Computer Beginner Guide

Some people are of the opinion that the command line works one way. You type in a command and hope that you got all of the information right and received the correct result, which you then have to interpret. This entire activity sounds quite difficult, somewhat boring, and error prone to say the least. You have to wonder why someone would put themselves through all that pain. However, the command line isn’t anything like the scenario just mentioned. Actually, if you know a few simple rules, using the command line doesn’t have to be hard at all. The following sections describe some of the methods you can use to work at the command line. Using Utilities Directly Generally, you’ll being using the command line by working with the utilities directly. After all, it’s a little hard to create a batch file or script if you don’t know how the command works. However, using a command doesn’t have to be hard. All you need to remember is two simple characters, /? . That command line sw

You might have been there the day that Microsoft released Windows. The original reason for this product was twofold. First, it let users run more than one application at a time—something that required a kludge at the DOS prompt. Second, it provided a friendly interface that made using a computer easier. No longer did you have to remember command names; all of them appeared on screen so you could simply select the command you wanted to execute. The first version of Windows went over like a lead balloon, and the second version wasn’t far behind, but by the third version, Microsoft had something workable—something people could use to perform their tasks without worrying about the command prompt. Over the years Windows has delivered on its promise to make applications easier to use—at least the applications that you must sit in front of to use. For example, I wouldn’t consider going back to a character mode word processor and I doubt very much that I’d want to write complex ap

Oracle Database 10g is a significant upgrade from prior releases of Oracle. New features give developers, database administrators, and end users greater control over the storage, processing, and retrieval of their data. An Oracle database is a collection of data in one or more files. The database contains physical and logical structures. In the course of developing an application, you create structures such as tables and indexes to store rows and speed their retrieval. You can create synonyms for the object names, view objects in different databases (across database links), and you can restrict access to the objects. You can even use external tables to access files outside the database as if the rows in the files were rows in tables. An Oracle instance comprises a memory area called the System Global Area (SGA) and the background processes that interact between the SGA and the database files on disk. In an Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC), more than one instance will

The installation of Joomla! is a matter of two minutes. To install Joomla!, it would be best to have the dream team mentioned in Chapter 1—Apache, MySQL, and PHP—installed as the development environment. Of course, Joomla! does not make any special demands on Apache or MySQL. So you can also use any other web server that works with PHP. PHP has to be of version 4.1.2 or higher and it should be compiled with support for MySQL and Zlib. Zlib is a library that makes it possible for PHP to read file packages that are compressed with the ZIP procedure. The installation has to be done on a server that can be accessed over the Internet, usually located at the Internet Service Provider. But before we venture into the wilderness of the Internet, we should first practice on our local computer. This is an advantage as there are no connection fees, it is very fast, and we can practice at a leisurely pace. We can even have a small local network at home where we can install Joomla! on

As with all software, there are different development versions with Joomla!. The Joomla! team published a roadmap on September 1, 2005 and started with the Joomla! version 1.0, which is also with what this book concerns itself. The first Joomla! version received the number 1.0, in order to not be confused with existing Mambo versions. Version 1.0 is a revised version of the last Mambo version, 4.5.2.3. The revisions relate to the changed name, known errors, and security patches. Joomla! Versions abide by the X.Y.Z system. X = major release number: It is incremented whenever profound changes are made at the source-code level. The version with the higher number sometimes is not compatible with earlier versions. Y = the minor release number: It is incremented whenever significant changes to functionality are made. The higher version number is usually compatible (with minor customizing) with earlier versions. Z = the maintenance release number: It is incremented whenever

The different functionalities offered by a CMS can be split up into a number of categories. These categories together form the structure of a CMS. Front End and Back End - A CMS consists of a front end and a back end. The front end is the website—what the visitors and the logged-on users see. The back end, on the other hand, contains the administration layer of the website for the administrator. Configuration, maintenance, cleaning, creation of statistics, and new content creation are all done in the back end. The back end is at a different Uniform Resource Locator (URL) than the website. Configuration Settings - Settings that apply to the entire website are specified using the configuration settings. These include the title text in the browser window, passwords for search engines, switches that permit or forbid logging on to the site, switches that switch the entire page offline or online, and many other functions. Access Rights - Whenever we talk of manag

An Australian company, Miro , developed a CMS named Mambo in the year 2001. It made this system available as open-source software to test it and to make sure of a wider distribution. In the year 2002, the company split its product Mambo into a commercial and an open-source version. The commercial variant was called Mambo CMS, the open-source version Mambo Open Source (MOS). In the meantime, all parties involved agreed that MOS can officially be called Mambo and together a successful future for the fastest developing CMS of the moment was secured. The advantages of the commercial version for companies are primarily in increased security and the fact that they have the company Miro, which also supports further development, as a partner. The advantage the open-source version offers is that it is free and that an enormous community of users and developers alike provide continuous enhancements. In addition, it is possible for enterprises to take Mambo as a base and to build t

Before you can understand how to operate Joomla!, allow me to explain the basic principles that underlie the Joomla! Content Management System. Content Management System (CMS) contains the terms content and management (administration) that imprecisely refer only to a system that administers content. Such a system could be a board and a piece of chalk (menu or school chalkboard), or it could be something like Wikipedia (the free online encyclopedia), or an online auction house such as eBay . In all these cases, content is administered; at times even for a large number of participants as in the case of the last two examples. These participants play a major role with the CMS, on one hand as the administrators, and on the other hand as users. In general, the term content management is used in connection with web pages that can be maintained by a browser. This doesn't necessarily make the definition any easier. Apart from CMSs there are Enterprise Resource Planning System

The following outline each of browsers and what role they play in web development. Microsoft Internet Explorer Internet Explorer is Microsoft’s browser that comes preloaded with the Windows operating system. The current version, as of this writing, is version 6. Microsoft discontinued development of the Internet Explorer browser as a standalone application for Windows and announced that Internet Explorer will no longer be developed for other operating systems. That translates into no more Internet Explorer for the Macintosh. Instead, Microsoft plans for Internet Explorer to be completely integrated with its next operating system, codenamed Longhorn. Internet Explorer will no longer be its own application but a smaller part of the larger operating system. Consequently, updates to Internet Explorer will only be available with operating system updates and upgrades. In the meantime, updates to the current Internet Explorer 6 browser will come in the form of service packs and

HTML, XHTML, and XML are best written using a plain text editor. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors such as Microsoft Word aren’t ideally suited for mark-up because the environment is not ideal for the composition of source code. WYSIWYG programs often have features like AutoCorrection and line wrapping; a plain text editor is more appealing precisely because it does not have these automatic features. Furthermore, the more automated WYSIWYG editors are designed to write the source code for you behind the scenes, so you don’t have complete control over the structure and formatting of the source code. In contrast, a plain text editor doesn’t insert anything into the source code beyond what you type into the text editor. The Windows Notepad program is one example of a text editor that is ideal for composing source code. To launch Notepad, choose Start > Run and then type Notepad in the Open text box. You can also use Microsoft FrontPage, but FrontPage is best

Cascading Style Sheets, fondly referred to as CSS, is a simple design language intended to simplify the process of making web pages presentable. Put simply, CSS handles the look and feel part of a web page. With CSS, you can control the color of the text, the style of fonts, the spacing between paragraphs, how columns are sized and laid out, what background images or colors are used, as well as a variety of other effects. CSS was created in language that is easy to learn and understand, but it provides powerful control over the presentation of a document. Most commonly, CSS is combined with the markup languages HTML or XHTML. These markup languages contain the actual text you see in a web page—the paragraphs, headings, lists, and tables—and are the glue of a web document. They contain the web page’s data, as well as the CSS document that contains information about what the web page should look like. HTML and XHTML are very similar languages. In fact, for the majority of d

HTML, XHTML, and XML are all based on SGML, which stands for Standard Generalized Markup Language. SGML is the parent of tag-based languages like HTML, XHTML, and XML, although it is not limited to these three examples. SGML defines what it means to be a tag-based language. Like SGML, HTML, XHTML, and XML are acronyms for more complex names: HTML: HyperText Markup Language XHTML: eXtensible HyperText Markup Language XML: eXtensible Markup Language Some debate exists about which markup language is best and why. Most HTML coders don’t bother to follow the W3C standards, which provide a way to create web documents that behave predictably from browser to browser and from platform to platform. Standards provide a level-playing field for development. They allow the document to be designed in such a way that it can reach the largest audience with the least amount of effort. The tag, for example, a simple HTML tag that can set a font face, size, and color, has been deprecated (a

By using Cascading Style Sheets for the presentation of a web document, you can substantially reduce the amount of time and work spent on composing not only a single document, but an entire website. Because more can be done with less, Cascading Style Sheets can reduce the amount of hard disk space that a website occupies, as well as the amount of bandwidth required to transmit that website from the server to the browser. Cascading Style Sheets have the following advantages: The presentation of an entire website can be centralized to one or a handful of documents, enabling the look and feel of a website to be updated at a moment’s notice. In legacy HTML documents, the presentation was limited only to the document. CSS brings a much needed feature to HTML: the separation of a document’s structure from its presentation. Users of a website can compose style sheets of their own, a feature which makes websites more accessible. For example, a user can compose a high-cont

During the mid-1990s, use of the Internet exploded. At that time, HTML was the only option for presenting a web page. As the Internet began to be used by more regular folks (as opposed to government, educational institutions, and researchers, as in the early days), users began demanding more control over the presentation of HTML documents. A great quandary arose; clearly HTML alone was not good enough to make a document presentable. In fact, not only was it not good enough, HTML alone simply wasn’t suited for the job. HTML did not have the functionality that professional publishing required and had no way of making magazine-or newspaper-like presentations of an electronic document. At the time, style sheets were not a new invention. In fact, style sheets were part of the plan from the beginning of HTML in 1990. Unfortunately, however, no standardized method of implementing style sheets was ever outlined, leaving this function up to the various browsers. In 1994, Tim Berne

If you haven’t installed Linux on your machine yet and are wondering whether you can, it is relatively safe to say that Ubuntu will run on most machines out there today. Of course, this statement comes with a major caveat: You just never know until you get up and running. There are so many minor parts to your machine that it is difficult to say whether each part will cooperate with your installation. Ignoring minor parts for the time being, there are video cards, sound chips, LAN cards, monitors, and so on, and they all need to be considered. If you are going to buy a new machine on which to run Ubuntu, then it is reasonable enough to do a bit of worrying and check things out first, but if you are going to install it on the machine you have, I recommend just diving in. After all, you don’t really have to install anything the first time out. If you have a live CD, just pop that CD in your drive, boot up your machine, and, biff, bam, zowie, you’ll be up and running (or not)

Ubuntu is a completely free, easy-to-use, and extremely popular Linux distribution that is geared toward the desktop user. It is one of the hottest Linux distros in the marketplace today. It is also one of the few Linux distros with what could be described as a social agenda behind it. Ubuntu was the brainchild of South African millionaire entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, who is probably better known for being one of the first space tourists—the first African in space, to be exact. Shuttleworth invested over $10 million starting up the Ubuntu Foundation based on his belief in free software and in order to fix what he describes as “bug #1”—Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop PC marketplace. As Shuttleworth states in his blog (available at wiki.ubuntu.com/MarkShuttleworth ): I believe that free software brings us into a new era of technology, and holds the promise of universal access to the tools of the digital era. I drive Ubuntu because I would like to see that promise

An operating system consists of a lot of files that perform a lot of different functions. And because there is no Linux corporation to package and distribute the files that make up Linux, the task of getting Linux onto your computer in working order, along with the applications that you are likely to want, has fallen to a varied group of entities—companies, universities, user groups, and even private individuals. These entities create Linux system and application collections called distributions, or distros. You could bypass such distros and try to collect everything you’d need to set up a system all on your own, but you would undoubtedly lose your mind in the process. Most people, even the geekiest, opt for the distros. The majority of these distros, whatever their ultimate target audience, basically consist of the same main elements: the core operating system (better known as the Linux kernel), some sort of installer program to get all the system parts and applications

People use Linux for different reasons. For many it is a matter of power, stability, multilingual capabilities, or even personal philosophy. However, for others, crass as it may sound, it is a matter of money. Just think for a moment about what it usually costs to get started with an operating system. Go to wherever it is you go to buy software, and take a walk down the aisles. Make a list in your head of all the things you want to buy and how much each costs: an office suite; a game or two; maybe a graphics program with which to make yourself look better in your digital photos; and a collection of all those firewall, antispam, antivirus, and anti-adware programs that you really need to protect yourself in the Windows world. Now do the math. After you pick yourself up off the floor, you will understand that we are talking big bucks here. On the other hand, for the price of this book you will have all of the things you wanted and more in the Linux world. Despite the worries

Your computer, despite being a collection of highly sophisticated parts, is really just . . . well, a collection of highly sophisticated parts. On its own, it can do nothing other than switch on and off and spin a disk or two. In order for it to do anything truly useful, it needs an operating system (OS) to guide it. The OS takes an essentially well-endowed but completely uneducated hunk of a machine and educates it, at least enough so that it will understand what you want it to do. You already know of and have probably used at least one of the many operating systems that exist today. Windows, DOS, and the Mac OS are all such operating systems, and Linux is yet another. Linux is, however, different from these other operating systems, both in terms of its capabilities and its heritage. Linux was not created by a corporation or by some corporate wannabes out to make money. The Linux core, referred to as the kernel, was created by computer enthusiast Linus Torvalds, a Finn a

Learning how to move around the Excel grid quickly and confidently is an indispensable skill. To move from cell to cell, you have two basic choices: Use the arrow keys on the keyboard. Keystrokes move you one cell at a time in any direction. Click the cell with the mouse. A mouse click jumps you directly to the cell you've clicked. As you move from cell to cell, you see the black focus box move to highlight the currently active cell. In some cases, you might want to cover ground a little quicker. You can use any of the shortcut keys. The most useful shortcut keys include the Home key combinations, which bring you back to the beginning of a row or the top of your worksheet. ., Excel also lets you cross great distances in a single bound using a Ctrl+arrow key combination. These key combinations jump to the edges of your data. Edge cells include cells that are next to other blank cells. For example, if you press Ctrl+ → while you're inside a group of cells wi