Wow! eBook – Blog

Book Description

The fun and friendly guide to the world’s most popular online learning management system

Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, also known as Moodle, is an online learning management system that creates opportunities for rich interaction between educators and their audience. However, the market has been lacking a simple, easy-to-understand guide that covers all the essentials of Moodle until now. Using straightforward language and an entertaining tone to decipher the intricate world of Moodle, this book provides you with the resources you need to take advantage of all the eLearning and eTraining possibilities that Moodle offers.

• Offers a hands-on approach to learning Moodle, the revolutionary online learning management system
• Uses simple language peppered with good humor to break down the complexities of Moodle into easily digested pieces of information
• Caters to the specific needs of teachers and business trainers by providing the resources they need

Moodle For Dummies provides you with the tools you need to acquire a solid understanding of Moodle and start implementing it in your courses.

From the Back Cover
Stop noodling, start Moodling!

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Book Description

If you’re a solo website designer or part of a small team itching to build interesting projects with Drupal, this concise guide will get you started. Drupal’s learning curve has thrown off many experienced designers, particularly the way it handles design challenges. This book shows you the lifecycle of a typical Drupal project, with emphasis on the early stages of site planning. Learn how to efficiently estimate and set up your own project, so you can focus on ways to make your vision a reality, rather than let project management details constantly distract you.

• Plan and estimate your project by discovering your client’s goals and audience perceptions
• Discover how Drupal works under the hood, and learn basic DrupalSpeak
• Frame the UX design challenge through a deeper understanding of your site’s intended users
• Get real content for your project as early as possible—before you start prototyping
• Choose the right modules for your project, and learn about several go-to modules
• Understand how to walk clients through the Drupal design and development process

Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Setting the Stage: Discovery and User Experience
Chapter 3 Fleshing Things Out: Getting ready to prototype
Chapter 4 Working with Clients

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Book Description

Dive into the RStudio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for using and programming R, the popular open source software for statistical computing and graphics. This concise book provides new and experienced users with an overview of RStudio, as well as hands-on instructions for analyzing data, generating reports, and developing R software packages.

The open source RStudio IDE brings many powerful coding tools together into an intuitive, easy-to-learn interface. With this guide, you’ll learn how to use its main components—including the console, source code editor, and data viewer—through descriptions and case studies. Getting Started with RStudio serves as both a reference and introduction to this unique IDE.

• Use RStudio to provide enhanced support for interactive R sessions
• Clean and format raw data quickly with several RStudio components
• Edit R commands with RStudio’s code editor, and combine them into functions
• Easily locate and use more than 3,000 add-on packages in R’s CRAN service
• Develop and document your own R packages with the code editor and related components
• Create one-click PDF reports in RStudio with a mix of text and R output

About the Author
John Verzani is a long-time R user and author of both Using R for Introductory Statistics (CRC, 2004) and, with Michael Lawrence, Programming GUIs in R (CRC, forthcoming). He is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Mathematics at CUNY’s College of Staten Island. Download Now »

Book Description

Mahara is an e-portfolio system that allows you to build dynamic and engaging portfolios in no time. Use Mahara when applying for jobs, creating portfolios for certification and accreditation, for classroom projects, book reviews, to create your own social network and much more. This book will show you the many different ways in which you can use Mahara, and how to exploit the various components of Mahara.

The Mahara 1.4 Cookbook will introduce you to features you probably have not explored, and show you how to use them in ways you probably had not considered.   The book also provides guidance in the use of  Gimp, Picasa, Audacity, Word and other programs that can be used to create artifacts. It will provide you with techniques for creating everything from dynamic and engaging web pages to complete projects, interactive groups, educational templates, and professional resume packages.

By exploring the recipes in this book, you will learn how to use each of the various blocks and content areas including the resume sections, Journals, and plans.  You will learn how to archive a portfolio, and set access levels.  We will build an art gallery,  a newspaper, use groups for collaboration and assessment, and use the Collections feature to build complex layered portfolios. You will also find recipes for building templates for standards-based report cards and teacher certification. The book is packed with ideas from the simple to the extremely advanced, but each idea is supported with step-by-step instructions that will make all of them seem easy.

From promotion and tenure packages, to photo galleries, to project templates Download Now »

Book Description

Drupal is ideally equipped to serve as a base system for creating a custom social networking site like Facebook or MySpace. While these large social networks have their place, niche social networking websites can help promote businesses, products, projects, and hobbies of any nature.

Drupal 7 Social Networking provides careful instructions and clear explanations to take you through the setup and management of your social network site, covering topics from users, to marketing, to maintenance. It will help you create your own social networking site, suitable for whatever audience you choose!

Starting from the very basics of both Drupal and Social Networking, right through to more complicated aspects, you will progressively learn how to add to and expand your social networking site and add more features. You will learn how to secure your social network, deploy it on the Internet, and keep it running and well maintained. As social networking sites rely on the participation of their users, this book helps you to structure your site in such a way so that users can easily and enjoyably contribute, thus creating a powerful social network.

A complete walkthrough for creating, developing, growing, and maintaining a Social Networking website using Drupal 7

What you will learn from this book :

• Build a social networking site from the ground up using Drupal 7 Download Now »

Book Description

Spring Roo is an easy-to-use productivity tool for rapidly developing Java enterprise applications using well-recognized frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, AspectJ, Spring Web Flow, Spring Security, GWT, and so on. Spring Roo takes care of creating maven-enabled projects, enterprise application architecture based on your choice of technologies, unit/integration tests based on your choice of testing framework, and so on. The bottom line is that if you’re using Spring, then you must consider using Spring Roo for increased productivity.

Spring Roo 1.1 Cookbook brings together a collection of recipes that demonstrate how the Spring Roo developer tool simplifies rapidly developing enterprise applications using standard technologies/frameworks such as JPA, GWT, Spring, Flex, Spring Web Flow, Spring Security, and so on. It introduces readers to developing enterprise applications for the real world using Spring Roo tool. The book starts off with basic recipes to make readers comfortable with using Spring Roo tool. As the book progresses, readers are introduced to more sophisticated features supported by Spring Roo in the context of a Flight Booking application. In a step-by-step by fashion, each recipe shows how a particular activity is performed, what Spring Roo does when a command is executed, and why it is important in the context of the application being developed.

Initially, you make a quick start with using Spring Roo through some simple recipes. Then you learn how Spring Roo simplifies creating the persistence layer of an enterprise application using JPA. You are introduced to the various roo commands to create JPA entities Download Now »