Book Description
As time goes on, system administrators are presented with increasingly complicated challenges. In the early days, a team of engineers might have had to look after one or two systems. These days, one engineer can administer hundreds or thousands of systems.

System administrators are gradually replacing their tools with more advanced and flexible ones. One of the choices is Python. Structurally, Python is a modern, high-level language with a very clean syntax. Python comes with many built-in libraries that can make automation tasks easier. It also has extensive set of third-party libraries and a very active development community. This flexibility makes Python a good choice for a wide variety of tasks, from prototyping science applications to system maintenance and administration jobs.

• This book explains and shows how to apply Python scripting in practice. Unlike the majority of the Python books, it will show you how to approach and resolve real-world issues that most system administrators will come across in their careers.
• In this book, you will find several projects in the categories of network administration, web server administration, and monitoring and database management. In each project, we will define the problem, design the solution, and go through the more interesting implementation steps.
• Each project is accompanied with the source code of a fully working prototype, which you’ll be able to use immediately or adapt to your requirements and environment.

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Book Description
Many businesses and organizations depend on older high-value PHP software that risks abandonment because it is impossible to maintain. The reasons for this may be that the software is not well designed; there is only one developer (the one who created the system) who can develop it because he didn’t use common design patterns and documentation; or the code is procedural, not object oriented. With this book, you’ll learn to identify problem code and refactor it to create more effective applications using test-driven design.

What you’ll learn

• What refactoring is and why you need to refactor code
• What test-driven design is and why you need to test your code
• How to write unit and functional tests with PHPUnit and Selenium Remote Control (RC)
• How to detect “bad smells” in PHP code, and refactor them using test-driven design
• How to refactor a large procedural application affected by many bad smells

Who is this book for?
This book is for PHP developers, businesses, and developers relying on legacy PHP apps. Continue Reading »

Book Description
You’ve learned the basics of Python, but how do you take your skills to the next stage? Even if you know enough to be productive, there are a number of features that can take you to the next level in Python. Pro Python explores concepts and features normally left to experimentation, allowing you to be even more productive and creative.

In addition to pure code concerns, Pro Python will develop your programming techniques and approaches, which will help make you a better Python programmer. Not only will this book help your code, it will also help you understand and interact with the many established Python communities, or even start your own.

• Take your Python knowledge and coding skills to the next level.
• Write clean, innovative code that will be respected among your peers.
• Make your code do more with introspection and metaprogramming.
• Design complete frameworks and libraries (two are included in the book!).

What you’ll learn

• Write strong Python code that will be respected in the Python community.
• Understand the reasons behind big design decisions in Python. Continue Reading »

Book Description
This book takes a practical problem-solution approach to common business challenges. You’ll not only encounter interesting code samples, but also see how to combine these examples with the Microsoft collaboration platform’s services. The book’s solutions focus on using Visual Studio 2008 and its built-in Office development tools to construct the user interface layer. And solutions can interact with SharePoint as a service provider, taking advantage of SharePoint’s many collaboration features like document repositories, collaboration sites, and search functions.

This book is unique because it starts with challenges that end users deal with every day when using the Microsoft collaboration platform to support business processes. The solutions are presented as hypothetical business challenges of a fictional company. By presenting the examples in this context, author Ed Hild makes it easier to relate to the challenges and solution value. The goal of these examples is to build applications that apply the benefits of the Office desktop interface to the richness of SharePoint collaboration features. This book will help you develop real-world solutions to complex business problems and challenges. Continue Reading »

Book Description
Every business has a reams of business data locked away in databases, business systems, and spreadsheets. While you may be able to build some reports by pulling a few of these repositories together, actually performing any kind of analysis on the data that runs your business can range from problematic to impossible. Pro SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services will show you how to pull that data together and present it for reporting and analysis in a way that makes the data accessible to business users, instead of needing to rely on the IT department every time someone needs a different report.

• Accessible–With a single author’s voice, this book conducts a guided tour through the technology that makes it easy to dive into.
• Solution–oriented–While technically deep, the goal is to focus on practical application of the technologies instead of acting as a technical manual.
• ComprehensiveThis book covers every aspect of Analysis Services and ancillary technologies to enable you to make the most of SQL Server. Continue Reading »