FreeTechBooks.com is a website dedicated to programming books, textbooks, and notes. The content is 100% free and 100% legal. There are hundreds of books spread out among seven main categories with many subcategories within each main category. The seven main categories are Computer Science Books, Mathematics Books, Supporting Fields Books, Operating System Books, Programming/Scripting Books, Miscellaneous Books, and General.

You can find the books you are interested in by using the main and subcategories mentioned above, by looking at the most popular books listed on the left hand menu, or by using the search function to locate a book based on keyword(s), author(s), and/or other criteria. The site is updated regularly with news and comments as well as regular additions to the book collection, the most recent being the IT Security Cookbook, which was added on August 16, 2008.

Beyond the books, there is a community that you can register and be a part of. This allows you to post comments to the forum as well as be in contact with the other people that are interested in the same type of information you are. Registration is not necessary, but it is an option.

Be sure to check out the website and get all the free information you can. This is a great free and legal resource that allows us to "view, download and with a very few exceptions, print the books for your own private use at no charge. In fact, you are encouraged to tell others about the books" (FreeTechBooks.com).

PHP Magazine

PHP Magazine is an online magazine in the form of a blog. There are posts that range many different categories, mainly PHP, but others from within their network of sites. There is information from software and book reviews to articles and tutorials.

Ajax Magazine

Ajax Magazine is another online magazine in the form of a blog from the publishers of PHP Magazine. The Ajax version focuses mainly on Ajax technologies and offers news, articles, and reviews to name a few.

Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine is one of the best sites on the web (also an online magazine in the form of a blog). They have amazing "round-ups" and posts bringing together the best sites, services, and resources on the web. They focus a lot on web 2.0 technologies and provide great content for both designers and developers.

Design Mag

Design Mag offers news, articles, galleries, interviews and more. The website is in the form of a blog and is updated very frequently. They have great resources and devote a section to freelance information. This is often a common thread between webmasters/designers/developers. They are the home of the 200+ Resources for Freelance Web Designers article.

Website Magazine

Website Magazine offers their magazine both in print and online. However, the only way you can see the online version is if you subscribe to the print version. The good news: it's free! The website has forums, articles, and blogs full of content. The magazine contains a lot of useful information in typical article format, usually offering one focus article with many other shorter articles throughout.

Digital Web Magazine

Digital Web Magazine offers news, articles, reviews, interviews, and tutorials. News is updated daily and main articles are updated on a weekly basis and are well worth the wait. The content is very useful and very thorough. They also report on upcoming events around the world.

SD Times

SD Times reports on content related to programmers and developers. In both a print version and online, SD Times has over 60,000 subscribers. They report on recent news and stories, write columns and opinions, as well as providing a job board and resource center. This publication reads more as a newspaper than a magazine.

Dr. Dobb's Journal

Dr. Dobb's Journal is another publication both in print and online. They offer information from a variety of different programming and development topics. Some topics include databases, open source, security, web development, and specific programming languages like C/C++ and Java. They also have a resource center and a blog full of information as well.

Developer.* Magazine

Developer.* offers articles, blogs, and book reviews for all things development and programming. There articles are broken down by categories ranging from software design and quality to legal issues and techniques. The articles are well written, the information is great, and the information is very thorough.

.Net Magazine

.Net Magazine is both in print and online. They offer articles to help developer, discover, and design. They also have podcasts and forums filled with content. They cover topics ranging from flash to CSS to Facebook.

The PHP Presentation System hosts over three hundred presentations, covering a slew of different topics including performance, testing, debugging, XML, and security. The presentations are from speakers at a variety of conferences. You will see (and hear if interested) presentations from speakers like Derick Rethans, Tobias Schlitt, Rasmus Lerdorf and many many more. These presentations have been at conferences all around the world and contain a great deal of information. Most presentations are between 25 and 40 slides. You will have to sift through some information in the presentations because some build on each other.

The presentations are best viewed in Firefox and are not available for use with IE. If you try to use IE you will get a pretty funny error code; "IE is not supported - please use Firefox, Safari, Konqueror or just about anything else" (view this presentation in IE). There are presentations dated as far back as 2002 and as recent as August 2008. Take a look around and see what's there.

My Top 10 Presentations

1. Input Filter
2. Webservices with PHP
3. XML and PHP
4. Myth Busting
5. PHP Best Practices
6. Web 2.0 and PHP 5
7. XSS
8. Help, I Found a Bug in my Code
9. Hack Day
10. Designing Good Databases

Copyright, Fair Use, and DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) are issues that webmasters need to be aware of and familiar with. The fair use doctrine and the DMCA are both parts of the US copyright laws. They are very applicable to what we do and need to be referred to on a regular basis. These laws are very important, but they are not very easy to understand. There seems to be a lot of gray areas (especially within Fair Use) that are determined once a problem arises. Copyright laws apply to many different aspects of websites from pictures and videos to quotes and citations. The laws are meant to protect the originator of the work without limiting free speech. This isn't always the case however.

You can read up on a few of these cases where the copyright laws were used against a website. Recent coverage has been of the AP filing DMCA takedown notices against the Drudge Retort, which sparked a lot of commotion from major sites like TechCrunch. Universal Music Group also filed a DMCA takedown for a video of a girl dancing to a Prince song posted on YouTube.

In order to learn and have a better understanding of Copyright, Fair Use, and DMCA, here are 10 great resources to help you out. These sites cover all of the specifics of the laws as well as highlighting the major points that are typically referred to when dealing with them.

Resources

• U.S Copyright Office
  • Copyright
  • Fair Use
  • DMCA
• Wikipedia
  • Copyright
  • Fair Use
  • DMCA
• Other Resources
  • Stanford Copyright & Fair Use
  • Chilling Effects
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation
  • Brad Templeton's Home Page

Picking the colors for your next website is not always an easy task. There are so many great looking websites out there that use some very nice colors. How do you find the color to start with as the base or add to compliment it? Thankfully for those of us that aren't as creative as we wish we were there are websites available to help us see what a color scheme would look like. Here are some of the websites available.

Adobe Kuler

This is one of the coolest color applications I've used. It allows you to register an account in order to save color schemes you create or like to easily return to them at a later time. There are recent and best lists for color schemes that have been created by others. You can create your own or pick one that someone else has made. Being able to browse the others helps in finding the right scheme for you. The app lets you control and change each of the five colors or choose one to start with and create a scheme based on rule sets (analogous, monochromatic, triad, complimentary, compound, and shades). Another cool thing about Kuler is its ability to pick a color from an uploaded picture.

Color Wizard

The Color Wizard is very similar to Adobe Kuler. It has the ability to pick many different colors and provides RGB color sliders for fine tuning. Once you pick a color, a general scheme is generated and allows you to filter based on the rule sets (monochromatic, analogous, triadic, tetradic, complimentary, and split-complimentary). You are given a scheme made up of four colors. You don't have the ability to save schemes for later, but this is still a great tool for color schemes.

Colour Scheme Chooser

This is the slowest loading application that I found but it is worth the wait. The app was originally created by SitePro Central. You have the ability to choose a color to start with based on HEX and RGB as well as providing a color picker. A scheme of seven colors is created for you based on rule sets (monochromatic, analogic, analogic+, complimentary, and split-complimentary, triadic, and double contrast).

Color Schemer

This application is available both online and as a downloadable desktop installation. It isn't as fancy looking as Adobe's but it gets the job done. You are able to pick a color to start with either by HEX or RGB code or clicking on a color and a palette will be generated based on that color. Once you have picked your base color and the palette has been created you can lighten or darken the entire palette. If you see another color in the palette that you like better you can simply click on the color and a new palette will be generated based on the new color as the base. A palette of 16 colors is created.

ColorToy 2.0

This is yet another Flash application that allows you to start with a base color and have a scheme created from that color. There aren't many bells and whistles offered but it will generate nine colors that work well together. You can use HEX or RGB to select your base color or use a random function that will pick a color for you.

What other resources do you use to pick your color scheme? Let us know in the comments.

Have you ever wanted to see where your website shows up in the two major search engines for a particular keyword? Well, now you can. Yahoo! vs. Google compares the first 100 search results between the two search engines. You can enter a search term and look at the similarities and differences between the results. The app is a SWF that is clean to look at and easy to use.

Once you enter a keyword, the app generates a point-to-point graph with Google results on the top and Yahoo! results on the bottom. You can follow the blue lines that connect two points to know where a certain website shows up in each search engine. This is a quick way to find out which search engine shows a website in a higher position within the results. It’s a pretty limited tool without a lot of bells and whistles, but it is a useful tool nonetheless. It provides some interesting information that hasn’t been easy to acquire in the past. It’s worth checking out.

FeedBurner has become very intermittent for me. I am unable to load a page and then the next refresh brings it up and then the next page I try to load fails to load. I have received multiple errors including "The connection was reset" and "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable". Here are the screenshots.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

Aptana Studio is an IDE for creating web 2.0 applications. It can be downloaded and run as an application or run in the Eclipse IDE. The IDE can be purchased as a professional edition or downloaded in an open source community edition. The open source community edition boasts over 1,300,000 downloads with a combined total including the professional version of more than 2,200,000 downloads to date. This application is designed and optimized for web development languages such as JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, and PHP, with other plugins available including Adobe AIR and iPhone development.

Aptana is backed by many big names in the industry. The advisory board is made up of Ajax gurus like Brendan Eich and John Resig from Mozilla, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith who are the founder and co-founder of ajaxian.com, and Jack Slocum from EXT JS. With a lineup like this, it is no surprise that the Aptana Studio has as many downloads and as much supports as it does.

Notable Features

• FTP Support - There is built-in FTP support for working with remote files. The community edition includes only basic FTP protocols, while the professional edition adds SFTP support.
• Plugins - There are many plugins available to extend the functionality of the IDE including SVN, MySQL, PHP, and more.
• Code Snippets - There are many code snippets integrated with the default package that can save time when using common code techniques.
• Debugging - There is integrated debugging with Firebug for Firefox. The professional version also includes debugging capabilities for Internet Explorer.
• DOM Support - There is an integrated code assist function that provides help for browser support and information pertaining to the DOM.
• Code Assist - There are helpful hints and suggestions for HTML and CSS code to speed up the development process.
• Ajax Libraries - There are many prepackaged Ajax and JavaScript libraries like YUI, Mootools, Prototype, and Scriptaculous.
• Integrated Proxy - There are proxy capabilities available to allow Aptana to be used behind a firewall.
• Integrated Help - There are several integrated help documents for included JavaScript libraries, alleviating the need to load the help documentation in a web browser. You can have it directly available in pane within Aptana.
• Error Checking - There is line by line error checking and reporting to take the guess work out of troubleshooting. You will be told and shown what and where the error occurred.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 was released to manufacturing on August 6, 2008. Microsoft released a press statement providing details about the new release. Although you can't buy your copy yet on a disk, MSDN and TechNet subscribers can downoad an evaluation copy right now from the SQL Server web site.

Prices have been published and are not being increased since the last version of SQL Server (2005). The prices are listed below with the different versions available.

I have listed the notable features below and there are quite a few. There are major improvements as well as minor fixes listed. There is a nice article about what's new in SQL Server 2008 on TechNet. The improvements and new features are within three main categories, trusted, productive, and intelligent.

Notable New Features

• New Date and Time data types
  • DATE
  • TIME
  • DATETIMEOFFSET
  • DATETIME2
• Grouping sets
  • An extension to the GROUP BY clause that lets you specify what to compute as an aggregate.
• MERGE SQL Statement
  • Transaction SQL statement that can be used to synchronize two tables based on their differences.
• Integrated Full Text Search
  • Full Text Searches allow you to compare values in a field based on words or phrases. This is similar to the LIKE comparisons, only comparing words or phrases instead of characters.
• Data Compression
  • Allows for more efficient storage and less storage. It also improves performance on I/O functions, such as data warehousing.
• Transparent Data Encryption
  • This feature will encrypt the database files automatically allowing for better security. This reduces the risk of data being discovered, even if the database files are obtained by an unauthorized user.

Technologies

• Analysis Services
• Data Mining
• High Availability—Always On
• Integration Services
• Manageability
• Performance and Scalability
• Programmability
• Reporting Services
• Security
• Spatial Data

Available Editions

• SQL Server 2008 Enterprise ($24,999)
• SQL Server 2008 Standard ($5,999)
• SQL Server 2008 Workgroup ($3,899)
• SQL Server 2008 Web ($15/proc/month)
• SQL Server 2008 Developer ($50)
• SQL Server 2008 Express (N/A)
• SQL Server Compact 3.5 (N/A)

For more detailed information, you can check out the white papers, or if you are looking to try it out, you can download an evaluation copy.

Additional Resources

• SQL Server 2008 Website
• SQL Server 2008 TechCenter
• SQL Server 2008 Developer Center

S5 (Simple Standards-based Slide Show System) is an easy way to create nice looking slide shows that are completely standards compliant. Using XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript, S5 allows you to view the normal slideshow as well as a printer friendly version. The transitions are fast and smooth. There are a number of keyboard shortcuts that can be used to navigate through the slides as well. You can check out the full feature list for all the bells and whistles S5 has to offer. Complete with five themes, this slide show package is a great choice. The author has created a primer, a reference, and a FAQ to help you learn and start creating your own slideshows.

There is one warning given about using S5 with Firefox. If you have the AdBlock extension installed, there are known problems with older versions of AdBlock and S5. Be sure you are using the latest AdBlock version and you should be okay. As noted in the comments by Wladimir Palant, the developer of Adblock Plus, this issue is apparently moot.

The overall layout of the slideshow is very clean. It is based on a few <div> tags, and all slides are contained within those. For example, inside the start of the presentation div tag ( <div class="presentation"> ) are slide div tags ( <div class="slide"> ). The layout looks a lot like XML when formatted cleanly. I find the "syntax", if you will, very intuitive; it makes sense and is easy to follow and understand. There is a sample presentation that is nice to help you get started. It is easy to look at and understand. You should be able to quickly gain an understanding for the basics of a slide show. From there, you can add additional formatting and customizations to fit your specific need.

In my opinion, the best part of S5 is its small size and simplicity. The author articulates these points, which I have included below.

I like complex, powerful tools. Why should I use a "simple" slide show system?

Actually, the "simple" part refers mostly to the file structure, and also to the fact that you can create a decent slide show system with a few open Web standards. However, it does also express the anticipated simplicity of the slides themselves. Read the full explanation at the S5 FAQ page.

Check out the sample slideshow and give S5 a shot.