Maven free e-book

For those who are going to use Maven, just for the hype surrounding this project or for real need: the Definitive Guide book, published by the great guys of O'Reilly, is also available on line free of charge at the Sonatype web site.

If you are interested, go and visit the Maven: The Definitive Guide page and download the PDF edition or directly browse the on-line version.

UPDATE: The Definitive Guide is not available anymore but on the Sonatype web site there are two other free books on Maven, Maven by Example and Maven: The Complete Reference.

VideoLectures.net

Just a quick post to recommend this site I discovered a few hours ago. VideoLectures.net provides for free videos of presentations given at several international conferences (mostly in Slovenia where the project started).

Quite impressive is the list of the available lectures and interviews, that span from Architecture to Politics, even if the great majority of them are related to Computer Science in general (almost 1.400 when other categories at present only include a few dozens of videos) and in particular to Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Semantic Web and Data and Text Mining. 

Conferences of distinguished international personalities can be seen, including lectures and/or interviews of Umberto Eco, Noam Chomsky, Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) and Tim Berners Lee.

I gave a quick glance to a couple of Semantic Web related lectures that seem quite interesting. Especially this very complete Introduction to the Semantic Web, taken at the ISWC 2008 in Karlsruhe, Germany, deserves to be mentioned, since it provides a quite detailed explanation (9 parts for about 5 hours and half overall!) of the basics of this technology plus an analysis of the state of the art at present.