Rockstar WordPress Designer

Rockstar WordPress Designer

 
Book Description: Theme Like a Professional!


Managing web content has always been tricky, but with WordPress, any web designer can have a flexible, free and powerful CMS to use not just on blogging projects, but on all sorts of websites. In How To Be a Rockstar WordPress Designer you will learn step by step how to take a straight HTML site and power it with WordPress.

During the course of the book you’ll build THREE WordPress themes, a blog, a portfolio site and a general site with menus and submenus. Each theme demonstrates different aspects of WordPress theming and all three are packaged in with the book so you’ll have Photoshop, HTML, CSS and WordPress PHP files to refer to.


Updated for WordPress 3.0: How to Be a Rockstar WordPress Designer has been updated for the latest release of WordPress and includes a section on Navigation Menus!
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Rockstar Presentations

Rockstar Presentations

 
Book Description: Give a Rockstar Presentation!

In Rockstar Presentations, author Joseph Lewis shares tips, tricks and wisdom on public speaking with no fear, no cue cards and no worries!

Whether you’re giving a blockbuster keynote or teaching a handful of co-workers how to do something cool, this book was written for you.

This book also comes bundled with 3 great PowerPoint templates you can use in your own presentations.

About the Authors  Joseph Lewis is a regular contributor to WorkAwesome.com, and has over ten years of experience in publishing for government, defense, health care, and technology firms. As an editor, he has corrected typos for admirals, doctors, and scientists, and published numerous books, journals, and case studies.

As a writer, Joseph has published countless classified and proprietary documents that you cannot read. Over the years, he has created and delivered presentations to bosses, peers, clients, and students on more subjects than he cares to remember, including how to give a quality presentation.

He has also written articles about business presentations, office politics, and other humorous subjects. Joseph lives in a pleasant suburb of the United States with his wife, daughter, and two cats.
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How to Build a Successful Blog Business

How to Build a Successful Blog Business

 
Book Description: How to Build a Successful Blog Business is a straight forward guide to building a publishing business online that covers everything from choosing a niche to hiring staff, registering a business to selling it, finding traffic to monetizing it.

Whether you are interested in creating an additional income stream or building a fully-fledged business, this is an essential read for web entrepreneurs and online publishers.

Collis is a web veteran with a wealth of experience and an easy to read style. He has founded sites such as the Tuts+ network, the Envato Marketplaces, FreelanceSwitch and AppStorm which combined serve up over 50 million pageviews a month.

In How to Build a Successful Blog Business Collis shares tips from his years of operating kick ass blogs, and reveals stats, graphs, revenue figures and inside details from three real world case studies.

Nowhere else will you be able to find information like this. Step behind the scenes of Envato’s wildly successful sites and find out how you build blogs that are both profitable and popular.

This is the must-read book on blogging business.
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How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer

How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer

Book Description: Covering everything from getting started to expanding your business, How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer is the official FreelanceSwitch book. It’s packed with new information, advice and insights not covered on the blog.

If you want to start your freelance career the right way, then How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer will give you everything you need to become the best freelancer in town!

About the Authors Cyan and Collis Ta’eed are the founders of popular freelancing blog FreelanceSwitch. After years of running a small freelance graphic and web design business, they shut up shop and started web startup Envato where they work building brilliant websites for creatives everywhere.

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Design Driven Testing: Test Smarter, Not Harder

Design Driven Testing: Test Smarter, Not Harder

 
Book Description: The groundbreaking book Design Driven Testing brings sanity back to the software development process by flipping around the concept of Test Driven Development (TDD)—restoring the concept of using testing to verify a design instead of pretending that unit tests are a replacement for design. Anyone who feels that TDD is “Too Damn Difficult” will appreciate this book.

Design Driven Testing shows that, by combining a forward-thinking development process with cutting-edge automation, testing can be a finely targeted, business-driven, rewarding effort. In other words, you’ll learn how to test smarter, not harder.

• Applies a feedback-driven approach to each stage of the project lifecycle.
• Illustrates a lightweight and effective approach using a core subset of UML.
• Follows a real-life example project using Java and Flex/ActionScript.
• Presents bonus chapters for advanced DDTers covering unit-test antipatterns (and their opposite, “test-conscious” design patterns), and showing how to create your own test transformation templates in Enterprise Architect.

What you’ll learn

• Create unit and behavioral tests using JUnit, NUnit, FlexUnit.
• Generate acceptance tests for all usage paths through use case thread expansion.
• Generate requirement tests for functional requirements.

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Beginning Rails 3

Beginning Rails 3

 
Book Description: Beginning Rails 3 is the practical starting point for anyone wanting to learn how to build dynamic web applications using the latest release of the Rails framework for Ruby. You’ll learn how all of the components of Rails fit together and how you can leverage them to create sophisticated web applications with less code and more joy.

This book is particularly well suited to those with little or no experience with web application development, or who have some experience but are new to Rails. Beginning Rails 3 assumes basic familiarity with web terms and technologies, but doesn’t require you to be an expert.

Rather than delving into the arcane details of Rails, the focus is on the aspects of the framework that will become your pick, shovel, and axe. Part history lesson, part introduction to object-oriented programming, and part dissertation on open source software, this title doesn’t just explain how to do something in Rails, it explains why.

• Learn to create Rails web applications from scratch
• Includes a gentle introduction to the Ruby programming language
• Completely updated to include the new features of Rails 3

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Beginning ASP.NET 4 in VB 2010

Beginning ASP.NET 4 in VB 2010

 
Book Description: The most up-to-date and comprehensive introductory ASP.NET book you’ll find on any shelf, Beginning ASP.NET 4 in VB 2010 guides you through Microsoft’s latest technology for building dynamic web sites. This book will enable you to build dynamic web pages on the fly, and assumes only the most basic knowledge of Visual Basic.

The book provides exhaustive coverage of ASP.NET, guiding you from your first steps right up to the most advanced techniques, such as querying databases from within a web page and tuning your site for optimal performance.

Within these pages, you’ll find tips for best practices and comprehensive discussions of key database and XML principles you need to know in order to be effective with ASP.NET. The book also emphasizes the invaluable coding techniques of object orientation and code-behind, which will start you off on the track to building real-world web sites right from the beginning—rather than just faking it with simplified coding practices.

By the time you’ve finished the book, you will have mastered the core techniques and have all the knowledge you need to begin work as a professional ASP.NET developer.

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Professional Blogging For Dummies

Professional Blogging For Dummies

 
Book Description: Take your hobby to the next level and turn your blog into real income
Anyone who blogs knows that it is a fun, creative way for sharing thoughts and opinions. Now imagine making money from that hobby!

This practical, how-to guide shows you how you can get serious about using your blog and implement advertising, sponsorship, partnerships, and affiliate marketing options to turn your hobby into extra income, or even a full-time career.

Helpful examples and featured articles with topic experts and bloggers who have built successful business demonstrate how to promote your business or build a blog-based business.

• Discusses finding your niche, adhering to legal considerations, establishing your disclosure and privacy policies, and dealing responsibly with review requests
• Introduces ideas for advertising and other monetization options and recommends promotional avenues to explore
• Suggests creative ways to keep your blog fresh, unique, and interesting
• Provides tips for monitoring and measuring your success

Professional Blogging For Dummies opens the door to a world of money-making blogging possibilities!
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Photoshop CS5 For Dummies

Photoshop CS5 For Dummies

 
Book Description: The bestselling guide to the leading image-editing software, fully updated
Previous editions of this For Dummies guide have sold more 650,000 copies. Richly illustrated in full color, this edition covers all the updates in the newest version of Photoshop, the gold standard for image-editing programs.

Used by professional photographers, graphic designers, and Web designers as well as hobbyists, Photoshop has more than four million users worldwide.

• Photoshop is the image-editing software preferred by professional photographers and designers around the world; the latest version includes new functionality and enhanced tools
• Teaches all the basics for first-time users, including how to work with the menus, panels, tools, options, and essential shortcuts
• Covers how to fix red-eye, remove blemishes and wrinkles, remove people or objects from a photo, adjust brightness, improve color, add shadows and highlights, work with Camera Raw, decrease digital noise, create composite images, use channels and masks, optimize images for the Web, and much more

Photoshop CS5 For Dummies helps both amateur and professional Photoshop users take advantage of all the program has to offer.
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Professional WCF 4: Windows Communication Foundation with .NET 4

Professional WCF 4: Windows Communication Foundation with .NET 4

Book Description: A guide to architecting, designing, and building distributed applications with Windows Communication FoundationWindows Communication Foundation is the .NET technology that is used to build service-oriented applications, exchange messages in various communication scenarios, and run workflows. This guide enables developers to create state-of-the-art applications using this technology.

Written by a team of Microsoft MVPs and WCF experts, this book explains how the pieces of WCF 4.0 build on each other to provide a comprehensive framework to support distributed enterprise applications.

Experienced developers will learn both theory and practical application using the familiar Wrox approach.
.NET developers will learn to design services, create a hosting environment with Dublin, build cloud-based integrations, and much more.

Coverage Includes:

• Design Principles and Patterns
• Service Contracts and Data Contracts
• Bindings

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Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010

Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010

 

Book Description: Get up to speed on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) with Visual Studio 2010 through a combination of hands-on instruction and deep-dives.

Microsoft has packed a lot of brand new testing and modeling tools into Visual Studio 2010, tools that previously were available only to Microsoft internal development teams. Developers will appreciate the focus on practical implementation techniques and best practices.

A team of Microsoft insiders provides a nuts-and-bolts approach. This Wrox guide is designed as both a step-by-step guide and a reference for modeling, designing, and coordinating software development solutions at every level using Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010.

Visual Studio 2010 offers a complete lifecycle management system that covers modeling, testing, code analysis, collaboration, build and deployment tools.

Coverage includes:

• An Introduction to Software Architecture
• Top-down Design with Use Case Diagrams, Activity Diagrams, and Sequence Diagrams
• Top-down Design with Component and Class Diagrams

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Dreamweaver CS5 For Dummies

Dreamweaver CS5 For Dummies

Book Description: A fully updated guide to the leading Web site creation tool, Dreamweaver CS5. Dreamweaver holds 90 percent of the market share for professional Web site development software.

This popular book, which has sold more than 300,000 copies in previous editions, is fully updated for the newest version of Dreamweaver. Both beginning and intermediate Web site developers will get the information they need from this easy-to-follow guide.

• Dreamweaver is the gold standard for Web site development software; this book covers what both beginners and intermediate-level users need to know to develop sites for online commerce, education, customer service, and other uses
• Covers the basics, including customizing your workspace, setting up your site, creating pages, and publishing your site to the Web
• Explains how to work with text, graphics, and links; managing and testing your site; defining and applying styles with CSS; creating CSS layouts; adding audio, video, and Flash files; exploring the Spry framework; building dynamic sites, connecting to a database, and more

Web site developers will find just what they need to get going and create effective, eye-catching Web sites with Dreamweaver CS5 For Dummies.
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English Grammar For Dummies, 2nd Edition

English Grammar For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Book Description: The fun and easy way® to improve your grammar. Enhancing your speaking and writing skills helps in everyday situations, such as writing a paper for school, giving a presentation to a company’s bigwigs, or communicating effectively with family and friends. English Grammar For Dummies, 2nd Edition gives you the latest techniques for improving your efficiency with English grammar and punctuation.

• Teaches the rules of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; prepositions, propositions, and pronoun pronouncements; punctuation; possessives; and proofreading skills for all communication
• Geraldine Woods is the author of English Grammar Workbook For Dummies, College Admission Essays For Dummies, Research Papers For Dummies, SAT I For Dummies, 6th Edition, AP English Literature For Dummies, and AP English Language For Dummies

For speakers and writers of all skill levels, English Grammar For Dummies, 2nd Edition provides easy-to-follow, practical information for improving your command of English grammar.

From the Back Cover - The fun and easy way® to improve your grammar. Do the parts of speech render you speechless? Does the thought of diagramming sentences make you sweat? Fear not! English Grammar For Dummies, 2nd Edition takes the “grr” out of grammar and gives you fun, easy-to-followstrategies for understanding the rules of grammar and punctuation to improve your speaking and writing skills —without ever diagramming a single sentence!

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Hacking For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Hacking For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Book Description: A new edition of the bestselling guide-now updated to cover the latest hacks and how to prevent them! It’s bad enough when a hack occurs-stealing identities, bank accounts, and personal information. But when the hack could have been prevented by taking basic security measures-like the ones described in this book-somehow that makes a bad situation even worse.

This beginner guide to hacking examines some of the best security measures that exist and has been updated to cover the latest hacks for Windows 7 and the newest version of Linux.

Offering increased coverage of Web application hacks, database hacks, VoIP hacks, and mobile computing hacks, this guide addresses a wide range of vulnerabilities and how to identify and prevent them. Plus, you’ll examine why ethical hacking is oftentimes the only way to find security flaws, which can then prevent any future malicious attacks.

• Explores the malicious hackers’s mindset so that you can counteract or avoid attacks completely
• Covers developing strategies for reporting vulnerabilities, managing security changes, and putting anti-hacking policies and procedures in place
• Completely updated to examine the latest hacks to Windows 7 and the newest version of Linux
• Explains ethical hacking and why it is essential

Hacking For Dummies, 3rd Edition shows you how to put all the necessary security measures in place so that you avoid becoming a victim of malicious hacking.
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InDesign CS5 For Dummies

InDesign CS5 For Dummies

Book Description: Get up to speed on the latest features and enhancements to the new version of InDesign. As the industry standard in professional layout and design, InDesign delivers powerful publishing solutions for magazine, newspaper, and other publishing fields.

This introductory book is an easy-to-understand reference for anyone migrating from another software application or those with little-to-no desktop publishing experience. You’ll explore InDesign basics and examine the enhancements to the latest version, while you also discover how pages work, build templates, create frames and shapes, manage styles, and much more.

• InDesign is proving to be an increasingly popular layout and design application; the latest version includes new functionality and enhanced tools
• Teaches all the basics for first-time users, including how to open and save your work, arrange objects, work with color, edit text, manage styles, finesse character details, add special type, import and size graphics, set paths, work with tabs, create indices, and more
• Demonstrates how to calibrate colors, export PDF files, fine-tune paragraph details, create frames and shapes, manipulate objects, and work with automated text

InDesign CS5 For Dummies offers a straightforward but fun approach to discovering how to get the most from your desktop publishing experience when using InDesign.

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jQuery For Dummies

jQuery For Dummies

Book Description: Learn how jQuery can make your Web page or blog stand out from the crowd! jQuery is free, open source software that allows you to extend and customize Joomla!, Drupal, AJAX, and WordPress via plug-ins. Assuming no previous programming experience, Lynn Beighley takes you through the basics of jQuery from the very start.

You’ll discover how the jQuery library separates itself from other JavaScript libraries through its ease of use, compactness, and friendliness if you’re a beginner programmer.

Written in the easy-to-understand style of the For Dummies brand, this book demonstrates how you can add unique and exciting interactivity to a Web site or WordPress blog, including photo browsers, menus, tab-based navigation, sliding sidepanels, slideshows, transition effects, fade effects, Twitter feeds, and much, much more!

• Walks you through the capabilities of jQuery, the number one open source JavaScript library that enables you to provide interactivity on a Web site or blog
• Helps you understand DOM (Document Object Model) scripting, applying CSS classes via JQuery, and adding in special effects and jQuery plug-ins to your site
• Shows you how to create dazzling special effects on your site, including fades, slide shows, sliding panels, tabbed navigation, and more

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Silverlight 4 Business Intelligence Software

Silverlight 4 Business Intelligence Software

 
Book Description: Business Intelligence (BI) software allows you to view different components of a business using a single visual platform, which makes comprehending mountains of data easier. BI is everywhere.

Applications that include reports, analytics, statistics, and historical and predictive modeling are all examples of BI. Currently, we are in the second generation of BI software—called BI 2.0—which is focused on writing BI software that is predictive, adaptive, simple, and interactive.

As computers and software have evolved, more data can be presented to end users with increasingly visually rich techniques. Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies such as Microsoft Silverlight can be used to transform traditional user-interfaces filled with boring data into fully interactive analytical applications that quickly deliver insight from large data sets.

Furthermore, RIA applications now include 3D spatial-design capabilities that move beyond a simple list or grid and allow for interesting layouts of aggregated data. BI 2.0 implemented via an RIA technology can truly bring out the power of BI and deliver it to an average user on the Web.

Next-Generation Business Intelligence Software with Silverlight 4 provides developers, designers, and architects with a solid foundation in BI design and architecture concepts for Microsoft Silverlight. This book covers key BI design concepts and how they can be applied without an existing BI infrastructure.

Author Bart Czernicki provides you with examples of how to build small BI applications that are interactive, highly visual, statistical, predictive—and most importantly—intuitive to the end-user.

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Pro HTML5 Programming: Powerful APIs for Richer Internet Application Development

Pro HTML5 Programming: Powerful APIs for Richer Internet Application Development

Description: HTML5 is here, and with it, web applications take on a power, ease, scalability, and responsiveness like never before. In this book, developers will learn how to use the latest cutting-edge HTML5 web technology—available in the most recent versions of modern browsers—to build web applications with unparalleled functionality, speed, and responsiveness.

• Explains how you can create real-time HTML5 applications that tap the full potential of modern browsers
• Provides practical, real-world examples of HTML5 features in action
• Shows which HTML5 features are supported in current browsers
• Covers all the new HTML5 APIs to get you up to speed quickly with HTML5

What you’ll learn

• How the HTML5 specification has evolved
• How to develop cutting-edge web applications using new HTML5 features like WebSockets, Geolocation, Web Storage, Canvas, and Audio and Video.
• Which features are available in browsers today

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Objective-C for Absolute Beginners: iPhone and Mac Programming Made Easy

Objective-C for Absolute Beginners: iPhone and Mac Programming Made Easy

Book Description: It seems as if everyone is writing applications for Apple’s iPhone and iPad, but how do they all do it? It’s best to learn Objective-C, the native language of both the iOSand Mac OS X, but where to begin? Right here, even if you’ve never programmed before!

Objective-C for Absolute Beginners will teach you how to write software for your Mac, iPhone,or iPad using Objective-C, an elegant and powerful language with a rich set of developer tools. Using a hands-on approach, you’ll learn to think in programming terms, how to use Objective-C to build program logic, and how towrite your own applications and apps.

With over 50 collective years in software development and based on an approach pioneered at Carnegie Mellon University, the authors have developed a remarkably effective approach to learning Objective-C.

Since the introduction of Apple’s iPhone, theauthors have taught hundreds of absolute beginners how to develop Mac, iPhone,and iPad apps, including many that became popular apps in the iTunes App Store.

What you’ll learn

• The fundamentals of computer programming: how to understand variables,design data structures, and work with file systems
• The logic of object-oriented programming: how to use Classes, Objects, and Methods
• The flexibility of Apple’s developer tools: how to install Xcode and write programs in Objective-C
• The power of Cocoa and Cocoa touch: how to make Mac OS Xapplications or iOS apps that do cool stuff

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iPhone 4 Made Simple

iPhone 4 Made Simple

Book Description: Congratulations—you’ve purchased the new iPhone 4, the coolest smartphone on the market. Now it’s time to learn how to take advantage of all the features, apps, and secret techniques available. To accomplish this, look no further than iPhone 4 Made Simple.

Over 1,000 screen visuals and clear-cut instructions guide you through both basic and advanced features of the iPhone 4, from email and calendar tips to navigating the App Store and understanding Bluetooth and Wi-Fi networks.

Written by two successful smartphone trainers and authors, this is the go-to guide for the latest and greatest version of the iPhone.

What you’ll learn

• Use copy/Paste, spotlight search, and voice memos
• Support for both Windows and Mac users
• Use music, videos, photos & voice notes
• Detailed iTunes instructions
• Sync playlists, videos, contacts, calendar, and notes
• Fast email, phone, calendar, and browser tips
• Create your own ringtones & wallpapers
• Use Google Maps to find just about anything!
• Navigate the App Store for games, productivity apps, and more
• Understand Bluetooth and Wi-Fi network setup & security

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Foundation Flash Catalyst

Foundation Flash Catalyst

Book Description: This book offers an introduction to Flash Catalyst for designers with intermediate to advanced skills. It discusses where Catalyst sits within the production process and how it communicates with other programs.

It covers all of the features of the Flash Catalyst workspace, teaching you how to create designs from scratch, how to build application designs and add functionality, and how to master the Catalyst/Flex workflow.

• Introduces Flash Catalyst
• Focuses on production process
• Covers the interrelation between Flash Catalyst and Photoshop/Illustrator/Flex/Flash

What you’ll learn
Starting from scratch, you’ll learn the basic concepts and interface functionality of Flash Catalyst, and get practical experience by working on carefully crafted real-life projects throughout the book. You’ll learn every stage of the process, from the first design sketches to the Flex Developer hand over, and how you can make design changes to assets while the developers work on the code.

You’ll also learn how to make your designs functional by adding simple buttons and scroll bars, and how to make sure that developers can precisely interpret your vision.
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