Newsletter from O'Reilly UG Program - 09/21/2007

Hi there—

viguy As usual, we're changing things around. You'll notice a slightly new format with articles, blogposts, and a UG news section. If you have news items to submit, please send me a short description with the details and URL. We'll try to fit in as many as possible on a first come first serve basis.

Thanks to everyone who's been contacting me on Facebook. It's nice to actually see your faces. We've started our own O'Reilly Media group, check it out when you have a chance.

I'll be attending the Women and Technology Summit in Santa Clara on Septemer 28. Let me know if you are going to be there and we can try and meet up.

We're looking for Amazon and Slashdot reviewers for Head First SQL, Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, Second Edition or any of our new releases. Just send me an email with your book choices and we'll ship them out.

If you would prefer to receive this email in text instead of HTML, drop me a line.

—Marsee

In this issue:

O'Reilly UG Program News—Just for User Group Leaders
New Releases
Upcoming Events
Conference News
School of Technology
News from O'Reilly & Beyond

O'Reilly UG Program News—Just for User Group Leaders
September 21, 2007

Put Up a Banner Get a Free Book

We're looking for user groups to display our discount banners on their web sites. If you send me your group's site with one or more banners, I'll send you the O'Reilly book(s) of your choice. Choose from the following list:

O'Reilly News for User Group Members
September 21, 2007

New Releases: Books, Short Cuts, and Rough Cuts

Head First SQL Get 35% off from O'Reilly, No Starch, Paraglyph, PC Publishing, Pragmatic Bookshelf, Rocky Nook, SitePoint, or YoungJin books you purchase directly from O'Reilly.

Just use code "DSUG" when ordering online or by phone 800-998-9938.

Free ground shipping on orders of $29.95 or more. See details.

Did you know you can request a free book or PDF to review for your group? Ask your group leader for more information.

For book review writing tips and suggestions, go to: http://ug.oreilly.com/bookreviews.html

New Releases: Books, Short Cuts, and Rough Cuts:

Ableton Live 6 Tips and Tricks (PC Publishing)
The ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology (SitePoint)
Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, Second Edition
AutoIt v3: Your Quick Guide
C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, Third Edition
Darkstar: The Java Game Server
Designing Web Navigation
Dynamic Learning: Flash CS3 Professional
The Essential Blender (No Starch)
Essential SharePoint 2007, Second Edition
Essential Silverlight
Fonts & Encodings
Google Ajax Search API
Google Analytics
Head First SQL
High Performance Web Sites
Learning ActionScript 3.0 Rough Cut
The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Idea Book (No Starch)
Linux Firewalls (No Starch)
Linux System Programming
Making Things Talk
The Nikon D200 Dbook (Hard Cover) (Rocky Nook)
Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit, Second Edition (Pragmatic Bookshelf)
Programming ASP.NET AJAX
Programming WPF, Second Edition
Security Data Visualization (No Starch)
Security Power Tools
SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide
SOA in Practice
Software Testing Practice: Test Management (Rocky Nook)

MAKE Magazine Subscriptions

The annual subscription price for four issues is $34.95. When you subscribe with this link, you'll get a free issue--one plus four more for $34.95. So subscribe for yourself or friends with this great offer for UG Members: five volumes for the cost of four.

Subscribe at: http://www.makezine.com/go/ugsub

Craft Magazine Subscriptions

The annual subscription price for four issues is $34.95. When you subscribe with this link, you'll get a free issue--the first one plus four more for $34.95. So subscribe for yourself or friends with this great offer for charter subscribers: five volumes for the cost of four.

Subscribe at: http://www.craftzine.com/go/craftug

Upcoming Events

For more events, please see: events.oreilly.com

New Dynamic Learning Seminars from O'Reilly Authors AGI

Locations include: Minneapolis; Toronto; Ft. Lauderdale;
Chicago; Denver; Detroit; Houston

Throughout the late summer and early fall, Aquent Graphics Institute (AGI) will be presenting its Adobe Creative Suite 3 seminar series in more than 20 cities in North America, Europe, and Australia. Creative professionals will have a unique 3-day opportunity to learn from expert trainers with world-class skills in Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, and InDesign. Register for a single day or all 3 days. Along with the hands-on classroom session, attendees will also receive a free Dynamic Learning book appropriate to their session and a DVD with videos and lesson files. For registration information, go to: http://www.agitraining.com/cs3/cs3seminar

Jesse Liberty at Ajax World

Sep 23-26, 2007

Author Jesse Liberty (Programming C# and Programming ASP.NET) speaks on Silverlight at Ajax World.

Mikkel Aaland at the San Francisco Apple Store

Sep 24, 2007

Author Mikkel Aaland will be giving an Apple Pro Session on digital photography and his new book Photoshop Lightroom Adventure at the Apple Store in San Francisco on Monday, September 24th.

Jared Smith at AstriCon

Sep 25-28, 2007

Carefree Resort & Villas
Carefree, AZ

Author Jared Smith (Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition) speaks at AstriCon--the Asterisk users conference--in Carefree, AZ, a suburb of Phoenix.

Tenni Theurer at Women and Technology Summit

Sep 27-29, 2007

Hyatt Regency
Santa Clara, CA

Tenni Theurer, manager of the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance team, and Nelly Yusupova, CTO Webgrrls International, will be speaking together at Women and Technology Summit in Santa Clara September 26-29. Learn technical tips and tricks to improve your site's speed and performance detailed in Steve Souders new book High Performance Web Sites, allowing your reader to connect to you more quickly. Discover the secrets of planning and good design that help you build and retain your audience.

Steve Souders at The Future of Web Apps Conference

Oct 3-5, 2007

London, UK

Author and Chief Performance Yahoo! Steve Souders (High Performance Web Sites) will deliver a Developer Track presentation on his 14 rules of best practices for making web pages faster. He will go into more detail in a workshop on the last day, expounding on research, case studies, and performance tools, and advocating a faster user experience for all web users. These guidelines focus on the front end, for example, why it's bad to use "@import" for including stylesheets and why ETags disable browser caching. These best practices have proven to reduce response times of Yahoo! properties by 25-50%.

Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene at NYCSPIN

Oct 9, 2007

Microsoft
NY, NY

Head First PMP authors Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene talk through the ways that software projects fail, using the signature humor and insight in the acclaimed "Head First" series. There's an old saying: "There's only one way to succeed, but a million ways to fail." But that saying just isn't true when it comes to software projects. As it turns out, there are a small number of ways that projects fail, and they'll sound eerily familiar to any project manager, software engineer or programmer who's been around for more than a few years. Many software projects that started out as a small, stopgap utility turn into raging behemoths, sucking seemingly unlimited time from your programmers. Or the president of your company announced that your project will be done this week, even though you know that it still has an enormous number of bugs. Or your team delivered the software, only to have users complain that an entire feature is missing. Or every time the team fixes a bug, they seem to uncover a dozen more--including ones that you know were fixed six months ago. Once you know how projects fail, you can do what you need to do to keep them on track.

Stephen Johnson conducts a Mono Lake and Eastern Sierra field workshop

Oct 11-13, 2007

Mono Lake and Eastern Sierra
CA

Join Stephen Johnson (Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography) in this dynamic combination of a traditional landscape photography workshop while diving deep into the digital age. Technical and aesthetic considerations will be discussed in detail, while you explore this high desert lake and its strange environs.

Web 2.0 Summit

Oct 17-19, 2007

San Francisco, CA

An invite only event, the Web 2.0 Summit brings the intelligence, innovation, and leadership of the Internet industry together to discuss and debate the most critical issues and strategies driving the Internet economy now and in the near future.

O'Reilly at PhotoPlus Expo

Oct 18-20, 2007

Jacob Javits Convention Center
New York, NY

This year's conference will offer over 100 in-depth photography and design seminars, including several hands-on workshops, taught by world-renowned experts. You'll find information-packed, idea-generating sessions at the only conference in the country that's 100% focused on photography, design & imaging. While you're there, stop by the O'Reilly booth (# 1448) to say hi, and pick up some great new books.

Maker Faire 2007--Austin

Oct 20-21, 2007

Travis County Fairgrounds
Austin, TX
Join us for MAKE magazine's Austin Maker Faire--a hands-on event featuring Makers whose science and technology projects will amaze you and ignite your imagination. Meet Expert Makers and MAKE contributors, hear from O'Reilly's Hacks author, attend DIY Tutorials, explore DIY projects and demonstrations, and see the Ultimate Workshop.

Tenni Theurer at The Ajax Experience, Boston

Oct 24-26, 2007

Seaport Hotel
Boston, MA

Tenni Theurer, manager of the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance team, will be speaking together at The Ajax Experience in Boston October 24-26. Through a series of research studies, Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance Team has identified 14 best practices for making web pages faster. Tenni will go in-depth on these best practices detailed in Steve Souders new book High Performance Web Sites, and also demonstrate a recently released tool called YSlow, which was developed as an extension to Firebug and analyzes web pages according to the performance best practices.

Conference News

ETel 2008 call for participation is now open
March 3-6, 2008 in San Diego, CA
We're looking for the people who can bring the future to life, with new technologies, new ideas, cutting edge presentations, and powerful thinking. Proposal due date has been extended to September 24. Submit your proposal now.

Graphing Social Patterns conference
October 7-9, 2007 in San Jose, CA
Graphing Social Patterns is the premier conference covering Facebook business & technology issues and related social networking platforms. The conference is designed for both business & marketing executives, and technical developers who want to learn more about social networking platforms, applications, marketing, and strategy. Conference speakers will include representatives from Facebook, O'Reilly, LinkedIn, Google, Slide.com, SocialMedia, RockYou, ClearSpring, Forrester Research, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, InsideFacebook, Charles River Ventures, Altura Ventures, among others.
15% discount code link for registration.

O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference 2008 Call for Participation
February 11-13, 2008 in New York City, NY
If you have something to say about where publishing is going, join the conversation. Submit a proposal to lead conference sessions or tutorials at TOC by October 1, 2007.

Call for Participation is Open for the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo
April 15-18, 2008 in Santa Clara, CA
Take an active role in shaping the future of MySQL and related open source technologies by leading sessions and tutorials at the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo. Visit the Proposals page for more details and to submit your ideas. Proposals are due no later than October 30, 2007.

O'Reilly's inaugural Money:Tech Conference has been announced
The dates are February 6-7, 2008 in New York City. That's right, in the heart of the financial universe, New York, NY, Money:Tech will raise the level of conversation around technology advances in the investment industry, and bring together innovators with established players to increase adoption and awareness and push the technology forward. Learn more about Money:Tech

O'Reilly School of Technology

O'Reilly School of Technology Courses: UG Members Receive a 30% Discount
O'Reilly School of Technology has opened its virtual doors with educational offerings and certification for IT students looking to further their careers or to launch one. As an O'Reilly User Group member, you save on all the courses in the following University of Illinois Certificate Series:

Linux/Unix System Administration
Web Programming
Open Source Programming
.NET Programming
Client-Side Web Programming featuring AJAX

To redeem, use Promotion Code "ORALL1," good for a 30% discount, in Step #3 of the enrollment process. Each course comes with a free O'Reilly book and a 7-day money-back guarantee. Register online.

News from O'Reilly & Beyond

UG News

Interview with the Python Atlanta Programmers O'Reilly Book Club Noah Gift and Doug Hellmann talk about the PyAtl O'Reilly Book Club they started. Maybe your groups should think about starting your own version.

Calling All Flex Developers
Are you doing any development work (including skinning and UI design) with Adobe Flex? Here's your chance to be a contributor to an Adobe Developer Library book to be published in 2008, "Flex 3 Cookbook." Adobe's got a terrific site for Flex developers of any stripe to show their best stuff, and O'Reilly and Adobe are partnering on a book that will include some of the best contributions from the site. Each contribution uses the classic O'Reilly cookbook "Problem/Solution/Explanation" format; if you've got strong material to show the rest of the world, it couldn't be easier to write up your material in the online fields, and join the cookbook party. Flex developers are in very short supply in an exploding market, so here's your chance to show your stuff to the rest of the community!

SCALE 6X Looking For Speakers in Several Areas
The Sixth Annual SoCal Linux Expo will be February 8th-10th, 2008. The Expo has expanded to included specialized conferences on the Friday prior to SCALE including the Women in Open Source conference, the health care conference, now known as DOHCS--Demonstrating Open Source Health Care Systems, and newly added "Open Source in Education" which focuses on opportunities for Open Source in the field of education.

If you have any experience in any of the above-mentioned areas, please consider sharing it with the Open Source community at SCALE. All of the calls are now open for submittals. For SCALE 4X and 5X the speaker slots filled rapidly. Submittal info for each conference can be found on their respective CFP pages.

INETA INETA Community Leadership Summit
September 29, Irvine, CA
INETA and the INETA User Groups of Southern California are hosting a Community Leadership Summit open to all .Net Development Community user group leaders, as well as those active in volunteering support. This will be an excellent opportunity to meet others in the community and to exchange information and ideas.

Perl Survey 2007 Closes September 30th
The Perl Survey is attempting to take a snapshot of the Perl world as it currently stands. Whether you're a web developer, sysadmin, or using Perl for scientific research or finance or just tracking your DVD collection, they want to hear about it.

The Bay Area Functional Programmers Group
Now programmers in the San Francisco Bay using or interested in functional programming and functional programming languages such as Haskell, OCaml, SML, Scala, and Erlang have a place to meet, discuss, and learn together. Attendance at the first meeting was great, with over 25 people enjoying pizza and beer at Amici's in San Francisco and a fairly even split between Haskell, OCaml, Erlang, and Scala enthusiasts. The next meeting will be October 11th, 2007 at 7:30pm. If you're interested in coming, or would like to give a talk, please join the mailing list and introduce yourself.

WoTech Talks to Jen Blackledge, Web Mistress at Edge Wireless, Bend Oregon
WoTech is a blog for and about women who work in technology and Jen Blackledge is with the Central Oregon Web Professionals' Usergroup.

Articles

WIT Women in Technology: Hear Us Roar
The brainchild of Tatiana Apandi, an associate editor at O'Reilly, this new series features articles solicited from technology's female side--and all focused on what it's like to carve out a career in technology.
To hear more from Tatiana, listen to her interview with Chuck Joiner on MacVoices.

An Introduction to Erlang
Not long ago, ONLamp readers were introduced to Haskell, a functional language. Another popular functional language is Erlang, which also features powerful features to manage concurrency. Gregory Brown recently tried it out, and has this summary.

Linux vs. BSD, What's the Difference?
Linux mavens are usually pretty sure they'll never go back to (or start using) Windows. They may like Mac OS, but usually don't jump ship for that either. But how about the other open source Unix descendant, BSD? Dru Lavigne offers a basic primer on what's different in PC-BSD for a Linux user, and what's better.

Schemaless Java-XML Data Binding with VTD-XML
This article introduces a Java-XML binding technique based on VTD-XML and XPath. This approach doesn't mandate a schema, takes advantage of XML's inherent loose encoding, and avoids needless object creation, so it is much more efficient for lightweight data binding.

Moonlight: Silverlight Goes Mono
By now, you may have heard the buzz around Silverlight, Microsoft's attempt to put Adobe out of the rich browser client business. But did you know that the Mono gang have been busy making an open source version for Linux? You do now.

Creating Google Custom Search Engines
Tired of searching for cheesecake recipes and getting nothing but pinup calendars? Google has a little-known feature that lets you design your own search engines that will search only the sites you want. Bernard Farrell introduces us to this useful capability and shows how to set one up.

Organizing Power Tips with Joe Schorr
Do you know the difference between blue folders and yellow folders? What do you do if you're about to meet with clients and want only their images to show in Aperture? In this podcast interview with Joe Schorr, Derrick Story discovers advanced organizing tips for Aperture power users.

Lightroom Using Lightroom's Develop module, you can do a lot to bring out the best tonal qualities of your images. Lightroom has easy-to-use sliders that allow you to react to the Exposure, Highlight/Shadow, and Brightness/Contrast needs of your images.

For more articles, go to: http://www.oreillynet.com/

Blogs

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