Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition – Breaking Away from Python 2 to Python 3 – #programming #bookreview

Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition
David Beazley & Brian K. Jones
(O’Reilly - paperback, Kindle)

PYTHON 3 users will be very pleased with this new book. Those who still cling to Python 2 likely will not.

Even though “most working Python programmers continue to use Python 2 in production,” its authors concede, and “Python 3 is not backward compatible with past versions,” this third edition of the popular Python Cookbook is intended to be used only with Python 3.3 and above.

“Just as Python 3 is about the future, this edition…represents a major change over past editions,” Beazley and Jones state. “First and foremost, this is meant to be a very forward looking book. All of the recipes have been written and tested with Python 3.3 without regard to past Python versions or the ‘old way’ of doing things. In fact, many of the recipes will only work with Python 3.3 and above.”

THEIR “ultimate goal,” they point out, was “to write a book of recipes based on the most modern tools and idioms possible. It is hoped that the recipes can serve as a guide for people writing new code in Python 3 or those who hope to modernize existing code.”

The 687-page Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition is not intended for beginning programmers. However, beginners can learn a few things from it and keep the book on their shelves for future use as they gain experience with Python 3.

And, it can be a helpful guide if you are working to update some Python 2 code to Python 3. According to the authors, “many of the recipes aim to illustrate features that are new to Python 3 and more likely to be unknown to even experienced programmers using older versions.”

THE book offers 15 chapters of how-to recipes organized into the following major categories:

1. Data Structures and Algorithms
2. Strings and Text
3. Numbers, Dates, and Times
4. Iterators and Generators
5. Files and I/O
6. Data Encoding and Processing
7. Functions
8. Classes and Objects
9. Metaprogramming
10. Modules and Packages
11. Network and Web Programming
12. Concurrency
13. Utility Scripting and Administration
14. Testing, Debugging, and Exceptions
15. C Extensions

Each of the approximately 260 recipes is presented using a “problem-solution-discussion” format. Here are a few recipe titles chosen at random:

• “Combining and Concatenating Strings”
• “Reformatting Text to a Fixed Number of Columns”
• “Bypassing Filename Encoding”
• “Iterating over the Index-Value Pairs of a Sequence”
• “Capturing Variables in Anonymous Functions”
• “Implementing Stateful Objects or State Machines”
• “Enforcing an Argument Signature on *args and **kwargs”
• “Creating Custom Exceptions”
• “Writing a Simple C Extension Module”

SOME of the book’s code examples are complete. But others, the authors caution, “are often just skeletons that provide essential information for getting started, but which require the reader to do more research to fill in the details.”

If you are serious about Python and keeping pace with its progress, you should seriously consider getting this excellent how-to book.

– Si Dunn

Arduino Workshop – An excellent hands-on guide with 65 DIY projects – #arduino #bookreview

Arduino Workshop
A Hands-On Introduction with 65 Projects
John Boxall
(No Starch Press - paperback, Kindle)

If you’ve been wanting to tinker with a tiny Arduino computer, this excellent book can show you how to do much more than simply get started.

Indeed, John Boxall’s Arduino Workshop can keep you busy, challenged and intrigued for a long time as you work your way through basic electronics, basic Arduino programming, and a big selection of interesting and useful projects. The book’s instructions are written clearly, and they feature numerous close-up photographs, diagrams, screenshots, code listings, and other illustrations that can help you perform the how-to steps for each project.

The devices you can build with the open source Arduino microcomputer platform range from a battery tester for single-cell batteries to a GPS logger that records your travels and displays them on Google Maps. Some other examples include a digital thermometer that displays temperature changes on an LCD screen, a device that reads radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, and a remote-controlled toy tank that you steer with an infrared TV remote. You can even create and program your own breadboard Arduino microcontroller using a handful of parts and Boxall’s instructions, diagrams, and photographs.

If that isn’t enough projects, the book also shows how to create a couple of games, plus an Arduino texter that sends your cell phone a text message when a particular event occurs. And you can rig up a simple Arduino device that will allow you to control its digital output pins by sending it a text message from your phone.

With Arduino projects, you not only do some computer programming (to create the “sketches” that control the microcomputer), you likewise learn to work with electronic components such as resistors, capacitors, LEDs and LCDs, oscillator crystals, voltage regulators, and other small parts and devices.

You also can meet and learn from other Arduino enthusiasts, Boxall notes in Arduino Workshop. “The Arduino project has grown exponentially since its introduction in 2005,” he writes. “It’s now a thriving industry, supported by a community of people united with the common bond of creating something new. You’ll find both individuals and groups, ranging from interest groups and clubs to local hackerspaces and educational institutions, all interested in toying with the Arduino.”

– Si Dunn

Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide – Automate configuration management & become a better system admin – #programming #bookreview

Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide
John Arundel
(Packt Publishing – paperback, Kindle)

If you administer a small network built around just a few servers, you may still be doing at least some of the configuration management by hand. You literally move from machine to machine, manually entering updates, changes, or fixes. And your small network may be running several different brands–and vintages–of hardware and software, which complicates the update and repair process.

However, infrastructure consultant John Arundel warns, once you get “[b]eyond ten or so servers, there simply isn’t a choice. You can’t manage an infrastructure like this by hand. If you’re using a cloud computing architecture, where servers are created and destroyed minute-by-minute in response to changing demand, the artisan approach to server crafting just won’t work.”

In his new book, Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide, Arundel emphasizes: “Manual configuration management is tedious and repetitive, it’s error-prone, and it doesn’t scale well. Puppet is a tool for automating this process.”

Among “UNIX-like systems,” there are at least three major configuration management (CM) packages, including Puppet. The others are Chef and CFEngine, plus a few more competitors. Arundel calls them “all great solutions to the CM problem…it’s not very important which one you choose as long as you choose one.” But he hopes, of course, you will favor Puppet and his well-written how-to guide.

Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide is structured to help system administrators “start from scratch…and learn how to fully utilize Puppet through simple, practical examples,” he writes.

He places important emphasis on the rapidly closing “divide between ‘devs,’ who wrangle code, and ‘ops,’ who wrangle configurations. Traditionally, the skills sets of the two groups haven’t overlapped much,” he notes. “It was common until recently for system administrators not to write complex programs, and for developers to have little or no experience of building and managing servers.”

Today, system admins are “facing the challenge of scaling systems to enormous size for the web, [and] have had to get smart about programming and automation.” Meanwhile, “[d]evelopers, who now often build applications, services, and businesses by themselves, couldn’t do what they do without knowing how to set up and fix servers,” he says.

Therefore, “[t]he term ‘devops’ has begun to be used to describe the growing overlap between these skill sets…Devops write code, herd servers, build apps, scale systems, analyze outages, and fix bugs. With the advent of CM systems, devs and ops are now all just people who work with code.”

Arundel’s 184-page Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide offers 10 chapters smoothly structured with headings, short paragraphs, code examples, and other illustrations. He has generated his code examples using the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise” distribution of Linux. But he explains how to load the software using “Red Hat Linux, CentOS, or another Linux distribution that uses the Yum package system,” as well.

The chapters are:

• Chapter 1, Introduction to Puppet
• Chapter 2, First Steps with Puppet
• Chapter 3, Packages, Files, and Services
• Chapter 4, Managing Puppet with Git
• Chapter 5, Managing Users
• Chapter 6, Tasks and Templates
• Chapter 7, Definitions and Classes
• Chapter 8, Expressions and Logic
• Chapter 9, Reporting and Troubleshooting
• Chapter 10, Moving on Up

That final chapter covers a range of topics, including how to make Puppet code “more elegant, more readable, and more maintainable.” The author offers “links and suggestions for further reading.” And he describes several projects to help you “improve your skills and your infrastructure at the same time.” Those projects, he says, “provide a series of stepping-stones from your first use of Puppet to a completely automated environment.”

Besides Linux, Puppet will run on other several platforms, including Windows and Macs. But there is almost no help for those in Arundel’s book. Essentially, it’s Linux or bust. For other operating systems, you will need to refer to the Puppet Labs website.

It can take a bit of work to get Puppet installed and properly configured. But once you have Puppet running, the Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide can help you become both a proficient Puppet user and a more efficient, knowledgeable, and versatile system administrator.

– Si Dunn

Book Brief – Programming Grails – A new, solid guide for experienced developers – #programming #bookreview

Programming Grails
Burt Beckwith
(O’Reilly – paperback, Kindle )

Burt Beckwith is an experienced core developer on the Grails software team at SpringSource. His new book, Programming Grails, is written primarily for experienced Grails developers “who want to dig deeper into the architecture and understand more about how Grails works its magic and how it integrates with Groovy, Spring, Hibernate, and other technologies.”

Beckwith adds that “[d]evelopers with experience in similar frameworks such as Spring MVC, JEE, or Ruby on Rails should find this book useful in understanding how Grails implements features to which they are accustomed.”

He cautions that Programming Grails “should not be your first Grails book, since it presumes a good deal of previous experience and understanding, so be sure to read a more comprehensive Grails book first.”

The 12-chapter, 344-page book focuses on the inner workings of the Grails 2.0 feature set and emphasizes “best practices for building and deploying Grails applications,” including topics such as “performance, security, scaling, tuning, debugging, and monitoring.” It is written clearly, and its text is kept reasonably short between topic headings. Numerous short code samples and other illustrations are included.

Grails’ creator, Graeme Rocher, has given this book a solid thumb’s up, stating that “it goes much deeper than any other Grails book I have seen.”

Absolute OpenBSD: Unix for the Practical Paranoid, 2nd Edition – A good & long-overdue update – #bookreview

Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition
Unix for the Practical Paranoid
Michael W. Lucas
(No Starch Press – Kindle, paperback)

This updated new edition likely will be hailed — and rightly so — as a major event by many dedicated users of OpenBSD. After all, the first edition of Michael W. Lucas’ book was published a full decade ago, back when, the author concedes, he still had hair.

OpenBSD’s founder and long-time administrator Theo de Raadt has called this new edition both “[t]he definitive book on OpenBSD” and “a long-overdue refresh.” The praise can’t get much higher in OpenBSD-land.

OpenBSD is a highly secure, Unix-like operating system frequently used in Domain Name System (DNS) servers, routers, and firewalls. It also can run on a wide array of computer hardware, ranging from new systems to old VAXes, 386 machines, Apple’s PowerPC Macintoshes, and most products from Sun.

“Old systems can run OpenBSD quite well,” Lucas notes. “I’ve run OpenBSD/i386 quite nicely on a 166 MHz processor with 128MB of memory. You probably have some old system lying around that’s perfectly adequate for learning OpenBSD.”

Indeed, he explains, “As a matter of legacy, OpenBSD will run on hardware that has been obsolete for decades because the hardware was in popular use when OpenBSD started, and the developers try to maintain compatibility and performance when possible.”

The OpenBSD software has an intriguing and complex history that involves the 1980s breakup of AT&T, lots of lawsuits, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) project, the University of California, and the eventual emergence of the “BSD license.” The result was “perhaps the freest of the free operating systems,” Lucas says.

Today, Lucas emphasizes, “OpenBSD strives to be the most secure operating system in the world.” OpenBSD developers constantly work to try to “eliminate [security] problems before they exist,” he states.

“OpenBSD is a gift. You’re free to use it or not. As with any gift, you can do whatever you want with it. But you’re not free to bug the developers for features or support.”

His 491-page second edition offers a heavy dose–23 chapters–of how-to instructions. And readers are encouraged to read OpenBSD’s man (manual) pages online. In a book where the first chapter is titled “Getting Additional Help” and the second is titled “Installation Preparations,” you can guess that this is not aimed at absolute newcomers. Actually, Lucas says: “This book is written for experienced Unix users or system administrators who want to add OpenBSD to their repertoire.”

Still, if you want to learn and use OpenBSD, you will need this book — and some online documentation and very likely some advice from the OpenBSD community, as well. There don’t seem to be recent introduction-level books floating around. However, there are a few tutorial sites, including this one. And OpenBSD.org maintains a list of support and consulting specialists. Training also is available from a number of companies that can be found via the Web.

If you want to use OpenBSD but not spend much time learning it, you also can purchase a support contract and let someone else set up and maintain your system. Even then, you likely will want to have this new edition of Absolute OpenBSD handy for reference–and for learning, just in case, down the line, you change your mind.

– Si Dunn

Mac Hacks – More than 50 ways to unlock the power of OS X – #apple #mac #bookreview

Mac Hacks
Tips & Tools for Unlocking the Power of OS X
Chris Seibold
(O’Reilly - paperback, Kindle)

Many people buy Apple’s Macintosh computers precisely because they do not want to have to mess with their machines. They just want to open a specific app, use it, close it and move on to the other things in their lives.

But many other users want to dive inside their Macs. They want to tinker with how it works, change settings for greater efficiency or utility, and know all that they can know about taking control and making their machine do new tricks and handle new tasks.

Mac Hacks is a fine and useful guidebook for anyone who isn’t afraid to change default settings or bring up a cursor at a command-line interface. It is also an excellent how-to guide if you want to learn how to make OS X on your Mac work better for your needs.

Author Chris Seibold wisely launches his book with a caution: “Hacking is fun and productive, but it can also introduce an element of danger….” And he starts at the very basics of hacking: carefully backing up your files before you start driving your Mac off its familiar, well-beaten paths. “With a good backup,” he writes, “you don’t start over, you simply restore. Without a good backup, well, good luck….” Indeed, his first “quick hack” shows how to change the default one-hour time-interval setting for the Mac’s Time Machine backup utility, so you can back up sooner (or later).

Seibold’s 11-chapter book contains 51 hacks that range from creating a bootable flash drive to learning how to use “the Unix side of your Mac” and putting your iTunes library on a separate disk. He also offers several more “quick hacks,” including how to copy the Mac’s Recovery partition to a Flash drive, so it can be available if your Mac’s hard drive fails.

Some of the book’s hacks have been provided by respected “guest hackers.”  But Seibold himself is no slouch at Mac hacking. He has written two other books for O’Reilly: the Big Book of Apple Hacks and the Mac OS X Lion Pocket Guide.

– Si Dunn

Programming iOS 6, 3rd Edition – In with the New, Out with the Old (iOS 5 & Earlier) – #bookreview

Programming iOS 6, 3rd Edition
Matt Neuburg
(O’Reilly - paperback, Kindle)

“My book is way bigger than your book.”

Matt Neuburg, author of Programming iOS 6, could make that claim and win almost any book-size contest. The recently published 3rd Edition of his well-respected how-to guide focuses on the “Fundamentals of iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Development” and now spans 1,154 pages in its paperback edition. It’s definitely much thicker and heavier than any of the devices it covers.

This new edition is centered on iOS 6.1 and xCode 4.6. The author notes that he has “eliminated most references to previous iOS versions.” And he explains: “Many iOS 6 features, of course, do not exist in iOS 5 or before; I usually mention that a new feature is new, but I have not generally addressed the problem of writing backwards-compatible code. The text would become confused and bloated if everything had to be qualified with advice for different versions (‘but if you’re targeting iOS 5.1, do this; if you’re targeting iOS 5.0, do that; if you’re targeting iOS 4.3, do the other’). I believe that I can justify such omissions on the grounds that previous editions of this book exist!”

Indeed they do. Programming iOS 5, which was published in two editions, also covers iOS 4.3 and is available on Amazon.com and through other sources..

“New iOS 6 features are, of course, both explained and adopted” in the new 3rd edition, Neuburg says. “For example, having described NSArray subscripting (in Chapter 10), I then use it consistently, in place of objectAtIndex:, throughout the rest of the book. Aside from this, the book’s structure remains the same as in previous editions, growing where necessary to accommodate explanations of new features, such as autolayout (in Chapter 14), state restoration (in Chapter 19), and collection views (in Chapter 21). Also, in response to reader requests, I have inserted a short example of Core Data programming into Chapter 36.”

Absolute beginners should not start with this book. Get some basic programming experience in C and Objective-C first.

And don’t be surprised that not everything about iOS is covered in a book 1,154 pages long. “It’s far too big to be encompassed in a book even of this size,” Neuburg emphasizes. “There are areas of Cocoa Touch that I have ruthlessly avoided discussing. Some of them would require an entire book of their own. Others you can pick up well enough, when the time comes, from the documentation. This book is only a beginning — the fundamentals.”

– Si Dunn

Four good books that can help boost your JavaScript skills – #programming #bookreview

Ready for some enlightenment that can boost your JavaScript programming skills?

O’Reilly recently has published four books that can help you move from basic JavaScript library user to confident, experienced developer. 

“JavaScript started out as a simple and approachable front-end scripting language,” the publisher notes. “It has matured into a true cross-platform environment targeted by the latest emerging languages, frameworks, and developer tools.” The four new JavaScript books can help you “[l]earn how you can get the ultimate in responsiveness and interactivity from JavaScript, whether you use it on the front-end or server-side.” 

The four books are: JavaScript Enlightenment and DOM Enlightenment, both by Cody Lindley; Learning from jQuery by Callum Macrae; and Testable JavaScript by Mark Ethan Trostler.

#

JavaScript Enlightenment
Cody Lindley
(O’Reilly – paperback, Kindle)

Short, clear code samples are the stars of this fine, informative book. And most of the code samples can be viewed, executed and modified online using file links provided for the jsFiddle.net website.

The book’s goal is “to give the reader an accurate JavaScript worldview through an examination of native JavaScript objects and supporting nuances: complex values, primitive values, scope, inheritance, the head object, etc.” Cody Lindley adds: “I intend this book to be a short and digestible summary of the ECMAScript 3 Edition specification, focused on the nature of objects in JavaScript.”

Lindley keeps that promise in his 147-page book. His code samples rarely span more than a half page, and his explanatory paragraphs also are taut and to the point.

For example: “In JavaScript, objects are king: Almost everything is an object or acts like an object. Understand objects and you will understand JavaScript. So let’s examine the creating of objects in JavaScript….An object is just a container for a collection of named values (a.k.a properties).” 

Lindley’s book covers six of the nine native object constructors that are pre-packaged with JavaScript. The six are: Number(); String(); Boolean(); Object(); Array(); and Function(). He skips Date(), Error(), and RegEx() “because, as useful as they are, grasping the details of these objects will not make or break your general understanding of objects in JavaScript.” But he does hope you will learn them later, on your own. 

“JavaScript,” he writes, is mostly constructed from just these nine objects (as well as string, number, and boolean primitive values.) Understanding these objects in detail is key to taking advantage of JavaScript’s unique programming power and language flexibility.”

 # 

DOM Enlightenment
Cody Lindley
(O’Reilly – paperback, Kindle)

If you work with JavaScript, you probably rely on a Document Object Model (DOM) library such as jQuery to help you handle HTML scripting. 

But you can script the DOM without a DOM library, using JavaScript. Cody Lindley shows how in this excellent guide aimed at two types of developers who have experience with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

“The first developer is someone who has a good handle on JavaScript or jQuery, but has really never taken the time to understand the purpose and value of a library like jQuery,” Lindley writes. “The second type of developer is an engineer who is tasked with scripting HTML documents that will only run in modern browsers or that will get ported to native code for multiple OSes and device distributions (e.g., PhoneGap) and needs to avoid the overhead (i.e., size or size versus use) of a library.”

He notes that “HTML documents get parsed by a browser and converted into a tree structure of node objects representing a live document. The purpose of the DOM is to provide a programmatic interface for scripting (removing, adding, replacing, eventing, and modifying) this live document.”

Much of his 161-page DOM Enlightenment  focuses on how to work in JavaScript with “the most common types of nodes…one encounters when working with HTML documents.” He purposefully has “left out any details pertaining to XML or XHTML.” And, to help keep the book small, he has “purposely excluded the form and table APIs,” but adds: “I can see these sections being added in the future.”

Lindley also imposes a key technical limitation on the “content and code in this book….” It was, he says, “written with modern browsers (IE9+, Firefox latest, Chrome latest, Safari latest, Opera latest) in mind.”  

In keeping with the goals of O’Reilly’s Enlightenment series, explanations are short and concise and code examples are kept small. Also, the code examples are available online and can be displayed, run, and modified at the jsFiddle.net website.

 Cody Lindley emphasizes that he is “not promoting the idea of only going native when it comes to DOM scripting….” He hopes, instead,  “that developers may realize that DOM libraries are not always required when scripting the DOM.”

#

Learning from jQuery
Callum Macrae
(O’Reilly – paperback, Kindle)

Some developers work comfortably with jQuery yet have only a modest understanding of JavaScript.

Callum Macrae’s concise, well-written new book is intended to help fill that gap. It is “targeted at developers who know jQuery, but who don’t feel comfortable in their JavaScript knowledge or would just like to know more.”

The 102-page book focuses on the JavaScript code that jQuery covers up. It offers five chapters and two appendixes, with many short code examples and other illustrations. Much of the code is available through a GitHub repo.

Chapter 1, “Event Handling,” explains how event handling works in JavaScript and notes that “[e]vents are the heart of pretty much all web applications….jQuery provides a suite of functions to make event handling considerably easier than in JavaScript alone.” But these functions “add overhead and remove control from you, the developer. For this reason, it is important to know how you can handle events without jQuery in pure JavaScript.”

Chapter 2 covers “Constructors and Prototypes.” Writes Macrae: “Constructors are a way of creating objects, and can be initiated via the new keyword. Prototypes are one of the more powerful features of JavaScript, and allow the developer to declare a method or property that all instances of an object will inherit.” The chapter also can “help you understand how jQuery works, as jQuery itself uses prototypes.” 

Chapter 3 deals with “DOM Traversal and Manipulation.” Macrae notes that “jQuery includes a number of functions that make working with the DOM a lot easier than with JavaScript alone, which can be pretty ugly. However, the functions provided by jQuery can be rather hefty (especially in older browsers), and it is often a lot faster to just use pure JavaScript. Therefore, it is important to know how to work both.”

Chapter 4, “AJAX,” covers jQuery’s AJAX functions and concedes that they “offer some significant improvements over the native JavaScript AJAX features, as they are a lot easier to use.” Macrae explains: “AJAX is the act of making an HTTP request from JavaScript without having to reload the page; you could think of it as an inline HTTP request.” The chapter shows some jQuery AJAX requests and how those AJAX requests are sent in JavaScript. The goal is to help you get better at debugging code and also realize that “it isn’t worth loading the entire jQuery library to send a few requests and nothing else….”

Chapter 5, “JavaScript Conventions,” explains some “common conventions that you can use to improve your JavaScript…such as making your code more readable by using comments and whitespace correctly, optimizing your code in order to improve performance, design patterns, and some common antipatterns (code that causes more problems than it solves.)”

 This book is not recommended for persons who have no jQuery or JavaScript experience. Still, Appendix A, “JavaScript Basics,” provides a 28-page introduction to JavaScript, starting at “Hello World!” Appendix B, meanwhile, describes several applications and websites that can help you improve your JavaScript knowledge.

 # 

Testable JavaScript
Mark Ethan Trostler
(O’Reilly – paperback, Kindle)

“You have to test your code,” Mark Ethan Trostler emphasizes, “so why not make the process as easy and painless as possible?”

That’s a very desirable goal. Yet, as he notes a few sentences later, “testing–especially JavaScript testing–is complicated.”

For example: “Client-side JavaScript is especially difficult to test properly, as we have very little control over the environment within which our code runs. Multiple operating systems, multiple versions of operating systems, multiple browsers, multiple versions of browsers, not to mention plug-ins, extensions, different languages, zoom levels, and who knows what else, all conspire to hinder the performance of our applications. These permutations slow down, break, crash, and eat our applications for lunch. It’s a jungle out there!”

Trostler, a software engineer who works in test at Google, says his book “attempts to bridge the gap between sane development practices and JavaScript. JavaScript is a weird little language.” And he has aimed his guide at “people who encounter JavaScript professionally. Beginning, intermediate, or guru-level developers are all welcome, as this book has something for everyone.”

His 250-page how-to guide is structured into eight chapters that “tackle testable code in several steps. First we will investigate complexity. Then we will look at an architecture choice that attempts to limit complexity and coupling. With that as our foundation,” Trostler continues, “we will move on to testing, both at the functional level and at the application level.” From there, he delves into: code coverage; integration, performance, and load testing; debugging; and using automation in tests.

 “Writing unit tests for client-side JavaScript can be daunting,” Trostler states. “That means too many people don’t do it. This is not OK…”

Testable JavaScript is well written and rich with code examples, screenshots, diagrams and other illustrations. Whether you write client-side or server-side JavaScript — or both — or you are trying to rework some legacy files, Mark Ethan Trostler’s text can help you learn how to better create and maintain testable code.

– Si Dunn

EPUB 3 Best Practices – A solid guide to the EPUB digital publishing process – #bookreview

EPUB 3 Best Practices
Matt Garrish and Marcus Gylling
(O’Reilly - paperback, Kindle)

If you publish ebooks and other documents or hope to publish some soon, you definitely need to be aware of EPUB 3.

“EPUB is a format for representing documents in electronic form,” the two authors of EPUB 3 Best Practices point out. “Ebook, on the other hand, is just an abstract term used to encompass any electronic representation of a book, including formats such as PDF, HTML, ASCII text, Word, and a host of others, in addition to EPUB.”

They add: “EPUB is designed to be a general-purpose document format, and it can be used to represent many kinds of publications other than books: from magazines to newspapers to journals, and on through office documents and policies and beyond.”

This 345-page, 11-chapter book is not a digital publishing how-to guide that you can zip through in a weekend. Indeed, its contents are, by nature, a bit dense. But Garrish and Gylling do a fine job of explaining and illustrating each key aspect of EPUB. And their book contains essential information that you will need to know — or at least be aware of — if you intend to be a serious publisher of online publications.

You can, after all, hire the services of an EPUB consultant to help you with the technical details. Yet, it can be very beneficial to have a good sense of what you will be paying to have done.

Likewise, you should consider this book if you are thinking of becoming an EPUB consultant. The two authors are EPUB experts;  Gylling, in fact, led the development of the EPUB 3 specification.

“On a practical level,” they note, “EPUB defines both the format for your content and how reading systems go about discovering it and rendering it to readers….” And: “One of the most common misconceptions about EPUB is that its a ‘flavor’ of XML. (‘Should I use EPUB or DocBook?’ or, even worse, ‘Should I use EPUB or HTML5?’ Hint: EPUB (pretty much) = HTML5.)”

If you have little or no experience with EPUB, you may want to check out two ebooks–both free–before diving into EPUB 3 Best Practices. Those books are: What is EPUB 3?  and Accessible EPUB 3.

– Si Dunn

Windows PowerShell 3.0: Step by Step – A huge guide to things you can do after you’ve found PowerShell – #bookreview

Windows PowerShell 3.0: Step by Step
Ed Wilson
(Microsoft Press – paperback, Kindle)

 

Wondering what the “Open Windows PowerShell” option does on your Windows 8 PC?

There’s a book for that: Windows PowerShell 3.0: Step by Step by Ed Wilson.

According to Wilson, “Windows PowerShell 3.0 is an essential management and automation tool that brings the simplicity of the command line to the next generation operating systems.” It is “included in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, and portable to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2” and “offers unprecedented power and flexibility to everyone from power users to enterprise network administrators and architects.”

Windows PowerShell is accessed as a command console that also offers a programming language. This means you can create files that will perform some automated actions using “cmdlets” (pronounced “command-lets”) at the PowerShell prompt. The cmdlets, Wilson writes, “are like executable programs, but they take advantage of the facilities built into Windows PowerShell, and therefore are easy to write.” cmdlets are not scripts, he adds, “because they are built using the services of a special .NET Framework namespace.”

In one basic, introductory example in Wilson’s book, you create a batch file — TroubleShoot.bat — that automatically enters four commands in sequence and pipes the results of each command to a text file:

ipconfig /all >C:\tshoot.txt
route print >>C:\tshoot.txt
hostname >>C:\tshoot.txt
net statistics workstation >>C:\tshoot.txt

Wilson’s book spans 666 pages, so there are many other features and uses for PowerShell that should please power users, technical staff, Windows network administrators, and Windows networking consultants. Some programmers also will relish its opportunities to write various types of PowerShell files and create functions, subroutines, modules, and other processes.

If you are studying to become a Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) or Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT), you may know this already: Windows PowerShell is considered “a key component of many Microsoft courses and certification exams.”

Windows PowerShell 3.0: Step by Step is well written, and it is solidly illustrated with code examples, screenshots, and other graphics. The author is a senior consultant at Microsoft and a well-known scripting expert. Readers are not expected to have “any background in programming, development, or scripting.” So, it is a good (albeit hefty)  how-to guide for PowerShell beginners and intermediate users.

– Si Dunn