Free! - Mini-review and competition of Blog Design Solutions

Blogging has moved rapidly from being a craze to become a core feature of the Internet—from individuals sharing their thoughts with the world via online diaries, through fans talking about their favorite sports teams or music, right up to serious business minds discussing industry futures. Read More

Free! - Mini-review and competition of ActionScript for Flash 8

ActionScript is the native scripting language of Flash. ActionScript knowledge is essential within the world of Flash design and development, as Flash remains a leading tool for cutting-edge interactive design and development.

ActionScript is what gives Flash its power, but with that power comes a certain level of complexity, which can be intimidating. This beginners book, significantly updated since the last edition, covers all of the basics of ActionScript using the latest version of Flash, Flash 8. The skills acquired by working through this book will enable you to move on to more advanced friends of ED books such as Foundation PHP 5 for Flash, Foundation ActionScript Animation or Foundation XML for Flash.

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Free! - Mini-review and competition of ASP for Dreamweaver 8

Do you want to learn about Microsoft's ASP and use it via Dreamweaver 8 to add the power of a database to your website? Use dynamic web forms to exchange data between you and your users? Build complete web applications? This book shows you how to do all that and more. Read More

Free! - Mini-review and competition of AJAX and PHP

AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications is the most practical and efficient resource you can get to enter the exciting world of AJAX. This book will teach you how to create better PHP Web Applications by using the AJAX technologies to their full potential. Read More

Free! - Mini-review and competition of ASP.NET for Flash

Ryan has set up a dedicated support site to accompany his book at flashasp.net.

If you’re a reasonably experienced Flash user who has mastered the basics but wants to empower your SWFs, taking them further toward rich Internet applications, then you’ve come to the right place! Foundation ASP.NET for Flash will teach you everything you need to know to integrate two of the most exciting technologies used on the Web today.

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Free! - Web Design With Dreamweaver 8

From The Friends Of Ed Site

Dreamweaver is Macromedia’s best-selling web design/development environment, and the updated version of Dreamweaver will be available later this year. Dreamweaver has the capability to generate dynamic website code using server-side languages like ASP, PHP, and ASP.NET. We know that you don't always require a full database driven site though, so this book focuses on using the latest version of Dreamweaver to design and create usable, standards-compliant websites using XHTML and CSS. One of the highlights of this version is much closer, tighter CSS/XHTML. This book will show you how to make the most of that feature.

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Free! - Competition and mini-review of CSS Mastery

From The Friends Of Ed Site

This book is your indispensable guide to cutting-edge CSS development—all you need to work your way up to CSS professional.

While CSS is a relatively simple technology to learn, it is a difficult one to master. When you first start developing sites using CSS, you will come across all kinds of infuriating browser bugs and inconsistencies. It sometimes feels like there are a million and one different techniques to master, spread across a bewildering array of websites. The range of possibilities seems endless and makes for a steep and daunting learning curve.

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Free! - Competition and mini-review of osCommerce: Professional Edition

From the back cover

osCommerce is one of the most popular e-commerce solutions and provides businesses with the ability to set up a sophisticated online store that will proudly compete against any other site at very low cost.

With the growing need for well considered, practical information on this topic, this book seeks to provide a comprehensive environment for learning osCommerce up to an advanced level. Written in a clear and concise style, this book will shed light on the oft times complex issues that surround building and understanding your online business. Utilizing this book means that you will spend time working constructively, achieving your goals using a professional methodology and developing a solid understanding of the way in which osCOmmerce can accomplish every need of your business.

 

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Free! - mini-review&competition of XML for Flash

XML is an important technology that allows people and applications to share data in self-describing documents. Many software packages support XML data exchange, and most major databases can share information using XML. Therefore, an understanding of XML is essential for anyone working in web development.

And this includes Flash! You can load external XML data and include it within your Flash movies, and also send XML content from Flash in a flexible XML framework to create visually appealing and usable rich Internet applications.

In this book, Sas Jacobs shows you how. She first introduces XML and related technologies, and then covers the different ways that Flash can work with XML content, including the XML class, data components, XML sockets, and web services.

Throughout the book, you will build many different fully functional examples, including an MP3 player, an XML photo gallery, an address book manager, and an XML-driven chat application. Some of these examples utilize Office 2003 for the PC and ASP.NET or PHP.

You should read this book if you're a Flash designer or developer and you have a basic understanding of ActionScript. The book supports Flash 8, but much of the content is suitable for any version of Flash from 5 up. Whether you're new to XML or ActionScript, or an experienced Flash developer, Foundation XML for Flash is essential reading.

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Free! - mini-review&competition of PHP for Dreamweaver 8

From the back cover

Want to add the power of a database to your websites? Build online forms that send feedback straight to your inbox? Incorporate live news feeds and XML data into your web pages? This book shows you how to do all that and more.
Dreamweaver 8 takes a lot of the hard work out of integrating a database into your websites, but it can’t do everything. So instead of just giving you a series of instructions to click this and click that, this book helps you understand what’s going on in the background. As a result, you’re more likely to remember and to get it right.

Most books on PHP concentrate on code and throw all design considerations out the window. This one is different. It makes use of Dreamweaver 8’s vastly improved CSS rendering, and shows you how to build a site that’s smart in both senses of the word. It looks good and is intelligent too. You’ll learn how to change the entire look of the site, using PHP to serve up different stylesheets each month. You’ll also build a contact form protected against email injection attacks. All of Dreamweaver’s PHP server behaviors are put through their paces, and you’ll even make some custom server behaviors that will come in useful on any site you create.

Two chapters take you through the setup process with step-by-step instructions for both Windows and Mac OS X, helping you make the right choices: Apache or IIS? Remote or local testing? There are even instructions on how to set up virtual hosts on your own computer. And in the unlikely event that things go wrong, there’s plenty of troubleshooting advice too.

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Free! - mini review and competition of Professional ASP.NET 2.0

From the back cover

ASP.NET allows web sites to display unique pages for each visitor rather than show the same static HTML pages. The release of ASP.NET 2.0 is a revolutionary leap forward in the area of web application development. It brings with it a wealth of new and exciting built-in functions that reduce the amount of code you'll need to write for even the most common applications.

With more than 50 new server controls, the number of classes inside ASP.NET 2.0 has more than doubled, and, in many cases, the changes in this new version are dramatic. This book will alert you to every new feature and capability that ASP.NET 2.0 provides so that you'll be prepared to put these new technologies into action.

What you will learn from this book

• The idea of the server control and its pivotal role in ASP.NET development
• How to create templated ASP.NET pages using the new master page feature
• Techniques for debugging and handling errors
• The various frameworks that will enable you to extract, create, manipulate, and store XML
• Ways to package and deploy ASP.NET applications
• How to retrieve, update, and delete data quickly and logically

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Free! - FireFox Plug-ins for the Discerning Web Developer

One of the useful features of the FireFox browser is its extensibility. Given the nature of its early adopters, many of the plugins available are there to make the web designer or developers job easier. In this tutorial we'll look at some of the more useful ones, how they can be used to enhance your testing work-flow once you've built your site in Dreamweaver and techniques that they make available to you and why you'd want to use them.

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