O'Reilly's Hacks Series reclaims the term "hacking" for the good
guys--innovators who explore and experiment, unearth shortcuts, create
useful tools, and come up with fun things to try on their own.
This site's goal is to help you connect to Hacks authors, discuss the various hacks, and even let you show off your own hackery by contributing techniques of your own. Join us in exploring the possibilities of creative
hacking.
Featured Hacks Book
Home Theater Hacks is a smart collection of insider tips and tricks,
covering everything you need to know about home theater installation.
Say goodbye to frustrating trial-and-error processes and expensive
appointments with installation experts. This book prevents both by
imparting down-and-dirty techniques not found anywhere else. From
finding the right audio and video components and dealing with speakers
and wiring, to mastering remote controls and getting a handle on TiVo,
this book will help you customize your own, personal home theater
experience. Sample Hacks are available free online.
Suggestion Box -- Submit ideas for a Hacks title or ideas about the series in general.
What People Are Saying
"Google Hacks" is an excellent industrial strength tips and tools book that both the novice newbie as well as the seasoned veteran will appreciate and keep next to their computer as a important search reference! Definitely appreciate and enjoy the no nonsense to the point style of information delivery offered by this book!
The information, layout and format of the book all relate to obtaining information quickly and concisely in the same way that it shows one to receive the same from Google(tm). I consider "Google Hacks" to be a "must have" for anyone interested in searching the Internet using Google(tm) as their primary source! I will mention it in my national speeches and talk show interviews. -- Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. on Google Hacks
This is one of the best books I've laid my hands on. It is small but the quality and level of technical details in many tips are just too good. Most notable are the tips on backing up, ssh and various other hacks with perl, shell scripts, apache etc. Any system administrator with about 1-2 years of experience would definitely appreciate most of the cool hacks in this book. Great work by the
author. -- Ravi on Linux Server Hacks
Got a Hack?
Your hack could end up in one of our upcoming books!
Got a non-obvious solution to an interesting problem? Contribute your hack and share it with others online. We'll consider it for publication in future titles.
Quickly Change Your File > Open Path Instead of always using My Documents, this hack shows you how to make Word open to the folder where your documents really are.
stripping off word special characters You can remove formats, etc from MS Word files by copying from .doc into .txt (say in Notepad) then copying from .txt back into MS Word or an email program, or spreadsheet.
Using JavaScript to close the opening window When you try to close a window in JavaScript with self.close(), it asks the end user permission to close the window if it doesn't have a parent window. A simple property change will fix it.
Dave Barry latest column email service. In the same way m-w.com or dictionary.com has Word-of-the-day services, I thought it'd
try it out with Dave Barry's columns.
wikipedia: Article of the Day Grabs the "Article of the Day" from wikipedia.com and emails it to you. Similar to dictionary "Word of the Day" features.
Publishing Mindshare This hack is based on Spidering Hack#49 and Google Hack #79.
One of the things I always did to help keep track of Linux's popularity is to go to the local bookstore and see how many shelves were dedicated to Linux and compare this to Microsoft Server software. I've did this with web/non-web and Perl/Java as well. Now we can automate this with Amazon's API.
Got a non-obvious solution to an interesting problem? Contribute your hack and share it with others online. We'll consider it for publication in future titles.