Safari Books Online

Introduced at the beginning of the year as a new IEEE Computing Society membership benefit, Safari Books Online’s Essential Tech and Business Library provides access to – “600 selections included from major publishers like O’Reilly, Addison-Wesley, and Cisco Press.”

An annual membership to the Computing Society currently costs $99 (USD) = £59.73, compared to $252.99 (USD) = £152.65 for access to Safari Books Online Library by itself. In addition to Safari Books Online however, Computer Society membership also includes access to its own online Digital Library and 2700 e-Learning courses covering Cisco, MS technologies as well as specific topics – e.g. Security plus several other benefits.

More information can be found as below:

IEEE Computing Society
http://www.computer.org/portal/site/ieeecs/
http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/membership/safari

Safari Books Online Library
https://ssl.safaribooksonline.com/subscribe

Bottom line – a worthwhile investment for those who want to get on even in these tough economic times.

Econ screensaver

Available from http://www.seoxys.com/econ-2/ whilst a nice enough screensaver, for the paronoid amongst us – do you really want every application icon displayed?

OpenDNS

Want a simple, FREE way to add an additional layer of protection to your home/small business network?

Substitute your ISP provided domain name server (DNS) entries with those of OpenDNS.com on your computer, router or DNS server and configure comprehensive anti-phishing, content filtering technologies and more via a straightforward browser based control panel; add to this reporting tools and plain english explanations of any errors/violations and have greater peace of mind – time well spent.

everythingsysadmin.com

Run by the authors of The Practice of System and Network Administration (recommended for everybody who works in IT); like the book (updated to a 2nd edition in 2007)  the website provides common sense advice on how to be a competent sysadmin from a platform agnostic standpoint.