Wow! eBook – Blog

Book Description

Windows power users have always envied their friends running UNIX machines for the ease of automation that they enjoy. The traditional Windows command–line shell, cmd.exe, has never been up to par with shells like bash or tcsh, especially when it comes to text processing and process automation.

Windows PowerShell changes all that. This next–generation shell is also a full–blown scripting environment with a real programming language that allows users to access every part of their operating system. Files, registry entries, and COM and .NET objects are all supported by PowerShell, which makes manipulating them a breeze.

Pro Windows PowerShell will show you how to use all this power in your own work. You’ll discover the object–oriented features of the shell and how they help in extracting and manipulating data. You’ll then learn how to use those features to solve real–world problems: manipulating files, working with text, monitoring systems, and performing operations over the network. The book serves as not only a tutorial, but also a reference: the “Real World” part is structured so that it can be read nonlinearly and used as a reference or a cookbook. And you’ll find freely available tools and extensions that will help you do things even faster.

Pro Windows PowerShell is your best companion to the capabilities and power that PowerShell offers you. Download Now »

Book Description

Whether you’re moving to .NET for the first time, or you’re already writing applications on .NET 2.0 or .NET 3.0, Pro VB 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform will provide you with a solid grounding in this new technology and serve as a comprehensive reference throughout your coding career:

• Explore five new chapters of content—including the grammar of the common intermediate language (CIL), .NET generics, and object serialization services.
• Discover all the new .NET 3.5 features—nullable types, delegate covariance, ASP.NET 2.0 master pages, the new Windows Forms “Strip” controls, and much more.
• Get a professional foothold—targeted to appeal to experienced software professionals and/or graduate students of computer science (so don’t expect three chapters on iteration or decision constructs!).
• Gain a rock–solid foundation in programming using Visual Basic.
• Get comfortable with all the core aspects of the .NET platform—including assemblies, remoting, Windows Forms, Web Forms, ADO.NET, XML web services, and much more.

Once you’ve digested the information contained in the 25 chapters of this 1000+ page book, you’ll be ready to apply this knowledge to your specific programming assignments and well equipped to explore the .NET universe on your own. Download Now »

Book Description

Many would argue that the single, most important job of a SQL Server database administrator is to be able to recover your database in the event of loss or damage. Pro SQL Server Disaster Recovery helps you meet that goal by showing you how to think about and plan for potential problems. You’ll learn to anticipate and reduce the likelihood of a disaster, and to mitigate the effects of a disaster when one does occur. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll learn how to prepare so that you can return a system to its normal state quickly, ensuring system availability and the continued success and operation of your business.

Many SQL Server features and technologies are, or can be put to good use in disaster recovery planning. In this book, you’ll learn about powerful tools and features — such as Database Snapshots and Mirroring — for data backup and disaster recovery that are present in SQL Server 2005, and that are enhanced in SQL Server 2008. Also covered are common issues to expect when using these features. This book explores your options by examining the technical details of disaster recovery features and then applying that knowledge to practical scenarios.

There’s a human side to disaster recovery planning as well. Like few other activities, disaster recovery planning requires that you work closely with a wide variety of people from all across your organization. People skills are as critical to disaster recovery planning as technical skills, and perhaps more so. This book does not leave you in the dark, but provides sound advice on how to keep disaster recovery planning projects on track, how to avoid dangerous scope creep, and how to work effectively with the variety of personality types that you will encounter.

Disaster recovery planning is really about sleep. When you get the call at 3:00 am that your database is lost, don’t wake up with that icy feeling in your veins. Instead wake up with confidence that you have a plan in place, a plan that you’ve practiced, that management has bought into, a plan that you can execute even while half–asleep to get your database, your company, and your job back on track. Download Now »

Book Description

Taking care to focus solely on those topics that will have the most impact on experienced PHP developers, Pro PHP is written for readers seeking to take their understanding of both PHP and sound software development practices to the next level. Advanced object–oriented features, documentation, debugging, software patterns, and the Standard PHP Library are just a few of the topics covered in extensive detail.

Author and noted PHP expert Kevin McArthur also examines emerging practices and trends such as the MVC architecture as applied to PHP, with special emphasis placed upon the increasingly popular Zend Framework.

With Ajax and web services crucial to the success of todays web applications, the book concludes with several chapters covering JSON, the SOAP extension, and advanced web services topics.

If youre seeking to go beyond the basics, Pro PHP is the book for you. Download Now »

Book Description

The highly anticipated JavaFX™ technology and platform is essentially Sun’s approach to Adobe Flash and Microsoft’s emerging Silverlight. JavaFX lets developers play with the open source scripting, desktop, and mobile APIs offered to create dynamic, seamless visual user interfaces (UIs) that are “Flash–like” and beyond…

Learn from bestselling JavaFX author Jim Weaver and expert JavaFX developers Weiqi Gao, Stephen Chin, and Dean Iverson to discover the highly anticipated JavaFX technology and platform that enables developers and designers to create RIAs that can run across diverse devices. Covering the JavaFX Script language, JavaFX Mobile, and development tools, Pro JavaFX™ Platform: Script, Desktop and Mobile RIA with Java™ Technology provides code examples that cover virtually every language and API feature.

This book contains

• Tutorials that teach JavaFX to an application developer or graphics designer who has had no exposure to JavaFX. These tutorials will be exhaustive, covering virtually every facet of JavaFX Script.
• Reference materials on JavaFX that augment what is available from the JavaFX Language Reference and API documentation.
• JavaFX on other platforms besides the desktop, such as mobile.

Visit projavafx.com for more resources and information from the authors. Download Now »

Book Description

Joomla!, exclamation point and all, is one of the most searched–for and hired–for open source content management systems in the world. Since 2007, the combination of Joomla! and Dan Rahmel’s bestselling Beginning Joomla!, From Novice to Professional have made it so that all you have to do is read a single book to learn how to build sites that take community–authored content and turn it instantly into published web pages with all the latest features like rich templating, community member profile management, forums, photo management, and article commenting.

Now revised and updated for the new Joomla! 1.6, this second edition “job–in–a–book” provides the solid core of know–how that you’ll need to get the most out of your Joomla! deployment, written to fully exploit the features of latest version of Joomla!. More than just a simple “build a toy web site” guide, Beginning Joomla!, Second Edition will give you a wealth of life–saving tips, tricks, tools, and fixes that experienced Joomla! developers use to build powerful, popular web sites while avoiding major headaches. This book covers

• How to use content versioning and multi–blogger support, among the latest changes to Joomla!
• Access management and how documents, photos, and other content are managed in Joomla! 1.6
• E–commerce integration, search engine optimization, and even extending Joomla! by creating your own plug–ins
• And much more… Download Now »