Sebastopol, CA--When Abraham Lincoln said, "The things I want to know are in books," he wasn't necessarily excluding the PDF. It was, after all, some time before the digital age, and although it's possible he was referring to the physical sheets of paper bound between covers, it's more likely that he was speaking of the ideas presented in the literary works themselves. What Abe Lincoln would have loved about the PDF is its viral ability to share important information instantaneously: you can get the information you need when you need it, without waiting for the book to be printed and shipped.
As part of O'Reilly Media's commitment to delivering vital technology information to people who need it, when they need it, O'Reilly is launching an ongoing series of PDF publications to address cutting edge technologies. O'Reilly's PDF guides are in-depth, immediate, timely, and authoritative. Readers can purchase and download the PDFs through the O'Reilly online store, with no restrictions on the ability to save, copy, or print them.
The advantages to readers are numerous. O'Reilly authors can disseminate crucial information as the need arises, without having to wait for enough material to fill an entire book. Production time is reduced dramatically, giving IT professionals and others immediate access to the knowledge they want. Plus, readers can easily search the text, copy and paste handy bits of code into their applications, and take the PDF with them even when they're offline. But most importantly, readers won't have to compromise in their pursuit of timely information--these PDFs provide the high-quality content for which O'Reilly has come to be known.
This month's PDF offerings are available now:
- Build Tag Clouds in Perl and PHP by Jim Bumgardner
First popularized by the web sites Flickr, Technorati, and del.icio.us, these amorphous clumps of words now appear on a slew of web sites as visual evidence of their membership in the elite corps of "Web 2.0." This PDF analyzes what is and isn't a tag cloud, offers design tips for using them effectively, and then shows how to collect tags and display them in the tag cloud format. Scripts are provided in Perl and PHP.
ISBN: 0-596-52794-2, 46 pages, $9.99 US, $12.99 CAN - Web Services on Rails by Kevin Marshall
In recent years, web services have become increasingly useful to smaller web site developers. Thanks to standards like SOAP and XML-RPC as well as frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, developers can easily create web service clients and servers with fewer errors. This guide looks at how Ruby on Rails makes building web service clients and servers simple and fun, with plenty of working examples and code details so you can see just how everything works.
ISBN: 0-596-52796-9, 32 pages, $9.99 US, $12.99 CA - Atlas UpdatePanel Control by Bertrand Le Roy and Matt Gibbs
The key to making ASP.NET applications more responsive to user input is the UpdatePanel control. In this tutorial, you'll learn from the experts: Bertrand Le Roy, UpdatePanel control's architect and developer, and Matt Gibbs, Atlas dev team manager. This PDF document contains all you need to get started implementing AJAX functionality in existing ASP.NET applications.
ISBN: 0-596-52747-0, 56 pages, $9.99 US, $12.99 CA - Search Engine Optimization by Harold Davis
SEO--short for Search Engine Optimization--is the art, craft, and science of driving web traffic to web sites. Whether your web site depends on broad, general traffic, or high-quality, targeted traffic, this PDF has the tools and information you need to draw more traffic to your site, and build your bottom line. You’ll learn how to effectively use PageRank and Google itself--effective use of SEO means understanding how Google works: how to boost placement in Google search results, how not to offend Google, and how best to use paid Google programs. You’ll also learn how to best organize your web pages and web sites, apply SEO analysis tools, establish effective SEO best practices, and much more.
ISBN: 0-596-52786-1, 41 pages, $9.99 US, $12.99 CA - O'Reilly's other PDFs can be found here.
About O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.