At PC Magazine, we've been talking about "media convergence" for years. Network-based home entertainment devices like TiVo and Microsoft's Media Center PC . . . make a home LAN more useful than ever. Chapters 2 and 12 show you how they work.

I am guilty! After publicly complaining about the existence of too many Python based web frameworks, after praising the merits of Django, Pylons, TurboGears, CherryPy, and web.py, after having used them professionally and taught them in University level courses, I could not resist and created one more: web2py.

Back in the old days, working in a chemical darkroom, I could only have dreamed of a postprocessing tool as wonderful as Photoshop. But for me that’s exactly what Photoshop is—a tool. It’s a tool that helps me as a professional image creator. The image is what matters, not the tool.

You try to open a spreadsheet and Excel won't let you, because there's a macro involved. You cannot convince the software that the macro is safe. You hurl something across the room.

While cryptography can still be a controversial topic in the programming community, Java has weathered that storm and provides a rich set of APIs that allow you, the developer, to effectively include cryptography in applications—if you know how.