News

Gigapolis and Gravitas released in electronic form for free!

Featured Books

Modern Perl: 2011-2012 edition

by chromatic

January 2012

In 1987, Perl 1.0 changed the world. In 2012, modern Perl programs are shorter, faster, more powerful, and easier to maintain than their alternatives. This productivity can be yours, whether you've dabbled with Perl for a decade or someone just handed you this book and said "Fix this code by Friday."

Modern Perl is suitable for programmers of every level. It's more than a Perl tutorial—only Modern Perl focuses on Perl 5.12 and 5.14, to demonstrate the latest and most effective time-saving features. Only Modern Perl explains how and why the language works, to let you unlock the full power of Perl.

Hone your skills. Sharpen your knowledge of the tools and techniques that make Perl so effective. Master everything Perl has to offer. When you have to solve a problem now, reach for Perl. When you have to solve a problem right, reach for Modern Perl.

Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams & Projects

by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies

December 2011

Liftoff—it's the unexplored, often ignored, Agile project practice.

As the first act of the flight, a rocket launch requires an entire set of systems to successfully lift the vehicle into orbit—not just the vehicle itself, but all the systems needed for smoothly moving off the ground into space. Likewise, your project needs its entire set of supporting systems in place to begin a successful journey to delivery.

You too can launch successful projects! Agile veterans Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies share their experience and teach you how to organize and conduct liftoffs, hold team activities to discover what's most important, and offer a working framework for effective and lightweight agile chartering.

Cifiscape Vol. I, The Twin Cities

by Ken Avidor, Brian Garrity, Toianna Gump, Max Hrabal, Bob Lipski, Ken Lubold, & Aaron Wilson

The community comes together, to narrate their hopes and fears of our future in the Twin Cities. Cifiscape Vol. I describes a diverse and gritty future for our beloved Metro. Including seven of the best Twin Cities short stories and graphic comics, Onyx Neon Press is proud to present these glimpses into the future of the Twin Cities.

Gigapolis

by S. Christopher

New! Download for free!

The world cries out for justice, peace, healing, and inspiration — and heroes arise. Unfortunately, they stick around after that.

Everything in the city is new to John-Paul, including a new identity he never asked for and strange abilities everyone seems to take for granted. Is this all just a cruel hoax on a wide-eyed farmboy?

Everyone wants something from Pandora, and she'll go along just to figure out what's happening. Is there more to this photojournalism intern than she thinks?

Everywhere conspiracies lurk in Titian's mind. Is the old man as rich and powerful as he seems, or is he as much of a pawn as he considers his underlings?

Every day is another chance for the world to spin out of control around Clownfish. Is she the only one who wonders when and where everything went wrong?

Perhaps the imminent destruction of Gigapolis, home to millions of perfectly average people happy to leave heroics to heroes, will clarify their thinking — if it doesn't kill them all first.

Parrot Developer's Guide: PIR

by Allison Randal, Andrew Whitworth & The Parrot Team

Parrot is a language-neutral virtual machine for dynamic languages such as Ruby, Python, PHP, and Perl. This book covers Parrot Intermediate Representation (PIR), Parrot's native low-level language. PIR is fundamentally an assembly language, but it adds higher-level features such as operator syntax, syntactic sugar for subroutine and method calls, automatic register allocation, and more friendly conditional syntax. Parrot libraries — including most of Parrot's compiler tools — are often written in PIR. Even so, PIR is more rigid and "close to the machine" than higher-level languages, which makes it a good window into the inner workings of the virtual machine.

mod_perl 2 User's Guide

by Stas Bekman & Jim Brandt

mod_perl 2, the next generation of the Apache Perl module, gives you full access to the Apache 2 internals via the Perl programming language, just as mod_perl 1 gave you access to Apache 1. New features in Apache and Perl make mod_perl 2 even more powerful and useful than before, allowing you to quickly write and deploy fast, robust web applications.

As with any major upgrade, there are new features and key changes to mod_perl from the 1.x generation. The mod_perl 2 User's Guide explains these key changes and demonstrates the tools that you can use to port modules and migrate your existing code.

Whether you're new to mod_perl or migrating from mod_perl 1, the mod_perl 2 User's Guide will give you the information you need to get up and running on Apache 2 and mod_perl 2.

Gravitas

by S. Christopher

New! Download for free!

The city is a haven for dreamers and idealists who spend their time in ornately mundane ways. Now and then someone escapes to touch the face of the sky.

Life is what you make it. It's hard to be a grown-up but too easy to take things seriously.

One day, Ben woke up with a good job, a house, and no idea what he wanted out of life. Then she knocked his comfortable world askew.

In one brief moment of clarity, he saw the whole picture: life, the universe, and his place in it. Now all he knows is that if he can do it again, he has a chance to achieve what everyone wants.

A word from our authors...

"Aliens!" The Dread Pirate Jack Spartan spit the word carelessly across the beach.

He sat just shy of the water's edge and watched the ship—his ship!—soar ever smaller to the lee of the sun, where a shadowy hulk menaced the otherwise blue sky.

There would be no third hijacking, he resolved.

The tropical sun bore down. Jack found shade under a palm tree and resumed his reading. He'd risked his skin to save a small satchel of books.

"Aliens," he grumbled again. They'd pay... and the words under his fingers began to tickle an idea in his head.

— S. Christopher