Free Computer programming Books

Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 16:19:02 -0500

Very odd book on Ruby,go and have a look.

Getting Real

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 16:53:39 -0500

Getting Real is the business, design, programming, and marketing philosophies of 37signals — a developer of web-based software used by over 1 million people and businesses in 70 countries.

Why is the book relevant?

37signals used the unconventional Getting Real process to launch five successful web-based applications (Basecamp, Campfire, Backpack, Writeboard, Ta-da List), and Ruby on Rails, an open-source web application framework, in just two years with no funding, no debt, and only 7 people.

What's in it for me?

Anyone working on a web app — including entrepreneurs, designers, programmers, executives, or marketers — will find value, fresh perspectives, and inspiration in this practical book. At under 200 pages it's quick reading too. Makes a great airplane book.

Who is 37signals?

We’re a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based software products possible with the least number of features necessary. Our products do less than the competition — intentionally. We’ve been in business since 1999 and love what we do.

Windows NT Workstation Configuration and Maintenance

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:44:37 -0500

Anyone faced with the task of setting up and managing a large number of workstations quickly learns the limitations of a graphical user interface. Ashley Meggitt and Matthew Lavy manage the LAN at Jesus College, Cambridge, and they've developed a number of scripts and techniques to bypass the GUI limitations and administer the workstations centrally. The result is Windows NT Workstation Configuration and Maintenance, the only book on the market to focus on automating the management tasks you perform daily to keep a large workstation farm up and running. Instead of trying to provide one-size-fits-all solutions to what are in reality site-specific kinds of problems, the authors concentrate on the techniques you need to master to keep your workstations under control. Their step-by-step approach shows you how to implement Perl scripts to take care of your particular problems.

Web Client Programming with Perl

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:42:02 -0500

If you've ever wanted to learn more about Web protocols so you could build custom client-side tools to automate tasks--or just so you have a better understanding of what's happening behind the scenes--then Web Client Programming with Perl is the book for you. Wong explains HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) requests and socket calls, then shows how you can use the LWP library for Perl to retrieve Web pages, parse HTML, check whether a server is responding, and more.

Java AWT Reference

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:38:00 -0500

The Java AWT Reference provides complete reference documentation on the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT), a large collection of classes for building graphical user interfaces in Java. With AWT, you can create windows, draw, work with images, and use components like buttons, scrollbars, and pulldown menus. The Java AWT Reference covers the classes that comprise the java.awt, java.awt.image, java.applet,java.awt.event, and java.awt.datatransfer packages. These classes provide the functionality that allows a Java application to provide user interaction in a graphical environment.

This book takes you beyond what you'd expect from a standard reference manual. Classes and methods are, of course, described in detail. But the book does much more. It offers a comprehensive explanation of how AWT components fit together. In working with components, for example, you'll see how events fit into the overall picture, what they mean, and how to use them. The book includes lots of sample code, so that you can learn by example. In addition to descriptions of the standard layout managers, for instance, you'll find an extended code example for writing your own layout manager.

CGI Programming on the World Wide Web

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:36:05 -0500

The World Wide Web is more than a place to put up clever documents and pretty pictures. With a little study and practice, you can offer interactive queries and serve instant information from databases, worked up into colorful graphics. That is what the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) offers.

This book offers a comprehensive explanation of CGI and related techniques for people who hold on to the dream of providing their own information servers on the Web.

Good scripting is not limited to a knowledge of CGI -- you need to know something about other programming tools that organize data and make the output look attractive. Gundavaram starts at the beginning, explaining the value of CGI and how it works, and takes you swiftly into the subtle details of programming. The book offers a comprehensive look at the job of providing information dynamically on the Web.

For most of the examples, this book uses the most common platform (UNIX) and the most popular language (Perl) used for CGI programming today. However, it also introduces the essentials of making CGI work with other platforms and languages. The actual programming techniques are not too different from one platform and language to another; the lessons from this book can be applied to any tools you choose.

Managing Projects with GNU Make

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:13:58 -0500

The utility simply known as make is one of the most enduring features of both Unix and other operating systems. First invented in the 1970s, make still turns up to this day as the central engine in most programming projects; it even builds the Linux kernel. In the third edition of the classic Managing Projects with GNU make, readers will learn why this utility continues to hold its top position in project build software, despite many younger competitors. The premise behind make is simple: after you change source files and want to rebuild your program or other output files, make checks timestamps to see what has changed and rebuilds just what you need, without wasting time rebuilding other files. But on top of this simple principle, make layers a rich collection of options that lets you manipulate multiple directories, build different versions of programs for different platforms, and customize your builds in other ways. This edition focuses on the GNU version of make, which has deservedly become the industry standard. GNU make contains powerful extensions that are explored in this book. It is also popular because it is free software and provides a version for almost every platform, including a version for Microsoft Windows as part of the free Cygwin project. Managing Projects with GNU make, 3rd Edition provides guidelines on meeting the needs of large, modern projects. Also added are a number of interesting advanced topics such as portability, parallelism, and use with Java. Robert Mecklenburg, author of the third edition, has used make for decades with a variety of platforms and languages. In this book he zealously lays forth how to get your builds to be as efficient as possible, reduce maintenance, avoid errors, and thoroughly understand what make is doing. Chapters on C++ and Java provide makefile entries optimized for projects in those languages. The author even includes a discussion of the makefile used to build the book.

Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:09:46 -0500

Updated to cover version 2.4.x of the Linux kernel, the second edition of Linux Device Drivers remains the best general-purpose, paper-bound guide for programmers wishing to make hardware devices work under the world's most popular open-source operating system. The authors take care to show how to write drivers that are portable--that is, that compile and run under all popular Linux platforms. That, along with the fact that they're careful to explain and illustrate concepts, makes this book very well-suited to any programmer familiar with C but not with the hardware-software interface. It's worth noting that the emphasis in the title is on "device drivers" as much as "Linux". This book will make sense to you if you've never written a driver for any platform before. It helps if you have some Linux or UNIX background, but even that is secondary as a prerequisite to C skill.

For a programming text--and one concerned with low-level instructions and data structures, at that--this book is remarkably rich in prose. You'll typically want to read this book straight through, more or less skipping the code samples, before sketching out your plan for the driver you need to write. Then, go back and pay closer attention to the sections on specific details you need to implement, such as custom task queues. For coding-time details about specific system calls and programming techniques, count on the index to point you to the right passages. --David Wall

Version Control with Subversion

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:04:17 -0500

One of the greatest frustrations in most software projects is version control: the art of managing changes to information. Today's increasingly fast pace of software development--as programmers make small changes to software one day only to undo them the next--has only heightened the problem; consecutive work on code or single-programmer software is a rare sight these days. Without careful attention to version control, concurrent and collaborative work can create more headaches than it solves. This is where Subversion comes into play. Written by members of the Subversion open source development team, Version Control with Subversion introduces the powerful new versioning tool designed to be the successor to the Concurrent Version System or CVS. CVS users will find the "look and feel" Subversion comfortably familiar, but under the surface it's far more flexible, robust, and usable, and more importantly, it improves on CVS's more notable flaws. The book begins with a general introduction to Subversion, the basic concepts behind version control, and a guided tour of Subversion's capabilities and structure. With thorough attention to detail, the authors cover every aspect of installing and configuring Subversion for managing a programming project, documentation, or any other team-based endeavor. Later chapters cover the more complex topics of branching, repository administration, and other advanced features such as properties, externals, and access control. The book ends with reference material and appendices covering a number of useful topics such as a Subversion complete reference and troubleshooting guide. Version Control with Subversion aims to be useful to readers of widely different backgrounds, from those with no previous experience in version control to experienced sysadmins. If you've never used version control, you'll find everything you need to get started in this book. And if you're a seasoned CVS pro, this book will help you make a painless leap into Subversion.

Using Samba

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:01:02 -0500

This book, which has been officially adopted by the Samba Team and is under the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), is a comprehensive guide to Samba administration. The current edition focuses on Samba 2.2 and covers the most important features of 3.0, which was under development as this book went to print.

Samba is a cross-platform triumph: it turns a Unix or Linux system into a file and print server for Microsoft Windows network clients. Samba is so robust, flexible, fast, and secure that many people are choosing it over Windows NT/2000/XP for their file and print services. Samba is also free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License.

This book will help you make file and print sharing as robust, powerful, and efficient as possible. The authors delve into the internals of the Windows activities and protocols to an unprecedented degree, explaining the strengths and weaknesses of each feature in Windows domains and in Samba itself.

Using Samba takes you from basic installation and configuration--on both the client and server side, for a wide range of systems--to subtle details of security, cross-platform compatibility, and resource discovery that make the difference between whether a user sees the folder they expect or a cryptic error message.

The range of this book knows few bounds. Wondering how to integrate Samba's authentication with that of a Windows PDC? How to get Samba to serve Microsoft Dfs shares? How to share files on Mac OS X? These and a dozen other issues of interest to system administrators are covered. A whole chapter is dedicated to troubleshooting.

Whether you're playing on one note or a full three-octave range, on your personal computer or an enterprise network, Using Samba will give you an efficient and secure server.