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.
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:
Content Management System (CMS)
Latest Articles
Unity 3.x Scripting-Character Controller versus Rigidbody
by
Devon Kraczla Volodymyr Gerasimov | June 2012 | Open Source
Character controller is extremely important part of any game. Essentially, it allows us to interact with it, control our alter-ego, shoot, explore, and do all kinds of crazy stuff. Most common character controller is humanoid, in general it needs to know how to walk, run, jump, attack, it needs to camera rig that will be accompanying it throughout play. All these actions need to be supported on a programming level and we will look into a way that it can be done in Unity. This article by Volodymyr Gerasimov and Devon Kraczla, the authors of the Unity 3.x Scripting, will help you to:
- Learn Character Controller versus Rigidbody – pros and cons
- Teach player-controlled character walk, run, jump, and shoot
- Program camera controls and switching between different camera types with a press of a single button
- Learn script animations to follow character's actions
Android Database Programming: Binding to the UI
by
Jason Wei | June 2012 | Open Source
As mobile developers, our applications will need to both aesthetically display the results of our data queries, as well as give users an intuitive interface to store and insert data.
In this article by Jason Wei, author of Android Database Programming, we will focus on the former – on binding data to the user interface (UI) and will look specifically at various classes that will allow us to bind our data in the form of lists (the most common and intuitive way to display rows of data).
Read Android Database Programming: Binding to the UI in fullConstruct Game Development: Platformer Revisited, a 2D Shooter
by
Daven Bigelow | June 2012 | Open Source
Construct Classic is a free, DirectX 9 game creator for Windows, designed for 2D games. Construct Classic uses an event-based system for defining how the game behaves, in a visual, human-readable way - you don't need to program or script anything at all. It's intuitive for beginners, but powerful enough for advanced users to work without hindrance. You never know when you’ll need a helping hand exploring its inner workings, or harnessing its raw power to do your bidding.
In this aticle by Daven Bigelow author of Construct Game Development Beginner's Guide, we shall:
- Learn how to make a two-player platformer
- Learn how to make objects shoot projectiles and create muzzle flashes
Understanding the True Security Posture of the Network Environment being Tested
by
Lee Allen | May 2012 | Open Source
There is a good possibility that your potential clients will not understand the benefits of performing a full penetration test. Simply enumerating the known vulnerabilities in a network environment is not suffcient to truly understand the effectiveness of the corporation's combined security controls; we need to prove that the vulnerabilities found have a potential to impact the bottom line. After all, this is what your clients need to know and understand about their environment.
In this article by Lee Allen, author of the book Advanced Penetration Testing for Highly-Secured Environments: The Ultimate Security Guide, we will review some interesting techniques and methods that will let us understand the true security posture of the network environment we are testing.Items of interest discussed in this article include the following:
- Transferring files to and from the victim machine
- Password cracking with John the Ripper
- Brute forcing with THC Hydra
- Metasploit—learn it and love it
Supporting hypervisors by OpenNebula
by
Giovanni Toraldo | May 2012 | Open Source
OpenNebula is one of the most advanced and highly scalable open source cloud computing toolkits. If you ever wanted to understand what Cloud Computing is and how to realise it, this is your way.
This article, by Giovanni Toraldo author of OpenNebula 3 Cloud Computing, guides you through the various hypervisors which are supported by OpenNebula. We will cover the following topics in this article:
- Configuring hosts
- Configuring sudo
- Configuring network bridges
- Managing hosts in OpenNebula
- Networking drivers
- KVM installation
- Xen installation
- Installing on Debian Squeeze through standard repositories
- Installing Xen through sources
- Installing VMware ESXi
- Installing Libvirt with ESX support
Read Supporting hypervisors by OpenNebula in full
Building Objects in Inkscape
by
Bethany Hiitola | May 2012 | Open Source
This article by Bethany Hiitola author of Inkscape Beginner's Guide is all about objects. We'll learn about what objects are and how Inkscape interprets them, how to change object features, change fill and stroke, grouping objects, combining objects, and how to best use the masking and clipping features.
Details in this article include:
- Working with objects
- Fill and Stroke
- Grouping
- Clipping and masking
Creating Modal-Dialogs Grids and Collapsible Blocks
by
Andy Matthews Raymond Camden | May 2012 | Web Services Open Source Web Development
In this article, we will:
- Discuss how to link to and create dialogs – also how to handle leaving them
- Demonstrate grids and how you can add them to your pages
- Show how collapsible blocks allow you to pack a lot of information in a small amount of space
In this article by Raymond Camden, co-author of jQuery Mobile Development Essentials, we will look at dialogs, grids, and collapsible blocks.
Read Creating Modal-Dialogs Grids and Collapsible Blocks in fullHours 1-12: Your Quest Begins!
by
Christer Kaitila | April 2012 | Beginner's Guides Open Source
This article by Christer Kaitila, author of The Game Jam Survival Guide focuses on the early stages of a Game Jam. These most important first few hours will set the state for the rest of your experience. Topics that we will cover include:
- Dealing with the Game Jam theme
- An example of a winning entry
- Coming up with a plan of action
- Brainstorming and prototyping
Collaboration Features in Alfresco Share
by
Amita Bhandari Pallika Majmudar Vinita Choudhary | March 2012 | Content Management Open Source
Alfresco Share offers a number of such features out-of-the-box. These are features that ensure effective task management. These are completely customizable if need be. The numerous technologies and tools that Alfresco supports ensures that no, or minimal, change be made to the enterprise's existing infrastructure.
Enterprises have a number of tasks that require its people to be able to effectively manage their tasks and schedules. For the purpose of managing intra- and inter-team events, a variety of collaboration tools like calendars, forums, and so on are available. More often than not, there are tools independent of each other, or they may not be compatible with existing systems that are in place.
In this article by Pallika Majmudar, co-author of Alfresco Share, we shall understand the various collaborative features like wiki, blogs, data lists, calendar, discussions, and lists features that Share has on offer.
By the end of this article, you will have learned about:
- Wiki pages and blogs in Share
- Managing data lists
- Creating events in Alfresco Share
- Effective collaboration through discussions
- Managing and creating data lists
Read Collaboration Features in Alfresco Share in full
Introduction to Logging in Tomcat 7
by
Tanuj Khare | March 2012 | Web Services Open Source
Logging services play a vital role in the life of the administrator and developer to manage the application from the phase of development to production issues. It's the logging services that help you to find the actual problem in the web application. Also, it plays an essential role in performance tuning for many applications.
In this artice by Tanuj Khare, author of Apache Tomcat 7 Essentials, we will look at the logging features in Apache Tomcat 7. We will cover the following topics:
- Logging services in Tomcat 7
- JULI
- Log4j
- Log level
- Valve component
- Analysis of logs
Latest Books and eBooks from Packt
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- Learn how to better administer your IBM Cognos 10 environment in order to improve productivity and efficiency.
- Empower your business with the latest Business Intelligence (BI) tools.
- Discover advanced tools and knowledge that can greatly improve daily tasks and analysis.
- Explore the new interfaces of IBM Cognos 10.
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- Full of illustrations, diagrams, and tips with clear step-by-step instructions and real-time examples.
- Get to know the visual and declarative programming model offered by ADF.
- In depth coverage of ADF business components and ADF binding layer.
- Teaches you the ADF best practices and fine-tuning tips.
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- Learn to leverage the power of Spring Security to keep intruders at bay through simple examples that illustrate real world problems
- Each sample demonstrates key concepts allowing you to build your knowledge of the architecture in a practical and incremental way
- Filled with samples that clearly illustrate how to integrate with the technologies and frameworks of your choice
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- Track customers on your websites and apps and improve conversion rates right away
- Customize your tracking for every application and situation
- Embed Piwik’s tracking capabilities in other applications
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- Master all that Java 7 has to offer for concurrent programming
- Get to grips with thread management, the Fork/Join framework, concurrency classes and much more in this book and e-book
- A practical Cookbook packed with recipes for achieving the most important Java Concurrency tasks
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- Full of illustrations, diagrams, and tips with clear step-by-step instructions and real world examples
- Gain a strong foundation of WPF features and patterns
- Leverage the MVVM pattern to build decoupled, maintainable apps
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- Create 3D games that run on Android devices, Windows, Mac OS, Linux desktop PCs and in web browsers – for commercial, hobbyists, or educational purposes.
- Follow end-to-end examples that teach essential concepts and processes of game development, from the basic layout of a scene to interactive game characters.
- Make your artwork come alive and publish your game to multiple platforms, all from one unified development environment.
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- Provides over a hundred practical recipes that utilize PowerShell to automate, integrate and simplify SQL Server tasks
- Offers easy to follow, step-by-step guide to getting the most out of SQL Server and PowerShell
- Covers numerous guidelines, tips, and explanations on how and when to use PowerShell cmdlets, WMI, SMO, .NET classes or other components
- Builds a strong foundation that gets you comfortable using PowerShell with SQL Server--empowering you to create more complex scripts that you need in your day-to-day job
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- Learn how to go about developing some simple, yet powerful applications with ease.
- Each chapter explains about the technology in-depth, whilst providing you with enough information and examples to help grasp the technology.
- Get to grips with integrating Facebook, iCloud, Twitter and Airplay into your applications.
- Lots of step-by-step examples with images and diagrams to get you up to speed in no time, with helpful hints along the way.
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- Full step-by-step approach to help structure your apps in an MVC style that will make them more maintainable, easier to code and more stable
- Learn best practices and optimizations both related directly to JavaScript and Titanium itself
- Learn solutions to create cross-compatible layouts that work across both Android and the iPhone and utilize the new Appcelerator Cloud Services to bring your apps to the market faster than every before
