O’Reilly Media

Everything You Wanted to Know about Drupal but were Afraid to Ask — In this live webcast, happening Friday, Dec. 5th, Drupal developers Jeff Eaton and James Walker will guide newcomers through the nuts and bolts of Drupal's content management system, content management framework, and community. Attendance is limited, so register now.

With QuickBooks 2009: The Missing Manual, you don't just learn how to use this popular program, you learn why and when to use specific features. You also get basic accounting advice so that everything makes sense along the way. If you're new to QuickBooks, special "Up to Speed" boxes fill you in on introductory information. Sidebars labeled "Power Users' Clinic" offer technical tips, tricks, and shortcuts for the experienced QuickBooks fan. Get more out of QuickBooks 2009 whether you're a beginner or an old pro. Learn more.

I take minutes in two conference calls every week. Every call starts at the same time -- I look up the number in my calendar, dial the phone, then launch a Vim instance. I've written a few Vim macros to... Read more.

An Editorial. Doom and gloom seems to be the order of the day. The stock markets seem to be making daily 4% to 5% drops, followed up by the very occasional 5-6% surges (perhaps the epitome of random walks happening... Read more.

Yesterday I gave a talk to the Privacy Forum in Auckland, New Zealand, titled Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud. The talk was intended as a scene setter for a discussion with the audience, about 70 lawyers, technologists, consultants, and public policy wonks. They responded well to the challenge, and we talked about the nature of... Read more.

Photoshop expert Deke McClelland offers some straight talk about trimming excess poundage from your images using Photoshop's near magical Liquify command. In this new dekePod episode—The Instant Liquid Diet—Deke shows you how to nip and tuck, avoid stretch marks, and make your trim edges nice and smooth. Watch the video.

Big Data is a major theme on the O'Reilly Radar, so we're delighted to welcome guest blogger Joe Hellerstein, a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley whose research focuses on databases and distributed systems. Joe has written a whitepaper with more detail on this topic. There is a debate brewing among data systems cognoscenti as to the best way... Read more.

Juval Lowy's Programming WCF Services is considered to be the most definitive treatment of Microsoft's WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) available. In it, Juval provides both the guidance and insight needed to master the skills for building maintainable, extensible, and reusable WCF-based applications. Juval's talent as a teacher—that for tackling vast subjects and making them easy to learn—comes through especially well in this appendix from his book: An Introduction to Service-Orientation. These days, there's no avoiding the phrase "service-oriented," but few people can explain what it means and why it's so important. Juval gets to the heart of the matter in this excerpt.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that they're going to stop selling their consumer security product OneCare, and instead they're going to give away for free an AV product based on the same technology. I've had several people ask me questions... Read more.

Sean McGrath wrote a great article on the struggle for Open Source to manage complexity. It's a great insight because much of programming is managing complexity. This requirement has fostered "high level" languages and continues to be powerful concept that... Read more.

Thoroughly vetted by Adobe's AIR development team, Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook addresses fundamentals, best practices, and topics that web developers and application designers inquire about most. The hands-on recipes in this cookbook help you solve a variety of tasks and scenarios you may encounter using Adobe AIR to build Rich Internet Applications for the desktop. It's an ideal way to learn the nuances of Adobe AIR, with practical solutions you can use right away, and detailed explanations of why and how they work. Learn more.

Over the weekend, TechCrunch postulated that with a frenzy of election-related activity, Twitter hit its hockey stick moment in late October. The theory goes that Twitter saw a 25 percent increase in U.S. visits from September to October and is thus about to experience the sort of explosive growth that will propel it into mainstream consciousness. That could well be... Read more.

Or, My Enterprise is Appliancized, Why Isn't Your Web? I wrote a couple of posts a while back that covered task-optimized hardware. This one was about a system that combined Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's) with a commodity CPU platform to provide the sheer number crunching performance needed to break GSM encryption. This one looked at using task-appropriate efficient processors... Read more.