Law X.0

New Edition of Visual Blueprint Guide to HTML, XHTML and CSS Published

Great guide for novice HTML coders! [JH]

HTML, XHTML, and CSS: Your visual blueprint for designing effective Web pages
by Rob Huddleston

List Price: $29.99 
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Visual (June 3, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0470274360
ISBN-13: 978-0470274361

Description: This edition of the bestseller-previous editions have sold a combined 110,000 copies-has been thoroughly revised and expanded to include modern, standards-compliant design principles and best practices.

• Offers visual learners a solid reference packed with hundreds of screen shots and straightforward examples so they can learn to create and design Web pages that will have an impact on their audience
• Step-by-step, two-page lessons show how to set up a Web page, reduce image resolution, create radio buttons, add a hit counter, add an embedded sound, include content from other sites, and more
• The companion Web site contains all the necessary code to learn HTML

Serial Entrepreneurs and the Rise of Web 2.0

Just release, Lacy's book is on my summertime reading list. [JH]

Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good:
The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0
by Sarah Lacy

List Price: $26.00 
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Gotham (May 15, 2008)
ISBN-10: 1592403824
ISBN-13: 978-1592403820

Book Description: Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good is the story of the entrepreneurs who learned their lesson from the bust and in recent years have created groundbreaking new Web companies. The second iteration of the dotcoms—dubbed Web 2.0—is all about bringing people together. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace unite friends online; YouTube lets anyone posts videos for the world to see; Digg.com allows Internet users to vote on the most relevant news of the day; Six Apart sells software that enables bloggers to post their viewpoints online; and Slide helps people customize their virtual selves.

Business reporter Sarah Lacy brings to light the entire Web 2.0 scene: the wide-eyed but wary entrepreneurs, the hated venture capitalists, the bloggers fueling the hype, the programmers coding through the night, the twenty-something millionaires, and the Internet “fan boys” eager for all the promises to come true.

About the Author: Sarah Lacy has reported on startups and venture capital in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade. Most recently she was a reporter for BusinessWeek, where her August 2006 cover story on Web 2.0 was among the most popular summer issues in the magazine’s history.

New Book: Designing for the Social Web

Designing for the Social Web
by Joshua Porter

Price: $40.00 
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: New Riders Press; 1 edition (May 4, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0321534921
ISBN-13: 978-0321534927

Description: No matter what type of web site or application you’re building, social interaction among the people who use it will be key to its success. They will talk about it, invite their friends, complain, sing its high praises, and dissect it in countless ways. With the right design strategy you can use this social interaction to get people signing up, coming back regularly, and bringing others into the fold. With tons of examples from real-world interfaces and a touch of the underlying social psychology theory, Joshua Porter shows you how to design your next great social web application.

Yee's Pro Web 2.0 Mashups

Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services
By Raymond Yee

List Price: $49.99
Paperback: 603 pages
Publisher: Apress (February 25, 2008)
ISBN-10: 159059858X
ISBN-13: 978-1590598580 

Description: The modern Web is awash with data and services just waiting to be used, but how do you make effective use of all this information? The answer lies in APIs (such as Google Maps, Flickr, and Amazon Web Services) and remixing, or mash ups. Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services teaches you everything you need to create useful, dynamic real–world applications using APIs, web services, Ajax, web standards, and server–side languages. All you need to make full use of this book is basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and at least one server–side language (such as PHP or ASP.NET).

What you’ll learn

• Understand how the constituent parts of the modern Web fit together—web standards, Ajax, APIs, libraries, tagging, blogs, wikis, and more.
• Create different types of mashup, for example mapping mash ups, search functionality, calendars, RSS/Atom feeds, social bookmarking, online storage systems, open document formats, and more.
• Build Web 2.0 applications using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, server–side languages, APIs, and libraries

About the Author: Raymond Yee is a data architect, consultant, and trainer. He is currently a lecturer at the School of Information, UC Berkeley, where he teaches the course “Mixing and Remixing Information.” While earning a PhD in biophysics, he taught computer science, philosophy, and personal development to K–11 students in the Academic Talent Development Program on the Berkeley campus. He is the primary architect of the Scholar’s Box, software that enables users to gather digital content from multiple sources to create personal collections that can be shared with others. As a software architect and developer, he focuses on developing software to support learning, teaching, scholarship, and research.

On the Real-World Effects of the Web: O'Hara and Shadbolt's The Spy in the Coffee Machine

"Kieron O'Hara and Nigel Shadbolt have offered an engaging and thought provoking roadmap for the emerging field of Web Science. They crisply survey what lies ahead as the Web becomes ubiquitous, and they invite everyone -- not just academics and experts -- to think about how to preserve the Web's magic while avoiding its most unsettling prospects." Jonathan Zittrain,Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation, Oxford University

The Spy in the Coffee Machine
The End of Privacy as We Know It
Kieron O'Hara and Nigel Shadbolt

List Price: $16.95 
Paperback: 294 pages
Publisher: Oneworld Publications (March 3, 2008)
ISBN-10: 1851685545
ISBN-13: 978-1851685547
Sample Chapter (pdf)

Description: The relationship between society and technology is complex, particularly as each has unpredicatable effects on the other.. We, as technologists, can talk until we are blue in the face about what is possible, or will be possible in the next few years. That’s our favourite subject. But what will people want to use? What technologies will ‘fit into’ particular social niches? What technologies will remould society in their own images? These are tricky questions, and the correct answers can make you very rich. Wrong guesses, in a dynamic industry, can kill a firm or a reputation stone dead. Potential is huge, but not all nifty gizmos can define the future.

The need to understand these looping influences between society and technology has led to what is in effect a new discipline: Web Science. The Web is, in effect, a series of protocols defining how different computers talk to each other, but those protocols have massive real-world effects, which in turn create demands for new protocols and technologies. The aim of the recently-created Web Science Research Initiative, a joint venture between the University of Southampton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is to hone the intellectual tools to study these developmental cycles. This book is part of the Web Science programme.

There are two things that technologists can be reasonably confident about. First, given enough history (and the electronic computer now does have a decent history behind it – one of us has recently been privileged to serve as the President of the British Computer Society in its 50th year), we can identify general trends. And second, understanding what is possible will tell us what social norms and attitudes are under threat. If a technology is sufficiently widespread, and becoming more so, then it may be that a particular set of cultural or political assumptions are no longer tenable.

It is our contention that privacy, since the Enlightenment a key pillar of the liberal ideal, is one of these somewhat obsolete norms in the face of the rapid spread of information technology. Information about one can be stored, found and passed around with almost trivial ease, and it is getting increasingly hard for the subject to retain control.

This means a political rethink, for sure. But it is not our contention that we are about to descend into a Nineteen Eighty-Four-style nightmare. It is cultural determinism of the worst sort to assume that society, politics and philosophy cannot adapt to the technology, and outright pessimism to suggest that the technology cannot be brought to heel by a sufficiently vigilant, engaged and educated society.

What is true is that the twentieth-century ideal of the private space will need to evolve, and that, if we truly value our privacy, we will have to play a much more active role in keeping it in place. The technologies that threaten can also be used to protect, and awareness is an important factor in their advantageous deployment. Education is vital; so is a public spirit (some of the gains from privacy accrue more to the community as a whole than to the individual, and therefore sometimes preserving privacy is a matter of altruism or social responsibility). Fatuous claims of the ‘if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear’ sort need to be resisted just as much as the puerile conspiracy theories that plague our political discourse.

We need debate, but for that debate to be worth having we need a much greater level of awareness of the technology to be diffused throughout society. This book is a small contribution to that task.

About the Authors: Kieron O’Hara is Senior Research Fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and is currently involved in the Office of Science and Technology’s Cybertrust and Crime Prevention initiative.

Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and is President of the British Computer Society.

Johnny Long's Google Hacking for Penetration Testers

Johnny Long, "The Google Guy," is a professional hacker and author on a number of well-known IT security books including the 2005 edition of Google Hacking for Penetration Testers and Google Talking (2006)(with Joshua Brashars). He maintains the Google Hacking Database, probably the largest db of its kind. For background see Why Johnny Long Hacks. In Google Hacking for Penetration Testers, Long reveals basic and advanced search techniques, basic and advanced hacking techniques, multi-engine attack query morphing, and zero-packet target foot printing and recon techniques. Long also demonstrates Googles search-blocking tactics (and see them bypassed). Highly recommended. [JH]

Google Hacking for Penetration Testers, Volume 2
by Johnny Long

List Price: $49.95
Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Syngress; (November 2, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1597491764
ISBN-13: 978-1597491761

Book Description: Googles search capabilities are so powerful, they sometimes discover content that no one ever intended to be publicly available on the Web including: social security numbers, credit card numbers, trade secrets, and federally classified documents. Google Hacking for Penetration Testers, Volume 2 shows the art of torqueing Google used by security professionals and system administrators to find this sensitive information and self-police their own organizations.