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Is there an O'Reilly book that isn't useful or somewhat entertaining?

I don't find any of these useful or entertaining. ;)

There are some sample hacks on the O'Reilly webpage for the book, which is also available as part of the O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf for those that subscribe to the service.

There are some sample hacks on the O'Reilly webpage for the book, which is also available as part of the O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf for those that subscribe to the service.

There are some sample hacks on the O'Reilly webpage for the book, which is also available as part of the O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf for those that subscribe to the service.

Not to say that it's not cool. I've been using 144Kbps to stay connected from my favorite brewpub while writing my latest book (the sequel to Llama book). Nice.

Of course, if I could just convince them to install an 802.11 link... that'd be so much nicer. {grin}

For a few insights into this rebellion against control, read Free as in Freedom and Why GNU su does not support the wheel group.

The book can be found online here.

It's really worth reading. RMS's biography. Give it a try.

I dont belive you're being fair. FSF was there a long time before Linux (and I mean the kernel) come out. I wouldn't call their work "contributions to the Linux movement".

And about "renaming Linux" (to GNU/Linux)... you should distinguish the kernel, that is Linux, from the whole OS, which is usually called Linux but some feel that it would be better called GNU/Linux.

Remember that Linus started Linux because he wanted to run GNU software in a x86 without having to pay for a non-free OS/kernel. As Linus himself said in the famous Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate:

If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't. Linux wins heavily on points of being available now.

"I was devastated by the fear, but I couldn't imagine what to do and didn't have the guts to go demonstrate," recalls Stallman, whose March 18th birthday earned him a dreaded low number in the draft lottery when the federal government finally eliminated college deferments in 1971."

Taken from the Free as in Freedom, which you can read here.

I remembered this because I thought I shared a birthday with RMS. Perhaps I was wrong after all.

And here is where you go to read O'reilly on Herbert

The real story is a very interesting one, and anyone interested should do one of two things: Either read the condensed version as one of the chapters of the book Open Sources or go buy a copy of the videotape of Kirk telling the story himself (surely the best $49 I've ever spent on videotape).

perl -MLWP::Simple -e'print get "http://www.noodleroni.com/beerlyrics.txt"'

Or, using my WWW::Mechanize module,

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use WWW::Mechanize;

my $agent = new WWW::Mechanize();
$agent->get( 'http://www.noodleroni.com/beerlyrics.txt' );
print $agent->content;

There is a book on the O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf (free trial available)called IT Organization : Building A World Class infrastructure. While not 100% devoted to your topic of interest, some sections from the Table of Contents seem like they may help you.

Good luck.

There is a book on the O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf (free trial available)called IT Organization : Building A World Class infrastructure. While not 100% devoted to your topic of interest, some sections from the Table of Contents seem like they may help you.

Good luck.

Sorry, but I get tired of people always saying this type of thing

The truth is, sometimes it is the truth (well, the "Use FreeBSD" crack might not be).

I work tech support for lusers, and one day my boss got a complaint from a luser that all we knew how to do was reboot the computer if its not working. He came to me with the complaint, and I told him, "You know what? At least 90% of the time the problem is fixed."

I know the Linux IRC channel I frequent tries to discourage people from using sendmail when they ask for help with it. This is because they almost always have no clue what they are doing, and almost always have no desire to read the book (1200+ pages). There is 1200 pages of documentation, and the person almost always is too clueless to ask for anything more specific than "help". So we tell them to use something else, rather than try to explain 1200 pages of options, configuration, and usage. Problem solved.

Here is a clickable link.

• PHP Cookbook
• Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL

Both have at least good reviews (I have the 2nd, and I like it a lot). Not sure how them compare against the one of the article, but at least with fewer authors they don't have so much repetitions.

• PHP Cookbook
• Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL

Both have at least good reviews (I have the 2nd, and I like it a lot). Not sure how them compare against the one of the article, but at least with fewer authors they don't have so much repetitions.

Are you sure they weren't confused a decade ago? Back then, books had titles like The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog, and meant it. There were far fewer people's writing samples sitting on a network for you to read.

But, since its a fair question, I checked. Yes, everyone did it back then too.

For me, the site is good example of what else you can do with google if you go a bit under the plain interface it have, but, like in the World of Ends site say for internet, the main google interface and main use should be as "dumb" as it is now, and top of it anyone could do this kind of hacks (you can do even a directory of hacks, like Yahoo but pointing to google hacks for each category)

With Google's new API ( http://www.google.com/apis/ ) using search engines is now even more fun and flexible. Since I first started playing with the API in April 2002, I've had several different ideas for ways to make the best use of it. Some of the ideas are little "sketches", while some are more thought-out programs.

This toolbox is a workbench for me to play with different ideas online, and make the interfaces publicly available so you can take a look at them too. So poke around, try the tools, and if you've got any ideas let me know what you think. Some of these tools, with codes and discussion about how they work, are available in the O'Reilly book Google Hacks.

If you want to use these tools, please please PLEASE consider getting a key from http:// www.google.com/apis/ . All you'll have to do is register. Programs will have key interfaces added to them over time. I only have one key, and it can be used only 1000 times a day, so with all these tools that key isn't going to go far. Some of the tools don't use the API key, thank goodness.

This Web site is so not finished it's not even funny. Pardon any dead-ends or under- constructions.

The latest tools:

You plagarized that word for word from http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ki rkmck.html. Why don't you cite your references next time?

I imagine it's relavent because it shows that Novel, purchaser of Unix System Labs, forgave any losses that might have arising from dissemination of trade secrets in 1993. It also shows that the whole nightmare has happened before, sort of like the MPAA's attack on the VCR coming back to life in the form of DRM.

You must know this book front and back.

The 3rd edition is already available: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/puis3/

I know, this one could talk less about firewalls and windows and more about unix, but anyway, is good to see in what is better and in what not.

My university has what amounts to a campus-wide subscription. Can't hurt to check if you're a student/faculty at an academic institution.

• ...There's a common misperception that, because there are no printing and shipping charges, ebooks should be less expensive than print books. Yet, these functions account for only about 15 percent of a book's cost...
  

• 
  [links:]
  DocBook - DocBook reference online (free)
  Interview with Jon Udell about Safari - http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/news/udell_0301.ht ml
  Open books - http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ free and out of print books online.

• ...There's a common misperception that, because there are no printing and shipping charges, ebooks should be less expensive than print books. Yet, these functions account for only about 15 percent of a book's cost...
  

• 
  [links:]
  DocBook - DocBook reference online (free)
  Interview with Jon Udell about Safari - http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/news/udell_0301.ht ml
  Open books - http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ free and out of print books online.

• ...There's a common misperception that, because there are no printing and shipping charges, ebooks should be less expensive than print books. Yet, these functions account for only about 15 percent of a book's cost...
  

• 
  [links:]
  DocBook - DocBook reference online (free)
  Interview with Jon Udell about Safari - http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/news/udell_0301.ht ml
  Open books - http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ free and out of print books online.

• ...There's a common misperception that, because there are no printing and shipping charges, ebooks should be less expensive than print books. Yet, these functions account for only about 15 percent of a book's cost...
  

• 
  [links:]
  DocBook - DocBook reference online (free)
  Interview with Jon Udell about Safari - http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/news/udell_0301.ht ml
  Open books - http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ free and out of print books online.

• ...There's a common misperception that, because there are no printing and shipping charges, ebooks should be less expensive than print books. Yet, these functions account for only about 15 percent of a book's cost...
  

• 
  [links:]
  DocBook - DocBook reference online (free)
  Interview with Jon Udell about Safari - http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/news/udell_0301.ht ml
  Open books - http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ free and out of print books online.

Not to say I'm not glad they made that choice, I am, I'm just not convinced that their intentions were necessarily, "pure".

Jon Udell explains why here:

http://www.oreilly.com/news/udell_0301.html

If its a conceptual book to be read from first page to last (i.e. DNS and BIND, or Web Database Applications with PHP and Mysql to name a few) I prefer them in paper, so I can read them in bed, in the bathroom, in a bus or in the beach, where I'm more comfortable for the time that I will be reading it... at least, for the first time is a must.

In the other hand, books like the "in a nutshell" series, or dictionary-like books, or books where I have to read or focus only in one chapter without having to read all to understand, are best reading in a computer. In this category I surely put "books" like the PHP annotated manual. Also for this are best the "cookbooks" or the books that would be useful to have cut and paste. Or even the conceptual books of the first kind, once you have readed it in a printed version and the concepts are enough, but you have to verify something or reread some chapter.

If its a conceptual book to be read from first page to last (i.e. DNS and BIND, or Web Database Applications with PHP and Mysql to name a few) I prefer them in paper, so I can read them in bed, in the bathroom, in a bus or in the beach, where I'm more comfortable for the time that I will be reading it... at least, for the first time is a must.

In the other hand, books like the "in a nutshell" series, or dictionary-like books, or books where I have to read or focus only in one chapter without having to read all to understand, are best reading in a computer. In this category I surely put "books" like the PHP annotated manual. Also for this are best the "cookbooks" or the books that would be useful to have cut and paste. Or even the conceptual books of the first kind, once you have readed it in a printed version and the concepts are enough, but you have to verify something or reread some chapter.

Yeah, and That Guy That Wrote That Regular Expression Book used to work there. He wrote the Japanese dictionary server that I use, too.

I have a book, entitled Applying RCS and SCCS , published by O'Reilly, dated 1995. I'm not sure how long I've owned it, but it's collected at least two years' of dust on my shelf.

It's a good point, but what are the alternatives?

I've just bough myself a book on XML, and while I can see the idea it's far to bloated, computationally and financially expensive* to use day to day. It seems that it's been taken and Sure, XML as a data interchange method is useful, add a DTD and you can do some validation.

* I worked for a company that was crippled by a management descissions to use Java/XML. We were quite happy with mod_perl before. The bill came in at ~2,000,000 plus a stock control system at ~7,000,000. All singing and dancing, when the bespoke stuff we had before did the job fine.

The two books I can recommend are: Open Sources and Cathedral and the Bazaar. Both are published by O'Reilly. They are quick, invaluable in your quest to understand the open source movement, and in paperback.

It's true in that just making your application open source doesn't mean the world suddenly does all your work. To steal a common ad slogan, "Open source developers don't make the software, they make it better". In otherwords, there is always a core development group that steers the project and do the majority of the work. But once you open source, I think you'll find patches slowly come in plus developers taking the code and doing original things with it.

Of course, the better the code is to begin with, the easier it is for developers to get started with it. I believe this is one of the main reasons the mozilla project took so long to really get rolling. Their original code base was a mess, and the average developer could not just "jump right in". If your code is clean and workable, then you'll see a normal pace of outside work.

Good luck, and congrats! Going open source will definitely help you and the project out.

The two books I can recommend are: Open Sources and Cathedral and the Bazaar. Both are published by O'Reilly. They are quick, invaluable in your quest to understand the open source movement, and in paperback.

It's true in that just making your application open source doesn't mean the world suddenly does all your work. To steal a common ad slogan, "Open source developers don't make the software, they make it better". In otherwords, there is always a core development group that steers the project and do the majority of the work. But once you open source, I think you'll find patches slowly come in plus developers taking the code and doing original things with it.

Of course, the better the code is to begin with, the easier it is for developers to get started with it. I believe this is one of the main reasons the mozilla project took so long to really get rolling. Their original code base was a mess, and the average developer could not just "jump right in". If your code is clean and workable, then you'll see a normal pace of outside work.

Good luck, and congrats! Going open source will definitely help you and the project out.

Hmmm. Is it now time to download an iso & write a couple of configuration files? At 1232 printed pages, sendmail is starting looking like a good candidate to keep some of my other books about fighting the good fight company.

MICROSOFT SHARED SOURCE CLI, C#, AND JSCRIPT LICENSE

This License governs use of the accompanying Software, and your use of
the Software constitutes acceptance of this license.

You may use this Software for any non-commercial purpose, subject to
the restrictions in this license. Some purposes which can be
non-commercial are teaching, academic research, and personal
experimentation. You may also distribute this Software with books or
other teaching materials, or publish the Software on websites, that
are intended to teach the use of the Software.

You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in
any form for commercial purposes. Examples of commercial purposes
would be running business operations, licensing, leasing, or selling
the Software, or distributing the Software for use with commercial
products.

You may modify this Software and distribute the modified Software for
non-commercial purposes, however, you may not grant rights to the
Software or derivative works that are broader than those provided by
this License. For example, you may not distribute modifications of
the Software under terms that would permit commercial use, or under
terms that purport to require the Software or derivative works to be
sublicensed to others.

You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after
accessing the Software. However, this right does not grant you a
license to any of Microsoft's copyrights or patents for anything you
might create using such information.

In return, we simply require that you agree:

1. Not to remove any copyright or other notices from the Software.

2. That if you distribute the Software in source or object form,
you will include a verbatim copy of this license.

3. That if you distribute derivative works of the Software in
source code form you do so only under a license that
includes all of the provisions of this License, and if you
distribute derivative works of the Software solely in object
form you do so only under a license that complies with this
License.

4. That if you have modified the Software or created derivative
works, and distribute such modifications or derivative
works, you will cause the modified files to carry prominent
notices so that recipients know that they are not receiving
the original Software. Such notices must state: (i) that
you have changed the Software; and (ii) the date of any
changes.

5. THAT THE SOFTWARE COMES "AS IS", WITH NO WARRANTIES. THIS
MEANS NO EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY WARRANTY, INCLUDING
WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR ANY WARRANTY OF TITLE OR
NON-INFRINGEMENT. ALSO, YOU MUST PASS THIS DISCLAIMER ON
WHENEVER YOU DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE OR DERIVATIVE WORKS.

6. THAT MICROSOFT WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES RELATED TO
THE SOFTWARE OR THIS LICENSE, INCLUDING DIRECT, INDIRECT,
SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, TO THE MAXIMUM
EXTENT THE LAW PERMITS, NO MATTER WHAT LEGAL THEORY IT IS
BASED ON. ALSO, YOU MUST PASS THIS LIMITATION OF LIABILITY
ON WHENEVER YOU DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE OR DERIVATIVE
WORKS.

7. That if you sue anyone over patents that you think may apply
to the Software or anyone's use of the Software, your
license to the Software ends automatically.

8. That your rights under the License end automatically if you
breach it in any way.

9. Microsoft reserves all rights not expressly granted to you in
this license.

MICROSOFT SHARED SOURCE CLI, C#, AND JSCRIPT LICENSE

This License governs use of the accompanying Software, and your use of
the Software constitutes acceptance of this license.

You may use this Software for any non-commercial purpose, subject to
the restrictions in this license. Some purposes which can be
non-commercial are teaching, academic research, and personal
experimentation. You may also distribute this Software with books or
other teaching materials, or publish the Software on websites, that
are intended to teach the use of the Software.

You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in
any form for commercial purposes. Examples of commercial purposes
would be running business operations, licensing, leasing, or selling
the Software, or distributing the Software for use with commercial
products.

You may modify this Software and distribute the modified Software for
non-commercial purposes, however, you may not grant rights to the
Software or derivative works that are broader than those provided by
this License. For example, you may not distribute modifications of
the Software under terms that would permit commercial use, or under
terms that purport to require the Software or derivative works to be
sublicensed to others.

You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after
accessing the Software. However, this right does not grant you a
license to any of Microsoft's copyrights or patents for anything you
might create using such information.

In return, we simply require that you agree:

1. Not to remove any copyright or other notices from the Software.

2. That if you distribute the Software in source or object form,
you will include a verbatim copy of this license.

3. That if you distribute derivative works of the Software in
source code form you do so only under a license that
includes all of the provisions of this License, and if you
distribute derivative works of the Software solely in object
form you do so only under a license that complies with this
License.

4. That if you have modified the Software or created derivative
works, and distribute such modifications or derivative
works, you will cause the modified files to carry prominent
notices so that recipients know that they are not receiving
the original Software. Such notices must state: (i) that
you have changed the Software; and (ii) the date of any
changes.

5. THAT THE SOFTWARE COMES "AS IS", WITH NO WARRANTIES. THIS
MEANS NO EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY WARRANTY, INCLUDING
WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR ANY WARRANTY OF TITLE OR
NON-INFRINGEMENT. ALSO, YOU MUST PASS THIS DISCLAIMER ON
WHENEVER YOU DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE OR DERIVATIVE WORKS.

6. THAT MICROSOFT WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES RELATED TO
THE SOFTWARE OR THIS LICENSE, INCLUDING DIRECT, INDIRECT,
SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, TO THE MAXIMUM
EXTENT THE LAW PERMITS, NO MATTER WHAT LEGAL THEORY IT IS
BASED ON. ALSO, YOU MUST PASS THIS LIMITATION OF LIABILITY
ON WHENEVER YOU DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE OR DERIVATIVE
WORKS.

7. That if you sue anyone over patents that you think may apply
to the Software or anyone's use of the Software, your
license to the Software ends automatically.

8. That your rights under the License end automatically if you
breach it in any way.

9. Microsoft reserves all rights not expressly granted to you in
this license.

Well then can you recommend some non-bias .NET books?

To be honest, I can't--I don't use .NET and haven't had a need to read about it in-depth. I was making more of a general comment about understanding the backgrounds of authors before deciding whether they'll be reasonably objective about their subject matter.

Obviously, anyone who writes a good book on any subject needs to be an expert of the same--and I doubt someone who isn't at least favorable towards a given technology will be motivated to write about it. (I note that one of the co-authors of the O'Reilly book C# Essentials, for instance, is an engineer at Microsoft. And Programming Perl might be far less useful if Larry Wall hadn't had a hand in writing it.)

Having said that, I think you can peruse books from certain "independent" publishers with a fair amount of confidence that its authors aren't simply shills for their favorite technology vendor. O'Reilly, IMO, publishes the best tech books in the business, and I've never come across one that sounds like an extended marketing brochure. I also have had good luck with Wrox titles. As always, YMMV.

For a similar, but maybe more technical overview, see .Net Framework Essentials from O'Reilly. It's a nice short book with a good number of simple code examples. I'm about half-way through it, and I've learned a lot.

• Jython is a Python scripting engine for Java. There, now you can use Python within the JVM! <sarcasm>Get the worst of both worlds!</sarcasm\>
• Rhino is a Javascript engine for Java.
• Jacl is a TCL engine for Java.
• Bean Sripting Framework is a generic wrapper for including scripting languages within your application. It's from IBM, and is intended to abstract away the implementation of the scripting language. It supports Jython, Jacl, and Rhino now. It seems like I remember IBM releasing something for REXX as well.

Performance isn't great, but reports have indicated that Jython is about 75% of the performance (near the end of the article...search for the word "performance") of CPython. It's slower than Java code of the same type. But, hey, if you wanted speed you wouldn't be using interpreted code (or byte-code interpreted code, for that matter), right?

Funny how you mention half-blind.

SVG is one of the few 'imaging technologies' that has very good support for accessibility. Each drawn object can have a title and a description, so whereas you see a "stuffed garbage can", the braille user-agent would output the desc text: "Garbage Can containing more than 1 MB of trash".

SVG could also be used for an org charts, and instead of having a long 'alt' tag would probably be out of sync with the 'gif', the blind user would be able to read the contents of each box, and depending on how the SVG is structured (with groups and defs), even get an idea of how the boxes are related.

Also, SVG supports CSS, so you can have different stylesheets for different media (screen, printer, cell-phone-screen, and even braille and audio).

As far as an imaging technology goes, since it's just another XML format, you can grab an XML document (say in the Weather Observation Markup Format) and use XSLT to output a nice SVG graphic showing the weather. (In fact, that's one of the example used in O'Reilly's SVG Essentials).

I've just started using SVG (with Python) as a way to transform map data from the US Govt and make nice little SVG maps for my browser (kind of like a hand-rolled Mapquest).

Programmers familiar with XML will be able to make some neat (albeit very ugly) stuff. Designers who know the fancier drawing tools will be able to make some pretty nice-looking stuff. Put 'em together and you can have some nice smart graphics. Will it replace flash? Who knows.

My offtopic question is: why doesn't this happen with Linux ? (or does it happen with Linux?)

I don't use Linux and I'm not a bonafide geek (I've never had 'root' access, which seems to be one of the key requirements --- that may change now that I use Mac OS X), and I've always wondered why using fixes, new functions, patches, whatever, written by numerous different people hasn't turned Linux or other open source into a non-functioning morass of code. I read Eric Raymond's The Cathedral & the Bazaar but I didn't really feel like he answered the question, other than refering to the gospel of Linus "with enough eyes, any bug is shallow."

Isn't an operating system more complicated (or at least more fundamental) than an application? Why doesn't (or how often) does fixing one bug in Linux create two new ones?

blog-O-rama

> The indian version, really a reprint for sale only in India, sold at prakashbooks.com is offered at Rs. 276.50 (about $5.78)

Hmm... the O'Reilly books in India are far cheaper than the American versions too. But the quality? Incidentally, in India, L'Oréal, Kellogs, Sony ...etc cost much less than equivalent international prices, but almost all these companies cut corners in packaging, etc. [rant]In Sony's case, the quality of the product too[/rant].

In the end, I firmly believe you *do* get what you pay for. Whether the things that you don't get matter to you (in Kellogs and L'Oréal's cases, you lose out on the fancy packaging, for example).