A great review of one of my favorite computer books to be published in years has been posted to Slashdot:

Read the review

While attending LinuxWorld I had the pleasure of spending some time with the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. Read the review on TechTarget.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Apress’ open source editorial team devotes a substantial amount of time to research. This takes many forms, ranging from installing every Linux variant under the sun, investigating the latest Web framework, speaking with community members, and basically playing around with anything that strikes our fancy. To date, our ongoing findings have been published internally, shared over email and during weekly meetings. However, as we’re in the publishing business, it makes sense we should disseminate   (more...)

My ongoing Developer.com series covering the Google Maps API (tutorial 1, tutorial 2, tutorial 3, tutorial 4) shows you how to use this great service to build interesting and useful spatial Web applications. Yet one of the glaring omissions from the API has been   (more...)

We’re running a great promotion on for the next 15 days, in which you can purchase 5 Perl eBooks for $50. This collection includes Beginning Perl Web Development (Steve Suerhing), Pro Perl (Peter Wainwright), Pro Perl Parsing (Chris Frenz), Regular Expression Recipes (Nate Good), and Perl 6 Now (Scott Walters). That’s 2,425 pages of Perl tutorials and reference material, mind you.

Learn more

Dave Rosenberg and Matt Asay run InfoWorld’s Open Sources blog, and recently issued a call for submissions regarding how readers effectively manage their time. Several very interesting submissions have already been published, including ActiveGrid CEO Peter Yared, and MySQL Director of Architecture (more...)

Pro MySQL co-authors Jay Pipes and Mike Kruckenberg were recently interviewed at dbazine.com. In the interview they talk about how they became involved with MySQL and open source technologies, open source’s role in the enterprise, the virtues of using MySQL, and about their experiences working with Apress and writing the book.

Download the podcast   (more...)

As a followup to my much read piece, Five Reasons Why You Should Never Use PostgreSQL. Ever. (thanks for the hate-mail, btw), I recently penned a short article highlighting PostgreSQL’s ability to replace MS SQL server. This ability lies not in PostgreSQL’s clear capabilities in terms of speed and standards-conformance, but is due to offerings such as business reporting tools and replication services, two features   (more...)

Version 7 of the world’s greatest text editor is now available.

http://www.vim.org/

On another note, I’ve just learned Google hired vim’s creator, Bram Moolenaar, a few months ago. More evidence they’re dead-set on taking over the world.

Jason

Mono developer Dennis Hayes recently reviewed “Cross Platform .NET Development: Using Mono, Portable .NET, and Microsoft .NET“, authored by Mark Easton and Jason King. If you’re interested in learning how to create cross-platform applications using the .NET framework, I invite you to check out this detailed review of a truly interesting book.

Read the review

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Pro MySQL co-author Jay Pipes recently gave a talk at Google HQ regarding MySQL performance tuning best practices. The 45-minute webinar has been made available for viewing via video.google.com.

Watch the Webinar

Learn more about Pro MySQL

Netcraft always offers some rather eye-opening statistics regarding technology adoption across the globe. One of its most recently published surveys notes that Apache has overtaken IIS as the world’s #1 most prolific secure server.

Read the survey

Browse Apress’ Apache Books

File this one in the “Story that just doesn’t stop” department.

My co-author Robert Treat and I were recently interviewed by MiMi Yeh of TechTarget, in which we responded to several questions pertinent to whether PostgreSQL could be used as a replacement to proprietary database systems such as Oracle or MS SQL. This interview, in conjunction with a story I recently penned for the same publication   (more...)

SearchOpenSource recently posted the second part of the interview they recently conducted with Robert and I regarding the viability of PostgreSQL as an enterprise-level open source database.

Read Part II

Read Part I

It’s great to see that Keir’s new book, “Beginning Ubuntu: From Novice to Professional” was slashdotted today. Not only is Ubuntu an awesome distro (I switched to it about a year ago after a long stint with Red Hat and then SUSE), but so is his book, as it’s one of those rare Linux books that’s actually written from the point of view that Linux can be so much more than a server or secondary desktop. Keir quite eloquently and comprehensively   (more...)

Back in the early days of Web development, it was easy to create Web sites that were well-organized and used easily recallable URLs. After all, we were still enamored with the fact that the Web even existed; even if at the time most of us didn’t have all that much information to publish. For instance, a typical corporate website might have consisted of just a few URLs:

http://www.example.com/about/
http://www.example.com/contact/
http://www.example.com/products/
http://www.example.com/services/

That   (more...)

Robert and I had fun being interviewed by MiMi Yeh over at SearchOpenSource.com, where we answered questions pertinent some of the features that set PostgreSQL apart from other databases, and talk about some best practices for working with the database.

Read the interview

Why use PostgreSQL when you have a tens of thousands of dollars remaining in your yearly IT budget? More money for pizza, that’s why.

Read on

Undoubtedly extensions are one of Firefox’s coolest features, as they expand the browser’s capability to do so much more beyond site navigation. I have quite a few installed, including:

adblock: Allows you to prevent server-specific ads from being rendered to the page. Generally I don’t mind ads, however I generally snuff out those which are so large (or loud) that they hinder my ability to view the page. del.icio.us: Greatly simplifies interaction with the del.icio.us social bookmarking service. Forecast   (more...)

Despite its impressive array of features, excellent stability, and an active development community, PostgreSQL has historically stood in the shadow of MySQL in terms of popularity and general adoption. Arguably the reasons for this stem from largely from non-technical reasons, however in early 2005 these issues were erased.

For starters, the January, 2005 version 8.0 release included a native Windows port, opening up the possibility of experimentation among newcomers to the world of open source. Around the same time,   (more...)