New: All Things O'Reilly

Make Magazine Weekend Project: Beetlebot - Simple robot from your parts bin that avoids obstacles

O'Reilly Media — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:36:18 PST

Learning iPhone Programming: Rough Cuts Version

Alasdair Allan — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:02:10 PST

If you want to start programming for the iPhone or iPod Touch, this book is the easy-to-follow guide you need. You'll learn hands-on all about Xcode suite of tools, the Objective-C programming language, and the core frameworks by writing sample apps. Before you know it, you'll not only have the skills to develop your own app, you'll also easily handle the complex details of preparing and submitting apps to the App Store.

Developing Large Web Applications: Rough Cuts Version

O'Reilly Media, Inc. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:03:10 PST

As web applications get more complex, so do the challenges. These applications need to live up to demanding performance requirements, and be reliable 24/7, without exception. And they also need to withstand frequent modifications by many different programmers. If you're building a mission-critical site, this book will help you achieve the same rigor in web application development that has traditionally applied to other types of software.

jQuery Cookbook

O'Reilly Media, Inc. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:03:48 PST

Solutions & Examples for jQuery Developers

Asia Continues to be Facebook's Strongest Growth Region

Ben Lorica — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:38:35 PST

With Facebook topping 330 million active users over the past week, the company's strongest growth region continues to be Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook added close to 17M active users in Asia alone. Since my previous post, the share of active users from Asia grew by 2% (to 13.5% of all users), and roughly 1 in 7 users now come from the region. With a market penetration under 2%, Facebook is poised to add many more users in Asia (and Africa).

Four short links: 20 November 2009 - Social Network Search for Morons, Bulking Up Bio Data, Better E-Mail, Better Standards

Nat Torkington — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:39:35 PST

Introducing the Open Web Foundation Agreement -- Applying the open source approach to better standards. The Open Web Foundation Agreement itself establishes the copyright and patent rights for a specification, ensuring that downstream consumers may freely implement and reuse the licensed specification without seeking further permission. In addition to the agreement itself, we also created an easy-to-read "Deed" that provides a high level overview of the agreement. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Health gets personal in the cloud - Google Health Beta and Microsoft's My Health Info

Brian Ahier — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:40:35 PST

Healthcare in the near future will be quite different than it is today. Web enabled technology is already changing the way medicine is practiced. As the digital nation comes of age we will see new opportunities, and new challenges, bringing healthcare in America into the 21st century. Health consumers will come to expect they will have control over their own health data. Having secure, interoperable access to clinical data will allow patients to partner with their care providers in new ways incorporating Web 2.0 principles.

Google Closure: A New Way of Developing in JavaScript - A Guide and Links to Google Closure's Mature and Complex JavaScript Framework

Davide Zanotti — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:41:35 PST

Every day million people make use of Google products and these products are written mainly using one well known language: JavaScript! What makes this online software stable, fast and responsive is a good use of the language and an excellent system of data compression and asynchronous loading. Today this power is available to everyone, since Google has released its magic tool under Apache 2 license.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 One-on-One

Deke McClelland, Colleen Wheeler — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:08:30 PST

Master the fundamentals of Photoshop Elements 8 with Deke McClelland's unique and effective learning system. Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 One-on-One includes step-by-step tutorials, hours of DVD-video demonstrations, and hands-on projects to help you improve your knowledge and hone your skills. Once you read about a particular technique, you can see how it's done first-hand in the video. Learn to use Elements faster, more creatively, and more efficiently than you thought possible.

The Social Media Marketing Book

Dan Zarrella — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:09:30 PST

Take advantage of the phenomenon that is quickly becoming the most effective way to market brands, products, and services -- social media. This easy-to-understand book introduces you to social networks, blogging, and several other websites, and helps you plan and execute strategies with actionable advice every step of the way. Determine which networks fit your marketing program, and learn the techniques necessary to measure results and track return on investment.

Google Wave: Up and Running: Rough Cuts Version

O'Reilly Media, Inc. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:10:30 PST

Learn how to use and built extensions for Google Wave, the exciting new real-time communication and collaboration technology that unifies email, instant messaging (IM), wiki, and social networking functions in one integrated platform. With this book, you'll quickly learn about the Google Wave Client and how to use Google Wave's APIs to extend the platform and customize its functions and display.

Featured Ignite Video: Blessed Are the Cheesemakers - Episode 39

O'Reilly Media — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:49:52 PST

Subscribe to this video podcast series via iTunes. Or, visit the O'Reilly Media area at iTunes to find other podcasts from O'Reilly.

Open for Business - Designing Social Interfaces

Christian Crumlish — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:50:52 PST

This is an excerpt from Designing Social Interfaces. From the creators of Yahoo!'s Design Pattern Library, Designing Social Interfaces provides you with more than 100 patterns, principles, and best practices, along with salient advice for many of the common challenges you'll face when starting a social website. Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.

Four short links: 19 November 2009 - Chumby One, Gorgeous IE Debugger, Freer Than Free, and Phone-a-Friend for Government IT

Nat Torkington — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:51:52 PST

Less Than Free -- Begins by talking about Google giving away turn-by-turn directions on Android, and then analyses Google's "less than free" business model: Additionally, because Google has created an open source version of Android, carriers believe they have an “out” if they part ways with Google in the future. I then asked my friend, “so why would they ever use the Google (non open source) license version.” Here was the big punch line - because Google will give you ad splits on search if you use that version! That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the “less than free” business model. This is a remarkable card to play. Because of its dominance in search, Google has ad rates that blow away the competition. To compete at an equally “less than free” price point, Symbian or windows mobile would need to subsidize. Double ouch!! This and more in today's Four Short Links.

CarTunes

Peter Drescher — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:52:52 PST

Green Technologies and Interactive Audio are two fields not generally considered related, but a new trend may change that: "Generated Sounds for Electric Vehicles", aka "EV Audio", aka "CarTunes". When I first heard that "electric cars are so quiet, manufacturers want them to make noise", I had a strong memory flashback to 1995, when I was contracted to produce my first ringtone (Fur Elise for Sprint PCS). At the time, I thought "mobile phone plays melody when it rings" was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard of; now, it's a multi-billion dollar industry. If you think audio personalization of your cellphone is an important statement of your individuality (as many do), imagine how much more important personalizing the sound of your car will be!

Success of a Broadcast Medium: The Muzak Transmission Process

Andy Oram — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:53:52 PST

Muzak grew from constant technological innovation and originally succeeded as a broadcast medium using spare spectrum, a business model rarely examined today.

Visualizing Stackoverflow's data dump

Andrew Odewahn — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:54:52 PST

Stackoverflow releases a monthly XML data dump (CC-licensed) of all the data in their system. Unlike a lot of other data sets that just reflects what developers are buying, this data reflects what developers are actually using and asking questions about, which is pretty cool. I used this dataset to create a topic map that reflects the relationships among the top topics (based on how frequently the topic was used as a tag on a post) for the month of October, 2009. There was a lot of interesting stuff in here. For example, I love the fact that plain old "regex" is the main link between "php" and "c#." Also, it's interesting that only PHP has a direct link to various database topics; I would have expected databases to be more central.

Francesco Cesarini --Tutorial: Practical Erlang Programming - Feb 3 2010

Francesco Cesarini — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:13:44 PST

Francesco Cesarini (Erlang Programming) will give a tutorial on Practical Erlang Programming. The tutorial covers the basic, sequential and concurrent aspects of the Erlang programming language.

The Social Media Marketing Book--New from O'Reilly: Mastering Today's Marketing Tools

O'Reilly Media, Inc. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:13:54 PST

SEO Warrior--New from O'Reilly: Essential Techniques for Increasing Web Visibility

O'Reilly Media, Inc. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:14:54 PST

Effective UI

Jonathan Anderson, EffectiveUI Inc., John McRee, Robb Wilson — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:18:30 PST

Effective UI provides a complete roadmap to building groundbreaking software centered on user experience (UX) quality, how to get management support, employing product management strategies proven to deliver greater success, and how to manage the design, engineering, staffing, and business considerations that must be centered on the user's needs and working effectively in tandem all throughout the project. Effective UI is a guide for business and product, software professionals, and anyone else struggling to advance the cause of better UX and working to deliver on the promise of higher quality software.

CouchDB: The Definitive Guide

J. Chris Anderson, Jan Lehnardt, Noah Slater — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:19:30 PST

This book introduces you to Apache CouchDB, a document-oriented database designed to work with applications that handle commonplace information such as contacts, invoices, and receipts. In CouchDB: The Definitive Guide, three of the core developers gently explain how to work with CouchDB, using clear and practical scenarios. Each chapter showcases key features, such as simple document CRUD (create, read, update, delete), advanced MapReduce, and deployment tuning for performance and reliability.

Search Patterns

Jeff Callender, Peter Morville — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:20:30 PST

Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe. This provocative and inspiring book explores design patterns that apply across the categories of web, e-commerce, enterprise, desktop, mobile, social, and realtime search and discovery. Using colorful illustrations and examples, the authors bring modern information retrieval to life, covering such diverse topics as relevance ranking, faceted navigation, multi-touch, and augmented reality. Search Patterns challenges us to invent the future of discovery while serving as a practical guide to help us make search better today.

C# 4.0 in a Nutshell

Ben Albahari, Joseph Albahari — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:21:30 PST

When you need to look up the essentials of C# 4.0 language syntax and usage, or locate key information in the .NET base class libraries, this concise reference helps you find it quickly. C# 4.0 in a Nutshell thoroughly covers C# 4.0 programming as implemented in Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010, including new CLR 4.0 features such as dynamic typing and the PLINQ/TPL threading libraries.

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Jonathan Stark — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:22:30 PST

With this Early Release edition, you'll get the entire book in its earliest form -- the author's raw and unedited content -- so you can take advantage of this content long before the book's official release. You'll also receive updates when significant changes are made, as well as the final ebook version. All of this for a fraction of the price of the printed book.

It's a fact: if you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you already have what you need to develop your own iPhone apps. With this special Early Release ebook, you'll learn how to use these open source web technologies to design and build apps for both the iPhone and iPod Touch, on the platform of your choice. Device-agnostic apps are the wave of the future, especially for mobile devices, and this book shows you how to create, test, and convert one product that can be used on several platforms.