Covering everything from ebook design to reading devices to social media strategies, best of TOC 2011 draws from O'Reilly Radar's extensive publishing coverage. This anthology highlights the important trends and developments that shaped the publishing world throughout 2011 and it points the way to publishing's near-term future.

Want to build your own satellite and launch it into space? It’s easier than you may think. The first in a series of four books, this do-it-yourself guide shows you the essential steps needed to design a base picosatellite platform—complete with a solar-powered computer-controlled assembly—tough enough to withstand a rocket launch and survive in orbit for three months.

This pocket-sized guide delivers ready answers for administering SQL Server. Zero in on core support and maintenance tasks using quick-reference tables, instructions, and lists that help you save time and get the job done!

Free as in Freedom interweaves biographical snapshots of GNU project founder Richard Stallman with the political, social and economic history of the free software movement. It examines Stallman's unique personality and how that personality has been at turns a driving force and a drawback in terms of the movement's overall success.

How can you extend Google Apps to fit your organization’s needs? This concise guide shows you how to use Google Scripts, the JavaScript-based language that provides a complete web-based development platform—with no downloads, configuration, or compiling required. You’ll learn how to add functionality to Gmail, spreadsheets, and other Google services, or build data-driven apps that run from a spreadsheet, in a browser window, or within a Google Site.

Right now, thousands of people worldwide are tracking environmental conditions with monitoring devices they’ve built themselves. You can do it too! This inspiring guide shows you how to use Arduino to create gadgets for measuring noise, weather, electromagnetic interference (EMI), water purity, and more. You’ll also learn how to collect and share your own data, and you can experiment by creating your own variations of the gadgets covered in the book. If you’re new to DIY electronics, the first chapter offers a primer on electronic circuits and Arduino programming.

This hands-on guide shows you how to work more efficiently by organizing and managing projects with SharePoint 2010. You’ll learn how to build a Project Management Information System (PMIS), customized to your project, that can effectively coordinate communication and collaboration among team members. Written by a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and Microsoft SharePoint MVP with 15 years of IT project management experience, each chapter includes step-by-step guides as well as workshops that help you practice what you learn.

Google App Engine does more than provide access to a large system of servers. It also offers you a simple model for building applications that scale automatically to accommodate millions of users. With this updated edition of Programming Google App Engine, you'll get expert practical guidance that will help you make the best use of this powerful platform. Google engineer Dan Sanderson shows you how to design your applications for scalability, including ways to perform common development tasks using App Engine's APIs and scalable services.

Screen sharing gives you the power to control the mouse and keyboard of one Mac while you sit at another, whether it's just across the room or on the other side of the world. It's great for helping far-flung colleagues and relatives run their Macs, managing a remote server, and collaborating in real time on documents.

In recent versions of Mac OS X, Apple has piled on the options, enabling screen sharing via iChat, Bonjour, directly by entering an IP address, and Back to My Mac. Plus, Skype can do screen sharing with Macs and Windows computers, and various iOS apps let you run your Mac by tapping and dragging.

Join networking guru Glenn Fleishman as he helps you identify the best screen-sharing option for your needs. You'll learn how to set up screen sharing, get tips on using iChat and Apple's Screen Sharing application, and find directions for Skype screen sharing. A separate chapter explains how to use the iTeleport and LogMeIn apps on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch to run a Mac remotely.

If you know how to use JavaScript in the browser, you already have the skills you need to put JavaScript to work on back-end servers with Node. This hands-on book shows you how to use this popular JavaScript framework to create simple server applications, communicate with the client, build dynamic pages, work with data, and tackle other tasks.

Your customers want rock-solid, bug-free software that does exactly what they expect it to do. Yet they can't always articulate their ideas clearly enough for you to turn them into code. The Cucumber Book dives straight into the core of the problem: communication between people. Cucumber saves the day; it's a testing, communication, and requirements tool - all rolled into one.

Working with data and databases in C# certainly can be daunting if you’re coming from VB6, VBA, or Access. With this hands-on guide, you’ll shorten the learning curve considerably as you master accessing, adding, updating, and deleting data with C#—basic skills you need if you intend to program with this language.

CouchDB is a new breed of database for the Internet, geared to meet the needs of today’s dynamic web applications. With this concise introduction, you’ll learn how CouchDB’s simple model for storing, processing, and accessing data makes it ideal for the type of data and rapid response users now demand from your applications—and how easy CouchDB is to set up, deploy, maintain, and scale.

Ready to unleash the power of your massive dataset? With the latest edition of this comprehensive resource, you’ll learn how to use Apache Hadoop to build and maintain reliable, scalable, distributed systems. It’s ideal for programmers looking to analyze datasets of any size, and for administrators who want to set up and run Hadoop clusters. This third edition covers recent changes to Hadoop, including new material on the new MapReduce API, as well as version 2 of the MapReduce runtime (YARN) and its more flexible execution model. You’ll also find illuminating case studies that demonstrate how Hadoop is used to solve specific problems.

This is an ebook-only question and answer workbook to accompany the 6th Edition of Learning Perl ("the Llama"). If you're just getting started with Perl, this is the book you want—whether you're a programmer, system administrator, or web hacker. This 6th edition of Learning Perl covers recent changes to the language up to version 5.14. Exercises are presented in the first half of the workbook, with the answers in the second.

Topics include:

Scalar Data Lists and Arrays Subroutines Input and Output Hashes In the World of Regular Expressions Matching with Regular Expressions Processing Text with Regular Expressions 10. More Control Structures Perl Modules File Tests Directory Operations Strings and Sorting Smart Matching Process Management Some Advanced Perl Techniques Databases

This in-depth video training session introduces you to the Cassandra NoSQL database, from drivers to deployment. Through a series of group exercises, you’ll discover several new data modeling patterns in Cassandra that depart from the relational tradition in important ways. Learn how Cassandra delivers on its promise of horizontal scalability and fault tolerance, and how its log-structured storage subsystem helps it achieve impressive write and read performance. You’ll also look at some common administrative scenarios such as adding and removing nodes.

Grails is a high-productivity, convention-over-configuration web framework for the Groovy language. This brief video course begins with some basic instruction in the Groovy language, then shows you how to get started building a simple application using Grails domain modeling, controllers, and GSPs through the powerful scaffolding feature. In just three hours, you’ll learn how to be productive with this exciting framework.

This detailed, hands-on guide provides the technical and conceptual information you need to build cool applications with Microsoft’s Kinect, the amazing motion-sensing device that enables computers to see. Through half a dozen meaty projects, you’ll learn how to create gestural interfaces for software, use motion capture for easy 3D character animation, 3D scanning for custom fabrication, and many other applications. Perfect for hobbyists, makers, artists, and gamers.

Ready to unleash the power of your massive dataset? With the latest edition of this comprehensive resource, you’ll learn how to use Apache Hadoop to build and maintain reliable, scalable, distributed systems. It’s ideal for programmers looking to analyze datasets of any size, and for administrators who want to set up and run Hadoop clusters. This third edition covers recent changes to Hadoop, including new material on the new MapReduce API, as well as version 2 of the MapReduce runtime (YARN) and its more flexible execution model. You’ll also find illuminating case studies that demonstrate how Hadoop is used to solve specific problems.

What would happen if you optimized a data store for the operations application developers actually use? You’d arrive at MongoDB, the reliable document-oriented database. Learn how to build elegant database applications with MongoDB and PHP. This book takes you through MongoDB basics such as queries, read-write operations, and administration, and then dives into MapReduce, sharding, and other advanced topics.