Books News & Articles

O’Reilly Media’s got another book for you.

As you probably know, performance plays a critical part in a website’s journey to success. This doesn’t bode well for sites that are bogged down in Web applications that push browsers to the brink with heavy doses of rich content and Ajax.

In Even Faster Web Sites, author Steve Souders, Web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, provides techniques and advice for improving your site’s performance under three different categories:

• JavaScript-Get advice for understanding Ajax performance, writing efficient JavaScript, creating responsive applications, loading scripts without blocking other components, and more.
• Network-Learn to share resources across multiple domains, reduce image size without loss of quality, and use chunked encoding to render pages faster.
• Browser-Discover alternatives to iframes, how to simplify CSS selectors, and other techniques.

Even Faster Web Sites also contains six guest chapters contributed by Dion Almaer, Doug Crockford, Ben Galbraith, Tony Gentilcore, Dylan Schiemann, Stoyan Stefanov, Nicole Sullivan, and Nicholas C. Zakas. Pick up your own copy here and get on your way to faster load and response times.

Monday mantra: You can’t fix what you don’t measure.

At least, that’s the idea played on by Alistair Croll and Sean Power in their new book, Complete Web Monitoring. O'Reilly Media's new 662 page gem promises to show you how to transform missed opportunities, frustrated users, and spiraling costs into online success.

Said to be suitable for anyone who owns a website, Complete Web Monitoring will help you to:

• Discover how visitors use and interact with your site through web analytics, segmentation, conversions, and user interaction analysis
• Find out your market's motivations with voice-of-the-customer research
• Measure the health and availability of your website with synthetic testing and real-user monitoring
• Track communities related to your online presence, including social networks, forums, blogs, microblogs, wikis, and social news aggregators
• Understand how to assemble this data into clear reports tailored to your organization and audience

"This is a very comprehensive view of just about everything one needs to know about how websites work and what one needs to know about them. I'd like to make this book required reading for every employee at Gomez,” said Imad Mouline, CTO of Gomez.

For more information on this book, including author bios and the table of contents, check it out here. 

Just because DITA authoring tools are coming onto the market at the speed of a runaway train, does not necessarily mean that A) companies understand what it is they are actually using, or B) they do not want to understand it.

And it is this segment of the market that the latest publication from Toronto-based content management consultancy the Rockley Group (TRG) is targeting with DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers.

While the authors (Anne Rockley, Steve Manning and Charles Cooper) never claim that the 148-page overview of DITA will make an expert out of you, they do say that it will help answer the $40 million question: Is DITA for you or your company?

Just to put it in perspective: DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standard that breaks content into small bundles of information that can be used and re-used at will through company- or group- specific information.

An XML-based architecture, it was introduced in 2001. In 2005, it was ratified as an OASIS (news, site) standard and is becoming increasingly popular in the creation of all kinds of documents.

Initial reviews of the book appear to be good, but then they would because they appear on the publisher’s website.

But then that shouldn’t put potential readers off. A quick search across the Web shows just how confusing the subject can be, and anything that can untangle the mess of ‘explanations’ out there should be worth a look.

Download or buy it from publisher on Lulu.com, or flip through a free chapter online before you actually buy.

People who are new to content management systems find it a little overwhelming as they try to figure out which CMS is right for them. Packt Publishing (news, site) has released a book that hopes to help people make some sense out of so many choices.

The book is "Choosing an Open Source CMS," by Nirav Mehta.

O'Reilly Media has released a new book on Web 2.0. Called Web 2.0 Architectures, this book should help you understand better the inner workings of Web 2.0 from a technology perspective and how some online services today have been successful with this model.

The book was written by James Governor (founder of RedMonk), Dion Hinchcliffe (Hinchcliffe and Company) and Duane Nickull (tech evangelist for Adobe Systems), all three strongly versed in the workings of enterprise architecture.

If you want to understand how Web 2.0 applications are built and how you can take advantage of this type of architecture, then this book should provide you with a lot of information to build on:

• A Web 2.0 model: The evolution of the Web 2.0 model.
• Web 2.0 reference architecture: Understand the breakdown, or components, of basic Web 2.0 patterns.
• Specific Web 2.0 patterns: Understand how your business can take advantage of Web 2.0 patterns such as SOA, mashups, RIAs, SaaS, Semantic Web, Folksonomies and more.

The book includes reviews of some of the most successful Web 2.0 ventures today including Flickr, Akamai and Napster. It also looks at more generic technologies like blogs and wikis, content management systems and directories and tagging.

If you are looking to understand Web 2.0 from a marketing perspective, this may not be the book for you. But if you are a web architect, business analyst or someone who wants to build your own Web 2.0 website or solution, there is bound to be some information in this book to get you started.

The hard cover version of Web 2.0 Architectures costs US$ 34.99, but you can also get a e-version for a little less and maybe save a tree. Get more information here.

That's right, there's an entire book about SilverStripe CMS. Written by SilverStripe core developer Ingo Schommer with the help of designer, programmer and writer Steven Broschart, the book is a 450 page long guide to SilverStripe for Web developers with an intermediate familiarity with website development, PHP5, and object oriented code.

The company put out a call for writers specifically for the project in March 2008. Merely a year later they've not only kicked it out, they' also managed to land on Amazon.de's CMS bestseller list within two weeks of release.

We would say we're surprised, but given that the company just won the Most Promising Open Source Content Management System award from Packt Publishing, we're not. The folks over at SilverStripe are definitely on top of things. 

For now, the guide is only in German (bummer) but SilverStripe has stated that they're exploring the idea of an English translation in the near future. 

Attention PacktPub.com account holders! In December 2008 the company decided to enable the copy and paste feature on their eBooks. That announcement spawned loads of requests for the removal of password protection as well, and in this case, the little guy’s voice was actually heard. After considering the increasing popularity of reading books on portable services, PacktPub took the advice of their customers and announced the immediate removal of all password protection from their eBooks earlier this week.

The bad annoying news: If you own a Packt eBook, you’ll have to download it again from your account to get rid of the password protection.

With a ton of aim to please, PacktPub is not only listening to their customers, but giving them cool stuff as well. Their site is currently offering 30% off of all their eBooks for the duration of March, and has also released a free download called Building Websites with Plone by Cameron Cooper. Originally published in 2004, Cooper's book quickly became a definitive book on the Zope-based content management system. 

For more details regarding Cooper's book, other free books and discounts or if you have any additional suggestions you'd like to offer up, just visit Packt's site. 

Still searching for that perfect Christmas gift for the web designer on your list? Not anymore.

O'Reilly has just published Universal Design for Web Applications, a new book that promotes designing accessible websites and teaches readers how to build websites that are more accessible to people with disabilities and explains why doing so is good business.

O’Reilly Media wants to help make working with the Drupal web content management system just a bit easier. Many people realize that when working with a CMS of any kind, even an open source option, things can get pretty hairy for those not overly savvy with code and module configuration. Using Drupal’s goal is to eliminate as much frustration and as many wrong turns as possible.

MediaWiki is one of the most powerful open source wiki systems available today. MediaWiki, a book released by O’Reilly about the popular wiki CMS, is prepared to explain how users can take full advantage of it.

TYPO3 Extension Development by Dmitry Dulepov, a TYPO3 core developer, is a recent book from Packt Publishing. It is aimed towards those looking to get their hands dirty with — unsurprisingly — TYPO3 extension development.

The book takes its readers from the beginning process of planning a TYPO3 extension to writing the documentation that will allow others to better understand the developer’s hard work. The book won’t make anyone an award-winning TYPO3 extension developer overnight, but it can help provide a solid foundation to build upon.

Drupal is undoubtedly one of the best web content management systems for creating complex community websites. But it is certainly not the easiest to customize — that is, unless there are code ninjas in the house.

Drupal customization requires time, patience and programming knowledge to create something impressive. There’s a learning curve.

Drupal 6 Themes, a new Drupal book from our friends at Packt Publishing, aims to help steer would be Drupal jockeys in the right direction.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is a popular global book extravaganza that not only sells books, but also serves as a cultural interchange across national borders. This year, while bookworming their way around the aisles, the organizers conducted a survey designed to figure out if the digitization has begun to influence the publishing industry, as well as who might be the driving force behind it.

Over 1,000 industry professionals from over 30 countries responded to the survey.

It just seems right to end the day with one final piece of news on SharePoint. This one comes from Packt Publishing who has released a new book on SharePoint entitled: SharePoint Designer Tutorial: Working with SharePoint Websites.

Web forms are the one thing that consistently stand between the customer and the product, as well as between companies and their profits. If the web form proves successful, the customer receives his product and the company, their money. Yet, if the form isn’t successful, the company can bet that they have not only lost revenue, but a customer as well.

Thanks to a new book published by Rosenfeld Media, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, author and Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. Luke Wroblewski lays out the basic principles needed to apply toward the right design solutions for your web forms.