Oreilly News & Articles

As we all drown in today's unparalleled access to mostly disorganized information, the holy grail for many has become to perfect search. O'Reilly Media (news, site) has released a new book to help those following this path.

In June we told you Yooba Studio (news, site) would be worth a first and second look for those interested in Flash-based websites but not the cost of a creative agency.

Today it seems the platform has gotten more than a look or two, as they recently landed a spot on the list of semi-finalists for Best of InsideRIA 2009, sponsored by O’Reilly Media and Adobe.

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. 

If you are just getting into the web development business and you want to build cloud-based applications, there's no better place to start than with Google. The Google App Engine (news, site) is Google's infrastructure for building and running cloud-based applications.

While there's a lot of documentation on developing using the Google App Engine on Google's website itself, there's another way to learn how to develop these applications - where you are a beginner or an expert.

O'Reilly has released the book Using Google App Engine - Start Building and Running Web Apps on Google's Infrastructure. The book is written by Charles Severance, Clinical Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, and someone who has extensive experience with the development languages used to write Google Apps.

What will you learn? You will learn:

• Web programming and the move to develop cloud-based applications
• The basic technologies used to develop Google Apps including Python, HTML and CSS
• How to Use the Google App Engine Datastore
• How to Implement Caching and Use Cookies and Session
• Installing and Running the App Engine on XP, Vista, Mac and Linux
• and much more

The book is designed for beginners, but offers information that will benefit even the more experienced Google App developer.

Pick up your copy of Using Google App Engine on O'Reilly for US$ 29.99.

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.

Among growing trends in web design, rich interaction is at the top of the list. Creating a rich, interactive user experience doesn't happen overnight. Not only does it require strategy, but it also demands skills with web technologies like Ajax and Flash. With these becoming more popular, the face of the web is changing. 

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.

In the world of search, all that once was lost can now be found. Be it through Google Search, semantic search, green search or using your nose to sniff through the web-o-sphere, search functionality and optimization is the latest and greatest trend.

Capitalizing on this, O’Reilly introduces a new conference, simply called Found.

Touted as a search acquisition and architecture conference, Found has been scheduled for June 9-11, 2009, at the San Francisco Airport Marriott in Burlingame, CA.

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.

Have we learned all we need to know about Web 2.0 and how it impacts our organizations? O’Reilly thinks not and so has decided to enlighten us with a new book on the subject: Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide — Business Thinking and Strategies Behind Successful Web 2.0 Implementations

Despite the implied vulnerabilities, whether they be security or implementation-related, Web 2.0 technologies can help to redefine the Web as a platform to harness collective intelligence as well as to establish enterprise 2.0 applications that can improve user experiences, knowledge sharing and collaboration, and increase employee productivity.

Open Text is certainly setting their goals higher, but I suppose that’s the point of a strategy.

Confronting the demands of the marketplace, Open Text will begin to provide a comprehensive set of new solutions. Looking beyond the traditional silo approach in which businesses address each application individually, Open Text has instead decided to take a “holistic approach for their Enterprise 2.0 aspirations”.

So you’ve designed an awesome website packed full of nifty features, but it doesn’t seem to be loading fast enough on people’s browsers. What’s the deal?

The features used by most popular sites to make their pages appealing, such as extensive graphics, rich layout and various interactive web 2.0 functionalities have pushed browsers to their limits. The end result can lead to painfully slow loading times unless you’re optimizing your web sites.

O’Reilly Media’s High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders (US$ 29.99) should give you much-needed assistance on this topic.