Packt Open Source

Packt Open Source books

Packt Open Source books will continue to be built around the “community experience distilled” motto, focussing on taking real advice from the community around projects, and refining and distilling it into easy to follow specialist information.

 

Through this, the Open Source Royalty Scheme will continue to support open source projects, offering a royalty for the sale of each book to the project on which that book was written.

 

Believe in Open Source

Open Source Awards

The Open Source Awards is an annual online event held by Packt Publishing to distinguish excellence among Open Source projects. We aim to play our part in the growth of Open Source software and see the annual Award as the ultimate platform for not only appreciating the great things projects have given back to the community but also supporting projects who have future potential to change things for the better.

Packt Open Source Project Royalty Scheme

Packt believes in open source and helping to sustain and support its unique projects and communities. Therefore, when we sell a book written on an open source project, we pay a royalty directly to that project. As a result of purchasing one of our Open Source books, Packt will have given some of the money received to the Open Source project.

In the long term, we see ourselves and yourselves, as customers and readers of our books, as part of the Open Source ecosystem, providing sustainable revenue for the projects we publish on. Our aim at Packt is to establish publishing royalties as an essential part of the service and support business model that sustains open source.

To read up on the projects that are supported by the Packt Open Source Project Royalty Scheme, click the appropriate categories below:

All Open Source Projects

Content Management System (CMS)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

e-Commerce

e-Learning

Networking and Telephony

Web Development

Web Graphics and Video

Latest Open Source Articles

GnuCash: Payroll Management, Depreciation, and Owner's Drawing

by Ashok Ramachandran | March 2011 | Open Source

GnuCash is a personal and small business bookkeeping and accounting software. Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, income, and expenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register, it is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports.

In the previous article by Ashok Ramachandran, author of the book Gnucash 2.4 Small Business Accounting: Beginner's Guide, we took a look at why budgets are needed, how to create them, and how to create reports showing budget vs. actual comparison.

In this article we shall cover the following:

  • Employees and payroll: GnuCash doesn't have a payroll module. However, we will show how to enter payroll data for employees. We will also cover employee expense voucher processing.
  • Depreciation: We will recommend ways of setting up accounts for depreciation and making entries.
  • Paying yourself (also known as owner's draw): We will walk through the steps involved in cash withdrawals by the owner.
Read GnuCash: Payroll Management, Depreciation, and Owner's Drawing in full

Tcl/Tk: Handling String Expressions

by Bert Wheeler | March 2011 | Open Source

Tcl (Tool Command Language) is a scripting language originally designed for embedded system platforms. Since its creation, Tcl has grown far beyond its original design with numerous expansions and additions (such as the graphical Took Kit or Tk) to become a full-featured scripted programming language capable of creating elegant, cross-platform solutions.

This article by Bert Wheeler, author of Tcl/Tk 8.5 Programming Cookbook, explains how to create, manipulate, and manage string variables. We will cover:

  • Appending to a string
  • Formatting a string
  • Matching a regular expression within a string
  • Performing character substitution on a string
  • Parsing a string using conversion specifiers
  • Comparing strings
Read Tcl/Tk: Handling String Expressions in full

New Features of OpenVPN 2.1 and 2.2

by Jan Just Keijser | March 2011 | Cookbooks Networking & Telephony Open Source

This article by Jan Just Keijser, author of OpenVPN 2 Cookbook, will focus on some of the new features found in OpenVPN 2.1 and the upcoming 2.2 release. The upcoming 2.2 release of OpenVPN is mainly a bug-fix release, though a few new directives were introduced. In the last recipe of this article, we will focus on one of them.

In this article, we will cover:

  • Inline certificates
  • Connection blocks
  • Port sharing with an HTTPS server
  • Routing features: redirect-private, allow-pull-fqdn
  • Handing out public IPs
  • OCSP support
  • New for 2.2: the x509_user_name parameter
Read New Features of OpenVPN 2.1 and 2.2 in full

Unpublished

Open Source Project Royalty Scheme

by | March 2011 | Open Source

Believe in Open Source

 

 

 

 

 

Read Open Source Project Royalty Scheme in full

Animating in Panda3D

by Dave Mathews | March 2011 | Open Source

Animation is a crucial component of most 3D applications. Our game is a bit of a special case because our characters are vehicles rather than people, and they don't need walking or running animations. For many video games, that won't be the case. In order to be better prepared for those situations, we're going to use a simple proxy program to discuss some of the aspects of animation and how it's used in Panda3D. Once we've covered that material, we'll employ some aspects of the animation system in our game as well. Our hover cycles may not need a walking animation, but there are pieces of the animation system we can make use of.

The topics we're going to cover in this article by David Brian Mathews, author of Panda3D 1.6 Game Engine Beginner's Guide, will be:

  • Loading Actors and Animations
  • Controlling Animation
  • Blending Animations
  • Creating and using Actor subparts
  • Exposing joints
Read Animating in Panda3D in full

FAQ on Web Services and Apache Axis2

by | February 2011 | Web Services Open Source

This FAQ deals with ways of enabling the SOA functionally in your organization. We discuss three key approaches—existing messaging system, plain old XML, and web services. We then look at the standard bodies of web service and the web service model. Finally, we discuss Apache Axis2 and how to download and use it.

Read FAQ on Web Services and Apache Axis2 in full

Spring Security 3: Tips and Tricks

by Peter Mularien | February 2011 | Open Source

Spring Security exists to fill a gap in the universe of Java third-party libraries, much as the Spring Framework originally did when it was first introduced. Standards such as Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) or Java EE Security do offer some ways of performing some of the same authentication and authorization functions, but Spring Security is a winner because it packages up everything you need to implement a top-to-bottom application security solution in a concise and sensible way. Additionally, Spring Security appeals to many because it offers out of the box integration with many common enterprise authentication systems; so it's adaptable to most situations with little effort (beyond configuration) on the part of the developer.

This article will provide you with a few tips and tricks on Spring Security.

Read Spring Security 3: Tips and Tricks in full

Getting Started With Cocos2d

by Pablo Ruiz | February 2011 | Open Source

Cocos2d for iPhone is a framework for building 2D games, applications, presentations, demos, and more. It was originally made for Python and then ported to IPhone by Ricardo Quesada as an open source project with the MIT license.

In this article by Pablo Ruiz, author of the book Cocos2d for iPhone 0.99 Beginner's Guide, we shall:

  • Learn how to get the example projects (called templates) working
  • Play with those templates
  • Take a look at the basic structure of a Cocos2d game

So let's get on with it.

Read Getting Started With Cocos2d in full

Tips and Tricks for using Alfresco 3 Business Solutions

by Martin Bergljung | February 2011 | Content Management Open Source

Alfresco is an open source content management system written entirely in Java that can be run in a standard Servlet container, such as Apache Tomcat or a JEE server, such as JBoss. The Alfresco platform is built using many third-party open source Java libraries and it's good to know about these libraries as we will use many of them when building extensions and solutions.

This article will take a look at some tips and tricks for using Alfresco, such as:

  • Executing patches in a specific order
  • NTLM authentication
  • Content modeling manageability
Read Tips and Tricks for using Alfresco 3 Business Solutions in full

Enabling Apache Axis2 Clustering

by Afkham Azeez Deepal Jayasinghe | February 2011 | Web Services Open Source

Axis2 has extensive support for clustering. State replication amongst members in the same group as well as cluster management is supported in Axis2. Cluster management refers to managing a single group or several groups of Axis2 nodes. It is also noteworthy that third-party software such as Apache Synapse, which builds on Apache Axis2, also automatically benefits from Axis2 clustering capabilities.

In this article by Deepal Jayasinghe and Afkham Azeez, authors of Apache Axis2 Web Services, 2nd Edition, we will be covering the following areas:

  • Axis2 cluster configuration language
  • Membership management schemes
  • Cluster management

By the end of this article, you will learn the finer details of configuring an Axis2 cluster in a production deployment.

Read Enabling Apache Axis2 Clustering in full
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