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Books and articles by Mark Alexander Bain
Books by Mark Alexander Bain:
  • May 2008: Learning Facebook Application Development - A step-by-step tutorial for creating custom Facebook applications using the Facebook platform and PHP.
  • June 2007: SugarCRM Developer's Manual: Customize and extend SugarCRM - This is a developer's manual for SugarCRM. It focuses on customizing SugarCRM. It provides an overview of the architecture of the application and the database, and covers the essential steps for hooking your module into the SugarCRM infrastructure.
  • December 2006: Learn OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet Macro Programming: OOoBasic and Calc automation - Learn how to extend and customize Calc, the OpenOffice.org spreadsheet, using OOoBasic, OOo's built-in programming language. You don't need to be a developer to create useful and powerful routines and applications. This well structured and practical tutorial will walk you though every step, and inspire you with great ways to save time and increase your productivity using Calc.
Latest articles by Mark Alexander Bain:
  • Mon May 05, 2008: Korn -- an extended shell - Everyone knows what a Linux shell is -- you open up a Linux terminal window (such as Konsole or xterm), type in some commands, and there you are, using your Linux shell. Write your commands to a file, make it executable, run it, and you're a shell programmer. But did you know that there are different shells that you can use, and that each shell operates in a slightly different way? My personal favorite is the Korn shell; by the end of this article, it may be your favorite as well.
  • Thu Apr 03, 2008: Omnis Studio 4.3 - Is this the cross-platform RAD of Mark's dreams? Maybe, but only if he's eaten a lot of cheese before bedtime.
  • Wed Dec 12, 2007: Creating simple charts with Gambas 2.0 - About three years ago we had a look at how Gambas speeds database development. Now that Gambas 2.0 is being prepared for release, it's time to see what the new version can do.
  • Fri Oct 05, 2007: Automate FTP with macros - Has it been a while since you used FTP from the command line? While there are decent GUI-based FTP clients (such as gFTP), you can automate operations with the command-line version and handle file transfers with no user interaction at all.

Mark Alexander Bain's latest contributions to OOoForum.org:
View all of Mark Alexander Bain's contributions at OOoForum.org

Tips and Tricks:

Automating OpenOffice: Optimizing Column Widths from a Macro

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© MMVIII - Mark Alexander Bain Last updated: Thu Jun 19 10:18:51 BST 2008