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* what's the right strategy here?
OUTSOURCE. EVERYTHING.

  * What routers or switches or other equipment should I acquire?
Routers and switches: depends on $x connections and @y traffic volumes. You'll also need:
  * A cable tester
  * An 8P8C crimp tool
  * Rollover cables and DB9 adapters
  * At least 1 PDU per rack
  * patch panels (NOT belkin! They suck and your budget allows for anything worth its salt, e.g. Matrix)
  * cable management brackets
  * A KVM drawer
  * USB hubs like these (any decent hub will do)
  * RS232 to USB adapters
  * UPSes
  * A SAS tape autoloader should be sufficient in most cases, otherwise get an iSCSI tape library. Stay away from Veritas and Symantec software, try bacula.
  * If you need more storage, an iSCSI SAN server (there's AoE and it works but I doubt the cost-effectivenes and only CoRaid supports it).
On the networking equipment (and PDUs), connect the rollover cables to the console port and the other end to a DB9 adapter. Connect all the serial ports to the USB adapters and to the USB hubs. Connect the USB hub to the server you operate with the KVM drawer. Require at least public key authentication for ssh access to that box.
Set up the Linux servers to boot on the serial port (in the BIOS, grub and init) so you can easily remote in even when you can't ping it. You could even use a modem and pppd with MS-CHAPv2 to provide a remote getty when the Internet is down. You can further restrict it using e.g. pam_opie. Alternatively, set up a VPN over 3G but that requires a third server somewhere. Or simply cross your fingers and hope you'll never need it (it's all about cost-benefits).

  * What books should I read?
Linux In A Nutshell, ISBN13 978-0-596-15448-6. Using Samba 3rd edition, ISBN13 978-0-596-00769-0. Something on IPv6 as well as both "CCNA 1 and 2 Companion Guide" and "CCNA 3 and 4 Companion Guide" from Cisco press (doesn't cover IPv6, so that's why you'll need a separate book for that). If that's not enough, read up on open LDAP. But most of all, Read The Friendly Man pages.

  * Should I take classes from Cisco, Global Knowledge, my local community college, or somewhere else?
Yes, as a network admin you should get CCNA. LPI is nice to have but not essential and I doubt you'll ever need RHCE.

Don't buy network appliances (e.g. spamfilter/proxy/etc.) unless you have a really good reason to because most of the time these are black boxes hiding Linux with a crap (and potentially vulnerable) userland. As a general advice, Brocade FastIron switches are great for an "unlimited" budget. They support just about every standard under the sun and then some. If the budget is not /that/ unlimited, HP ProCurve will do. Cisco Catalyst is hardly worth the expense.

Lastly, do not accept anything less then 1000Base-T for every port on your network. Do not use UTP for the cabling between the patch panels and wall outlets (use STP or at least FTP instead, STP is perfect for an "unlimited" budget).

AMA!

from the people who have actually 'studied' this issue:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/04/apple-location-tracking.html
"Our best guess is that the location is determined by cell-tower triangulation, and the timing of the recording is erratic, with a widely varying frequency of updates that may be triggered by traveling between cells or activity on the phone itself."

It's not the tower locations, and is probably related to Assisted GPS used on iPhones

This is not what caused the uproar. If you go to the original source that even disclosed this was happening, they point out there is "[no] evidence to suggest this data is leaving your custody".

TFA is quoting Sewall from last year and trying to put it into the context of the current situation when his comments were not in the context of the current situation. That seems pretty disingenuous.

'Safari is $110/yr for the base package--5 books at a time.'

For that money, you could also buy around 20 O'Reilly iPhone apps on iTunes. Each contains the unencrypted text of the book, which is easy to extract and re-package as a conventional ePub for use on any device:

http://oreilly.com/ebooks/oreilly_iphone_tips.csp
http://zef.me/3246/convert-cheap-oreilly-iphone-app-books-to-epub

Are there no more O'Reilly books being published anymore? How about some reviews of new instant classics (like the Camel book)?

It's been all Packt, all the time for how long now?

As a side note, PacktLib (all you can eat package) is more expensive at $220/yr than O'Reilly's Safari Online Books. Safari is $110/yr for the base package--5 books at a time. That's strange, since O'Reilly books have usually been considered the best tech books. Also they have books from a whole lot of other publishers, while Packt is mostly just barely edited PDFs.

This might be the appropriate place to mention the venerable Unix Power Tools.

It goes through most of the common Unix commands (including Bash, but also sort, uniq, awk, sed, etc.). It teaches you about redirection and piping, customizing your shell prompt, xterms, X, remote X, Unix file times and permissions, find/exec, diff, head/tail, grep, vi, emacs, jobs, cron, time, regexes, sed, bash scripting, tar, rcs/cvs, perl/python, /dev, symlinks, tty's, ssh, users/groups.

In short, everything you ought to know before opening a root shell.

It's written in a funny/witty (for geeks) manner.

In principle, you're right. There are both legal (HIPAA) and ethical concerns involved in releasing medical patient records. An earlier version of this article stated that Heritage Health Care was already aware of the privacy issues, and was trying to minimize potential risk by performing anonymization. As we've seen in the past with other competition such as the Netflix Challenge, anonymization schemes don't always work. On the other hand, there's already a precedent for releasing anonymized medical data into the public domain.

In fact all the big shops use Solr searching and not Drupal's built in search. Awesome no?

Including, in fact, the White House, which is on a LAMP stack of Open Source goodness, including Drupal and Solr. Awesome indeed.

Look at who started using Drupal in the last year or two: The Economist, The Grammys, Fast Company, The Examiner, House.gov (and all ~535 house websites) recently moved to Drupal, Energy.gov, WhiteHouse.gov, and here's a list of some 120 national governments using Drupal.

But hey, Drupal only has 2% market share of all sites on the web, is being adopted by government and corporate organizations at a maddening pace, and just had their first major release in 3 years. There's no reason why this Drupal shit should be discussed on Slashdot.

http://oreilly.com/pub/a/mac/2006/05/23/thermal-paste-question.html

Amazon Indifference to EC2 Attacks - http://www.voipusersconference.org/2010/amazon-ec2-attacks-continue/

Slashdot story about it - http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/04/17/2059256/SIP-Attacks-From-Amazon-EC2-Going-Unaddressed?art_pos=1

Phishers using EC2 - http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/blame-the-credit-card-franchis.html

Complaint about SPAM coming from EC2 IP Address - http://www.ipillion.com/ip/174.129.162.38

EC2 used for Botnet C&C - http://securitywatch.eweek.com/botnets/amazon_ec2_used_as_botnet_command_and_control.html

Just Google for it. This stuff is all over the place. A lot of fraud websites host themselves with Amazon. Now that alone is not a reason to vilify them, but they are slow to act and seemingly ignore complaints about traffic coming from their EC2.

Personally, I bought a product from a site hosted on Amazon EC2 and had payments going through PayPal. Seemed to be above board and was the only place online selling a rather rare product at the time. Never got anything and both Amazon and PayPal were both aware of previous complaints but failed to shut the place down.

I can see how that might make me look biased, but I also have logs of brute force SIP attacks on my own servers and much of it has come from EC2. Not just Rwanda. Not just Romania. Not just China. EC2. What use is there to complain to them when everyone else gets ignored too?

How hard is it? The IP in question sends me 100,000 SIP registration requests that are clearly walking the extensions up from 1000 with dictionary attacks on the secret. Seriously? That much to investigate? Just shut the crap down and work with the account owner to clear their "infestation" up or nail them as the hackers they are.

The (flying wood) ant book is: Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices....

I'm working in a Mac OS X environment, but this should work for Linux too: I have groups for the various classes of stuff, e.g. photos, household files (like taxes and Christmas letters), etc. Each group has a group home associated with it, and I mount those from my server as needed. (The server's a RAID 5 box). Irreplaceable stuff like photos are copied a couple of times, once to a disk on a separate machine and periodically to a portable USB drive that I keep at a friend's house. (I have 2 of them and rotate them.) An advantage of the group-based approach is that I can use group privileges to limit access if required (e.g. my work related stuff is not readable by the rest of the family. Photos are updatable by my wife and I and readable by everyone else, etc.)

For sensitive materials, I actually use a Mac OS X encrypted disk image in the group home directory. One of these days I'll work out how to get whole-drive encryption on my Mac OS X Mini Server.

For my photos, I'm experimenting with various keyword Digital Asset Management schemes, inspired by "The DAM Book" http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596523589/

And as a side note, I'm seeing -50% failure rate- on Seagate 3.5" 1tb drives that are about 1-2 years old. The RAID enclosure is running Toshiba 1tb drives. One of my 2 USB backups (with a Seagate drive) failed, so I'll replace that with a Toshiba or WD drive. I'm really disgusted with Seagate reliability!

It was drown by noise: spammers, pirates, binaries, and even great readers like slrn and excellent filters couldn't make the signal to noise ratio manaegable.

I find it interesting that your definition of noise includes binaries.

Usenet is an incredibly wonderful way of distributing binaries. It's pretty darn easy to keep binaries and discussion separate, depending on how you want to set up your server, your reader, your group. While massposting of binaries that are off-topic to a group does create terrible noise, that's deliberate vandalism. Usenet is not proof against vandalism. Neither is the web, web forums, various feeds and pushes, or, well, any communications technology. I imagine people were tapping into and sending crap on telegraph wires back in the day. I can deal with occasional vandalism in other parts of life. I feel the same way about usenet. The things about it that work are so wonderful that I'll put up with the bad stuff.

I guess I came along too long after usenet started up. I never corresponded with kibo. I actually consider binary distribution to be a reasonable use of the technnology for commerical providers and assume that specialty or *.edu providers will simply eschew the entire alt.binaries.* hierarchy in favor of setting up their own groups where they can filter binaries at the server. Hell, I've got a copy of the chicken book at home and I fully intend to set up a server of my own as a bit of a hobby after I retire in a few years.

I just don't think usenet has been "driven out" in any meaningful way for folks who appreciate the things it does so wonderfully well. Discussions of the viability of usenet cannot yet reasonbly lump usenet in with Veronica and Gopher. I think it will be a long time before such is the case.

My point here isn't that you should use a database to store your data about your files, (unfortunately, a unified markup system for files doesn't exist yet; it would be nice, but all that stuff is in the OS right now) my point is that the author of the article is missing that even if in-memory data systems do become extremely large, the underlying theory of the technology will not change much.

I realize that, but it's a related issue. Back in the 80s, it didn't do you a damned bit of good to know that the file was saved if you had to spend 10 hours sorting through disks to find it. In the modern era that's a much smaller concern for most people as a 1tb disk is quite affordable and there's a number of products to search it efficiently.

It's something which has been talked about before. The discussion I best remember was in terms of back up systems. (Backup & Recovery if you're curious)

The basic idea was to move backups from faster, but more readily accessible media to slower and harder to get media as the files got older and less frequently used. The main reason for individuals to do that is so that they've got a copy on some sort of WORM so as to make it more difficult to make fat fingered mistakes.

There are a few products out there that do that, but they aren't particularly universal and I haven't personally found one that I like for my typical files. And with the rate at which disk space is expanding, most people aren't going to need them, unless they're responsible for enterprise file management.

2. DON'T make the administrative interface a GUI. System administrators need a command-line tool for constructing repeatable processes. Procedures are best documented by providing commands that we can copy and paste from the procedure document to the command line. We cannot achieve the same repeatability when the instructions are: "Checkmark the 3rd and 5th options, but not the 2nd option, then click OK." Sysadmins do not want a GUI that requires 25 clicks for each new user. We want to craft the commands to be executed in a text editor or generate them via Perl, Python, or PowerShell.

Since I've had to work with Windows servers in my new job, I thought I'd better read up on them, so I've been reading Windows Server 2008: The Definitive Guide. The sections on the underlying principles and theory of the OS are fine. But that's one third of the text, at most. Most of the text is useless blow-by-blow accounts of sequences of clicks in GUI applets. It's completely unreadable -- the descriptions are meaningless unless you're working through the instructions with an instance of Windows Server 2008 in front of you. And who's going to set up several instances, just to make sense of the description of the applet for configuring load balancing?

I can't blame the book, particularly, as it's a problem of GUIs.My workplace has lots of documents with step-by-step instructions for configuring services, which have one sentence of text, followed by a screenshot, followed by another sentence of text, and another screenshot, and so on.

On the flip side, one of the great things about text configuration files is that while they're full of obscure configuration options, they're also full of the documentation explaining the obscure configuration options. Config files are rich with documentation. GUI configuration applets frequently aren't. I'll take a documented option in a config file over an undocumented option in a GUI config applet any day.

Small correction: His name is Eric Raymond, and he usually goes by Eric S. Raymond professionally.

The book can be found at isbn.nu or elsewhere, including from O'Reilly in case you're partial to them (since they don't show up in isbn.nu's list).

ESR's home page is a great resource unto itself.

I guess you're probably joking but just in case...
RMS

I see the comments filling up with RMS is irrelevant, chicken little!, etc.. If you really don't know who he is give the site a read; I learned a lot about the software industry reading articles by Richard. Give this a try as well. Better yet, buy a copy!

As the Federal CIO sang the praises of Amazon.com-backed Animoto's use of the Amazon Cloud, the Chairman of the Recovery Board decided giving Amazon the contract to host Recovery.gov was the right thing to do, and called on the public to 'imagine if other, much larger federal agencies were to follow our lead.'

Credit for deciding to tap Amazon was given to government contractor Smartronix, who reportedly used AWS in the development and testing of recovery.gov, but did not go live with it in the initial roll-out.

The government planned to find another home for the more than $1 million in computer hardware and software that were previously purchased to host the (apparently) relatively low-traffic Recovery.gov site, but were no longer needed after hosting was switched to Amazon.

First Get the Zwicky book and follow the pretty pictures that do NOT have the universal no symbol next to them.

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781565928718

This will mean that the person that has to clean up after you, does not have to start with ripping out all the wiring.

Second, set up a wiki for documentation so the person that comes in after you doesn't have to rip and replace because it is cheaper and quicker than figuring out what you have done.

Third, install network monitoring software such as opennms. (if you have a choice between one $1,500 server and two $500 servers go with the two $500 servers)

Fourth, do a netwok audit of all hardware and what software is on that hardware.

Fifth, price out what it will cost to bring your organization into compliance, if you are in the US and not a 501(c)3 this will probably be expensive.

Sixth, install project management issue tracking software, I use recommend redmine.

Now you are ready to start doing your job. (or at least you have not made the situation worse, and could possibly contract out your job.)

Their description of Subversion is almost blatantly wrong, and misses much of the improvements SVN brought about. It would have helped them to at least have read some of the Subversion Documentation - or even just the chapter on Subversion's Delta Editor in the book Beautiful Code.

Can I buy it as an elecrtonic copy, e.g. Kindle?

I saw electronic copies available on O'Reilly's site. Not exactly a huge cost benefit but that seems to be the norm.

You can run apps freely in OSX with the developer tools. To transfer them to an iphone you need some additional software that you have to buy from apple. But anyone can get it.

??? all you\re buying is a key to a lock you already bought.
This already happened : http://oreilly.com/news/differences_nt.html

For those who might be interested, haee a look at this upcoming O'Reilly title.

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596807740

In addition to RFID chipping my cat, I'm building him a GPS-enabled collar that I can ping him should he escape using my cell phone.

Also, there is another way to construct your apps in Android.

Well, not just Android -- from what I can see, that book's about making web apps. Cool, but nothing specific to Android!

With Android, Java skills are everything and... um... we got more people capable of doing Websphere/JBoss stuff? What a victory would that be.

So because there haven't been totally unrelated very large and sometimes hated Objective-C projects, iOS is better than Android? I find it humorous how quickly this has been sidetracked to a religious language flamewar instead of looking at the platforms and developer support. Yeah, it's in Java. Yeah, Java can be used badly. Just like every other language. Where's your evidence that Android uses it poorly? Or do you have to say "Hitler drank Java and Java is run on Android. Do you want to use Hitler's mobile operating system?"

Java skills aren't everything with Android. They're important and you will need to know a touch of Java. You also need to know XML and sometimes have a choice of how you store resources like Strings between Java and XML. Also, there is another way to construct your apps in Android.

There is a whole ecosystem of books, online material and courses created by Microsoft to facilitate people learning their product. No such infrastructure exists for open source products. It may not even be possible to create such an infrastructure.

I'd be amazed to find out it's impossible for Open Source folks to create an infrastructure with books, online material, and training.

Now more than ever before, we need people to understand the difference between open and locked-down hardware, and to help them make rational choices while shopping.

Translation: The "rational choice" is only the one that I approve of you making.

I didn't read that into the text you quoted. If you did, congratulations. But it's not what the person you are replying to actually said, nor is it necessarily what he meant.

People do understand the difference, they just overwhelming don't care.

I don't know about that. As far as I am able to see, most people don't know how hardware can be locked down and don't think about it. Those who do know and think about this stuff generally fall into 3 categories: (1) those who seek out hardware that they can tinker with, (2) those who will buy locked-down hardware, but then brake the locks, and (3) those who run into the limitations and just shrug and go on with their lives. I would say only those in group (3) understand the difference but don't care, and even that is tenuous: I am sure they _would_ prefer to have hardware that did let them do what they wanted.

To me, it is unthinkable that my personal computers should be remote-controlled by a third party

Then *gasp* don't buy that product. Wow, that was hard, right?

It can require quite a lot of research to find hardware that you get full control over, actually. It would be a lot easier if that hardware were labeled somehow. Hey! That sounds like the subject of this story!

but the crowds are only beginning to wake up to the pain that proprietary platforms are causing them.

If by "the crowds" you mean a bunch of irrelevant whining by some nerds on a few tech sites, then yes, they truly are "waking up".

I don't know. The nerds have been whining about this since at least the 1980s and maybe even before that. More recently, I have seen and heard about many people who weren't interested in free software or unlocked hardware before, who wanted to jailbreak their iPhones, complained about losing features of their Playstation 3s, wanted to watch DVDs on their Wii, install the latest version of Android on their phones, or put a video from YouTube on a CD-R. Maybe it isn't "crowds", but people are finding out the limitations that are imposed on the hardware they buy, and this is exactly what freedom to tinker is about.

That's what I remember reading here in Chapter 1: For Want of a Printer.

Stallman had subsequently written a large number of GNU tools, but the license was his most important contribution.

Says the vi user who never wrote a line of code in his life! ;-)

It would have been nice if your review had compared other books on the same topic so I could know which is best to get.

I think you want to reference the latest edition of that book which is also the Third Edition and also based on the 2.6 kernel. The book you linked is from 2000 and based on 2.3 I believe.

It appears that the O'Reilly book focuses more on the tiny implementation details while Love's book has more theory. The O'Reilly book is more than twice as long as Love's book. The O'Reilly book was also published in November 2005 so I doubt it would have anything on the Completely Fair Scheduler or any advancements since then.

I wish I had more time to give you a better review but the fact is that I'm new to this stuff and this is the only book I've read devoted solely to the Linux Kernel. The Love book is a solid book though (hence the 10/10) and if you're looking for a current Linux guide, it's probably the newest.

It would have been nice if your review had compared other books on the same topic so I could know which is best to get.

Free markets and capitalism are largely synonymous.

Capitalism is a system of economics based around private ownership of resources. Contrast it with economic communism, where the people collectively own everything, or socialism, where the state owns everything.

The free market is any system where there are no restrictions on who can buy or sell, or what can be bought or sold. Contrast it with a regulated market, where there are rules on the prices of goods, or who can buy from which companies, or where certain regions must be supplied from...

It is fully possible to have capitalism without a free market. A free market without capitalism is also possible, though it gets a little weird and requires some different definitions. They are entirely different concepts. Calling them synonymous is like greeting a pigeon with "nice doggy!".

The reference to a protection racket shows the potential for serious problems with patents...

That example should be interpreted as "get a patent, and it'll keep Big Bad Corporation away from you. Don't get a patent, and take the risk of losing your market..."

Not having patents just means you're always taking the risk.

and it's unhealthy for a society to not have some skepticism of the institution.

Maybe that's why I have no hesitation in pointing out that the current implementation sucks.

As for your claim, there's not that much evidence that patents actually are beneficial to society,

As for your claim, there's not that much evidence that patents actually are not beneficial to society.

In most markets, the first mover's advantage is generally seen as the biggest element in turning an idea into money

You mean like the GRiDPad? Or QDOS? Those are just off the top of my head. In fact, there are a lot of reasons why ideas fail, and being second to market isn't that important. Even if it were, it takes time to get enough investors to produce something. During that time, another (larger) company could launch their identical product first. Without patents, inventors get screwed.

I wrote a Javascript library to be used internally with our almost-but-not-entirely-unlike CMS - I could have used jQuery (which I use a lot, and really like), but there were two reasons why I didn't. First, Javascript is sadly a very misunderstood language, also by most of our technical staff - while jQuery is very powerful, the syntax is a bit terse (not a bad thing in itself, but might take some time getting used to), and it's very extensive even with no plugins. It was simpler for the others to adapt to a library with a more limited feature set and a more procedural approach. Secondly, and this was the main reason, I wanted to learn the language better. And it certainly was a learning experience, the differences in DOM implementations can be really infuriating. But in the end, it was certainly worth it, and in my opinion it made me much better in Javascript than I would have been should I just have used jQuery.

Having said that though, I'm not certain that cookbook-style books are good for learning Javascript, nor any language for that matter, if one wishes to do more than simply cut'n'paste ready bits of code. For Javascript I personally recommend this book.

BTW let me guess you pulled this 10% figure from this article, right? One that bases it's entire claims on a Steve Ballmer statement and a year old projection from ABI Research of what Linux netbook sales might be that didn't end up being true. Yeah, that sounds like a extremely reliable basis for the claim. Oh wait...

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596805890

Following the affiliate link in the review will take you to Amazon. They don't provide a Kindle version. But if you go to O'Reilly's site you can get it in various DRM-free formats for your reader of choice. And yeah, I would prefer the paper version of a cookbook too. I just found it ironic that the only way to get a version for your Kindle was to NOT go to Amazon.

Is there an e-edition? I'm not able to find it on Amazon.

And "Cooking for Geeks" should have an e-edition if any cookbook should.

Not only is there an e-edition, but in true geek fashion, it is DRM-free. You can order it here

I read this book and found the language to be suited to harsh environments, stubborn, and smelly.

The Animal on the cover would be some old Gypsy looking into a crystal ball.

Well there's already one with a dodo , so how about a passenger pigeon or a quagga?

Your comment reminded me of this article (posted on /. here), where the author came to exactly the same conclusion.

What I find interesting is that when I fire up my NES and play Final Fantasy it looks pretty good because that's what I grew up with but when I load up some N64 games I can't believe how bad they look. It will be interesting to see what the generation that grows up with HD thinks.

public class MarketingSpeakOMatic {
public static void main (String[] args) {

String [] wordListOne = {"24/7","multi-Tier","multi-dimensional","30,000-foot","B-to-B","B-to-A","win-win","front-end","web-based",
"pervasive","semantically mapped", "paradigm-shifting", "smart","six-sigma","critical-path","dynamic","crowd-generated",
"customer centric", "at-the-end-of-the-day-style","no-false-negatives","widget-based","viral", "online-based","social-networking-based", "Web 2.0"};

String[] wordListTwo = {"empowered","sticky","synergetic","value-added","oriented","centric","scalable","cocentric","small-scale","large-
scale","distributed","clustered","branded","outside-the-box","off-the-shelves","positioned","networked","focused","leveraged","longtailed",
"aligned","targeted","shared","cooperative","accelerated"};

String[] wordListThree = {"metric", "process","tipping-point","synergy","braindump","solution","architecture","core competency growth-
vector","alignment", "strategy","mindshare","debriefing","portal","space","vision","paradigm","mission"};

int oneLength = wordListOne.length;
int twoLength = wordListTwo.length;
int threeLength = wordListThree.length;

int rand1 = (int) (Math.random() * oneLength);
int rand2 = (int) (Math.random() * twoLength);
int rand3 = (int) (Math.random() * threeLength);

String phrase = wordListOne[rand1] + " " + wordListTwo[rand2] + " " + wordListThree[rand3];

System.out.println("It facilitates a " + phrase + "approach");
}
}

Head First Java

Does O'Reilly sell any of its books through ebook intermediaries? Since they sell DRM-free versions direct, usually in multiple formats, I've never bothered to look. The only exception I've noticed is the occasional iPhone app.

As for price, discounts aren't too hard to find. I ordered one book for half its listed ebook price. I've since gotten a couple of "deal of the day" ebooks for $10 each. Today's deal, listed prominently at oreilly.com, is Learning the vi and Vim Editors (PDF only, unfortunately).

As an (occasional) R user, I am excited to see a well-reviewed O'Reilly book on the language. I went and checked the major ebook stores - Amazon, BN, and Stanza, and none had the title.

It turns out that in addition to the Safari books service, O'Reilly also sells DRM-free copies in epub, mobi, and PDF formats. This book is available here. It's not a huge discount over the printed version on Amazon ($6.50 less), though. I'm surprised, then, that it isn't available via the major stores.

In a volume of this size (about 650 pages)

Not to criticize the reviewer but there's not enough written above to do this book justice. From the author's emphasis on preprocessing the data in another language (like Perl I think he uses in the Chapter 3 tutorial) so that it can be effortlessly ingested by R to the very last pages on machine learning in R, it's a good book. I actively lament that in college I was relegated to Matlab instead of R today and the many packages available on CRAN.

I too would give this book a 9/10. It sometimes tries to inject tutorials in what should probably stick to being a reference and it might have too large of a scope for a single volume (I've read sets of books on machine learning and classification models) but this book is great for R beginners and R intermediates and as an R reference.

Seriously if you know a statistician who codes or if you know a developer who values statistics then this is their book. Given the nature of the subject matter and the GPL'd beauty of R, you'll undoubtedly have a hard time finding a negative review of this book anywhere.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/08/piracy-is-progressive-taxation.html

"Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy."

Check out High Performance MySQL by Schwartz, Zaitsev, Tkachenko, Zawodny, Lentz and Balling

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101718

A couple of the authors are the guys that run http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/, which is itself a good resource for MySQL scaling.

Here's the link to the book in O'Reilly's catalog. It's 240 pages and priced at $29.95USD for print, $23.99 e-book (PDF). The author is C.J. Date.

That's been updated and replaced by SQL and Relational Theory: How to Write Accurate SQL Code .

O'Reilly books are your friend. The "... in a Nutshell" books are a good place to start, and then proceed into the more advanced books. They have 25 titles related to MySQL and 53 titles related to Microsoft SQL. There are usually a few to browse through at the large chain book stores.

O'Reilly books are your friend. The "... in a Nutshell" books are a good place to start, and then proceed into the more advanced books. They have 25 titles related to MySQL and 53 titles related to Microsoft SQL. There are usually a few to browse through at the large chain book stores.