O’Reilly Media

Thoroughly vetted by Adobe's AIR development team, Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook addresses fundamentals, best practices, and topics that web developers and application designers inquire about most. The hands-on recipes in this cookbook help you solve a variety of tasks and scenarios you may encounter using Adobe AIR to build Rich Internet Applications for the desktop. It's an ideal way to learn the nuances of Adobe AIR, with practical solutions you can use right away, and detailed explanations of why and how they work. Learn more.

It is time that legislators, regulators and procurement officials put an end to end-user license agreements (EULA) that prevent publication of comparative benchmarks. Read more.

I met recently with Vic Gundotra, formerly Microsoft's head of platform evangelism, and now VP of Engineering at Google, responsible for all their mobile efforts outside of Android. We were talking about Google's mobile strategy and the insanely cool new voice-activated Google search in the Google Mobile Application for iPhone. But what I really want to share is Vic's story... Read more.

In this article, we take a look at how the "Heroes" VFX team fried Hayden Panettierre to a crisp, shattered a human Popsicle, and tore Tokyo in two using one of the industry's best proprietary content management systems. Read more.

Many people that are just starting in their software career have not been exposed to the contrast between two very different approaches to solving server side scalability issues. And although efficiently using 100 CPUs is not critical today, in the next five years it will become critical for a projects success. In this article we look at how the cognitive styles of functional and imperative software will shape the computing industry. Read more.

Stay Competitive. Regroup, retrain, rebuild. Financial markets are in a tailspin. Jobless rates are at a 7-year high. Budgets are shrinking. The good news is that the shifting economic landscape is creating new opportunities for those with the right skills. Do you have what it takes to tackle tough technical problems? To offer bold solutions? To provide businesses with the expertise they need? Learn more.

Sun announced massive layoffs of up to 18% of the global workforce as they split the software division into three groups. What do these changes mean for Java? Who is managing the new Application Platform Software group? Read more.

Twitter—the messaging service that lets you send instant, short updates to people around the world—is fast becoming a mainstream communication tool. In her Twitter for Business webcast, Sarah Milstein (a Twitter user from day one) shows how to use Twitter and other micro-messaging services at work. She covers the the benefits and challenges of this exciting new medium, along with best practices and potential pitfalls you can avoid. Sarah is the author of the O'Reilly Radar report Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy--140 Characters at a Time.

Two new books from O'Reilly's Companion Series offer a complete photography class, tailored specifically for folks using Canon's new Digital Rebel cameras. Both--The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi/450D Companion and The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS/1000D Companion--are by producer and videographer Ben Long. In each of his handy pocket guides, Ben not only provides a detailed one-stop camera manual but he also walks you through all the basic photography theories that apply to any camera. And here Ben provides tips, warnings, and reminders from the books for using the XS cameras (which are applicable to most DSLRs). Read on to learn more. Read more.

Vivek Kundra, the District of Columbia's CTO, isn't just talking about transparent government and participative democracy, he's working hard to make DC's massive data stores transparent and inviting your participation. I first heard about Vivek's push for transparency when he spoke at an Intelligence Community Conference in September (I just happened to be speaking on a panel thanks to... Read more.

Perl is a great language for processing text and automating tasks. It's also a fully-capable modern programming language, with effective modularization and object oriented capabilities. Though that sounds scary, they're easy to understand (and even easier to accomplish, through shiny modern tools such as Moose and Mouse). Read more.

The authors of O'Reilly's soon-to-be-released Using Drupal are featured on Drupal.org, with an excerpt from their book. In the new reference, the authors—Angela "webchick" Byron, Addison "add1sun" Berry, Nathan "quicksketch" Haug, Jeff "eaton" Eaton, James "walkah" Walker, and Jeff "jjeff" Robbins—guide you through the amazing Land of Modules, pointing out popular attractions and steering you around the Maw of Module Madness. Head over to Drupal.org.

The Java Programming Certificate Series, from O'Reilly School of Technology, is comprised of four courses covering beginning to advanced Java programming and object-oriented concepts, as well as skills using the Eclipse open source IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Experience Ellipse, our brand-new Eclipse-based Learning Sandbox! Enroll today and get the "Java Programming 4: Java Application Building" course free!

Recently I spoke with Francois Gossieaux of Beeline Labs about the role of online communities in the enterprise. Francois has been evangelizing the learning gained from his recent study “The Tribalization of Business” (see here for the Slideshare presentation). The interview is broken into three parts. Francois is a great storyteller, bringing case studies in to support nearly every point.... Read more.