While personal blogs take up much of the blogosphere, blogs are quickly gaining popularity in business as an inexpensive and amazingly effective marketing tool. It’s time for a practical book about business blogging: this is the first book to demonstrate how businesses are blogging and how you can use blogging technology to converse with your customers to build your brand and sell your products.

Written from the business person/designer’s perspectives, this book shows how businesses can leverage current, real-world blogging techniques, tools, and platforms to promote and enhance their ventures. The key idea is that the conversation with your market is stronger and more meaningful with a blog. Filled with practical information and a how-to approach, this book provides case studies of companies as large as Boeing or General Motors and as small as Clip-’n-seal. Readers will learn about the types of business blogs, how companies use blogs, how to sell blogs to management and IT, effective blog design, content, and conversation, pitfalls to avoid, how to develop Web presence, and more.

This developer’s guide takes a practical and code-oriented approach to provide the essential skill set and examples that are needed to develop and implement applications with InfoPath. A CD-ROM is included with full source code and samples from the book.

Introducing a clear path toward event excellence

A comprehensive guide to essential competencies for event coordinators, Professional Event Coordination examines the full event planning process and provides the tools and strategies to effectively procure, organize, implement, and monitor all the products, services, and service providers that will bring an event to life.

After establishing each layer of the anatomy of an event, this in-depth guide covers:

* Event design
* Project management techniques
* Site selection and development
* Infrastructure services
* Entertainment possibilities
* Food and beverage options
* Safety and security
* Inviting attendees

In addition to dozens of checklists, tables, and figures, this complete guidebook is enhanced with On-Site Insights (real-world examples), Technology Tips, and Exercises in Professional Event Coordination (reinforcement exercises that help in preparation for the CSEP certification exam).

A versatile tool that is effective for all types of events-for small functions with ten guests to major festivals with 10,000 attendees - Professional Event Coordination is a valuable book for every professional who works events, including event managers, caterers, event planners, and hotel and food and beverage managers.

Twenty-seven weekends a year, the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference rolls into another town, featuring the world’s best technical speakers and writers. Up until now, you had to go to one of the shows to soak up their collective wisdom. Now, you can hold it in the palm of your hand. The No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology represents topics presented on the tour, written by the speakers who created it. This book allows the authors the chance to go more in depth on the subjects for which they are passionate. It is guaranteed to surprise, enlighten, and broaden your understanding of the technical world in which you live.

The No Fluff, Just Stuff Symposium Series is a traveling conference series for software developers visiting 27 cities a year. No Fluff has put on over 75 symposia throughout the U.S. and Canada, with more than 12,000 attendees so far. Its success has been a result of focusing on high quality technical presentations, great speakers, and no marketing hype. Now this world-class material is available to you in print for the first time.

Look beyond the hype–new and noteworthy and what Vista really means for tomorrow’s desktop.

Covers the Beta 2 release of Windows® Vista

An unbiased, unvarnished sneak peek at everything that’s new, noteworthy, and ready for prime time in Windows Vista.

Microsoft Windows Vista Unveiled is an in-depth exploration of the public release Beta 2 version of Windows Vista, Microsoft’s next major operating system and the successor to Windows XP. Whether you’re just planning ahead for a future upgrade or running Beta 2 already, Microsoft Windows Vista Unveiled takes you on a detailed tour of all the new and improved technologies, features, tools, and programs that Microsoft programmers have stitched into the Vista fabric. You will learn not only what features are new in Vista, but also why they’re important (or not), who they were designed for, and how they will affect your computing life. The goal of this book is to give you an exhaustive sneak preview of Vista’s innovations and changes so that by the end of the book you should know whether Vista is for you and what you can expect when you sit down in front of this new operating system.

Iterative processes have gained widespread acceptance because they help software developers reduce risk and cost, manage change, improve productivity, and deliver more effective, timely solutions. But conventional project management techniques don’t work well in iterative projects, and newer iterative management techniques have been poorly documented. Managing Iterative Software Development Projects is the solution: a relentlessly practical guide to planning, organizing, estimating, staffing, and managing any iterative project, from start to finish.

Leading iterative development experts Kurt Bittner and Ian Spence introduce a proven, scalable approach that improves both agility and control at the same time, satisfying the needs of developers, managers, and the business alike. Their techniques are easy to understand, and easy to use with any iterative methodology, from Rational Unified Process to Extreme Programming to the Microsoft Solutions Framework.

Whatever your role–team leader, program manager, project manager, developer, sponsor, or user representative–this book will help you

18 + Hours of “Real-World” Cisco Video Training taught by an Expert Instructor! Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933, will teach you the “ins and outs” of Cisco Routing with his very powerful teaching methods, making your experience both fun and rewarding. You will be well prepared to manage Cisco equipment on company networks AND you will be well prepared to pass the CCNP BSCI exam!

With the release of Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME), Sun Microsystems opened Java to the rapidly expanding Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) market.This comprehensive tutorial and reference provides an in-depth look at developing PDA software with J2ME and PersonalJava, covering both Palm and PocketPC devices. Succinct and practical, Java(TM) Development on PDAs focuses on real-world programming tasks with extensive code examples and an end-to-end PDA application demonstrating techniques for integrating devices with the enterprise via Web services.

This book describes the J2ME platform and PersonalJava and discusses design issues specific to resource-constrained devices. It also provides in-depth coverage of networking and Internet access, the user interface, data storage, and integrating PDAs into the corporation.

The .NET Developer’s Guide to Windows Security is required reading for .NET programmers who want to develop secure Windows applications. Readers gain a deep understanding of Windows security and the know-how to program secure systems that run on Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000.Author Keith Brown crystallizes his application security expertise into 75 short, specific guidelines. Each item is clearly explained, cross-referenced, and illustrated with detailed examples. The items build on one another until they produce a comprehensive picture of what tools are available and how developers should use them.

The book highlights new features in Windows Server 2003 and previews features of the upcoming version 2.0 of the .NET Framework. A companion Web site includes the source code and examples used throughout the book.

There’s an old saying that goes “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Designing for Cisco Internetwork Solutions helps you learn how to plan a LAN/WAN infrastructure using analysis and modeling techniques to design a network using Cisco components.This CCDA training is cutting edge and focuses on the newest Cisco PDIOO (Plan, Design, Implement, Operate, Optimize) analysis and methodology as well as teaching Cisco Enterprise Composite Network Modeling as the next generation beyond the Cisco 3-layer Design (Access/Distribution/Core). You’ll learn modular analysis and modeling along with the newest multilayer switching technology, routing essentials, IP telephony, IP addressing with NAT and IPv6, Management and more.Instructor Michael Shannon has broken the topics down into easy to understand segments filled with information that you can readily put to use on the job. If you are already certified as a CCNA, this training will give you a lot of background and theory on network design to make you a more knowledgeable and effective IT professional.Exam 640-861 DESGN is the only exam required to earn the Cisco Certified Design Associate certification. A basic understanding of Cisco networking such as a CCNA certification or equivalent knowledge is recommended before viewing these videos. The training contains 16 videos providing more than 8 hours of instruction.