Useful Books and Software

• Create dynamic websites with design and usability in mind, as well as functionality
• Understand how PHP scripts work, giving you confidence to adapt them to your own needs
• Bring online forms to life, check required fields, and ensure user input is safe to process
• Upload files and automatically create thumbnails from larger images
• Manage website content with a searchable database

• Chapter 1: What Is PHPAnd Why Should I Care?
• Chapter 2: Getting Ready to Work with PHP
• Chapter 3: How to Write PHP Scripts
• Chapter 4: Lightening Your Workload with Includes
• Chapter 5: Bringing Forms to Life
• Chapter 6: Uploading Files
• Chapter 7: Using PHP to Manage Files
• Chapter 8: Generating Thumbnail Images
• Chapter 9: Pages That Remember: Simple Login and Multipage Forms
• Chapter 10: Setting Up MySQL and phpMyAdmin
• Chapter 11: Getting Started with a Database
• Chapter 12: Creating a Dynamic Online Gallery
• Chapter 13: Managing Content
• Chapter 14: Solutions to Common PHP/MySQL Problems
• Chapter 15: Keeping Intruders at Bay

New Price: $21.09 / Used Price: $19.24

Do you want to push Ruby to its limits? The Ruby Cookbook is the most comprehensive problem-solving guide to today's hottest programming language. It gives you hundreds of solutions to real-world problems, with clear explanations and thousands of lines of code you can use in your own projects.

From data structures and algorithms, to integration with cutting-edge technologies, the Ruby Cookbook has something for every programmer. Beginners and advanced Rubyists alike will learn how to program with:

• Strings and numbers
• Arrays and hashes
• Classes, modules, and namespaces
• Reflection and metaprogramming
• XML and HTML processing
• Ruby on Rails (including Ajax integration)
• Databases
• Graphics
• Internet services like email, SSH, and BitTorrent
• Web services
• Multitasking
• Graphical and terminal interfaces

If you need to write a web application, this book shows you how to get started with Rails. If you're a system administrator who needs to rename thousands of files, you'll see how to use Ruby for this and other everyday tasks. You'll learn how to read and write Excel spreadsheets, classify text with Bayesian filters, and create PDF files. We've even included a few silly tricks that were too cool to leave out, like how to blink the lights on your keyboard.

The Ruby Cookbook is the most useful book yet written about Ruby. When you need to solve a problem, don't reinvent the wheel: look it up in the Cookbook.

New Price: $22.00 / Used Price: $9.87

• Working with interactive forms and style sheets
• Presenting user-friendly page navigation
• Creating dynamic content
• Producing visual effects for stationary content
• Positioning HTML elements
• Managing browser windows and multiple frames

New Price: $7.00 / Used Price: $1.75

New Price: n.a. / Used Price: $0.01

The book is perfect for developers of Web sites running on Apache on Unix. Loyalties vary in terms of operating systems, Web servers, and scripting languages, but those who find their home in the Unix and Perl environments will find this book right up their alleys. The target audience is developers somewhat familiar with Perl and the Unix-based Web server environment, but you'll find the book illustrative even if your knowledge is sketchy.

After showing how to make database connections using Perl and MySQL, author Paul DuBois dives into some useful real-world examples to help you build your skills. He shows how to implement a simple to-do list application, an online product registration site, contests, online polls, image databases, an online greeting card service, and more. There is also excellent coverage of search facilities and session management.

The sample code for the applications in this text is presented in small pieces in context with the discussion; most of the space is devoted to explanations of the issues and implementation. All of the code is available, however, from the book's companion Web site. This tutorial is an excellent way for Perl developers to move to the next level of development and make the most of some powerful, free tools. --Stephen W. Plain

MySQL and Perl for the Web provides a much-needed handbook for database and Web developers seeking an extensive and detailed guide for using the combination of MySQL and Perl to build dynamic and interactive database-backed Web sites. It shows how to use Perl's DBI database access module, pairing it with with the CGI.pm module that allows Web pages and forms to be generated and processed easily. These tools provide developers with a solid foundation for creating applications that incorporate database content to create dynamic, up-to-date Web sites.

The book employs a practical learn-by-doing approach that demonstrates development techniques by building complete applications, not just fragmentary pieces. It shows what to do at each step of the way during the process of building live, working examples. Applications are fully explained so you can understand how they work and apply the techniques they illustrate to your own projects.

New Price: $32.93 / Used Price: $9.95

Departing from O'Reilly's earlier monograph Developing Bioinformatic Computer Skills, Tisdall's text is organized aggressively along didactic lines. Nearly all of the 13 chapters begin with twin bullet lists of Perl programming tools and the bioinformatic methods that require them. Likewise, the chapters end with exercises. String concatenation is illustrated with gene splicing, and regular expressions are taught with gene transcription and motif searching.

Tisdall emphasizes sequence examples throughout, leading up to an introduction to a Perl interface for the NIH GenBank biological database and the widely used BLAST sequence alignment tool. After a brief discussion of three-dimensional protein structure, he returns to sequence extraction and secondary structure prediction.

Tisdall's goal is to boost the beginning programmer into a domain of self-learning. He imparts essential etiquette for the success of programming newbies: use the wealth or resources available, from user documentation to Web site surveys to FAQs to How-To's to news groups and finally to direct personal appeals for help from a senior colleague. A well-plugged-in bioinformatics Perl student will soon discover Bioperl, an open-source effort to bring research-grade bioinformatic tools to the Perl community. Bioperl is described briefly at the end of Tisdall's book and will reportedly be a forthcoming title of its own in the O'Reilly bioinformatics series.

Although he introduces bioinformatics as an academic discipline, Tisdall treats it as a trade throughout his book. He indicates that open questions and computational hard problems exist, but does not describe what they are or how they are being tackled. Ultimately, Tisdall presents bioinformatics as another arrow in a bench scientist's quiver, very much like HPLC, 2D-PAGE, and the various spectroscopies.

As odd as a "bioinformatics-as-tool" book may be to its research proponents, the reduction of bioinformatics to trade status both deflates and vindicates the years of research, as Tisdall's work attests. --Peter Leopold

With its highly developed capacity to detect patterns in data, Perl has become one of the most popular languages for biological data analysis. But if you're a biologist with little or no programming experience, starting out in Perl can be a challenge. Many biologists have a difficult time learning how to apply the language to bioinformatics. The most popular Perl programming books are often too theoretical and too focused on computer science for a non-programming biologist who needs to solve very specific problems.

"Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" is designed to get you quickly over the Perl language barrier by approaching programming as an important new laboratory skill, revealing Perl programs and techniques that are immediately useful in the lab. Each chapter focuses on solving a particular bioinformatics problem or class of problems, starting with the simplest and increasing in complexity as the book progresses. Each chapter includes programming exercises and teaches bioinformatics by showing and modifying programs that deal with various kinds of practical biological problems. By the end of the book you'll have a solid understanding of Perl basics, a collection of programs for such tasks as parsing BLAST and GenBank, and the skills to take on more advanced bioinformatics programming. Some of the later chapters focus in greater detail on specific bioinformatics topics. This book is suitable for use as a classroom textbook, for self-study, and as a reference.

The book covers:

Programming basics and working with DNA sequences and strings

Debugging your code

Simulating gene mutations using random number generators

Regular expressions and finding motifs indata

Arrays, hashes, and relational databases

Regular expressions and restriction maps

Using Perl to parse PDB records, annotations in GenBank, and BLAST output

Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Author: James Tisdall
Release Date: 2001-10-01
ISBN/EAN: 1600330282 / 9781600330285

New Price: n.a. / Used Price: n.a.

Beginning PHP 5 E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional is an ideal reference for intermediate PHP 5 and MySQL developers, and programmers familiar with web development technologies. This book covers every step of the design and build process, and provides rich examples that will enable you to build high-quality, extendable e-commerce websites. Take a peek at an actual book example!

Furthermore, this book covers site building in three phases. Phase one results in a live website, with an attractive interface and fully searchable product catalog. Next, phase two explains adding facilities to increase sales through cross-selling, upselling, and enhancing customer service. Finally, phase three seeks to reduce costs through automated order processing and integrating with other systems via XML Web services.

New Price: $10.20 / Used Price: $5.95

New Price: $22.39 / Used Price: $18.00

Step-by-step guide reveals best practices for enhancing Web sites with Ajax

• A step-by-step guide to enhancing Web sites with Ajax.
• Uses progressive enhancement techniques to ensure graceful degradation (which makes sites usable in all browsers).
• Shows readers how to write their own Ajax scripts instead of relying on third-party libraries.

Web site designers love the idea of Ajax--of creating Web pages in which information can be updated without refreshing the entire page. But for those who aren't hard-core programmers, enhancing pages using Ajax can be a challenge. Even more of a challenge is making sure those pages work for all users. In Bulletproof Ajax, author Jeremy Keith demonstrates how developers comfortable with CSS and (X)HTML can build Ajax functionality without frameworks, using the ideas of graceful degradation and progressive enhancement to ensure that the pages work for all users. Throughout this step-by-step guide, his emphasis is on best practices with an approach to building Ajax pages called Hijax, which improves flexibility and avoids worst-case scenarios.

New Price: $23.49 / Used Price: $21.59

New Price: $6.00 / Used Price: $1.22