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Supply Chain Management (SCM) is not a buzzword like many others in management and IT - it is here to stay. "Megatrends" such as globalization and increasing specialization result in a complex division of labor at national and international levels. Lean and agile supply chains have become a major anagement target, and the interorganizational coordination of business processes has become highly relevant. The complexity of today's supply chains cannot be mastered without the support of powerful information systems. SAP has established itself as the market leader in this type of IT systems. The book describes SCM using a pyramidal framework and relates it to the SAP SCM Solution Map. Desired features of IT support for SCM are formulated, and the extent to which SAP systems provide these features is shown. We describe the functionalities of SAP APO™ in detail, present case studies on implementing and running SAP SCM™ systems, and discuss SCM aspects of the new SAP Business ByDesign™ approach.

Magento is the hottest and most powerful e-commerce software around and it has gained massive popularity in a short period. By using Magento's powerful theming engine, you can control the look, content, and functionality, and easily launch a flexible e-commerce web site. However, because of its powerful features, developing Magento themes is easier said than done.

Magento 1.3 Theme Design covers everything you need to build effective, attractive themes for your Magento store. You will learn how the theming system works, how to build your own look on top of the Magento Blank Theme, how to give different looks to different parts of your store, and much more.

We start off by introducing you to Magento and its basic themes and then take you through the benefits of changing your store's theme. We then move on to the actual Magento theme design, where you will learn the basics, such as changing the logo, color scheme, and so on. Next, we take a look at more advance tasks where you will learn theme layouts. You will then prepare a Magento theme from scratch and also take a look at Magento templates and layouts. You will also learn how to promote and improve your Magento store with the use of social media such as Twitter, social bookmarks, and so on and how to define a good print style. Finally, you will learn Magento Theme Deployment in detail.

What you will learn from this book?

• Create a custom theme that gives a unique branded look and feel to your Magento stores
• Edit an existing Magento theme to satisfy your business needs
• Give different looks to different parts of your store
• Tricks and tips for making your Magento theme design easier
• Style your store ready for printing by defining a good print layout
• Share your Magento theme with others in the community through Magento Connect extensions
• Embed social media tools to promote and improve your Magento store
• Deploy your new Magento theme to your store
• Create and use non-default Magento Themes
• Discover the basis of Magento themes: templates, skins, and layout

Approach

Magento 1.3 Theme Design is a step-by-step guide to creating custom themes for Magento. The author's experience in Magento theming enables him to design a book that lessens the steep learning curve associated with Magento theming. The author uses code examples and ideas that facilitate learning and make Magento theme development a great learning experience.

Who this book is written for?

Magento 1.3 Theme Design is written for those who are familiar with Magento and know the Magento basics and now want to customize the look and feel. The book assumes familiarity with CSS and (X)HTML. The book is also aimed at store owners who want to customize their e-commerce store and web designers who want to sell their custom-made Magento themes. Seasoned theme designers will find very useful tips and hints in this book.

About the Author

Richard Carter (http://www.EarlGreyAndBattenburg.co.uk ) started as a freelance web designer working in Leicestershire during his gap year. After meeting his business partner at Durham University, he co-founded Peacock Carter (http://www.peacockcarter.co.uk ), a Newcastle-based creative partnership specializing in web design and development and corporate identity.

If you are a developer building a high-traffic web site, you need to have a terrific search engine. Sites like Netflix.com and Zappos.com employ Solr, an open source enterprise search server, which uses and extends the Lucene search library. This is the first book in the market on Solr and it will show you how to optimize your web site for high volume web traffic with full-text search capabilities along with loads of customization options. So, let your users gain a terrific search experience.

This book is a comprehensive reference guide for every feature Solr has to offer. It serves the reader right from initiation to development to deployment. It also comes with complete running examples to demonstrate its use and show how to integrate it with other languages and frameworks.

This book first gives you a quick overview of Solr, and then gradually takes you from basic to advanced features that enhance your search. It starts off by discussing Solr and helping you understand how it fits into your architecture--where all databases and document/web crawlers fall short, and Solr shines. The main part of the book is a thorough exploration of nearly every feature that Solr offers. To keep this interesting and realistic, we use a large open source set of metadata about artists, releases, and tracks courtesy of the MusicBrainz.org project. Using this data as a testing ground for Solr, you will learn how to import this data in various ways from CSV to XML to database access. You will then learn how to search this data in a myriad of ways, including Solr's rich query syntax, "boosting" match scores based on record data and other means, about searching across multiple fields with different boosts, getting facets on the results, auto-complete user queries, spell-correcting searches, highlighting queried text in search results, and so on.

After this thorough tour, we'll demonstrate working examples of integrating a variety of technologies with Solr such as Java, JavaScript, Drupal, Ruby, XSLT, PHP, and Python.

Finally, we'll cover various deployment considerations to include indexing strategies and performance-oriented configuration that will enable you to scale Solr to meet the needs of a high-volume site.

What you will learn from this book?

• Blend structured data with real search features
• Import CSV formatted data, XML, common document formats, and from databases
• Deploy Solr and provide reference to Solr's query syntax from the basics to range queries
• Enhance search results with spell-checking, auto-completing queries, highlighting search results, and more.
• Secure Solr
• Integrate a host of technologies with Solr from the server side to client-side JavaScript, to frameworks like Drupal
• Scale Solr using replication, distributed searches, and tuning

Approach

The book takes a step-by-step tutorial approach with fully working examples in Java. It will show you how to implement a Solr-based search engine on your intranet or web site.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for developers who would like to use Solr for their applications. You only need to have basic programming skills to use Solr. Knowledge of Lucene is certainly a bonus.

About the Author

David Smiley

Born to code, David Smiley is a senior software developer with 10 years of experience in the defense industry using Java and various web technologies. David is a strong believer in the open-source development model and has made small contributions to various projects over the years.

David began using Lucene way back in 2000 and was immediately excited by it and its future potential. Later on he went to use the Lucene-based "Compass" library to construct a very basic search server similar in spirit to Solr. Since then, David has used Solr for a larger search project and was able to contribute modifications back to the Solr community. Although preferring open-source solutions, David has also been trained on the commercial Endeca search platform and is currently using that product as well as Solr for a different project.

Eric Pugh

Fascinated by the "craft" of software development, Eric Pugh has been heavily involved in the open source world as a developer, committer, and user for the past 5 years. He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and lately has been mulling over how we move from the read/write web to the read/write/share web.

In biotech, financial services, and defense IT, he has helped European and American companies develop coherent strategies for embracing open source software. As a speaker he has advocated the advantages of Agile practices in software development.

Eric became involved in Solr when he submitted the patch SOLR-284 for Parsing Rich Document types such as PDF and MS Office formats that became the single most popular patch as measured by votes! SOLR-284 became part of Solr version 1.4.

 

Cacti is a web-based, PHP/MySQL graphing solution to monitor network bandwidth with SNMP using the RRDTool engine—developed by Tobi Oeticker who is already the creator of the famous MRTG. RRDtool is a program developed in C and it stores collected data on .rrd files. Cacti's strength lies in the fact that it can be installed and used easily. You don't need to be a guru or spend hours to configure it. Also, the official forum for Cacti is very active and supports Cacti users and there are lots of Cacti templates that can save your time. You can also add plug-ins to Cacti enabling the possibility of integration with other open source tools such as ntop or PHP Weathermap. This is the best RRDtool frontend.

 
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IT SHOULD BE possible to build a portal by plugging components from different vendors into a portal from any vendor. These components are portlets, and we explain how to build them in this book.

The noble aim of the portlet specification—which arose from Sun’s Java Community Process with the collaboration of Sun, IBM, BEA, and others—was to simplify the process of tying applications into a portal by allowing them to cooperate. That so many vendors have come together to standardize their existing proprietary solutions bodes well for the future of this technology.

We believe that portlets and the portlet API will become at least as important to Java application developers as the servlet API has been because portlets make building a truly integrated system that much easier. Any new portal development projects should select a portal that supports the portlet API because independent software vendors now need to write portlets for only one API, not a dozen.

Both of us enjoy working with new technology, and there are a lot of new standards for portals, content management systems, business rules, and web services. We hope that you will enjoy learning about portal development as much as we enjoyed writing this book!

The Zend Framework is one of today’s most popular PHP–based web application development frameworks. Beginning Zend Framework is a beginner’s guide to learning and using the Zend Framework. It covers everything from the installation to the various features of the framework to get the reader up and running quickly.

What you’ll learn

• Install and configure the Zend Framework.
• Create your first Zend Framework web application.
• Explore controllers and actions, views, form creation, validation, and filtering.
• Build and access the database layer with Zend_Db.
• Develop a Send/Receive e–mail application using Zend_Mail.
• Integrate web services and feeds, and create and incorporate a search engine.
• Complete your web application by looking at performance optimization.

Who is this book for?

This book is for the beginning to intermediate Web developer who primarily uses PHP.

About the Apress Beginning Series

The Beginning series from Apress is the right choice to get the information you need to land that crucial entry–level job. These books will teach you a standard and important technology from the ground up because they are explicitly designed to take you from “novice to professional.” You’ll start your journey by seeing what you need to know—but without needless theory and filler. You’ll build your skill set by learning how to put together real–world projects step by step. So whether your goal is your next career challenge or a new learning opportunity, the Beginning series from Apress will take you there—it is your trusted guide through unfamiliar territory!

About the Author

Armando Padilla has over 10 years in the PHP community, and has contributed PHP development of asset management tools to both Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Saturday Night Live, and recently contributed to the Zend Frameworkâ€"powered Dundermifflininfinity.com social networking web site, an NBC.com project for The Office. He is currently an active PHP developer at Yahoo!, and is working on his MS in the computer science, semantic web, and data mining fields.

In April 2005, Linus Torvalds published the very first version of Git, the distributed version control system that is the topic of this book, and started managing the Linux kernel project with it.

Countless online pages have been written about Git by third parties since then, but many of them are unfortunately obsolete—not in the sense that the procedures they teach no longer work, but in the sense that there are better ways to do the same things more effectively with more modern versions of Git. The rate at which Git has undergone vast improvements both in capability and usability has been simply too rapid for those pages to keep up.

For a long time, the user manual and the documentation that came with Git were the only up-to-date and accurate sources of information, but they were primarily written by the people who built Git. The Git community sorely lacked good introductory material written from the perspective of the end user.

Enter Scott Chacon, the author of this book, who is also behind git-scm.com, the popular online resource that has become the default home site for Git documentation. In this latest book, Scott makes effective use of graphics to explain the key concepts and writes in plain and clear language to give a readable overview of how to work with Git.

After you gain a solid understanding from this book, I hope you will find yourself being more productive and using Git more effectively.

And, more important, I hope you will enjoy using Git.

Back in the 1990s one of the common questions asked of online professionals was, ‘ what were you doing before the Internet? ’ The answers were many and varied and helped understand the drift of the ensuing conversation. Today, the most common answer is, ‘ I was in school ’ , delivered with a quizzical look as if wondering what on earth people did ‘ before ’ the Internet.

By the time I met Steve Jackson he had already started Aboavista and was happily posting to the Conversion Chronicles – long before we knew it was going to be called a blog. This was after he had tackled total quality management, KAIZEN and measuring standard deviations of the processes and end products within the automobile industry. This was after he had spent the later 1990s as a freelancer designing websites for companies that wanted online brochures, and after doing A/B/C/D split test print runs of 10,000 direct marketing pieces in preparation for sending out a million letters.

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