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Computers and education frequently comes up in Steve Talbott's NetFuture e-zine, which can be accessed on O'Reilly's web site. Here's an example article from an indexed list of NetFuture articles on the subject.

Computers and education frequently comes up in Steve Talbott's NetFuture e-zine, which can be accessed on O'Reilly's web site. Here's an example article from an indexed list of NetFuture articles on the subject.

Steve Talbott has an excellent article on the relation between technology and craft/art.

I signed up today for one reason alone, you know all those overpriced DVD's of the documentaries and biographies you see on TV? They have them, although you wouldn't know it from the main page on their site due to poor infotecture.

Nobody has mentioned this yet, so I will. A research version of the CLR implements true generics, but because they only have limited resources, they decided not to include it in the first release. The following is quoted from this interview with Chief C# Language Architect Anders Hejlsberg:

Hejlsberg:
But with respect to the generics that you asked about, I definitely think generics are a very useful concept and you can certainly tell that from all the generics research that's taking place in academia and industry. Templates are one solution to the problem. In our internal discussions, we concluded that we wanted to do it right for this new platform. But what we would really like is to have generics understood by the underlying runtime. This is different from how some of the generic prototypes have been built. Take Java's notions of "erasure" where there's really no knowledge of generics in the system. By having the common language runtime understand the concept of generics, multiple languages can share the functionality. You can write a generic class in C# over in one place and someone else using a different language can use it. But making generics part of the runtime also enables you to do certain things much more efficiently. Instantiation of generics should ideally happen at runtime. With C++, instantiation of templates happens at compile time, and then you have two options: you can either let your code bloat or you can try, in the linker, to get rid of some of the bloat. But, if you have multiple applications, you can forget about it. You're just going to get bloated code.

If you push the knowledge of generics into the common language runtime, then the runtime can understand that when an application or a component asks for a list of "Foo's," it should first ask: "Do I already have an instantiation of a list of "Foo?" If so, use that one. Indeed, if Foo is a reference type, and if we do the design right, we can share the instantiation for all reference types. For value types, such as ints and floats, and we can create one instantiation per value type. But only when an application asks for it. We've done a lot of the design work and groundwork necessary to add generics to the runtime.

It's interesting you asked earlier about the IL because deciding to add generics impacts the design of the IL. If the instructions in the IL embed type information -- if, for example, an Add instruction is not an Add, but is an Add int or an Add float or an Add double -- then you've baked the type into the instruction stream and the IL is not generic at that point. Our IL format is actually truly type neutral. And, by keeping it type neutral, we can add generics later and not get ourselves into trouble, at least not as much trouble. That's one of the reasons our IL looks different from Java byte code. We have type neutral IL. The Add instruction adds whatever the two things are on top of the stack. In a generic world, that could translate into different code when the generic is instantiated.

Osborn: Is that available to all .NET languages?

Hejlsberg:
Yes. Microsoft Research in Cambridge has created a generics version of the common language runtime and the C# compiler. We're looking at how to move that forward right now. It's not going to happen in the first release, that much we know, but we are working on making sure that we do things right for the first release so that generics fit into the picture.

You mean this?

Ok, here's my facts.

Anders Hejlsberg won the 2001 Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award. Quote: "Hejlsberg is best known as author of Borland's Turbo Pascal"

Anders Hejlsberg wrote the Pascal compiler core. Quote: "Borland licensed the Pascal compiler core, written by Anders Hejlsberg (Poly Data was the name of his company in Denmark), and added the user interface and editor."

And, "Anders Hejlsberg is famous in the programming world for creating the Turbo Pascal compiler and leading the team that designed Delphi."

Your turn.

All I need is a motivation.

Just like when I understood the idea of inheritance and the real OO code reuse, together with the idea of moving data to the foreground and that with a good data you need simple algorithms -- that day I understood, that I have to learn Smalltalk, Objective C, C++ and OO Perl.

Today I need to know why I need to learn how to think with the functional paradigm. It's a serious problem, which stops many people before they learn functional languages.

Many years ago I was writing C programs to process text, and I could do everything that way, I just didn't realize, that there were better ways to do the same. That was before I knew Regular Expressions, egrep, sed or Perl. Now I write Perl one-liners for tasks, which used to take me days of writing C code, but I didn't know that before, because "If the only tool you have in the toolbox is a hammer - every problem looks like a nail."

So now I ask for a reason to learn the functional way of thinking. I need to know it before I actually learn them, just to have a strong imperative. Learning the new way of thinking is a long and hard process, I just want to know what waits for me at the end.

I hope someone who know that reason, will tell me and those who also need it, why it's worth the efford. Thanks in advance.

-- Your Anonymous Coward who wants to learn new ways of thinking...

All I need is a motivation.

Just like when I understood the idea of inheritance and the real OO code reuse, together with the idea of moving data to the foreground and that with a good data you need simple algorithms -- that day I understood, that I have to learn Smalltalk, Objective C, C++ and OO Perl.

Today I need to know why I need to learn how to think with the functional paradigm. It's a serious problem, which stops many people before they learn functional languages.

Many years ago I was writing C programs to process text, and I could do everything that way, I just didn't realize, that there were better ways to do the same. That was before I knew Regular Expressions, egrep, sed or Perl. Now I write Perl one-liners for tasks, which used to take me days of writing C code, but I didn't know that before, because "If the only tool you have in the toolbox is a hammer - every problem looks like a nail."

So now I ask for a reason to learn the functional way of thinking. I need to know it before I actually learn them, just to have a strong imperative. Learning the new way of thinking is a long and hard process, I just want to know what waits for me at the end.

I hope someone who know that reason, will tell me and those who also need it, why it's worth the efford. Thanks in advance.

-- Your Anonymous Coward who wants to learn new ways of thinking...

That has not been my experience. ORA books have some faults but my experience has been that the production values are far better than average.

• Landscape like New Riders "... Magic" books (lay-flat with no special binding)
• non-moron step by step like Coriolis Visual Black books. (Also 2 colour printing good, 4 colour bad).
• Split style like Peachpit VQS, but not split between images and text, but between reference (outer half) and relevant cookbook "recipes" (gutter half).

Why not publish the ultimate recursive manual, "How to Write Documentation (That is Interesting to Read, Informative and Does Not Insult Intelligence)"?

"Use Your Old Hardware" - what you really can do with old pc's, macs, routers, switches, printers etc. With honest advice of when to give it to a deserving cause or just chuck it. Lots of DLable binaries on the website for this book.

And ebooks? Wait till the hardware is

• waterproof to 50m
• OLED 1200 dpi display
• 100 Gb storage
• battery life is a week even with 50 hours 'reading' time
• and is given away like mobile phones when you sign up for a contract (think book clubs).

I do see your point, in theory... Here's yet another quote from chapter 4 of Mastering Regular Expressions:

The true mathematical and computational meaning of "NFA'' is different from what is commonly called an "NFA regex engine.'' In theory, NFA and DFA engines should match exactly the same text and have exactly the same features. In practice, the desire for richer, more expressive regular expressions has caused their semantics to diverge. We'll see several examples later in this chapter, but one right off the top is support for backreferences.

As a programmer, if you have a true (mathematically speaking) NFA regex engine, it is a relatively small task to add support for backreferences. A DFA's engine's design precludes the adding of this support, but an NFA's common implementation makes it trivial. In doing so, you create a more powerful tool, but you also make it decidedly nonregular (mathematically speaking). What does this mean? At most, that you should probably stop calling it an NFA, and start using the phrase "nonregular expressions,'' since that describes (mathematically speaking) the new situation. No one has actually done this, so the name "NFA'' has lingered, even though the implementation is no longer (mathematically speaking) an NFA.

When it comes right down to the implementation though, a DFA would be the preferred choice for Google. Another quote:

Three things come to my mind when describing a DFA engine:

• DFA matching is very fast
• DFA matching is very consistent
• Talking about DFA matching is very boring

Not entirely accurate. Here's a quote from chapter 4 of O'Reilly's Mastering Regular Expressions: "The way a DFA engine works completely precludes the concept of backreferences and capturing parentheses. It just can't happen."

is a relatively simple proof to show transformations between them.

Between some of them. If you expression contains backreferences or counted subexpressions, then you can't go from NFA to DFA.

Keep in mind this is version one of the CLR. In a very informative interview with Anders Hejlsberg, the chief architect of C#, as well as Turbo Pascal and Delphi, he says that some of the higher-end language features such as generics were implemented in a research version of the CLR but were cut for the current release. After reading that interview, it looks to me like they will implement the more exotic language features in future releases of the CLR, but they just didn't have the time or resources to implement their entire language feature wish list.

The limitations of the current CLR does favor languages that look a lot like C#. But the next version will change that. A very informative interview with Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of C#, Turbo Pascal, and Delphi can be found here. They implemented generics in a research version of the CLR, but had to cut it from the current version because "unlike what everyone believes about Microsoft -- we do not have unlimited resources. We had to make some hard decisions in terms of what is actually in this first release."

After reading the interview mentioned above, it seems clear to me that Microsoft will eventually incorporate as many language features as possible into their CLR that would support all the special-purpose language features of things like multiple inheritance, generics, multiple dispatch, or Lisp's closures.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar, (Online Version) ought to do the trick. Some of Robert Cringley's books maybe, too.

Well, Oreilly published Programming with GNU Software. Doesn't have anything about DDD, Electric Fence, etc..., but it does cover gcc, gdb, make, gprof, ld, ar et.al.

I agree a lot. The problem is, many people need different things. When everything is crammed into one book, it gets bloated for everyone.

My point of case: Linux in a Nutshell. I have previously thought that all information is more easily available on the net, and most books were useless. I borrowed the first edition of this book from a library in a project to find some books to our local school (which was switching to Linux). I thought it was pretty good, but as I was learning Perl at the time, I wished it would have a Perl-reference too.

When I noticed that a second edition was available and that it included a Perl quick reference, I went to buy the book the very next day. It was excellent. It did have some cruft that didn't seem to fit in, e.g. the booting section. It didn't matter much, though, as it was only 20 pages.

When I flipped through the third edition in a bookstore sometime later, I was horrified. It was already a huge, bulky book, containing network administration, booting and configuration stuff for GNOME, KDE and fvwm2! This isn't what I want! I want a simple book that tells me how to use the simple unix text-based programs (bash, sed, gawk, perl, etc.)

How difficult would it be to offer custom-made books? This is the only way I can think of to get really slim books that cover what I need.

Good humor can make otherwise dry books easier to read, while bad humor can make any book a chore. Even good humor shouldn't get in the way of the subject matter though. Personally, I like the way the Llama keeps humor in footnotes - it lightens the subject matter while allowing you to ignore the humor completely if you want.

at 280 pages? oops. and I thought it would be a good idea to add another 150-200 pages to the second edition...

maybe you meant Programming Python, 2nd Edition?

the late Frank Willison wrote about the extraordinary size of that book in this article.

O'Reilly has made the difficult decision to temporarily suspend the use of lay-flat bindings as a cost-savings measure that today's economic climate deemed prudent. O'Reilly will resume providing this feature as soon as possible

O'Reilly has made the difficult decision to temporarily suspend the use of lay-flat bindings as a cost-savings measure that today's economic climate deemed prudent. O'Reilly will resume providing this feature as soon as possible

http://www.oreilly.com/ask_tim/booktopics_0102.htm l

Question: What book topics are in demand?

Answer: " ... we generally don't operate the way many other publishers do in terms of just chasing hot topics with authors who are generically qualified to write on many topics. We look for authors who are already knowledgeable and passionate about a subject, who can look at our catalog and say, 'You need a book on such and such a subject' because they are convinced of the subject's importance and the lack of good information on the subject. If we're doing our job right, many of these subjects will already be covered with projects in the pipeline but not announced.... 'So You Want To Write a Book' has a fairly up-to-date list of the general topic areas we're interested in."

P.S.: Yes I want dead tree books, and often I need a shorter book more than a longer one. (Examples: UML Distilled and the XP series.)

http://www.oreilly.com/ask_tim/booktopics_0102.htm l

Question: What book topics are in demand?

Answer: " ... we generally don't operate the way many other publishers do in terms of just chasing hot topics with authors who are generically qualified to write on many topics. We look for authors who are already knowledgeable and passionate about a subject, who can look at our catalog and say, 'You need a book on such and such a subject' because they are convinced of the subject's importance and the lack of good information on the subject. If we're doing our job right, many of these subjects will already be covered with projects in the pipeline but not announced.... 'So You Want To Write a Book' has a fairly up-to-date list of the general topic areas we're interested in."

P.S.: Yes I want dead tree books, and often I need a shorter book more than a longer one. (Examples: UML Distilled and the XP series.)

The Java Cookbook sounds like what you are looking for. I own it and really enjoy it.

Damian has set the bar very high in this regard--see the start of his 2002 schedule, and read his 2001 diary to see how much he gets around. While I doubt Larry and Dan will be travelling internationally as much as Damian, we do want them to visit user groups outside their home town.

In an ideal world, a conference would pay Larry to be Larry. Unfortunately, you might have noticed that this world isn't ideal. Larry has to pay his own way to conferences, just like everyone else.

--Nathan Torkington

Larry was, up until October, funded by O'Reilly to continue his development of Perl. Unfortunately, in the economic climate that we are all facing, ORA had to make the decision to lay off Larry in October, after 5 years of supporting him. The previous two grants were arranged and planned when it was assumed that Larry would still be working. When that ceased to be the case, things were brought together such that Larry could also be brought on board.

That's not packet switching. It was more or less the invention of a shared communication channel. AlohaNet inspired behind Ethernet but they are not related. Read Ethernet by O'Reilly, Chapter One, for a good discussion of the history.

Basically COM treats things in a client-server way, so that you can e.g. write a Python client to Excel that will let Excel do all the heavy lifting -- optionally in the background -- and then you get back the results and display them in a GUI or insert into a database or pipe out across the network or what have you. Conversely, you can write a COM server that can have Excel (or whatever, that's just the example I'm using) act as a client, with your Python (or whatever) program doing the work. Moreover, with DCOM (which seems to be the exact same thing but with an amended title), the clients & servers don't have to be on the same machine (as you'd probably expect of anything calling itself client-server). The bridge from this present-day model to the pervasively distributed .NET framework we keep hearing about should be pretty obvious.

When you get into COM, it's much more similar to the Unix "small programs / filters" model than I was expecting, at least in certain abstract ways. Obviously you hear a lot of griping about it, especially here on Slashdot, but COM does seem to be a pretty solid framework for GUI application development, and much better than Motif, GTK, Bonobo, Swing etc, from what little I know about those systems. (I'm not trying to flame or troll, just speaking as a interested observer / non-developer of gui frameworks.)

But again, what are you trying to do exactly? Aside from suggesting digging up some COM (and, presumably, MFC) references, the next question is what problem are you trying to solve, and what tools are you considering using? I've played around with Windows Python, based largely on what I learned about it & COM by reading Python Programming on Win32, and it seems like it isn't too hard (and it's much nicer than Visual Basic for the same tasks). I also read Dave Roth's Win32 Perl Programming: The Standard Extensions and Win32 Perl Scripting: Administrator's Handbook, and the material was good but I'm not convinced that Perl is as good of a fit for the Win32 world -- it's great for short scripts, task automation, sysadmin stuff, etc, but I don't think I'd use it for a user-driven GUI application as I would with Python. (And keep in mind that, in general, I much prefer Perl to Python, and almost always use Perl over Python on other platforms, but I'm trying to match the tool to the role here...).

You might also want to look into Visual Basic & Access -- as a lot of Win32 apps seem to be little more than a VB front end for an Access backend -- as well as VC++, MySQL (works great on Windows, IME), Delphi (never used it but I hear nothing but great things about it), and RealBasic (Mac oriented but can cross-develop to Win32, and again I hear nothing but great things about it).

O'Reilly & Associates has a great book on this very subject, Beyond Contact.

O'Reilly & Associates has a great book on this very subject, Beyond Contact.

If you're just looking for online books, there are lots of them; e.g., here and here and here. Of course, almost all books for which the copyright has expired are online somewhere -- although very few, if any, IT books would fall into that category.

I'll echo curunir's suggestion: Bob Eckstein, Peter Kelly and I wrote the O'Reilly "Using Samba" book, under their non-open licence, and then at the request of Andrew Tridgell of the Samba team and Tim O'Reilly (!) released it as part of the Open Book initiative. The license makes the book both free source and free beer. O'Reilly retains the right to print it commercially. Andy Oram, the editor, and the O'Reilly production crew then generated a very viewable html version of the book, done in sections that are just about exactly the size you'd want to send to the printer as a portable reference on a given subject. The book is shipped with Samba, is available here on-line, and is being prepared for its second edition by Jay Ts as we speak. The license made it very well-known at the time, the low cost of trying it made it much-sampled, and so the on-paper book promptly sold out! Quick, Andy, schedule a second printing! (This brought us a nice chunk of income.) Moral of the story? If you want a professional publisher for a salebale book and still want to use an Open Source licence, speak to O'Reilly. --dave

I'll echo curunir's suggestion: Bob Eckstein, Peter Kelly and I wrote the O'Reilly "Using Samba" book, under their non-open licence, and then at the request of Andrew Tridgell of the Samba team and Tim O'Reilly (!) released it as part of the Open Book initiative. The license makes the book both free source and free beer. O'Reilly retains the right to print it commercially. Andy Oram, the editor, and the O'Reilly production crew then generated a very viewable html version of the book, done in sections that are just about exactly the size you'd want to send to the printer as a portable reference on a given subject. The book is shipped with Samba, is available here on-line, and is being prepared for its second edition by Jay Ts as we speak. The license made it very well-known at the time, the low cost of trying it made it much-sampled, and so the on-paper book promptly sold out! Quick, Andy, schedule a second printing! (This brought us a nice chunk of income.) Moral of the story? If you want a professional publisher for a salebale book and still want to use an Open Source licence, speak to O'Reilly. --dave

Not sure what license their using, but...Do whay O'Reilly does with their Open Book [oreilly.com] program.

Do whay O'Reilly does with their Open Book program.

You mean about the lawsuit?

Linus himself has said that if BSD hadn't been
under a cloud of legal uncertainty in 1990, he
might not have embarked on the Linux project.

You can get more information about the lawsuit
here, just search for the string "the lawsuit".

The other advantage of Compiling yourself is control, you can control any aspect of the build process. Take Mozilla as an example, you can choose whether you want Mail/News client, SVG, MathML, you can prefer certain librarys over others (each of which has its own pros and cons) you can even choose which kind of garbage collection you want it to heav, if any.
The same thing can obviously be accomplished with binary packages as well. And of course, control is nice, but some libraries are better than others and I think it's nice that the distro people make the choices.

I never leard more about the inner workings of Linux, as when I first installed it manually from sources for the first time.
I perfectly agree with that. If you have the time, it's a nice excersise. But then so is a good book.

Frankly, he's probably written more O'Reilly books than you have.

as an electronics student, i wouldn't dare criticizing the kernel programmers: if you ever tried to program a kernel from scratch, you'd know what a damn job that is...

for all of you interested, there's a great book over at o'reillys, understanding the linux kernel. it covers the changes from the 2.2 to 2.4 version and explains into every very detail the structures behind all the features you enjoy in you everyday linux life ;-)

cu, mephinet

Why whine? So they're underhanded. Become underhanded yourself. Build a perlbot that strips the ads from the content and delivers it all locally to your cache folder. A quick and dirty bot takes 20 lines of perl. There's one in the Perl Cookbook. Your bot may not block every ad but it can easily strip 4 out of every 5. Traditionally people were good natured and made their bots comply with the robots.txt files on websites. But those days are over. So stop rocking your rocking chairs and talking about sad times and webmasters not respecting their elders and carrying your packets to the server by hand uphill through 2 foot high drifts of snow and liking it.

While it's true that a lot of "attractive/sexy" work can be done via open source methods, there's still some areas that traditional programming models (i.e., closed source) still function better (even though ESR says otherwise in The Cathedral & the Bazaar ). What, in your opinion, is the proper balance between open source and closed source methods Sun should strive to?

Local Director is a horrible device. Unlike modern loadbalancers from F5, Alteon, Foundry, etc. the Local Defector is a layer-2 bridge. It cannot have more than one path to a given target, causes all the problems that bridges introduce into switched networks, and allows for potential security breaches, becuse it is commonly used to bridge between differing subnets!

All of the above vendors provide a proxy/switch style solution for layer 3 and above. If you can afford F5's BigIP HA+ in fail-over, this is a dream! Host-based on Intel, with a customized *BSD. Unless you are a freak for IOS-type management, Unix admins will love this.

Check out O'Reilly on Bridge-Path vs. Route-Path Server Load Balancing

For those who don't know about it: O'Reilly keeps a web page of free, open, and/or out-of-print books available online for your edification at http://www.reilly.com/openbook.

PS:The "Programming Perl" was my previous favourite reference book, but the online "perldoc" documentation replaces that now.

PS:The "Programming Perl" was my previous favourite reference book, but the online "perldoc" documentation replaces that now.

No, this is the right list. It was even linked to in the article, if you bothered to check...

Done.

Old yellow sodium lighting is disgusting too unless you go for that deserted carpark feel.

According to this snippet, Police have installed sodium lights to 'discourage' teens from cruising in certain areas. Apparantly it really makes the acne stand out.