"Living Green: The Missing Manual" for only $9.99. Use discount code DDLGM to get your savings!...

Can HTML rival print for quality? I took a fresh look at hyphenation, body text fonts, sidebars, and dynamic layout.

Myth of China's Manufacturing Prowess -- The latest data shows [...] that the United States is still the largest manufacturer in the world. In 2008, U.S. manufacturing output was $1.8 trillion, compared to $1.4 trillion in China (UN data. China’s data do not separate manufacturing from mining and utilities. So the actual Chinese manufacturing number should be much smaller). Also contains pointers to an interesting discussion of lack of opportunities for college grads in China. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Wired is leading the magazine-to-iPad charge with a great looking app, but it's also reverting to some back lock-in habits. Instead of trapping content and readers within a space -- a true exercise in futility -- Wired and other publishers should go the other way with their iPad offerings: create more web hooks, not less.

A fun follow up to my previous post about writing outside of technology. This one focuses on my childrens picture books and a series called Bugville Critters. All 16 of my original Bugville Critters books have been published. The latest...

Chickenfoot -- Firefox plugin to let you script and manipulate web pages. Useful for automation, like Greasemonkey, but acts on the rendered page and not the HTML source. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Join Joe Albahari (C# 4.0 in a Nutshell and LINQ Pocket Reference) in an interactive session on the new and upcoming features of LINQPad. We'll demonstrate support for C# 4.0, the new extensibility model and some exciting enhancements to autocompletion and other new developments in the next beta. You'll get a chance to talk with Joe on feature requests, future direction, and LINQPad's emerging role as a scratchpad for C# 4. Attendance is limited, so register now! Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

Are you a creative type that would like to get started with designing and prototyping with Processing? In this excerpt from Visualizing Data Ben Fry introduces the Processing Environment and quickly gets you sketching with Processing. Processing is a simple programming environment that was created to make it easier to develop visually oriented applications with an emphasis on animation and provide users with instant feedback through interaction. Read more.

QuickBooks 2010: The Missing Manual for only $9.99. Use discount code DDQB2 to get your savings!...

Since our limerick contest was such a hit last year, we decided to host it again! Today, we're encouraging you to write a limerick that is either tech-themed or that references O'Reilly Media or one (or more) of our books, conferences, or webcasts. Anything goes, so long as it fits the standard form of a limerick and is a PG rating. We'll run the contest until 11:59pm PDT and then randomly pick three winners out of a hat to win a free ebook of your choice.

I've puzzled over Google's Fiber project ever since they announced it. It seemed too big, too hubristic (even for a company that's already big and has earned the right to hubris) -- and also not a business Google would want to be in. But the FCC's announcement of their plans to widen broadband Internet access in the US puts Google Fiber in a new context. The FCC's plans are cast in terms of upgrading and expanding the network infrastructure. That's a familiar debate, and Google is a familiar participant. This is really just an extension of the "network neutrality" debate that has been going on with fits and starts over the past few years.

One week into its public launch, the Google Apps Marketplace has just under 1,500 (enterprise) apps. Combined with Salesfore.com's app exchange (also with over a thousand apps), enterprises interested in moving to cloud apps have an increasing number of software tools to choose from.

A couple Google Buzz experiments with long-form posts hint at a new use for the service. It's emerging as a hybrid option in the social/publishing space; a spot that's well equipped for deeper inquiry and conversation.

Even if you're new to Excel, this live presentation with Michael Milton will get you using pivot tables like a champ. Pivot tables let you put together in seconds data summaries that would take forever to create with Excel formulas. That speed gives you the ability to get answers about your data as quickly as you can think up questions for it. Pivot tables are one of Excel's most versatile features, but they can be tough to break into. Attendance is limited, so register now! Check out our Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events!

"Building Social Web Applications" for only $9.99. Use discount code DDBSW to get your savings!...

The all new Windows Phone 7 Series holds a promise to be an amazing personal mobile phone with new innovative user interface and functionality, as well as a great development platform on which you can quickly and easily build games and applications. I hope you are ready to start coding your first Windows Phone (WP) application and get hands-on experience with the platform. Learn more about Windows Phone programming now.

Modeling Scale Usage Heterogeneity the Bayesian Way -- people use 1-5 scales in different ways (some cluster around the middle, some choose extremes, etc.). This shows how to identify the types of users, compensate for their interpretation of the scale, and how it leads to more accurate results. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

After blogging about talking to government departments and scientists about truly open data, talking up an "open source approach" to data, pushing hard to get them to release datasets in machine readable formats with reuse-friendly licenses, readers sent me a lot of interesting links. I've collected them all to share.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know for only $9.99. Use discount code DD97T to get your savings!...

Recently, I became interested in maximizing lookup performance in R. Many problems require looking up values in tables. I decided to perform some tests to show how different lookup mechanisms performed in R. If you're not familiar with R, here's a short description. R is a very popular language (and environment) for working with data. You can download a current version from The R Project web site. R was designed to make it easy to define and manipulate vectors and matrices.