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Best way to teach programming to children? What motivates you to become a programmer? How to activate a Motorola Droid without a Verizon data plan How to measure Facebook activity with the Facebook API and Perl What's new in Photoshop CS5Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today. O'Reilly Media 2010-06-10T20:58:03-08:10

Google Hiring by the Lake Wobegon Strategy -- having just run some interviews myself, I recognise the wisdom in what they say. Another hiring strategy we use is no hiring manager. Whenever you give project managers responsibility for hiring for their own projects they'll take the best candidate in the pool, even if that candidate is sub-standard for the... Nat Torkington 2010-05-19T07:28:25-08:11

I often write HTML pages or documentation that includes code samples. When the code is presented this way, it's much easier to follow if it features syntax highlighting. I had found a script that could highlight Perl code, and then I realized I needed the same thing for C code as well. I've posted a new script on my web site that inserts HTML markup into source code files to provide colored syntax highlighting. Kyle Dent 2010-04-19T15:58:17-08:12

We're launching the beta of O'Reilly Answers, and I'm inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O'Reilly). O'Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation, and we want you to join us in changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. Allen Noren 2009-11-04T09:58:13-08:13

Anatomy of SSDs -- A teeth-rattlingly technical Linux Magazine article explaining the different types of SSDs (Solid State Disks--imagine a hard drive made of rapid-access Flash memory). Artur Bergman told me that installing an SSD drive in his MacBook Pro gave the greatest performance increase of any computer upgrade he'd performed since he went from no computer to one. This and more in today's Four Short Links. Nat Torkington 2009-10-29T08:04:08-08:14

The Programming Language With The Happiest Users (Dolores Labs) -- Dolores Labs asks, "Which languages make programmers the happiest?" In examining recent tweets related to mentions of programming languages and analyzing whether the content of the tweet expressed something positive, neutral or negative about the language, Dolores Labs has concluded that users of certain programming languages are happier than others with their choice of code. You'll be surprised at the results of this interesting study. This and more in today's Four Short Links. Nat Torkington 2009-09-02T18:26:53-08:15

Opening dispatch from OSCon: another look at the effects of Software as a Service on opens source plus awards, APIs, and more. Andy Oram 2009-07-23T16:57:14-08:16

Today I received the following from Tom Christiansen, author of several of our bestselling Perl books, frequent speaker at OSCON, and Perl consultant extraordinaire. He asked that we publish this special news on his behalf. If you're at all interested... Allen Noren 2009-07-23T16:57:14-08:17

Tools to Make You More Efficient David N. Blank-Edelman 2009-05-21T23:50:46-08:19 PRINT or PDF

Detailed Solutions in Eight Programming Languages Steven Levithan, Jan Goyvaerts 2009-05-22T23:50:59-08:18 PRINT or PDF

Design, Perl, Heresy, and Ephemera: Product Panic: 2009 -- Bruce Sterling essay on design for recession-panicked consumers. As is usual with Bruce, I can't tell whether he's wryly tongue-in-cheek or literally advocating what he says. Great panic products are like Roosevelt’s fireside chats. They’re cheery bluff. The standard virtues of fine industrial design—safety, convenience, serviceability, utility, solid construction … well,... Nat Torkington 2009-03-27T20:50:48-08:20

Masterminds of Programming features exclusive interviews with the creators of several historic and highly influential programming languages. Think along with Adin D. Falkoff (APL), James Gosling (Java), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), and others whose vision and hard work helped shape the computer industry. You'll find advice you can apply to systems you're developing, even if you don't use the specific languages being discussed. Federico Biancuzzi, Shane Warden 2009-03-27T23:47:34-08:21 PRINT or PDF

Learning Perl, popularly known as "the Llama," is the book most programmers rely on to get started with Perl. The bestselling Perl tutorial since it was first published in 1993, this new fifth edition covers recent changes to the language up to Perl 5.10. Reflecting years of classroom testing and experience, this edition is packed with exercises that let you practice the concepts while you follow the text. brian d foy, Tom Phoenix, Randal L. Schwartz 2008-06-27T23:48:09-08:22 PRINT

Unearthing the Excellence in JavaScript Douglas Crockford 2008-05-08T14:06:37-08:23 PRINT or INSTANT ACCESS

This handy little book offers programmers a complete overview of the syntax and semantics of regular expressions that are at the heart of every text-processing application. Ideal as a quick reference, Regular Expression Pocket Reference covers the regular expression APIs for Perl 5.8, Ruby (including some upcoming 1.9 features), Java, PHP, .NET and C#, Python, vi, JavaScript, and the PCRE regular expression libraries. Tony Stubblebine 2007-07-18T18:23:51-08:24

This is the third in O'Reilly's series of landmark Perl tutorials, which started with Learning Perl, the bestselling introduction that taught you the basics of Perl syntax, and Intermediate Perl, which taught you how to create re-usable Perl software. Mastering Perl pulls everything together to show you how to bend Perl to your will. brian d foy 2007-07-16T18:23:17-08:25

By Patrick Michaud, release manager for Rakudo Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to announce the July 2010 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the July 2010 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads.

Rakudo Star is aimed at "early adopters" of Perl 6. We know that it still has some bugs, it is far slower than it ought to be, and there are some advanced pieces of the Perl 6 language specification that aren't implemented yet. But Rakudo Perl 6 in its current form is also proving to be viable (and fun) for developing applications and exploring a great new language. These "Star" releases are intended to make Perl 6 more widely available to programmers, grow the Perl 6 codebase, and gain additional end-user feedback about the Perl 6 language and Rakudo's implementation of it.

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language ("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as "Rakudo Perl". "Rakudo Star" is a distribution that includes release #31 of the Rakudo Perl 6 "compiler, version 2.6.0 of the Parrot Virtual Machine, and various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community. We plan to make Rakudo Star releases on a monthly schedule, with occasional special releases in response to important bugfixes or changes.

Some of the many cool Perl 6 features that are available in this release of Rakudo Star:

• Perl 6 grammars and regexes
• formal parameter lists and signatures
• metaoperators
• gradual typing
• a powerful object model, including roles and classes
• lazy list evaluation
• multiple dispatch
• smart matching
• junctions and autothreading
• operator overloading (limited forms for now)
• introspection
• currying
• a rich library of builtin operators, functions, and types
• an interactive read-evaluation-print loop
• Unicode at the codepoint level
• resumable exceptions

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases. Thus, we do not consider Rakudo Star to be a "Perl 6.0.0" or "1.0" release.

In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are many that we've missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are welcomed.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. Rakudo Star also contains a draft of a Perl 6 book -- see in the release tarball.

The development team thanks all of the contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Star possible. If you would like to contribute, see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help, ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode.

Rakudo Star releases are created on a monthly cycle or as needed in response to important bug fixes or improvements. The next planned release of Rakudo Star will be on August 24, 2010.

An anonymous reader writes with news that security experts from Spider Labs released a kernel level rootkit for Android devices at DefCon on Friday. "As a proof of concept, it is able to send an attacker a reverse TCP over 3G/WIFI shell upon receiving an incoming call from a 'trigger number.' This ultimately results in full root access on the Android device." The rootkit was developed over a period of two weeks, and has been handed out to DefCon attendees on DVD.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We all know that content is king when it comes to online marketing. If you have a blog, an e-newsletter or want to create an online content-driven site, Publisha (beta) helps you do it easily.

Publisha is new way to distribute your content across many platforms in one fell swoop.

What is Publisha?

This is how Publisha is described on the website:

Whether you want to create a new digital publication or support an existing blog or magazine, Publisha is for you. There’s no need for existing layout or PDFs. Publisha lets you use social media to gain new readers, and – coming soon – turn on the built-in revenue streams to make money.

Basically, Publisha provides a way for you to get your content out to more people in more places, with the ability to monetize it. The end result of using the service is one you can achieve on your own. You probably already do if you actively use your online content for marketing. But Publisha streamlines the process.

What Can Publisha Do?

Publisha uses one dashboard to allow you to push your content out to different places, including a web site, Facebook, iPhone/iPad and Twitter (coming soon). This can all be accomplished with other services, but the value comes from the all-in-one aspect. It takes just a few clicks to publish everywhere.

Publisha also includes a built-in adserver and features like affiliate setup, selling subscriptions and mailing list creation are on the way.

You can use Publisha to create your content outlets from scratch, or import your RSS to give your existing content more reach.

Publisha Test Drive

I took it for a test drive with my existing e-newsletter, and there are a few features I really loved.

In the multi-tasking nature of online business, you can’t beat having just one place to go to get your content out there. Getting published is as easy as adding your content and selecting where you want it to go through the content manager shown below.

The Facebook publishing element is awesome.  It’s not just a link sharing service like others that already exist. Publisha actually allows you to create your own custom Facebook app that contains all of your content in full form, right on Facebook. This is an excellent way to boost readership and engagement on your fan page and for your brand.

The screenshots below shows the content I added being pulled directly into the Facebook app on one of my fan pages.

It also creates a blog for you with your content, if you don’t already have one. You can select from eight themes and have access to the source code so you can customize it. The screenshot below shows the blog I created in my test drive.

Would You Use Publisha?

In my evaluation, if you already have a blog with your content and use tools to feed it into Twitter and Facebook, this service may be overkill for you.

If you’re starting from scratch, however, this is a great way to start a publication from your blog component to Facebook and into other outlets. And once the monetization feature launches, I can seen even more value in using Publisha.

Do you think Publisha would fulfill a need for you? If you’ve tried it out, what do you think about it?

Publisha is free to use with 20% of your ad space going to Publisha. There are other pricing plans with add-ons available.

Related Posts

1. Hollywood Actors Want $759 per Day Residuals For Online Video Content
2. 13 Tools to Back Up Your Social Media Content
3. 5 of the Best Facebook Fan Page Apps for User Engagement

The VAR Guy has applied some polish to the SaaS 20 Stock Index, which tracks trends across SaaS and cloud computing stocks. From January 2010 through the end of July 2010, the SaaS 20 Stock Index has risen nearly 8 percent, despite a 1 percent drop for the week ending July 30, 2010. Plus, some new companies are in the index. Here’s a look at the latest SaaS 20 Stock Index winners, losers and cloud computing updates.

For July 30, 2010, the index’s biggest one-week winners were:

• Vocus Inc. (VOCS), up 7.81 percent: The company’s sales are rising but so are losses, according to financial results announced July 23.
• Savvis (SVVS), up 6.91 percent: The company’s shares rose after Savvis Q2 sales topped analysts expectations.
• Terremark Worldwide (TMRK), up 6.52 percent: The company is expected to announce quarterly results on Aug. 4.

For July 30, 2010, the index’s biggest one-week losers were:

• SuccessFactors (SFSF), down 10.92%: The company’s Q2 loss widened, hurt by stock options and higher operating expenses.
• ConstantContact (CTCT), down 9.82%: The company reported 37 percent revenue growth for its quarter ended June 30, 2010. But apparently, investors were hoping for even better performance.
• Taleo (TLEO), down 6.96%: The company’s CFO is leaving amid a $1.4 million quarterly loss — though quarterly revenue rose to $56.3 million, up form $49.1 million in the corresponding quarter last year.

Year-to-Date Performance

For January 2010 through July 30, 2010, the index’s biggest winners were:

• VMware (VMW), up 82.94%
• NaviSite (NAVI), up 43%
• SalesForce.com (CRM), up 34.13%
• Intuit (INTU), up 29.35%

For January 2010 through July 30, 2010, the Index’s biggest losers were:

• Google Inc. (GOOG), down 21.80%
• Equinix (EQIX), down 11.91%
• Rackspace Hosting (RAX), down 10.31%
• Vocus Inc. (VOCS), down 9.50%

Index Changes

The VAR Guy also made some adjustments to the SaaS 20 Stock Index today. Among the updates:

• Companies removed from the SaaS 20 Stock Index include Dell, EMC, Ingram Micro, Salary.com and Websense. Most of the dropped companies have limited SaaS efforts, or SaaS and cloud computing don’t yet dominate their businesses.
• Companies added to the SaaS 20 Stock Index include Equinix, NaviSite, Savvis, Terremark Worldwide and VMware. Generally speaking, the companies added have well-known cloud or managed services efforts, plus VMware virtualization is a foundation for many SaaS and cloud platforms.

That’s all for this week. The VAR Guy will be back on Aug. 6 with more SaaS 20 Stock Index weekly analysis.

Follow The VAR Guy via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; Twitter; and via his Newsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center. Plus, visit www.VARtweet.com.

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