XML and Web Services and E4X: ECMAScript for XML. Note that while E4X includes language syntax and APIs for working with XML namespaces, the examples don't illustrate this syntax (for simplicity). By David Flanagan. 1002
JavaScript and XML: Part 2: This is the continuation of a three part series. This week we look at transforming XML with XSLT, querying XML with XPath, evaluating XPath Expressions, serializing XML and more. By David Flanagan. 0925
JavaScript and XML: This week you'll learn how to use JavaScript to work with XML data. Topics convered are obtaining XML documents, loading a document from the network, parsing XML text, XML documents from data islands and manipulating XML with the DOM API. By David Flanagan. 0918
Scripting in the Browser - Part 2: This week we examine extra functionality in MSXML which provides additional properties and methods that can be used with the DOM interfaces discussed previously. You'll see examples and learn how to create similar functionality in Mozilla. By Apress. 0705
Scripting in the Browser - Part 1: This week you'll learn how to use JavaScript to manipulate XML documents. Some of the topics covered are the key DOM interfaces and the differences between Internet Explorer (IE) and Mozilla. By Apress. 0628
Web Design with Ajax: If you're tired of clunky Web Interfaces, check out Ajax. Ajax - asynchronous JavaScript and XML is the key to building rich Internet applications that are more interactive, responsive and easy to use. Here, you'll learn about the newest thing to hit the Web. By O'Reilly Media Inc. 0508
Professional Ajax: XML, XPath, and XSLT, Pt. 1: This week you will learn how to load and manipulate XML documents in an XML DOM object, use XPath to select XML nodes that meet certain criteria, and transform XML documents into HTML using XSLT. By Wrox. 0306

Ajax ThinWire

ThinWire Handbook: Layout Management: ThinWire is an LGPL open source framework that allows you to build responsive, expressive and interactive Web applications without the complexities found with other methods. By Joshua Gertzen, Ted C. Howard. 0813

Apache

Mitigating the WASC Web Security Threat Classification with Apache: Part 3: The Client-Side Attacks section focuses on the abuse or exploitation of a Web site's users. Topics covered are content spoofing, cross-site scripting, buffer overflow, denial of service attacks, and more. By Ryan C. Barnett. 1227
Mitigating the WASC Web Security Threat Classification with Apache: Part 2: This week we look at attacks that target a Web site's method of determining if a user, service, or application has the necessary permissions to perform a requested action. Using various techniques, attackers can fool a Web site into increasing their privileges to protected areas. By Ryan C. Barnett. 1218
Mitigating the WASC Web Security Threat Classification with Apache: Do you know what threats exist for Web applications? Do you know about the attack scenarios? This week you'll learn about threats associated with running Web applications and Apache strategies to mitigate the problem. By Ryan C. Barnett. 1211
Apache Ant Best Practices: Apache Ant is a powerful build tool. This week you'll learn what Ant property files are, how to use Ant's capabilities to better integrate with IBM Rational ClearCase, how to implement Ant build files and more. By Kevin A. Lee. 0717

ASP.NET

Installing the ASP.NET Engine, Editor, and Database System: Three components need to be installed to work with the ASP.NET examples, the .NET Framework, the Visual Web Developer and SQL Server 2005. In addition, your computer must be running Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008. By Scott Mitchell.
Getting Started with ASP.NET 3.5: ASP.NET is a Web programming technology pioneered by Microsoft that allows developers to create dynamic Web pages. Here, you'll find out how to create dynamic ASP.NET Web sites quickly and easily. By Scott Mitchell. 1208
ASP.NET Compilation Models: This week we discuss the details of how ASP.NET applications are compiled. This information isn't vital to your success as an ASP.NET developer, but understanding the architecture of your development environment makes you a better developer. By Jim Cheshire. 1027
Adding Client Capabilities to Server Controls Using the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit: Part 2: The introduction of the Extender Wizard in Visual Studio 2008 has enhanced the design-time experience with regard to working with extender controls. This section explains how to add design-time features of your own to give your controls that professional feel that users enjoy. By Adam Calderon & Joel Rumerman. 0721
Adding Client Capabilities to Server Controls Using the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit: The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit assists in the development of extender controls, the use of attributes to decorate extender control properties that should be included in the $create statement creation, built-in designer support, and much more. By Adam Calderon & Joel Rumerman. 0714
Customizing and Managing Your Site's Appearance - Part 3: When a page that uses a master page (i.e., a content page) is requested, ASP.NET merges the content page and master page together (assuming both have been compiled) by inserting the master page's content at the beginning of the content page's control tree. This means that the master page content is actually a control added to the page. By Randy Connolly. 0421
Customizing and Managing Your Site's Appearance - Part 2: This week we'll look at an example that demonstrates the dynamic selection of themes. The page contains no appearance markup, only structured content. All formatting is contained in the theme skins and CSS files. By Randy Connolly. 0414
Customizing and Managing Your Site's Appearance: ASP.NET 2.0 provides a number of ways to customize the style of pages and controls in your Web application. This week we examine the various properties of Web server controls, how to use CSS with ASP.NET and how to work with themes, master pages and user controls. By Randy Connolly. 0407
Building Websites with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit: The ASP.NET Community Starter Kit from Microsoft is an application that allows you to create a fully featured community-driven Web site, complete with article and news management, downloads, forums, and user handling. This book excerpt illustrates how easy it is to create a complete and functional community Web site from scratch with a personalized look and feel. September 27, 2004
Build Your Own ASP.NET Website Using C# & VB.NET. Pt. 4.: At the heart of ASP.NET is its ability to create dynamic form content. Today, you'll learn how Web Forms, HTML controls, and Web controls, in conjunction with VB.NET and C# code, should change the way you look at, and develop for, the Web. By SitePoint. 0726
Build Your Own ASP.NET Website Using C# & VB.NET. Pt. 3.: Today, you'll learn about programming fundamentals such as control and page events, variables, arrays, functions, operators, conditionals, and loops. Next, we'll dive into namespaces and address the topic of classes, how they're exposed through namespaces, etc. By SitePoint. 0719
Build Your Own ASP.NET Website Using C# & VB.NET. Pt. 2.: This week, you're going to learn about some key mechanisms of an ASP.NET page, including Page Structure, View State, Namespaces and Directives. As this section unfolds, you'll learn about the differences and similarities between VB.NET and C#. By SitePoint. 0628
Build Your Own ASP.NET Website Using C# & VB.NET. Pt. 1.: Using a practical step-by-step approach, author Zak Ruvalcaba introduces the ASP.NET framework, teaches you about database design, and shows you how to build several real world Web-based applications that you can put to use. By SitePoint. 0621

Blogging

Building a Weblog: Part 4: This week is the conclusion of our series. Topics covered are blog categories, creating new blog entries and updating entries. Adding blog categories uses a page similar to the one for adding comments. By Jono Bacon. 0305
Building a Weblog: Part 3: This week, we're going to build the category browser. In this section, you'll create a page that allows users to browse the different categories and see which blog entries have been posted in each category. By Jono Bacon. 0226
Building a Weblog: Part 2: One of the planned features for this blog is to add comments to a blog entry. When comments have been posted, you can display the number of comments and the names of the posters, which double as hyperlinks, so when you click the poster's name, the application jumps to that poster's comment. By Jono Bacon. 0219
Building a Weblog: The basic function of a blog is to store a series of blog posts (often called entries), but many blogs also include commenting, categorization and archives. This week you'll learn how to build a blog that incorporates these features. By Jono Bacon. 0212
How Much Blog - and How Often?: This week you'll learn about the resource needs that business bloggers will want to consider, and how to rally the troops behind a blogging initiative. As many bloggers have learned, blogging is fairly simple - but it's not effortless. By Steve Broback and DL Byron. 0724

ColdFusion

Programming ColdFusion MX: Web Services: A relatively new technology, web services seeks to provide a global object repository where applications can be assembled using using relatively simple protocols. Here is an overview of consuming, producing and security of web services. By O'Reilly. 0915

CSS

Page Structuring Using Cascading Style Sheets: Part 2: This week we look at how to modify AP element properties with the AP elements panel, design tableless Web pages with AP elements, work with built-in CSS page layouts and more. By Zak Ruvalcaba. 0204
Page Structuring Using Cascading Style Sheets: Part 1: This week you'll learn about AP (or Absolutely Positioned) Elements. These are CSS-driven "content blocks" in Dreamweaver that can contain text, images, media elements, and more. Additionally, you can freely position the AP Element anywhere you want on a page. By Zak Ruvalcaba. 0128
Review: CSS: The Missing Manual: CSS can be a difficult to master as there are many aspects to learn. So what do you do? First of all, don't give up. Secondly, check out this volume, which uses a new concept, enabling the reader to quickly learn the technical aspects of CSS. By David Sawyer McFarland. 1023
Browser Support for CSS: CSS rules are always interpreted by Web browsers. These standards give specifics on how browsers should display those rules Â but they're not always followed. To design pages with CSS, you need to know the standards, and to understand how browsers' quirks and flaws will affect your Web design results. By Kynn Bartlett. 0912
CSS Mastery: Fixed-Width, Liquid, and Elastic Layouts and Faux Columns: So far (in the previous article), all the examples have used widths defined in pixels. This type of layout is known as fixed-width layout, or sometimes "ice layout" due to its rigid nature. This week we look at fixed-width, liquid and elastic layouts. By Andy Budd, Cameron Moll and Simon Collison. 0904
CSS Mastery: Page Layout: One of the major benefits of CSS is the ability to control page layout without needing to use presentational markup. This week you'll learn how to horizontally center a design on a page, create two and three column float based layouts and more. By Andy Budd, Cameron Moll and Simon Collison. 0828
Sams Teach Yourself CSS in 10 Minutes: This is a book excerpt from "Sams Teach Yourself CSS in 10 Minutes", by Russ Weakley. In this excerpt, you will learn how to position a two-column page layout with a header and a footer.. January 3, 2006
Two Column Page Layouts with CSS: In this lesson, you will learn how to position a two-column page layout with a header and a footer. This method involves floating them both because it is the most reliable method across most modern browsers. By Que & Sams Publishing. 0103
Core CSS: 2nd Edition. Pt. 2: This week, you'll learn about the Text-Kashida-Space, Text-Underline-Position, Word-Break and Text-Align-Last properties. By Prentice Hall. 1006
Core CSS: 2nd Edition. Pt. 1: Core CSS provides both novice and experienced Web Developers with an up-to-date listing on CSS compatibility across browsers and operating systems so Webmasters can finally know which CSS properties are "safe." CSS allows you to create Web page layouts that are not possible using regular HTML. By Prentice Hall 0929

CURL

Enterprise Curl, Chapter 13: The Wizard Control, Pt. 2: The following is the conclusion of our series of excerpts from the Prentice Hall title, Enterprise Curl. This excerpt is from Chapter 13.
Enterprise Curl, Chapter 1: Introduction: Enterprise Curl shows how to take advantage of Curl for serious enterprise development. Through a start-to-finish case study, Paul Sheehan introduces powerfully effective design and development techniques. Prentice Hall
Curl Programming Bible: These days, any language claiming to be useful on the Web must support Web services. Find out how one specific language, Curl, simplifies the process in this excerpt entitled "Curl and Web Services." From John Wiley & Sons.

Graphics (including 3D)

Hello Triangle: An OpenGL ES 2.0 Example: This week you'll learn what's necessary to create an OpenGL ES 2.0 program that draws a single triangle. You'll also learn how to create an on-screen render surface with EGL, load vertex and fragment shaders, create a program object and more. By Aaftab Munshi, Dan Ginsburg, Dave Shreiner. 0728
Photoshop CS3: Adjusting Color: Color adjustment is one of the most important aspects of working with images. This week you'll learn how to turn red roses blue, change a sky from midday to sunset and back again, bring out the detail in shadows, and control every imaginable aspect of color manipulation. By Carla Rose and Kate Binder. 0702
Building Preloaders: Do you have trouble with stuttering, delayed or broken playbacks? If so, check out the Bandwidth Profiler, which will simulate the the playback at different connection speeds. If you have a problem, you can fix it by creating a preloader. By Joey Lott. 0821
Reducing Noise, Correcting Chromatic Aberrations & Controlling Vignetting: With varying degrees, all digital cameras produce images with electronic noise, chromatic aberrations, and vignetting. This week you'll learn how to reduce the effects of these imperfections in your RAW files. By O'Reilly Media, Inc. 0708
Masking with Channels in Photoshop: Masking is one of the most important aspects of working with Photoshop and often the most difficult. These week you'll learn how to create effective masks for tree branches and fur, how to make the most of blending modes and more. By O'Reilly Media, Inc. 0410
How to Use Bridge and Version Cue: Part 2: This week we look at the PDF review process, file naming in Version Cue, adding and viewing metadata in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, GoLive, Bridge and more. By O'Reilly. 0327
How to Use Bridge and Version Cue: Part 1: Just when you thought you knew everything about Creative Suite, Adobe has given you more to work with - and the ability to connect all your Creative Suite 2 applications via the new Bridge and manage your files with Version Cue CS2. By O'Reilly. 0320
How to Use Photoshop for the Web: In this lesson you'll learn how to create images for the web. Some of the topics covered are file formats and size, preparing backgrounds, creating slices, making pages load faster and more. By Que & Sams Publishing. 0109
The Game Artist's Guide to Maya, Pt. 3: In our final section, we have a look at the process of UV mapping the head of the character and applying materials to the model. You'll also learn about applying a texture to a material, 3D painting tools, vertex coloring and texture painting tips. By Sybex. 0117
The Game Artist's Guide to Maya, Pt. 2: Here we look at UV mapping of the body and armor. While some parts (such are the sword) are easy to map, UV mapping of characters is about as complex as you can get and this is our focus today. In addition, a Layout Tips section is provided to assist you with your own projects. By Sybex. 0111
The Game Artist's Guide to Maya. Pt. 1: To bring life to your model, you must texture it. The main process you need to be aware of is what is known as UV Mapping. Here, we look at Mapping UVs, UV Projection Commands, The UV Texture Editor, Texture Resolutions, Formats, Alpha Channel and Pixel Shader Effects. By Sybex. 0104
The Hidden Power of Photoshop Elements 3, Pt. 2.: In part 2, we look at Applying Color: Separating the Color Component and Hand-Coloring, Exploring Color and Tone Through the Composite Layer, Hand Coloring with Gradient Maps, Opacity and Color Stops and more. By Sybex. 1227
The Hidden Power of Photoshop Elements 3, Pt. 1.: Photoshop Elements 3 has quickly become a popular program with it's user base. Today, you'll learn about the art of turning color to black-and-white and turning black-and-white to color again. By Sybex. 1220
Photoshop Elements 3 Solutions, Pt. 2.: Today, we look at Tinting Images, Eliminating or Diminishing Dust, Scratches, and Electronic Noise, Spot Healing, Converting Color Images to Black-and-White and more. By Sybex. 1206
Photoshop Elements 3 Solutions, Pt. 1.: With Photoshop Elements 3, Adobe has introduced RAW support, organizing tools, Healing Brushes, and much more. Join author Mikkel Aaland as he covers all of version 3's new features plus many fresh techniques and examples. By Sybex. 1130
Introducing Maya 6: 3D for Beginners: Today, author Dariush Derakhshani shows you how to create a 3D representation of our solar system and the mechanics of animating orbits. You'll learn about creating simple objects, setting simple keyframes, and stacking your animation to get planets and moons to orbit each other and the sun. By Sybex. 1101
Al Ward's Photoshop Productivity Toolki: This resource from actions guru Al Ward supplies you with over 600 Photoshop actions that you can instantly apply to your work. These actions allow you to automate routine production tasks, make color and tone enhancements, apply artistic effects, and much more. September 7, 2004
Creating Striking Graphics with Maya and Photoshop: Designed to inspire Photoshop artists, here's an opportunity to learn how to incorporate 3D into your graphics. For Maya users, you'll learn how to use Photoshop to enhance your 3D creations. Case studies from high-profile artists demonstrates the cutting-edge of graphics creation. By Sybex 1018
Acrobat 6 and PDF Solutions: Creating the PDF You Want. Pt. 2: Today, you'll learn about Improving Distiller's Efficiency with Watched Folders, How to Prevent the Corruption of PDFs across the Internet, Creating PDFs from within Non-Acrobat Applications, Alternative PDF Creation Methods, Exporting PDFs and more. By Sybex. 0503
Acrobat 6 and PDF Solutions: Creating the PDF You Want. Pt. 1: Acrobat 6 and PDF Solutions offers expert instruction about PDF documents, where you'll learn how to create catalogs, e-books, multimedia presentations, web pages, build PDF order forms, edit text and graphics, run preflight and more. By Sybex. 0426
Getting a Job in CG: Real Advice from Reel People: What to learn: Here is an explanation of the skills involved in 3D and effects and how to acquire them. You'll learn about the importance of having an arts education and of having specific 3D skills (such as using Maya), that are necessary when 3D is the major focus of your work. By Sybex. 0419
Mastering Digital Photography and Imaging, Chapter 1: Essential Digital Imaging Equipment. Pt. 2.: Today, we look at in-depth options when shopping for a digital camera. Topics include Professional Studio and Compact Cameras, Resolution, Recording Options, Operating Modes, White Balance, and much more. By Sybex. 0329
Mastering Digital Photography and Imaging, Chapter 1: Essential Digital Imaging Equipment. Pt. 1.: If you've ever wanted to buy a digital camera, this guide demystifies the world of digital photography and imaging - a must-read whether you're a photography enthusiast, a gadget lover, a novice photographer, or anybody who regularly works with images. By Sybex. 0322

HTML

Refactoring HTML: Well-Formedness - Part 3: UTF-8 is a standard encoding that works across all web browsers and is supported by all major text editors and other tools. It supports all Unicode characters and is a good basis for internationalization and localization of pages. By Elliotte Rusty Harold. 0623
Refactoring HTML: Well-Formedness - Part 2: The very first step in moving markup into modern form is to make it well-formed. Well-formedness is the basis of the huge and incredibly powerful XML tool chain. By Elliotte Rusty Harold. 0609
Refactoring HTML: Well-Formedness: The first step in moving markup into modern form is to make it well-formed. Well-formedness guarantees a single unique tree structure for the document that can be operated on by the DOM, thus making it the basis of reliable, cross-browser JavaScript. Elliotte Rusty Harold. 0602
HTML Utopia. Chapter 1: Getting the Lay of the Land. Pt. 1: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were designed to deal with issues that HTML cannot handle. CSS lets you separate the style and layout of your HTML files from their content, without compromising its structure. By Dan Shafer.
HTML Utopia: Chapter 5: Building the Skeleton, Pt. 4.: This chapter focuses specifically on creating the basic structural layout of a Web page or site using CSS, covering multi-column layouts, boxes, borders, the famous Box Model of CSS design, two and three-column page layouts, etc. By Sitepoint.
HTML Utopia: Chapter 4: CSS Web Site Design, Pt. 3: The development of any Website begins with its design. In this and the following chapters, you'll move from tables to using CSS as your primary page layout tool and learn a new set of design principles. By Sitepoint.
HTML Utopia: Chapter 3: Digging Below the Surface, Pt. 2: This chapter completes our look at the "mechanics" of CSS: the background you need to have to work with the technology, which covers six topics. To learn more, read on... By Sitepoint.

HTTP

How to Use the HTTP Protocol: Various protocols are used for communication over the Web, perhaps the most important being HTTP, which is also fundamental to Ajax applications. This week you'll learn about the HTTP protocol and how it's used to request and receive information. By Sams Publishing. 0522
HTTP: The Definitive Guide: The simple, but often mis-understood Hypertext Transfer Protocol is the subject of this series of book excerpts; beginning with a look at the individual components that make up HTTP messages, and continuing through discussions of methods, status codes, and HTTP headers. From O'Reilly.

Jabber

Programming Jabber: Programmers looking to get into the instant messaging arena would do well to acquaint themselves with the open-source Jabber technology. Our excerpts from the O'Reilly title "Programming Jabber" discuss installation and troubleshooting of the Jabber Server.

Jakarta

Jakarta Commons Online Bookshelf: XML parsing with Digester. Part 1: Written for developers and architects, the Jakarta Commons Online Bookshelf is a collection of over twenty open-source Java tools broadly ranging from logging, validation, bean utilities and XML parsing. It summarizes each component, provides expert explanations and hands-on examples of their use. By Manning Publications. 0503

Java

Software Engineering for Ajax: A great advantage of using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) when building Ajax applications is leveraging advanced software engineering. This week you'll learn how to use the Java software engineering tools in GWT to build high-quality Ajax applications. By Ryan Dewsbury. 0512
Implement Drag and Drop in Your Web Apps: Part 2: Last time we looked at how to use the dnd module. This week, we look at how it's implemented. Like all GWT modules, our drag-and-drop module has an XML configuration file. It also has some Java classes and interfaces. David Geary and Rob Gordon. 0505
Implement Drag and Drop in Your Web Apps: With the advent of GWT (Google Web Toolkit), we have drag-and-drop capabilities in a Java-based Web application framework. In this solution, we implement drag and drop in its own module, allowing you to easily incorporate it into your applications. By David Geary and Rob Gordon. 0428
Complexity: "The more complex the system, the more open it is to total breakdown." This week you'll learn about the complexity of software and the difficulties of managing the development process. By Grady Booch, Bob Maksimchuk, Michael Engle, Bobbi Young, Jim Conallen and Kelli Houston. 0625
Basic SOA Using REST: This week you'll learn about the basics of implementing SOA components using the REST paradigm. REST stands for Representational State Transfer. For simple applications, REST is an easy way to get started. By Mark Hansen. 0618
Google Web Toolkit Solutions: Cool & Useful Stuff: The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a UI framework for Java developers to create interactive user interfaces using familiar idioms from Java's Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT), Swing, and the Eclipse Foundation's SWT. This short cut assumes that you've already installed GWT and have experimented with its basic features. By David Geary. 0405
How to Create Interactive Web Programs with Java: Now that Java has made the transition from a child prodigy to an established language, it's being used for business software and other applications. This week you'll learn about applet programming and Java Web Start, a way to install and run Java software from within a web browser. By Sams Publishing. 0215
Spring in Action: A Spring Jump Start. Part 3: This week, we look at Spring Alternatives, including a comparison between Spring, EJB and other lightweight containers such as HiveMind and Avalon. Other topics include Web Frameworks, Persistence Frameworks and a summary. By Manning Publications. 0327
Spring in Action: A Spring Jump Start. Part 2: This week, we look at understanding inversion of control. A sampling of the other topics we'll cover are injecting dependencies, IoC in action, decoupling with interfaces, IoC in enterprise applications and more. By Manning Publications. 0318
Spring in Action: A Spring Jump Start. Part 1: This week, we look at an introduction to Spring. Based on a design principle called Inversion of Control, Spring reduces the complexity of using interfaces and speeds up your application development. You get the power of EJB and get to keep the simplicity of the non-enterprise JavaBean. By Manning Publications. 0307
JavaServer Faces in Action: Introducing JavaServer Faces: JavaServer Faces helps streamline your web development through the use of UI components and events. JSF components (buttons, text boxes, etc.) live between user requests. JSF also synchronizes user input with application objects, automating another tedious aspect of web development. By Manning Publications 1123
Java Reflection in Action: Using Java's Dynamic Proxy: With Java reflection, you learn to work smarter by designing flexible applications where you can easily add new requirements. Topics include: How reflective code generation can address common cross-cutting concerns, how to load new classes dynamically into a running application and how to decide when reflection is the best solution. By Manning Publications. 1112

JavaScript

Primitive Data Types, Arrays, Loops, and Conditions: Part 3: This tutorial takes a look at some of the basics of JavaScript, such as primitive data types, arrays, common operators and flow control statements. This final installment looks at arrays, conditions and loops. By Stoyan Stefanov. 0818
Primitive Data Types, Arrays, Loops, and Conditions: Part 2: Any value that you use is of a certain type. In JavaScript, there are the following primitive data types: Number, String, Boolean, Undefined and Null. Any value that doesn't belong to one of the five primitive types listed above is an object. By Stoyan Stefanov. 0811
Primitive Data Types, Arrays, Loops, and Conditions: Before diving into the object-oriented features of JavaScript, one needs to look at some of the basics, including: primitive data types, such as strings and numbers, arrays, common operators, flow control statements, etc. By Stoyan Stefanov. 0804
Object-Oriented JavaScript: Part 3: This week wraps up our section on Object-Oriented JavaScript with a look at prototypes, the JavaScript execution context, var x, this.x, and x, inheritance using closures and prototypes and more. By Cristian Darie, Bogdan Brinzarea. 1029
Object-Oriented JavaScript: Part 2: Not only can JavaScript functions contain other functions, but they can also be instantiated. This makes JavaScript functions a good candidate for implementing the concept of a class from traditional object-oriented programming. By Cristian Darie, Bogdan Brinzarea. 1022
Object-Oriented JavaScript: This week we cover OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) and how it relates to JavaScript. Topics covered include: what encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism mean, how JavaScript functions work, how to implement inheritance using closures, prototypes and more. By Cristian Darie and Bogdan Brinzarea. 1015
JavaScript Language Essentials: This week you'll learn about the basic elements of JavaScript such as loops, arrays and functions. You'll see how you can use JavaScript to write your Web pages for you, how JavaScript handles user errors and much more. By Tom Negrino and Dori Smith. 0412
Using Variables and Built-in Functions to Update Your Web Pages Automatically: With JavaScript you can update the content on your pages automatically - every day, every hour, or every second. Here, you'll learn about a simple script that automatically changes the date on your web page. By thau! 0205
PPK on JavaScript: The DOM - Part 3: This week we look at text nodes, node lists, forms and the level 0 DOM, DOM hyperspace and markers. The W3C DOM defines a few methods for getting and changing texts, but the core string methods and properties are more useful and versatile. By Peter-Paul Koch. 1120
PPK on JavaScript: The DOM - Part 2: The W3C DOM allows you to create your own elements and text nodes, and add them to the document tree. This week we look at creating and cloning elements, innerHTML, and attributes. By Peter-Paul Koch. 1114
PPK on JavaScript: The DOM - Part 1: In 1998, the W3C published its Level 1 DOM specification, which all browser vendors implemented. This week we're going to spend most of our time working with the Level 1 DOM, but we'll also take a look at the old Level 0 DOM, especially at its useful form-field properties. By Peter-Paul Koch. 1106
Scripting in the Browser - Part 2: This week we examine extra functionality in MSXML which provides additional properties and methods that can be used with the DOM interfaces discussed previously. You'll see examples and learn how to create similar functionality in Mozilla. By Apress. 0705
Scripting in the Browser - Part 1: This week you'll learn how to use JavaScript to manipulate XML documents. Some of the topics covered are the key DOM interfaces and the differences between Internet Explorer (IE) and Mozilla. By Apress. 0628
Core JavaScript Guide 1.5: JavaScript is Netscape's cross-platform, object-based scripting language. This book explains everything you need to know about using core JavaScript. Knowledge of HTML and some programming experience with a language such as C is helpful. 0903
Core JavaScript Reference 1.5: This book (in HTML format) is a reference manual for the core JavaScript language for version 1.5. Written by the developers at Netscape Communications. 0711
Professional JavaScript for Web Developers: JavaScript in the Browser, Pt. 2: This week, we continue our exploration. A sampling of topics covered here are navigating and opening new windows, system dialogs, intervals and timeouts, the document object, the location object and more. By WROX Press. 0627
Professional JavaScript for Web Developers: JavaScript in the Browser, Pt. 1: Web browsers have come a long way over the years and can now handle a variety of file formats, not just conventional HTML. Here, you'll learn how JavaScript fits into HTML, other languages, and some basic concepts of the Browser Object Model (BOM). By WROX Press. 0620
JavaScript Core Objects. Pt. 2: This week, author Ellie Quigley covers the Wrapper, String, Number, Boolean and Function Objects. These core objects are consistent across different implementations and platforms and have been standardized by the ECMAScript 1.0 specification, allowing programs to be portable. By Prentice Hall. 1208
JavaScript Core Objects. Pt. 1: A definitive set of tutorials, JavaScript by Example is written for the serious non-programmer who is interested in mastering the full power of the language. The book offers complete coverage, from basics such as script setup, data types, and dialog boxes, to advanced topics including event handling, the Document Object Model and CSS. By Prentice Hall. 1201
JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook, Chapter 8: Pt. 2: The following is the conclusion of our series of excerpts from Chapter 8 of the O'Reilly title, JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook.
JavaScript and DHTML Cookbook: Chapter 8: Pt. 1: On numerous online forums for JavaScript and DHTML, many questions begin with "How do I...?" This new Cookbook provides over 150 recipes, covering topics such as manipulating strings, validating dates in JavaScript, cross-browser positioning of HTML elements, sorting tables, etc. By O'Reilly.
Beyond HTML Goodies: Goodies is as goodies does--or something like that. Our excerpt from chapter 6 of "Beyond HTML Goodies" runs through a collection of basic JavaScript-based form tricks, including auto submitting a form and select box-based navigation. From Que.
Designing with JavaScript, 2nd Edition: WebRef offers you sample chapters from the book Designing with JavaScript, 2nd Edition. Before you learn how JavaScript differentiates between one browser and another, you need to understand how JavaScript gets information from the browser.
Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference: Newly updated to cover DHTML support in the latest major browsers, Our prime cut from chapter 6 of this classic text teaches how to script events, including the differing methodologies used in IE vs. Gecko-Based browsers. From O'Reilly.
JavaScript Design: If you're lost in advanced JavaScript topics such as Web services, DOM scripting, and pop-up menus then we have the perfect excerpt for you. Chapter 2 of "JavaScript Design" provides beginning scripters with the dos and don'ts of JavaScript coding. From New Riders.
The JavaScript Sourcebook: WebRef offers you sample chapters from this reference guide to the wonders of JavaScript, including some basic programming concepts and how to use JavaScript to validate forms.
JavaScript: The Definitive Guide: In this excerpt from the classic O'Reilly JavaScript reference, we examine the W3C's Document Object Model: the core standard, how it relates to HTML documents, and browser specific implications.
Optimizing JavaScript for Download Speed: Creating speedy scripts is only half the JavaScript optimization battle: You must also create code that can be quickly downloaded. Find out what you should and shouldn't cut in this exclusive excerpt from Chapter 9 of Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization. From New Riders.
Optimizing JavaScript for Execution Speed: Learn how to tune your code to execute faster in this complete chapter excerpt of Chapter 10 of Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization. From New Riders.
Practical JavaScript for the Usable Web: In this excerpt from the glasshaus title, an in depth discussion of credit card number validation in JavaScript is discussed.
Professional JavaScript: This group of articles is taken from selected chapters of the Wrox Press book Professional JavaScript. Some of the many topics covered include object-orientation, scope chains, prototype chains, exception handling, regular expressions, methods, properties, and basic browser JavaScript.

Joomla

Joomla Templates: Creating a Pure CSS Template - Part 4: This week we look at how to make a Joomla 1.5 template. We begin with a comp, the design which is the basis of the template. From there we get into slicing (creating small sliced images), setting up module locations, column backgrounds and more. By Barrie North. 0310
Joomla Templates: Creating a Pure CSS Template - Part 3: In this installment, we look at modules in templates, menus in templates, hiding columns and module code. All of this creates a pure CSS layout that has dynamic collapsible columns. By Barrie North. 0303
Joomla Templates: Creating a Pure CSS Template - Part 2: This week we delve deeper into CSS with Joomla. We cover templateDetails.xml, index.php, creating a blank Joomla template body, using CSS to create a tableless layout, CSS shorthand, Joomla specific CSS and more. By Barrie North. 0218
Joomla Templates: Creating a Pure CSS Template: This week you'll learn how to create a Joomla template that uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to produce a layout. This makes the template code easier to validate. It also tends to load faster and is easier to maintain. By Barrie North. 0211

JMeter

Functional Testing: JMeter is useful and convenient for functional testing. This week, you'll learn how to create a Test Plan and incorporate and/or configure JMeter elements to support functional testing. By Emily H. Halili. 0707

JXTA

Early Adopter JXTA: Excerpts from the Wrox Press title discuss the creation of custom commands for the JXTA shell.

Lucene

Lucene in Action: Meet Lucene Pt. 2: Excerpts from the Wrox Press title discuss the creation of custom commands for the JXTA shell.
Lucene in Action: Meet Lucene Pt. 1: This week, we look at the following classes, which are necessary to perform the simplest indexing procedures. They are: IndexWriter, Directory, Analyzer, Document and Field. What follows is a brief overview of these classes and how they're used in Lucene. By Manning Publications. 0131

Modular Programming

The Benefits of Modular Programming: Nobody writes software entirely in-house anymore. Almost everyone relies upon libraries and frameworks written by someone else. This allows programmers to concentrate on the actual logic of the application and shortens the development time. By Tim Boudreau, Jaroslav (Yarda) Tulach and Geertjan Wielenga. 0611

Mozilla

Rapid Application Development with Mozilla: Navigation. Pt. 2: This week, you'll learn about Menu Variations, Statusbars, Titlebars, Multiple Panels, Special Purpose Widgets, Style Options, and more. By Prentice-Hall PTR. 1229
Rapid Application Development with Mozilla: Navigation. Pt. 1: Rapid Application Development with Mozilla is a concise guide for any programmer who wants to learn the versatility and compatibility of Mozilla, an open source toolset with over a thousand objects and components. By Prentice-Hall PTR. 1222
Creating Applications with Mozilla: While most would recognize Mozilla only as a Web browser, Web developers see the open-source effort as a cross-platform application framework. Our excerpt from O'Reilly's "Creating Applications with Mozilla" focuses on Mozilla scripting, including discussions of the DOM, the UI, and XPConnect.

MySQL

MySQL Data Methods: Virtually everything in MySQL involves data in some way or another because the purpose of a database management system is, by definition, to manage data. Here you'll learn about data types, values, categories and more. By Sams Publishing. 0424

PERL

Wicked Cool Perl Scripts: Programming in a CGI environment can be tricky. There's no built-in CGI debugger, and error messages can easily get lost or misplaced. Fortunately, there are options. Here are some Perl hacks you can use to help debug your CGI programs. By Steve Oualline. 0430
Perl as a (Better) Find Command: Part 2: Continuing our focus on find perl pipelines we begin by processing filename arguments. Additional topics are defending against grep's messes, recursive grepping, using findxargs vs. Perl alternatives, reliable timestamp sorting, multi-word filenames and more. By Tim Maher. 1204
Perl as a (Better) Find Command: This week, our primary focus is on find perl pipelines that serve as functional enhancements to find and consider possible improvements to grep and sed-like programs. We begin by comparing find's file-testing capabilities with Perl's. By Tim Maher 1127
Files and Directories in Perl: This week we look at how to get a directory listing, how to create and remove files, how to create and remove directories and how to get information about files. By Sams Publishing. 0203
Perl Medic: Transforming Legacy Code. Chapter 3. Pt. 2: Today, we delve deeper into testing Perl code. Topics include testing code as it's written, tweaking an existing application, using a top-down approach, testing that an application meets its requirements, and more. By Addison-Wesley. 0412
Perl Medic: Transforming Legacy Code. Chapter 3. Pt. 1: Maintain, optimize, and scale any Perl software... whether you wrote it or not. Perl Medic is a start-to-finish guide to understanding that code, maintaining it, updating it, and refactoring it for maximum performance and reliability. By Addison-Wesley. 0405
Perl 6 Essentials. Chapter 1: Project Overview: Perl 6 Essentials is a sneak-preview of Perl 6. This book covers the development not only of Perl 6 syntax but also Parrot, the language-independent interpreter developed as part of the Perl 6 design strategy. By O'Reilly. 0825
Practical mod_perl: Chapter 6: Coding with mod_perl in Mind. Pt. 4: The following is the conclusion of our series of excerpts from Chapter 6 of the O'Reilly title, Practical mod_perl. By O'Reilly. 0818
Practical mod_perl: Chapter 6: Coding with mod_perl in Mind. Pt. 3: This week, we begin with the topic: Converting into a Perl Content Handler. First, you have to configure Apache to run the new code as a Perl handler, then modify the code itself. By O'Reilly. 0811
Practical mod_perl: Chapter 6: Coding with mod_perl in Mind. Pt. 2: This week, we begin with a discussion about the specifics of Perl's behavior under mod_perl. By O'Reilly 0804
Practical mod_perl. Chapter 6: Coding with mod_perl in Mind. Pt. 1: mod_perl embeds the popular programming language Perl in the Apache web server, giving rise to a fast and powerful web programming environment. This book also covers mod_perl 2.0, a completely rewritten version of mod_perl designed for integration with Apache 2.0. By O'Reilly. 0728
Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules: Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules picks up where Learning Perl leaves off. Topics include: packages and namespaces, references and scoping, manipulating complex data structures, object-oriented programming, writing and using modules and contributing to CPAN. By O'Reilly. 0721
Book Excerpt: Perl Graphics Programming, Pt. 3: Using Unicode Text in SVG Images. The following is the conclusion of our series of excerpts from Chapter 7 of the O'Reilly title, Perl Graphics Programming.
Book Excerpt: Perl Graphics Programming, Pt. 2: The following is a continuation of our series of excerpts from chapter 7 of the O'Reilly title, Perl Graphics Programming. Here, you'll see how SVG wraps up a sequence of high-level animation transformations in one of four animation tags, which describes how an object should be moved between two points, etc.
Book Excerpt: Perl Graphics Programming: While often relegated strictly to text handling tasks, Perl can also be used to create and manipulate graphics. Our new excerpt series focuses on the creation of SVG images in Perl and begins with a simple slide-show example. From O'Reilly.

PHP

Administering MySQL Databases on the Web Using PHP: This week you'll learn how to access a database from the Web using PHP. Inserting new items into the database is similar to getting items out of the database. You follow the same basic steps: make a connection, send a query, and check the results. By Luke Welling, Laura Thomson. 1204
Accessing Your MySQL Database from the Web with PHP: This week you'll find out how to access the Book-O-Rama database from the Web using PHP. A sampling of key topics covered include: how Web database architectures work, choosing a database to use, querying the database, using other PHP-database interfaces and more. By Luke Welling, Laura Thomson. 1124
Administering RBAC in PHP 5 CMS Framework: This week we continue our look at PHP 5 CMS Framework Development. Our focus is on ways to implement modelÂrole-based access control. Specific details, such as the way accessors and subjects are identified are adapted to the particular situation of a CMS framework. By Martin Brampton. 1117
PHP 5 CMS Framework Development: Access Control: Many Web sites want to control who has access to what. There are many situations where access control is appropriate, and they can easily become very complex. Here we look at the most highly regarded modelÂrole-based access control (RBAC) system - and find ways to implement it. By Martin Brampton 1103
Controllers: Programming Application Logic - Part 2: In CakePHP, controllers are the classes that handle browser requests and facilitate communication between models and views. This week we will learn the nuts and bolts of the CakePHP controller. By Ahsanul Bari, Anupom Syam. 1006
Controllers: Programming Application Logic: In CakePHP, controllers are the classes that handle browser requests and facilitate communication between models and views. This week you'll learn the nuts and bolts of CakePHP controller. By Ahsanul Bari, Anupom Syam. 0929
Working With Forms: Forms are how your users talk to your scripts. To get the most out of PHP, you must master forms. While PHP makes it easy to access form data, you need to take security measures since you cannot trust the data supplied by an HTML form. By William Steinmetz with Brian Ward. 0331
XML-Enabled Applications: This week you'll learn how to use XML in PHP and Oracle when building XML-enabled PHP/Oracle applications. Topics covered include: constructing XML with the PHP DOM extension, navigating XML with XPath, generating XML from relational data with Oracle SQL/XML functions, and more. By Yuli Vasiliev. 0917
Security Techniques: Part 2: New in PHP 5 is the filter library of PECL code. This filter package (in beta as of this moment) offers two types of security, data validation by type and data sanitization. By Larry Ullman. 0528
Security Techniques: With more and more personal information being stored on the Web, such as credit card data, social security numbers, etc. - today's PHP developer cannot afford to be ignorant when it comes to security, but many programmers fail to understand it's importance. This week you'll learn how to make your applications more secure. By Larry Ullman. 0509
The Building Blocks: Data Types, Literals, Variables, and Constants - Part 3: In the last part of this series, we look at creating constants with the define() function, the constant() function, predefined and "magic" constants. By Ellie Quigley. 0129
The Building Blocks: Data Types, Literals, Variables, and Constants - Part 2: This week we look at valid names, declaring, initializing and displaying variables and mixed data types. We conclude this section with an introduction to form variables. By Ellie Quigley. 0122
The Building Blocks: Data Types, Literals, Variables, and Constants: A program can do many things, including perform calculations, sort names, prepare phone lists, display images, play chess, ad infinitum, based on the data given to it. Data types specify what kind of data can be stored and manipulated within a program. By Ellie Quigley. 0115
How to Manage Memory in PHP: An important difference between a managed language like PHP, and an unmanaged language like C is control over memory pointers. Here you'll learn that traditional memory management functions are almost never used directly by the PHP source code. By Pearson Education. 0619
How to Interact with Web Forms. Part 2: This week you'll learn more about how to use HTML form data from within PHP. Some of the topics covered are preselecting multiple selection lists, processing graphical submit buttons, checking mandatory fields, writing form data into a file and more. By Sams Publishing. 0123
How to Interact with Web Forms. Part 1: HTML forms are one of the key ingredients of any dynamic website because they can enable the users of a site to interact with it. HTML forms can change that; therefore, using data from forms from within PHP is very important. By Sams Publishing. 0118
Core Web Application Development with PHP and MySQL. Part 2: This week we continue with learning how to write web applications. You'll learn about the basic layout of web applications, the user interface, 3-tier and n-tier architectures, performance, scalability applications and more. By Prentice Hall PTR. 1003
Core Web Application Development with PHP and MySQL. Part 1: This week we're going to have a a look at writing web applications. You'll learn about the technologies and protocols that make up the World Wide Web, how they work, how to define web applications, how to structure them and more. By Prentice Hall PTR. 0926
PHP Anthology, Volume 2: Applications. Chapter 5: Caching: The PHP Anthology tackles the most common problems and shows you how to solve them using modern PHP-coding practices. The PHP Anthology will help you improve your development techniques, cut down on needless lines of code and avoid potential security pitfalls. By Sitepoint 0209
PHP Anthology, Volume 1, Chapter 2. Object Oriented PHP: Here, you'll gain a practical grounding in writing object oriented PHP. In the author's opinion, the best approach is to dive in head first, seeing how procedural tasks can be accomplished with classes in PHP, and adding the theory as you go. By Sitepoint. 0202
PHP Anthology, Volume 1, Chapter 1: PHP Basics: The PHP Anthology is a complete reference guide for any PHP developerhobbyist or professionalto help you write better, faster and more secure code that solves common problems. With over 100 best-practice solutions, you'll learn how to get it right the first time. By Sitepoint. 0126
An Introduction to PHP, Pt. 2: This is the conclusion of An Introduction to PHP. By Prentice Hall. 0909
An Introduction to PHP: In this introduction to PHP, you'll learn how it came about, what it looks like, and why it is the best server-side technology. It also exposes the most important features of the language. By Leon Atkinson and Zeev Suraski. 0902

PHP Cookbook, Chapter 11: Web Automation, Pt. 2: The following is the conclusion of our series of excerpts from Chapter 11 of the O'Reilly title, PHP Cookbook.
PHP Cookbook, Chapter 11: Web Automation, Pt. 1: PHP is a simple yet powerful open source scripting language that has become a big player in web development. The recipes cover more than 250 recipes on topics such as: sending a database query, fetching URLs, printing HTML tables, generating bar charts etc.
Introduction to PHP5: PHP5 is not yet official but the development versions are already usable (and unstable!) so we can start to learn and practice the new features of the upcoming version of PHP. In this article the focus in on the three major new features of PHP5: The new object model, Exceptions and Namespaces.

Podcasting

Podcasting with Audacity: Creating a Podcast With Free Audio Software: You've successfully recorded your podcast and you want to get it online. Before you do so, you need to use Audacity to clean up the recording and edit it. This week you'll learn about the most common tasks. By Dominic Mazzoni and Scott Granneman. 0820

Promotion

Marketing 2.0: Gaming, Widgets, Blogging, RSS, Podcasts and More: A shift in demographics has pushed a post-dot-com generation to seek an online experience with an emphasis on entertainment. With the number of people growing up with gaming, it can be a familiar way to teach new concepts. By Sandy Carter. 0119
The New Vessels: The New Language of Marketing 2.0: The new vessels, which include blogs, games, social networks, and other Web 2.0 mechanisms, involve listening, cultivating, and participating in the continuous dialogue among customers. By Sandy Carter. 0112

Python

Python Essentials: Operators and Expressions: The new features covered in this volume include new style classes, unification of types and classes, xmlrpclip, intertools, bz2, optparse and more. This week we look at Python's built-in operators as well as the precedence rules used in the evaluation of expressions. By Sams Publishing. 0313

RSS

RSS and Atom in Action: Newsfeed Formats Part 2: In 2003, a group of bloggers came together to create a new standard, which would later be known as Atom. They wanted to start fresh and do things right this time. As a result, all the major blog servers either support Atom now or have plans to do so. To learn more, read on. By Dave Johnson. 1030
RSS and Atom in Action: Newsfeed Formats: The most popular newsfeed format is RSS, but the formats have forked into two opposing camps which don't agree on what the RSS letters stand for. Clarity will dawn as you learn about the history of RSS, the RSS fork and the most widely used RSS formats. By Dave Johnson. 1023
Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom. Chapter 8: Parsing and Using Feeds: In this section, we'll look at the two major alternatives for parsing feeds, MagpieRSS and the Ultraliberal Feed Parser. Both parsers are libraries, both convert feeds into native data structures and neither cares whether a feed is RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 or Atom. By O'Reilly. 0603
Book Excerpt: Content Syndication with RSS, Chapter 2: Content-Syndication Architecture: RSS, (originally developed by Netscape and Userland in the late 1990s) is an XML-based format that allows web developers to describe and syndicate web site content. This excerpt is from Chapter 2: Content Syndication Architecture. From O'Reilly.

Rule-Based Applications

Collecting Knowledge for Rule-Based Applications: Imagine a different way to program in which you specify rules and facts instead of the usual linear set of instructions. Join author Ernest J. Friedman-Hill as he introduces you to rule-based programming. By Manning Publications. 0807

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site. Part 2: This week we continue our exploration of search engine marketing. Some of the topics covered are Specialty Search Engines, A Brief History of Web Search, How Search Marketing is Cost Effective, The Challenge of Search Success and more. By Prentice Hall PTR. 0815
Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site. Part 1: Search engine marketing is one of the most important aspects of driving traffic to your web site. Here is an in-depth guide to the opportunities and pitfalls of this subject. You'll learn about web search basics, the kinds of search results, paid programs, the different search engines and more. By Prentice Hall PTR. 0808

Sliverlight

Getting Started with Silverlight: Part 3: In this third and final installment, we look at interacting with the Silverlight control programmatically. Topics covered include: the settings property, the content property and other members. By Adam Nathan. 1217
Getting Started with Silverlight: Part 2: This week we dig deeper and look at the Silverlight.createObjectEx function, understanding your hosting options, properties, the enableHtmlAccess property, and much more. By Adam Nathan. 1210
Getting Started with Silverlight: Despite the options available with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, accommodating their differences can be maddening. Enter Silverlight, a plug-in for multiple Web browsers on multiple platforms that makes it easier to create rich content. By Adam Nathan. 1202

Tapestry

Tapestry in Action: Implementing a Tapestry Application: Tapestry in Action allows you to create full-featured web apps by connecting framework components to economical amounts of application code. Examples include form validation, application localization, client-side scripting, and synchronization between browser and app server. By Manning Publications Co. 0510

Technical Writing

Book Review: Spring Into Technical Writing for Engineers and Scientists: As Web design professionals, we often need to do some form of writing. Since we design and code for a living, many of us aren't sure where to begin. Enter Spring Into Technical Writing for Engineers and Scientists, a book that gives you the necessary tools using short, concise, fast-paced tutorials. By Lee Underwood. 0718

Ubuntu

Using Ubuntu on the Desktop: This week you'll learn about Ubuntu, a free, all-in-one operating system that includes an office suite, media tools, a Web browser, a graphics package, an e-mail client and more. Once installed, you're up and running right away. By Benjamin Mako Hill, Jono Bacon, Ivan Krstic, David Murphy, Jonathan Jesse, Peter Savage and Corey Burger. 0723

Web Design

Customer-Centered Web Design: More Than a Good Idea: The World Wide Web is no longer a novelty. To many companies and organizations, the Web is a necessity, the foundation of their businesses. This week you'll discover the thinking behind customer-centered design and learn how to apply it to your projects. By Douglas K. van Duyne, James A. Landay, and Jason I. Hong. 0111
How to Create User Friendly Web Sites: Today's multimedia Web sites are becoming more prevalent. Done well, video, animation, and sound can enrich the user experience. Done poorly, multimedia reduces your site's value. This week you'll learn how to avoid common pitfalls and use multimedia to your advantage. By Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders. 0529
How to Design for Different Browsers: Most web authors agree that the biggest challenge (and headache) in Web design is dealing with a multitude of browsers and their varying support of Web standards. This week you'll learn about ways of dealing with browser differences. By O'Reilly Media Inc. 0417
The Non-Designer's Web Book, Third Edition: Type on the web can be a terrible mess, due in part to the different browsers and limitations on what can be done. This week you'll about the basics of good typography, how to adjust traditional typographic rules to work on the web and how to use Cascading Style Sheets (css) for better typographic control. By Pearson Education, Inc. and Peachpit. 1206
Don't Make Me Think, Second Edition: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability: In today's world of web design the sites that offer the best, easiest, most intuitive experience are the ones people visit again and again. Join usability guru Steve Krug who distills his years of experience into a practical primer on the do's and don'ts of good Web design. By Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders. 1122
Web Design on a Shoestring: Web design on a Shoestring reveals all sorts of free or inexpensive resources that are available but unknown. Learn how to test your web sites efficiencies and functionalities, to understand content management systems, and what commercial products to use or avoid. By New Riders. 1020
Book Excerpt: The Web Professional's Handbook, Pt. 2: The following is the conclusion of our series of excerpts from chapter 6 of the Glasshaus title, The Web Professional's Handbook. This excerpt begins with a discussion about "The images Object."
Book Excerpt: The Web Professional's Handbook, Pt. 1: This book is designed to be an all-in-one reference manual for web professionals. It's not tutorial based, but is filled with information on client-side development topics, including XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, graphics, usability, and accessibility. From Glasshaus.
Flow in Web Design - Speed Up Your Site: What is this thing called flow? Learn how to design your site to enable an optimal experience for your users. This exclusive excerpt from Andy King's new book includes an interview with Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of "Flow." From New Riders.

Web Optimization

Advanced Web Performance Optimization: On the server side, you can improve performance by: Optimizing parallel downloads, caching frequently used objects, using HTTP compression, deploying delta encoding and rewriting URIs with mod_rewrite. By Andrew B. King. 0825

Windows Forms

How to Use Advanced Windows Forms: In computer programming, a style is a way of doing something, whether it's how a control is docked or anchored to a form or how a Windows interface is laid out. This week you'll learn about a specific application interface style known as the explorer interface. By Manning Publications. 0501

WordPress

Business Blogging: Content Is King: Today we look at issues surrounding content creation, and discuss some techniques and methods to help you produce the best content you can. For many Web users, blogging is all about text, and that's what we'll be focusing on here. By Paul Thewlis. 0922
WordPress: AJAX/Dynamic Content and Interactive Forms: This week we look at the most popular methods to get you going with AJAX in WordPress and use plug-ins and widgets to create dynamic self-updating content and interactive forms in your WordPress site. By Tessa Blakeley Silver. 0916

XFORMS

XForms Essentials: XForms Building Blocks: XForms Essentials shows readers how to integrate XForms with both HTML and XML vocabularies. If you work with forms, HTML, or XML information, XForms Essentials will provides a simpler route to more sophisticated interactions with users. By O'Reilly. 1013

XML

XML-Enabled Applications - Part 4: When building XML-enabled PHP/Oracle applications, the database can be used as an efficient means of storing XML data and will operate on any kind of data that can be expressed in XML. PHP's XML extensions allow you to take advantage of Oracle XML DB. By Yuli Vasiliev. 1008
XML-Enabled Applications - Part 3: In this section we look at validating XML documents against XML schemas. Topics covered include: retrieving XML data, accessing relational data through XMLType views, using XMLType views and performing DML operations on XML schema-based XMLType views. By Yuli Vasiliev. 1001
XML-Enabled Applications - Part 2: Oracle XML DB allows you to perform SQL operations on XML data as well as XML operations on relational data, thus bridging the gap between the SQL and XML worlds. You can choose between several storage options and achieve required levels of performance and scalability. By Yuli Vasiliev. 0924
XML-Enabled Applications: This week you'll learn how to use XML in PHP and Oracle when building XML-enabled PHP/Oracle applications. Topics covered include: constructing XML with the PHP DOM extension, navigating XML with XPath, generating XML from relational data with Oracle SQL/XML functions, and more. By Yuli Vasiliev. 0917
Scripting in the Browser - Part 2: This week we examine extra functionality in MSXML which provides additional properties and methods that can be used with the DOM interfaces discussed previously. You'll see examples and learn how to create similar functionality in Mozilla. By Apress. 0705
Scripting in the Browser - Part 1: This week you'll learn how to use JavaScript to manipulate XML documents. Some of the topics covered are the key DOM interfaces and the differences between Internet Explorer (IE) and Mozilla. By Apress. 0628
Sams Teach Yourself XML in 24 Hours, Part 2: This week we continue learning about Xlink. Some of the topics covered are addressing with XPointer, linking with XLink, understanding XLink attributes and more. By Que and Sams Publishing. 1212
Sams Teach Yourself XML in 24 Hours: You've probably worked with XML, but you may not have heard about XLink, the XML linking technology that allows you to carry out advanced linking between XML documents. Learn how XML linking works in conjunction with addressing XML documents in this excerpt from Sams Publishing. 1212
XForms: XML Powered Web Forms: Chapter 1: XForms--XML-powered Web forms--are set to replace HTML forms as the backbone of electronic commerce. With XForms, programmers can create durable and dependable feature-rich forms accessible from multiple platforms and devices and available in multiple languages and modes. By Addison-Wesley. 0119
Using XML with Legacy Business Applications: Chapter 1: Businesses running legacy applications that do not support XML can face a tough choice: Either keep their legacy applications or switch to newer, XML-enhanced applications. Here, author Michael Rawlins shows you how to build XML support into legacy business applications using Java and C++. By Addison-Wesley. 0112
The XML Schema Companion. Chapter 15: Patterns: Here, the most crucial concepts are covered first, including mastering the construction of document models, defining data types that can serve as reusable building blocks for your documents, learning how to master the powerful XML Schema pattern language and inheritance techniques. by Addison-Wesley. 0105
Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML. Pt. 2: XML documents are just too rich in syntax sugar to be processed by anything short of a full-blown XML parser. If the software does not perform its function, the rest is useless. By Addison-Wesley. 1103
Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML: An excellent collection of XML best practices, this is essential reading for any developer using XML. Here, you'll learn how to write XML that is easy to edit, simple to process, and is fully interoperable with other applications and code. by Addison-Wesley. 1027

XQUERY

XQuery from the Experts: Influences on the design of XQuery: The first major XML language that takes advantage of the benefits of strong typing provided by XML Schema, XQuery has the versatility to manipulate both XML and non-XML data and connects the world of XML and relational databases. Here, select members of the W3C's XML Query working group discuss every facet of XQuery. By Addison-Wesley. 1120

XSLT

XSLT 2.0 Web Development: Elements of a Web Site. Pt. 2.: Today, Dmitry delves deeper into XSLT. You'll learn about Abbreviating Addresses, Multicomponent Abbreviations, Site Structure, Unabbreviation, Orthongonal Content, and more. By Prentice Hall PTR. 0524
XSLT 2.0 Web Development: Elements of a Web Site. Pt. 1.: XML developer and web designer Dmitry Kirsanov shows you how to build state-of-the-art web sites with XSLT/XPath 2.0. He takes you through the entire project lifecycle, including schema creation, validation, transformation, testing, and maintenance. By Prentice Hall PTR. 0517
XSLT Cookbook: Chapter 8, Pt. 3: The following is the conclusion of our series of excerpts from Chapter 8 of the O'Reilly title, XSLT Cookbook.
XSLT Cookbook: Chapter 8, Pt. 2: This week, we continue our series of excerpts from Chapter 8 of the XSLT Cookbook. Today's portion begins is about Creating Frames and Data Driven Style Sheets. By O'Reilly.
XSLT Cookbook, Chapter 8, Pt. 1: The XSLT Cookbook is a collection of hundreds of solutions to problems that (XSLT) developers regularly face. Each recipe can be tweaked to fit your particular application's needs more precisely. By O'Reilly

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