Useful Books and Software

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Amazon.com is advancing the boundaries of the Internet through their powerful suite of web services. Innovative developers are combining Amazon data with other freely available sources to create new and interesting applications known as Mashups. This book teaches you the techniques behind mashup applications and for the first time shows you how to build them yourself.

The examples in this book show you how to integrate Amazon web services with APIs from Yahoo!, eBay, Google and YouTube. You'll learn how to combine data from disparate sources to create new applications using next generation browser techniques such as AJAX, JSON and Dynamic Scripting. You will learn how to re-purpose web service data so that it can be consumed from mobile devices such as a cell phone or PDA. Because both the theory and code are explained, you'll be able to easily take the lessons in this book to build your own killer mashup applications.

Expert web services developer Francis Shanahan guides you through the basics of web service consumption using XML, SOAP and REST. Next generation browser techniques such as AJAX are illustrated in easy to follow step by step examples. He also completes the picture by introducing advanced techniques to enhance performance such as the multi-threading web service features of ASP.NET 2.0.

With this book, you'll discover how to:

• Build a generic AJAX library from the ground up
• Consume publicly available APIs such as Yahoo!(r) Search, Google(r), eBay(r) and YouTube
• Use SOAP to expose Amazon data as RSS
• Convert Amazon data directly into JSON using XSLT
• Plot Amazon.com customers on Yahoo Maps
• Use the OpenSearch API to build your own search service
• Access Amazon data from your cell phone using WML

Who this book is for

This book is for developers who have some prior experience with web technologies such as Javascript(r) and ASP.NET. This book covers a wide range of technologies and techniques including ASP.NET 2.0, WML, REST, RSS, SOAP, XML, XSLT, AJAX and JSON. Everything in the book is built using free tools and explained in detail, along with the source code which makes this a useful resource regardless of experience level.

Publisher: Wrox
Author: Francis Shanahan
Release Date: 2007-01-03
ISBN/EAN: 0470097779 / 9780470097779

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Give your audience the power to interact with your content on their own terms. It's the right thing to do, and with a $100 billion a year market for accessible content, new laws and new technologies, you can't afford to ignore accessibility.

With this book, you'll learn basic principles and techniques for developing accessible HTML, audio, video, and multimedia content. In addition, you will understand how to apply the principles you learn in this book to new technologies when they emerge.

You'll learn how to:

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Although Perl remains a vibrant language with a fiercely loyal following, it has undergone many changes to keep up with new technologies and applications that were not anticipated when Perl was first introduced in 1987. Through its community-based development model, Perl has kept up with changing times and remained fresh when other languages might have stagnated.

Internally, however, there have remained kinks and stumbling blocks that developers have needed to sidestep, long-abandoned features that have been maintained only for backwards compatibility, misdirected phrasings that have hindered more intuitive syntax structures, and a cacophony of modules that sometimes work well together, but occasionally don't. Perl continues to have a strong following devoted to its development, but in the meantime, a group of core Perl developers have begun working on Perl 6, a complete rewrite of the Perl language. While Perl's creative philosophy and common-sense syntax are sure to remain in Perl 6, everything else in the language is being re-examined and recreated.

Perl 6 Essentials provides an overview of the current state of Perl 6 for those who await its release. Written by members of the Perl 6 core development team, the book offers an explanation of the various stages of the project, with reference material for programmers who are interested in what changes are planned or who may want to contribute to the project. The book will satisfy their curiosity and show how changes in the language will make it more powerful and easier to use.

Perl 6 Essentials is the first book that offers a peek into the next major version of the Perl language. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of Perl.

The thing about Perl 6 is: It's a work in progress. However, the end product--which may not be out for a couple of years--will represent such a foundation shift in the state of the Perl art that it's a good idea to keep up with advances in the development process as they occur. Perl 6 Essentials, which is intended to be reissued several times during Perl 6 development, aims to keep working Perl users informed of architectural decisions, feature additions, syntactic changes, and community developments as they occur. The idea is that if you keep up with the Perl 6 Essentials series, you'll be ready to go when the final release appears--if you're not inspired to join the development effort first.

A jaded software developer, having seen too many insubstantial "advance" books rushed to press just so they can be the only books available on their topic for a while, might be suspicious of this book. Such suspicion is not borne out by the contents of Perl 6 Essentials, which are valuable. Though thin, this book is dense with information and well worth its modest cover price. The authors clearly explain what's new (so far) in Perl 6, and do an excellent job of explaining the new Parrot virtual machine architecture. There's extensive coverage of Parrot assembly language (PASM), more than enough for you to do some significant exploratory programming with it. The authors have a good sense of what Perl developers want to know about their future working environment, and satisfy that demand. --David Wall

Topics covered: The state of the Perl 6 development effort through Apocalypse 6 (a development milestone) and the Parrot virtual machine through version 0.0.10. The most valuable coverage is of Parrot and its assembly language (PASM). Changes in Perl features and syntax get lots of attention, as well.

Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Allison Randal, Dan Sugalski, Leopold Totsch
Release Date: 2003-06-20
ISBN/EAN: 0596004990 / 9780596004996

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Real World SQL Server Administration with Perl is written with the goal of super-charging your SQL Server administration skills with Perl scripting, taking you to the next level of SQL Server administration. Through a broad range of scenarios, this book shows you how to write Perl scripts (often in combination with T-SQL scripting) to solve a wide variety of SQL Server administration problems. This unique book will provide you with the techniques to conquer real-world problems that frequently trouble DBAs.

You will take away at least two things from reading this book: a DBA toolkit complete with over 150 Perl scripts, and problem-solving techniques perfect for attacking additional SQL Server administrative challenges. Many of the sample problems are described in SQL Server 7 or 2000 context, but in reality, the examples arent version specificall the Perl scripts are open and may be adapted to work with any version of SQL Server.

Publisher: Apress
Author: Linchi Shea
Release Date: 2003-07
ISBN/EAN: 159059097X / 9781590590973

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Instead of starting at "Hello World," Wicked Cool PHP assumes that you're familiar with the language and jumps right into the good stuff. After you learn the FAQs of life-the most commonly wished for PHP scripts-you'll work your way through smart configuration options and the art of forms, all the way through to complex database-backed scripts.

Wicked Cool PHP contains a wide variety of scripts to process credit cards, check the validity of email addresses, template HTML, and serve dynamic images and text. The 76 easily implemented scripts will also teach you how to: