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I get first dibs on 1-click buying

By the way, if anyone in the /. community knows of an active list, let us all know so that we can sign there as well.

By the way, if anyone in the /. community knows of an active list, let us all know so that we can sign there as well.

http://www.oreilly.com/ca talog/phppr /chapter/php_pkt.html.

-- .sig --

Um... Try this link
Gottum book, related books and some discussion links.

When in doubt, just surf over to http://www.ora.com

Vote Naked 2000

... and on a somewhat offtopic note, consider the 5-rated (!!) troll who wrote:

"...this is the road that RMS and the FSF want to lead us down. No IP rights, and no recourse against people who "share" the output of your hard work."

You can find "Using Samba" here. They also have an online version of Learning Debian/GNU Linux.

You can find "Using Samba" here. They also have an online version of Learning Debian/GNU Linux.

They don't have a reference, per se. But the do have a great book on C++, Practical C++ Programming.

Though this is a good idea to write abook about complex Linux-based networks, I'd like to highlight the fact that in real-life, the most frequent situation a sysadmin might encounter consists of complex hybrid networks, i.e. gathering tons of different machines together like (in my case) Digital Unix, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, Windows NT, etc.
There is an ORA book about this which I venerate : Essential System Administration, 2nd Edition.
It not only covers most situations (though more aimed at single machines) but is also written a very pleasant way by a woman: AEleen Frisch.
I especially appreciated when ORA asked a French(-speaking) woman: Céline Valot to translate it to French, thus preserving the typical flavour of the original author's feminine humor.
It is one of my fery few French computing books.
ESA2 not only covers most aspect of all the different unices but also implicitely conveys its reader to uniformize the way each machine has to do each job, hence making the resulting network even more homogeneous and easy to administer.
--

Though this is a good idea to write abook about complex Linux-based networks, I'd like to highlight the fact that in real-life, the most frequent situation a sysadmin might encounter consists of complex hybrid networks, i.e. gathering tons of different machines together like (in my case) Digital Unix, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, Windows NT, etc.
There is an ORA book about this which I venerate : Essential System Administration, 2nd Edition.
It not only covers most situations (though more aimed at single machines) but is also written a very pleasant way by a woman: AEleen Frisch.
I especially appreciated when ORA asked a French(-speaking) woman: Céline Valot to translate it to French, thus preserving the typical flavour of the original author's feminine humor.
It is one of my fery few French computing books.
ESA2 not only covers most aspect of all the different unices but also implicitely conveys its reader to uniformize the way each machine has to do each job, hence making the resulting network even more homogeneous and easy to administer.
--

I was interested in this user group thing so I went an dug up the link: http://ug.oreilly.com/

Some notes from that page:

• 20% discount on all O'Reilly books and software when your members order directly from us (800-998-9938)
  
• ...
  
• Special discounts and promotions
  

Sounds good! It's nice to see a company whose principles and practice seem really respectable... I haven't really seen any "dirt" on O'reilly, is it out there? I hope not!

--8<--

At this job and a previous one, all incoming snailmail is opened by the secretary and stamped as received with today's date before delivery to the addressee. I don't know if they actually read it, but I certainly wouldn't want a Playboy or even a Maxim subscription coming to the office, certainly.

The wierd thing is that I was starting, The Cathedral and the Bazaar before reading this post. Within A Brief History of Hackerdom, at this site paragraph 5 it references an OS being entered by Seymour Cray trough switches.

For programming, try Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment by W. Richard Stevens, and for extreme beginners, try The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.

For system administration, try the whatever Unleashed books. On Linux, much can be learned by browsing /usr/doc/HOWTO and the man pages.

Good luck!

Brian

Granted, this isn't platform independent, but I've found that I've learned more about Linux and Unix by playing with the system, rather than reading books. You might want to consider handing out Linux CDs so people who want to can install them and play with them.

Aside from that, a really good book that is largely platform neutral is Unix Power Tools. It is a huge collection of tips and tricks that demonstrate the true power of Unix.

I'm glad you asked as I have wondered myself how to best secure my box. As someone who has to get work in the winTel world my skills are mainly NT oriented. Despite that I am not naive to think that my gateway (athlon 600 with 2 3c905B's) should be anything other than a linux-based OS. The problem I've been having is finding good documentation about locking the box down. Currently I run only SSH and turn on services here and there (FTP's when I'm away from home) but turn them off again when I'm done. This solution is sloppy I know, but so far the books I've read (O'Reilly Practical Unix and Internet Security, and Building Internet Firewalls book) don't give much in practical advice as overall theory and design. I almost feel that my box is *more* vulnerable now as I would be able to secure an NT box fairly tight (aside from the obvious problem that it's MS to begin with) and defend it. With linux I don't know as much and am sure that I've commited many common mistakes. So am I better off with a more securable (could be a word) OS that I'm not as skill in or a less securable OS that I do have skills in?

I'm glad you asked as I have wondered myself how to best secure my box. As someone who has to get work in the winTel world my skills are mainly NT oriented. Despite that I am not naive to think that my gateway (athlon 600 with 2 3c905B's) should be anything other than a linux-based OS. The problem I've been having is finding good documentation about locking the box down. Currently I run only SSH and turn on services here and there (FTP's when I'm away from home) but turn them off again when I'm done. This solution is sloppy I know, but so far the books I've read (O'Reilly Practical Unix and Internet Security, and Building Internet Firewalls book) don't give much in practical advice as overall theory and design. I almost feel that my box is *more* vulnerable now as I would be able to secure an NT box fairly tight (aside from the obvious problem that it's MS to begin with) and defend it. With linux I don't know as much and am sure that I've commited many common mistakes. So am I better off with a more securable (could be a word) OS that I'm not as skill in or a less securable OS that I do have skills in?

PostgreSQL is the perfect book for you if you use PostgreSQL at work and on your Web sites wherever you expose data on the Web using Linux and Apache. It covers the new features of PostgreSQL as well as the PostgreSQL processor, which defines all necessary objects in a database, to get acquainted with SQL and to test ideas and verify joins and queries. Database developers for corporate and Web applications will find this book useful. It is geared toward intermediate to advanced developers who have designed and administered databases, but not PostgreSQL. The accompanying CD includes PostgreSQL, plus sample databases and modules.

If you just want to use it (and not admin it), O'Reilly's Programming the Perl DBI has some info on accessing a PostgreSQL DB (hint: it's not that different from any other DB when seen through DBI). Oh yeah, MySQL & mSQL, also from O'Reilly has a little bit about it (but not very much at all). I guess readmes, man pages and HOW-TOs are your friends for the next couple months.

If you're really curious, throw it on a test machine and (if possible) "port" some apps to use Postgres instead of MySQL or whatever. You probably won't reach any real conclusion (or do nearly enough work to justify moving to another DB for a production environment), but the effort will very likely get you very familiar with how it works, how to set it up, how to admin it, its performance, its quirks, etc. That's both a good and a bad thing, BTW... :-)

-B

PostgreSQL is the perfect book for you if you use PostgreSQL at work and on your Web sites wherever you expose data on the Web using Linux and Apache. It covers the new features of PostgreSQL as well as the PostgreSQL processor, which defines all necessary objects in a database, to get acquainted with SQL and to test ideas and verify joins and queries. Database developers for corporate and Web applications will find this book useful. It is geared toward intermediate to advanced developers who have designed and administered databases, but not PostgreSQL. The accompanying CD includes PostgreSQL, plus sample databases and modules.

If you just want to use it (and not admin it), O'Reilly's Programming the Perl DBI has some info on accessing a PostgreSQL DB (hint: it's not that different from any other DB when seen through DBI). Oh yeah, MySQL & mSQL, also from O'Reilly has a little bit about it (but not very much at all). I guess readmes, man pages and HOW-TOs are your friends for the next couple months.

If you're really curious, throw it on a test machine and (if possible) "port" some apps to use Postgres instead of MySQL or whatever. You probably won't reach any real conclusion (or do nearly enough work to justify moving to another DB for a production environment), but the effort will very likely get you very familiar with how it works, how to set it up, how to admin it, its performance, its quirks, etc. That's both a good and a bad thing, BTW... :-)

-B

Check out this interview on C# and the language engine underlying it with Anders Hejlsberg on O'Reilly.

Python, among other languages, is being ported to run on the .NET language engine (reported on comp.lang.python by Mark Hammond). As the article makes clear, any language using the common language engine can compile down to machine code. Also, interoperability with all interprocess methods is open and equal.

As I told my friends, I take back almost everything bad I've said about MS. &lt&ltg&gt&gt

Hank Fay

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.

Looks like labelled break is the Java way to deal with my first case, and try/finally is the Java way to deal with final cleanup. Cool... maybe goto really is dead.

One question: is try/finally an expensive or risky thing to do, or is it commonly used?

It's difficult to find good evidence on both sides of the argument for Open Source. For the record, I'm definitely in favor of open source (especially if your company has no competency in software). In any case, I've included some pieces of evidence, not necessarily in favor of open source per se, but perhaps a bit more generally about dealing with an open community with regards to development.

• Luc Barthlet's "The Simulation Sandbox"
  Actually an overview of "The Sims" before it came out, but the end of the lecture discusses how they used immediate Internet feedback to improve the design of the game.
• Linux GNOME FAQ
  Hidden in the depths of the FAQ in the section "What CORBA implementation is GNOME using?", is a comment about how Xerox's implementation of CORBA was not used. If this had been open sourced, Xerox's name would be associated with an important part of one of the largest software projects around.
• OpenSource.org
  I apologize if I've being repetitive, but I didn't see this URL earlier. Anyway, this site has some very good arguments in favor of open source. You may wish to take what they have and modify it slightly for your specific purpose.
• Successful OpenSource sites
  Conferences like O'Reilly's Open Source Software Convention, LinuxWorld Expo, open source projects like Apache and MySQL, and sites like SourceForge and IBM DeveloperWorks are showing that Open Source Software (in some cases) is becoming quite mainstream. If you have even one really cool project, that's advertising that no budget could pay for.

Well, I hope this helps.

Samba is the brainchild of Andrew Tridgell, who currently heads the Samba development team from his home of Canberra, Australia. The project was born in 1991 when Andrew created a fileserver program for his local network that supported an odd DEC protocol from Digital Pathworks. Although he didn't know it at the time, that protocol later turned out to be SMB. A few years later, he expanded upon his custom-made SMB server and began distributing it as a product on the Internet under the name SMB Server. However, Andrew couldn't keep that name -- it already belonged to another company's product -- so he tried the following Unix renaming approach:

grep -i 's.*m.*b' /usr/dict/words

And the response was:

salmonberry samba sawtimber scramble

Thus, the name "Samba" was born.

Which is a good thing, because our marketing people highly doubt you would have picked up a book called "Using Salmonberry"!

To me the whole idea seems to have been fated for disaster from square one.

As I see it there are 3 main issues with migrating from one RDBMS to another:

• Migrating data.
• Migrating packages (ie processes such as triggers that run within the database).
• Skills Transfer

On the first one you really have two choices. If you can extract the data as Comma-Separated-Variable or fixed field width files then you can use SQL*Loader to perform the upload. Alternatively Oracle do supply a Migration Workbech product that can help semiautomate the process, more details can be found here.

Packages running within the database (I must admit I don't know if Sybase has these) will probably need to be rewritten for the new RDBMS. In favour of Oracle it is now possible to write these in Java as a JVM is now included as part of the basic install of the server, I believe that it is Java 2 as of Oracle 8.1.6 but you would have to confirm this with Oracle themselves. Release 3 of Oracle 8i definately supports Java 2 API and includes XML support and Apache bundled within the database according to this page. Try searching the Oracle Corporate Website for further details.

Oracle uses the SQL-92 (ie ANSI) SQL for those areas that it covers, as has been quite rightly pointed out the extensions will differ from RDBMS to RDBMS. There are a lot of very good books available for Oracle which cover everything from introducing a total newbie upto assisting someone skilled in another RDBMS to transfer to Oracle. Try O'Reilly or Amazon for some good examples.

I hope that this is helpful

Stephen

I know it sounds strange, but Lego Mindstorms is actually pretty cool. O'Reilly has a good book for it and they also list lots of online resources here.

I know it sounds strange, but Lego Mindstorms is actually pretty cool. O'Reilly has a good book for it and they also list lots of online resources here.

Just out of curiosity: how many perl programmers here upgraded old perl scripts to use Perl 5 features when Perl 5 came out?

I didn't attempt a wholesale upgrade of my Perl4 scripts. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! However, once I got Srinivasan's Advanced Perl Programming and figured out how to really make use of all those cool new features, my scripts take serious advantage of Perl5's new features. In particular I make heavy use of references and complex data types, and I love the IO::Socket and Net::* modules!

Perl6 had better not break 99% of the legacy Perl4 and Perl5 code out there. I'd hate to have to convert a ton of scripts! But if it introduces useful new features I sure won't be shy about using them.

Don't expect the HURD to go anywhere. Who needs it? Linux works better now than the HURD will ever work. The MACH kernel is a fundamentally flawed thing, in concept alone. It's a great example of why we have the term "ivory towers" - it's designed by academics based on theory rather than experience and fact. It's advantage, in theory, is that it's more portable. In practice, Linux proves that a properly written monolithic kernel can be so close to it in portability as to make that a non-issue, without incurring the huge performance hit that the MACH kernel imposes by insisting on a lot of unecessary abstraction.

Given these facts, which you can easily verify for yourself, (start with this bit by Torvalds explaining the difference between microkernel and monolithic architecture from a practical point of view, and how the design of Linux enables it to meet the same goals without sacrificing performance) it's easy to see why the vast majority of competent kernel hackers are working on Linux or *BSD, not MACH, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. The longer they do this the further behind the HURD gets and the less likely it becomes that it will ever become anything usable, let alone desirable. If by some miracle the HURD project suddenly starts moving and puts out a usable product, it still won't go anywhere, because it will still be inferior to Linux and *BSD performance wise, and Linux and *BSD are both portable enough that no one would choose the HURD just for portability.

In short, the HURD is dead, for good reason, so your entire post is irrelevant.

But, even without the HURD, there are still no shortage of good systems that people use and develop that won't work with a binary only driver.

• Linux on anything besides an x86.
• *BSD in any form on any platform.
• Solaris on any platform.
• Linux on x86, as soon as you need to update the kernel.

That's nowhere near a comprehensive list I am sure, but just a few major ones off the top of my head.

When M$ claims that much of their stability problems come from poor 3rd party drivers, for once they are telling the truth. Unlike windows, linux was not designed to support binary only drivers, and it's not maintained in such a way to support them, by design and for good cause. The whole point to linux for most people is to get away from the bad things that come with windows, and binary only drivers are right up in the top part of that list. If a company won't release the source for their drivers, or at least the technical specs so that someone else can write a driver for it, I won't buy their hardware. Far better for them to release the specs and let a kernel hacker write the driver (which costs them nothing) than for them to pay a team of their programmers to produce, test, and release the best binary only driver in the world. Releasing a binary only driver isn't supporting linux, it's proving that you don't have a clue about Linux or Free Software in general.

O'Reilly

See, Visual Basic on the front page. They even have a whole domain devoted to the evil stuff!

The moral of the story? Be careful with hard and fast rules...

:-)

Cheers,
Ben

O'Reilly

See, Visual Basic on the front page. They even have a whole domain devoted to the evil stuff!

The moral of the story? Be careful with hard and fast rules...

:-)

Cheers,
Ben

(from the 1999 Free Software Award Nominee page)

• 1.Tom Adelstein
• 2.Eric Allman
• 3.Lennart Augustsson
• 4.Stig Bakken
• 5.Donald Becker
• 6.Brian Behlendorf
• 7.Tim Berners-Lee -- inventor of the World Wide Web
• 8.Jim Blandy
• 9.Craig Burley
• 10.Thomas Bushnell
• 11.Shane Caraveo
• 12.James Clark
• 13.Alan Cox -- major Linux kernel hacker
• 14.Miguel de Icaza
• 15.DJ Delorie -- DJGPP
• 16.Theo De Raadt -- founder of the OpenBSD project
• 17.Matthias Ettrich
• 18.Paul Eggert
• 19.Ralf S. Engelschall
• 20.Fred Fish
• 21.Olivier Fourdan
• 22.Fractint Team
• 23.John Gilmore
• 24.Andi Gutmans
• 25.Chuck Hagenbuch
• 26.Carsten Haitzler
• 27.Charles Hannum
• 28.Shawn Hargreaves -- Allegro game programming library
• 29.Geoff Harrison
• 30.Mike Heins
• 31.Joey Hess
• 32.Earl Hood
• 33.Jordan K. Hubbard
• 34.Dan Ingalls
• 35.Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
• 36.Kyle Jones
• 37.Bill Joy -- Sun, vi editor
• 38.Alexandre Julliard
• 39.Mike Karels
• 40.Jeremy Katz
• 41.Spencer Kimball
• 42.Donald E. Knuth -- author of Art of Computer Programming
• 43.Werner Koch
• 44.Alfredo Kenji Kojima
• 45.Jeffrey A. Law
• 46.Patrick Lenz
• 47.Marc Lehmann
• 48.Rasmus Lerdorf
• 49.Mark Linton
• 50.Paul Mackerras
• 51.Peter Mattias
• 52.Doug McEachern
• 53.Caolan McNamara
• 54.Kirk McKusick
• 55.Bram Moolenaar
• 56.Tobias Oetiker
• 57.Tim O'Reilly -- O'Reilly books
• 58.John Ousterhout
• 59.Dave Rand
• 60.Brian Paul
• 61.Nicholas Petreley
• 62.Bernhard Rosenkraenzer
• 63.Alessandro Rubini
• 64.Dr Douglas Schmidt
• 65.Keith Sklower
• 66.W. Richard Stevens -- Unix Network Programming
• 67.Darryl Strauss, Zeev Suraski
• 68.Danny ter Haar
• 69.Andrew Tridgell
• 70.Jorrit Tyberghein
• 71.Bert Tyler
• 72.Guido van Rossum -- Python programming language
• 73.Miquels van Smoorenburg
• 74.Wietse Venema
• 75.Paul Vixie -- cron daemon
• 76.Patrick Volkerding
• 77.Tim Wegner
• 78.Jim Winstead
• 79.Jamie Zawinski
• 80.Phil Zimmerman.

Granted, some of these have been covered already, but maybe a handful at the most. I must confess to maybe knowing who 10% of these people are. I would sure like to know something about the rest of them. Just imagine all the cool stuff each of these people has to offer--why in the world are we looking to interview inflamatory, damaging people like JP?

Just trying to help :-) I figure 80 some odd suggestions should keep you busy for a while.

(from the 1999 Free Software Award Nominee page)

• 1.Tom Adelstein
• 2.Eric Allman
• 3.Lennart Augustsson
• 4.Stig Bakken
• 5.Donald Becker
• 6.Brian Behlendorf
• 7.Tim Berners-Lee -- inventor of the World Wide Web
• 8.Jim Blandy
• 9.Craig Burley
• 10.Thomas Bushnell
• 11.Shane Caraveo
• 12.James Clark
• 13.Alan Cox -- major Linux kernel hacker
• 14.Miguel de Icaza
• 15.DJ Delorie -- DJGPP
• 16.Theo De Raadt -- founder of the OpenBSD project
• 17.Matthias Ettrich
• 18.Paul Eggert
• 19.Ralf S. Engelschall
• 20.Fred Fish
• 21.Olivier Fourdan
• 22.Fractint Team
• 23.John Gilmore
• 24.Andi Gutmans
• 25.Chuck Hagenbuch
• 26.Carsten Haitzler
• 27.Charles Hannum
• 28.Shawn Hargreaves -- Allegro game programming library
• 29.Geoff Harrison
• 30.Mike Heins
• 31.Joey Hess
• 32.Earl Hood
• 33.Jordan K. Hubbard
• 34.Dan Ingalls
• 35.Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
• 36.Kyle Jones
• 37.Bill Joy -- Sun, vi editor
• 38.Alexandre Julliard
• 39.Mike Karels
• 40.Jeremy Katz
• 41.Spencer Kimball
• 42.Donald E. Knuth -- author of Art of Computer Programming
• 43.Werner Koch
• 44.Alfredo Kenji Kojima
• 45.Jeffrey A. Law
• 46.Patrick Lenz
• 47.Marc Lehmann
• 48.Rasmus Lerdorf
• 49.Mark Linton
• 50.Paul Mackerras
• 51.Peter Mattias
• 52.Doug McEachern
• 53.Caolan McNamara
• 54.Kirk McKusick
• 55.Bram Moolenaar
• 56.Tobias Oetiker
• 57.Tim O'Reilly -- O'Reilly books
• 58.John Ousterhout
• 59.Dave Rand
• 60.Brian Paul
• 61.Nicholas Petreley
• 62.Bernhard Rosenkraenzer
• 63.Alessandro Rubini
• 64.Dr Douglas Schmidt
• 65.Keith Sklower
• 66.W. Richard Stevens -- Unix Network Programming
• 67.Darryl Strauss, Zeev Suraski
• 68.Danny ter Haar
• 69.Andrew Tridgell
• 70.Jorrit Tyberghein
• 71.Bert Tyler
• 72.Guido van Rossum -- Python programming language
• 73.Miquels van Smoorenburg
• 74.Wietse Venema
• 75.Paul Vixie -- cron daemon
• 76.Patrick Volkerding
• 77.Tim Wegner
• 78.Jim Winstead
• 79.Jamie Zawinski
• 80.Phil Zimmerman.

Granted, some of these have been covered already, but maybe a handful at the most. I must confess to maybe knowing who 10% of these people are. I would sure like to know something about the rest of them. Just imagine all the cool stuff each of these people has to offer--why in the world are we looking to interview inflamatory, damaging people like JP?

Just trying to help :-) I figure 80 some odd suggestions should keep you busy for a while.

It is also the most copied text ever. If you were going to pick one text, what would you pick? O'Reilly's Programming Perl?

Actually, now that I think of it... that's a great choice!

However, One chapter makes one an expert on mp3, not. The book talks NOTHING about how each of the filters and compressions levels work, how one implements audio masking, DCT etc... The only thing that chapter gives you enough detail to actually work with is the file format, which is more or less trivial.

The rest of the book is not technical, and at least for me completely useless.

-Jon

The Shorten format(.SHN extension), though larger than MP3, is lossless.

O'Reilly has posted a sample chapter of Chapter 2, "Inside The Codec" of the MP3 format.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mp3/chapter/ch02.ht ml

it ain't for geeks until there's an O'Reilly book

I can refute that statement with a single URL. As we all know... VB isn't fit for ANYONE, especially not geeks.

The JPEG algorithm is capable of encoding images that use any type of color space. Jpeg itself encodes each component in a color model separately, and it is completely independent of any color-space model, such as RGB, HSI, or CMY.

However, as you say CMYK isn't very useful for web graphics.

BSD 4.4 is neither FreeBSD nor OpenBSD (nor NetBSD for that matter). However, it was the last official release of BSD by Berkeley, and is the code that today's BSD's are based upon (with quite a few twists and turns along the way).

For a excellent, if a bit dry, history of BSD check out: Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution

For a more narrative, though less inclusive, story of BSD try: BSD Unix: Power to the people, from the code

The comments on how to have different platforms be binary compatible are interesting in their own right. What I find interesting is how the same idea in a different form is implicit in what Torvalds writes. For instance read his essay on the kernel from Open Sources carefully. Here is a more technical explanation. In both cases you abstract out from the architecture, OS, library, whatever the interface you want to program to, and then (with appropriate macros etc) set up that interface. Then when you go to port it, you merely need to figure out how to set up all of your macros and the bulk of the code remains untouched.

Look at that sideways. That is *exactly* what IBM did to make code binary portable. That is the principle that the AS400 uses. If you peek in well-known and widely ported projects (eg Perl) you will often find that they take the same approach. (For good reason!)

The key to wisdom lies in seeing how good ideas about foo look like good ideas about bar and then trying to apply that. There is a good lesson here about portability...

Cheers,
Ben

It's not exactly what you asked for, but near the bottom of the page is a matrix of licenses, and above it are pretty good descriptions of them.
http://www.oreilly.com/ catalog/opensources/book/perens.html

Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is

First, I'd like to say that DBI itself is very cool, and I find it really useful.

I read the book as soon as it came out several weeks ago; I was anticipating its release very much. I skimmed most of it, though, as it's kinda lightweight. The first 50 pages deal with flatfiles.. blah. Out of 330 pages, the last 140 of them are appendix -- which is the perldoc pages that you can get a more up-to-date version (and quicker access) of online.

Also, I think it's weird that they'd spend 50 pages on (non-DBI) flatfiles, then only like 125 (excluding appendix) on DBI.

• Interview with the authors
• DBI-users archive
• Old DBI-users archive, but w/index
• Positive review by perl.org (duh..)

Open sources, Tim O'Reilly

What's interesting is that the killer application is no longer a desktop productivity application or even a back-office
enterprise software system, but an individual web site. And once you start thinking of web sites as applications, you soon come
to realize that they represent an entirely new breed, something you might call an "information application," or perhaps even
"infoware."

You didn't say whether you planned to develop the software using only internal people and then release it, or whether you wanted to co-develop with some independent developers from the very beginning. This can make a big difference. If you develop everything internally and then release the software then you'll face the problem of interesting people in working on something that they didn't have any part in creating, and which appears on the surface to be a company-specific project of limited general interest. On the other hand, if you try and bring people in earlier on then you'll be in a situation where you won't have anything yet that runs and is usable.

If you develop the software totally in-house and then release it, this is to some degree comparable to projects like Mozilla. In the Mozilla project the original Netscape developers started out as the designated "module owners" responsible for particular portions of the code, and then as non-Netscape contributors came on board they first contributed patches that were checked in by others, then they could get check-in access themselves (with their code being reviewed by module owners or others) and then finally they had the opportunity to become module owners themselves for particular components. So except for people in your company everybody else starts out "on the outside looking in"; this is unavoidable under this model, and has the effect of stretching out the period before the project is seen as a true open public effort (mostly) independent of your company. (Again, Mozilla is the classic case of this.)

So there are some good reasons to try to get other people outside your company involved relatively early on. Then they can participate as code contributors and module owners for whatever part of the project interests them. As for exercising overall control, you can have a single person overseeing the project or you can try and do a committee-style structure like the Apache folks did.

(The Apache project is one of the most formal ones in terms of their internal organization, and it's probably worth you're checking out what they did with the Apache Software Foundation. Also check out Brian Behlendorf's chapter in the "Open Sources" book, particularly the "Bootstrapping" section, for some information on the types of people you'll need in the course of the project, either from your company or from somewhere else.)

If you want to get people involved early on then you'll need to find people who are motivated to participate at the design stage. You might try looking for existing open source projects that are related to the problem space that your planned software addresses; those projects might have existing software you can reuse, and even more important may have people interested in participating in your project starting at the ground floor. (Even if you develop the software internally you're going to want to do this sort of "market study" anyway, because there's no point in doing work and then finding out that someone else has created a project that duplicates yours and prevents your project attracting developers.)

Another option is actually contracting with independent developers to work on the project in the early development phases, either to supplement your own developers or even to totally outsource the work. (For example, this is what Galactic Marketing did with the open source workflow project they're doing.) Even if you contract work out there's nothing to stop you from running the project "in the open" so others can check it out and provide useful feedback (as indeed happened with the Galactic Marketing project); whether you host the project yourself or somewhere else, you want to have some level of public access so interested observers have an entry point into the project.

That's all the comments I have time for now; good luck with your project!

Programming Perl has a section called "Efficiency" in the "Other Oddments" chapter, which contains many useful pointers for time and space efficiency.

If you don't know what's going to be so cool about Kylix, here's an explanation from the author of "Delphi in a nutshell".
--

Only without the years of development, the thousands of freely available modules, the extreme flexibility, the massive cross-platform portability (you can configure perl for your toaster), integration with Apache, Database support, tens of thousands of existing experts and freely available sample scripts, a huge set of some of the world's best programming language documentation, and (let's not forget) its own poetry (what other language can claim that?), having the core built by one of the coolest people on earth (read and laugh!).

Maybe Pike is amusing, but next to a language like Perl, is it really needed? And can you really claim that Pike has "character" when you can't even write poetry? (Yes, I am a Perl bigot.)

BTW, Hello world in perl? perl -e 'print "hello, world\n";' on the command line will do the trick. Ha!

David E. Weekly

(I was going to post this as an "AskSlashdot"...but here's as good of a place as any....)

The problem with the original question is that it's posted as an either/or option. Unfortunately, we deal with a mix of electronic and printed documents -- and you're like me you've paid for some of them in both formats.

My "AskSlashdot" is this:

1. Is there a cost-effective way of moving existing dead-tree documents into either HTML, PDF, or another searchable mixed text and graphics format?

I'll buy new documents in electronic *searchable* format when I can. For example, O'Reilly's Networking Bookshelf is easily worth the price I paid since I can now search it -- and everything else I have -- easily.

Yet, I have a four foot wide stack of technical documents and books that just isn't going to come with me on each plane trip. I'm not going to get rid of them -- they are still valuable -- but I have this creeping feeling that they would be more useful if they were searchable all the time...not just when I think of a specific text.

The available tools for capturing paper and converting it into searchable PDFs is costly, and is geared toward corporations that can justify the costs by the number of users. To me, a per-use licence of Adobe's Capture --

1. Adobe Capture - Prices

   Adobe Capture - Features

-- is just not cost effective.

If the document is already a text document -- even if it's in some wordprocessor I don't use -- generating PDF files is easy and cheap;

Print a document to a Postscript file, or create one. For example a simple text document is trivial;

1. enscript file.txt -p file.ps

Convert the resulting Postscript file to PDF;

1. ps2pdf file.ps file.pdf

Converting a paper document to PDF is also easy. Just scan the image and use tiff2ps or jpeg2ps to create the Post script file. The only problem is that the resulting PDF is a bitmap image and isn't searchable.

So, if you want it done, you're back to paying Adobe for Capture or some other nearly as expensive method.

Tell me I'm wrong...please!

Other references: PDF utilities on Freshmeat.