Preface

Software Configuration Management (SCM) is one of the first skills a serious developer should master, after becoming proficient with his or her development tools of choice. Unfortunately this doesn't always happen because the subject of SCM is not commonly taught in academic or company training.

Although software is not a material thing, as you cannot touch it, smell it, or taste it, building software can be as complex as building physical things such as cars or planes, if not more so. The main difference between the two worlds lies in the limitations you confront. In the world of developing software there are no physical limitations—the only limit is your imagination.

However, all this freedom can have a downside. A good TV commercial once stated "Power is nothing without control"—if you do not control it wisely, it may start working against you. When developing software, you need to have a manageable team development effort, track and maintain the history of your projects, sustain parallel development on multiple product versions, fix bugs, and release service packs while further developing the applications.

This is where the concept of Software Configuration Management (SCM) comes into play, dealing among other things with source code versioning, tracking development evolution, building, and releasing. Putting it in simple terms, SCM is about getting the job done safer, faster, and better.

While trying to keep the theory to a minimum, this book starts by teaching you what SCM is, why it is important, and what benefits you get by using it, either by working individually or by being part of a team. You will find this part very valuable if you're new to the concept of SCM, because you will be setting your base for understanding what happens in the rest of the book.

Preface

WordPress is an open-source blog engine released under the GNU general public license. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing blogs and though it is chiefly used for blogging, it can also be used as a complete CMS with very little effort. Its versality and ease of use have attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.

If you want to create powerful, fully featured blogs in no time, this book is for you. This book will help you explore WordPress showing you what it offers and how to go about building your blog with the system.

You will be introduced to the main aspects of a blog — users, communities, posts, comments, news feeds — and learn how to manage them using WordPress. You will develop the skills and confidence to manage all types of content, be it text or images, on your blog, and also understand how users interact with the blog. In working through the book you'll be inspired as well as informed, and have the capability and the ideas to make your blog cutting edge and exciting to maximize its impact.

Software development is not just about writing code - we need to manage the entire process.
This book looks at that process, how it can be managed, and how Trac and Subversion can help us achieve this. It combines theory with practical knowledge and experience that most developers will relate to.
Trac is an open-source, web-based project management and bug-tracking tool. Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue-tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Trac is written in the Python programming language. In computing, Subversion (SVN) is a version control system (VCS). It allows users to keep track of changes made to any type of electronic data, typically source code, web pages, or design documents.

What This Book Covers

Chapter 1 covers the basics of task management and how these apply to software development. It also looks into another important skill needed for managing projects—communication—and discusses the problems faced during software development and how they can be solved.
Chapter 2 introduces the various applications used for implementing the solution discussed in the chapter. Trac and Subversion are the main parts of the solution, but by no means the only ones.
Chapter 3 along with the appendices shows how to install these applications on Microsoft Windows or Linux.
Chapter 4 discusses how to create and use documentation using Trac.
Chapter 5 brings us back to the topic of task management and we again focus on Trac and how it helps us with this.

Ruby on Rails is an open-source web application framework ideally suited to building business applications, accelerating and simplifying the creation of database-driven websites. It has been developed on the Ruby platform.
This book is a tutorial for creating a complete website with Ruby on Rails (RoR). It will teach you to develop database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller pattern. It will take you on a joy ride right from installation to a complete dynamic website. All the applications discussed in this book will help you add exciting features to your website. This book will show you how to assemble RoR's features and leverage its power to design, develop, and deploy a fully featured website.

What This Book Covers

Chapter 1 gives you an overview of the features of Ruby and RoR, as well as providing the various ways of installing, configuring, and testing both Ruby and RoR.
Chapter 2 introduces you to the basics of Ruby as well as the main concepts and components of RoR.
Chapter 3 makes you understand the design of tables according to the conventions of RoR, creation of scaffolds for tables, and changing the scaffolds according to the requirements.
Chapter 4 gives you details about how to set up the User Management module for the website called TaleWiki.
Chapter 5 makes you familiar with the Login Management and Comment Management modules for TaleWiki.

Learning the Yahoo! User Interface Library was written to help people with a basic knowledge of JavaScript and web design principles to quickly get up to speed with the UI library developed by Yahoo. The book covers a selection of some of the most established utilities and controls found in the library, but it does not go into detail on any of the beta or experimental components.

Each chapter of the book focuses on one, or a maximum of two, individual utilities or controls, and is broken down into theory and practice sections. The theory sections of each chapter discuss the benefits of the component being looked at, the situations it would be most useful in and looks at the classes from which it is constructed. The code sections walk you through implementing and configuring the component in step by step detail.

No previous experience of the YUI library is required, although an understanding of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS is assumed. Other technologies such as PHP and mySQL are used in places throughout the book, although these are not explained in great detail as they fall outside of the book's scope.

By the time you finish this book you'll be well on your way to mastering the library and will have increased the number of web design tools and techniques at your disposal exponentially.