Centre of the Universe

I have a love of astronomy, and combined with my love for programming, that creates in me that burning ambition to try and use both these passions together. This is where this book is invaluable.

Practical Astronomy with your Calculator is a very useful books to figure out how to calculate just about every astronomical phenomena which can be calculated from solar eclipses to the phase and location of the moon, to finding the positions of the planets at any given time.

Now, this book is aimed at calculating using a calculator, so the algorithms are slightly simplified to make that task easier, and therefore the precision of the calculations is not as great as if the algorithms had ben designed purely for a computer, but for most calculations this level of accuracy is more than sufficient.

The advantage of this method though, is that each step is very clearly laid out in the calculation, so that it is very easy to understand.

I have used this book extensively in writing an astronomical calculation application, which I will soon make available for download, and has proven indespensible to me.

As they always say, there are always three sides to every story, there is the one side, the other side, and then you have the truth. History is far from an exact science, with history often being written by the victor, and even if not, most historians have some bias. That is , I suppose, what makes a modern historian’s job fun.

Well, this little book was a very entertaining read for me. It certainly won’t live up to intense academic scrutiny, and most of the facts in it are not going to change the world in any way, but what I liked most about this book is it makes you think and question. Did history really happen the way the history book portray, or is the story a little deeper than that. In that, this book excels.

I have heard people complain that the book is too fragmented, consisting mainly of a bunch of facts lumped together, but I think that that allows the book to be enjoyed in small bits, grabbing a chance to read a page or two every now and again.

I love the For Dummies series of books, and this one is no exception. It contains enough details about Air to get you going and using it quickly and easily. In the tradition of the For Dummies books, it addresses Air in a very easy to understand way.

It points out a lot of gotchas and pitfalls to watch out for when using Air too, which is most useful when first encountering the system or porting code across from a web environment.

This book will also help the novice, given the straightforwardness of the writing, although a seasoned veteran may need something more to keep him happy.

Adobe Air can be very finicky when it comes to ajax, as it has quite a lot of security rules to protect your computer from rogue scripts, and that is where this book comes in handy.

Most of the book covers general topics in Adobe Air, giving Air a full treatment, but where this book stands out is detailing how to get ajax working withing the Air environment, bypassing the security restrictions. For example, there is a chapter dealing with a client/server bridge.

Another great feature of this book is that it focuses on using Javascript to build Air applications rather than Flex, which is great for all us Javascript developers.

This book makes a good reference.

Face it, networking is hard. And wireless networking is even worse.

For the uninitiated, the can be a total minefield. There are a million settings that need to be just right and a million things that can go wrong. This book will help the amatuer to get a network going without any fuss.

It covers everything from the equipment, improving performance, different computer types such as Mac and PC, and has a useful section on troubleshooting problems on the network, all in a very easy to understand way.

My brother wanted to be a writer when he finished university, and for 6 months, he sat and wrote a full novel, but never did get round to publishing it. The ones he took it to didn’t like it all that much, because, if I remember correctly, it was not African enough (a very annoying thing about living in SA, is that it is the politically correct thing to make everything ‘African’).

Well, the problem of getting published for a writer is no longer that much of an issue. that is all thanks to a really innovative site called lulu.com.

What they are, are an online publishing company that lets you publish your own book, and gives you the freedom to control every aspect of the book, from the design, paper format and price, to how you would like to sell it.

The reason why Lulu works so well, is that books are only printed on demand. That means there are never any large runs with 1000 copies of your brand new book gathering dust in your cupboard under the stairs.

So, how do you sell your book then? Well, Lulu interfaces direct to Amazon, so if a copy of the book gets sold on Amazon, it is printed off and posted along to the buyer directly. And if you would to sell your book in a more conventional way at bookstores, then you are free to order a batch, and then distribute it. Lulu also makes it very easy to distribute your book as an ebook as well.

There is a downside too though. With a traditional publisher, you would get a marketing campaign and solid distribution network behind you. Thus, it is quite likely that an established writer would not benefit too much from taking advantage of Lulu. For a new writer who is struggling to get published, or someone who is not seriously into writing, but has a book they would like to publish, the business model of Lulu is a much better fit.

This is one big and comprehensive book, but do not let the title fool you. This book is about both MySQL and PHP and how to use them, but the real strength is how they work together.

It is most convenient to have both these technologies in one book, since in modern PHP programming, it is almost inconceivable to use one without the other, so it makes a very handy reference.

The book also includes tutorials and case studies to show real world examples.