The Definitive Guide to CentOS

CentOS is just like Red Hat, but without the price tag and with the virtuous license. When belts have to be tightened, we want to read about an OS with all the features of a commercial Linux variety, but without the pain. The Definitive Guide to CentOS is the first definitive reference for CentOS and focuses on CentOS alone, the workhorse Linux distro, that does the heavy lifting in small and medium-size enterprises without drawing too much attention to itself.

• Provides tutorial and hands-on learning but is also designed to be used as a reference
• Bases all examples on real-world tasks that readers are likely to perform
• Serves up hard-won examples and hints and tips from the author's experiences of CentOS in production

What you’ll learn

• See why CentOS is an ideal platform for deploying services on the same level as Redhat Enterprise Linux without the cost.
• Prepare and install a CentOS server from scratch.
• Install and configure core services.
• Follow best practices for managing and administering the server and its services.
• Integrate enterprise features in CentOS/Red Hat networks.
• And finally, move away from Fedora, which has great features, but is not meant to be a server OS!

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Introducing Windows Azure

Windows Azure is Microsoft's next-generation cloud-computing operating system and is designed to provide companies with new business opportunities as they migrate toward hosted services.

Introducing Microsoft Azure provides all the information developers need to get started with this new technology and apply it across a range of situations. Presented in a clear, concise manner, this book provides a carefully measured learning curve for surmounting the architectural and coding challenges that need to be faced when building a well-balanced Windows Azure service.

What you'll learn

• Understand the critical concepts of Azure, such as data storage and retrieval, .NET Services, and SQL Azure
• Learn to write Azure code and architect cloud-based solutions
• Gain a comprehensive understanding of cloud computing and how the hosted architecture will impact the way organizations host, deploy, and maintain their solutions
• Integrate .NET Services and SQL Azure into existing applications to increase their functionality
• Understand how Azure can be leveraged to solve a variety of programming tasks through extensive exercises and recipes

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iPhone User Interface Design Projects

With over 100,000 iPhone applications and 125,000 registered iPhone developers, is it still possible to create a top-selling app that stands apart from the six-figure crowd? Of course, but you’ll need more than a great idea and flawless code—an eye-catching and functional user interface design is essential. With this book, you’ll get practical advice on user interface design from 10 innovative developers who, like you, have sat wondering how to best utilize the iPhone’s minimal screen real estate. Their stories illustrate precisely why, with more apps and more experienced, creative developers, no iPhone app can succeed without a great UI.

Whatever type of iPhone project you have in mind—social networking app, game, or reference tool—you’ll benefit from the information presented in this book. More than just tips and pointers, you’ll learn from the authors’ hands-on experiences, including:

• Dave Barnard of App Cubby on how to use Apple’s User Interface conventions and test for usability to assure better results
• Joachim Bondo, creator of Deep Green Chess, beats a classic design problem of navigating large dataset results in the realm of the iPhone
• Former Apple employee Dan Burcaw tailors user interfaces and adds the power of CoreLocation, Address Book, and Camera to the social networking app, Brightkite
• David Kaneda takes his Basecamp project management client, Outpost, from a blank page (literally) to a model of dashboard clarity
• Craig Kemper focuses on the smallest details to create his award-winning puzzle games TanZen and Zentomino
• Tim Novikoff, a graduate student in applied math with no programming experience, reduces a complex problem to simplicity in Flash of Genius: SAT Vocab
• Long-time Mac developer Chris Parrish goes into detail on the creation of the digital postcard app, Postage, which won the 2009 Apple Design Award
• Flash developer Keith Peters provides solutions for bringing games that were designed for a desktop screen to the small, touch-sensitive world of the iPhone
• Jürgen Siebert, creator of FontShuffle, outlines the anatomy of letters and how to select the right fonts for maximum readability on the iPhone screen
• Eddie Wilson, an interactive designer, reveals the fine balance of excellent design and trial-by-fire programming used to create his successful app Snow Report

Combined with Apress’ best-selling Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK, you’ll be prepared to match great code with striking design and create the app that everyone is talking about.

What you’ll learn

• Optimize your design for the iPhone’s limited screen real estate and the mobile environment
• Create a user interface that is eye-catching and stands apart from the crowd
• Maximize your use of typographic elements for style and readability
• Perfect entry views and display large amounts of data in an exciting way
• Translate games made for the desktop’s big screen to the iPhone
• Strike the perfect balance between simplicity, beauty, and features

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Oracle SQL Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

Have you ever been faced with a new type of query to write, or been asked to create an unfamiliar database object? In such situations, you have probably wanted a good, solid example upon which to build, and instead have been forced into the drudgery of parsing railroad-style syntax diagrams in Oracle's manual set. This book frees you from that drudgery by providing tested and working examples of SQL used to solve common problems faced by developers and database administrators on a daily basis. When you're under pressure to get results fast, Oracle SQL Recipes is there at your side.

• Example-based, providing quality solutions to everyday problems
• Respects your time by putting solutions first and keeping discussions short
• Solves the most commonly encountered SQL problems

What you'll learn

• Recognize common query patterns and apply their corresponding solutions.
• Solve common reporting problems such as sorting rows into buckets.
• Troubleshoot SQL performance problems.
• Create and manage database objects such as tables, indexes, and views.
• Work with XML and tree-structured data.
• Take advantage of analytic functions, regular expressions, hierarchical query support, and other powerful aspects of Oracle SQL.

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Pro Silverlight 3 in VB

Silverlight is a lightweight browser plug-in that frees your code from the traditional confines of the browser. It's a rules-changing, groundbreaking technology that allows you to run rich client applications right inside the browser. Even more impressively, it's able to host true .NET applications in non-Microsoft browsers (like Firefox) and on non-Microsoft platforms (like Mac OS X). Silverlight is still new and evolving fast, and you need a reliable guidebook to make sense of it.

Pro Silverlight 3 in VB, Second Edition is the perfect reference to ensure you are informed and up to date: you'll learn about the features that put Silverlight in direct competition with Adobe Flash, such as rich support for 2D drawing, animations, and media playback, and best of all, you'll experience the plumbing of .NET and the design model of WPF through Silverlight—all of the same .NET technology that developers use to design next-generation Windows applications. Author Matthew MacDonald provides an expertly crafted tutorial written from professional developer to professional developer. You'll learn to create rich media applications using Silverlight in the environment you’re most productive in—no matter what the target platform.

What you'll learn

• Develop rich media applications using Silverlight and Visual Basic across browsers and platforms
• Create a project, set up a layout, and use controls
• Handle 2D drawing, animation, and media playback through Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
• Integrate web services support
• Use Silverlight in conjunction with ASP.NET and its interactions with HTML

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jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery

Modern web application user interface design requires rapid development and proven results. jQuery UI, a trusted suite of official plug-ins for the jQuery JavaScript library, gives you a solid platform on which to build rich and engaging interfaces with maximum compatibility and stability, and minimum time and effort.

jQuery UI has a series of ready-made, great-looking user interface widgets and a comprehensive set of core interaction helpers designed to be implemented in a consistent and developer-friendly way. With all this, the amount of code that you need to write personally to take a project from conception to completion is drastically reduced.

Specially revised for version 1.7 of jQuery UI, this book has been written to maximize your experience with the library by breaking down each component and walking you through examples that progressively build upon your knowledge, taking you from beginner to advanced usage in a series of easy-to-follow steps.

In this book, you'll learn how each component can be initialized in a basic default implementation and then see how easy it is to customize its appearance and configure its behavior to tailor it to the requirements of your application. You'll look at the configuration options and the methods exposed by each component's API to see how these can be used to bring out the best of the library.

Events play a key role in any modern web application if it is to meet the expected minimum requirements of interactivity and responsiveness, and each chapter will show you the custom events fired by the component covered and how these events can be intercepted and acted upon.

What you will learn from this book?

• How the brand-new CSS framework styles each of the library components
• Organizing different sections of related content as tabs and accordions to save space on your page while maximizing its content
• Displaying messages, images, and interactive content like forms using the dialog widget
• Using sliders for volume and color control of your applications by dynamically scrolling left and right, displaying different ranges
• Allowing your site visitors to select dates from the calendar using the date picker widget
• Adding an attractive and effective deterministic progress bar to give visitors essential feedback on how much longer a process has left to complete
• Providing a drag-and-drop mechanism to let users directly rearrange elements around the page
• Making a range of elements of a group selectable and taking collective actions on them
• Creating a page with content boxes that can be sorted into various positions to suit the visitor's personal preference
• Adding flair to your actions with animation effects

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Matplotlib for Python Developers

Providing appealing plots and graphs is an essential part of various fields such as scientific research, data analysis, and so on. Matplotlib, the Python 2D plotting library, is used to produce publication-quality figures in a variety of hardcopy formats and interactive environments across platforms. This book explains creating various plots, histograms, power spectra, bar charts, error charts, scatter-plots and much more using the powerful Matplotlib library to get impressive out-of-the-box results.

This book gives you a comprehensive tour of the key features of the Matplotlib Python 2D plotting library, right from the simplest concepts to the most advanced topics. You will discover how easy it is to produce professional-quality plots when you have this book to hand.

The book introduces the library in steps. First come the basics: introducing what the library is, its important prerequisites (and terminology), installing and configuring Matplotlib, and going through simple plots such as lines, grids, axes, and charts. Then we start with some introductory examples, and move ahead by discussing the various programming styles that Matplotlib allows, and several key features.

Further, the book presents an important section on embedding applications. You will be introduced to three of the best known GUI libraries--GTK+, Qt, and wxWidgets--and presented with the steps to implement to include Matplotlib in an application written using each of them. You will learn through an incremental approach: from a simple example that presents the peculiarities of the GUI library, to more complex ones, using GUI designer tools.

Because the Web permeates all of our activities, a part of the book is dedicated to showing how Matplotlib can be used in a web environment, and another section focuses on using Matplotlib with common Python web frameworks, namely, Pylons and Django. Last, but not least, you will go through real-world examples, where you will see some real situations in which you can use Matplotlib.

What you will learn from this book?

• Exploit the interactive computing environment of IPython to its fullest in collaboration with Matplotlib
• Learn line and point styles and master their customization, customization of axis ticks, and develop several plot types available in Matplotlib, such as histograms, bars, pie charts, polar charts, and so on
• Explore Object Oriented Matplotlib and learn how to add subplots, multiple figures, additional and shared axes, logarithmic scaled axes, data plotting with tick formatting and locators, text properties, fonts, LaTeX typewriting, and contour plots
• Get comfortable with Glade--a RAD tool--to quickly design a GUI for GTK+ and embed Matplotlib into it
• Make the most of Matplotlib within the wxWidgets framework, in particular using the wxPython bindings and design a GUI with wxGlade
• Use the Qt Designer to draw a simple GUI and refer it to your Python code to fit your needs
• Expose Matplotlib on the Web using CGI (through Apache mod_cgi), mod_python, Django, and Pylons in no time at all
• Profit from the real-world examples by simply following the stream--identify the data source, elaborate the data and generate the resulting plot

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Linux Email

Many businesses want to run their email servers on Linux for greater control and flexibility of corporate communications, but getting started can be complicated. The attractiveness of a free-to-use and robust email service running on Linux can be undermined by the apparent technical challenges involved. Some of the complexity arises from the fact that an email server consists of several components that must be installed and configured separately, then integrated together.

This book gives you just what you need to know to set up and maintain an email server. Unlike other approaches that deal with one component at a time, this book delivers a step-by-step approach across all the server components, leaving you with a complete working email server for your small business network.

Starting with a discussion on why you should even consider hosting your own email server, the book covers setting up the mail server. We then move on to look at providing web access, so that users can access their email out of the office. After this we look at the features you'll want to add to improve email productivity: virus protection, spam detection, and automatic email processing. Finally we look at an essential maintenance task: backups.

Written by professional Linux administrators, the book is aimed at technically confident users and new and part-time system administrators. The emphasis is on simple, practical and reliable guidance.

Based entirely on free, Open Source software, this book will show you how to set up and manage your email server easily.

What you will learn from this book? You will:

• Install Postfix mail transfer agent and set up an environment to send and receive email messages
• Implement the two standard email retrieval protocol services - POP3 and IMAP - for your mail server using Courier-IMAP
• Configure an easy-to-use open source email client - Mozilla Thunderbird - on your system
• Install and maintain an efficient webmail solution for your clients with SquirrelMail
• Prevent usernames and passwords from being sent in plain text, instead encrypting them to avoid eavesdroppers from intercepting valid account details
• Configure relay permissions for static as well as dynamic IP addresses, and protect your Postfix server from relay abuse
• Create mail filters, sort your incoming mail into separate folders, pre-process your mail, start any programs upon mail arrival and selectively forward certain incoming mail automatically to someone using Procmail
• Automatically filter all the mails for spam by integrating SpamAssassin with your mail server
• Secure your mail server by configuring an email virus scanning system with Clam AV
• Create an ongoing scheduled backup to recover from catastrophic loss of service in case of a major hardware or software malfunction

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Programming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is a well established Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, part of the Microsoft Dynamics family. Dynamics NAV is installed worldwide, with well over one million users. Version 2009 contains many major new features and structures, requiring even experienced Dynamics NAV developers to refresh their NAV development knowledge.

Renowned for its challenging learning curve, Dynamics NAV is a complex piece of software with a unique design structure. For developers learning to modify or enhance Dynamics NAV for vital business purposes, the task can sometimes be intimidating.

This book is an in-depth step-by-step guide to programming NAV, designed to ease you through the complexities of NAV application development. You will learn the skills and develop the confidence to tackle your own critical NAV applications. This book will act as your experienced NAV programming mentor, helping you to become productive as a NAV developer much more quickly.

NAV development is quite complex, with a steep learning curve. This book makes it easy for you. From basic NAV terminology and concept definitions, through the essential building blocks of NAV data structure and objects, you will gain an understanding of the fundamental underlying concepts of NAV. You will learn practical details about NAV object construction and the tools available, including table, page, and report design. You will learn how to use NAV's tools to effectively navigate through the various features of objects, including properties, triggers, and C/AL code, and receive practical guidance on ways to develop and test in the unique NAV C/SIDE development environment.

Extensive guidance on software design for NAV is provided along with tips for efficient design of new NAV applications or enhancing existing applications. With its comprehensive collection of NAV information and distillation of years of NAV development experience, this book is not only designed to help you learn, but to act as a reference as well.

What you will learn from this book?

• Get started and master NAV business management solutions concepts
• Create tables to define your NAV data structure, review the types of tables found in the out-of-the-box NAV application and understand how to use these in new enhancements
• Explore all NAV data types and learn how they help develop financially oriented business applications
• Define filters to apply defined limits on data in any business process
• Meet several data presentation tools and create pages to input data and output information for users
• Create reports - using the Report Designer tools - which are intuitive to work with and easier to distribute
• Dive into C/SIDE and C/AL - essential navigation, object construction, numbering, basic syntax, naming rules, SIFT technology, string operators and functions, numeric operators and functions, logical and relational operators and functions, and the whole range of input/output functions
• Debug your NAV applications using the Debuggers and associated tools and techniques
• Integrate data and business logic from NAV 2009 with other applications

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RESTful Java Web Services

If you are already familiar with REST theory but are new to RESTful Java web services, and want to use the Java technology stack together with Java RESTful frameworks to create robust web services, this is the book for you.

This book is a guide to developing RESTful web services using Java and the most popular RESTful frameworks available today. It covers the theory of REST; practical coding examples for RESTful clients; a practical outline of the RESTful design process-yes, it's different from traditional web application development; and a complete implementation of a non-trivial web service using the following frameworks: Jersey's JAX-RS, Restlet's Lightweight REST, JBoss's JAX-RS RESTEasy, and Struts 2 with the REST plug-in.

We begin with an introduction to REST theory, for example, what it means for a web service to be RESTful, what it means for a web service to exchange representations of resources, and what it means to only use the conventional HTTP request method types-GET, POST, PUT, DELETE-for client/server communication. Before moving into the design and implementation process of a non-trivial web service, we look at a set of sample Java applications that connect to existing REST services that are freely available (Google, Yahoo, Twitter). We then outline a practical design process for RESTful web services and then cover the four most widely used frameworks available to date: JAX-RS implementations such as Jersey and RESTEasy, the Restlet framework, and Struts 2 with the REST plug-in. We cover each framework in detail to allow you to compare the strengths and weaknesses of each framework and to begin developing your own web services after the first reading; what's more, the whole source is included for you to modify and deploy in your own web services. Finally, we discuss the most common performance issues faced by RESTful web services and cover practical solutions to security-related issues such as authentication and data transfer.

What you will learn from this book?

• REST architecture basics
• What it means for a web service to be RESTful
• How to connect to and consume RESTful web services such as Yahoo or Google
• A RESTful web service design heuristic
• How to deploy web services to Java web containers such as Tomcat and JBoss
• How to implement an entire web service using the most popular open source frameworks currently available, including JAX-RS implementations Jersey and RESTEasy, Restlet, and Struts 2 with the REST plug-in
• How to create standalone Java web services using the Restlet framework
• How you can secure RESTful web services

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