11 Thursday May 2023
Posted in Books
Apress has made one of their InfoSec books freely available in EBook format here. It isn’t the most up-to-date text, but it does deal with a lot of the ideas, principals45, and issues rather than low-down detailed specifics, meaning it still holds a lot of relevance today (e.g. Social Engineering4), Cryptography, Malware, etc). So if you want an easy starter read into this space that’s free you can’t go wrong with this.
13 Wednesday Apr 2022
Tags
book, free, oreilly, WASM, WebAssembly
Red Panda is currently making the O’Reilly book by Brian Sletten – WebAssembly the Definitive Guide free to download (well, the price of your email address).
So why is worth snagging a download? Well, WebAssembly (Wasm) is the new way to deliver browser-based solutions to a client without having to develop with JavaScript. As a result, you have the chance to reuse more of your existing code. It also has the benefit of having been precompiled to a binary form, offering code security and compact download. But Wasm also has been seeing adoption in back-end server solutions as well, particularly for feature extensions, etc.
29 Monday Nov 2021
Posted in development, General, Oracle, Technology
Today was the first run of some new presentation material looking at the use of GitHub Actions using Runners deployed on OCI Free Tier. The presentation was actually physical rather than virtual which was after 2 years of virtual presenting, rather refreshing. Not to mention the UKOUG hosted the event at the Oval Cricket ground, which made for an interesting venue. The example configuration is included in our GitHub OCI Utilities repository (as we use this solution to help validate and test our development work).
The presentation itself (which includes screenshots of the setup of a simple Action and runner) is here, note I have disconnected my Runners, but you will be able to see the Action configuration but if you try to trigger activity through my repository then nothing will happen.
05 Monday Jul 2021
Posted in Cloud, development, General, Oracle, Technology
Tags
@oracledevs, @soacommunity, actions, always free, arm, CICD, Cloud, flake8, free, GitHub, OCI, Oracle, pytest, python, unit test
While there is a deserved amount of publicity around the introduction of ARM compute onto OCI with the ARM Ampere CPU offering, and the amazing level of always free compute being provided (24GB of memory and 4 cores which can be used in any combination of servers). There have been some interesting announcements that perhaps haven’t drawn as much attention that they deserve. This includes OCI support for GitHub Actions, plus several new DevOps services and an Artifact Registry. We’ll comeback to the new services in another post. Today, let’s look at GitHub Actions.
Continue reading04 Monday Nov 2019
Posted in Cloud, General, Oracle, Technology
Tags
CloudEvents, CNCF, events, free, Functions, Notifications, Oracle
The news about Oracle offering some free cloud services ‘for life’ is making an impact. But, the free services don’t end there. The pricing of some other native cloud services includes some free bands. So it’s worth keeping an eye on the fine print. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see limited capacity access in other areas.
Oracle Functions – whilst the core of this service is built on the open-source Fn Project (also largely driven by Oracle) the managed service has a free tier allowing up to 2 million invocations that can consume 400, 000 gigabytes of memory per second use (details can be seen here). Plenty enough to experiment with the concepts behind Serverless aka FaaS capabilities.
Oracle Notifications whilst focussed on the technical side of gathering key event data from OCI and its services, as the document states “sending notifications to numerous interested parties, or even synchronizing the moving parts of a distributed application” – this obviously means a service with characteristics a bit like AWS’ SNS. Like SNS it can be hooked up to email and other HTTPS services using Oracle Events which also has free use. Events is particularly interesting as it is bases the event structure on the CNCF CloudEvents spec. There is an excellent illustration of such a use case in the Oracle blogs here.
It will be interesting to see if we a similar trend with other Oracle cloud-native services. A new take on the now-defunct Application Container Cloud Service (ACCS) would be an ideal vehicle – whether there is sufficient demand for such a capability is not clear (it would in effect be an always live service like a Kubernetes solution, but the simpler, smaller footprint more like Functions in a multi-tenant environment. At the same time, it doesn’t have potential latency of a Function being activated).
27 Tuesday Sep 2016
Posted in Books, General, Technology
Tags
architecture, Big Data, booklet, books, creative commons, Design, development, ebook, ebooks, free, open books, oreilly, vJUG
I received an email through the virtual Java User Group highlighting the availability of a couple of eBooks around Java published by O’Reilly. The details are below. The books are more booklets (nothing wrong with that). The key difference being that they are shorter and focused on one or two focused subjects (in this case Java 8’s Lambda’s & Streams) which is great because I don’t want a whole Java book again, I just want to get a handle on the key changes and language innovations. It is worth highlighting that these aren’t just ‘free chapters’ which is what you see happen sometimes as the goal of the book is described, doesn’t depend on prior chapters to work the illustrated material and structured with the appropriate cover material contents, index etc so works as a discrete entity.
This approach seems to be coming more common at O’Reilly at least as a marketing device, and we have seen this being done with the Dummies brand where the booklets have then been printed as conference give aways.
Some may argue that this is a reflection of our ever shortening attention span with books. This maybe the case for some, but I suspect it is more about providing some that is more digestible than a ‘free chapter’, but more importantly reflects the recognition that for books that are providing guides (as opposed to reference books – which I’d include patterns books) people don’t want to buy a latest edition of a book where the 1st chapters are exactly the same as the previous edition of the book and that the only significant change is a new section on Lambdas for example.
Any way the latest book details received are:
by Raoul-Gabriel UrmaOffers a practical tutorial to some of the core Java 8 features and gets you programming quickly with Java 8.by Richard WarburtonExplains the similarities and differences between functional programming and object oriented programming with Java focused examples.http://insightfullogic.com
@RichardWarburto
The other book(lets) that have drawn my attention to the trend include:
In addition to these Book(let)s O’Reilly offer a range of ‘reports’ such as:
In addition O’Reilly have a page on ‘Open Books’ (here) – covering significant texts O’Reilly have had some involvement in but published under licenses such as Create Commons.
25 Tuesday Aug 2015
Packt have made another Oracle book available for free today as part of their Free Learning initiative. For the next 24 hours you can get a book on Oracle Data Integrator 11g Cookbook from https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning
19 Wednesday Aug 2015
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Packt
Might be a little early for Packt, but I have completed reviewing the 2nd Edition of Java EE with Eclipse for Packt now. So the book should be available in the next couple of months.
On the subject of Packt, the Free Learning scheme they are running continues. I’ve seen a couple of books repair since the start of the promotion. But for main part each day is new and different and covers a wide range of things from JQuery and Node, to Hadoop and into Drupal and WordPress. So worth checking back on a daily basis.
All of this means time to do some more Oracle writing.
05 Tuesday May 2015
Packt are repeating the promotion that they ran earlier in the year where each day they give away a free ebook. The books so far are (at least from my perspective) a little niche – developing for Kinect for example. Go check it out each day until the 17th you might see something that works for you.
05 Thursday Mar 2015
Posted in Books, General, Oracle, Technology
Tags
So Oracle Press have been celebrating 20 years of publications. As part of that celebration they have over the year offered a number of eBooks for free. The UKOCN site have pulled a list of these free books together along with relevant links for request the ebooks – go checkout http://www.ukocn.com/article/oracle-press-free-copies – if this link doesn’t work (UKOCN maybe preventing deep links) then go to http://www.ukocn.com/ and visit articles, and you should see an article called “ORACLE PRESS FREE COPIES!”. at the time of writing this post this is on the homepage of listed articles.
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