Home Hacking Projects for Geeks presents a wide range of projects, from automating light switches, to building home theaters using Windows or Linux-based PCs, to building home security systems that rival those offered by professional security consultants. The thirteen projects in the book are divided into three categories: Home Automation, Home Entertainment Systems, and Security. Designed for hackers of all skill levels, this fun, new guide combines creativity with electricity and power tools to achieve cool, and sometimes even practical, home automation projects. Sample Excerpts are available free online.

Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition -- This comprehensive guide offers a wealth of tips, instructions, and expert advice dedicated to making your time with Windows XP safer, easier, and more fun. It's perfectly suited for both first-time PC fans and budding power users. Best of all, it's been updated to include Service Pack 2 (SP2), so you can better defend yourself against viruses, worms, and hackers. Fill the void in XP documentation with the technical insight, crystal-clear objectivity, and humor that define the Missing Manuals series.

Illustrations with Photoshop: A Designer's Notebook -- World-renowned French artists share their exciting and innovative digital creations in this first-time English translation of the cutting-edge French work. The images in this book will energize image professionals, graphic artists, photographers, computer graphics designers -- all creators of images, whether still or animated -- and will forever change the way you see and perform your design work. This visually stunning book will give you the creative license and technical knowledge needed to create one-of-a-kind digital illustrations with Photoshop. You are limited only by your imagination.

Small Web Sites, Great Results (Paraglyph Press) -- Simplicity leads to great results. This book offers design guidelines to make websites look professional even on a small scale, techniques to get more hits from search engines, and much more that will help readers construct a holistic web presence that garners real results. The simple website system described in the book includes a series of pages and scripts that users can download and instantly put to use on their own sites.

Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition shows readers how to get started with the GNU Emacs editor. This thorough guide grows with you: as you become more proficient, it teaches you how to use Emacs more effectively. The new edition describes Emacs 21.3 from the ground up, including new user-interface features such as an icon-based toolbar and an interactive interface to Emacs customization. There's also a new chapter that details how to install, run, and use Emacs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Sample Chapter 6, Writing Macros, is available free online.

Windows XP Pro: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition -- Completely refreshed and updated for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), this bestseller is for the novice or budding power user who wants to master Microsoft's latest operating system and get down to work. The book reveals which features work well and which don't, such as the Remote Desktop software that enables people to connect to the office from home, the encryption file system that protects sensitive information, and the Windows Messenger that enables real-time text, voice, and video communication.

Photo Retouching with Photoshop: A Designer's Notebook -- This lavish, colorful book showcases innovative photo-retouching solutions by well known French artists, and will be inspiring and instructive for anyone involved in creating digital images or animations. You'll see what the pros are able to do to their photographs with Photoshop; you'll be guided, step-by-step, through the editing process of each project--from original shot to polished print; and you'll gain insight into how each visionary artist imagined, conceptualized, and created the final exquisite image.

Linux Cookbook -- Linux information can be found scattered in man pages, texinfo files, and source code comments, but the best source is the experts who have built up a working knowledge of managing Linux systems. Linux Cookbook's tested techniques distill years of hard-won experience into practical cut-and-paste solutions to everyday Linux dilemmas. Use just one recipe from this collection of real-world solutions, and the hours of tedious trial-and-error saved will more than pay for the cost of the book. Sample Chapter 14, Printing with CUPS, is available free online.

Revolution in the Valley traces the development of the Macintosh computer from its inception as an underground skunkworks project in 1979 to its triumphant introduction in 1984 and beyond. In this vivid first-hand account, author and key Macintosh developer Andy Hertzfeld reveals exactly what it was like to be a key player in one of the most important technical achievements in modern history. Lavish illustrations and period photos (many never before published) bring to life the talented and often eccentric characters who participated in the birth of the personal computer revolution.

iBook Fan Book serves as your guide through the many features and amazing capabilities of the Apple iBook. iBook Fan Book acquaints you with your new laptop and helps you get familiar and comfortable with Mac OS X Panther. It covers: getting started; organizing your digital lifestyle; advanced features; iBook at home, at the office, and on the go; and tips and tricks for minimizing time and stress and maximizing fun and productivity while accomplishing anything and everything you want to accomplish with your iBook.

O'Reilly Happenings at Macworld SF -- Macworld SF 2005 will be a busy show for O'Reilly. We'll have great specials, lots of books, a full speaker line up, and a menu of activities. We're also partnering with some of the Mac OS X Innovator Contest winners to provide discounts on award-winning software. For all the latest Mac news and articles, visit MacDevCenter.com.

Perl Tackles HIPAA Compliancy -- Dietrich Schmitz of the SUNY Upstate Medical University writes, "It is so true that Perl 'makes the simple things easy and the hard things possible'." Dietrich describes how he used Perl in writing an in-house application to make the Claims and Patient Billing system HIPAA-compliant, in this latest Perl Success Story.

Linux/Unix SysAdmin Certificate -- Learn system administration skills online and receive certification from the University of Illinois. Courses include: The Unix File System, Networking and DNS, Unix Services (including email and web servers), and Scripting for Administrators with Sed, Awk, and Perl. It's all at the O'Reilly Learning Lab. Enroll today and save $200.

Embedding Multimedia in JSPs -- A JSP is the preferred choice for combining multimedia with dynamic content, because you can make the tags that you use to embed the multimedia a part of the JSP's HTML template text. Chapter 17 of Java Servlet & JSP Cookbook teaches you how to use object and embed tags to embed multimedia in Java web components. If you like this chapter, read the whole book (and up to nine others) on Safari with a free trial subscription.

Remove Me! Do those unsubscribe links actually work, or are they just another spammer scam? In this Salon.com article, Brian McWilliams goes undercover in the world of fake Rolexes to find the answer. Brian is the author of Spam Kings.

2004 MDJ Power 25 -- MDJ has released its fifth annual list of the 25 most influential people in the Mac world. We're proud to see that our own Tim O'Reilly, David Pogue, and Derrick Story all made this year's list. For all the latest happenings in the Mac world, visit O'Reilly's Mac DevCenter.

Freedom, Innovation, and Convenience: The RMS Interview -- Since 1984, Richard M. Stallman has fought for software freedom as coder, project leader, and philosopher. Read about Stallman's views on freedom, the GNU project, the Linux kernel, and GNU/Linux distributions, in this interview by Federico Biancuzzi on LinuxDevCenter.com.

O is for O'Reilly -- A is for Apple. B is for, uh, Physical Review B (Condensed Matter and Materials Physics). C is for CNET. . . . And O is for O'Reilly.

RSS Feeds and New Plugins for Safari -- Safari Bookshelf now offers standard and customizable RSS feeds for new titles and top titles in its repository of over 2,000 leading technical books for IT professionals and programmers. Additional services designed to make your use of Safari as easy, accessible, and effective as possible include: Eclipse and NetBeans plugins so users never have to leave their development environment, and access to the Safari web services API so you can integrate Safari content into your website. Learn more about Safari Tools.

From the Editors List: Dear Scott/Dear Max -- If there's one constant in the publishing world, it's the give-and-take relationship between editors and authors. O'Reilly's editors discussed this relationship among famous authors and editors, as captured in their own words, in the latest From the Editors List.

java.net Online Books -- Safari Bookshelf has expanded its services to members of the java.net community. Among Safari's many features are plugins for the Eclipse and NetBeans development environments, so users can search, annotate, read, and download the industry's leading technical books without ever leaving their working environment. Read about the new safari.java.net portal in this blog by Daniel Steinberg, editor of java.net.

Slip a Geek Book Under the Tree -- Here are some holiday gift recommendations from Michelle Delio, writing for Wired.com: "The winter holidays are the perfect time to brainwash our friends and family by giving them geeky gifts. [Here] are books that any techno-loving, systems-tinkering, hardware-hacking person would love, but that even those who can't program the clock on their VCR will find quite readable."

Registration Is Open for the MySQL Users Conference -- The 2005 MySQL Users Conference, co-presented by O'Reilly Media and MySQL AB, will take place April 18-21, 2005 in Santa Clara. This conference brings together experts, users, and industry leaders with unique MySQL insights, offering attendees a detailed look into new features in MySQL 5.0, sessions and workshops designed to teach best practices, and exposure to new open source technologies. Register now and save up to $300.

Ex-AOL worker to plead guilty in spam case -- In news from the spam wars, Jason Smathers, the former America Online software engineer accused of stealing 92 million email addresses, has reached a plea agreement on charges that he sold those stolen AOL email addresses to spammers. Spam Kings author Brian McWilliams notes in the article that, to spammers, "An AOL user is like a deer with a red ribbon in its antlers."