Having a web site is almost mandatory whether you are an individual promoting yourself, part of a company showcasing its products or services, or even a member of a band promoting its music, for instance; but unless you want to hire an expert to put your web site together, you’ll need a good deal of experience and knowledge of web technologies to make your site look professional and convincing. Microsoft Office Live provides a complete solution for creating attractive and effective web sites through a series of easy-to-use interfaces. The basic version is free, and you don’t need any coding knowledge to start making use of it.
Learn all the basic functions with Beginning Microsoft Office Live and get advice on how to improve site usability for your visitors, as well as explore more advanced topics. Your web site will soon be better designed and even more effective once you’ve mastered the more sophisticated aspects, such as sending e-mail to and from your site and adding dynamic functionality.

See How To

• Create databases more efficiently using a new results-oriented interface
• Use tools for building a database that makes information easier to find and use
• Import data from other programs, HTML, XML files, and other databases
• Use forms, filters, queries, and reports to capture and analyze data
• Discover ways to prevent data corruption and unauthorized access
• Share your data with others through interactive web pages
• Put your newly acquired skills to work using the online workshops
• Organize information and add impact with clip art, SmartArt diagrams, tables, and charts
• Use Groove and SharePoint Team Services to collaborate and share documents and information
• Prepare for the Microsoft Certified Application Specialist (MCAS) exam

Tired of reading HTML books that only make sense after you’re an expert? Then it’s about time you picked up Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML and really learned HTML. You want to learn HTML so you can finally create those web pages you’ve always wanted, so you can communicate more effectively with friends, family, fans, and fanatic customers. You also want to do it right so you can actually maintain and expand your Web pages over time, and so your web pages work in all the browsers and mobile devices out there. Oh, and if you’ve never heard of CSS, that’s okay - we won’t tell anyone you’re still partying like it’s 1999 - but if you’re going to create Web pages in the 21st century then you’ll want to know and understand CSS.

Learn the real secrets of creating Web pages, and why everything your boss told you about HTML tables is probably wrong (and what to do instead). Most importantly, hold your own with your co-worker (and impress cocktail party guests) when he casually mentions how his HTML is now strict, and his CSS is in an external style sheet.

This collection of short expository, critical, and speculative texts offers a field guide to the cultural, political, social, and aesthetic impact of software. Computing and digital media are essential to the way we work and live, and much has been said about their influence. But the very material of software has often been left invisible. In Software Studies, computer scientists, artists, designers, cultural theorists, programmers, and others from a range of disciplines each take on a key topic in the understanding of software and the work that surrounds it. These include algorithms; logical structures; ways of thinking and doing that leak out of the domain of logic and into everyday life; the value and aesthetic judgments built into computing; programming's own subcultures; and the tightly formulated building blocks that work to make, name, multiply, control, and interweave reality.

Want to learn all about Ruby on Rails 2.0, the web application framework that is inspiring developers around the world?

The 2nd edition of this practical hands-on guide for first-time Ruby on Rails programmers will walk you through installing the required software on a Windows, Mac or Linux computer. And before you get coding, an entire chapter is devoted to object oriented programming in Ruby, so you'll be completely confident with the Ruby language before you begin working with Rails.

The example application that the book builds - a user-generated news web site - is built upon with each following chapter, and concepts such as sessions, cookies and basic AJAX usage are gradually introduced. Different aspects of Rails, such as user authentication, session cookies, and automated testing are explored with each feature that is added to the application.

The book finishes with chapters on debugging, benchmarking and deployment to a live web server.

By the end of the book, you'll have built a fully-featured Web 2.0 application and deployed it to the Web. And all code is up-to-date for Rails 2.0, so you can begin coding immediately with the latest version of Rails.

Now in its new edition, this book continues to provide a comprehensive, accessible, and up-to-date introduction to the dynamic field of computer science using a breadth-first approach. The table of contents and the text itself have been revised and expanded to reflect changes in the field, including the trend toward using Web and Internet Technology, the evolution of Objects, and the important growth in the field of databases. Specifically, chapter three from the previous edition has been expanded into two chapters. Chapter three will now only cover Operating Systems and the new chapter four will focus on Networks and the Internet. Anyone interested in gaining a thorough introduction to Computer Science.

Flex 3 is the next generation of a technology that revolutionized web applications. It is the next evolutionary step of Flash, which has grown from a web animation medium to a powerful enterprise web design and development platform. With nearly 98% of all web browsers, and a growing number of mobile devices, running Flash Player, a knowledge of Flex is indispensible for any serious web developer.

This book will show you how to create powerful Rich Internet Applications using Flex 3. After learning how to install and becoming familiar with the basics of the Flex Builder 3 software, you will explore in depth how the Flash scripting language, ActionScript 3.0, interacts with Flex's powerful XML-like design language: MXML.

You'll learn how to construct your applications using layout and navigation containers, and how to move between various states using transitions. There is coverage of how best to plan your applications and use the Model-View-Controller pattern to keep various aspects of development separated and ease creation of potentially complicated projects.

Feel the power of VBA and Excel

No one can uncover Excel’s hidden capabilities like "Mr. Spreadsheet" himself. John Walkenbach begins this power user’s guide with a conceptual overview, an analysis of Excel application development, and a complete introduction to VBA. Then, he shows you how to customize Excel UserForms, develop new utilities, use VBA with charts and pivot tables, create event-handling applications, and much more. If you’re fairly new to Excel programming, here’s the foundation you need. If you’re already a VBA veteran, you can start mining a rich lode of programming ideas right away.

Everything you need to know about:

* Creating stellar UserForms and custom dialog box alternatives
* Working with VBA subprocedures and function procedures
* Incorporating event-handling and interactions with other applications
* Building user-friendly toolbars, menus, and help systems
* Manipulating files and Visual Basic® components
* Understanding class modules
* Managing compatibility issues

Beginning PivotTables in Excel 2007 explains what Pivot Tables are, how you can benefit from using them, how to create them and modify them, and how to use their enhanced features. Using a Pivot Table in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 is a quick and exciting way to slice and dice a large amount of data.

• Carefully explains the benefits of using Pivot Tables for fast data analysis
• Provides a step-by-step approach to those new to Pivot Tables
• Offers tips and tricks that cannot be found elsewhere

What you’ll learn

• Summarize thousands of records in a Pivot Table with a few clicks of the mouse.
• Quickly change the Pivot Table layout to view a different summary of the data.
• Filter a Pivot Table to focus on one region or the top 10 products.
• Add colors or icons to highlight the high or low results.
• Use calculations to enhance the Pivot Table summaries.
• Create visual impact with a pivot chart.

First you'll learn how to build out your shared, virtual, or dedicated host. Then, you'll see how to build your applications for production and deploy them with one step, every time. Deploying Rails Applications will take you from a simple shared host through a highly scalable clustered and balanced setup with Nginx. See how to tell whether you've bought enough firepower, and learn how to optimize your Rails projects applications in a systemic, rational way. Take advantage of advanced caching techniques, and become and expert with the latest servers in Nginx and Mongrel. Don't worry. You'll get a dose of Apache too. Not only will you learn how to configure your production environment, you'll also see how to monitor it with free, automated tools that can restart your servers when the memory use gets too high for comfort. You'll see how to take a performance baseline, profile for bottlenecks, and solve the most common performance problems you're likely to see.