The Hindu Business Line : IT is India's tomorrow

Get the full picture on the great digital transformation being wrought by information and communication technology (ICT). It's food for thought... and admiration.

THE Grameen phone scheme in Bangladesh provided one cellular phone each to 10,000 villages for community use. Kerala's fishermen bargain rates for their catch using mobiles they carry out to sea. An Internet bus goes about with 20 computers in Malaysia, "bringing a new world of information and learning opportunities to school children in rural communities". And Dr Devi Shetty, a cardio-surgeon in Bangalore, is connected to 27 districts in the state and also to West Bengal and Assam for consultation. Is there a correlation between information and communication technology (ICT) usage and economic growth? Yes, says Vinod Vaish in his foreword to The Great Digital Transformation by D.K. Ghosh, from Sunrise Publications (sunrisepublications@front.ru). "The intensive application of ICTs has enabled emergence of a new company characterised by high productivity, efficient markets, innovations in products and services, technologies, business models and organisational structures." The book, subtitled `a saga of sustainable development', notes that the South Asian countries are a fertile group to cooperate on ICT implementation because of their geographic continuity, common historic experience, close cultural and linguistic environment and so forth.

Peter Drucker's book Management Challenges for the 21st Century is cited in a chapter that begins with a new definition of IT by the Prime Minister, Atalji - as `India's tomorrow'. But Drucker had a different explanation: That for almost four decades people thought IT meant merely T - that is, data processing using a computer; the significance of I in IT came much later. The enquiry is "leading rapidly to redefining the tasks to be done with the help of information and, with it, to redefining the institutions that do these tasks."

The Malaysian Model, dealt with in a separate chapter, discusses the `Multimedia Super Corridor' (MSC) - a forum for "new roles of government, new cyber laws and guarantees, collaborations between government and firms, companies and companies, new broadcasting, new types of entertainment, education and delivery of healthcare." Ghosh delves into something philosophical when laying down what are desirable as features in an international telecom order: "open, flexible, and competitive; user, rather than operator-oriented; containing an element of universal service both at the domestic and the international level; and economically efficient." But there is a telecommunications gap; it has three main dimensions. "The international gap, qualitative and technological gap, and the domestic gap."

Towards the end of the book, the author writes: "India, Malaysia and the Philippines, the three South Asian countries benefiting from outsourcing phenomenon would themselves be outsourcing their work once they too grow to be of world class." What a pipedream, you may think. But he adds: "This is happening already; an Indian company has set up a BPO unit in Malaysia. And Indian IT companies are buying up many small US companies and turning them around." Is that making you sit up already?

Blessed are the Perl-iterates

BIOLOGY is a life science, while computing is a machine world. But computers have become commonplace in biology, writes D. Curtis Jamison in "Perl Programming for Bioinformatics & Biologists", from Wiley Dreamtech (www.wileydreamtech.com) . "Almost every biology lab has some type of computer, and the uses of the computer range from manuscript preparation to Internet access, from data collection to data crunching." The field of bioinformatics can be split into two broad areas, states the intro: "Computational biology and analytical bioinformatics." The former is about "formal algorithms and testable hypotheses of biology, encoded into various programs"; computationists "spend their time thinking about the mathematics of biology" and develop bioinformatic tools such as BLAST or FASTA. Analytical bioinformatics puts those tools to use for tasks such as sequencing or regression.

Why Perl? Because it is the most widely used scripting language in bioinformatics, notes the author. What is Perl? Its author Larry Wall christened it so for `practical extraction and reporting language', because it was originally created "for parsing files and creating formatted reports". The name could just as easily stand for `pathologically eclectic rubbish lister' Wall had jested because the language is "perfect for rummaging through files looking for a particular pattern or characters, or for reformatting data tables."

How do these scientists put the language to use? For quick and dirty creation of small analysis programs, such as "to parse a nucleotide sequence into the reverse complement sequence". Such a program is called `glutility' - because it takes the output of one program and changes it into a form suitable for import into another program.

The book is replete with bio examples, such as storing DNA segment into a string, and using Perl's power "to find motifs, translate DNA sequences to RNA, or transcribe RNA sequences to protein"; deploying Bioperl that ships with Tools distribution; applying splice to truncate an array, e.g. splice(@genes, 1). What a blessing to have Perl help in bio work! But `blessing' a referent is the actual trick to creating object-oriented Perl code, writes the author. "The bless command marks the referent as belonging to a particular class or package." Okay, how to bless? bless($reference, "package_name"). Count yourself blessed if you are Perl-iterate!

Coding is the `easy' part

THE Mars expedition has Java running far, far away. For the earthlings, Paul Hatcher and John Gosney write JavaScript Professional Projects, a book from Easwar Press (www.eswarbooks.com) . "This book is not beginner-level basic tutorial, but a more advanced exploration of a real-world project that will show you how to implement JavaScript in actual applications," warns the intro. Center Park School is the fictitious project for which you play Web designer. "Rather than just throwing a bunch of sample code at you and asking you to make sense of it on your own, the project is divided into chapters that deal with a specific aspect of the final Web site." If you thought all design is about coding, you could be wrong. "Actual coding of a project is often the `easy' part, and developing a design plan and project template the real challenge," say the authors. "Working with clients can be a daunting task, especially if those customers are not technically minded."

All right, what is JavaScript? Designed by Netscape Communications and Sun, it is a "lightweight programming language that you can use to add dynamic effects to your Web pages." HTML has limitations, because it can only describe the way a page's elements such as text, forms, hyperlinks and tables look like; it cannot dictate how they behave which is where JavaScript steps in. "The ability to embed JavaScript scripts in a Web page gives you, the programmer, much more control over how your Web page behaves." When you use it in combination with the browser's Document Object Model (DOM), JavaScript can produce intricate, dynamic HTML effects as well as animation and sound.

If your job is in IS security, you must remember that JavaScript has a history of security problems. Most of these security holes have been caught and fixed, "but new ones are being discovered all the time." So, a developer has to "keep up-to-date on the current status" of patches and bugs.

The book's lingo is simple. Try this: "The most important thing to know about using functions is how to make them work. Only three conditions need to be met for a function call to succeed. First, the function must have been previously defined in the program. Second, the correct number of parameters must be passed to it. Lastly, the correct object must be present - you cannot call the string object's split function without a string object." A book to invoke before you launch upon your own project.

Please e-mail us on the latest IT books you have read at Books2Byte@hotmail.com

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