Wow! eBook – Blog

Book Description

Schools, colleges and universities all over the world are installing Moodle, but many educators aren’t making much use of it. With so many features, it can be a hassle to learn – and with teachers under so much pressure day-to-day, they cannot devote much time to recreating all their lessons from scratch.

This book provides the quickest way for teachers and trainers to get up and running with Moodle, by turning their familiar teaching materials into a Moodle e-learning course.

This book shows how to bring your existing notes, worksheets, resources and lesson plans into Moodle quickly and easily. Instead of exploring every feature of Moodle, the book focuses on getting you started immediately – you will be turning your existing materials into Moodle courses right from the start.

The book begins by showing how to turn your teaching schedule into a Moodle course, with the correct number of topics and weeks. You will then see how to convert your resources – documents, slideshows, and worksheets, into Moodle. You will learn how to format them in a way that means students will be able to read them, and along the way plenty of shortcuts to speed up the process.

By the end of Chapter 3, you will already have a Moodle course that contains your learning resources in a presentable way. But the book doesn’t end there– you will also see how to use Moodle to accept and assess coursework submissions, discuss work with students, and deliver quizzes, tests, and video.

Throughout the book, the focus is on getting results fast Download Now »

Book Description

Written for developers, The WordPress Anthology will take you beyond the basics to give you a thorough overview of the WordPress universe. With a cookbook-style approach, you can pick and choose what you need from each chapter to suit your projects.

• Gain a comprehensive overview of installing, customizing and getting the most out of the web’s most versatile content management system
• Dive into the inner mechanics of WordPress and make the code work the way you want
• Explore the world of plugins, themes and APIs to add extra functionality
• Adopt Multisite capabilities to host and manage your own centralized network of WordPress websites
• Learn how to launch your application on a global scale with localization techniques and marketing tips

About the Author
Raena Jackson Armitage is an Australian web developer with a background in content management and training. A former SitePoint technical editor, you’ll find her speaking at some of the more popular geek conferences.

Mick Olinik is a WordPress expert that specializes in graphic design and WordPress theme skinning, organic search engine optimization, DNS routing and Linux web hosting platforms. Download Now »

Book Description

Cfengine is a compact automation framework primarily used to provide automated configuration and maintenance of laptops, desktops, servers, and mainframes. It is not a very complex framework, but certainly is extensive. There is too much to learn and it is hard to convey in a simple way what the software can do. That is where this book steps in and saves your day.

Cfengine 3 Beginner’s Guide is the first and only book dedicated to Cfengine. It dives deep into using the framework’s ‘promise’ language to solve complex data center problems. Find all the details you’ll need about using the advanced functions and variables, with easy-to-understand examples. The book also covers complex work flows that showcase the framework’s possibilities.

This book starts off with step-by-step instructions for installing and configuring the Cfengine server and clients, and moves on to configuring systems using Cfengine scripts. The author then walks you through the policy decision flow, conducting system and security audits.

This is followed by detailed discussions, through various examples, on how you can use Cfengine to configure systems, users, networks, databases, web servers et al. Adding to this, the book also provides a list of best practices, Cfengine policy decision flow, and how you may use the Cfengine Orion Cloud pack. By the end of the book you should be able to write policies for automating your complex data centre tasks.

Automate your Builds, Deployments, Management Download Now »

Book Description

Moodle has evolved from an academic project to the world’s most popular virtual learning environment. During this evolution, its complexity has risen dramatically and so have the skills that are required to administer the system.

Moodle 2 Administration is a complete, practical guide to administering Moodle sites. It covers how to set up Moodle in any learning environment, configuration and day-to-day admin tasks, as well as advanced options for customizing and extending Moodle.

The author, who has been administering systems for over 20 years, has adopted a problem-solution approach to bring the content in line with your day-to-day operations. The practical examples will help you to set up Moodle for large groups and small courses alike.

This is a one-stop reference for any task you will ever come across when administering a Moodle site of any shape and size.

What you will learn from this book:

• Install and update Moodle on multiple platforms manually and using the CLI
• Manage courses, cohorts, users, and roles
• Get Moodle hooked up to repositories, portfolios, and plagiarism detection systems
• Configure Moodle for accessibility, localization, communication, and collaboration
• Generate comprehensive Moodle reports and statistics Download Now »

Book Description

How do you use R to import, manage, visualize, and analyze real-world data? With this short, hands-on tutorial, you learn how to collect online data, massage it into a reasonable form, and work with it using R facilities to interact with web servers, parse HTML and XML, and more. Rather than use canned sample data, you’ll plot and analyze current home foreclosure auctions in Philadelphia.

This practical mashup exercise shows you how to access spatial data in several formats locally and over the Web to produce a map of home foreclosures. It’s an excellent way to explore how the R environment works with R packages and performs statistical analysis.

• Parse messy data from public foreclosure auction postings
• Plot the data using R’s PBSmapping package
• Import US Census data to add context to foreclosure data
• Use R’s lattice and latticeExtra packages for data visualization
• Create multidimensional correlation graphs with the pairs() scatterplot matrix package

About the Author
Jeremy Leipzig is a bioinformatics software developer at DuPont Crop Genetics. He has conducted academic research in viral integration, metagenomics, schizophrenia, and alternative splicing. While a graduate student, he developed one of the first faculty-review websites and wrote “Work Issues in Software Engineering”, a survey-based study of “death march” projects. Download Now »

Book Description

If you’re an experienced programmer willing to crunch data, this concise guide will show you how to use machine learning to work with email. You’ll learn how to write algorithms that automatically sort and redirect email based on statistical patterns. Authors Drew Conway and John Myles White approach the process in a practical fashion, using a case-study driven approach rather than a traditional math-heavy presentation.

This book also includes a short tutorial on using the popular R language to manipulate and analyze data. You’ll get clear examples for analyzing sample data and writing machine learning programs with R.

• Mine email content with R functions, using a collection of sample files
• Analyze the data and use the results to write a Bayesian spam classifier
• Rank email by importance, using factors such as thread activity
• Use your email ranking analysis to write a priority inbox program
• Test your classifier and priority inbox with a separate email sample set

Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Using R
Chapter 2 Data Exploration
Chapter 3 Classification: Spam Filtering
Chapter 4 Ranking: Priority Inbox Download Now »