Discover Alabama's curious underside with this oddly entertaining little guide! Travelers with a taste for the bizarre, tacky, and hilarious can visit the Coon Dog Cemetery, learn about the cattle-mutilation mystery, view the world's largest boll weevil, and sip Kudzu Tea. Only a true Southerner could capture the essence of these and other authentic Alabama phenomena, and Andy Duncan does his home state proud.

Perl is a very powerful tool for Oracle database administrators, but too few DBAs realize how helpful Perl can be in managing, monitoring, and tuning Oracle9i, Oracle8i, and earlier databases. You don't need to be a Perl expert to reap the rewards of reading Perl for Oracle DBAs. The book explains what you need to know about Perl, profiles the best Perl open source applications available to DBAs, and provides the Perl DBA Toolkit, a comprehensive suite of ready-to-use scripts designed to ease the burden of Oracle database administration.

This is the first book to tie together the commercial world of Oracle and the free-wheeling world of open source software. It describes nearly 100 open source tools, from the widely applied (like Linux, Perl, and Apache) to the Oracle-specific (like Orasoft, Orac, OracleTool, and OraSnap). You'll learn where to find them, what their advantages are, and how to create and release new open source Oracle tools yourself.

In the tales gathered in An Agent of Utopia: New and Selected Stories you will meet a Utopian assassin, an aging UFO contactee, a haunted Mohawk steelworker, a time-traveling prizefighter, a yam-eating Zombie, and a child who loves a frizzled chicken-not to mention Harry Houdini, Zora Neale Hurston, Sir Thomas More, and all their fellow travelers riding the steamer-trunk imagination of a unique twenty-first-century fabulist. From the Florida folktales of the perennial prison escapee Daddy Mention and the dangerous gator-man Uncle Monday that inspired "Daddy Mention and the Monday Skull" (first published in Mojo: Conjure Stories, edited by Nalo Hopkinson) to the imagined story of boxer and historical bit player Jess Willard in World Fantasy Award winner "The Pottawatomie Giant" (first published on SciFiction), or the Ozark UFO contactees in Nebula Award winner "Close Encounters" to Flannery O'Connor's childhood celebrity in Shirley Jackson Award finalist "Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse" (first published in Eclipse) Duncan's historical juxtapositions come alive on the page as if this Southern storyteller was sitting on a rocking chair stretching the truth out beside you. Duncan rounds out his explorations of the nooks and crannies of history in two irresistible new stories, "Joe Diabo's Farewell" - in which a gang of Native American ironworkers in 1920s New York City go to a show - and the title story, "An Agent of Utopia" - where he reveals what really (might have) happened to Thomas More's head.