Activities of BOJUG
Hi Folks!
We are meeting on 21 March, 2009 for our next meet:
Sessions
Please sign up at http://bojug.wikispaces.com
Date & Venue:
Saturday, 21st March 2009
Starting time: 11.00 AM
Thoughtworks, Diamond district
Old Air Port Road
Bangalore
Posted in Uncategorized.
New Releases: Books, Short Cuts, and Rough Cuts
Get 35% off from O’Reilly, No Starch, Paraglyph, PC Publishing, Pragmatic Bookshelf, Rocky Nook, SitePoint, or YoungJin books you purchase directly from O’Reilly. Just use code “DSUG” when ordering online or by phone 800-998-9938.
Free ground shipping on orders of $29.95 or more. See details.
Did you know you can request a free book or PDF to review for your group? Ask your group leader for more information.
For book review writing tips and suggestions, go to: http://ug.oreilly.com/bookreviews.html
New Releases: Books, Short Cuts, and Rough Cuts:
O’Reilly School of Technology
O’Reilly School of Technology Courses: UG Members Receive a 30% Discount
O’Reilly School of Technology has opened its virtual doors with educational offerings and certification for IT students looking to further their careers or to launch one. As an O’Reilly User Group member, you save on all the courses in the following University of Illinois Certificate Series:
In today’s economy, it’s crucial to stay competitive in Information Technology. With the O’Reilly School of Technology, you can do just that–at your own pace, with 1-to-1 instructor support, real tools, and free books.
New Java Programming Course Java Programming 1: Introduction to Java and the Eclipse Development Environment! We are especially excited about this course, because it is the first course to utilize Ellipse, our brand-new Learning Sandbox built on the Eclipse open-source IDE. This is the first course in our upcoming Java Programming Certificate Series. The Java Programming 2 and 3 courses will be released very soon as they are in their final editing phases.
To redeem, use Promotion Code “ORALL1″ good for a 30% discount, in Step #2 of the enrollment process. Each course comes with a free O’Reilly book and a 7-day money-back guarantee. Register online. (This discount may not be combinable with other offers.)
News from O’Reilly & Beyond
UG News
Listen to the O’Reilly Week in Review
Get some O’Reilly on your iPod! Every week, we take the wisdom of O’Reilly, and squeeze it down into a bite-sized podcast you can listen to on the go. The O’Reilly Week in Review features excerpts from interviews, tips from authors, roundtable discussions from the editors, and a quiz that can score you a free O’Reilly book. Subscribe via iTunes or search for “week in review” on the O’Reilly web site to listen from your browser.
Can Subversion help teams work better? Tell us and you could win one of 10 great prize packages!
Are you on a team that works with shared documents? If so, you know what a headache version control can be. The good news is that there is a remedy: Subversion, a simple yet powerful open-source document management tool that streamlines the versioning process. O’Reilly, Beanstalk, Versions, and CollabNet–four companies who make working with Subversion even easier–want to hear your best stories about how Subversion has or could help your team. Tell us your story by March 6, 2009 and enter to win one of 10 Prize Packages.
State of the Computer Book Market 2008
As described in Computer Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator, and our other posts on the State of the Computer Book Market we have an updated series of posts that show the whole market’s final 2008 numbers.
Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book
In O’Reilly Insights on Forbes.com, Tim O’Reilly boldly predicts that “unless Amazon embraces open ebook standards like epub, which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years.” In the new column, O’Reilly explains why he’s thrown his support behind “epub and other open ebook standards, providing our books as “ebook bundles” that give the reader the choice of pdf (still the only viable choice for many highly formatted books like our Head First series of “brain friendly” tutorials that even HTML can’t handle), epub, and mobi, an HTML-based predecessor to the Kindle format that lacks digital rights management but that can be imported into the Kindle.”
Deke McClelland’s Martini Hour Visualization Contest Details
The basic idea is simple; create a graphic that can be used to promote Martini Hour that features some Deke, some Colleen, and some Martini or other refreshing beverage. You can use the raw materials we have posted in the dekeOnline Flickr group. Or you can use anything you like. (Remember, Deke likes costumes and weapons.)
Twitter Drives Traffic, Sales: A Case Study
Back in December, Dell reported that offers from its Dell Outlet Twitter account had led to more than $1 million in revenue. A small percentage for a company that books $16B in revenue annually–but a nice number nonetheless, particularly in a dreary economy. Question is: are they the only ones?
Call For Makers: Maker Faire Bay Area 2009
We are now accepting entries for the Maker Faire Bay Area, May 30 and 31 at the San Mateo County Expo Center. This year’s focus is Re-Make America, inspired by President Obama’s call for all of us to participate in remaking America. We’re looking to showcase “the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things.”
Sneak Peek at iWork ‘09 & Share Your Tips Contest
Currently available as a Rough Cut, the new book will teach you everything you need to know about Apple’s incredible productivity programs, including the Pages word-processor, the Numbers spreadsheet, and the Keynote presentation program that Al Gore and Steve Jobs made famous. Read an excerpt from Josh Clark’s work in progress, (adapted for the web). Then, take a minute to share an iWork ‘09 tip and you could win free access to iWork ‘09: The Missing Manual: Rough Cuts Version.
What You’ll Find in “Ruby Best Practices”
When Ruby Best Practices first entered roughcuts, Gregory Brown passed on a couple copies to some reviewers to see what they thought, and Peter Cooper summed things up pretty accurately.
And here’s a sample chapter “Mastering the Dynamic Toolkit” in PDF.
Ignite Launches Weekly Video Series Highlighting the Best of GeekCulture
Ignite captures the best of geek culture in a series of five-minute speed presentations on topics ranging from “The Best Way to Buy a Car” to “Hacking Chocolate” to “Transhuman Technology Trends.” Imagine that you’re on stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, doing a five-minute presentation using a slide deck that auto-forwards every 15 seconds, whether you’re ready or not. What would you do? What would you say? Could you stand the pressure? Every week, find out how some of the smartest minds on the planet dealt with this situation as your host, Brady Forrest, highlights a different talk from Ignites around the world.
Safari Books Online Optimizes for Top Mobile Devices
Safari Books Online Ubiquitous for Users On-the-Go Safari Books Online is now fully optimized to support the top mobile devices in the United States. The new website, m.safaribooksonline.com, optimizes Safari Books Online’s content and reading experience for the majority of mobile phones (such as Nokia, BlackBerry, iPhone, and Windows Mobile), making it possible for users to read while on-the-go.
ETech Preview: Creating Biological Legos
If you’ve gotten tired of hacking firewalls or cloud computing, maybe it’s time to try your hand with DNA. That’s what Reshma Shetty is doing with her Doctorate in Biological Engineering from MIT. Apart from her crowning achievement of getting bacteria to smell like mint and bananas, she’s also active in the developing field of synthetic biology and has recently helped found a company called Gingko BioWorks which is developing enabling technologies to allow for rapid prototyping of biological systems.
ETech Preview: Inside Factory China, An Interview with Andrew Huang
China has become the production workhorse of the consumer electronics industry. Almost anything you pick up at a Best Buy first breathed life across the Pacific Ocean. But what is it like to shepherd a product through the design and production process? Andrew “bunnie” Huang has done just that with the Chumby, a new internet appliance.
BOJUG in association with one of its sponsors, Itspice is proud to announce a technical article contest for its members. Here are the details:
The contest runs from 3rd February, 2009 – 1st March, 2009. Judges’ decision is final. Please send your articles to info@itspice.com
Prizes:
Three prizes. iPod shuffle(First prize), Pendrive (Second), Book vouchers(Third).
For any clarifications, please mail the JUG leader Amit Saha (amitsaha.in@gmail.com)
…By Amit Saha
I have zero experience with Groovy before this. However, I am well versed with the Java language and hence this review should be read from the point of view of a Java guy but a Groovy newbie. My goal in reading this book is get acquainted with the Groovy language and keep the knowledge in my sub-conscious mind so that I am ready when I need it 
Programming Groovy is a great starting point to the Groovy language and more so if you are already decently acquainted with Java . The whole book is divided into three parts, each part looking at different features of the language.
Part I: Beginning Groovy
As the name of this part suggests, in this part of the book, the author begins with instructions on how to go about setting up your system for Groovy development. Among other things, working with the Groovy shell is demonstrated.
Being well acquainted with Java, I skimmed over the chapters 2 and 3. Things are very familiar in these chapters. Chapter 4- Dynamic Typing talks about data types in Groovy and some other essential information of typing in Java world and its counterpart in the Groovy world. This chapter also introduces multi-methods. Chapter 5- Using Closures was the first major interesting roadblock for me. I intended to understand it fully and so I read this chapter and worked on it for a couple of times. Co-incidentally, I was also reading about closures in Common Lisp. You will need to understand at-least, what closures are and how they can be used- Sections 5.1-5.3 (as you will later see) that closures are widely used in Groovy. Most of the times, you will be passing a closure around to standard method calls in Groovy. So, understanding how a closure works is very useful. You may also want to read more about closures here. Chapter 6- Working with Strings, introduces the GString ( he he )- which are interpolated strings, and also talks a bit about the GString Lazy Evaluation Problem. Some other topics include: Groovy’s own String Convenience Methods, and Multiline Strings. The last chapter in this part- Working with Collections talks about working with the usually available data structures: lists, maps and arrays, alongwith the convenience methods made available by Groovy.
Part I is over and I haven’t yet learnt to take a User Input or is it assumed that I am a Java developer?
Part II: Using Groovy
Using Chapter 8: Exploring the GDK, looks at the extensions provided by the GDK to make the JDK more groovy.
In the next three chapters, the author will help you start using Groovy in your daily tasks, like Working with XML files, Databases (GSQL) and mixing and matching Groovy and Java.
Part III: MOPping Groovy
This part of the book looks at the implementation of the Meta-Object Protocol in Groovy and essentially builds upon it to present other very useful concepts such as Unit Testing and Mocking (where you are shown how to write Unit tests for your Java classes in Groovy), Groovy Builders and finally, at Creating DSLs in Groovy. This part can be classified as some serious and advanced Groovy and is a great collection of some very cool concepts in Groovy.
Overall, this book of is a great introduction to Groovy for the Java developer. I am not sure, how non-Java developer would benefit at all from this book, or for that matter Groovy.
Great work by the author and the whole team!To learn more about the book, errata and discussions, please go to http://www.pragprog.com/titles/vslg/programming-groovy
Many thanks to O’Reilly UG program for providing with a review copy to BOJUG.
Posted in BookReviews.
Sathish started his talk on Freemarker to unusually low turnout of aorund 15 people:
I updated the folks on the latest happenings on the group:
We had to pick one person to raffle away the O’Reily book to. Here is how:
Here is the lucky guy:
As usual, Thank You, Tirthankar for the great pics!
Posted in BOJUG.
BOJUG is a proud member of the O’Reilly UG program. One of the coolest things that O’Reilly offers is books for raffling away at the UG meets. I just recieved four O’Reilly books on various Java technologies. Yay!
Stay tuned for clicks!
Hi Folks,
This is the first meet of the new Year Yay!
Please find the details of the next meet as follows:
Date & Time
*Saturday, 31st January 2009*
Starting time: *04.00 PM*
Venue:
Sun Microsystems India Pvt. Ltd.
Himalaya Conference Room,
Ground Floor, DivyaSree Chambers,
Off Langford Road,
Bangalore- 560025
(Landmark: Near Shanthinagar Hockey Stadium)
Sessions:
Getting your feet wet with Freemarker
(http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/) - Sathish Kumar, Senior Engineer
& Consultant, STARMARK
Be ready with your questions
Special Attraction: We have got something for the soul and not for the stomach this time. We have got a O’Reilly Java title to raffle away
If you are planning to attend, please put up your name on the wiki page at http://bojug.wikispaces.com. Putting up your name will help in smooth conduction of the meet.
**PLEASE COME atleast 30 minutes BEFORE the start AS I WILL NEED TO GET SECURITY CLEARANCE ETC..**
See you!
Posted in BOJUG.
Hi Folks!
This is the weblog of BOJUG- Bangalore Open Java Users Group.
More coming up.. As you can see, we barely have anything now. We have got a new home: http://www.bojug.in. Thanks to one of our sponsors, ItSpice.
Posted in BOJUG.
Bojug Discussions Planet NetBeans
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