Michael J. Ross writes "There are countless content management systems (CMSs) available for building websites, and they offer varying levels of built-in functionality. But once a site developer has successfully installed any given CMS, a critical form of help (or hindrance) is the CMS's documentation, which for some CMSs is quite impressive, and for others absolutely atrocious. Joomla is a powerful and popular choice for Web developers, but can be daunting to newbies confused by its non-intuitive menu structure and restrictive content hierarchy. The documentation for Joomla is frequently criticized, for various reasons, and that may largely account for the popularity of third-party books — such as Barrie M. North's Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, now in its second edition." Read on for the rest of Michael and Ethelyn's review.

stoolpigeon writes "Microblogging service Twitter has undeniably been a hit, with growth rates that were at times in excess of 1400%. The growth was rapid enough that the site became well known for its periodic, and, at times, extensive downtime. Even with these issues, the service continued to grow rapidly, and with celebrities getting into the mix Twitter was quickly on the radar of mainstream media. The ubiquity of Twitter and ever-increasing coverage of 'tweets' has also brought the inevitable backlash. As with anything that gains high-profile popularity, there are plenty of Twitter haters out there, though the role Twitter has played in the recent Iranian elections seems to have brought more legitimacy to Twitter in the eyes of many. With popularity come books, and quite a few are already out there about and for Twitter, but my favorite so far is The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein." Read below for the rest of JR's review.

Michael J. Ross writes "Content management systems (CMSs) are created largely by Web developers using back-end programming languages (such as PHP, by far the most common choice). The free CMSs are built as open source projects, by volunteers who have many demands on their time. As a result of both of these competing factors, far less time is devoted to the front-end aspects of these CMSs. In turn, the "themes" that define the appearance of a CMS-based website are typically substandard, in the eyes of many Web designers and, most likely, countless users of those sites. This criticism has been leveled even against Drupal, although the situation is improving. A new book, Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting, is intended to help Drupal designers everywhere speed up that process of improvement." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

Michael J. Ross writes "Every major content management system (CMS) offers considerable functionality for building Web sites out of the box. But to get the most out of any CMS, its functionality must be extended through the addition of modules, most of which are created by third-party developers. For instance, a given CMS may need to be supplemented by an e-commerce module in order to use that CMS for building an online store. Joomla, one of the most widely used CMSs, is no exception. Web developers interested in creating their own Joomla extensions can read Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development, authored by Joseph LeBlanc." Read below for the rest of Michael's review.

Michael J. Ross writes "As Internet users' expectations continue to ratchet upwards, it is increasingly essential that every Web site owner maximize the chances that those users will find the site in question, and, once found, that the site will perform well enough that those visitors become customers or members, and recommend the site to others. Key elements of a successful strategy include optimization for search engines, pay-per-click advertising, and visitor conversion, as well as responsive Web pages and fine-tuning of all the above, using various metrics. These topics and others are explored in Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets by Andrew B. King." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.

Josh Skillings writes "The author, Chad Fowler, draws upon his experiences as a software engineer, a team leader over a group of Indian developers, and as a jazz musician, to describe 52 ways or tips that will help you to become a more valuable employee. These tips are described in two or three pages each, and are usually illustrated by a practical example or story. The tips are well thought-out, well-explained and make sense. Chad draws upon the open source movement as well, highlighting ways that contributing to and learning from open source can improve your career. These tips gave me greater respect and appreciation for the open source movement in general." Read on for the rest of Josh's review.

rsiles writes "Honeynet solutions were seen just as a research technology a couple of years ago. It is not the case anymore. Due to the inherent constraints and limitations of the current and widely deployed intrusion detection solutions, like IDS/IPS and antivirus, it is time to extended our detection arsenal and capabilities with new tools: virtual honeypots. Do not get confused about the book title, specially about the "virtual" term. The main reason to mention virtual honeypots, although the book covers all kind of honeynet/honeypot technologies, is because during the last few years virtualization has been a key element in the deployment of honeynets. It has offered us a significant cost reduction, more flexibility, reusability and multiple benefits. The main drawback of this solution is the detection of virtual environments by some malware specimens." Read below for the rest of Raul's review.

Vlad Dolezal tips us to a philosophical take on why Linux hasn't grown to challenge Windows as the most popular operating system. According to the author, the reason is simple; Linux is free, and humans tend not to equate free things with being valuable. "Here's what Compy McNewb sees. He can get both OS's for free. But one of them is worth over three hundred dollars, while the other one is worth nothing. 'That's not true!' I hear you scream. 'Linux is worth a lot! It's just being offered for free!' I know it's not true that Linux is worth less than Windows. It's far more valuable to the end user in terms of getting things done. But that's not what Average Joe Computer Newbie sees. He sees a free product versus a three-hundred-dollar product he can get free. It's all about the perception!"

Michael J. Ross writes "When veteran PHP developers have specific and nontrivial functionality that they want to implement in their code, they can do so from scratch, but this can be time-consuming or essentially reinventing the wheel. They can adopt completed code posted in an online discussion forum, but such code tends to be buggy. They can use an open source library or other packaged code, but this approach can oftentimes prove to be overkill. Consequently, many developers prefer focused solutions found in PHP cookbooks, such as The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

Joe Kauzlarich writes "The 'pattern' book has become a familiar genre for frequent readers of technical manuals. The idea is to sift through mountains of architectural or design schemes and then to categorize and catalogue the most frequent ideas and present their strengths and weaknesses. This type of book has been a success in software engineering, but can it translate to website design, where designers have everyday and frequent access to other designs? At worst, these books provide a common industry vocabulary (assuming it was read by everyone in the industry). How many people knew what a factory method referred to before Erich Gamma's Design Patterns was released? At best, as in the case of that 'original' software design patterns book, mountains of complex ideas are archived into a single reference and will sit within arm's reach for the rest of your life. So, is the web design discipline full of patterns that evade common sense?" Read below for the rest of Joe's review.

An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks has a few quick tips on how to write maintainable code that won't leech your most valuable resource — time. These six tips on how to write maintainable code are guaranteed to save you time and frustration: one minute spent writing comments can save you an hour of anguish. Bad code gets written all the time. But it doesn't have to be that way. Its time to ask yourself if its time for you to convert to the clean code religion."

OSXCPA writes "TextMate is a closed-source, GUI-based, extensible text editor that looks and behaves like a mashup of GNU Emacs ("Emacs") and NetBeans. This book is a primer and reference for TextMate. The blurb on the back of the book identifies the target audience as 'Programmers, web designers and anyone else who regularly needs to work with text files on Mac OSX.' After working with TextMate and reading through the book, the target audience is spot on. For example, the book briefly covers basic text editing, but provides in-depth information about basic operations (keyboard shortcuts, customizations, etc.) more advanced users will want to know and beginning users should know." Read below for the rest of OSXCPA's review.

Michael J. Ross writes "Experienced and conscientious Web developers, in their efforts to learn from the mistakes of others and to avoid repeating them on their own projects, tend to accumulate tips and recommendations for the many aspects of successfully creating Web sites. These best practices take the form of bookmarked Web pages, saved articles, downloaded PDF files, scribbled notes on scraps of paper, and hastily created documents that will be better organized one of these days, when the developer's schedule becomes less hectic (sure...). Being difficult if not impossible to find later, these pearls of wisdom are rarely consulted before or during each new Web site project. What the developer needs is a book that brings together as many of these best practices as possible, without being overwhelming. Deliver First Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists may be the answer." Read the rest of Michael's review.

Ravi writes "Any one who has had the opportunity to manipulate images would be aware of Adobe's Photoshop - considered to be the market leader in image manipulation software. But with its high price tag, buying Photoshop is akin to putting strain on your bank balance. What is interesting is that there is a very popular free alternative to Photoshop in GIMP. For those in the dark, GIMP is a state of the art image manipulation software which runs on multiple architectures and OSes and which is released under the GNU free License (GPL). I have been using GIMP exclusively for touching up images for many years now and it has met all my graphics manipulation needs." Read the rest of Ravi's review

Michael J. Ross writes "Given the current popularity of the Web development language PHP, it makes sense that newcomers to the language have a large number of introductory and reference volumes from which to choose. But for the more advanced PHP programmer, there are far fewer titles that explain how to make the most of the language, by applying it to solve relatively substantial problems. One such book is PHP Hacks: Tips & Tools for Creating Dynamic Websites, by Jack D. Herrington. Read the rest of Michael's review.

jsuda writes "Core Web Application Development with PHP and MySQL is an intermediate to advanced-level guide for programmers and developers. It bills itself as >everything one needs to know about building robust database applications. That is a bit of puffery but this is a comprehensive practical guide for designing and building production-quality, database-enabled applications." Read the rest of John's review.

John Garrett writes "The Search Engine Marketing Kit is a kit aimed at professional web developers and Search Engine Marketing professionals who are seeking proven strategies and techniques for improving the search performance of websites. In fact anyone who has an interest in how well a website ranks on searches related to the website’s content or target market could benefit from the tips found in this kit." Read the rest of John's review.

Early last year, NCSoft and Cryptic Studios released a MMORPG that struck out in a new direction. Despite the familiar leveling structure, it eschewed the fantasy trappings of Everquest and Ultima Online for a more four-colour experience. City of Heroes (CoH) tapped into the Comic Book Guy in all of us by allowing players to create their own superhero. The incredibly detailed character generation system and the feeling of power that it invoked for even starting players made it one of the most enjoyable games of 2004. Unfortunately, a sense of repetition set in for many players and CoH subscription numbers dipped. CoH has an evil twin, though, and City of Villains (CoV) allows you the opportunity to step into the psyche of a depraved criminal mind, a thuggish legbreaker, or a lead-melting pyromaniac. Whatever your villainous bent, read on for my take on Cryptic Studio's City of Villains.

SFEley (Stephen Eley) writes "Todd Cochrane's Podcasting: The Do-It-Yourself Guide has been heavily pushed in the podcasting community as the first of a wave of podcasting books to be released in the next several months. All of these books will surely cover the same themes, more or less: what podcasts are, how to listen to them, and how to produce your own. The popularity of podcasting is exploding right now, with coverage in every press outlet and Apple hyping it as The Next Big Thing. It's easy to see that there will be a huge demand for these books, even if they don't do much more than state the obvious. So what about this one? Other than being the first, does it offer any compelling virtues for the would-be podcaster or listener?" Read on for Eley's answer to that question.

Martin Ecker writes "Following up on last year's first installment of the "GPU Gems" book series, NVIDIA has recently finished work on the second book in the series titled GPU Gems 2 - Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation, published by Addison-Wesley. Just like the first book, GPU Gems 2 is a collection of articles by various authors from game development companies, academia, and tool developers on advanced techniques for programming graphics processing units (or GPUs for short). It is aimed at intermediate to advanced graphics developers that are familiar with the most common graphics APIs - in particular OpenGL and Direct3D - and high-level shading languages, such as GLSL, HLSL, or Cg. The reader should also be proficient in C++. As with GPU Gems, GPU Gems 2 is not for beginners. For professional graphics and game developers, however, it is an excellent collection of interesting techniques, tips, and tricks." Read on for Ecker's review.