Go Beyond the Basics of Blogger with New Book

Blogger: Beyond the Basics is a new book from Packt, which will take users beyond the basics of Blogger. Written by Lee Jordan, this book will help users to take full advantage of the rich and powerful features of Blogger to transform their blog into a fresh and state-of-the-art blog as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Blogger is a blog publishing system from Google with a friendly interface specifically designed to create and maintain weblogs. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features including RSS feeds, link-backs, photo slideshows, and integration with popular Google applications like Picasa. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.

This book will focus on transforming a typical blog into something fresh and professional that stands out from the crowd. It starts with an introduction to an example blog, discussing what it is lacking, and then adding all the features of Blogger to make it successful. This book will show users how to transform a slow-paced typical business blog into an attractive and interactive profit-making blog with measurable results. It has a very user-friendly approach and shares tips, tricks, and resources to continue to grow their blog.

This book deals with using the current Blogger and third-party tools to optimize and create widgets for a blog. Users can transform their blog using existing tools then take it further with more challenging approaches to customizing their blog. All the steps involved in each example are listed under the section called "Time for action". Similarly, the results of that action are listed under the section called "What just happened". This structure adds to the clear, simple, and focused approach of the book.

The book is aimed at current users of the Blogger platform who want to get the most out of Blogger and people who use a different blogging platform and are planning on switching to Blogger. Blog owners who promote their own services, expertise, and products, and want to increase their blog's success by pushing the limits of what Blogger can do will get the most out of this book. The book doesn't require any specific knowledge of Blogger or the related technologies: RSS, CSS, HTML, and XML. Everything users need to know to grow beyond the basics is covered in this book.

How to Optimize Your Rails Projects for Speed and Concurrency -->

Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide (Pragmatic Bookshelf, $34.95, ISBN: 978-0-9787392-0-1) changes all of that by providing a consistent, level-headed book containing advice you can trust. You'll get the inside angle from those that have built, deployed, and maintained some of the largest Rails apps in production, anywhere.

First you'll learn how to build out your shared, virtual, or dedicated host. Then, you'll see how to build your applications for production and deploy them with one step, every time. Deploying Rails Applications will take you from a simple shared host through a highly scalable clustered and balanced setup with Nginx.

See how to tell whether you've bought enough firepower, and learn how to optimize your Rails projects applications in a systemic, rational way. Take advantage of advanced caching techniques, and become and expert with the latest servers in Nginx and Mongrel—you'll get a dose of Apache too.

You'll learn how to configure your production environment, and see how to monitor it with free, automated tools that can restart your servers when the memory use gets too high for comfort. You'll see how to take a performance baseline, profile for bottlenecks, and solve the most common performance problems you're likely to see.

With Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide you'll learn:

• Everything from source control and migrations to Capistrano, rake tasks and beyond.
• Directly from authors who run EngineYard, one of the best Rails hosts in the business.
• How to deploy your applications to multiple production servers with a single command using Capistrano.
• How to setup a Rails/Nginx/Mongrel cluster for applications with high scalabilty needs.

You've written the next killer app. Now is the time to learn how to deploy it. This book will do just that.

For a review copy or more information please email pragprogpr@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz has been working with computers since the 128k original Mac in 1987. He's worked in PHP and hand-blown glass art, and now uses Ruby for web application and system automation programming. His work as the webmaster for the Yakima Herald-Republic newspaper taught him a lot about Rails Deployment architecture and how to scale a Rails app. Since then he has built and deployed many Rails applications. From these deployments he has collected a play book of patterns and best practices for deploying and scaling rails applications.

Bruce A. Tate is a kayaker, mountain biker, and father of two. In his spare time, he is an independent consultant in Austin, Texas. In 2001, he founded J2Life, LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in Java persistence frameworks and lightweight development methods. His customers have included FedEx, Great West Life, TheServerSide, and BEA. He speaks at conferences and Java user's groups around the nation. Before striking out on his own, Bruce spent 13 years at IBM working on database technologies, object-oriented infrastructure, and Java. He was recruited away from IBM to help start the client services practice in an Austin startup called Pervado Systems. He later served a brief stint as CTO of IronGrid, which built nimble Java performance tools. Bruce is the author of four books, including the bestselling "Bitter Java", and the recently released Better, Faster, Lighter Java, from O'Reilly. First rule of kayak: When in doubt, paddle like Hell.

Clinton Begin has built a presence in both the enterprise and open source communities.  Having consulted as a Senior Developer and Agile Mentor for industry greats such as ThoughtWorks, Microsoft and Stanford University, his experiences have spanned a broad range of business and technical domains.  Clinton has applied agile methodologies, open source software, Java, .NET and Ruby to the development of large-scale applications. He is an experienced author, speaker, and has delivered formal presentations and training from San Francisco to New York City.

Additional Resources:
For more information about the book, including code, errata, discussions, table of contents, a chapter excerpt, and more, see: http://pragprog.com/titles/twa.

Deploying Rails Applications
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Bruce A. Tate
ISBN: 9781934356142, 248 pages, $38.95 USD, £24.50 GBP
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000

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Programming Groovy

Magma Interactive, LLC is extremely excited to announce that our latest publication, ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Pocket Guide by Matthew Ellis has been released and is available from the Magma Interactive online store, as well Amazon.com. What this book offers that no other book does, is a comprehensive, straight to the point, detailed guide on developing applications with the ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Framework. You'd be amazed at what we've crammed into this pocket guide! ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Pocket Guide includes as few pages as possible, but no fewer than required! With all of the large books available, you'll find ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Pocket Guide to be an unbeatable guide both in content and price!

You'll discover the detailed intricacies of the server-side and client-side library, as well as advanced AJAX topics, such as, Windows Communication Foundation web services, resource localization, how to build extender controls, how to use and install the AJAX Control Toolkit, how to use the application services (authentication, role, and profile) and last, but hardly least, the book wraps up the discussion with an advanced mashup utilizing Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo Geocode and Flickr to build a complete application named My Adventures.

For more information check out the Amazon.com product information page (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0970372035), Magma Interactive product information page (http://magmainteractive.net/Store/product/2c1800b8-0be2-411e-9acd-a5cc9a7f50ac.aspx) and the table of contents (http://downloads.magmainteractive.net/0970372035/0970372035_TOC.pdf) (Adobe PDF file).

All You Need to Manage and Administer Windows Server 2008 -->

One source of help for the beleaguered system administrator has always been the technical book market; each major operating system release has always been accompanied by books written to support it. But Jonathan Hassell, author Windows Server 2008: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly, US $54.99), reflects on an interesting phenomenon: "Over the years, many of these books have become as complex, and have accumulated as much detritus, as the operating systems they explain," he says. Bookstores are filled with 1200-plus page volumes that lead you through how things worked in the last four versions of the operating system. And Hassell's belief is that you don't need all that information to get your work done effectively.

"It was in this spirit that I set out to write Windows Server 2008: The Definitive Guide, he says. "I have trimmed the content of this volume to include just enough background on a subject for you to understand how different features and systems work in this version of Windows. I want you to come away from reading sections with a firm understanding of what's happening under the hood of the system, but without the sense that you're taking a graduate course in OS theory." Most of all, he has written the book to be a practical guide that helps sys admins get their jobs done: "here's how it works; here's how to do it."

The book offers step-by-step procedures for using all of the major components of Windows Server 2008, along with discussions on complex concepts such as Active Directory replication, DFS namespaces and replication, network access protection, the Server Core edition, Windows PowerShell, server clustering, and more. Simply put, this is the most thorough reference available for Windows Server 2008, with complete guides to:

• Installing the server in a variety of different environments
• File services and the Windows permission structure
• How the domain name system (DNS) works
• Active Directory, including its logical and physical structure, hierarchical components, scalability, and replication
• Group Policy's structure and operation
• Managing security policy with predefined templates and customized policy plans
• Architectural improvements, new features, and daily administration of IIS 7
• Terminal Services from both the administrator's user's point of view
• Networking architecture including DNS, DHCP, VPN, RADIUS server, IAS, and IPSec
• Windows clustering services--applications, grouping machines, capacity and network planning, user account management
• Windows PowerShell scripting and command-line technology

For a review copy or more information please email kathrynb@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.

Jonathan Hassell is a system administrator, IT consultant, and industry author residing in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Additional Resources:
For more information about the book, including table of contents, index, author bios, and cover graphic, see: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514112 9780596514112 -->

Business Thinking and Strategies Behind Successful Web 2.0 Implementations -->

• How is Web 2.0 different from the Web 1.0 dot-com boom and bust?
• How does Google offer "the world's knowledge" to searchers for free and still make more than 10 billion in revenue, grow 68%, and have a stock market valuation of close to $200 billion?
• What could possibly make Flickr--a two-year-old photo-sharing startup--worth $40 million to Yahoo!, a video-sharing YouTube worth $1.6 billion to Google, or a social networking site called Facebook worth the equivalent of $15 billion to Microsoft?
• Is Web 2.0 about corporate blogging, wikis and podcasting, or something else entirely?

Amy Shuen's new book Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide (O'Reilly, US $24.99) answers these questions, and explains what's different about Web 2.0 and how those differences can improve your company's bottom line. Using real-life examples, Shuen demonstrates how various companies, large and small, are creating new opportunities on today's Web and shows how you can apply the same strategies to your own business.

"You're already an integral part of the Web 2.0 business economy," Shuen explains. "Every time you click on Google, Wikipedia, eBay, or Amazon, you are sparking 'network effects.' If you use a Flickr-enabled cell phone or tune in to iTunes podcasts or check Yahoo! Finance for stock quotes, you are creating monetizable value for businesses--even if you don't actually buy anything."

Rather than focus on the technology, the examples in Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide concentrate on its effect. You will learn that creating a Web 2.0 business, or integrating Web 2.0 strategies with your existing business, means creating places online where people like to come together to share what they think, see, and do. When people come together over the Web, the result can be much more than the sum of the parts. The customers themselves help build the site, as old-fashioned "word of mouth" becomes hypergrowth.

"I wrote the book to change the mindset and answer the questions that colleagues, CEOs, MBAs, technical managers, investors, and analysts--informally or in one of my exec ed programs or consulting projects--would ask me about the 'buzz and hype' surrounding Web 2.0 companies and projects," says Shuen, adding that her audience includes any of these people who want to thrive and survive in a hyper-networked Web 2.0 economy.

According to Tim O'Reilly, there is still a lot left to learn about Web 2.0. "The Web 2.0 revolution continues," he says in his foreword to the book, "and every day, entrepreneurs are finding new ways to apply the principles of Web 2.0. I expect more surprises and new success stories. But for now, this book is the best starting point for any company that wants to understand and apply Internet-era business strategy."

For a review copy or more information please email kathrynb@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.

Amy Shuen is an internationally recognized authority on Silicon Valley business models and innovation economics, frequent speaker at industry conferences and venture capital events, and an award-winning strategy researcher.

Additional Resources: