Most web libraries make 90 percent of the job simple and the rest impossible. Rails,an open source framework programmed in Ruby,is flexible enough to succeed with that remaining 10 percent.

To get past a firewall and into a LAN,you need either a secret backdoor or a cooperative agent on the inside. A Jabber client on the LAN contacts a public Jabber server and wait for instructions trickling in as instant messages from its Internet buddies.

A number of useful development environments are available for Python in Linux. We’ll show you around some popular Python IDEs that are more than just text editors.

Armed with just a rescue CD and a Perl script, you can back up a client’s hard disk across the wire.

Boo is a scripting language tailor-made for Mono and .NET. This haunting mixture of Python and C# may be just what you need to get started with the .NET framework.

Wireless networks are practical but dangerous at the same time.WEP encryption is unlikely to stop an attacker. But help is at hand in the form of add-on security measures such as an encrypted OpenVPN tunnel.