Brothers Joseph and Ben Albahari have posted a terrific Q&A about their new title, C# 3.0 in a Nutshell.
Q: Why do queries start with “from”? In SQL they start with “select”!
In a LINQ query, data flows in order of the clauses. In the query above, we start with customers; then we filter them; then we sort them; finally, we project the result set. This approach has three major benefits:
- Visual Studio can prompt you with IntelliSense as you type the query.
- No special scoping rules are required to handle more complex kinds of query.
- Once you’ve got used to it, queries are much easier to write.
Q: Sounds interesting. Is it hard to learn?
LINQ borrows from the functional programming paradigm—the basis of such languages as LISP and Haskell. As most people are unfamiliar with functional programming, this creates an initial hump in the learning curve. If—like me—you start by jumping in and writing queries, there can be a frustrating period when nothing you write will compile, let alone run! Once you’ve understood LINQ’s core concepts, however, it becomes highly rewarding. LINQ is highly consistent in its syntax and semantics, and relatively free of the nuances that plague SQL. The hardest bit then—is having to go back to SQL on other projects!
Is Silverlight the new “Flash Killer”? Christian Wenz isn’t sure whether it is, but he says that the similarities between Silverlight and Flash are certainly striking. Both Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) and Microsoft’s Silverlight come as browser plugins. Both support vector graphics, audio and video playback, animations, and scripting support.
On the other hand, Flash is historically a web designer’s tool that has only recently begun to appeal to developers. Flash was created with web designers in mind, which is why all web designers love it and why Christian Wenz has a love/hate relationship with it. (All right, not all web developers love it, but many do.)
And more to the point, the technology basis is different. Flash uses a semi-open binary format and Silverlight is based on WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation, for those who aren’t keeping up to speed on the acronyms). Before it was called Silverlight, the technology was codenamed WPFE (that’s WPF Everywhere). As Wenz says, “thanks to good browser support, Silverlight can really be run everywhere…at least in theory.” In practice, Wenz cautions, the penetration of the browser plugin is a key issue, but we won’t go into that here.
Wenz’s new book Essential Silverlight shows you how to use Silverlight to add more interactive and graphically rich interfaces to your web applications. It’s current, loaded with code, and browser agnostic and platform aware. Plus–it gets even better–this concise source of expert Silverlight knowledge will never go out of date. Released as a PDF now, the book will be continually updated and revised as the software is, so readers can always download the most current version, until the final print version comes out (anticipated release: Summer 2008).
Top Hollywood animators, motion graphics artists and VFX artists are coming to the Best in the SW: Flash Animation and Motion Graphics Festival to share their skills, work, and professional insights in panel discussions and workshop sessions. See how screen graphics were created for The Bourne Ultimatum. Learn about the VFX pipeline used in Star Wars. Discover how Disney and Nickelodeon animators are using Flash in their workflow. Learn new skills and techniques to apply to your own work in motion graphics, title design, broadcast design and animation.
This is the first time such a wealth of industry talent has come together—at the same time and in one location, ready to take you beyond technique to the art of Flash animation, broadcast design and motion graphics. Best in the SW covers it all: concepts, design and execution, in panels, keynotes and sessions by some of the top talent in the industry including Zoa Martinez, Chris & Trish Meyer, Chris Georgenes, Stanton Cruse, Phil Nibbelink and many more.
At a time when so much of our society is visually based, using appropriate typography is key in reaching your audience. But how do we know which fonts are appropriate, or which will best fit our purposes? Yannis Haralambous, founder of Atelier Fluxus Virus, comes to the rescue with his encyclopedic volume on fonts & typography, entitled Fonts & Encodings.
Haralambous explains why he wrote the book in a recent interview:
While preparing lectures for my students I realized that during the last 20 years I have gathered knowledge and documentation about fonts and encodings, which was very hard to find, and difficult to understand. For example, not a single book describes Panose or TrueType instructions, and if you manage to find specifications and look into them, you will have a hard time understanding how they work…I [also] wanted to write my own history of typefaces, in a zig-zag way, starting from an historical typeface and describing all the derivatives until today, and then back again to history, and so on.
It’s been called “Burning Man for science geeks.” The annual Maker Faire attracts thousands of amateur inventors and scientists, displaying their home-made prototypes and gadget hacks. In a world where the technological race is speeding up, the Maker movement has revealed that the do-it-yourself culture is in no danger of dying out.
And don’t forget. Maker Faire is headed to Austin, TX, Oct 19 &20. Find all the details http://makerfaire.com/.
imaginginfo: Describe your experience as beta tester in Iceland. Explain some of the challenges you experienced while developing Photoshop Lightroom Adventure. Was there healthy competition among other members of the group? When was it finally published? Describe the additions/tweaks made to it and what delayed final publication.
Mikkel Aaland: The book was a challenge! That’s for sure. It’s the most ambitious technical book I’ve ever done. Not only was I working with beta software (think moving target) but I organized and worked with 12 very serious, world-class professional photographers (think herding cats). The book is out … nearly a year after the adventure in Iceland. Why did it take so long? When you see it, I think you will understand! It’s not only a complete guide to the latest version of the application, but a pleasure to look at. It’s a technical book, yes. But it’s my hope that it honors photography through the beautiful images that fill every chapter. I was actually done with the book several months ago, but then Adobe let me know they were planning a major upgrade from Lightroom 1.0 to 1.1 and my publisher and I decided it was best to update the book right away, and not put a book on the market that was immediately out-dated.
As a new college grad–having used Facebook to keep track of friends both in school and out–I have recently been put in charge of convincing O’Reilly to join the Facebook revolution. As such, I’ve recently created an O’Reilly Media Facebook group… located here–as long as you have a Facebook account.
Come check it out… we’ve got book covers, photos from the recent Sonoma County Book Fair, video screencasts compliments of the guys at MissingManual.com, local and international events, and a place to discuss your favorite O’Reilly book or a new book that we should publish. Keep tabs on it. We plan to post more special offers, discounts, and contests on the discussion boards and wall. If you have any suggestions of other items we should add, just drop us a note on the wall.
BTW, since the features of 1.2 are virtually identical to those of 1.1, users of my Photoshop Lightroom Adventure book are in good shape. Everything I wrote still applies.
Network Warrior by Gary A. Donahue is not so much about network-based military strategies or even defending your network against attack, but instead prepares readers to run a network efficiently by covering everything that isn’t on the CCNA exam. Sean Walberg summed it up nicely in a recent Slashdot review: it provides “a practical look at what you really need to know to run a Cisco network.” Sean adds that the goal of the book is to “point out both the technical areas in which the CCNA falls short, and to teach the reader the non-Cisco aspects of running a network.”
Interestingly enough, the first comments following his review asked, “What’s with all the military terminology?” Good question.
Lined up here are 1,000 copies of Colin Moock’s Essential ActionScript 3.0. They were given away at this morning’s Flashforward conference keynote. The start of three days of intensive education, inspiration, community, and networking and the chance to “live, breathe, eat, and sleep Flash, Flex, ActionScript, and Apollo.”
At Yahoo!, Steve Souders, has developed a set of best practices–14 easy-to-follow rules–for putting some zip into web site load times. So he put his thoughts revving thing up together and wrote a rule book. Here this efficiency expert talks about writing his new book, High Performance Web Sites.
According to Steve, free double lattes makes writing a whole lot easier.
I had been thinking about capturing Yahoo!’s performance best practices in a book for a year or so. After YUI and YDN were released, it felt like the time was right to do the book. Jeremy Zawodny introduced me to his editor, Andy Oram. Andy and I discussed the idea, I submitted an application that was accepted, and the writing started. It was a long process with a lot of late nights. I was working 4 to 5 nights a week until 2am or so, getting up at 7am to help carpool the kids to school. A huge benefit of working at Yahoo! is the free espresso bars. It was the multiple daily doses of double lattes that allowed me to put in those hours and still make it through the day. I’ve since weaned myself back to one double latte per day. At least until the next book starts.
Saturday was a beautiful day in Sonoma County, and Old Courthouse Square was bustling in Santa Rosa. The 8th Annual Sonoma County Book Fair took place Saturday, with over 80 exhibitors and a great sense of community, with people milling around, perusing books and booths, picking up and sometimes purchasing interesting-looking titles.
O’Reilly authors Derrick Story and Mikkel Aaland participated in a panel titled “Photography Publishing Opportunities in the Digital Age” and mingled with the fair-comers afterwards. Derrick commented about the event, saying,
This was a positive event for us because we had a great opportunity to promote the Lightroom guide, expose a book-oriented audience to our excellent products, and strengthen relationships with those who follow our work.
Marsee and Mary led the charge at the O’Reilly Booth, and traffic was brisk…Both Mikkel and I signed a lot of books and heard some great stories about customers’ involvement with our products. I signed not one, not two, but three Pocket Guides that had traveled around the world. Nothing makes an author feel better than to see a dog-eared, note-ridden copy of his book.
Thanks to all who came out and stopped by our booth. We’ll be looking forward to seeing you again next year!
Noah Gift: I do quite a bit of reading and I was interested in combining the experience of our local Python User’s Group, with the experience of reading a book. Doug was interested in the idea and he played a role in helping get it organized.
Doug Hellmann: That’s right. I was especially interested in the club “meeting” online, since I live a good distance outside of Atlanta and can’t make it to meetings in person on a regular basis. By hosting the group discussion on Google Groups, we can all participate asynchronously.
Q: How do you pick the books?
Noah: We use Google Groups to communicate and discuss our books. We have decided that it will be a very informal process. Someone makes a suggestion and people either like it and decide to read the book, or they may read another book and the book the group has informally chosen, or not read the book that month at all. We lean toward making this an easy process.
Doug: No one has time to be the group leader every month, so we rotate reponsibility. Participation is the driving force. If someone is especially interested in a book, they can suggest it and then help keep the conversation active while we are reading it. So far, we haven’t had any problems coming to a consensus about what books to read.
Q: Do you have a set of questions or criteria you use to discuss the book or is it freeform?
Noah: We have been very informal about regulating how we discuss the book. Most of our discussion occurs online, but we have also gotten together for dinner to discuss the book before the regularly scheduled Python User Group meeting.
Doug: The discussion is freeform, but we do try to make sure we cover both likes and dislikes as well as any past experience someone might have with the material covered. I more or less led the discussion for “RESTful Web Services,” and I tried to post some of my thoughts about each chapter and how it related to projects I had done or am planning. Breaking up the discussion around each chapter seemed to work well, especially since not everyone was reading at the same rate.
Rick Smolan, the co-creator of the best-selling A Day in the Life and America 24/7 book series invites you and me and everyone else to participate in America at Home, a nationwide photo project, September 17 to 23, 2007.
O’Reilly Media’s evangelist and pro-photog Derrick Story explains, “The end result will be a mixture of photos from the public and the 100 professionals who will also be capturing images of what defines the home. The photos will then go into a coffee table book titled, “America at Home” to be released in March of 2008. When the book is released, buyers will have the option of personalizing it by putting their own family pictures on the photo jacket.”
Check here for Derrick’s photo tips created especially for this project.
As Deke McClelland’s “One-on-One” series continues to grow, it continues to receive praise from both professional and amateur photographers. The relatively new Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One has particularly received fantastic reviews from individuals new to Photoshop as well as authors of other Photoshop books, such as Scott Kelby.
As the person responsible for posting reviews on our catalog pages here at O’Reilly, I often come across many great quotes from media and consumers. Check out the recent reviews for this book here.
I stumbled across a particularly stellar review of the book on MyMac.com just today:
If there’s a better way to learn the power of Photoshop CS3 I surely don’t know what it is. Short of the Vulcan Mind Meld this has to be one of the easiest and quickest ways to learn what at first seems to be an intimidating subject. The way this author breaks the steps down and then leads us into the future is brilliant. Go ahead. Check out the myriad of Photoshop books out there. I know that when you compare this set with any of the others, and there are some good ones to be sure, you will put this one at the top of your list. And rightfully so.
Touching on No Starch’s Forbidden Lego once again… this book is flying off the shelves! We’re still getting all sorts of requests for it here at O’Reilly and it’s up to #68 on Amazon’s Computers and Internet list. If you’re interested in Legos to any extent whatsoever, pick up a copy of it and see what all you can do with the “non-Lego endorsed” ideas.
BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow blogged about the book recently…
Once you get into the spirit, you’ll want to try inventing your own rule-breaking models. Forbidden Lego’s authors share tips and tricks that will inspire you and help you turn your visions into reality. Nothing’s against the rules in this book!
SOA has a reputation for being one of the most unloved terms of the day. The problem is that nobody knows for sure what the heck it is. All the talk devoted to figuring out what SOA is about and why it’s important (or not) sends me back to the early discussions of web services. No one was really sure what web services were and a lot of people were quick to dismiss the talk as marketing hype, sure to blow over. They’d include XML as a passing fad, too. Try to imagine getting by without these technologies today.
Still, it’s hard to find a good definition of SOA. Nicolai Josuttis agrees: “The problem is not that there aren’t any definitions; the problem is that there are many different definitions.” He devotes a few pages in his new book, SOA in Practice, to the various definitions and you can see that they’re all over the place. He’s not attempting to confuse, however; he does an excellent job of explaining what SOA is and how you can put it to use. Josuttis brings the concept of SOA down to earth, talks about the problems you can face running and implementing your SOA in practice, and everything else you’ve wondered about the technology. It’s one of the clearest and most practical explanations I’ve seen.
If you’re looking to get up to speed on this, you might also want to check out the books Enterprise SOA and Enterprise Service Bus. Wondering what ESB has to do with SOA? There’s a great podcast with Dave Rosenberg of MuleSource on SearchWebServices explaining how the two are linked. And if you’re pressed for time, one of the best explanations of ESB I’ve read can be found on Dr. Dobb’s Portal: Defining the ESB by Eric Bruno (only 10 pages).
Josuttis says SOA helps systems remain scalable and flexibly while growing and is exactly what’s needed to bridge today’s business/IT gap. Sounds good to me.
Why does she do it? The same question that I ask myself regularly, and her answer is generally the same as mine, “an effort to be the change I wish to see in the world”.
I asked her if you could elaborate on this a little for me, she replied:
“I do this job for love. For the love of getting things done, for the love of helping others, and the love of helping others create things that will be of widest benefit and greatest use. I do it because I constantly see that the people in the open source community that I interact with are working towards higher goals, be it serving of personal creativity through scratching one’s own itch or creating useful tools that others can enjoy freely. I do it because it’s the right thing to do.”
She definitely should be proud to be known as “Google’s geek herder”. Thank you Leslie for inspiring me!
If you happen to be in New Haven, CT later this month, check out David Pogue’s talk about the most unique portable devices to land on his desk in the past year. The Missing Manual series founder and author of iPhone: The Missing Manual delivers his “Mobile Gadget Show-and-Tell” on Sept. 18. The event is free and open to the public. Details here.
Editor Tatiana Apandi talks to Chuck Joiner of MacVoices about the “Women in Technology” series on the O’Reilly Network, how it came to be, and what she wants to accomplish by giving a voice to a wide variety of women in the technology industry. Tatiana shares some of her personal experiences from tech conferences and beyond, and how they led her to invite technology women from around the world to share their own stories and their unique perspectives on the topic.
“At first, I thought it would be the same old complaint fest, but now I must eat crow,” writes Lena West, in her guest blog posted today on Lip-Sticking about O’Reilly’s Women in Technology series.
Indeed West, chief social media strategist at xynoMedia Technology says the new series is the “place to see women working together (albeit virtually) - and not necessarily always agreeing - sans backstabbing and ‘tude. It’s about damn time.”
Looking for more user group events and opportunities to network? Register for the Florida Association of Computer User Groups Fall Conference or attend the Central Florida Computer Society’s free TechFair on October 6 & 7.
One of today’s Women in Tech articles features an interview with O’Reilly Editor Tatiana Apandi and BSD Hacks author Dru Lavigne.
Tatiana Apandi: You’ve had a variety of careers in different areas, ranging from municipal government to construction, how is the atmosphere different in the IT world?
Dru Lavigne: If I were to rate these careers by gender discrimination, municipal government would fare the worst and IT the best. Even in the construction industry where one would expect to see blatant gender discrimination, I wasn’t really affected. Once I had proved myself capable of doing the job (which, by the way, men have to do as well), I was a respected member of the team. Basically, your attitude on the first day of work determined where you belonged in the scheme of things. Whereas in municipal government there was a very low glass ceiling and women were restricted in the jobs and salary ranges available to them, regardless of their ability or motivation to succeed. This was my experience and is probably not true across the board; those in leadership roles for this particular municipal government had concrete ideas regarding a woman’s place, which in turn set the tone for hiring and employee/employer interactions.
The holidays came early yesterday to the early adopters of the iPhone. After thinking over his decision to drop the price of the iPhone by $200 only two months afer it went on sale, Steve Jobs decided to give those eager iPhone fans a $100 Apple store credit. Yesterday, in an open letter to iPhone customers, Jobs wrote:
Third, even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of iPhone, and even though the technology road is bumpy, we need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price. Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.
Science fiction writer and Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow gives his winning tips for creating blogs that attracts the most readers. Hint–think like a wire service reporter.
Leslie Hawthorne kicks off O’Reilly’s Women in Technology series with an article about social engineering:
On any given day, it seems I do more than I can recount or recollect, such as spec out new initiatives for the Open Source Programs Office, write documentation, answer questions on the Google Summer of Code ™ mailing lists, plan future improvements to the program both from a technical and logistics perspective, organize community conferences, make sure that the right people are talking to each other, and peruse the latest offerings on Digg. What I do every day is fairly straightforward, but trying to summarize my role as a woman in the technical community has proved a difficult enterprise.
On the other hand, Flash is historically a web designer’s tool that has only recently begun to appeal to developers. Flash was created with web designers in mind, which is why all web designers love it and why Christian Wenz has a love/hate relationship with it. (All right, not all web developers love it, but many do.) 
Still, it’s hard to find a good definition of SOA. Nicolai Josuttis agrees: “The problem is not that there aren’t any definitions; the problem is that there are many different definitions.” He devotes a few pages in his new book, 
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