Utilities Books

Learning Perl, Fourth Edition

Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, brian d foy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 293 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Learning Perl," better known as "the Llama book," starts the programmer on the way to mastery. Written by three prominent members of the Perl community who each have several years of experience teaching Perl around the world, this edition has been updated to account for all the recent changes to the language up to Perl 5.8.

Perl is the language for people who want to get work done. It started as a tool for Unix system administrators who needed something powerful for small tasks. Since then, Perl has blossomed into a full-featured programming language used for web programming, database manipulation, XML processing, and system administration--on practically all platforms--while remaining the favorite tool for the small daily tasks it was designed for. You might start using Perl because you need it, but you'll continue to use it because you love it.

Informed by their years of success at teaching Perl as consultants, the authors have re-engineered the Llama to better match the pace and scope appropriate for readers getting started with Perl, while retaining the detailed discussion, thorough examples, and eclectic wit for which the Llama is famous.

The book includes new exercises and solutions so you can practice what you've learned while it's still fresh in your mind. Here are just some of the topics covered:

Perl variable types

subroutines

file operations

regular expressions

text processing

strings and sorting

process management

using third party modules

If you ask Perl programmers today what book they relied on most when they were learning Perl, you'll find that an overwhelming majority will point to the Llama. With good reason. Other books mayteach you to program in Perl, but this book will turn you into a Perl programmer.

Version Control with Subversion

C Pilato, Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian Fitzpatrick

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Written by members of the development team that maintains Subversion, this is the official guide and reference manual for the popular open source revision control technology. The new edition covers Subversion 1.5 with a complete introduction and guided tour of its capabilities, along with best practice recommendations.

Version Control with Subversion is useful for people from a wide variety of backgrounds, from those with no previous version control experience to experienced system administrators.

Subversion is the perfect tool to track individual changes when several people collaborate on documentation or, particularly, software development projects. As a more powerful and flexible successor to the CVS revision control system, Subversion makes life so much simpler, allowing each team member to work separately and then merge source code changes into a single repository that keeps a record of each separate version.

Inside the updated edition Version Control with Subversion, you'll find:

• An introduction to Subversion and basic concepts behind version control
• A guided tour of the capabilities and structure of Subversion 1.5
Guidelines for installing and configuring Subversion to manage programming, documentation, or any other team-based project
• Detailed coverage of complex topics such as branching and repository administration
• Advanced features such as properties, externals, and access control
• A guide to best practices
• Complete Subversion reference and troubleshooting guide

If you've never used version control, you'll find everything you need to get started. And if you're a seasoned CVS pro, this book will help you make a painless leap into Subversion.

Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Jim Elferdink

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Still the top-selling software suite for Mac users, Microsoft Office has been improved and enhanced to take advantage of the latest Mac OS X features. You'll find lots of new features in Office 2008 for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage, but not a page of printed instructions to guide you through the changes. Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual gives you the friendly, thorough introduction you need, whether you're a beginner who can't do more than point and click, or a power user who's ready to tackle a few advanced techniques.

To cover Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage, this guide gives you four superb books in one -- a separate section each for program! You can manage your day and create professional-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in no time. Office 2008 has been redesigned so that the windows, toolbars, and icons blend in better with your other Mac applications. But there are still plenty of oddities. That's why this Missing Manual isn't shy about pointing out which features are gems in the rough -- and which are duds. With it, you'll learn how to:

• Navigate the new user interface with its bigger and more graphic toolbars
• Use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage separately or together
• Keep track of appointments and manage daily priorities with the My Day feature
• Create newsletters, flyers, brochures, and more with Word's Publishing Layout View
• Build financial documents like budgets and invoices with Excel's Ledger Sheets
• Get quick access to all document templates and graphics with the Elements Gallery
• Organize all of your Office projects using Entourage's Project Center
• Scan or import digital camera images directly into any of the programs
• Customize each program with power-user techniques

With Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual, you get objective and entertaining instruction to help you tap into all of the features of this powerful suite, so you can get more done in less time.

Why Should I Upgrade to Office 2008 for Macintosh?

Author Jim Elferdink talks about what’s new in Office 2008 for Macintosh. If you’re still using Office 2004, you’ll find some great reasons to upgrade. Jim also fills you in on some cool features that Office for Windows can’t match, and why you may not need to invest in iWork!

What are the best new features that will make folks want to upgrade to Office 2008?
Publishing Layout view. If you use Word to create formatted documents like letters and brochures, you’ll find it so much easier to do now in the new Publishing Layout view than in the old Page Layout view. Publishing Layout view is actually quite similar to Pages; both are very usable. It’s a huge boon for Word people—if you haven’t bought Pages, now you won’t have to!
MyDay. I really enjoy Entourage’s MyDay feature. Assuming you’re not working on a laptop that doesn’t have screen space to spare, I recommend keeping MyDay open in the corner of your screen. That’s what I do! It helps me keep track of my appointments and schedule. If you’ve got appointments every 20 minutes or just a lot going on in your day, it’s great to have it all at a glance. It also helps you remember to go pick up the kids. (And you can feel superior to your Windows friends. There’s nothing resembling MyDay in Office for Windows.) Project Center. Entourage’s Project Center has been streamlined and beautified for 2008, but it’s still very underutilized. It takes a little extra effort to learn, but once you’ve got it up and running, if you’re doing any kind of a project that involves Office documents or even files from other programs, it’s a great timesaver. It lets you keep shortcuts to all these documents, plus email related to the project, in one window. The Project Center makes it easy to categorize email, contacts, notes, and documents. Things don’t get lost, and you don’t have to worry about Mac OS X labels and other ways to categorize things. (Office for Windows also has nothing like the Project Center.)
Formula Builder. In Excel, one of the greatest new features is the formula builder. If you use Excel much for formulas at all, especially more complicated ones, it’s really a timesaver. It helps you get those things created and working much faster than you could do before.
Elements Gallery. The Elements Gallery concept is really great because it carries over from one program to the other, gives the programs a consistent feel. If you’re using a lot of templates or AutoShapes, you’ll find it a quick way to get at all that stuff. You could do all these things before, but it was a lot harder to find what you were looking for.

So, are there any disadvantages to upgrading to Office 2008?
Publishing Layout view can be frustratingly slow on G4 Macs, especially when you’re trying to move layout elements around onscreen. I would only use it on an Intel Mac. The same caveat holds true for PowerPoint; it’s hard to move things around. But the rest of the suite works great on faster G4 machines.
Office 2008 uses the same new, XML-based file format as Office 2007 for Windows. It’s great not to have to worry when someone with Office 2007 on a PC sends you something. Office 2008 can open those documents right up. But now when you send documents to Mac folks who haven’t upgraded, they won’t be able to open them! Once you upgrade to Office 2008, you’ve got to be aware that not everyone else has, and (unless you have a real need to use the XML format) set your Save options (in Preferences) to the older format so there won’t be problems with your attachments.
Then there’s the macro problem. Any macros you wrote in earlier versions of Office use the Visual Basic programming language (VBA), and they won’t work in Office 2008! If you’ve written a lot of macros for yourself, you’ll have to stick with Office 2004 until you have time to rewrite them in AppleScript.

What do you like best about "Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual?"
I’m happy with the way this book turned out. I think it covers everything you need to use this really powerful suite of programs for all your work. One chapter I’m particularly fond of, and which I think is missing from every other PowerPoint book I’ve looked at, is Chapter 15—Planning Great Presentations. It helps you prepare for your presentation and shows you how to use PowerPoint for its true purpose. PowerPoint isn’t doing the presentation—you are. You’re the star of the show! Unfortunately, too many people think it’s the other way around.

Classic Shell Scripting

Arnold Robbins, Nelson H.F. Beebe

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Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Operating Systems -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Shell scripting skills never go out of style. It's the shell that unlocks the real potential of Unix. Shell scripting is essential for Unix users and system administrators-a way to quickly harness and customize the full power of any Unix system. With shell scripts, you can combine the fundamental Unix text and file processing commands to crunch data and automate repetitive tasks. But beneath this simple promise lies a treacherous ocean of variations in Unix commands and standards. "Classic Shell Scripting" is written to help you reliably navigate these tricky waters.

Writing shell scripts requires more than just a knowledge of the shell language, it also requires familiarity with the individual Unix programs: why each one is there, how to use them by themselves, and in combination with the other programs. The authors are intimately familiar with the tips and tricks that can be used to create excellent scripts, as well as the traps that can make your best effort a bad shell script. With "Classic Shell Scripting" you'll avoid hours of wasted effort. You'll learn not only write useful shell scripts, but how to do it properly and portably.

The ability to program and customize the shell quickly, reliably, and portably to get the best out of any individual system is an important skill for anyone operating and maintaining Unix or Linux systems. "Classic Shell Scripting" gives you everything you need to master these essential skills.

Facebook: The Missing Manual

E. Vander Veer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Facebook is the wildly popular, free social networking site that combines the best of blogs, online forums, photo sharing, clever applications, and interaction among friends. The one thing it doesn't have is a user's guide to help you truly take advantage of it. Until now. Facebook: The Missing Manual gives you a crystal clear and entertaining look at everything this fascinating Facebook phenomenon has to offer. Teeming with high-quality color graphics, each page in this Missing Manual is uniquely designed to help you with specific Facebook tasks, such as signing up, networking, shopping, joining groups, finding or filling a job, and a whole lot more. You'll discover how to create your page and make connections with other members in no time -- everybody who went to your school, for example, or those who work at your company or play on your soccer team. Then, bingo! Instant access to the personal and professional details of all the folks you're connected with, the people they're connected with, and so on, and so on. With Facebook: The Missing Manual, you learn to: Join a network, whether it's where you went to school, work-related, or based on other interests Look up old friends, find new ones, and decide who you'd like to keep track of Contact members by virtually poking them, or leaving notes on their message boards Get automatic updates from Facebook friends and send updates of your own Participate in groups of particular interest and meet up with members face-to-face Buy and sell using Facebook's marketplace and classified ads Find a job or hire employees by combing through the member pool Use Facebook as a collaboration tool to keep team members, co-workers, clients, and projects upto date Play it safe by using a multi-pronged approach to ensuring your privacy Think of Facebook as a 30-million-plus-entry searchable Rolodex on steroids! With help from this guide, you'll quickly get into the Facebook experience -- without getting in over your head.

Facebook: The Missing Manual Sneak Preview: Five Tips and Tricks
1. Never check the "Remember me" box when logging onto the site. (Doing so puts your account at unnecessary risk and saves you very little time or effort.)
2. When you register for the site, use your actual birthday so that your friends will get an automatic heads-up a few days before the Big Day (all the better to fete you with).
3. Never add compromising photos or info to your Facebook profile; bosses, teachers, hiring managers, and others can use legitimate means to see your profile *even if* you think you've adjusted your privacy settings to prevent them.
4. If you're on Facebook to find a gig (or a date), be sure to sprinkle keywords liberally in your profile descriptions. Doing so ups the odds of your appearing in other members' searches.
5. Before you fill out your profile, first head to the main menu and click the "privacy" link (little-p) and follow the steps in Chapter 12 of the book to customize who gets to see how much of your personal information.

sed & awk (2nd Edition)

Dale Dougherty, Arnold Robbins

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The book begins with an overview and a tutorial that demonstrate a progression in functionality from grep to sed to awk. sed and awk share a similar command-line syntax, accepting user instructions in the form of a script. Because all three programs use UNIX regular expressions, an entire chapter is devoted to understanding UNIX regular expression syntax. Next, the book describes how to write sed scripts. After getting started by writing a few simple scripts, you'll learn other basic commands that parallel manual editing actions, as well as advanced commands that introduce simple programming constructs. Among the advanced commands are those that manipulate the hold space, a set-aside temporary buffer. The second part of the book has been extensively revised to include POSIX awk as well as coverage of three freely available and three commercial versions of awk. The book introduces the primary features of the awk language and how to write simple scripts. You'll also learn: common programming constructs; how to use awk's built-in functions; how to write user-defined functions; debugging techniques for awk programs; how to develop an application that processes an index, demonstrating much of the power of awk; and FTP and contact information for obtaining various versions of awk. Also included is a miscellany of user-contributed scripts that demonstrate a wide range of sed and awk scripting styles and techniques.

Divorce for Dummies

John Ventura, Mary Reed

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Dispenses useful, timely advice to people at all stages of divorce."
—Diana Shepherd, Divorce magazine

What to do, where to go, who to trust!

Break up without breaking the bank

Are you wondering how to serve divorce papers? Afraid you’ll have to sell your house just to cover legal costs? Heading for trial? Let this friendly guide take some of the grief out of your ordeal. Filled with sound, practical advice, it shows you how you can work out the terms of your divorce agreement without losing your shirt – or your mind!

Praise for Divorce For Dummies

"Reed and Ventura walk us through some of the toughest decisions many of us will ever make – with sensitivity and expert advice."
— Ellen G. Sanchez, MEd, family life educator

Discover how to

• Assess whether you’re ready for divorce
• Understand your legal rights
• Cut costs by negotiating terms yourself
• Work with an attorney
• Avoid going to trial
• Help your kids get through it

Office 2007: The Missing Manual

Chris Grover, Matthew MacDonald, E. Vander Veer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Quickly learn the most useful features of Microsoft Office 2007 with our easy to read four-in-one guide. This fast-paced book gives you the basics of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access so you can start using the new versions of these major Office applications right away. Unlike every previous version, Office 2007 offers a completely redesigned user interface for each program. Microsoft has replaced the familiar menus with a new tabbed toolbar (or "ribbon"), and added other features such as "live preview" that lets you see exactly what each option will look like in the document before you choose it. This is good news for longtime users who never knew about some amazing Office features because they were hidden among cluttered and outdated menus. Adapting to the new format is going to be a shock -- especially if you're a longtime user. That's where Office 2007: The Missing Manual comes in. Rather than present a lot of arcane detail, this quick & friendly primer teaches you how to work with the most-used Office features, with four separate sections covering the four programs. The book offers a walkthrough of Microsoft's redesigned Office user interface before taking you through the basics of creating text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and databases with:

• Clear explanations
• Step-by-step instructions
• Lots of illustrations
• Plenty of friendly advice

It's a great way to master all 4 programs without having to stock up on a shelf-load of different books. This book has everything you need to get you up to speed fast. Office 2007: The Missing Manual is truly the book that should have been in the box.

Unix Power Tools, Third Edition

Shelley Powers, Tim O'Reilly

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 67 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

True to the Unix philosophy 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Here is a quote taken from _Unix_Power_Tools_ which demonstrates the
attitude, shared by the authors, that unix allows you to make things
easier. "''Ugh!', you say, 'that's just what I hate about UNIX. All
these long filenames and options I can't remember. Who wants to type
all that stuff!' Precisely. That's why UNIX makes it so easy to
create custom commands, in the form of aliases and shell scripts."

Unix Power Tools is true to the spirit and philosophy of unix in
focusing on the command line environment with its rich abundance of
command interpreters, shell languages, system utilities, commands, and
the like. This is the realm of real power.

The book is aimed squarely at the user who wants to learn what's under
the hood of the unix (and Linux) system. It's not about how to change
your wallpaper or install the latest media player, or configure your
desktop, although this new edition may touch on these topics, too.
It's really about using unix to greatest advantage, about tapping its
real power, the power of its simplicity, of its flexibility, of
tapping into I/O streams, and using the tool-box approach to solving
real problems. It's about using 'pipes', 'redirection', and
'filters', to automate the big jobs.

My copy of this book is tattered from all the use it's had over the
last ten years. I'm always hunting it down, as my associates at work
are constantly borrowing it to help them solve a problem. That's
okay, though. I am ordering another copy, just for me. I'm curious
to see this new edition, which I understand has broader coverage of
the various unix flavors, including Linux, which I run
at home.

I would recommend this book to those who find unix intimidating, as
well as to the unix enthusiast. For anyone who ever wondered what the
fuss over unix was about, this book will certainly bring on an
epiphany. For between these covers is the greatest accumulation of
unix wisdom and know-how to be found in any book. The shear volume is
enough to elicit awe. But that's only part of its value, because such
an enormous accumulation of material might normally overwhelm the
reader, leaving him frustrated and unenlightened. Happily, this book
is so well organized, and the material so pleasingly presented, that
anyone will find it a pleasure to browse through and to mine
repeatedly for those precious tips, tricks, and methods that make
using unix so rewarding.

This is admittedly a pound heavy volume, and might be expected to
contain a lot of chaff with the grain. I have not found it so. The
authors have chosen the material well, and know their subject so
intimately and thoroughly, that I am left with a feeling of profound
respect. This is, in short, a book that is worthy of its subject; a
truly great book for a great OS.

I read another reviewer who avers this is the one book he would take
with him to a deserted island. I concur. It has taught me more than
any other unix book, and has made my work more efficient, and most
importantly, more interesting. I paid full retail for my copy of
Power Tools, and at the time, I thought it was a lot, but it has
repaid me many times over. It's the most indispensable unix book on
my shelf; a real gem.

Editorial Review:

Very occasionally a book is written about or for Unix System Administration, or Unix in general. If the author or publishers get the mix right it receives acclaim. Very, very occasionally one of those books achieves legendary status, by finding its way onto 98% of all Unix Sysadmins book shelves. This book is one of those legendary tomes. Just about every Unix Sysadmin I know has a copy of this sitting alongside books like Evi Nemeth's "Unix Sys Admin Handbook". OK so it has a lot of information that isn't new to most sysadmins, but that's not where the beauty of the book lies. The real treasure is found in the countless nuggets of Unix info that have been long since forgotten, or yet to be learned. In my humble opinion, a true Unix Classic! If like me, you earn a living from Unix, then think of this book as a carpenter would his set of chisels. You don't use them for every job, but when needed, can prove invaluable.

Using Samba, 3rd Edition

Gerald Carter, Jay Ts, Robert Eckstein

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This book is the comprehensive guide to Samba administration, officially adopted by the Samba Team. Wondering how to integrate Samba's authentication with that of a Windows domain? How to get Samba to serve Microsoft Dfs shares? How to share files on Mac OS X? These and a dozen other issues of interest to system administrators are covered. A whole chapter is dedicated to troubleshooting!

The range of this book knows few bounds. Using Samba takes you from basic installation and configuration -- on both the client and server side, for a wide range of systems -- to subtle details of security, cross-platform compatibility, and resource discovery that make the difference between whether users see the folder they expect or a cryptic error message.

The current edition covers such advanced 3.x features as:

• Integration with Active Directory and OpenLDAP
• Migrating from Windows NT 4.0 domains to Samba
• Delegating administrative tasks to non-root users
• Central printer management
• Advanced file serving features, such as making use of Virtual File System (VFS) plugins.

Samba is a cross-platform triumph: robust, flexible and fast, it turns a Unix or Linux system into a file and print server for Microsoft Windows network clients. This book will help you make your file and print sharing as powerful and efficient as possible. The authors delve into the internals of the Windows activities and protocols to an unprecedented degree, explaining the strengths and weaknesses of each feature in Windows domains and in Samba itself.

Whether you're playing on your personal computer or an enterprise network, on one note or a full three-octave range, Using Samba will give you an efficient and secure server.