Joomla 1.5: Beginner's Guide Review

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(More customer reviews)In the early days of the web, a business would put up a website with a few HTML pages, some contact info, and be done with it. This was fine until their competitors started offering more dynamic content and services on-line. Customers began to have higher expectations for on-line services, and the web has evolved to meet these new realities. It's changes like these that have sparked the 'CMS Revolution', where businesses and individuals are empowered by software tools like Joomla! 1.5. Tools that allow a non technical person to build and maintain a website quickly and easily. Joomla 1.5 Beginner's Guide by Eric Tiggeler is a new book that covers a broad range of topics to get you up and running on your new Joomla! 1.5 based website.
You'll learn how easy it is to install Joomla! 1.5 on your own computer or a web server. Using a practical example website, follow the step by step guide to creating a basic site in just one hour. You'll learn techniques for organizing your content and navigation. This means that as the site grows, it remains easy to find what you're looking for, both as an administrator, and as a visitor browsing the site. Beyond the basics of site administration, you'll learn best practices to help you get the most from your website. Tips for attracting search engine traffic are included, as well as ways to enable visitor interaction, to keep people engaged with your content. In addition to the practical examples given, each section concludes with a quiz, to help reinforce learning in an entertaining way.
Even if you're new to web design concepts like HTML and CSS, you won't have any difficulty understanding this book. By following the practical, clearly worded examples, you'll learn everything you need to know to build and maintain a professional looking website. The material in this book will meet the needs of most website administrators. This is because Joomla! 1.5, and the many extensions available, are built with ease of use in mind. If you want to learn more advanced topics, this book doesn't cover those, but will still give you a solid grounding in Joomla! 1.5 administration. So for the more experienced web developers, it's also a great way to fast track your knowledge about the CMS.
So why are open source CMS solutions becoming so popular? On the one hand, it's about moving from static HTML based websites, to dynamic CMS solutions. This allows websites to deliver an engaging experience that's not possible with only static HTML. In many cases, it's also about users being empowered to publish their content directly, rather than relying on expensive and restrictive proprietary products and services, such as proprietary portal software. Joomla! 1.5 is free software, maintained by a word-wide user community, with the goal of empowering anyone to build and maintain their own website. I hope you enjoy this book, and that is helps you get the most from your Joomla! 1.5 based website.
Note: I'm a member of the Packt affiliate program. I'm providing disclosure of this fact, so that my readers can make informed decisions.

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Written with a fast-paced but friendly and engaging approach, this Packt Beginner's guide is designed to be placed alongside the computer as your guide and mentor to meet real-world web building challenges. Step-by-step tutorials are bolstered by explanations of the reasoning behind what you are doing. You will quickly pick up the necessary skills, tips, and tricks for building a successful Joomla! web site with practical examples that help you to learn by experiment and play. If you want to build and maintain your own web site, the Joomla! Beginner's Guide is perfect for you. It helps you build on the skills and knowledge you may already have on creating web sites-but even if you're new to this subject, you won't have any difficulty understanding the clear and friendly instructions and explanations. You learn how to build and maintain web sites without having to dive deep into HTML and CSS.

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Greasemonkey Hacks: Tips & Tools for Remixing the Web with Firefox Review

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(More customer reviews)Greasemonkey (GM) is an extension (arguably one of the most useful) for the Firefox browser. GM is an agent that allows the dynamic alteration and manipulation of web pages via scripts which run after the page is loaded but before it is rendered to you. GM opens the Document Object Model (DOM) of other people's web pages up to client-side access, which gives you the power to add, remove and change the content of that web page to suit your tastes and needs - almost exactly if you had written the web page yourself. GM, however, is only the hosting engine. All the real work is performed by implementing JavaScript files, that you or someone else has written.
Greasemonkey Hacks is a great read and a valuable "ideas" asset, but only if you fit into the niche it is written for. As GM is nothing more than an interface host for dynamic scripting, not a lot other than an overview of the extension, where to get it, and a how to use its few dialogs can be written about. Indeed, it already has been covered before and is freely available on the extension's home page (Greasemonkey dot Mozdev dot Org). As GM makes the DOM available to custom JavaScripts, unless you only intend to look for and run other peoples scripts (which is quite doable as UserScripts dot Org makes hundreds of thousands of them readily available, some of which appear in this book), a working knowledge of the DOM and JavaScript is needed. The author does not spend much time covering what GM is, and very little time covering any JavaScripting or DOM objects; you are expected to already understand what you see. What this title does give you is hundreds of pages of ideas, accomplished by presenting recipe script after recipe script complete with discussions and explanations.
The book is well written, and entertaining to read. The information presented within ranges from novice to advanced (if you're into scripting) and is never dumbed down or made overly complicated. If you're really interested in writing your own web browsing "hacks", this is an excellent read as it provides a great guided introduction into the topic, beyond what you would get if you just threw yourself into the GM-related websites. If you find the possibilities tantalizing, you won't be sorry you purchased this book. But, as this is not a how-to or learning book for the DOM or for JavaScript, I couldn't recommend it above the GM websites to the casual Firefox user or those who do not script.

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Greasemonkey Hacks is an invaluable compendium 100 ingenious hacks for power users who want to master Greasemonkey, the hot new Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. With Greasemonkey, you can create scripts that make a web site more usable, fix rendering bugs that site owners can't be bothered to fix themselves, or add items to a web site's menu bar. You can alter pages so they work better with technologies that speak a web page out loud or convert it to Braille. Greasemonkey gurus can even import, combine, and alter data from different web sites to meet their own specific needs.

Greasemonkey has achieved a cult-like following in its short lifespan, but its uses are just beginning to be explored. Let's say you're shopping on an e-commerce site. You can create a script that will automatically display competitive prices for that particular product from other web sites. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination and your Greasemonkey expertise. Greasemonkey Hacks can't help you with the imagination part, but it can provide the expert hacks-complete with the sample code-you need to turn your brainstorms into reality.

More than just an essential collection of made-to-order Greasemonkey solutions, Greasemonkey Hacks is crammed with sample code, a Greasemonkey API reference, and a comprehensive list of resources, to ensure that every resource you need is available between its covers.

Some people are content to receive information from websites passively; some people want to control it. If you are one of the latter, Greasemonkey Hacks provides all the clever customizations and cutting-edge tips and tools you need to take command of any web page you view.

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When Search Meets Web Usability Review

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(More customer reviews)I'm a UI and usability professional. Not a search engine optimization expert. So this book offered me the perfect bridge between the two disciplines. In fact, the book discloses some surprising (and surprisingly valuable) nuggets that I'm able to incorporate into my work immediately.
This book is a pixel-perfect fit for designers on all ends of the spectrum, and for anyone running an online business. I recommend it to anyone who cares about creating a better user experience for all the visitors whose trip to a site begins with search.

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This book delivers a proactive approach to building an effective Web site that is search engine friendly and will result in better search rankings. It outlines the steps needed to bridge the gap between a Google search and a Web site, and also improve the users' experience once they get to the site. By understanding the wide variety of information-seeking strategies and the individual behaviors associated with them, this book helps information architects, Web designers/developers, SEOs/SEMs, and usability professionals build better interfaces and functionality into Web sites. Creating a satisfying user experience is the key to maximizing search effectiveness and getting conversions.

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Web Application Design Patterns (Interactive Technologies) Review

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(More customer reviews)User experience experts, information architects, and the like will want
to have a copy of "Web Application Design Patterns" as an important
addition to their knowledge base. Web developers and companies feeling
they can "handle it themselves in-house" will find this book an
absolutely critical must-have. It is obvious that years of experience
and research have gone into the production of this valuable reference.
Written at a college / professional level, Vora's style remains,
however, as user-friendly as his design solutions. Presented in a
straightforward PROBLEM --> SOLUTION --> WHY --> HOW format, this 429
page volume skips the editorializing and pontificating; instead, it provides
concrete examples and explanations of underlying concepts. This
book is a veritable encyclopedia of solutions to today's software
interface design issues.
Colorful screen shots grace almost every page, helping the reader
quickly understand problems and resolutions with real-world examples.
Along with the expected discussions of everyday mechanisms such as
forms, user authentication, and navigation schemes, "Web Application
Design Patterns" forges on with detailed examinations of rapidly
evolving areas such as Rich Internet Applications (RIA), social
networking sites and more.

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Ever notice that-in spite of their pervasiveness-designing web applications is still challenging? While their benefits motivate their creation, there are no well-established guidelines for design. This often results in inconsistent behaviors and appearances, even among web applications created by the same company. Design patterns for web applications, similar in concept to those for web sites and software design, offer an effective solution. In Web Application Design Patterns, Pawan Vora documents design patterns for web applications by not only identifying design solutions for user interaction problems, but also by examining the rationale for their effectiveness, and by presenting how they should be applied.. Design interfaces faster, with a better rationale for the solutions you choose.. Learn from over more than 100 patterns, with extensive annotation on use and extension.. Take a short-cut into understanding the industry with more than 500 full-color screenshots and a web site for help, discussion, and a collection of additional patterns.

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Enterprise Development with Flex: Best Practices for RIA Developers (Adobe Dev Lib) Review

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(More customer reviews)Just finish reading the last book from Yakov Fain, Victor Rasputnis and Anatole Tartakovsky.
Book, is quite a bit of a new revamp from first book of same authors, I love the way they write and in a level of how they manage the subject of each chapter.
And as I know them since 2004 not good enough to retribution to them and to you a book review about it.
The book itself it's worth enough just because of chapter 5,7 and 8. I will detail later bellow.
The Chapter 6 it's interesting but doubt with some aspect for example a deep example of using GraniteDS, WebOrb for Java where has many options to who uses Java in the back-end. Code-gen, Data Sync, EBJ3 support, among other improvements that product changed from past years. It should show a much more examples of integration, not just WebOrb but cover also ColdFusion which is missing too in the chapter.
On Chapter 5 I liked the way they talk about resending the channel back which is not very well documented in the official BlazeDS developer guide. That's made a chapter worth enough just to clarify that for anyone who buys this book.
On Chapter 7 will help you with modules, but don't to except much from it, it's still a thing that we need to handle it, but not 100% that will works fine. But this chapter definitely will help you pass throw some of basic and intermediate problems in real life projects, There's also a just little detail that authors could added on the book where is the Potomac aka. OSGi in Flex application, where it's a seamless integration OSGi on Flex apps, that could be added to the book, specially if you're a Java developer, you're used to use OSGi on yours first class projects.
Chapter 8 it's a well written, and will help you understand process of reduce memory consumption, but has many limitations on describing the chapter, an example of that. I missed using FlexPMD to identify problems or bad practices on your code, which is very valuable to enterprise application and collaboration development. But one of pages that I most liked was, when they mentioned RSL for modules, which completes the chapter 7, that's a must read part.
Printing in Flex is really hassle, and I believe on next release they could increase of easy access API to printing, in AIR 2.0 for example we gain a lot of new API improvements and new capabilities, but still missing some of it on Flash player way, Chapter 11 helps you to understand both sides of coin, on generating PDF on client side and server side.
There are many other subjects that might attract your attention, but for my needs, theses were most valuables chapters of book and my opinion on what I've get reading it. Authors does really have domain on the subject, but should added theses topics that I mentioned, to the developer who are border by non very useful Flex books titles.
Thanks Yakov, Victor and Anatole, you guys wrote a book that does really add value to the Flex community, specially for who uses Flex with Java back-end like me.
It's worth to buy it? Sure, if you take seriously, not just hype, but seriously about development, theses chapters I mentioned will catch you up.

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If you want to use Adobe Flex to build production-quality Rich Internet Applications for the enterprise, this groundbreaking book shows you exactly what's required. You'll learn efficient techniques and best practices, and compare several frameworks and tools available for RIA development -- well beyond anything you'll find in Flex tutorials and product documentation. Through many practical examples, the authors impart their considerable experience to help you overcome challenges during your project's life cycle.

Enterprise Development with Flex also suggests proper tools and methodologies, guidelines for determining the skill sets required for the project, and much more.

Choose among several frameworks to build Flex applications, including Cairngorm, PureMVC, Mate, and Clear Toolkit
Apply selected design patterns with Flex
Learn how to extend the Flex framework and build your own component library
Develop a sample AIR application that automatically synchronizes local and remote databases to support your sales force
Get solutions for leveraging AMF protocol and synchronizing Flex client data modifications with BlazeDS-based servers
Determine the actual performance of your application and improve its efficiency

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