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When we visit our favorite websites, we have very little insight into the person who created them other than recognition of our shared interests. A publisher in India might own a website about his penchant for classic American cars, and the majority of his readers might reside in the UK. The beauty of the Internet is that each web page could have been created by anyone, anywhere in the world -- and the site's readers are often as demographically diverse as they are a group of like-minded people.

This is where AdSense comes in -- publishers can earn money for something they probably would have done for free, i.e., writing about subjects they love. Since ads are targeted both to the content of the page and the location of the user, there are no geographic limitations on who can succeed. This puts publishers in the developing world on a near-level playing field with publishers in the developed world when it comes to earning money from their interests. We've heard stories from publishers in all parts of the world about how AdSense earnings are being reinvested into creating better websites and content, or spent on life improvements including new cars, vacations, education and even engagement rings.

While there are of course still barriers to entry in some parts of the world, like high hosting costs and access to the Internet, one of our biggest motivators in improving the AdSense product is hearing your success stories -- so please, keep them coming!

Posted by Brian Axe - AdSense Product Management

This concise book (149 pages) uses Ruby to teach basic programming; a good book for total green-horns to programming. But keep in mind this book is not titled: ‘Learn to Program Ruby’.

What I mean by that, is that the book targets new programmers, not programmers new to Ruby. So it may be a little slow for some people (experienced programmers) when the author (for example,) explains what an array is …

WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK INTERESTING

The book is well written and the flows well, but what I find interesting about it is:

• It uses Ruby to teach programming.
• It teaches some interesting concepts that you might not read in say, a PHP book.

Ruby is the hot new language in the geek world, but it has yet to show itself substantially in commercial application. That said, it is an interesting language choice for this kind of book: Ruby is a terse and easy to use language, and I think this allowed for the author to jump into concepts like recursion and procs - I like this.

CONCLUSION

A good book that is not so pragmatic, in that you don’t see the typical how to build a shopping cart project at the end.

Instead, the author concentrates on basic programming concepts and leaves it to another book to expose the reader to real-life application.

I would use this book in a programming 101 type of class.