Tech, Computer Science, Open source, and related links

Slashdot.org is a good news site. I go there often, for any sort of tech news or information. The humor section is good, too. There are areas in Slashdot for Macs, *BSDs, all sorts of GNU/Linux/open source projects, even Microsoft.

Oreilly.com, home of O'Reilly & Associates, publishers of fine computer books. Just because it's an O'Reilly book doesn't mean it's the best one, but it might be. A good place to look for books first.

Mozilla

Mozilla: the browser of choice. IMHO, much better than ie, I like it better than Netscape also. It looks the same as Netscape, but has more features than Netscape6. I have not compared it to Netscape7, but Netscape7 was actually based on Mozilla. There should be enough information in these links to get you interested...

Mozilla.org: Home of the Mozilla development project.

Mozdev.org: Free project hosting for developing Mozilla applications. You may ask, "What is the difference between mozilla.org and mozdev.org?" See the link for the answer. Also of interest may be Creating Applications with Mozilla, a guide to using css, html, xml and javascript with Mozilla to create web applications. Very interesting.

MozillaZine is an online zine covering Mozilla, Phoenix, Chimera, and related projects and development. Lots of good information and links.

Of course, you shouldn't forget to read Neil Deakin's 101 things you can do with Mozilla 1.2 that you cannot do with IE 6.0.

Free and Open Books and Information

You can never have too much information. There's plenty of it on the internet, and in case you're having trouble finding it, search no more.... Java

Java.sun.com, the obligatory link to Java's home. There's plenty of good information here, however, not to mention documentation.

The book Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel is available for free download, and is a great resource. A list of download mirrors can be found here.

Netscape has lots of documentation, on a variety of web technologies. Here also you can find the home of core javascript documentation, just in case you were looking for some. Oh, you weren't? Oh well....

Softpanorama.org is a great resource for technical information. Many, many links. Not to mention, they have an entertaining open source humor archive. Not for open source fundamentalists.

O'Reilly's Open Books Project has some high quality free online publications, some of which are out of print O'Reilly books, others which are licensed under the GPL or Open Content license, and so are available for free online. A few of my favorites are:

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar, an essay on Open Source development by Eric Raymond.
• Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's crusade for Free Software, by Sam Williams. A very interesting book.
• Learning Debian GNU/Linux by Bill McCarty. Out of print, and probably a bit out of date; still a fine resource for a Linux newbie or someone curious about the OS.
• Linux Network Administrator's Guide, the second edition, by Olaf Kirch & Terry Dawson.
• Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, O'Reilly and Associates. Essays and writings from Eric Raymond, Linus Torvalds, rms, Tim O'Reilly, and various others.

The Linux Documentation Project: an online library of Linux/Open Source guides, HOWTOs, links; too much information. It's worth going to visit just to realize how much information you can obtain without even getting a book...

The Jargon File, aka the New Hacker's Dictionary. Fun to browse.

Free Books is just that; a list of links to free books on the internet. Some of those on this list have direct links to from this page already.

FreeTechBooks is an easy to navigate site with a good list of programming, OS, and other Comp-Sci-ish material. Has a couple popup ads; but that won't bother you, because you're using the latest version of Mozilla or Phoenix, right?

The Secret Guide to Computers; the whole book seems to be available online now. Note: I just happened to be browsing this book online, and it looks like the `Java' page is missing. Everything else seems to be intact, but I'm not about to check the entire thing....

Don't forget Project Gutenberg, which has hundreds of free books, none copyright infringed or `pirated', though not too many of these will be technical in nature.