Six Free C\C++ ebooks by Microsoft

This week Microsoft announced that it's working on making C++ better suited for massive parallelism. This follows Google's recent benchmarks that showed that C++ is still faster than most programming languages (at least if you know how to optimize it correctly). Also, Google has been working on incorporating C and C++ support into Chrome.
In other words, C++ is a strong and important language, and will continue to be even in a browser dominated landscape. Here are a few resources for leaning C++, and its predecessor C.
Introduction to C Programming
You don't need to know C to learn C++, but many C++ books assume knowledge of C. If you're completely new to programming and want to learn C++ from a free book, please see How to Think Like a Computer Scientist below.
However, if you are new to programming and want to start with C, you might want to start with Introduction to C Programming by Rob Miles. A PDF version can be found here.
Miles has also written free e-books on C#.

The C Book

The C Book by Mike Banahan, Declan Brady and Mark Doran is an introduction to C for experienced programmers. The print edition, first published in 1991, is no longer in print.

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist C++ Version

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist C++ Version is the C++ 'port' of Allen B. Downey's classic introduction to programming. The Python version has been used by MIT for its introduction to programming. It assumes no prior programming experience.
There are also versions in Python and Java, and a Ruby version is in progress.

Thinking in C++

Thinking in C++ by Bruce Eckel aims to 'move you, a little at a time, from understanding C to the point where the C++ mindset becomes your native tongue.' It's written with the expectation that the learner have existing knowledge of C syntax. It begins by introducing object oriented programming and moves into covering more advanced C++ over the course of two volumes.
A print version is also available.
Eckel also wrote Thinking in Java which we included in our round-up of free Java e-books.

C++ Annotations

C++ Annotations is a free e-book by Frank B. Brokken of the University of Groningen. He uses it as the primary text of his course on C++, and it's written for programmers already familiar with C.

Visual C++ 6 Unleashed

Visual C++ 6 Unleashed by Mickey Williams and David Bennett covers programming in C++ using Microsoft's IDE. A print version is available as well.

Want Even More?

There are many more free e-books on C and C++, including many on more advanced topics. You can find more here, here and here.
If you want to learn C# or Objective C, we have separate round-ups for you here and here.

LibraOffice: An alternative to Microsoft Office 2010, yet free !!!

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• Pros
  Free, open-source office application suite, packed with features and power, and able to open and save files in almost any current format.
• Cons Clumsy, outdated interface; work-in-progress quality means that some Microsoft Office files import with errors.
  
• Bottom Line
  By far the best free office application suite, but not yet good enough to replace Microsoft Office except where free or open-source is required.

• FULL REVIEW
• USER REVIEWS
• SPECS

For almost twenty years, the world has wanted a no-cost alternative to Microsoft Office 2010 ($499, 4 stars). LibreOffice can't do everything that Office can do, but it's a vastly powerful and effective application suite that's the obvious first choice for any user, company, or organization that wants to stop paying for Office and wants to start using open-source software with its inherent security advantages and rapid updates. LibreOffice is both the oldest and newest alternative office suite. It's the oldest because most of its code is based on the open-source code in OpenOffice.org, a suite that's been in continuous development for twenty years. It's the newest because it's a newly-minted "branch" of the old OpenOffice.org, created by The Document Foundation, a new group of developers and vendors who got impatient with the way the original OpenOffice.org suite was being managed. It's also the only office suite that works almost identically under Windows, the Mac, and Linux. If you're already using OpenOffice.org as an office suite, you owe it to yourself to switch to LibreOffice. After only a few months of development, it already has more features than OpenOffice.org, an improved interface, and faster and more reliable performance.

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The LibreOffice suite includes a word-processor (named Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a a database (Base), and apps for presentations (Impress), math (Math) and drawing (Draw). Unlike Microsoft Office, it omits an Outlook-style mail, calendar, and contact-management program. The most widely-used LibreOffice applications—Writer, Calc,, and Impress—look and act a lot like Office 2003, with the old menu-and-toolbar interface that Microsoft abandoned in Office 2007 and 2010. This is a mixed blessing. If you're familiar with Microsoft's menus, then you can find most LibreOffice functions almost with your eyes closed, which is good. It's also good if you want to create documents in the new Microsoft formats (DOCX, XLSX, etc.) but you don't want to learn Microsoft's new Ribbon interface. What's less good is that many of LibreOffice's dialogs, like many bad old Microsoft dialogs, offer minimal explanations, and if you want to use advanced features like the LibreOffice macro system, you'll spend a lot of time scouring help files for guidance, and sometimes the Help button leads only to an empty page. If, like me, you've worked with Word 2007 or 2010 for a while, you'll wish LibreOffice would add the "live" wordcount feature in those Word versions instead of making you use a menu to bring up a wordcount in a message box.
An Alternative to Microsoft Office
Almost any document that you can create in Word you can also create in Writer, and most worksheets that you can create in Excel you can also create in Calc. Writer lacks many of Word's convenience features, such as easily-created "building blocks" that you can reuse in multiple documents. Writer lets you edit different parts of the same document in two separate windows, but it lacks Word's elegant split-window feature that lets you edit two parts of the same document in two panes of the same window. Writer doesn't have Word's ability to display a document with its actual page format, but also hide headers, footers, and white space at the top and bottom of the page, so that a sentence that begins on one page doesn't jump across a few inches of page borders before ending on the next page. Writer only lets you view full-page layout or a "web view" that doesn't match printed output at all.
The Calc spreadsheet now can handle up to a million rows, just like Excel, but lacks the dazzling graphics and advanced data-manipulation tools that Microsoft built into recent versions of Office. I've learned to rely on Excel's built-in feature that uses color gradients to indicate high and low numbers in a range, and its minature "Sparkline" charts-in-a-cell to get a quick look at data trends. Calc has only a primitive conditional-formatting feature that requires laborious effort to achieve less-useful effects. When you want to get quick multiple views of your data, Calc's DataPivot lags behind the user-friendliness of Excel's Pivot Tables, but is beginning to catch up, for example with the ability to use named ranges to select data. The Impress presentations app gets the job done, and includes a vast toolbox of distracting animations, but don't expect anything like PowerPoint's video editing or photo-editing features.

Specifications

Type

Business, Personal, Enterprise, Professional

Free

Yes

OS Compatibility

Windows Vista, Windows XP, Linux, Mac OS, Windows 7

Tech Support

Forum.

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Advantages to LibreOffice
In an Office-centric world, the main advantage of LibreOffice is that it's more compatible with Microsoft's document formats than anything else, and in some ways even surpasses Microsoft Office itself, because it opens Microsoft-format files that Office can't open at all, such as files created by Microsoft Works or by twenty-year-old versions of Word and Excel. It also imports files created by Lotus WordPro that you probably can't open with anything else, and opens files created by WordPerfect for the Macintosh that can't be opened in WordPerfect for WidnowsWindows. It also imports the latest Microsoft Office formats with generally impressive fidelity. Almost every Word 2010 document that I threw at LibreOffice opened with its content and formatting intact, even if the the original document was large and complex.
Excel worksheets fared less well, and some complex ones, especially those that contained pivot tables, simply caused Calc to crash. Even with the Excel 2010 worksheets that Calc successfully opened, I noticed some odd problems. For example, I have some worksheets that I created in Excel 2003 but later converted to Excel 2010 format. When I opened these in LibreOffice, some simple sums displayed as the error code "#NAME?" instead of the sum, and the formula that generated the sum had simply disappeared. There seemed to be no reason why some sums in a worksheet displayed correctly while others displayed as this error code. This problem occurred with at least three of my test files, so if you plan to open your Office files in LibreOffice, you should be wary of this sort of gotcha.
Advanced users will be impressed by LibreOffice's powerful and mature macro language, which I use to accomplish repetitive tasks like reformatting imported files, and which supports a feature that ought to be in Office but isn't—a feature that lets you use a menu to attach a macro to an object so that (for example) a pop-up explanation can appear when you move the mouse over an image. The macro language is conceptually similar to Office's VisualBasic, but, unfortunately, they're different enough to force you up a steep learning curve when you start working with LibreOffice macros, even if you have a lot of experience with Office's macros. You can learn the essentials by recording macros with the built-in macro recorder, but you'll need to hunt down the well-hidden option that enables recording and adds "Record macro" to the macro menu. You'll find this option under Tools, Options, LibreOffice, General, where you add a checkmark next to "Enable experimental (unstable) features"—not exactly the obvious place to look. This option also makes it possible to edit a mathematical formula in the formula itself, rather than by modifying control codes. (And if you're looking for the formula feature in the Writer word-processor, you'll find it under Insert, Object, but only if you've also installed the suite's Math module.)
LibreOffice for Early Adopters
LibreOffice is a work in progress, but its new management has been adding speed, reliability, and convenience at a far more rapid pace than the old regime that produced OpenOffice.org. New releases now appear according to a fixed schedule, as in other open-source projects like Ubuntu Linux. This means that some new versions may not be as finished as the designers want, and, when this happens, the download page warns that the new version is for "early adopters," while most users should continue to download the previous version. Unless you or your organization requires open-source software, I can't recommend that you ditch Microsoft Office for LibreOffice—yet—but I certainly think you ought to give it a try. You may be pleasantly surprised by the power and convenience you can get in a desktop application that costs you nothing at all.

Top 10 Free Antivirus to download

A virus in our computer just acts like a infection in a human, it spreads all over body, infecting and harming in every way it can. But we are lucky, that there is a way to protect our computer by a good and effective antivirus program.
In the starting days of Antivirus softwares, they generally detected viruses in computer. But nowadays, they are totally full protection software which basically acts like a layer over all programs in your computer to protect from various threats like virus, trojan, worm, malware, spyware, rootkit infections etc.
Even I recommend to use only one Antivirus program because more security programs can become cause of slow computer speed. But, there are many free Antivirus programs in the market and it’s difficult to choose the right one from ever growing number of Antivirus programs.

1) Microsoft Security Essentials : This antivirus is from Microsoft team and totally free for Genuine Windows users. It has a good detection rates and most of all very light on resources. Automatic updates works perfectly fine. To see the whole review and how to install MSE on your computer, please click this link.

2) Avast ! Free Antivirus : Avast is often seen as the biggest competitor to other Antivirus programs as it is very simple and easy to use. Avast is loaded with most features, real-time protection capabilities including web, E-mail, P2P, network shields, boot-time scanning. It is very light on resources and hardly take minutes to schedule scans. But there is one negative point that you have to register first and it takes time to register. Otherwise it is widely preferred Antivirus program for many users.

3) AVG Free Antivirus : AVG has been around in the Antivirus market from ages and gained lot of loyal users to their kitty. They also provide upgraded version which is very costly but I believe that their free Antivirus program is great for users having personal computers. AVG user interface is pretty simple and it takes a minute to install on your computer.

4) Bitdefender : Bitdefender  is one of the best contender for top Antivirus software which provides advanced protection against viruses, phishing attacks, spyware, malwaere and various other real-time threats. It takes only minutes to download it and work without slowing down your computer speed. There is also a very nifty feature included in the latest version that it helps to protect leaking your personal information via E-mail, Web or IM.

5) Avira AntiVir Personal : One of the best pick if you are looking for simple to use and light on Antivirus software. It works perfectly fine to detect virus, spyware, rootkit threats. The best part of Avira is that it is quiet outstanding in terms of finding malware. Few false positives about Avira is that it does not inlude E-mail scanner in free version, but if you open any infected E-mail, it comes again into action. And with every update, it shows advertisements but you have choice to disable them. I still believe that Avira is strong Antivirus program and you should try it.

6) Comodo Antivirus + Firewall : This program was started as a commerial Antivirus software but now available free for both personal and commercial use. It is very simple to use, light on resources and doesn’t affect your computer speed. It offers real-time scanning, automatic updates, email scanning, detects worms and spyware. The virus definition is update daily and Host Intrusion Detection allows you to protect from attacking viruses, spyware, and other malware before they infect your computer.

7) A – Squared Free : This program was detecting and removing only trojans in the starting but recently included the Ikarus antivirus engine. It scans your computer from  Trojans, Viruses, Spyware, Adware, Worms, Bots, Keyloggers and Dialers. The only negative point about this software is its large virus update size. Its comes with Antivirus + Anti – Spyware.

8 ) Rising Antivirus : Rising Antivirus Free Edition is Antivirus solution from China. It is a simple program which runs low on the memory and do every bit of task that every other Antivirus software does. It protects computers against all types of viruses, Trojans, worms, rootkits and other malicious programs. One feature is good is that it provides full protection to your account information. It mostly updates on alternate days and if you are looking for “install and forget” program, this program is best.

9) PC Tools Antivirus : All-in-one program which can protect your PC from virus, worms, trojans and also included scanning of incoming and outgoing mails. It provides you on-demand scans and automatic updates. The negative points are that free edition offers limited support and updates are non-priority based which are essential for real-time virus protection program.

10) Spyware Doctor with Antivirus 2010 : As the name suggests, its comes with Anti-spyware and Antivirus program which provides full security to your computer. It detects almost every infection like spyware, adware, trojans, viruses, worms, keyloggers, identity theft, phishing, popups and malicious websites. It updates automatically mostly on daily basis.

1 More Bonus Free Antivirus
11) DriveSentry : DriveSentry is free anti virus software for personal computer use only. It comes with Anti- spyware, Antivirus and Anti-Malware program. It provides real time protection and updates regularly.

Hope you like my list of top 10 free antivirus. If you know any free Antivirus which you feel that it would fit in the list, please be kind and share with others in the comments section below.