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http://www.phptr.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=01 31453483

My Glade point was a loose analogy. My point about XML UI was centered around Firefox and XUL (+ CSS + Javascript). So I am omitting your Glade bits from my reply because I don't think they pertain. Look at the contents of the jar files in the chrome directory from Firefox if you want a better idea of what I mean.

The biggest issue is the underlying logic that controls the interface. For example, Cocoa allows for observers, which can be updated when state changes. Both Gtk+ and KDE do this as well (though they use the signal/slot terminology). Last time I remember looking at the Windows API, it instead used a callback method.

You can write listeners in Javascript. They are behind a good deal of the Firefox interface, iirc.

My main point is this: creating an interface in HTML is not an ideal medium. It doesn't provide many native elements, and creating large libraries to compensate this is hard. It is actually quite easy to imagine someone creating a platform that isn't done in an HTML page -- especially since Java already exists.

Take a look at:

http://www.phptr.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=01 31423436&rl=1

It covers the whole XUL (which is *very* similar to HTML) + Javascript thing. It isn't that hard to set up most of what you describe. The real issue is that, like Motif or TK, the widgets available are still pretty unintelligent. Everything you need for a framework on a low level is there, however.

It's been about two years ago now that I embarked on a similar journey to your own. I wanted to find a good Linux distribution that met several criteria:
1. An installation routine that would allow me to dual-boot with Windows easily. My wife still uses Windows and is not yet ready for the transition, and since I earn my daily bread as a Windows sysadmin, I still need to keep it around for some of the things in my job.
2. A community which would be as newbie-friendly as the distribution itself. In the past I had bad experiences with some Linux experts who thought that Linux was, and should remain, the exclusive province of uber-geeks. In non-newbie-friendly support community forums, one may post a question, no matter how well formulated, and one of these fellows will offer helpful replies such as, "what a n00b- if you can't read the man pages, maybe you should go back to window$ or get a commodore64."
3. A reasonably good set of apps and tools built into the distro do to the things I need to do, and a reasonably good package manager to add new apps.
I loaded Mandrake (just prior to the change to Mandriva), looked at Suse, and Fedora. All of them met criteria 1 and 3, though correspondence to criteria 2 was a bit spotty. At that time I heard about a new distribution that was gaining a lot of popularity that had an African-sounding name: Ubuntu. I downloaded the then-current version, and loaded it with no problems. The forum users were hospitable and winsome, and welcomed me home to the distro, and the community tries to live up to the ethos of the word Ubuntu, which is used in several southern African languages, and means something like compassion for fellow human beings (very loosely paraphrased.) Where my previous experiences had been technically adequate and interesting, Ubuntu felt like coming home.
Since one of the reasons I was loading Linux was to join the free software community, I also decided that I would limit myself to obtaining whatever manuals and documentation I could also find that was free and open, in the same spirit of the Free Software Community, and here are some links that I think you'll find helpful:
The first stop on your documentation journey outside of the forums of your chosen distribution and the help guides and wikis therein should be the Linux Documentation Project at http://www.tldp.org/
Full length guides are here: http://www.tldp.org/guides.html Especially helpful to me were Machtelt Garrels Introduction to Linux: A Hands-On Guide and his Bash Guide for Beginners, but all the docs here are worthwhile, freely downloadable and printable.
Another good guide is RUTE: Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition Very well written and thorough. The author writes, "You can find out what book a person needs by asking the question, "Do you want to be a Muggle or a Wizard?" (1) If they answer "Wizard", then you give them Rute. (2) If they answer "Muggle", then you give them "Linux for Dummies." (3) If they answer "What's a Muggle?", then you give them "Harry Potter". I had just finished reading the first few Harry Potter books to my kids, and so this tickled me. RUTE is a great starter manual: http://linux.2038bug.com/rute-home.html
Bruce Perens is one of the brighter stars in the firmament of the Free Software movement, and his publisher, Prentiss Hall, has a number of books in the Bruce Perens Series available in PDF format for download here: http://www.phptr.com/promotions/promotion.asp?prom o=1484&redir=1&rl=1
No list would be complete without including the O'Reilly Open Book page. This page includes books such as the Linux Network Administrator's Guide, but also some books on the history and philosophy of the Free Software movement such as Eric S. Reymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar

as others have mentioned, wrong Bruce, and the one you seem to be talking about, Perens, his books are published under the Open Publication License, if you go here you can download 19 out of the 24 books in the series currently...not surprisingly you are wrong again.

I'd probably try to use Debian - it's fairly stable and already compiles for quite a few architectures. Maybe you can even get Kdevelop to cross-compile for you. (If you do, please consider working on the documentation for Kdevelop).

For the smaller architectures I'd seriously consider eCos (see Embedded Software Development with eCos at http://www.phptr.com/promotions/promotion.asp?prom o=1484&redir=1&rl=1). The eCos stuff is known to work with Red Hat Linux and Windows. You may be able to get it to work under another Distro.

While eCos is not Linux, it is an Open Source RTOS, with a POSIX layer and support for quite a few architectures. Check out the freely downloadable PDF. Note: I haven't used it myself, but have looked into it a bit.

Regards, Nontagonist.

Looks like the book is not actually available for download from the Perens Series web page yet.

Bruce Perens' Open Source Series

This is the first time since I've been using Fedora Core (and I've used it since Core 1) that I failed to be able to upgrade my server from the DVD-ROM.

I don't know what the deal was with it. At first it would "hang" at various stages of the install. Then, my system didn't seem to recognize the DVD as "bootable."

Finally, I tried a Yum upgrade, but it's just too soon after release for that--I actually had an easier time getting the DVD-R image via Bittorrent than using Yum. As it was, all the mirrors timed out--too busy.

FINALLY, I was able to follow this guy's recipe for setting the DVD up as a Yum repository, and that worked like a charm. I was even able to rsync the "updates" from kernel.org.

One HUGE saving grace though: For some reason, when I upgraded to FC4 last year, I completely lost X on my server. I have been running everything from the command line--not really that big a deal, but I couldn't even use remote X to get a graphical desktop. Puzzling.

Well, after the upgrade to FC5 as described above, *voila*! X is back! I now have that beautiful now Gnome desktop that FC5 has been getting raves for. It's just nice to have.

Anyway, that's the report from here.

Such as to the actual open source series?
http://www.phptr.com/promotions/promotion.asp?prom o=1484&redir=1&rl=1

This book will be there as a PDF in a few months, or you can buy it in dead tree format now.

Other books are also linked there.

Yes. I clicked on the Get your FREE downloads and book information here. link. Then most of the books listed there had a download in PDF option. Some of them didn't or only had a sample chapter, but I downloaded the Linux Quick Fix Notebook and that did seem to be the whole book (696 pages is a bit excessive for just a sample.)

I'm as blind as you were. Had to go back to the original story and search out the link to the link. Whatever... here's the (almost hidden) link... http://www.phptr.com/promotion/1484?redir=1 ~

Here's the correct PDF link. I accidently linked to the book on eCos. (Not that it isn't an interesting book...)

While this has nothing to do with MySQL directly, I think it would be fantastic if the Mozilla people were able to come up with a decent book regarding the embedding of the Gecko rendering engine.

I think I remember seeing a book on this when I did my article on free books. Ah, here we are. If I'm not mistaken, "Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" should cover the topic you're interested in. You can even download it at no cost as part of Peren's dedication to Open Source Books.

While this has nothing to do with MySQL directly, I think it would be fantastic if the Mozilla people were able to come up with a decent book regarding the embedding of the Gecko rendering engine.

I think I remember seeing a book on this when I did my article on free books. Ah, here we are. If I'm not mistaken, "Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" should cover the topic you're interested in. You can even download it at no cost as part of Peren's dedication to Open Source Books.

According to the book C++ GUI Programming With QT, I believe that the founder of the company had a dream in which he owned a company called Trolltech. He told his wife about the name, and she hated it, so they went with it.

That opening line was written by the editor of the piece. John Terpstra is a good author and more importantly, a long time contributor to FOSS, namely samba. See "Samba-3 by Example: Practical Exercises to Successful Deployment".

That opening line was written by the editor of the piece. John Terpstra is a good author and more importantly, a long time contributor to FOSS, namely samba. See "Samba-3 by Example: Practical Exercises to Successful Deployment".

For more background see Software Runaways: Monumental Software Disasters, ISBN: 013673443X, 1997 by Robert P. Glass includes the history of the Denver airport baggage handling system and 15 other desasters in large software systems, e.g. the FAA Air Traffic Control system (death by committee), American Airlines reservation system and others.

Be aware that this is not a technical book and mostly concerned about project management and the problems of defining the requirements of large projects years ahead of their finalization. All the project failures described are very large, complex projects including lots and lots of politics.

As a whole the book is rather depressing, because although in review the cause of failure seems rather obvious, but there is no obvious way to avoid them. It's also a rather dry subject, do not expect to many laughs. But it is great for a large picture on software development, a kind of "how not to do it" guide.

Wow, check out the Perens series' web page -- I hadn't realized they'd brought out so many titles. This is really impressively enlightened for a traditional print publisher. Note that all the books are available under a real free-as-in-speech license. Of the publishers that have tried making books free in digital form, almost all have made them free as in beer only. Prentice-Hall has really gone out on a limb for free information with the Perens series; it's even legal for their competitors to bring out competing editions of the same books! I hope this experiment turns out to be a commercial success, because that would be a big victory for free-as-in-speech books, and it would also help some of these writers to make a living while doing free information. BTW, all the books in the series are available for reviewing on theassayer.org.

Here is a link to said pdf: PDF

The direct link to download them is http://www.phptr.com/promotion/1484?redir=1/

Enjoy.

That's the list of all the books in the "Open Source Series." They're listed newest to oldest. Looks like this PHP 5 one will probably be available soon. It was released in October, and a book released in July is available. The ones that are electronically available have links to the PDF in the "Downloads" section on the book's page. Though the very oldest few don't seem to have that.

Right here...

http://www.phptr.com/series/series.asp?ser=335494

Well, this is the main page. There's a link just after the intro.

OpenLDAP by Example by John H. Terpstra and Benjamin Coles (0131488732)

Try Qt Designer. It allows you to drag and drop widgets onto a form, set up layouts in an easy way, and has an INCREDIBLY easy way of setting the tab order (you click the "Tab Order" button, then click on every widget in order).

It also has a built-in code editor, which will create form init events for you, and a graphical signal-slot editor which will create the slot shells for you as well.

Best of all, it Qt comes with extensive documentation and there's an excellent online book called C++ GUI Design in Qt introducing you to the toolkit

In addition to QtDesigner though, there's also the graphical Qt tool for translating your programs as well. It's actually one of the most sophisticated RAD suites out there. In terms of translation and layout management it's miles ahead of the Borland and MS tools (speaking as a guy who uses Delphi at work).

The Qt Designer code editor is a bit shakey, but it's possible to use KDevelop in conjunction with the Qt tools, in which case you get the best of both worlds.

Note, this is not to denegrate the great work performed by the GTK+ folks, but for RAD application developement, Qt has the better tools and for most modern programmers taught OOP from the get-go in Java or C++, it's easier to get to grips with.

The best one I know of is xulplanet.com. You can also google for some of the stuff from IBM (I think there was a series of 3 on using XPCOM); see bottom of this page.

PDFs of the book Rapid Application Development with Mozilla (look for "Download ... in PDF" on that page) from the publisher might help too, if you prefer going through that - or buy the book or something.

Note, though: devedge.netscape.com (the Netscape developer's site) appears to have been taken offline recently; so you'll need to go through web.archive.org if you find any results on that that look interesting.

(The folks on forums.mozillazine.org are usually quite nice too, if you're civil about things. Might be a better place to ask.)

The full text of the book "Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" is available in PDF form from here.

You'll find it helpful.

The W3C has been working on this - the "creation of a new language designed specifically for Internet computing" - since their original darpa grant in in 1995. Tim-Berners Lee's web site says he still acts as an advisor to the company that's continuing that project.

In 1995, DARPA gave a grant to MIT to develop the "next generation of communication and computation technology." Over the next three years, this research, conducted by some of the leading computing experts in the industry, produced two key deliverables. The first was a recommendation to establish what became known as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The second was the creation of a new language designed specifically for Internet computing, which they called Curl.

Andrew.S.Tanenbuam's Book "Computer Networks" deals this topic in a very elementary and a very good way. Any person,who is wondered by the Search Engine,should read that book. In the Chaper dealing with Application Layer,ast describes the basic data structures which constitute a web-search engine. You could better look at the presentation here.

Andrew.S.Tanenbuam's Book "Computer Networks" deals this topic in a very elementary and a very good way. Any person,who is wondered by the Search Engine,should read that book. In the Chaper dealing with Application Layer,ast describes the basic data structures which constitute a web-search engine. You could better look at the presentation here.

I can see the following "problems" with some of them (if I am wrong, someone please correct me):

ch02-printenv.c:

#include <stdio.h>

extern char **environ;

Shouldn't there be a #include <unistd.h> after the #include <stdio.h>? The extern variable environ is available only if unistd.h has been included. While I am talking about this example, it could have used int main(void) instead of ...(int argc, char **argv) (like he does in ch03-getline.c).

ch03-getline.c:

printf("(%lu) %s", size, line);

size is declared size_t, so it should be printed with %z (C99 only, IIRC), or it sould be cast (unsigned long) size.

ch03-memaddr.c:

uses global variables, when simply adding two parameters to afunc will do the job. I know it's a trivial example, but global variables are bad in general, and certainly avoidable in this case.

casts the result of alloca when there is no need for it. In fact, the cast will remove the warning the compiler might give if someone forgot to #include <alloca.h>.

I haven't checked other examples.

OK, you won't use it, but I did recently write a Mozilla application for MagPortal.com to allow our editors to work remotely. We are a Linux shop and our editors mostly use Windows, so it had to be cross-platform. Mozilla/XUL was used for the client application to provide a nice GUI interface (more sophisticated than what you could achieve with normal HTML -- uses widgets like <tree> and transfers data in a way that reduces latency for the user) that transfers XML back and forth across the Internet to the web server for storage. It works very nicely and is quite professional. I am somewhat surprised that you don't hear more noise about companies building custom applications like this with Mozilla.

McFarlane's book was my primary reference for the project. It is a very useful book, but I do agree with the reviewer that the index needs some work. Additionally, make sure you keep an eye on the errata page. I was a bit disappointed that the book didn't talk about how to parse generic XML in your application (look at the parseFromString() member function of DOMParser).

The book has already had its few months in paper-only format, and is available to download (along with a number of other books in the series) at InformIT

Bruce, I checked the page for accessing the source of the books under Open Content License:

http://phptr.com/Perens

However, it seems to me the source of "The Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide" is screwed. I downloaded the file but there's nothing there about the actual content of the book, and there are 5 missing chapters from Samba.org.

• Download the unencrypted PDF.
• Download the Docbook XML source for the book.
• Download the figures.

Thanks

Bruce

phptr.com/perens

Download it from The Bruce Perens Open Source Series site.

Bruce

Thanks

Bruce

Sorry about the editing stuff, I'll point your review out to Mark, the executive editor. My role is acquisition and overall series direction - I don't get involved in production.

Thanks

Bruce

Bruce

Also, the source to the first two books in my series is now online at phptr.com/perens.

Thanks

Bruce

Also, the source to the first two books in my series is now online at phptr.com/perens.

Thanks

Bruce

I found Counter Hack a good book to read and Tangled Web

Both emphasize that Internal Factors should be given as high (if not higher) priority than just blocking incoming ports (which is all a lot of the /. 'Use iptables dude' guys do...)

If you want to get serious, you'll have to understand the social, ecenomic and technical factors behind computer security, especially if you want to play with the big guys.

My $0.02

By the way, does a new edition mean old ones will be available cheaper? Anyone want to give away a Red Book?

By the way, does a new edition mean old ones will be available cheaper? Anyone want to give away a Red Book?

By the way, does a new edition mean old ones will be available cheaper? Anyone want to give away a Red Book?

Since the review doesn't say much about what's actually in the book, you can download a sample chapter in PDF format and read the table of contents at Prentice-Hall, the publisher of the book.

Operating System Design: The XINU Approach by Douglas Comer (from Prentice Hall) was a really good book for me. It concentrates more on building a working operating system than on theoretical issues, which makes it a lot easier to read than some of the more academic texts. (Tenanbaum, Silberschatz and Galvin, etc.) There used to be several versions of the book, one each for the PDP-11, IBM-PC, and Macintosh, but you may not be able to find anything other than the IBM-PC version these days.

I also have an old copy of The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System by Leffler, McKusick, Karels and Quarterman, from Addison-Wesley, which was a pretty thorough coverage of unix concepts when it was written. There is likely to be a more up-to-date contemporary edition. (and you can probably find a small army of similar books, including the excelent Linux Kernel Internals by Beck, Böhme, Dziadzka, et. al. also from Addison-Wesley) Finally, you may want to pick up a copy of the anotated unix source code Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions from Peer-to-Peer Communications.