Computing Internet Books

Being a great collection of masterly written articles, this book constitutes a deep introduction to a diversity of hot tech-topics. Surely, it will serve you well as a valuable skills thermometer in your professional growth planning.

Though, a couple of chapters awoke my interest and became the start point of further readings; I don't picture this book having a place in my "always at hand" book collection. I think this book, like those magazine subscriptions piling up in my garage, is a once in a lifetime reading.

Rather than having this professional guide to mainstream technological thinking dusting on my bookshelf; I would like to see it being passed around at the coffee table, inspiring, and guiding colleagues and friends. Definitely, this is not a book to own, but a book to share.

Articles by many notables - Scott Davis, Neal Ford, and more - pack an anthology covering all kinds of topics, from real-world web issues and applications to project testing, total object makeovers, and more, computer pros will find topics detailed, in depth and specialized to the computer geek world - and packed with logic and detail.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

This is certainly an eclectic mix of a book. Topics from 15 authors covering subjects such as language-oriented programming, through agile methodology and CSS.

Written by leaders in their fields, this book doesn't aim to be definitive, but consists of essays by those people about the stuff which interests them. I didn't follow all of the subjects covered, and I think that you would be hard-pressed to. All were well written and would appeal to followers of that particular facet of information technology.

One particular thing I liked about this was the appendix covering each author's favourite reads and tools, plus a comprehensive bibliography.

I'm sure you'll find, as I did, half a dozen topics of interest, with several others opening up previously unknown fields of study. I'm looking forward to the next edition.

I attended a NFJS conference last year and was very impressed by the quality of the speakers and content. So, when I had the chance to read the No Fluff, Just Stuff 2006 Anthology I jumped on it.

The book is a collection of 15 technical papers from NFJS speakers that will just make you flat smarter. I found each paper to be informative, well written, and enjoyable. For example, the first paper is "Real World Web Services" by Scott Davis. In it, he provides a broad overview of the various acronyms that make up Web Services. While I was already pretty familiar with WS, this paper filled a few gaps in my knowledge of the subject. In other sections of the book there are deep discussions on testing, continuous integration, methodologies, and more.

The NFJS 2006 Anthology cuts a wide swath across the topic of software development. And yet, each section manages to go quite deep into the subject. I found a nice balance of variety and detail. Some of the papers were on topics I wouldn't necessarily seek out but I appreciated the opportunity to widen my horizons a bit.

Check out the TOC and sample chapters on the Pragmatic Programmer site.

Think of it as a technical conference to go. Highly recommended.

There is not a single good reason known to me not to read the second No Fluff Just Stuff Anthology. Most engineers I know spend far more time coding than catching up on the latest tricks and trends in the engineering world. To those engineers, present company included, an anthology like this is invaluable. However, NFJS Anthology Vol. 2 is also grievously unbalanced.

Much material in this volume is written by agitators of the "new age" software movement, for lack of a better word. They gravitate towards weaker contracts (i.e. REST over WS-*), loose typing (i.e. Ruby over Java), relaxed processes (i.e. Agile over anything else), and so forth... While all authors are entitled to their opinions, I find it unsettling that the "new age" dogma dominates much of the publication. Brian Sletten assaults WS-* in his essay "Give it a Rest", but where is the counterargument? The three paragraphs Sletten himself offers? Or does the editor wish to suggest, quite falsely if so, that there really is no business case to explain why top enterprises leverage WS-* based solutions in spite of their cost?

How about Jared Richardson's article on JRuby titled "Integrating Ruby with legacy code"? Since when is Java considered legacy code? Since when has the free world stopped developing solutions in Java except when under the whip of mighty yet incompetent management? And once again, where is the refutation? Where is the essay on the dangers of mixing and matching languages and platforms? The weaknesses of purely-dynamic languages? Certainly not in this NFJS anthology (sorry, Jared, two brush-off bullet points don't count). And what of a counterargument to Venkat Sabramaniam's essay on Agile Methodologies? While deeply insightful into agile techniques, it also seems to offer Agile as a panacea of sorts, omitting any discussion of when an agile process may be unfitting or even crippling. Once again, shop somewhere else for the complete story.
Ultimately, the single greatest failure of this compilation can be attributed to Neal Ford's role as its editor. A quick glance at his blog allows one to glean Ford's biases with a naked eye. While the strength of Ford's dispositions does not detract from his status or credibility as a great speaker and author, it renders him unfit to edit such a compilation as this anthology. Ford goes so far as to violate a key principle of the NFJS series by propagandizing a $500 IDE (Chapter 10), while devoting less than half that real estate to Eclipse techniques (Chapter 11), despite the latter's prevalence in availability and market share. In short, Ford allows what would otherwise be an invaluable educational resource to become a hideous concoction of information and propaganda.

Fortunately, Ford's negligence toward balance was slightly tempered by the diversity and insight of several of the authors. Howard Lewis Ship's essay on testing tools and techniques (Chapter 7), David Geary's introduction to the Google Web Toolkit (Chapter 8), and Scott Leberknight's "Data Access using Spring, Hibernate, and JDBC" (Chapter 19). These chapters stand out due to both their relevance and their instructional approach. These essays teach, rather than preach, and set a wonderful example of what the rest of this volume should have looked like. While I look forward to attending this year's No Fluff Just Stuff conference in Boston and even hearing some of the people whose work I criticized in the preceding paragraphs, I hope the 2008 NFJS anthology will offer less demagoguery and more substance, less fluff and more stuff.

Released in early 2000, this was one of the first books about affiliate programs and it still sets the standard. While it didn't predict the demise of the dotcoms, this book is still very relevant. For the beginner, its basics and useful tips are exactly what you need to get started. But for the advanced reader, its unique and prescient predictions about where things where things are going are VERY interesting. (If you replace some of the book's references to no-longer existing companies with the newer term "XML Web Services," you have what amounts to a book that was written 5-8 YEARS ahead of its time! For instance, the authors were completely accurate in their prediction of the return of the importance of the individual/small site, a notion which was heresy in 2000 when the web was totally dominated by massive funded companies competing using millions of dollars from their IPO war chests. I credit the authors with this foresight and find their other 50,000-foot-level insights to still be fresh, insightful, and completely unique among the books I've seen in this category. This aspect makes the book required reading for anybody who thinks they know anything about affilate programs today.

The only drawback of this book is that many of the examples sited in the directory of affiliate programs are no longer around. But the authors do reference other affiliate program directories which still exist and that is really all you need to know to find suitable programs today.

I have to say that I had high hopes for this book. However, once I received it, I was dissappointed. Everything that is in this book can be found on the Internet.

While this book does provide a lot of information, if you have researched Affiliate Selling at all...anywhere else...you probably already know what's in this book.

Having said that, if you are looking for a place to start to learn about Affiliate Selling, this may be it. This book is written for the person who knows absolutlely nothing about Affiliate Selling. It goes over places to sign up with and defines what Affiliate Selling is.

Ignore all naysayers. This book is a comprehensive resource and the perfect introduction for those of us new to the industry. Well done!!

This is one you cannot miss! Well written, easy to digest, and so very eye-opening. It makes you want to read every book Helmstetter writes.

This book is copyright year 2000. Think about it! I just bought this book and I threw it away. I can't belive other people are selling this book on amazon. The title should be History of Affiliate Selling pre-y2k. There is No usable information in this book,Unless your are a history buff.

An entertaining and insightful analysis of cyberculture from a man with the sense of detail of an archeologist and the wit of Voltaire.

Mark Dery does an excellent job in this book of presenting elements the post-industrial fringe culture to the reader. This is a bookshelf essential for those with an interest in cyberculture, robotics, trans-humanism, body modification, and cultural criticism. Some of the references are now outdated, but that is inevitable in the print medium, given the rapid advancement of technology.

"Escape velocity is the speed at which a body...overcomes the gravitational pull of another body," begins Mark Dery in his non-fictional amalgamation of the current state of computer culture, Escape Velocity. Dery uses the concept as a metaphor for what is happening to the many memes--concept viruses--of the on-line and turned-on and their relation to the greater society (mainly American, although some service is given to Japan and Europe). Like the emergence of the Internet (and the 'net concept of on-line connectivity) into the mainstream, the ideas of body sculpting, merging with machines (either virtually or prosthetically), and transhuman growth, among others, are just below the cultural surface, according to Dery.

To be a cultural historian to the fast-paced world of computers is a difficult one, because the cyberculture, far more so than any subculture before it, is as varied in its parts as it is separated geographically. It exists on change. In ways, the myriad differences in the cybercrowd is what makes it a culture rather than a cult--it encourages the free range of expression from left to right, and all the fringes top and bottom, and there is no single authority to consult. Mark Dery's job, therefore, was to piece together a picture of a living community that is less than 30 years old and is more malleable than one of his favorite images, that of the T-2000 liquid-metal android from the movie Terminator 2. He assembled this jigsaw by grabbing at the outward manifestations of the culture--its art--rather than focusing on the nuts and bolts of how it came and stays together. Dery's goal was to achieve a focus on where cybernauts and cyberpunks are headed, rather than where they have been. Within the cybernetic expressions in print, screen, music, body art, performance, and philosophy lie the seeds of a cultural revolution that began with the home computer, according to Dery.

Any cultural representation requires a polymath to untangle the multitude of threads that bind it together. When that culture is the front end of the runaway train of technology, the examiner must also be moving at the speed of information. Dery, for the most part, rises to the challenge, able to quote both fiction writers and art critics, social commentators and "hackers" within the same page. His profiles of those on the fringe and those with the mainstream are balanced, except when he pauses to regroup his thinking at the end of each chapter and his own impressions slip in. One of the most rewarding aspects of Dery's compilation is that he went beyond the most visible proponents of cyberculture (William Gibson, Mark Pauline of the Survival Research Laboratories, Hans Moravec) to also get the equally important contributions that have not engendered cultish followings (in fiction, for example, Dery quotes the work of Pat Cadigan and John Shirley as well as that of Gibson and Bruce Sterling), as well as progenitors to the culture (again in fiction, the work of Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard).

As a document of fact about what happened and is happening in the computer subculture, Escape Velocity is hard to fault. But Dery's goal was to portray where the culture is headed (in his eyes into the larger mainstream), and it is herein that trouble lies. To extract the future of society from this mismatch of ideas would be like portraying the future of cinema in the 1960s by examining both Easy Rider and La Dolce Vita. Yes, these movies had a profound effect on the cinematic culture at large, but it was subsumed into the larger whole. Dery quotes Gibson's oft-touted refrain, "The street finds its own uses for things." Just so, the mainstream often finds its own uses for the street, as evidenced in the music business by the commercialization and marketing of punk, rap, and grunge, each a thriving subculture at one time.

Escape Velocity is an intriguing volume, and Mark Dery is to be commended for attempting to achieve a cyberculture gestalt. For those interested in what is happening "in there," Escape Velocity is a one-stop shop, a veritable sourcebook of cyberdom.

I read this about 3+ years ago and I was just discussing it last night. This book presents "cyber-whatever" in a way that is not bound by your typical Newsweek-esque angle of "Boy genius makes millions, blah blah" or by the approach of overwhelming the reader with senseless techie watchwords and jargon that are made up to confuse and confound the reader into thinking that the subject is important because they don't understand it. Escape Velocity presents real people doing wierd things with more esoteric aspects of our accelerted culture. A man who attached his computer to the nerves in his arm to invoke spasms of thrashing and flailing, all the while injuring himself in the process of making performance art is a whole other realm from Bill Gates' pedestrian spreadsheet programs. Don't read this book expecting "Pirates of Silicon Valley" or "the Road Ahead" or whatever drivel Bill wrote. But DO read this book.

His thesis hangs in mid-air, not fully articulated, but if you relax, it should wash over you. Well-written, flows nicely. Excellent job defining buzzwords/key concepts others don't bother to. I found his book to be the best on the topic I've found so far and invaluable in my own studies.

However, he does get a bit redundant and didactic, keeps resorting to catch-all phrases to explain what people are trying to escape from, e.g. economic inequality, environmental pollution, yah-dah-yah-dah. I wish he had drilled down a bit here.

Also, his groupings seems a bit forced, he seems to have dug himself a hole in his overall design. But it was probably a difficult project, so you have to forgive him that.

I am really interested in starting my own web store. After reading this book, I really feel like I can do it! This book covers everything and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to start an e-business but has no idea where to start!

The second edition of Creating Stores On The Web by Ben Swayer, et.al is even more valuable: it provides many basics on online selling options, from using Amazon zshops and Yahoo Store to setting up an individual site. An invaluable 'must', this answers questions ranging from accepting international payments and tracking shipping costs to accepting credit cards online.

If you don't know anything about setting up a virtual store, this book will show you the basics. But be carefull ! It's quite out of date, and much of the info you'll find in it is obsolete

If there will be a new edition for the book here I suggest a new topic `Creating Stores on the Web for Dummies`. This book is nothing if you have a little bit knowledge about how any kind of business is done and internet. So if you want to learn on this subject try another one.

If you are interested in finding information on the wide range of knowlege required to be a successful web store owner, this book is a great place to start.

This book is co-authored by a man who started a fledgling web-based business in 1993. Through his experience and successes you get all the tools you need to make informed decisions on your web design. You can go to his website and see that all the ideas he outlines for you in the book are in practice on his website.

I am a computer technician who is researching starting my own web based business to sell custom framed wedding invitations. I have read many books and articles in my research. I found this book and one other to be an incredible asset (101 Ways to Promote your Web Site). Both these books are written in "lay-mans" terms that any beginner would be able to understand.

A must have for anyone who wants to know where to start with creating their own web-based business.

this book covers all of modern open source license which i wanted to know. also, it explain them very easy understanding way.

People don't realize how important licensing is with open source, but there is a lot.

Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing is a very needed book and well written.

Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing
Andrew M. St. Laurent
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/osfreesoft/

When sharing with others that I was reviewing an O'Reilly book through their User Group & Professional Association Program, the first question was always the same: "What book are you reviewing?" After saying the title was "Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing", responses ranged from "What's that?" to "Well, you won't have any trouble sleeping!" One might think that this list of people included relatives and coworkers who were not attuned to the open source community and its issues. On the contrary, the responses came from those within my circle of acquaintances that include software developers, system administrators, and even an intellectual property lawyer. Licensing is not exactly the sort of topic where people slide forward in their seats and ask to be told more. Such is the appeal of software licensing; however, the importance of understanding licensing, particularly within the context of open source development, cannot be overstated.

Those familiar with the O'Reilly product offerings have no doubt seen or purchased one or more their Pocket Reference series (http://pocketrefs.oreilly.com/). They are not comprehensive references, but rather convenient guides for a specific topic to provide the sort of information one is not likely to have committed to memory, particularly as the trend of having cross-disciplined technologists continues. This book could be considered the analog of pocket guides for open source and free software licensing. Open source licenses and their legal interpretation are subject matter that easily warrant a "pocket reference" that is a full-sized book of nearly 200 pages.

Frankly, reading through a software license and maintaining a reasonable level of comprehension is a rather tough job. The author manages to make the task far more bearable and fruitful at the same time; a difficult balance to strike. The pace of the annotation works well to break up the various licenses (twelve in total) into bite-sized chunks. Chapters 2 and 3, which address the BSD/MIT family of licenses and the GPL/LGPL/MPL family of licenses respectively, each end with a section titled "Application and Philosophy" that serves as a sort of reward for making it through the license and establishes a touchstone to summarize and provide meaningful context for what has been covered.

The annotations of the different licenses are a great introduction, but the book should not be considered as a complete reference for open source licensing issues. The book seems to affirm this at points where the author indicates that particular topics fall outside the book's scope, even to the point of recommending experienced legal counsel for certain issues. It also has a wonderful collection of footnotes and reference to other resources to allow the reader to flesh out topics of interest beyond the focus of this work.

One subtlety of the book that should not be missed is how the history of the open source movement is woven throughout the book to provide the context in which these licenses came into being and were modified to accommodate the vibrant, emerging world of open development models. The book's last two chapters bring that context to the foreground, fully developing the consequence of the licenses in daily development activity. It is far too easy to view these licenses and as mere legal documents that exist in and of themselves; the author reminds us that these licenses are the manifestations of a spirit of selfless contribution and work toward social good made possible by the considerable sacrifice of quite gifted individuals. For those passionate about the open source and free software movements, the section of chapter 7 titled "Models of Open Source and Free Software Development" is a poignant and stirring encapsulation of the first years of the GNU and Linux projects and the work that brought them into being. The cliché rings true; we do indeed "stand on the shoulders of giants."

The number of editorial errors involving misspelled and/or missing words seemed relatively high; this is a trend that seems to have developed in technical books in recent years, to a point that the technical community has come to accept it as some sort of side effect of the rapid pace with which books must be produced in order to keep pace with the rate of change. Given that this is an issue present in other works as well as this one, it should not particularly count as a mark against the work, but rather serve to underscore an issue publishers should consider improving.

"Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing" is a book which strikes a balance between completeness of subject matter coverage and manageability of size. Given the amount of attention the average open source user or developer has given to licensing, reading this book would be a considerable improvement. This book is recommended for a couple of audiences. First, it serves as a great foundation for developers either active in or contemplating participation in open source development. Searching most any open source mailing list for the term "license" can usually turn up some of its hottest flame wars. If most developers had this introductory level of understanding about the main open source licenses, hundreds of message threads arguing about licensing could be avoided.

A second audience for this book is the project manager and/or CTO in most corporate IT shops. Most corporate projects are making use of numerous open source libraries and frameworks. This is particularly true with J2EE, but also with .Net as a number of .Net counterparts to popular J2EE resources arise, e.g. NAnt, NUnit, etc. This book can dispel unnecessary apprehension regarding the use of these libraries that often arises from fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) propagated in much of the mainstream technology media. It can also equip managers to make informed decisions about team members' potential contributions to open source projects and the potential legal implications.

I am an attorney who does open source software license work for a living. When this book came along, I picked it up, mostly because I was interested in seeing how O'Reilly does branching out well beyond its usual technical subjects. As you are probably aware, 2004 was the year of open source, according to some publications. Well, it was also the year of open source books. I have seen at least five that deal with the topic directly.

Getting to the merits of St. Laurent's book, I struggled with whether to give it three or four stars. You see, even as a lawyer I found it lacking in clarity and flow. Overall, I am opposed to the route he took in excerpting almost every term of each license and then providing exposition of his own that was a lot of times hardly more helpful than the original license language. A better approach to explaining the licenses can be found in Larry Rosen's wonderful book "Open Source Licensing." However, this downside becomes an upside when using the book as a reference, instead of an educational guide (justifying the fourth star). St. Laurent's approach here is useful for going into more depth on a particular license. Perhaps that was the goal all along.

Another advantage this book has over Rosen's is its broader treatment of the growing array of licenses and license types. St. Laurent covers more licenses and for that I am thankful. In the end, I would recommend having a copy of both Rosen's and St. Laurent's book handy. And whatever you do, skip Rod Dixon's "Open Source Software Law."

Software licensing can be one of the most confusing issues of software installation and development. Most people assume that there are few if any issues with Open Source and Free Software Licensing but that often is not the case. While it may be free to install you wade into murky waters when you change the code, make a new program that uses some of the coding of the open source program, make a derivative program, or a host of other situations. Part of the confusion is that all Open Source or Free Software licensing is not the same. For example there are the MIT, BSD, Apache, and Academic Free Licenses. Or what about the GNU license? Most people don't realize that there are two different versions of GNU licenses, the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)? Then there is the Mozilla Public License, Q Public License, Artistic License, and Creative Commons License.

Author Andrew M. St. Laurent does an excellent job explaining all these various licenses, what you can do and can't do, the various benefits and shortcomings of the licenses and pitfalls to watch for. If you are doing development in this arena, have made an improvement to one of the programs, or have written a program for internal use that might have resell value you can't afford to not understand the nuances of the various licensing agreements. Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing is highly recommended and required reading for anyone in this situation.

This book is part of the "For Mere Mortals" series, which sounds like it was created by the publisher to compete with the popular Dummies and Idiots books. However, McGrath's efforts are not a trivial read. What she describes is a considerable effort by Microsoft to migrate the myriad VBA developers towards .NET and Visual Studio 2005 Tools.

The emphasis is not on implementing abstractions like object oriented programming. Rather, it uses the reader's background in coding VBA and in MS Word and Excel. Nor are you expected to be proficient in database design or the intricacies of SQL Server. Much of the text is about front end material. Like using the conveniences of the VSTO user interface, with its many widgets and menus, to easily code.

Many new features are available, compared to what you previously had under VBA. The most striking example is now the nifty ability to have a data island. Imagine an Excel spreadsheet on one machine. That loads from a database on another. If the first machine is your laptop, and you take it somewhere isolated from the network, what happens to your data? Well, there is now a means of copying that data, while you're still connected, into a data cache on the laptop. Without having to go to the extent of running a full database on the laptop.

I found the book thorough and easy to read and follow. It reviewed .net extremely well, and made me aware of .net capabilities I had overlooked since the old ones worked.
I met a problem early on in my use of the book, communicated with the author, and got the help I needed to overcome the problem.
An excellent book on the subject.

I should mention although I haven't really done much with the book that it lacks a sample code file download. This means you have to key in everything yourself to test and debug.

Traditionally, developing on the Office platform meant that you would use VBA but Microsoft released Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) a few years ago to let .NET developers use their skills to develop managed Office applications. Moving from VBA to .NET is not easy because you need to learn so much new stuff especially if you never touched .NET in any way. "VSTO for Mere Mortals" is a book targeted at VBA developers who never used .NET before.

In the first chapters, the authors explain what is VSTO and what features are available for developers. Chapter 2 and 3 introduce the Visual Studio development environment and managed code. Seasoned .NET developers will skip these chapters but they are essential for people who never used Visual Studio before. The next chapters cover everything VSTO from Word, Excel and Outlook development to Smart Tags and database development. A full chapter is devoted to new features of VSTO 2005 SE and Office 2007.

If you're a VBA developer that wants to jump into .NET development using VSTO, look no further, this is the book for you. Experienced .NET will also find this book interesting but will skip a couple of .NET introduction chapters.

This book (VSTO for Mere Mortals) is very well written and easy to understand. I did not come from a programming background. I started by learning VBA so making the move from VBA to the .NET /VSTO world was a bit intimidating for me, however; after reading and following the examples in this book, making that leap is not as hard as I thought it would be. I love the detailed code samples in the book and the step-by-step way that they are presented. I really learned a lot from reading this book. Thank you to all that contributed to putting this book together.