Free eBooks and Training Resources

Oracle Application Express Forms Converter

Product Description
Convert your Oracle Forms applications to Oracle APEX successfully

• Convert your Oracle Forms Applications to Oracle APEX
• Master the different stages of a successful Oracle Forms to APEX conversion project
• Packed with screenshots and clear explanations to facilitate learning

• A step-by-step tutorial providing a proper understanding of Oracle conversion concepts

In Detail Although Oracle Forms remains popular, many developers now see Oracle APEX as a preferred technology. Oracle Forms to Oracle APEX conversion projects follow a well-defined procedure, but sub-procedures and complexities can arise that make such conversion projects a challenging job.
This book will take you through a real Oracle Forms to APEX conversion project. It explains all the elements of the conversion, from generating XML files to the deployment of a working APEX application. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the process of Forms conversion.

The book starts with the details of the Forms project, and prepares you for the conversion process. You will use the rwconverter and Reports Builder in Oracle Developer Suite to generate XML and other useful files. You will plan and define the business logic for your conversion project. You will use the Forms Converter in Oracle APEX to convert and customize your Oracle Forms applications. Finally, you will deploy your application.

With this book you will understand what a Forms Conversion project in Oracle APEX means, what needs to be done, and what steps are necessary in order to create a fully functional and meaningful conversion project. This book shows the best way to convert applications from Forms to APEX.

Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g: Getting Started

Product Description

Extract, Transform, and Load data to build a dynamic, operational data warehouse

• Build a working data warehouse from scratch with Oracle Warehouse Builder.
• Cover techniques in Extracting, Transforming, and Loading data into your data warehouse.

• Learn about the design of a data warehouse by using a multi-dimensional design with an underlying relational star schema.
• Written in an accessible and informative style, this book helps you achieve your warehousing goals, and is loaded with screenshots, numerous tips, and strategies not found in the official user guide.

In Detail

In today’s economy, businesses and IT professionals cannot afford to lag behind the latest technologies. Data warehousing is a critical area to the success of many enterprises, and Oracle Warehouse Builder is a powerful tool for building data warehouses. It comes free with the latest version of the Oracle database.

Written in an accessible, informative, and focused manner, this book will teach you to use Oracle Warehouse Builder to build your data warehouse. Covering warehouse design, the import of source data, the ETL cycle and more, this book will have you up and running in next to no time.

This book will walk you through the complete process of planning, building, and deploying a data warehouse using Oracle Warehouse Builder. By the book’s end, you will have built your own data warehouse from scratch.

Starting with the installation of the Oracle Database and Warehouse Builder software, this book then covers the analysis of source data, designing a data warehouse, and extracting, transforming, and loading data from the source system into the data warehouse. You’ll follow the whole process with detailed screenshots of key steps along the way, alongside numerous tips and hints not covered by the official documentation.

Magento 1.3 Theme Design

Product Description

Customize the appearance of your Magento e-commerce store with Magento’s powerful theming engine

• Give your Magento stores a unique branded look and feel by creating your own Magento themes
• Use design techniques to reinforce your brand message and increase sales
• Customise your Magento theme’s look, feel, layout, and features

• Promote and improve your Magento store with the use of social media such as Twitter, social bookmarks, and so on
• Ideas and examples for defining a good print stylesheet
• Packed with essential hints and tips for effective Magento web design

In Detail

Magento is the hottest and most powerful e-commerce software around and it has gained massive popularity in a short period. By using Magento’s powerful theming engine, you can control the look, content, and functionality, and easily launch a flexible e-commerce web site. However, because of its powerful features, developing Magento themes is easier said than done.

Magento 1.3 Theme Design covers everything you need to build effective, attractive themes for your Magento store. You will learn how the theming system works, how to build your own look on top of the Magento Blank Theme, how to give different looks to different parts of your store, and much more.

We start off by introducing you to Magento and its basic themes and then take you through the benefits of changing your store’s theme. We then move on to the actual Magento theme design, where you will learn the basics, such as changing the logo, color scheme, and so on. Next, we take a look at more advance tasks where you will learn theme layouts. You will then prepare a Magento theme from scratch and also take a look at Magento templates and layouts. You will also learn how to promote and improve your Magento store with the use of social media such as Twitter, social bookmarks, and so on and how to define a good print style. Finally, you will learn Magento Theme Deployment in detail.

iPhone Cool Projects

Product Description

The iPhone and iPod touch have provided all software developers with a level playing field—developers working alone have the same access to consumers as multinational software publishers. Very cool indeed! To make your application stand out from the crowd, though, it has to have that something extra. You must learn the skills to take your apps from being App Store filler to download chart-topping blockbusters.

Developers with years of experience helped write this book. Spend some time understanding their code and why they took the approach they did. You will find the writing, illustrations, code, and sample applications second to none. No matter what type of application you are writing, you will find something in this book to help you make your app that little bit cooler.

The book opens with Wolfgang Ante, the developer behind the Frenzic puzzle game, showing how timers, animation, and intelligence are used to make game play engaging. It moves on to Rogue Amoeba’s Mike Ash explaining how to design a network protocol using UDP, and demonstrating its use in a peer-to-peer application—a topic not normally for the faint of heart, but explained here in a way that makes sense to mere mortals. Gary Bennett then covers the important task of multithreading. Multithreading can be used to keep the user interface responsive while working on other tasks in the background. Gary demonstrates how to do this and highlights traps to avoid along the way.

Next up, Canis Lupus (aka Matthew Rosenfeld) describes the development of the Keynote-controlling application Stage Hand, how the user interface has evolved, and the lessons he has learned from that experience. Benjamin Jackson then introduces two open source libraries: cocos2d, for 2D gaming; and Chipmunk, for rigid body physics (think “collisions”). He describes the development of Arcade Hockey, an air hockey game, and explains some of the code used for this.

Neil Mix of Pandora Radio reveals the science behind processing streaming audio. How do you debug what you can’t see? Neil guides you through the toughest challenges, sharing his experience of what works and what to watch out for when working with audio. Finally, Steven Peterson demonstrates a comprehensive integration of iPhone technologies. He weaves Core Location, networking, XML, XPath, and SQLite into a solid and very useful application.

Software development can be hard work. Introductory books lay the foundation, but it can be challenging to understand where to go next. This book shows some of the pieces that can be brought together to make complete, cool applications.

Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring

Product Description
Monitor your network with ease!

• Install and setup Cacti to monitor your network and assign permissions to this setup in no time at all
• Create, edit, test, and host a graph template to customize your output graph
• Create new data input methods, SNMP, and Script XML data query

• Full of screenshots and step-by-step instructions to monitor your network with Cacti

In Detail Cacti is a network monitoring tool that provides graphic solutions to your everyday monitoring issues. It has a wide variety of features and misusing them can mean that you are not monitoring your network as closely as you think. This book takes you through all of the key features of Cacti and shows how to use them for maximum effectiveness.

This book will teach you how to use Cacti effectively to monitor your network through its web interface leaving aside all the heavy chunks of code. You will be introduced to all the features of Cacti in an easy-to-understand format.

This book introduces Cacti and goes through its complete installation and setup. After a quick look, it will teach you to use Cacti’s amazing graph templating and user management features. You will learn to customize graphs and make them better looking and easier to understand. It will teach you to provide the paths to any external script or command using Cacti. Then it will take you through importing and managing new templates and also customizing them. Creating users and assigning permissions to them is the next step in this book. Towards the end, you will learn to take backups and restore the system.

Solaris(TM) Internals: Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Kernel Architecture (2nd Edition)

Product Description
“The Solaris Internals volumes are simply the best and most comprehensive treatment of the Solaris (and OpenSolaris) Operating Environment. Any person using Solaris–in any capacity–would be remiss not to include these two new volumes in their personal library. With advanced observability tools in Solaris (likeDTrace), you will more often find yourself in what was previously unchartable territory. Solaris Internals, Second Edition, provides us a fantastic means to be able to quickly understand these systems and further explore the Solaris architecture–especially when coupled with OpenSolaris source availability.” –Jarod Jenson, chief systems architect, Aeysis “The Solaris Internals volumes by Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall must be on your bookshelf if you are interested in in-depth knowledge of Solaris operating system internals and architecture. As a senior Unix engineer for many years, I found the first edition of Solaris Internals the only fully comprehensive source for kernel developers, systems programmers, and systems administrators.The new second edition, with the companion performance and debugging book, is an indispensable reference set, containing many useful and practical explanations of Solaris and its underlying subsystems, including tools and methods for observing and analyzing any system running Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris. ” –Marc Strahl, senior UNIX engineer Solaris Internals, Second Edition, describes the algorithms and data structures of all the major subsystems in the Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris kernels. The text has been extensively revised since the first edition, with more than 600 pages of new material. Integrated Solaris tools and utilities, including DTrace, MDB, kstat, and the process tools, are used throughout to illustrate how the reader can observe the Solaris kernel in action. The companion volume, Solaris Performance and Tools, extends the examples contained here, and expands the scope to performance and behavior analysis.Coverage includes:*Virtual and physical memory *Processes, threads, and scheduling *File system framework and UFS implementation *Networking: TCP/IP implementation *Resource management facilities and zones The Solaris Internals volumes make a superb reference for anyone using Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris.

Core Java(TM), Volume I: Fundamentals

Product Description

This revised edition of the classic Core Java™, Volume I–Fundamentals, is the definitive guide to Java for serious programmers who want to put Java to work on real projects.

Fully updated for the new Java SE 6 platform, this no-nonsense tutorial and reliable reference illuminates the most important language and library features with thoroughly tested real-world examples. The example programs have been carefully crafted to be easy to understand as well as useful in practice, so you can rely on them as an outstanding starting point for your own code.

Volume I is designed to quickly bring you up to speed on what’s new in Java SE 6 and to help you make the transition as efficiently as possible, whether you’re upgrading from an earlier version of Java or migrating from another language. The authors concentrate on the fundamental concepts of the Java language, along with the basics of user-interface programming. You’ll find detailed, insightful coverage of

• Java fundamentals
• Object-oriented programming
• Interfaces and inner classes
• Reflection and proxies
• The event listener model
• GUI programming with Swing
• Packaging applications
• Exception handling
• Logging and debugging
• Generic programming
• The collections framework
• Concurrency

ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook: Solutions for Flash Platform and Flex Application Developers

Product Description
Well before Ajax and Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation hit the scene, Macromedia offered the first method for building web pages with the responsiveness and functionality of desktop programs with its Flash-based “Rich Internet Applications.” Now, new owner Adobe is taking Flash and its powerful capabilities beyond the Web and making it a full-fledged development environment.

Rather than focus on theory, the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook concentrates on the practical application of ActionScript, with more than 300 solutions you can use to solve a wide range of common coding dilemmas. You’ll find recipes that show you how to: Detect the user’s Flash Player version or their operating system Build custom classes Format dates and currency types Work with strings Build user interface components Work with audio and video Make remote procedure calls using Flash Remoting and web services Load, send, and search XML data And much, much more …

Each code recipe presents the Problem, Solution, and Discussion of how you can use it in other ways or personalize it for your own needs, and why it works. You can quickly locate the recipe that most closely matches your situation and get the solution without reading the whole book to understand the underlying code. Solutions progress from short recipes for small problems to more complex scripts for thornier riddles, and the discussions offer a deeper analysis for resolving similar issues in the future, along with possible design choices and ramifications. You’ll even learn how to link modular ActionScript pieces together to create rock-solid solutions for Flex 2 and Flash applications.

When you’re not sure how ActionScript 3.0 works or howto approach a specific programming dilemma, you can simply pick up the book, flip to the relevant recipe(s), and quickly find the solution you’re looking for.

Adobe Developer Library is a co-publishing partnership between O’Reilly Media and Adobe Systems, Inc. and is designed to produce the number one information resources for developers who use Adobe technologies. Created in 2006, the Adobe Developer Library is the official source for comprehensive learning solutions to help developers create expressive and interactive web applications that can reach virtually anyone on any platform. With top-notch books and innovative online resources covering the latest in rich Internet application development, the Adobe Developer Library offers expert training and in-depth resources, straight from the source.

Decision Making with the Analytic Network Process

Product Description
The Analytic Network Process (ANP) developed by Thomas Saaty in his work on multicriteria decision making applies network structures with dependence and feedback to complex decision making. This book is a selection of applications of ANP to economic, social and political decisions, and also to technological design. The chapters comprise contributions of scholars, consultants and people concerned about the outcome of certain important decisions who applied the Analytic Network Process to determine the best outcome for each decision from among several potential outcomes. The ANP is a methodological tool that is helpful to organize knowledge and thinking, elicit judgments registered in both in memory and in feelings, quantify the judgments and derive priorities from them, and finally synthesize these diverse priorities into a single mathematically and logically justifiable overall outcome. In the process of deriving this outcome, the ANP also allows for the representation and synthesis of diverse opinions in the midst of discussion and debate, The ANP offers economists a considerably different approach for dealing with economic problems than the usual quantitative models used. The ANP approach is based on absolute scales used to represent pairwise comparison judgments in the context of dominance with respect to a property shared by the homogeneous elements being compared. How much or how many times more does A dominate B with respect to property P? Actually people are able to answer this question by using words to indicate intensity of dominance that all of us are equipped biologically to do all the time (equal, moderate, strong, very strong, and extreme) whose conversion to numbers, validation and extension to inhomogeneous elements form the foundation of the AHP/ANP. Numerous applications of the ANP have been made to economic problems, among which prediction of the turn-around dates for the US economy in the early 1990’s and again in 2001 whose accuracy and validity were both confirmed later in the news. They were based on the process of comparisons of mostly intangible factors rather than on financial, employment and other data and statistics.

Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics 2006: Parallel Computing and its Applications

Product Description
The proceedings from Parallel CFD 2006 covers all aspects of parallel computings and its applications. Although CFD is one of basic tools for design procedures to produce machineries, such as automobiles, ships, aircrafts, etc., large scale parallel computing has been realized very recently, especially for the manufactures. Various applications in many areas could be experienced including acoustics, weather prediction and ocean modeling, flow control, turbine flow, fluid-structure interaction, optimization, heat transfer, hydrodynamics.

- Report on current research in the field in an area which is rapidly changing
- Subject is important to all interested in solving large fluid dynamics problems
- Interdisciplinary activity. Contributions include scientists with a variety of backgrounds

OpenOffice.org Macros Explained

Product Description
Providing complete and thorough coverage of macro programming in OpenOffice.org, this guide teaches users to create their own macros and to understand their underlying structure. An introduction to the creation and management of macros in OpenOffice is presented, and each function and command is described. Specific techniques to perform a variety of commonly requested functions are provided, including actions common to all applications in the OpenOffice.org suite, such as printing or saving files, as well as those specific to the individual application—Write, Calc, Impress, and Draw. Numerous examples and explanations demonstrate proper techniques and discuss known problems and solutions. The underlying data structure is discussed, and techniques are introduced to evaluate OpenOffice objects, facilitating the use of returned objects in the absence of sufficient documentation by the original programming team.

IBM Cognos 8 Planning

Product Description

Engineer a clear-cut strategy for achieving best-in-class results

• Build and deploy effective planning models using Cognos 8 Planning
• Filled with ideas and techniques for designing planning models
• Ample screenshots and clear explanations to facilitate learning

• Written for first-time developers focusing on what is important to the beginner
• A step-by-step approach that will help you strengthen your understanding of all the major concepts

Special Edition Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007

Product Description

Every business professional faces challenges in managing their time to be as efficient and productive as possible. Information management has become an important everyday task in helping manage these challenges successfully, and Microsoft Outlook is the gold standard to help users stay organized. Outlook not only helps manage contacts, appointments, and tasks, it also serves as the e-mail and fax client. Outlook 2007 has been redesigned and improved with a new user interface, electronic business cards, RSS support, smart scheduling, anti-phishing capabilities, junk e-mail filter, and more. Case study sections called “Improving Your Outlook” illustrate how to apply the information learned in real-world situations. Troubleshooting sections in each chapter illustrate common problems that occur when using Outlook, followed by a detailed solution. With this book, you learn the latest features and improvements in Outlook by focusing on user productivity through real-world techniques in real-world environments.

PC Pro - August 2009

PC Pro is one of several computer magazines published monthly in the United Kingdom by Dennis Publishing. PC Pro also licenses individual articles (or even the whole magazine) for republication in various countries around the world – and some articles are translated into local languages. The magazine is, as of 2006, the biggest selling PC monthly in the UK.