Getting Your Course Ready for a New Semester

In this article by Brandon Ballentine, author of Desire2Learn for Higher Education Cookbook, we will cover the following recipes:

• Copying course materials from a previous semester

• Importing a publisher's course cartridge

• Changing many due dates from one screen

• Double-checking everything from the student view

• Configuring your web browser

Building the Control-M Infrastructure

Unlike ordinary desktop applications, Control-M is an enterprise-level large-scale batch workload automation platform that handles the execution of end-to-end business processes potentially across the entire organization. Therefore, it is essential to properly plan the batch infrastructure in advance to fully utilize the benefits of Control-M and allow it to fulfill the future growth of the organization's batch needs.

In this article by Qiang Ding, author of BMC Control-M 7: A Journey from Traditional Batch Scheduling to Workload Automation , we are going to look at important factors that need to be taken into consideration for building a complete batch infrastructure. We will start with introducing the "Three Ages" towards workload automation. This will be followed by discussions of pre-implementation-related topics, such as batch environment sizing considerations, choices of high availability solutions, storage space requirements, firewall configuration requirements, user experience-related performance concerns, and so on. Once we have the environment planned, we focus on the technical aspects by building a complete sandpit Control-M batch infrastructure.

Team Foundation Server 2012

Team Foundation Server 2012 (TFS 2012) is the latest version of Microsoft's Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) system. This article by Jakob Ehn and Terje Sandstrom, authors of Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter, covers all the aspects of managing a software product over its complete lifecycle, from inception, through development and the subsequent maintenance phase for as long as it is in use.

Creating and configuring a basic mobile application

After everything is configured and prepared, this article by Darko Goleš, author of Magento Mobile How-to, starts exploring the Magento Mobile Admin Panel in order to create our first Magento Mobile application.

Creating Bar Charts

This article by Peter Backx and Dominic Gélineau, authors of ActionScript Graphing Cookbook, will give us all the tools to create multiple bar charts. Be it vertical, horizontal, comparison, or histograms, this article will provide solid bases to improve those charts even more. We will use the same methodology for every chart.

In this article, we will cover:

• Drawing a bar chart with Flex

• Building vertical bar charts

• Creating comparison bar charts

• Drawing histograms

• Creating sparklines to enrich text content

• Making 3D bar charts

Building Your First Application

In this article by Mariano Reingart and Massimo Di Pierro, the authors of web2py Application Development Cookbook we will cover:

• Improving the scaffolding application

• Building a simple contacts application

• Building a Reddit clone

• Building a Facebook clone

The recipes in this article will provide examples of complete applications, comprising models, views, and controllers. They range from simple contacts applications to a more complex Facebook clone. Other recipes in this article will show you how to solve some recurrent problems that new users typically encounter, from adding a logo to creating a navigation bar.

SQL Server and PowerShell Basic Tasks

This article by Donabel Santos author of SQL Server 2012 with PowerShell V3 Cookbook, demonstrates scripts and snippets of code that accomplish some basic SQL Server tasks, using PowerShell. We will start with simple tasks, such as listing SQL Server instances and creating objects such as tables, indexes, stored procedures, and functions, to get you comfortable with working with SQL Server programmatically.

You will find that many of the recipes can be accomplished using PowerShell and SQL Management Objects ( SMO). SMO is a library that exposes SQL Server classes, which allows for programmatic manipulation and automation of many database tasks. For some recipes, we will also explore alternative ways of accomplishing the same tasks, using different native PowerShell cmdlets.

Even though we are exploring how to create some common database objects using PowerShell, I would like to note that PowerShell is not always the best tool for the task. There will be tasks that are best left accomplished using T-SQL. Even so, it is still good to know what is possible with PowerShell and how to do it, so that you know you have alternatives depending on your requirements or situation.