Buy two O'Reilly books and get another book free

O'Reilly is celebrating February 2007 as the Web Design and Development month. And they have put together a special resource page dedicated to web development essentials including books, PDF Short Cuts, articles, and author events.

The highlight of the event is the above average discounts they are providing for all these web development titles which includes a massive 35% off for each title you buy (use the code 'DSUG' on their site) and if you buy two titles, you get a third one free (use the discount code 'opc10'). It is one option or the other. You cannot obviously get 35% off and a free book simultaneously as the discount codes are different. But seeing the line up of books, I can only say that this is a good opportunity to pick up a couple of web development books. I especially find the "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide" book rather tempting. Explore more web titles on the special resource page. There's also free ground shipping in the US on orders over $29.95.

Introducing a new installation wiki in the neighbourhood

If you ask me to start naming some content management system, I can start with Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and so on and then will not know when to stop. Seriously, there are innumerable content management or blogging systems around. Someone told me that he started counting the blogging tools available in order to get an idea in numbers and he was still counting when he reached the number 200.

Now add to this backend programs such as databases and web servers which play a pivotal role in the working of CMSes and we have a whole lot of software on our hands. Keeping this huge mountain of software in mind, Packt Book publishers who are on the forefront in publishing books related to CMSes (they publish books related to other subjects too) has rolled out a new Wiki called InstallationWiki.org which caters to explaining how to install most of these software on your machine either locally or remotely. It has divided the tutorials into 8 broad categories namely "Open Source", "Content management systems", "Web development", Databases, Java, PHP, "Microsoft and .NET" and finally "Networking and telephony".

Already there are a growing number of tutorials and howtos mostly related to CMSes on this site. But considering that this is a Wiki, which anyone can edit, this project shows a lot of promise. Also one should keep in mind that the tutorials listed on the Wiki bear the seal of approval of Packt Books thus one can expect to find quality articles on this site. Do check out the article on PHPMyAdmin for instance to know what I mean... In the past, I have reviewed a couple of Packt books such as the one on Oscommerce ,IPCOP, Wordpress, Drupal and so on and I have found each of them to contain very useful information.