Network security expert Omar Santos presents material from his latest book, End-to-End Network Security: Defense-in-Depth — Best practices for assessing and improving network defenses and responding to security incidents.

Merlin Mann, author of the brilliant organization and productivity blog 43 folders, recently resurfaced an “old” post from 2004.

It’s amazing how quickly Internet time moves!

Personally, I love when I unearth digital miscellania from my archives, though it’s rare to find an item as useful and interesting as Merlin’s resdiscovery.

Here’s what he found (again):

Jon Udell created the Library Lookup Project in 2002 to allow users to look up books in their local library’s online catalog systems using a Web browser bookmarklet.

I tried it, surfing Amazon’s recommended picks for me and tying it into the Boston Public Library. Success! Now, I just have to wait for Send to arrive sometime in 2013.

I’ve been doing this manually for some time, noting books there or on goodreads.com (a recent happy discovery, made through a high school friend), but this is huge improvement.

For those interested, Jon created a bookmarklet generator for the project, along with these tips for troubleshooting.

Happy summer reading!

Every now and then, I’m lucky enough to meet one of our readers in person, outside of comment sections, forums, email, IM or other virtual interactions.

It’s always a pleasure to get such direct feedback. When I asked what she liked (and didn’t like) about this blog, she mentioned that she appreciated past posts about free online education resources. (Just click on our learning tag to see them all to date.)

A simple search for other similar resources turns up many other hits, of course, notably for OER. OER stands for “Open Education Resources,” an effort to create a free, globally accessible commons for educational materials. In a spirit much like that of Professor Lessig’s Creative Commons, UNESCO’s 2002 initiative encourages educators to publish learning content and the tools to create that content online, free of intellectual property considerations. You can learn more at the Open Education Conference’s Web site, if you’re interested in the movement.

As Wendy Boswell details in Technophilia, her typically brilliant column on Lifehacker, such free resources easily available online — if you know where to look. Wendy ends with where I’d begin, however, by suggesting using Google to uncover different kinds of learning content.

As Wendy points out, simply by using the right keywords, you can unearth course syllabi (insert your own subject), lectures, tutorials, notes, podcasts and online books , all through the magic of the Google search field.

When you’re done Googling, the Feds may be able to provide some help: Check out free.ed.gov for an index of different subject areas. The National Education Association also has a page full of free course materials for teachers and students.

Still want more?

FreebiesList.com has a long list of free educational resources.

Finally, in the spirit of the OER, the OpenCourseWare Consortium provides, according to their Web site, “free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.”

Did we miss any of your favorite resources? Let us know in the comments!

What new thing did you learn today?

[Image credit: MasterNewMedia.org]

Jimmy Ruska has created an outstanding index of free online educational resources, which he’s called the Massive Resource List for All Autodidacts.

An autodidact, in case you’re wondering, is a self-directed learner. Wikipedia has an index of different different autodidacts in different countries.

Jimmy’s selections, which include courses, educational podcasts and much more, make it easier for all of the autodidacts out there to excel in self-directed learning.

Jimmy also has created a “Best of the Internet Today page, similar to popurls.com, and a blog that focuses on rating online video..

LibriVox.org is an open source project that provides free audiobooks from the public domain without any advertising. To pull that off, LibriVox enables volunteers to record chapters of books and then upload the audio files as .MP3 and .OGG files back onto LibriVox, where they are then listed within the online catalog. LibriVox’s stated goal is to make all public domain books available as free, downloadable content. We wish them luck! If you would like to help, it’s easy to volunteer. Don’t worry — quite a bit of Tolstoy’s War and Peace remains to be recorded, along with numerous works of Shakepeare, if you’re feeling your thespian oats.