-- FREE BOOK --
A Brief History of the Computer

Humanity has used devices to aid in computation for millenia. One of the earliest machines that could perform arithmetic calculations was the Chinese abacus, which was invented about 5000 years ago. In 1623, the first mechanical calculator was invented by Wilhelm Schickard, and so the computing era began.

Take a nostalgic trip down memory lane and read about the people, machines, technologies, programming languages and games that defined the history of the computer.

This is a FREE ebook. There are no strings attached - you don't have to enter your email address or sign up to a newsletter - no, it's just our way of saying thanks for visiting our website. Click here to go to the download page.

PHP & MySQL
for Absolute Beginners
Quick Start Workbook

Learn how to use the power of PHP and MySQL to develop great websites and applications. This book, like other Quick Start Workbooks, uses a friendly, easy-to-follow, approach designed to take you from being a novice PHP programmer to a competent developer able to create great websites and applications.

The book begins by explaining the basic building blocks of PHP such as variables, arrays, the use of cookies, HTML form processing and validation, looping through scripts, and then goes on to show you how to set up a complete development and test environment, before finally running through several sample web applications such as financial calculators, a web page hit counter, and the online poll (survey) shown to the right.

PHP is possibly the most popular server-side scripting language available. It is free, runs on multiple platforms, and is easy to learn. After Oracle, MySQL is the most popular relational database management system (RDBMS) available and, like PHP, is free. Together, they make a great web development team.

Although this book won't turn you into a professional PHP and MySQL web developer, it will provide you with the experience and knowledge to confidently develop useful, database-driven, applications for your own website(s).

Electronics for Absolute Beginners

The history of electronics, which is the study and use of devices that control the flow of charged particles, can be traced back to 1874 when Irish scientist George Johnstone Stoney (1826-1911) suggested that electricity must be "built" out of tiny electrical charges. Twenty years later, he coined the name "electron".

Today, electronic devices are all around us ... computers, cell (mobile) phones, televisions, calculators, hearing aids, and cars are just a few examples of devices that form part of everyday life in the 21st century and which make use of electronics.

The purpose of this book, which is available from Amazon, is to introduce the subject of electronics to people who have no prior knowledge of the subject. If you don't know what a prototyping breadboard is, or have no idea what a resistor or diode do, then this book will help you to gain a basic understanding of what electronics components exist and what they are used for. You will also learn how to combine such components to build electronics circuits.

Perl and Regular Expressions
Quick Start Workbook

Learn how to use Perl and regular expressions to manipulate files in a Windows environment. The book covers tasks such as how to create, delete, and merge files, how to extract data from them, and how to convert them from one format to another.

All of the scripts, applications, and other files used in the book are freely available for download from this website. There is even a free regular expression tester that you can download and use.

Together, Perl and regular expressions make a great team when it comes to processing files such as HTML and XML pages.

Perl's ability to manipulate files combined with the power of regular expressions to search for and change strings within those files provide a powerful tool that can be used in many situations.

By the use of numerous examples, which are all fully explained to make sure that you understand exactly what each Perl script is doing, this workbook will teach you how to perform loads of useful file processing tasks, including how to:

• Process a list of files entered at the command line prompt.
• Process all the files of a particular type in the current directory/folder.
• Process different types of files located in various directories/folders.
• Use regular expressions to extract data from multiple files and combine that data into a single file.
• Use regular expressions to convert files from one type to another, for example, XML to CSV.
• Run Perl scripts from Windows applications.
• Integrate a Perl script into a text editor.

No programming experience is required at all to work through and use the sample scripts contained in this workbook, although a very basic knowledge of markup languages such as HTML and XML may be useful to make some of the examples more interesting to you, but is certainly not a prior requirement in order to understand what is going on in the examples.

Based on the author's real-life experience of needing to process HTML, XML, CSV, and other text files over the past 15 years in commercial/business environments, this book will provide you with an excellent foundation that will enable you to learn a variety of Perl and regular expression skills.