Web Books

Speaking as an avid myspace user, this book did the website and its users appropriate justice. I recommend this book for everyone from myspace members that want to fully understand the opportunities myspace presents to the concerned parent not too sure of all that this website entails. This was entertaining yet insightful.

This handbook could be renamed A Parent's Guide of the Internet. It explained a ton of detail, from website history to detailed information. There were things that I thought would be over my head but in the concise and simple language the concepts were clear- such as the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

There were sites that I'd heard of but had never ventured to understand but the book lays them all out carefully, even explaining their site history and details- Orkut, Bebo, Flickr, and YouTube. Many of us recall [...] from a number of years ago but didn't realize it had become [...] and it likely on its way to further extinction due to sites like MySpace.

The social forum details were something I wasn't clear on. The fact that MySpace has issued a Terms of Service agreement (among them, no one less than 14 can have an account) gave me some confidence that there are efforts to monitor outside of what a parent can do on their own. Additionally, no one older than 18 allowed in the under 18 forum and in the event they do attempt to mask their identity and participate in a minor's chat forum, criminal prosecution can occur. There is also software strictly for monitoring PC use that a parent can use.

Additionally, I began to understand the use of MySpace for me. The Keeping in Touch section discussed finding old classmates and friends- something that previously only use to happen by chance but instead is now often just a few clicks away. 5 out of 5 stars.

As a mom with a teen I have heard all the reasons why myspace was a must have. To add to my daughter's social dilemma, she is home-schooled. Her social life is limited to church events and friends staying over night. You can imagine all the moaning I heard when I said "no, you can't have an account". Her arguments were fair. She just wanted to be able to keep in touch. Her friends all used myspace and few of them still used traditional email.

Unlike most parents concerns I am not worried that a predator will stalk my daughter. We have a very open relationship and she knows the signs to look for. I am however very worried about what she is exposed to. I have a strong belief that continual exposure, no matter how slight, will have serious consequences on a child's development. Myspace was an area of exposure that is not acceptable in my home. As I understood the site to work my daughter would be bombarded with friend requests from unfamiliar teens, advertisements that may not be appropriate, and an inability for me to readily supervise her activities. [...] was simply off limits and I had no reason to feel any different. That was of course until I read the [...] handbook.

This book offered an amazing amount of information for the myspace user and parents of teens with myspace accounts. It touches in great detail on areas of privacy and how to protect yourself or your child. It shows how to avoid unwanted friend requests and advertisements. The book even explains how to use myspace in a way that shows how friendly social networking can be. There is a section devoted to protecting yourself and your teens from many potential threats and gives a realistic view on these threats. After reading this book I am confident that my daughter and I can work together allowing her to join the social network her friends keep begging her to join. I shared the information in the book with her and she was willing to work together. Not too mention thrilled that mom also wanted to share this with her.

Any parent that is having doubts about their teens on myspace.com needs to read this book. It is the most informative guide I have seen out there. Even parents with active myspace users should read this book to better understand what their teens are doing. Not a parent? This guide offers a cluster of information on how to create and maintain a unique and creative myspace account. This is a book you will use over and over again as you utilize all the possibilities with a myspace account. This book deserves 5 stars.

I was new to Myspace before I read this book, and I was totally overwhelmed. After reading it, though, I absolutely love it. This book is great for anyone who wants to use Myspace but isn't really sure what to do. It's also great if you have kids and want to keep them safe from any online predators.

The book goes into a lot of detail as to how Myspace works and how you can use customize your own page, as well as keep your children protected. And though I'm not to the point yet where I'm making money through Myspace, this book would make it a lot easier for me if I wanted to do so. Overall, I'd say this book is ideal for a lot of people, especially those who are new or relatively new to Myspace.

This book answered many of the financial questions that I was too ashamed to ask. Even though I went to business school, much of the financial world and the language that accompanies it was foreign to me. Rather than having to venture into this overwhelming territory unassisted, I read this book and was able to start making smart decisions about my finances and my life. I would strongly recommend this book for anyone looking to learn about money or improve their financial standing. Most importantly, the book was interesting and inspiring.

This book is an increadible resource for someone who is looking to increase their financial "common sense". After reading this book, I immediately contacted my financial advisor and consulted with him about some of Russell Bailyn's interesting perspectives (and I'm already seeing results!). Navigating the Financial Blogosphere is easy to read and easy to follow. It provides some great, practical tips which will help you increase your networth starting today! I highly, highly recommend it!

Russell Bailyn's views on today's financial market are inventive and refreshing. He's wealth of knowledge really shows and eventhough it may be his first book i'm sure it won't be his last. His ideas give me a new outlook on my personal finances and how I make decisions. This book is a must have!

This was a nice little book written by a young professional who works as a wealth manager. It's a personal finance or young person's financial planning book. I liked the way the book presented the material in clear and digestible snippets. I read a book not too long ago that was similar in format. See Blogging and Podcasting (ISBN: 1419584359). In both books the authors promote themselves through blogging. And instead of writing their books as a separate and distinct activity as compared to their blogs, they lift a lot of their content from their blogs and spruce it up a little before calling it a book.

This book has 27 chapters divided up into the following four sections:

1. First perspectives on money (chapters 1-5)
2. Building wealth requires planing (chapters 6-13)
3. Living in a financial world (chapters 14-21)
4. Think long-term about money management (chapters 22-27)

The chapters are short which is why I equate them to spruced-up blog entries. And the number of chapters is large, another reason this book has the feel of a blog rather than something that was put together originally as a book.

The book is well-written and easy to read and follow. It cites much of its content to Web sites and links that can be found online. If you want to learn about some of the things the Internet has to offer regarding personal finance and financial planning, then I highly recommend this book. If you are just wanting to familiarize yourself with personal finance and financial planning, then this would be a nice book to read, too. However, it's not a treatise on the subject. 5 stars!

I liked this book because it let me make my own card games with Pokemon with my brother. It also has a contest that I did for free! I liked it because you get to make your own cards anyway you want and you can also make cards that aren't with Pokemon. I made ones with dinos.

This new version of Blast is great for making card games with Pokemon. It's so much easier to understand! I really like "Pokemon Swap" too, but Blast lets you make games not just cards.

This edition of Blast is greatly improved over the first. An excellent group project for 4th graders (9 years old) and up.

Young people love Pokemon right now so I thought I'd try something different in art. I brought in ten copies of this book and walked students through the process of making their own made-up Pokemon on the cards. Now their energy is focused on their unique creations. A great idea, Alex and Gille.

This a great all-inclusive resource for Oracle SQL developers. Though focusing on 8i and not on the newer 9i, the concepts are still helpful. Suitable for intermediate and advanced developers.

As a consultant, I depend on having the right answers available when they're needed. This compilation of books gives me an easily portable collection of seven of the best PL/SQL references available. The ebooks are collections of HTML pages, readable with any browser. The included search engine allows you to search through all the books, or a single book at a time (though not a limited subset of books) for keywords or phrases. The included "Oracle PL/SQL Programming Guide to Oracle8i Features" is an excellent book in its own right, with the typical well-written, entertaining, and informative prose that Feurstein fans are enamored with. This package is an incredible value.

O'Reilly simply has the best PL/SQL reference library on the market. This collection of 7 books on CD, along with soft-cover book "Guide to Oracle 8i Features" is the PL/SQL reference standard. Having some previous experience with a couple of the books on the CD, particularly with Steve Feuerstein's work, I found the writing to be clear, insightful and very readable. The programming comments and suggestions are right on the mark. What I also enjoyed was the price, which represents a significant savings over the list cost of the individual books in the bookshelf.

When I first started looking at the CD, I wondered how I would best make use of this reference. I tried reading it on my monitor, starting on the first page and continuing on from there, but after awhile I realized that wasn't going to work. I then started playing with the text searching capabilities provided on the CD. What I found is that O'Reilly has done a very nice job of first indexing and then implementing electronic searches. I am now using the CD exclusively as a reference via this search. Although I didn't know it then, I now believe that is the best way to use the reference if you have some prior knowledge of PL/SQL. I now keep the CD at work, consulting it whenever I need to refresh my memory on how best to write PL/SQL. If you have no prior experience with PL/SQL or you don't like reading books on-line, consider just purchasing the soft-cover components of the bookshelf. However, if you are like me and have some experience in the area, this bookshelf is an indispensable part of the Oracle reference library.

One last thought. Although the bookshelf is great, I do have a problem with it. The collection is dated. The CD covers PL/SQL through to version 8.0 of the Oracle RDBMS. A soft-cover book, included in the distribution but not on the CD, includes new features provided with Oracle 8i. That leaves a sizable hole in that PL/SQL features introduced with Oracle 9i are not discussed. I suspect that even as I write this Steve Feuerstein et. al. are hard at work filling that void. In the meantime this collection is the best PL/SQL reference for Oracle 8i.

This CD Bookshelf is an excellent resource for PL/SQL and Oracle Database Developers. It contains 7 books which offer valuable information on PL/SQL programming. The collection of books cover basic to advanced PL/SQL programming topics. Beginners and advanced PL/SQL Developers will find this a good reference to add to their library collection. The Oracle PL/SQL Programming, 2nd Edition book on the PL/SQL CD Bookshelf provides indepth information on the fundamentals of PL/SQL. For more advanced developers the Advanced Oracle PL/SQL Programming with Packages is an excellent resource. Other books on the PL/SQL CD Bookshelf are equally useful and valuable. The PL/SQL CD Bookshelf is a great resource kit to have in my collection!

There are few books out that deal with Oracle Text and XSQL. Applying the methodologies, practices, etc. I found no need to search for another reference.

Mike has done an outstanding job with a complicated topic, a remarkable achievment from a Carolina fellow!

This book describes a new and interesting approach to some well-known web development problems. Though not all of the technologies described are mature (yet), they are largely standards-based and likely to grow in popularity in the coming years. The author does a good job of showing how several different technologies (SQL, XML, XSLT, HTML and others) can be focused into a coherent whole. Probably not for beginners, but anyone with web development experience should be able to learn a lot from this book.

The author has done a excellent job. It describes about the important pieces in a dedicated chapter - XSQL architecture. After that he delves into SQL, PLSQL, XSQL , XSLT. The best part is chapter 14 on Building XSQL web applications. This explains how all the above pieces are put into a working model. The material is written keeping oracle 9i in mind. As a whole, I felt very comfortable reading the whole book.

Especially for database developers who come from sql, plsql background and are trying to get into web development world ( without the hassle of learning Java Servlets, Jsp etc ... ), I would definitely recommend it.

For my daughter I bought the whole of these books. This Outlook addition has been a good help for her. I recommend this for anyone

The colorful comic book cover of this book quickly grabbed my attention. The content of the book really doesn't have much to do with the comic character theme. The book is broken up into small lessons, which is good for someone like myself with a short attention span. This book is very easy to read and very well written, yet it is filled with a lot of humorous examples. I never thought I could enjoy reading a book about Microsoft Outlook, but I've got to admit this one made me laugh out loud at times.

Oh yes, it also comes with a very cool CD-ROM, so you can practice all of the examples on your computer without having to actually the program installed.

It is a great book if you have never used Outlook and you don't need the software on your computer.

The lessons contained on the disc are very detailed and easy to understand as you are walked through. After each lessons there is a quiz to make sure you understand the fundamentals contained in the lesson. The other good thing is you can use the lessons as many times as you like as you can reset the disc. Installation was easy just requiring you to put it in your CD drive.

It is a self paced system and after using it I definitely felt confident. For people learning at home without being on a shared server you can also complete this lesson for shared mailboxes and meeting requests.

For millions of users, Microsoft Outlook is how they read and write email. This book explains in easy steps the many features endowed in it. Each chapter is divided into short lessons, with a lesson typically spanning no more than 3 pages. The intent is that a lesson is a very bite-sized set of steps that you can readily comprehend in a few minutes. Regular readers of O'Reilly books will recognise this as similar to their Hacks series in format. Though the Custom Guide books are more vivid, shall we say?

To me, the most interesting lesson was how Outlook deals with spam. The book said earlier versions of Outlook used a filter "that was almost worthless". But the current filter is asserted to be much improved. Though the details are proprietary, it appears to be some type of Bayesian with other techniques like a white list. The subject is scarcely closed. The lesson says that third party filters can also be used, to improve spam detection.

This is an excellent guide that should be kept next to your computer at all times! Its impossible to research the many sites and software available for kids without some assistance and this little book is a BIG HELP.

The book described some good web sites that were fun for my 6 year-old. I had fun with it too. I liked the section about child safety and tips on how to deal with adult content on the Internet. I haven't bought any software yet, so I can't comment on the software reviews.

I think this book is a boon for my wife and kids, finally a book that we can all use together, that lays out for us fun and educational software and web sites. It is nice to have all this information in one place -- and on paper, rather than on "the internet." So, if you are fairly computer illiterate like me, I would recommend it to other parents with kids who already have computers in their households.

every 2-3 months, I find myself at zany brainy or some other kids' store trying to buy software for my 5 year old. I never know what's worth buying, and the store help tends to be clueless. This book is the answer -- it's got great, detailed reviews of some very cool kids software. And it also pointed me to some neat web sites that my son has loved (dealing with space and astronomy which is his favorite thing). So I'd highly recommend this book. Don't know what I did without it.

I work in the field of marketing and have dabbled with Photoshop for a while. I now find myself using it more and more since getting this book. I like that the book breaks things down and makes the program easy for the user to understand yet isnt't so simplistic an avid user would get bored. One of my favorite features of the book is the center section; here there are color photos of color swatches, different blending techniques, layering effects, etc. I refer to this section often, rather than choosing each effect on the menu bar and undoing until I find what I'm looking for. This book has a permanent spot within arms reach of my computer.

Wendy Willard provides an excellent resource for beginners and experienced Photoshop users. There are so many ways to accomplish the same task, and Wendy provides the most efficient, easiest to understand set of steps for accomplishing all sorts of tasks. Her informal writing style makes it easy to stay focused and grasp concepts after one read. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn or brush up on Photoshop skills.

Wendy makes learning Photoshop fun and easy, teaching her readers the most practical and useful aspects of Photoshop by featuring examples of real-world uses. With this book, users can mix-and-master Photoshop skills at their own pace by applying the book's easy to understand tips and techniques to everyday project tasks. The book teaches Photoshop's capabilities through easy to follow step-by-step techniques that are specifically designed to create effects that readily transfer to other uses of design and photo image editing. The book is packed with intuitive 'Quick Tips' (my favorite part), helpful 'Notes' and invaluable high-end techniques that quickly result in top-quality, professional images. The best part about this book is that it overlooks nobody. Both professional and amateur web designers, photographers and print designers will appreciate the attention Wendy brings to their specific and often unique industry requirements, helping to streamline their tasks, improve their quality of work and enhance their Photoshop experience.

This is more than your standard "tips and tricks" book. It gives much more comprehensive coverage of how to use Photoshop for some very specific purposes, from general page layout and design to slicing and optimizing images for the Web. Willard is something of an expert on Web design; I've used her other books on Web design and HTML, but in this book she gives as much focus and coverage to using Photoshop for print design as well as the Web. It's a great all-around resource. The writing is also clear and focused, as I've come to expect from her other books, and she is meticulous about the details. She is a real pro. I'd highly recommend this book for any level of user.

I started reading Lynda Weinman's books way back when she did a book on creating graphics for the web. I don't recall the title, but it was a book on optimizing images, and it was made way back in around '99.

What I guess I'm saying is that Lynda is an authority, she knows what she's doing, and just as importantly, knows how to actually convey her knowledge in an understandable, interactive way. Hands On Training is kinda like those DeVry ads you've seen for so many years during Perry Mason episodes. It's about learning by doing. I mean, how are you going to learn how create layer masks with gradients and textures that are linked and include shapes and are feathered with paths and........if you're reading a book with one paragraph after another, and very few numbered steps. Are you really going to remember that shortcut key for the magic wand from reading a manual written in paragraph form, with one pictured example every 3 pages?

And, to sidetrack, do you really want to learn how to make 3-D warped multicolored lettering to be used in a Word newsletter?

I say no. And so does Lynda, I'm sure. And so, I'd guess, does DeVry. I've used Photoshop for 12 years and I'd say I'm an intermediate. Maybe in 20 years I'll know what Lynda and her fine associates know.

This is by far the best and most informative and detailed book of its kind. It covers every aspect of "everything you ever wanted to know about" rollovers and rollover animated menus! It does not leave you 'missing something' or saying: 'yes, but it really doesn't cover...' - It covers everything! The accompanying CD is excellent!

My favorite tutorial books for software are the Hands On Training and the Classroom In A Book series. And, if forced to choose one series or the other, I'd choose H O T.

Authors Lynda Weinman and Jan Kabili have done a great job.

Although I remain a devotee of CIB methods, my library will include the HOT books for all complex software.

Discussion of animated GIFs, automation and integrating with other programs, such as GoLive, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Acrobat and QuickTime [Chapters 13, 14 and 16] are of especial importance.

This book is a must for users of Adobe's ImageReady and Photoshop.

The most comprehensive tutorial you're likely to find covering PhotoShop's "little web sister", leave it to Lynda.com to come up with THE ImageReady book. Don't let the title mislead you, especially if you're already a long-time P-Shop veteran. The information contained in these pages, accompanied by outstanding tutorials and full color illustrations, is NOT a rehash of stuff you already know; it is a means of making the transition from traditional publishing to creating full-blown web pages with minimal compromise.

Even seasoned users of Adobe's cornerstone image editing tool may find some new and useful tips in streamlining graphics production - I certainly did. Instructor Jan Kabili makes the journey such a pleasure (not to mention a productive use of time), one could actually become converted to working in lo-res art! As in other titles by this publisher, the exercises are straighforward, economical and plentiful - the reader is presented with a great deal of material in relatively short order, yet in a way that is not at all difficult to retain practical information.

Granted, Adobe ImageReady is not a web management tool ..... that's Macromedia Dreamweaver's job, and though it may not integrate with that program as closely as, say, Fireworks, it contains no shortage of tools for fully preparing, creating, optimizing and animating raster images for web use. This entry in the highly-praised Hands-On-Training series is as good an introduction as you'll find on making full use of ImageReady in a short time, and a genuinely enjoyable one at that.

Acquire, read, and get thyself web-ready.

Based on the title, the book has so many things to discuss but it actually has less than 400 pages that even include the glossary of terms. The reader might have a second thought about the book since it might not promise to discuss the things written in the chapter.

But if you go through the chapters, you will be surprised how each topic could be discussed thoroughly in this book. Using the traditional structures in most web and application development books, it slowly introduces each concept before they are brought together in the final chapters.

PHP and Oracle are discussed separately at first with sample codes and situations to ensure that the reader understands each concept. It then goes to discuss who they could be efficiently integrated. The final chapter which is about Ajax is very impressive as it gives the developers a chance to develop an Ajax based application using popular practices in web development. The robustness of Oracle and efficiency of PHP is actually shown in an Ajax based application.

PHP Oracle Web Development: Data processing, Security, Caching, XML, Web Services, and Ajax is a good starting book for any web development professionals and enthusiasts. It covers the basics of web development using PHP and database management of Oracle including an installation guide for Oracle and PHP. If you are looking for a book to start with PHP and Oracle, this book offers a good start.

For developers who are experienced in this discipline, the book could be a good reference point for developing an application. The sample codes that helps the reader understands the underlying concept of the application with actual scenarios, this PHP and Oracle book is almost too good to pass on.

This book consists in almost 400 pages of solid content, and is targeted at beginners-to-intermediate PHP and Oracle developers who want to learn or have a deeper understanding of the interaction of the two technologies.

The first chapters highlight the capabilities and advantages of Oracle, cover the installation and connecting procedures, and present some of the alternatives to use Oracle with PHP: using the PHP OCI8 extension directly, and with some popular database abstraction libraries like PEAR::DB, ADOdb, or PDO. A capital sin is it never mentions PEAR::MDB2 ;-)
The central chapters are dedicated to data processing, transaction handling, OO programming, security and caching (also using PEAR::Cache_Lite).
The last chapters are dedicated to XML, XSLT, SOAP and AJAX, and are packed with examples which are more than enough to get you started with those features. All the code examples are laid in a plain and very easy to understand way, yet consistently suggesting some best practices from the very beginning.

The first merit of this book is it shows how you can process data with the DBMS and not just to treat the DBMS like a dumb storage system. For instance, there's a whole chapter explaining how to store, query and transform XML documents with PHP and with Oracle's internal XSLT functions, and there are many examples of STORED PROCEDUREs, TRIGGERs, transaction handling, etc.
A good part of the examples have a strong focus on security too. I found particularly interesting the explanation of alternative techniques to secure your tables, and to mask rows and columns for fine-grained access, using not only VIEWs, but also SPs, multiple schemas, PL/SQL packages, table functions and Virtual Private Database policies. On the PHP side, it goes all the way to create a custom PEAR::Auth container.

One of the most interesting paragraphs of the book describes the usage of Change Notification and notification handlers (a new feature of Oracle Database 10g Rel 2) for caching purposes.

While some of the described techniques aren't Oracle-specific and could be used with any other DBMS and it would have been nice to dive deeper into some other unique Oracle characteristics, that was probably out of scope for an introduction to PHP and Oracle, and it doesn't detract from the merits of this excellent book.

The writing style is clear, even if IMHO it could have been more concise sometimes. For instance, reading continue anticipations and wrap-ups that stress the same concept can get a bit annoying after a while: "In the next chapter we're going to see...", "This chapter covers...", "Now that you have an idea on how...", "In this chapter we've learnt how to...".
Anyway, I guess that it's in the spirit of the old adagio "repetita iuvant", and it may make sense in a technical book. My overall impression is very positive.

It's rather small, but gives a good overview of PHP, Oracle and AJAX, coupled together. There is only one project example Throughout the whole book, which is enhanced from various aspects. To be precise, they are:

Performance Optimization - views, stored subprograms, triggers, binding variables (Oracle);
caching mechanisms (PHP,Oracle) - intended to reduce amount of data transferred between database and web servers; AJAX - browser-side optimization,

Security - special database schemas coding/decoding algorithms usage(sha1, md5),
Virtual Private Database (VPD) - Oracle

Scalability/Complexity Control - object-oriented approach (PHP5 features, Oracle Object Types)

Unified Data - XML-processing data inside database/PHP server
using XML DB to implement web-service (SOAP, WSDL).

Many of these ideas are rather universal and can be applied to other database servers, web servers and script languages

I would like to emphasize that author is an expert in Oracle, he tries to move almost all business-logic to database server, use native Oracle features (some of them are implemented only in latest Oracle versions). There are also chapters devoted to general database principles (transaction features (ACID), views, stored subprograms, concurrency, views, triggers, stored subprograms) which can be very useful for novice developers.

PHP Oracle Web Development by Yuli Vasiliev, to quote the front, covers data processing, security, caching, XML, Web Services and Ajax. Quite a lot for a mere 360 or so pages.

The book starts off with notes on both PHP and Oracle and describes how to obtain them both and how to get everything up and running using the PHP OCI8 extensions from Oracle. Whilst Oracle is a market leader in the big database arena, many developers will be surprised to learn that the full and unrestricted product is freely downloadable for development purposes - you only need to buy a licence for a production system. Even then, a free cut down version is available if you don't need the full bells and whistles.

So, with everything up and running, the book launches in to the subject at hand. I was immedietely impressed with the author's clear and easily read prose. Every subject is presented with just the right balance of detail with lots of additional notes and background information to help fill in any gaps. The author's real world experience shines through with sections on locking issues and coding for reusability. The section on object-orienation was particularly welcome.

I also liked the fact that the book didn't just cover the core subject of using Oracle with PHP but also covered vital related material such as various security models and a sizeable section on caching techniques. The sections on XML, Web Services via SOAP and Ajax ensure all the current must-have skills are represented. Ajax was presented via an example application which featured all the aspects you'd need including both code and style sheets but I'd have liked a bit more general advice and description here.

The bulk of the book though is the coverage of the OCI8 extentions and here you can find out how to issue a wide variety of SQL statements including using stored procedures, making use of triggers and a good section on transaction handling that didn't just show how to use them but also had useful advice on structuring your code to make best use of them. I would have liked some notes on avoiding things like SQL Injection attacks but that apart, the security section had some interesting nuggets.

The section on object-orientation warrents close inspection if you want to really leverage the power of the tools available in this development environment. It didn't have much on the 'big picture' of how you'd structure applications this way but it does describe how it all works and how to extend existing objects as well as create your own.

I feel I can safely say that if you need to get to grips with PHP in an Oracle environment, you'll find everything you'll need here to get up and running very quickly. The pace, content and structure of the book are all excellent with my only reserve being the assumption that everything works as it is supposed to with not much in the way of troubleshooting advice. That apart, this is a fine book.