FreeTechBooks’ Blog

Another book from the people of OOoAuthors.org, brought by Wily Yuen.

This one is a guide to Writers (official site, wiki), a wordprocessor part of the OpenOffice.org suite.

From the book:

In addition to the usual features of a word processor (spell checking, thesaurus, hyphenation, autocorrect, find and replace, automatic generation of tables of contents and indexes, mail merge and others), Writer provides these important features:
- templates and styles
- powerful page layout methods (including frames, columns, and tables)
- embedding or linking of graphics, spreadsheets, and other objects
- built-in drawing tools
- master documents, to group a collection of documents into a single document
- change tracking during revisions
- database integration, including a bibliography database
- export to PDF, including bookmarks
- and many more.

Those familiar with Microsoft Word will find Writers user interface look almost similar. This is no coincidence, since the interface was designed with Microsoft Word users in mind.

How to get this book

The book can be downloaded here.

The FreeTechBook’s link is here.

A article about how Writer save a corrupted Microsoft Word file, can be viewed here.

Last Sunday, I received an email from Nick Antonaccio suggesting his tutorial, Rebol Programming For The Absolute Beginner.

Rebol (official site, wiki) is a multiplatform scripting language created by Carl Sassenrath, the man who created Commodore Amiga Multitasking Operating System. Rebol stands for Relative Expression-Based Object Language with emphasized virtues of simplicity, compactness and availibility in 40 platforms. Its small code size and small footprint and its ability to use a single executable to run the scripts made it possible for the scripts to be run from an USB key without installing anything on the host PC.

Nick Antonaccio’s tutorial is intended for new programmers as well as new Rebolers. It teaches average users to program computers to do useful things, without the long and difficult learning curve imposed by other programming language.

As for experienced programmers, Nick has suggested to check out the final example applications to witness Rebol’s compact code and simple cross-platform usability.

How to get the tutorial

The tutorial can be viewed here.

The FreeTechBook’s link is here.

Rebol’s official documents can be downloaded here.

A nice article about Rebol, by Gregg Irwin can be viewed here.

Found yet another site with free books.

mikroElektronika was established in 1997 as a publishing firm. Now located in Belgrade, its major fields of interest include: development tools, compilers, magazine on electronics, acceleration sensors data and acquisition hardware and software, and book publishing.

In its website, visitors will find free articles, softwares, manuals, drivers, schematics and examples for their line of products. There are also 6 free books, which topics delve around electronics and microcontrollers.

The free books are:
- BASIC for PIC Microcontrollers
- Introduction to Industrial PLC Controllers, by Nebojsa Matic
- PIC Microcontrollers, 3rd Edition, by Nebojsa Matic
- Architecture and Programming of 8051 MCUs, by Nebojsa Matic and Milan Verle
- Components of Electronic Devices, by Filipovic D. Miomir
- Radio Receivers, by Miomir Filipovic

As for the terms of condtions, mikroElektronika declares that:

The content published in the books is subject to copyright and must not be reproduced in any form without an explicit written permission released from the editorial of mikroElektronika. The books was prepared with due care and attention, however the publisher doesn’t accept any responsibility neither for the exactness of the information published therein, nor for any consequences of its application.

Intended audience:

These books should be a match for those who seek to learn about microcontrollers or for anyone who just want to get the jobs done. As one of the authors pointed out, readers should read the parts they may need at that exact moment.

How to get the books:

The book’s HTML versions can be downloaded from here.

Printed copies of this book doesn’t seem to be available on the website.

The FreeTechBook’s link is here.

Another free books from our long time contributor, Wily Yuen.

The first one is OpenOffice.org’s Getting Started, the Second Edition. It’s a beginners introduction book on OpenOffice (wiki), a fully featured office suite just like Microsoft Office. It supports Microsoft Office format files (.doc, .xls, .ppt), and runs on Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X. And of course, it’s free.

OpenOffice.org’s Getting Started was written by a group of volunteer reviewers, writers, editors and translators from the OpenOffice.org community working through OOoAuthors.org.

This book deals with all the basics of increasing your productivity with OpenOffice 2.0.

The first part will show the reader on how to install, start and set up the software. The second part will introduce the reader to every piece of OpenOffice prides:
- Writer, the word processor (nice!)
- Calc, the spreadsheet
- Draw, the vector drawing tool
- Impress, the slide presentation tool
- Base, a database system
- Math, a mathematic equation editor

The third part, continues utilizing Writer, preparing the reader to work with document templates, styles, gallery, creating and editing Fontwork objects, and saving documents as webpages.

As you can already figured, this book is basically one big OpenOffice tutorial, filled with step-by-step instruction, tips and tricks. It’s repleted with colorful figures and screenshots, so readers will have little to worry about losing their way reading this book.

Highly recommended for those who want to find an alternative office suite other than Microsoft Office.

How to get the book

Printed copies of this book are now available at Lulu.com. Profits from the sale of this book will be used to benefit the community in ways to be determined by the members of OOoAuthors.

A full PDF version of the book can be downloaded from here.

The FreeTechBook’s link is here.

The next book from Wily Yuen will be on the next post