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Understanding and Developing Node Modules

  • Packt Publishing; By David Herron (Posted by naheeds on Aug 12, 2011 5:28 PM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial
Node is a newly-developed software platform that liberates JavaScript from the web browser, enabling it to be used as a general software development platform in server-side applications. It runs atop the ultra-fast JavaScript engine from the Chrome browser, V8, and adds in a fast and robust library of asynchronous network I/O modules. The primary focus of Node is on building high performance, highly scalable server and client applications for the "Real Time Web".</p> In this article we shall:</p>
  • Learn what a module is
  • Learn about the CommonJS module specification
  • Learn how Node finds modules

An Overview of the Node Package Manager

  • Packt Publishing; By David Herron (Posted by naheeds on Aug 12, 2011 10:16 AM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial
NPM is a package management and distribution system for Node. It has become the de-facto standard for distributing modules (packages) for use with Node. Conceptually it's similar to tools like apt-get (Debian), rpm/yum (Redhat/Fedora), MacPorts (Mac OS X), CPAN (Perl), or PEAR (PHP). It's purpose is publishing and distributing Node packages over the Internet using a simple command-line interface. With npm you can quickly find packages to serve specific purposes, download them, install them, and manage packages you've already installed. npm defines a package format for Node largely based on the CommonJS Package spec.

Tips for Deploying Sakai

  • Packt Publishing; By Alan Berg (Posted by naheeds on Jul 20, 2011 2:56 PM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial
Sakai is an open source, web-based, Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) that is primarily focused on higher education, and has been adopted by hundreds of institutions. It supports the activities of students, teachers, and researchers. Sakai also provides an administrative interface. Sakai is flexible, and can be configured for a variety of specialized audiences.

This article by explains concepts that you may need during first-time Sakai deployments. Within this article, you'll find an overview of the third-party frameworks on which Sakai is built and information about how to manage and monitor Java.

The Core HTTP Module in Nginx

  • Packt Publishing; By Dipankar Sarkar (Posted by naheeds on Jul 11, 2011 12:39 PM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial
Nginx is an open source high-performance web server, which has gained quite some popularity recently. Due to its modular architecture and small footprint, it has been the default choice for a lot of smaller Web 2.0 companies to be used as a load-balancing proxy server. It supports most of the existing backend web protocols such as FCGI, WSGI, and SCGI.

Top 5 Must-have Android Applications

  • Packt Publishing (Posted by naheeds on Jun 29, 2011 9:19 AM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial
Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes and operating system, middleware and key applications. It is one of the most popular OS in the market and is also a good platform for getting things done. There are a lot of Android apps, many designed to help users be more productive, but finding them can often be a burden.

Overall, there are more than 150,000 Android apps. We conducted a survey in our office and found the following 5 applications to be the most used among Android users. Let's take a detailed look at them.

WordPress 3 Security: Apache Modules

  • Packt Publishing; By Olly Connelly (Posted by naheeds on Jun 13, 2011 2:34 PM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial
Most likely, today, some hacker tried to crack your WordPress site, its data and content. Maybe that was just a one-off from some bored kid. Just as likely, it was an automated hit, trying dozens of attacks to find a soft spot. Then again, quite likely it was both. What we must do is to solidify your WordPress and other logins so you can securely administrate while keeping your data and credentials flying well under the radar. We'll put the best web protocols to work, along with added defenses, chiefly from Apache.

Linux Shell Script: Tips and Tricks

  • Packt Pub; By Sarath Lakshman (Posted by naheeds on Apr 18, 2011 8:57 AM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial; Groups: Linux
GNU/Linux is a remarkable operating system that comes with a complete development environment that is stable, reliable, and extremely powerful. The shell, being the native interface to communicate with the operating system, is capable of controlling the entire operating system. An understanding of shell scripting helps you to have better awareness of the operating system and helps you to automate most of the manual tasks with a few lines of script, saving you an enormous amount of time. Shell scripts can work with many external command-line utilities for tasks such as querying information, easy text manipulation, scheduling task running times, preparing reports, sending mails, and so on. There are numerous commands on the GNU/Linux shell, which are documented but hard to understand.

In this article we will take a look at some of the tips and tricks on working with Linux Shell Script.

How to Write a Widget in WordPress 3

  • Packt Publishing; By April Hodge Silver (Posted by naheeds on Jan 26, 2011 4:40 PM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial
WordPress is an excellent software that can run your website (blog or not). It's packed with excellent features, and is so flexible that it can really do anything you want, and it has a wealth of online resources. Additionally, it's super easy-to-use, and you need no special skills or prior experience to use it. Last but not least, it is free! Writing a widget bears some similarities to writing a plugin, but in some ways it's easier because there is a widget class that you can leverage for some of the functionality. In this article by April Hodge Silver, author of WordPress 3 Complete, we will learn to write a widget in WordPress 3.

Python Multimedia: Enhancing Images

  • Packt Publishing; By Ninad Sathaye (Posted by naheeds on Jan 24, 2011 9:06 AM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial
Python is a high-level, object-oriented language with a comprehensive standard library. Typically, one can develop complex applications in Python very quickly compared to some other languages. Multimedia applications are used in a broad spectrum of fields. Writing applications that work with images, videos, and other sensory effects is great. Not every application gets to make full use of audio/visual effects, but a certain amount of multimedia makes any application very appealing.

Scribus: Managing Colors

  • Packt Publishing; By Cedric Gemy (Posted by naheeds on Dec 15, 2010 6:23 PM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial
In the previous article, , we have used only default, primary colors. It's incredible how many things you can do with one single color or a small set of them. Even though black is still the most important color, you will certainly need custom colors very soon.

Working with Colors in Scribus

  • Packt Publishing Pvt. Ltd.; By Cedric Gemy (Posted by naheeds on Dec 14, 2010 2:57 AM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial

Even though you can see lots of black-only documents (such as books and the daily press) everyday, it's true that there are more and more full-color advertising brochures being printed. So color is becoming an important printing method. An in-between approach of printing with black and only one another color is less interesting, but is still used for many documents and can be considered as a creative approach. In any case, we need to be sure that the color we have on screen matches the printed results. From this, it becomes evident that using color in Scribus is not just a click here or there but is the result of both aesthetic choices and the capacity of the printing process.

Google Web Toolkit 2: Creating Page Layout

  • Packt Publishing; By Shamsuddin Ahammad (Posted by naheeds on Nov 26, 2010 6:04 AM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial; Groups:
In this article, we will learn about creating the home page of our application. The home page will include a banner at the top, a sidebar for navigation on the left-hand side, another sidebar on the right-hand side for showing dynamic content, a footer to show copyright and other information, and the main content at the center.

Creating Web Templates in Inkscape

  • Packt Publishing Pvt. Ltd.; By Bethany Hiltola (Posted by naheeds on Nov 8, 2010 1:52 PM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial
In this article by Bethany Hiitola, author of Inkscape 0.48 Essentials for Web Designers, we will see how you can use Inkscape to create basic design templates that can be used with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), HTML, and HTML5 in the final implementation. CSS are used with the HTML/XML coding to define the look and formatting of an entire website. One style sheet can be created that determines fonts, colors, spacing, placement, and more—reducing complexity and repetition in the coding of the pages themselves.

UNIX Monitoring Tool for PostgreSQL

  • Packt Publishing Pvt. Ltd.; By Gregory Smith (Posted by naheeds on Oct 28, 2010 6:53 AM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial; Groups:

Performance of your database server is directly tied to how well the underlying operating system is working, and there the performance is driven by the hardware you're using. To fit all of these pieces together—hardware performance, operating system performance, and database performance—you need a good monitoring system.

The simple performance tools on a UNIX-derived system are straightforward to use, and it's easy to show examples of good and bad behavior, the best way to teach how those tools are useful for monitoring. In this article by Gregory Smith, author of PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance, we will cover iostat; Unix's monitoring tool.

Blender 2.5: Creating a UV Texture

  • Packt Publishing; By Aaron W. Powell (Posted by naheeds on Oct 25, 2010 6:21 AM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial
Many times, objects contain numerous attributes that define how they look, and they're not always perfectly uniform in relation to the object. For example, a used paint can would have paint dripping down the sides of the can—if we were creating this can in 3D, we'd have to tell Blender that there is a specific spot on our 3D mesh that contains different attributes than the rest of the mesh. This is where UV mapping comes in handy. UV coordinates are, in simple terms, a two-dimensional representation of the texture coordinates of a three-dimensional object. They allow us to tell Blender specific properties about specific areas of our objects in a scene.

Lighting an Outdoor Scene in Blender

  • Packt Publishing; By Aaron W. Powell (Posted by naheeds on Oct 22, 2010 5:38 PM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial; Groups:
Lighting techniques are highly dependent on the location of the scene at hand. The approaches to lighting an outdoor scene are radically different from the techniques used to light an indoor scene. Knowing these differences and when to use each is important when aiming for a believable result.

Server Configuration Tuning in PostgreSQL

  • Packt Publishing Pvt. Ltd.; By Gregory Smith (Posted by naheeds on Oct 19, 2010 7:29 PM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial; Groups: MySQL
The main tunable settings for PostgreSQL are in a plain text file named postgresql.conf that's located at the base of the database directory structure. This will often be where $PGDATA is set to on UNIX-like systems, making the file $PGDATA/postgresql.conf on those platforms. This article by Gregory Smith, author of PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance, mirrors the general format of the official documentation's look at these parameters at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/runtime-config... However, it is more focused on guidelines for setting the most important values, from the perspective of someone interested in performance tuning, rather than describing the meaning of every parameter. This should be considered a supplement to rather than a complete replacement for the extensive material in the manual.

Python: Unit Testing with Doctest

  • Packt Publishing; By Daniel Arbuckle (Posted by naheeds on Sep 17, 2010 8:28 AM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial; Groups:
The title of this section, begs another question: "Why do I care?" One answer is that Unit testing is a best practice that has been evolving toward its current form over most of the time that programming has existed. Another answer is that the core principles of Unit testing are just good sense; it might actually be a little embarrassing to our community as a whole that it took us so long to recognize them.

Python 3 Object Oriented Programming: Managing objects

  • Packt Publishing; By Dusty Phillips (Posted by naheeds on Aug 13, 2010 5:43 AM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial
In this article , we'll take a look at designing higher-level objects; the kind of objects that manage other objects. The objects that tie everything together.

Agile with Yii 1.1 and PHP5: The TrackStar Application

  • packtpub.com; By Jeffery Winesett (Posted by naheeds on Aug 6, 2010 7:40 PM EDT)
  • Story Type: Tutorial; Groups: MySQL, PHP
In order to understand the framework in the context of a real-world application, we need to build something that will more closely resemble the types of applications web developers actually have to build. That is exactly what we are going to be doing.