Book review In the last couple of articles I wrote about the problems addressed by agile planning, and the sometimes problematic nature of the approach itself. Perhaps it's not so surprising that for such a relatively new subject, much has been written about it.

Book review Linux, like the other *nix platforms, has a reputation of being a good environment for developers. In fact, Linux and hacking – in the original sense of the word – seem to go hand in hand, so much so that some commentators still find it hard to conceive of it as anything but a server and/or development platform.

Whether the hacker roots of Linux have held it back from becoming a popular end-user platform is a topic for religious dispute. For those developers who've not been raised on the Linux command line, and for whom grep, awk and sed are strange and mysterious things, a book like John Fusco's The Linux Programmer's Toolbox might be regarded as pretty good place to get some guidance.

It is increasingly important to differentiate between Java the programming language and Java the platform.

While there have long been other languages that have targeted the platform, the best known being Jython – a version of the Python language that compiled down to Java byte code to be executed by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) – recent moves have seen the emergence of "official" support for scripting languages (JavaScript, for example), JRuby, Sun's own JavaFX and more.

The Register has teamed up with Microsoft Press to bring you training kits for various Microsoft certification exams with a colossal 40 per cent off the RRP*.

Ace your exam preparation and ramp up quickly on the topics covered in the featured titles, so you are able to maximise your performance on the exams and apply your new found skills and expertise to the job!

Book review While it may appear that object oriented programming has achieved dominance in terms of programming language paradigms, there still exist outposts that refuse to submit to the benefits of polymorphism, encapsulation, and object inheritance.

Book review Process improvement, in the guise of the ‘big three’ frameworks of ISO 9001, CMMI and Six Sigma on the face of it would seem to have much in common and all aim to produce the same end result – improved quality through established and proven processes. With compliance to one or other of these frameworks increasingly being sought by governments and corporations, it’s no surprise that there’s a rush of interest in them now.

Site offer The Easter holiday is upon us, and for many it is the first chance since Christmas to get away from work, put your feet up, and take a break.

Register Books thought it'd give you a break as well and slash the prices of masses of titles in our range by up to 40 per cent for this week only*.

While the methodology wars continue to flourish, and advocates of this process versus that process slug it out to show that they alone are following the one true path, there is one technique that all seem to agree on: the use case.

Site offer C# has enjoyed huge success since its launch, firmly establishing itself as the premier language for development on Microsoft's .NET 2.0 platform.

March 12-16, 2007, saw the Qcon Conference take place at The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster, London. Yours truly, here at El Reg, sponsored the event that was advertised as "organized by the community, for the community."

Book review In addition to the legions of professional Visual Basic programmers, there are still more developers who use VBA and Microsoft Office for automation, customisation or the development of tailored office applications. Many of these are super-users rather full-time developers, but they have depended on VBA to extend and expand what it is they can do with Excel, Office, Access et al.

Book review It is, perhaps, inevitable that the first code you write in a new programming looks suspiciously like code from the language you already know. I can remember my own first Java applications looking suspiciously procedural and C-like. In making those first moves into object orientation, it takes a while before it all makes sense. Even when picking up a new object oriented language things don’t fall into place at once – Python code that looks like weirdly indented Java isn’t so far fetched. Writing code that is idiomatic and fully captures the abstractions and features of a language is a skill that takes time to develop.

Book review Elliote Rusty Harold, acclaimed Java and XML author, recently described Java as the lingua franca of the programming world. According to Harold he can write basic Java and have it understood by non-Java programmers more often than not.

Site offer With reports that UK online sales in the weeks before Christmas hit nearly £7.7bn, and with the emerging markets in the Far East stamping their mark on today's online communities, it is a brave man that will bet against the web developing still further in terms of its importance in global financial markets.

Site offer Vista has finally arrived. As of 30 January, Microsoft's new operating system was released to the general public.

Book review Books on programming language x, technology y, and methodology z are 10 a penny. Bookshop shelves groan under the weight of books promising to teach programming x, y or z in 21 days, 7 days, 24 hours, 10 minutes, 30 seconds...

Site offer You've done it again. Our programming classics article went down a storm and prompted several emails back to Register Books, both praising and suggesting.

CashnCarrion Though IT is one of the fastest changing industries, there are some things that endure the test of time.

I can still remember the wow factor when first seeing a copy of Knoppix booting up on a Windows machine. It was many moons again and the idea of a bootable Linux CD seemed strangely miraculous.

Book review Like SQL and XML, regular expressions are an essential tool in every developers’ toolbox. Processing text, which is pretty much what most programs do when you think about it, is so central a concern that even without regular expressions most developers quickly build up a library of functions and idioms for text matching, replacement, parsing, token extraction etc.

Book review Alistair Cockburn is one of the most prominent and influential of the Agile development gurus. As well as being one of the original authors of the Agile Manifesto, he is also the developer of the Crystal family of agile methodologies and a pivotal figure in the evolution of the Use Case. He is also an articulate and passionate advocate for Agile as a philosophy over and above a set of prescriptive development practices.

Book review Readers have probably noticed that I was a DBA (Database Administrator) in a former life and I'm an enthusiast for the Relational Model.

Book review Although it sounds like something to do with electrical resistance in AC circuits, "impedance mismatch" describes the issues that arise when dealing with the different conceptual bases of object oriented development and relational databases.

Book review Everybody loves Ajax. Javaists, Rubyists, Pythonistas; even Microsofties get to play with Ajax in the form of Atlas. Book publishers love Ajax too, judging by the stack of new titles coming hot off the presses.

Book review This pair of books brings together a variety of small but annoying puzzles mediated by Herb Sutter through the news:comp.lang.c++.moderated newsgroup.

Book review Billed as a possible Java-killer, the huge amount of interest in the Ruby programming language is in no small part due to the popularity of the Ruby On Rails framework.

Book review If nothing else, the Agile development movement has hit on a good brand. Agile has so many positive connotations – fast, graceful, dynamic. Come on, who doesn’t want to be Agile? Besides, the alternatives don’t have a handy label to grab on to. Formal methodologies? The Unified Process? Arthritic programming… Nope, Agile wins that battle hands down.

Book review This book is aimed at practising Java and .NET developers, at a fairly novice level, who want to take advantage of the strong points of each of the two platforms in a single applications environment.

The No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) symposia have achieved a reputation for providing the geekiest content to its developer audiences. Primarily focused on Java and open source technologies, the symposia major on delivering sessions devoted to leading edge technologies presented by the leading practitioners. Audiences are deliberately kept small, and the usual presenter/audience barrier is actively discouraged. The aim is to encourage sharing of knowledge and experience as much as possible.

Book review This book is the 2006 revision of the key guide to SPARK, a programming language founded on formal proof and static code analysis.

Building a configurable, flexible and highly interactive community web site from scratch is no mean feat. Get the technical implementation right and you might have a vibrant and active community coalesce around your site. Get it wrong and you’re left with dead web real-estate that’s dressed right but is going nowhere. However, thanks to PHP-Nuke, most of the hard work has been done up front. And, for the would-be community site developer who doesn’t have the time to read manuals, Packt Publishing has even taken the hard work out of figuring what to do post-installation.

Book review The Unified Modelling Language (UML) has firmly established itself as the lingua franca of the object oriented development world. It offers the right levels of abstraction, independence from programming language implementation to make it pretty much ubiquitous.

Book review It seems it was only yesterday that the Tiger was escaping into the wild, and here we are today with Mustang rearing up ahead, and the Dolphin already surfacing here and there.

Tech Digest From the UK's leading gadgets blog Tech Digest

Okay, maybe not the beach - if you're spending a couple of weeks sunning yourself abroad you might want a break from technology, even in paper form. But if you're on the lookout for some more weighty reading matter on where all this technology is leading (or just want to make your own robot), we've picked out 10 recent books worth checking out. No, not including the Long Tail one - that's got quite enough recommendations online already.

Book review Subtitled "Game Development for Beginners", The Game Maker's Apprentice is just that, a guide to developing your own games using the free Game Maker games development software (available for download here, if you don’t buy the book).

Book review C++ is the most used language in that most lucrative of fields: financial engineering. Yet most of the people who use it for derivatives have no formal training in programming, and often use C++ as little more than C, or even as a mutant form of Fortran. The results are not always pretty.