Toby Segaran has written an excellent book in Programming Collective Intelligence. The books introduces the algorithms and thinking for developing cutting edge recommendation engines, searching tools, and data driven analysis. The beauty of this book is how Toby makes the subject fun and playful.
For a book sub-titled "The Missing Manual," my expectation is this book would serve as a useful reference manual. Its real value would rely on being able to consult it when I faced a problem. Accordingly, immediately after receiving the book, I turned first to the index to see how useful it was.
This is a very informative book describing many facets of what it takes to build a scalable website. Written by the engineering manager for Flickr. Topics range from how to set up your developement environement, to caching, to the various types of mysql clustering you can setup.
A great book about setting up a Joomla! site, including tips on organizing your site, managing and configuring Joomla!, SEO and how to do it with Joomla, and three example sites: A School, A Restaurant, and a Blog
"At Last!" is what came to mind when I first read about the new book on using QT with Python. The last and only book was published in 2001, by Boudewijn Rempt, but this was written around QT 2.x. QT has changed significantly since then and requires some re-familiarizing yourself with the new version, if you haven’t worked with it since then.
Enterprise Integration is like pornography; hard to define, but you know it when you see it. That was before I read this book. While I still don't have a complete definition, I'm far close thanks to this well written and informative book. There were a number of things I liked about this book, including the fact that it did not talk down to you and spend the first third of the book teaching you Ruby, although a Ruby quick reference appendix a la "Text Processing in Python" (Mertz, 2003) would not be out of place.
Head Rush Ajax is a great beginning course that covers a few fundamental JavaScript programming concepts. A beginning web developer will benefit from its slow, repetitivestyle that mixes graphics, conversational text, handwritten notes and homework-like exercises. Developers experienced with JavaScript or looking for a JavaScript or Document Object Model (DOM) reference book should consider a different book.
To start off, I should probably admit that I originally learned to program with Python 1.5 using the original version of this book. This latest version is a lot bigger, almost 600 pages versus the original's 360 or so, and the type in the new version is also a little smaller. This makes some sense, in the original there was always the sense that Python was a work in progress, and now since it's gotten much more popular and well defined, there's a lot more to cover. This means that generally, almost all of the original material has been kept, so any references you may have relied upon previously should be intact. I was thrilled to see that the slicing index figure (page 38 of the old version, page 83 of the new version) was kept.
To start off, I should probably admit that I originally learned to program with Python 1.5 using the original version of this book. This latest version is a lot bigger, almost 600 pages versus the original's 360 or so, and the type in the new version is also a little smaller. This makes some sense, in the original there was always the sense that Python was a work in progress, and now since it's gotten much more popular and well defined, there's a lot more to cover. This means that generally, almost all of the original material has been kept, so any references you may have relied upon previously should be intact. I was thrilled to see that the slicing index figure (page 38 of the old version, page 83 of the new version) was kept.