As users come to depend on MySQL, they find that they have to deal with
issues of reliability, scalability, and performance–issues that are
not well documented but are critical to a smoothly functioning site.
This book is an insider’s guide to these little understood topics.
Author Jeremy Zawodny has managed large numbers of MySQL servers for
mission-critical work at Yahoo!, maintained years of contacts with the
MySQL AB team, and presents regularly at conferences. Jeremy and Derek
have spent months experimenting, interviewing major users of MySQL,
talking to MySQL AB, benchmarking, and writing some of their own tools
in order to produce the information in this book. In High Performance MySQL
you will learn about MySQL indexing and optimization in depth so you
can make better use of these key features. You will learn practical
replication, backup, and load-balancing strategies with information
that goes beyond available tools to discuss their effects in real-life
environments. And you’ll learn the supporting techniques you need to
carry out these tasks, including advanced configuration, benchmarking,
and investigating logs.

eXtreme .NET shows developers and team leaders how to incorporate eXtreme programming (XP) practices with .NET-connected technologies to create high quality, low-cost code that will build better software. This practical, realistic guidebook systematically covers key elements of XP methodology in the specific context of the
.NET Framework, Visual Studio .NET, Microsoft Visual C#, and related Microsoft .NET-enabled applications.

Leading .NET and XP mentor Dr. Neil Roodyn covers planning, task definition, test-driven
development, user interfaces, refactoring, spiking, pair programming, and much more. Dr Neil offers field-proven advice for everything from automating builds to integrating third-party libraries. He also incorporates valuable exercises and presents a start-to-finish case study that shows exactly how XP and Microsoft .NET interoperate
throughout an entire development project. Coverage includes:

• Where to start if you’ve never used XP or other Agile methods before
• Pair programming: turning .NET programming into a collaborative game
• Test-Driven Development: Making sure your .NET code works as intended, while it’s easiest to fix
• Refactoring: Organizing your .NET code to improve flexibility and enable changes more readily
• Continuous integration and automated build/test: enhancing quality in distributed, component-based systems
• Spiking: using rapid experimentation to validate your expectations about behavior in the .NET Framework
• The importance of customer input to successful projects
• How to test .NET user interfaces and third-party libraries

The Microsoft .NET Framework is today’s most productive development platform. XP represents a fundamental breakthrough in building higher-value software. Combine them: transform your team into an eXtreme .NET team that can accomplish more than ever before. This book will show you how starting with your very next project.

Version 2.0 of the .NET Framework will offer powerful
enhancements to ADO.NET that will give application and service
developers unprecedented control over their data. In A First Look at ADO.NET and System.Xml v. 2.0,
Microsoft’s lead program manager on XML technologies joins with two
leading .NET and XML experts to present a comprehensive preview of
tomorrow’s ADO.NET and System.Xml classes.

Drawing
on the first .NET Framework 2.0 Technology Preview Release, the authors
introduce powerful new techniques for simplifying development,
enhancing flexibility, and leveraging .NET’s new support for emerging
XML standards. They also preview important new synergies between .NET
Framework 2.0, XML, and the next version of SQL Server (code-named
“Yukon”).

This book’s detailed coverage includes:

• Clear explanations of Microsoft’s data-access intentions and directions–so you’ll be ready when .NET 2.0 arrives
• A brief overview of ObjectSpaces–the exciting new technology for using objects that represent and hold their own data
• Major improvements in bulk loading, batch execution, and paging
• Support for truly asynchronous connection and command operations
• In-process server-side cursors for programmatic data processing within stored procedures
• XML class improvements that enhance standards support, promote integration, and maximize performance
• Beyond SQLXML 3.0: leveraging XQuery and XML Views in distributed query processing
• Better support for storing XML data and integrating relational and XML data management
• “Yukon’s” new XML data type: using SQL Server as an XML document store

You probably have your favorite blogs to visit each day, but there are countless other blogs that you could never find on your own and that could potentially be added to the top of your favorites! Blogosphere: Best of Blogs is a collection of the blogs you’ve heard about and the ones still waiting to be discovered. Organized into sections based on interests and moods, you’ll find a listing of the best blogs out there, along with the reasons why they’ve made the list. Complete with searching tips and strategies, Blogosphere will help you find the greatest voices in the blogging universe.

As a system administrator or security professionals, you probably find yourself inundated each day with a deluge of log files from seemingly countless devices, servers, and applications on your network ranging from Windows Server to Snort to your PIX firewall and everything in between. At times, the task of “seeing the forest through the trees” to extract useful, repeatable information from these logs may seem almost impossible. This unique book will show you how to use a combination of open source software such as Tcpdstats, and Snort perfmonitor to create succinct, meaningful reports that give you the big picture of your network’s overall health and well being. So, if you need to analyze and prioritize everything from how much of your bandwidth is devoted to browsing ESPN.com, to the most targeted machines in your IDS logs, this is the book for you. This book teaches IT professionals how to analyze, manage, and automate their security log files to generate useful, repeatable information that can be use to make their networks more efficient and secure using primarily open source tools.

The book begins by discussing the “Top 10″ security logs that every IT professional should be regularly analyzing. These 10 logs cover everything from the top workstations sending/receiving data through a firewall to the top targets of IDS alerts. The book then goes on to discuss the relevancy of all of this information. Next, the book describes how to script open source reporting tools like Tcpdstats to automatically correlate log files from the various network devices to the “Top 10″ list. By doing so, the IT professional is instantly made aware of any critical vulnerabilities or serious degradation of network performance. All of the scripts presented within the book will be available for download from the Syngress Solutions Web site.