Social marketing firm Buddy Media is being bought out by Salesforce.com in a $689 million stock and cash deal. The transaction will close Oct. 31 (the end of the third fiscal quarter).

Among its 1,000 customer, Buddy Media includes the companies ofFord, Hewlett-Packard and Mattel. Thanks to its capabilities of sending targeted marketing content through YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook, Salesforce.com will build on the monitoring technology in social media through its recent Radian6 purchase.

According to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, the Marketing Cloud leadership will enable the company to take advantage of the massive opportunity within the next five years.

The purchase is arriving on the heels of rival Oracle’s buyout of Virtue, who is the competitor to Buddy Media.

The job market is extremely tight these days, with several qualified workers being available for each empty position. That means that should you find yourself looking for work, for whatever reason, you need to make sure your interview skills are up to snuff. We will be taking a look at a variety of different tips that will help ensure your success during the interview process, including how to make sure your employers know about your C training experience. Here are some others:

• Do your own research in advance – Before you even step through the doorway to initiate the application process with a company, you should already know quite a bit about it. Investigate the corporate culture, speak with contacts who have experience with the firm, or search online; however you do it, having as much information as possible can really help you get an advantage during the hiring process. If you have specific experience, such as C training, that is of exceptional value to the firm you are applying to you can market yourself more effectively to the hiring agent.
• Dress Appropriately – In a perfect world, programming skill and experience such as C training should be the only factors in consideration when looking at a prospective hire; in real life this is often not the case. Don’t miss out because you gave a bad impression to someone, and strive to look your absolute best during your job interview. It is unfortunate, but the IT industry in particular tends to have a reputation for lacking in this department, so breaking the mold can be of great benefit to you.
• Be ready to interview at all times – You may be surprised how often job candidates are asked to participate in an off-the-cuff phone interview on the spot. Same-day in person interviews also are rising in popularity. Make sure you are always able to respond quickly if these situations come up and you get a fast interview. Memorize a few points in advance you can use to pump yourself up, such as an anecdote about your C training or other particular skills you may possess.

Job interviews are notoriously stressful for many people. Using simple tips like these can help you to prepare in advance for situations you may encounter during the interview process, and help you ultimately secure that new job. Make sure to emphasize whatever makes you special as an individual, such as your extensive C training.

Programmers often tend to be sedentary people. Sitting in a chair and pressing keys, testing code, and planning out one logical step-wise strategy after another to get the computer to process data the way you want it to is just what life as a programmer is all about. But, is being too sedentary hindering a programmers max potential? In other words, will getting up, moving around, and getting the blood pumping make us better programmers? To answer this question more efficiently, we will need to consider the impact of exercise on various aspects of programming.

Alertness And Focus

It is no surprise that working up a sweat makes the mind wake up and become more alert. As the blood starts pumping, the body physically reacts in ways that helps the mind to better focus. And improving our focus might make us better programmers in the sense that we are more able to wrap our mind around a problem and deal with it more efficiently than if we feel sluggish and not so alert. However, improving one's focus with exercise can be augmented by taking such vitamins as B6, Coleen, and eating more saturated fats rather than so many sugars. Exercise alone may be a good start, but it is important to realize that the impact of exercise on overall focus can be enhanced when combined with other dietary practices. However, it never hurts to begin a day of programming with fifteen minutes of rigorous workout to give the mind a little extra push.

Increase In Intellect

Does exercise cause a programmer to become a smarter programmer? This is perhaps a trickier question. In some sense, it might seem as if exercise makes us more intelligent. But, this may be more because our focus is sharper than because of any increase in actual knowledge. For example, if you don't know how to program in Python, it is highly doubtful that exercising harder will all of a sudden transfer such insights directly to your brain. However, exercise might have another indirect impact on a programmer’s intellect that will help them to become a better programmer. The more a person exercises, the more stamina and energy they will tend to have, as compared to programmers who never exercise all that much. That additional energy and stamina might help a programmer to be able to push themselves to learn things more efficiently, simply because they aren't getting tired as much as they study new languages or coding techniques. If you have more energy and stamina throughout the day, you will likely be more productive as a programmer as well. Greater productivity can often make one program better simply because they actually push themselves to finish projects. Other programmers who do not exercise on a regular basis may simply lack the energy, stamina, and motivation to follow through and bring their programming projects to completion.

Memory

The ability to remember things and recall them quickly is key to being an efficient programmer. Getting up and getting real exercise may be central to making sure that one does not lose control of these cognitive abilities. According to the New York Times, article, Getting a Brain Boost Through Exercise, recent research studies on mice and humans have shown that, in both cases, exercise does in fact appear to promote better memory function as well as other cognitive factors like spacial sense. (1) Consequently, if a person intends to be a programmer for a long time and wants their mind to be able to remember things and recall them more easily, then exercise may need to become an essential part of such a programmer's daily routine.

As much as one might want to resist the need for exercise and be sedentary programmers, the simple fact is that exercise very well could improve our ability to program in numerous ways. More importantly, exercise is critical to improving and maintaining good health overall. Even if a person does not have much time to get up and move around during the day, there are exercises that one can do while sitting, which would be better to do than no exercise at all.

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In this tutorial we are going to take a look at how you work with strings in Python. Now, any language worth its salt will have a number of options for working with text and Python is probably one of the best to use when it comes to processing text.

If you are new to programming in general you may be wondering what a string is. In terms of programming, a string is classed as any sequence of characters you can type with your keyboard, and let’s face it, if you want your application to be of any use to yourself or other users then you need it to tell you what it’s doing or to prompt you for an action, and that is where strings come into play.

They are your applications way of communicating with the user. Without the ability to enter and display text or software would be pretty useless.

So, how would you create a string in Python? Take a look at the following code: