================================================================ O'Reilly News for User Group Members October 15, 2003 ================================================================ ---------------------------------------------------------------- Book News ---------------------------------------------------------------- -Windows Server 2003 in a Nutshell -ADO.NET Cookbook -Excel Pocket Guide -Active Directory Cookbook -Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics -Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide -Programming ASP.NET, 2nd Edition -J2EE Design Patterns ---------------------------------------------------------------- Upcoming Events ---------------------------------------------------------------- -Brent Chapman ("Building Internet Firewalls"), BayLISA Author Event, Cupertino, CA--Oct 16, 2003 -Louis Rosenfeld ("Information Architecture for the World Wide Web"), Enterprise Information Architecture Seminar, San Francisco, CA-- Oct 20, 2003 -David Jordan ("Java Data Objects"), Colorado Software Summit, Summit County, CO--Oct 26-31, 2003 -USENIX LISA Conference, San Diego, CA--Oct 26-31, 2003 ---------------------------------------------------------------- Conferences ---------------------------------------------------------------- -Virginia Tech Building Power Mac G5 Supercomputer ---------------------------------------------------------------- News ---------------------------------------------------------------- -Enter the Great TiVo Giveaway -Fall Sale: O'Reilly CD Bookshelves -Take an O'Reilly Poll -Sending SMS Messages Using Windows XP -Adding System Calls -PHP Survey -Denial-of-Service Attacks -XML Parsing in a Producer-Consumer Model -SearchAssist: A Portable Search Engine in Java -.NET Serialization, Part 1 -Understanding Reflection, Part 1 -Cooking with ActionScript -Apple Wireless Mouse and Keyboard Tips and Tricks -Ten Things I Dig About Panther -Fast Picture Previews ================================================ Book News ================================================ Did you know you can request a free book to review for your group? Ask your group leader for more information. For book review writing tips and suggestions, go to: http://ug.oreilly.com/bookreviews.html Don't forget, you can receive 20% off any O'Reilly book you purchase directly from O'Reilly. Just use code DSUG when ordering online or by phone 800-998-9938. http://www.oreilly.com/ ***Free ground shipping is available for online orders of at least $29.95 that go to a single U.S. address. This offer applies to U.S. delivery addresses in the 50 states and Puerto Rico. For more details, go to: http://www.oreilly.com/news/freeshipping_0703.html ***Windows Server 2003 in a Nutshell Order Number: 4044 "Windows Server 2003 in a Nutshell" is the most thorough and practical reference to Microsoft's new server, with complete coverage of both the GUI and command-line features, functions, and commands. Each topic begins with a description of basic concepts, followed by a description of tools used to administer the feature, instructions on how to perform common administrative tasks, and notes detailing subtle points and potential gotchas. This comprehensive guide is ideal for administration and deployment, as well as deeper issues such as planning, configuring, and troubleshooting. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/winsvrian/ Chapter 2, "2000-2003," is available online: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/winsvrian/chapter/index.html ***ADO.NET Cookbook Order Number: 4397 "ADO.NET Cookbook" is a comprehensive collection of over 150 solutions andbest practices for everyday dilemmas. For each problem addressed in the book, there's a recipe--a short, focused piece of code that programmers can insert directly into their applications. The book provides clear explanations of how and why the code works, warns of potential pitfalls, and directs you to sources of additional information, so you can learn to adapt the problem-solving techniques to different situations. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/adonetckbk/ Chapter 8, "Working with XML," is available online: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/adonetckbk/chapter/index.html ***Excel Pocket Guide Order Number: 5342 If you're new to Excel, this compact reference will get you up to speed quickly. The book covers such basics as creating workbooks, entering data,printing, cell formatting, and spell checking. If you consider yourself an advanced user, you'll be surprised and pleased with some of the new Excel tricks this book will teach you. It provides you with handy information on formulas, pivot tables, collaboration, and customization. This quick reference will help users at all levels of expertise become Excel experts. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/excelpg/ ***Active Directory Cookbook Order Number: 4648 "Active Directory Cookbook" contains hundreds of step-by-step solutions for problems you might encounter with Active Directory, as well as recipes to deal with features such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), multi-master replication, Domain Name System (DNS), Group Policy, and the Active Directory Schema. Each recipe includes a discussion of how and why the solution works, so you can adapt the problem-solving techniques to similar situations. This unique guide offers quick answers for both Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/activedckbk/ Chapter 8, "Computers," is online now: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/activedckbk/chapter/index.html ***Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics Order Number: 3072 "Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics" covers the core Perl language and many of its module extensions, presenting them in the context of biological data. This book starts where "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" leaves off, covering references, complex data structures, object-oriented programming, and module use. The book then presents advanced topics, including gene finding, string alignment, data storage and retrieval, and biological computation models. Full of real-world biological problem solving, this book is a must for anyone wanting to move beyond beginner-level Perl for bioinformatics. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mperlbio/ Chapter 9, "Introduction to Bioperl," is available online: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mperlbio/chapter/index.html ***Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide Order Number: 401X "Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide" begins with the Flash Remoting basics, and goes on to look at the server-side environment, covering Flash Remoting with ColdFusion, Server-Side ActionScript, Java, ASP.NET, and PHP. Then the book delves into more advanced Flash Remoting techniques, such as calling web services, extending objects and UI controls, best practices, and debugging. This book is rich with examples that you can run on your own system, and concludes with a Flash Remoting API reference. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/flashremoting/ Chapter 1, "Introduction to Flash Remoting," is available online: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/flashremoting/chapter/index.html ***Programming ASP.NET, 2nd Edition Order Number: 4877 "Programming ASP.NET, 2nd Edition" covers everything you need to know to be effective with ASP.NET. The book includes a comprehensive tutorial on Web Forms, which, in conjunction with Visual Studio .NET 2003, allows you to apply Rapid Application Development techniques (such as drag-and-drop control placement) to web development. Programming ASP.NET has extensive coverage of each type of server control, including web server controls, HTML server controls, and custom controls. New material covers creating ASP.NET pages for mobile devices. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/progaspdotnet2/ Chapter 6, "Programming Web Forms," is available online: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/progaspdotnet2/chapter/index.html ***J2EE Design Patterns Order Number: 4273 Rather than simply presenting another catalog of design patterns, this book broadens the scope by discussing ways to choose design patterns when building an enterprise application from scratch, looking closely at real-world trade-offs Java developers must weigh when architecting their applications. Once design pattern choices are made, the book shows how to apply them when writing software. J2EE Design Patterns also extends design patterns into areas not covered in other books, presenting original patterns for data modeling, transaction/process modeling, and interoperability. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/j2eedp/ Chapter 5, "Presentation Tier Scalability," is available online: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/j2eedp/chapter/index.html ================================================ Upcoming Events ================================================ ***For more events, please see: http://events.oreilly.com/ ***Brent Chapman ("Building Internet Firewalls"), BayLISA Author Event, Cupertino, CA--Oct 16, 2003 Author Brent Chapman answers the question "MBAs for Sysadmins: Why would a hard-core techie like me get an MBA?" for members of the Bay Area Large Installation System Administrators. http://www.baylisa.org/events/ ***Louis Rosenfeld ("Information Architecture for the World Wide Web"), Enterprise Information Architecture Seminar, San Francisco, CA-- Oct 20, 2003 This author leads a daylong seminar to help managers and web professionals tie together content in a rational, user-centered way and develop a unified web site or intranet. http://louisrosenfeld.com/presentations/seminars/eia/ ***David Jordan ("Java Data Objects"), Colorado Software Summit, Summit County, CO--Oct 26-31, 2003 Author David Jordan is speaking at this conference focusing on Java and XML programming. http://www.softwaresummit.com/ ***USENIX LISA Conference, San Diego, CA--Oct 26-31, 2003 Authors David N. Blank-Edelman ("Perl for System Administration"), Gerald Carter ("LDAP System Administration"), D. Brent Chapman ("Building Internet Firewalls"), AEleen Frisch ("Essential System Administration, 3rd Edition"), Jeff Sedayao ("Cisco IOS Access Lists"), and Elizabeth Zwicky ("Building Internet Firewalls") are speakers at the 17th Systems Administration Conference. http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa03/ ================================================ Conference News ================================================ ***Virginia Tech Building Power Mac G5 Supercomputer The director of this Virginia Tech project, Srinidni Varadarajan, will take you inside the G5 supercluster to show you the challenges, opportunities, and rewards resulting from building the world's most impressive Mac cluster, at this year's O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference. http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/31485.html O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference October 27-30, 2003 Westin Santa Clara, Santa Clara, CA http://conferences.oreilly.com/macosxcon/ To register for the conference, go to: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/macosx2003/create/ord_mac03 ================================================ News From O'Reilly & Beyond ================================================ --------------------- General News --------------------- ***Enter the Great TiVo Giveaway Answer these questions for your chance to win an upgraded Philips HDR Tivo from WeaKnees with two 160GB hard drives for a total capacity of 344 hours. Ready for hacking! (Sorry, Available to U.S. residents only.) http://www.oreilly.com/promos/tivo_quiz.csp ***Fall Sale: O'Reilly CD Bookshelves For a limited time, we've put four of our most popular O'Reilly CD Bookshelves on sale. Each CD Bookshelf contains a searchable, cross-referenced O'Reilly library of 5 to 7 books, as well as a bonus print book. Order a Unix, XML, Networking, or Web Design CD Bookshelf, and save up to $70. (User Group discount does not apply.) http://cdbookshelves.oreilly.com/ ***Take an O'Reilly Poll We have a fun new poll available on our home page that changes frequently. Check it out! http://www.oreilly.com/ ***Sending SMS Messages Using Windows XP Wei-Meng Lee writes about the recent release of the free SMS Sender, which lets cell phone users send SMS messages from the comfort of their Windows XP computers. You need not envy Mac users anymore. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/10/10/sms.html --------------------- Open Source --------------------- ***Adding System Calls Kernel programming sometimes feels like a dark art where application programmers should never venture, but sometimes it's the right way to solve a problem. (Oh, and it's also very interesting.) One of the easiest places to start is by adding a new system call to a kernel. Kevin Lo explains how and why, with the OpenBSD kernel. http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/10/09/adding_system_calls.html ***PHP Survey Are you currently using PHP? What do you use it for? What database do you use most frequently with PHP? Please take a few minutes to tell us in our PHP Survey. Your answers will help us shape both our online and book publishing programs. http://www.zoomerang.com/recipient/survey-intro.zgi?ID=3Y1XRB4LBP95&PIN=7RNG1N74P7F4&PANEL= ***Denial-of-Service Attacks Noel Davis looks at denial-of-service attacks against Apache, OpenSSL, and FreeBSD, and problems in Perl, lsh, Teapop, ProFTPD, TclHttpd, MPlayer, Node, mpg123, and Freesweep. http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2003/10/06/insecurities.html --------------------- Java --------------------- ***XML Parsing in a Producer-Consumer Model Decent APIs such as SAX have made XML parsing much easier than in the old DOM and pre-DOM days. That doesn't mean it's completely natural, though, in all circumstances. Throw XML parsing into a multithreaded application and things can get weird quickly. That's where a different approach can help. Prabu Arumugam demonstrates the producer-consumer model, which can allow multithreaded XML processing. http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/10/08/multithreaded_xml.html ***SearchAssist: A Portable Search Engine in Java While server-side Java solves many problems, it's not always available. Besides, there's more to a good UI than HTML can provide. Sometimes an applet can fit the bill. Ashwin Jayaprakash demonstrates a search engine applet designed for portability and power. http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/10/01/searchassist.html --------------------- .NET --------------------- ***.NET Serialization, Part 1 Many a time, you may need to persist the value of an object to secondary storage. For example, you may wish to save the values of a couple of Point objects, representing the positioning of an item on screen, to secondary storage. The act of "flattening" an object into a serial form is known as serialization. Wei-Meng Lee discusses serialization as supported in the .NET framework--Binary and SOAP serialization. http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2003/10/13/serializationpt1.html ***Understanding Reflection, Part 1 Sometimes it is useful to be able to examine information about the objects in your applications. In this article, Nick Harrison starts you out with the basics of reflection. http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2003/10/06/reflectionpt1.html --------------------- Web --------------------- ***Cooking with ActionScript In part one learn how to format currency amounts, create timers and clocks, and use a unique depth when creating a movie clip. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/excerpt/ActionScriptCkbk_chap1/index.html In part two learn how to pause and resume a sound, save a local shared object, and search XML, in these sample recipes. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/excerpt/ActionScriptCkbk_chap1/index1.html --------------------- Mac --------------------- ***Apple Wireless Mouse and Keyboard Tips and Tricks The new Apple Wireless Mouse and Keyboard and two great peripherals that can spice up your computing life; here's how to make the most of them. http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/10/14/wireless.html ***Ten Things I Dig About Panther Now that the release of Panther is officially announced, it's time to take a close look at its key features. O'Reilly author James Duncan Davidson shows you the aspects of Panther that he really digs. http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/10/10/panther.html ***Fast Picture Previews Many photographers like to peek at their digital photos before uploading them into their digital shoebox. If that appeals to you, here's an easy to use procedure to preview and sort in the Mac Finder--even while the pictures are still on the memory card! http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/10/07/picture_preview.html Until next time-- Marsee __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com