Useful Books and Software

This guide briefly tours the Web and covers basic HTML, tables, forms, and frames in a series of quick reads. (This discussion offers just enough information to jog the memory to proper HTML usage.) You'll get in-depth coverage of cascading style sheets (CSS), the Extensible Markup Language (XML), JavaScript, HTTP, CGI, and Perl. Stephen Spainhour and Robert Eckstein explore CSS in brief but do cover the pending W3C standard. They also provide a refreshingly quick overview of XML. To present JavaScript, the book makes excellent use of diagrams to illustrate the object hierarchy and the way the language works with windows and frames.

Webmaster takes on a decidedly public domain slant in its presentation of server configuration, primarily aimed at the freeware Apache server, and PHP, the freeware server-side scripting language. Even if you don't code with these tools, however, this book offers plenty of industry-standard reference. --Stephen Plain

Individuals, organizations, and businesses are relying on their web pages to provide and collect information, manage processes, and interact with communities and customers. A reliable, informative, and responsive web site can reduce cost, increase visibility, and create a positive image for the owner of that site.

Behind every successful web page is an overworked and underappreciated webmaster.

Webmasters make sure that the information on a site is accessible and usable; that the site is always available; that performance is good; that users can get the information that they need; and that the site can collect the information it needs to serve those users. These disparate tasks require many different tools and skills. Webmaster in a Nutshell pulls together in a single volume all the essential reference information for webmasters working on UNIX-based web servers.

In this second edition of Webmaster in a Nutshell, we've updated our material to include the latest versions of HTML and Javascript, and also expanded the book to cover the newest technologies emerging on the Web. The book covers:

• HTML 4.0, with special attention to forms, tables and frames
• CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
• XML, the next-generation markup language for the Web
• CGI, with a chapter dedicated to the Perl module CGI.pm
• JavaScript 1.2
• PHP, the HTML-embedded programming language
• HTTP 1.1, the underlying protocol that drives the Web
• Apache server administration, including Apache modules
• mod_perl, the Apache module for enhancing CGI
performance and providing a Perl interface to the Apache API

Webmaster in a Nutshell, part of the bestselling O'Reilly series of reference books, makes it easy to find the information you want about the technologies you use. You'll keep your other books on the shelf; you'll keep Webmaster in a Nutshell next to your keyboard.

Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Stephen Spainhour, Robert Eckstein
Release Date: 1999-06-01
ISBN/EAN: 1565923251 / 9781565923256

New Price: $0.49 / Used Price: $0.01

Updated for Python 2.4, The "Python Cookbook," 2nd Edition offers a wealth of useful code for all Python programmers, not just advanced practitioners. Like its predecessor, the new edition provides solutions to problems that Python programmers face everyday.

It now includes over 200 recipes that range from simple tasks, such as working with dictionaries and list comprehensions, to complex tasks, such as monitoring a network and building a templating system. This revised version also includes new chapters on topics such as time, money, and metaprogramming.

Here's a list of additional topics covered:

Manipulating text

Searching and sorting

Working with files and the filesystem

Object-oriented programming

Dealing with threads and processes

System administration

Interacting with databases

Creating user interfaces

Network and web programming

Processing XML

Distributed programming

Debugging and testing

Another advantage of The "Python Cookbook," 2nd Edition is its trio of authors--three well-known Python programming experts, who are highly visible on email lists and in newsgroups, and speak often at Python conferences.

With scores of practical examples and pertinent background information, The "Python Cookbook," 2nd Edition is the one source you need if you're looking to build efficient, flexible, scalable, and well-integrated systems.

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Authors: Alex Martelli, Anna Ravenscroft, David Ascher
Release Date: 2005-03-18
ISBN/EAN: 0596007973 / 9780596007973

New Price: $28.92 / Used Price: $24.97

• A fast-paced tutorial on the syntax of the Python language itself
• An explanation of object-oriented programming in Python, covering both the classic and new-style object models
• Coverage of other core topics, including exceptions, modules, strings, and regular expressions
• A quick reference for Python's built-in types and functions, as well as the key modules in the Python standard library, including sys, os, time, thread, math, and socket, among many others
• Reference material on important third-party extensions, such as Numeric and Tkinter
• Information about extending Python and embedding it into other applications

New Price: $10.00 / Used Price: $7.99

• Working with basic data types, including strings, numbers, dates and times, and arrays
• PHP building blocks, such as variables, functions, classes, and objects
• Web programming, including forms, database access, and XML
• Useful features like regular expressions, encryption and security, graphics, internationalization and localization, and Internet services
• Working with files and directories
• Command-line PHP and PHP-GTK
• PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository

New Price: $9.99 / Used Price: $3.95

As you'd expect, this book teaches you all the core Java skills you need on the job, showing you how to take advantage of time-saving Java features like:

* the Scanner class
* type-safe enumerations
* enhanced for loops
* typed collections
* generics
* autoboxing
* the StringBuilder class

But beyond that, it gives you the practical training you need in both object-oriented programming and data access programming. In particular, it shows you how to use a 3-tiered architecture to separate the business classes, presentation classes, and database classes of an application. It shows you practical techniques for populating business objects with data from files or databases. And it shows you how to use inheritance, polymorphism, interfaces, and the factory pattern in a way that is not just understandable but also reflects what's done in the real world. The result is, you'll soon be writing Java applications the way the best professionals do.

To download the book applications...
You can download the code for the book applications, the starting code and test data for the exercises in the book, and sample chapters from the Murach web site.

Publisher: Mike Murach & Associates
Authors: Doug Lowe, Joel Murach, Andrea Steelman
Release Date: 2005-01-15
ISBN/EAN: 1890774294 / 9781890774295

New Price: $25.57 / Used Price: $13.95

But if you're serious about your profession, intuition isn't enough. Perl Best Practices author Damian Conway explains that rules, conventions, standards, and practices not only help programmers communicate and coordinate with one another, they also provide a reliable framework for thinking about problems, and a common language for expressing solutions. This is especially critical in Perl, because the language is designed to offer many ways to accomplish the same task, and consequently it supports many incompatible dialects.

With a good dose of Aussie humor, Dr. Conway (familiar to many in the Perl community) offers 256 guidelines on the art of coding to help you write better Perl code--in fact, the best Perl code you possibly can. The guidelines cover code layout, naming conventions, choice of data and control structures, program decomposition, interface design and implementation, modularity, object orientation, error handling, testing, and debugging.

They're designed to work together to produce code that is clear, robust, efficient, maintainable, and concise, but Dr. Conway doesn't pretend that this is the one true universal and unequivocal set of best practices. Instead, Perl Best Practices offers coherent and widely applicable suggestions based on real-world experience of how code is actually written, rather than on someone's ivory-tower theories on how software ought to be created.

Most of all, Perl Best Practices offers guidelines that actually work, and that many developers around the world are already using. Much like Perl itself, these guidelines are about helping you to get your job done, without getting in the way.

Praise for Perl Best Practices from Perl community members:

"As a manager of a large Perl project, I'd ensure that every member of my team has a copy of Perl Best Practices on their desk, and use it as the basis for an in-house style guide." -- Randal Schwartz

"There are no more excuses for writing bad Perl programs. All levels of Perl programmer will be more productive after reading this book." -- Peter Scott

"Perl Best Practices will be the next big important book in the evolution of Perl. The ideas and practices Damian lays down will help bring Perl out from under the embarrassing heading of "scripting languages". Many of us have known Perl is a real programming language, worthy of all the tasks normally delegated to Java and C++. With Perl Best Practices, Damian shows specifically how and why, so everyone else can see, too." -- Andy Lester

"Damian's done what many thought impossible: show how to build large, maintainable Perl applications, while still letting Perl be the powerful, expressive language that programmers have loved for years." -- Bill Odom

"Finally, a means to bring lasting order to the process and product of real Perl development teams." -- Andrew Sundstrom

New Price: $21.97 / Used Price: $19.00

New Price: $54.98 / Used Price: $84.97

But with so many changes, where do you start? You could read through the lengthy, often boring language specification; you could wait for the latest 500 page tome on concepts and theory; you could even play around with the new JDK, hoping you figure things out--or you can get straight to work with "Java 5.0 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook,"

This no-nonsense, down-and-dirty guide by bestselling Java authors Brett McLaughlin and David Flanagan skips all the boring prose and lecture, and jumps right into Tiger. You'll have a handle on the important new features of the language by the end of the first chapter, and be neck-deep in code before you hit the halfway point. Using the task-oriented format of this new series, you'll get complete practical coverage of generics, learn how boxing and unboxing affects your type conversions, understand the power of varargs, learn how to write enumerated types and annotations, master Java's new formatting methods and the for/in loop, and even get a grip on concurrency in the JVM.

Light on theory and long on practical application, "Java 5.0 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook" allows you to cut to the chase, getting straight to work with Tiger's new features. The new Developer's Notebooks series from O'Reilly covers important new tools for software developers. Emphasizing example over explanation and practice over theory, they focus onlearning by doing--you'll get the goods straight from the masters, in an informal and code-intensive style that suits developers. If you've been curious about Tiger, but haven't known where to start, this no-fluff, lab-style guide is the solution.

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Authors: David Flanagan, Brett McLaughlin
Release Date: 2004-06-25
ISBN/EAN: 0596007388 / 9780596007386

New Price: $4.82 / Used Price: $4.83

• 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: $20.00 / Used Price: $22.99

• Make Fewer HTTP Requests


• Use a Content Delivery Network


• Add an Expires Header


• Gzip Components


• Put Stylesheets at the Top


• Put Scripts at the Bottom


• Avoid CSS Expressions


• Make JavaScript and CSS External


• Reduce DNS Lookups


• Minify JavaScript


• Avoid Redirects


• Remove Duplicates Scripts


• Configure ETags


• Make Ajax Cacheable

New Price: $14.94 / Used Price: $14.34