Open Source Books

1. Open Books
   O'Reilly has published a number of Open Books--books with various forms of "open" copyright--over the years. The reasons for "opening" copyright, as well as the specific license agreements under which they are opened, are as varied as our authors.  Perhaps a book was outdated enough to be put out of print, yet some people still needed the information it covered. Or the author or subject of a book felt strongly that it should be published under a particular open copyright. Maybe the book was written collectively by a particular community, as in the case of our Community Press books. 
   

    

2. Open Source Revolution
   Linux creator Linus Torvalds reports that the name "Linus" was chosen for him because of his parents' admiration for Nobel laureate Linus Pauling. Pauling was the rarest of men: a scientist who won the Nobel Prize not once, but twice. We find a cautionary tale for the Open Source community in the story of Pauling's foundational work that made possible the discovery of the structure of DNA.  The actual discovery was made Francis Crick and James Watson, and is famously chronicled in Watson's book The Double Helix. Watson's book is a remarkably frank account of the way science is actually done. He recounts not just the brilliance and insight, but the politics, the competition, and the luck. The quest for the secret of DNA became a fierce competition between, among others, Watson and Crick's lab in Cambridge, and Pauling's lab at Cal Tech. 
   
3. Do Open-Source Books Work
   This article was discussed on the Slashdot forum 26 Sep 2000. Since then, I've started a web site called The Assayer for user-contributed book reviews, with an emphasis on free books. The number of free books and the number of open-source books has grown since then, and The Assayer is a good place to find them. If you're interested in old public-domain books that are free on the web, check out The Assayer's links page. I wrote followup articles in 2002 and 2005. Ben Franklin[1] figured out that information wants to be free, so in 1731 he invented the lending library. It was no Napster: this eighteenth-century information superhighway was meant for such serious purposes as education and fomenting revolution.
     
4. Prentice deliver Open Source books
   The first of Prentice Hall's initial series of seven Open Content-licensed books are already in the stores with the first two titles covering eCos, Linux development and a third on intrusion detection slated for March. All will be open and extensible electronic books: it's good manners, but not mandatory to inform the author of the changes under the terms of the license. It's another triumph for the backroom diplomacy of Perens, who with Eben Moglen and Larry Rosen helped negotiate a workable royalty-free patent policy for the World Wide Web Consortium. Perens was wryly noting his own prominence on the books' jackets, which give him top billing, and the name - "Bruce Perens' Open Source Series" - and he added that he doesn't have a bone to pick with Tim O'Reilly.
     
5. Professional Open Source Web Services
   Web Services is a new paradigm and probably one of the most discussed subjects amongst the IT solution providers. It is a simple concept that enables grand integration of various blocks of existing web infrastructure. It uses XML based messaging standards like SOAP, WSDL, UDDI which will provide solutions to the industry for many more years. Open Source products like Linux, Apache, Perl, PHP are popular robust parts of web infrastructure. The rising need of SOAP based web services has prompted the development of libraries for various open source languages in line with some industry efforts around .NET and J2EE framework. 
    
6. Open Source .NET Development
   One of the changes Microsoft brought with .NET was to submit C# and the Common Language Runtime for standardization. As a result, for the first time, people have been able to develop open source tools that can be used with Microsoft's tools. These open source tools are important because they give developers increased efficiency and flexibility. This is the first book to show how to use these new tools, including NAnt, NDoc, NUnit, Draco.net,Log4Net, and ASpell.Net. The author is an active member of the open source community, and has contributed to several of these projects. He shows how touse all the tools with both Visual Studio .NET and with the Mono Project, theleading Open Source IDE for .NET. This book should appeal equally to .NET developers interested in what open source tools are available to them, as well asto open source developers who are curious about .NET. 
      
7. Open Source PKI Book
   This project tries to collect the necessary information to create a document that describes Public-Key Infrastructures, current PKI standards, explains practical PKI functionality and gives an overview of available open-source PKI implementations. Its goal is to foster the creation of a hign quality open-source PKI.  Quick list 
   The OSPKI Book is written in DocBook (SGML) 
   The currently supported output formats are PDF, PostScript, HTML, DVI and RTF 
   The print formats distributed are for A4 paper size, 10pt font size. Ask for other formats or regenerate. 
   A diff of the SGML code is provided for a quick check between editions 
   The source code is available under the FDL license 
      
8. Open Source Apache Phrasebook
   The Apache Phrasebook. Packed with practical solutions, or "phrases," for tasks that the Apache developer much accomplish every day, the phrasebook fills the need for a short, functional, to-the-point reference for Apache. The code contained in the phrasebook is flexible, so it can be easily adapted to your needs. Today's problem is likely to be tomorrow's problem, so don't waste your time on lengthy tutorials. Go straight to practical Apache tools that provide immediately applicable solutions for any situation with the Apache Phrasebook. 
     
9. Open Source PHP Phrasebook
   If you were traveling in Spain, but couldn't speak Spanish very well, you'd probably carry a Spanish dictionary with you. If you are a PHP developer who needs a portable reference guide for frequent use in your job, the PHP Phrasebook is perfect for you. The PHP Phrasebook is actually a pocket guide that is jam-packed with useful and essential PHP code "phrases" for the PHP developer's everyday use. The code is flexible, so it can be easily adapted to your needs and mulitple situations, and your time isn't wasted wading through chapters of tutorial lessons and extraneous information. The phrasebook covers PHP 5 and is relevant for PHP 4.
     
10. PHP and MySQL Web Development
    We've taken the best and made it even better. The third edition of the best-selling PHP and MySQL Web Development has been updated to include material and code on MySQL 5, PHP 5 and on PHPs object model and validation. Through a clear, practical approach, you will learn to develop secure, dynamic websites by integrating and implementing the PHP scripting language and the MySQL database system. Real-
    world examples and working sample projects will give you a strong foundation on which to start building your own websites, complete with features such as SSL, shopping carts and payment systems. 
       
11. Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 
    Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003 Unleashed is a premium reference guide and a must-have for anyone currently developing or beginning to develop .NET applications. A primer on the basic fundamentals of .NET programming is supplemented by plenty of practical application development covering virtually every aspect of .NET programming. It is a comprehensive, easy-to-use book designed to lay flat, making it an ideal desk reference. You will also receive access to an online reference tool that contains fully searchable content and code samples. Unleashed will give you the knowledge you crave to master Visual Basic .NET 2003.
      
12. Open Source, Book Review
    Books on programming languages are fairly straightforward. There's the history, the basics of the language and syntax, and the most interesting parts - how to 'do stuff' with the language. How all of this is put together matters a lot, especially with the people new to the programming language. It means the difference between understanding and not understanding, and it also means the difference between a reference book and a narrative book. This book is a bit of both because of the way it was put together. To make matters more interesting, the person who buys such a book probably doesn't know what to expect from the book. Thus, I approached this book as someone who can't even spell PHP, and worked from there. 
      
13. Hands on Open Source 
    Hands on Open Source provides a practical introduction to some of the best open-source applications available. Easy-to-follow projects will help users to discover the flexibility and amazing features of some of the best open-source applications available, including Gantt Project, Lucane, Grisbi, Kaboodle, VLC media player, OmegaT and OpenOffice.org. The book shows how to create a radio recorder, a database application, interactive text documents, and a custom Live CD Linux. Users will also learn how to create an invoicing system, manage personal finances, and play open-source games. A considerable part of the book is dedicated to OpenOffice.org, an open-source office suite. The OpenOffice.org-related projects guide users through creating a mapping application, an e-wallet database, an interactive demo, and much more. The book covers Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms.
      
14. Open Source and Linux
    One of our very first books was about UNIX, and while UNIX is not strictly speaking an open source technology by license, you know, Open Source technically applies only to certain licenses, but I think in a broader sense, the Open Source movement is about independent collaborative development, and a lot of the early UNIX development was in fact done that way; it started out at Bell Labs, but it happened in universities, and there were all these programs that were developed by people who were just saying, ``Hey, we need this stuff''. I started working with UNIX as a consultant--my company did documentation consulting, and as we started working with UNIX we noticed that a lot of really cool programs didn't have any documentation, so we started writing it. And so, you know, our business really grew out of the fact that Open Source was happening.
       
15. Producing Open Source Software
    Although open source development is, by and large, a cooperative environment thriving with volunteers and the sharing of code, it is also mercilessly evolutionary. The tendency of humans is to strive for improvement, and this push for achievement results in a free software landscape littered with the desiccated corpses of dead or abandoned projects. A project might be doomed from conception because its motivating concept does not fill a real need in the community, or because it is poorly planned. If it survives birth, it might lose the struggle to attract enough developers to help it grow and stay vital. If it manages to evolve into a solid, stable release, it then needs to defend its place in the product space, possibly facing off against leaner, faster, or more feature-rich competitors for users' and developers' attention.