One side-effect of having made great leaps in computing over the last few decades, is the resulting over-abundance in software tools created to solve the diverse problems. Problem solving with computers has, in consequence, become more demanding; instead of focusing on the problem when conceptualizing strategies to solve them, users are side-tracked by the pursuit of even more programming tools (as available).Computer-Based Problem Solving Process is a work intended to offer a systematic treatment to the theory and practice of designing, implementing, and using software tools during the problem solving process. This method is obtained by enabling computer systems to be more Intuitive with human logic rather than machine logic. Instead of software dedicated to computer experts, the author advocates an approach dedicated to computer users in general. This approach does not require users to have an advanced computer education, though it does advocate a deeper education of the computer user in his or her problem domain logic.This book is intended for system software teachers, designers and implementers of various aspects of system software, as well as readers who have made computers a part of their day-today problem solving.

Videogames and Agency explores the trend in videogames and their marketing to offer a player higher volumes, or even more distinct kinds, of player freedom. The book offers a new conceptual framework that helps us understand how this freedom to act is discussed by designers, and how that in turn reflects in their design principles. What can we learn from existing theories around agency? How do paratextual materials reflect design intention with regards to what the player can and cannot do in a videogame? How does game design shape the possibility space for player action? Through these questions and selected case studies that include AAA and independent games alike, the book presents a unique approach to studying agency that combines game design, game studies, and game developer discourse. By doing so, the book examines what discourses around player action, as well as a game's design can reveal about the nature of agency and videogame aesthetics. This book will appeal to readers specifically interested in videogames, such as game studies scholars or game designers, but also to media studies students and media and screen studies scholars less familiar with digital games.

Over the last three decades, Professor Peter Cheung has made significant contributions to a variety of areas, such as analogue and digital computer-aided design tools, high-level synthesis and hardware/software codesign, low-power and high-performance circuit architectures for signal and image processing, and mixed-signal integrated-circuit design.However, the area that has attracted his greatest attention is reconfigurable systems and their design, and his work has contributed to the transformation of this important and exciting discipline. This festschrift contains a unique collection of technical papers based on presentations at a workshop at Imperial College London in May 2013 celebrating Professor Cheung's 60th birthday. Renowned researchers who have been inspired and motivated by his outstanding research in the area of reconfigurable systems are brought together from across the globe to offer their latest research in reconfigurable systems. Professor Cheung has devoted much of his professional career to Imperial College London, and has served with distinction as the Head of Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering for several years. His outstanding capability and his loyalty to Imperial College and the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering are legendary. Professor Cheung has made tremendous strides in ensuring excellence in both research and teaching, and in establishing sound governance and strong financial endowment; but above all, he has made his department a wonderful place in which to work and study.

When traditional web development techniques don't cut it, try React. Use React to create highly interactive web pages faster and with fewer errors. With a little JavaScript experience under your belt, you'll be up and running in no time creating dynamic web applications. Craft isolated components that make your apps easier to develop and maintain, with plenty of guidance on best practices. Set up automated tests, and make pages render fast for your users. See how to use your React skills to integrate with other front-end technologies when needed. Dive right into React by defining components, the basic building blocks of a React application. Integrate modern JavaScript language features such as classes and arrow functions in your app. Analyze the relationships in your data to isolate state, and sync the data model with what your users see. Once you're familiar with how a React application works, organize your code base with modules. Configure a production build and deliver your app as efficiently as possible with Webpack. Master testing with React-specific advice and tools to catch the most bugs with the least amount of code. Learn the basics of the Redux library. Define actions and manage an immutable central state with reducers, then connect Redux to your React components to build even larger and more complex interfaces. Package your React code as a standalone widget so anyone can use it in their own applications. Reuse existing JavaScript code in your React components, and build a new React view on top of an existing data model shared with a legacy application. When you finish this book, you'll be well on your way to solving your front-end problems with React. What You Need: Node.js 6.x or later, and a modern web browser

Gambling is both a multi-billion dollar international industry and a ubiquitous social and cultural phenomenon. It is also undergoing significant change, with new products and technologies, regulatory models, changing public attitudes and the sheer scale of the gambling enterprise necessitating innovative and mixed methodologies that are flexible, responsive and 'agile'. This book seeks to demonstrate that researchers should look beyond the existing disciplinary territory and the dominant paradigm of 'problem gambling' in order to follow those changes across territorial, political, technical, regulatory and conceptual boundaries. The book draws on cutting-edge qualitative work in disciplines including anthropology, history and media studies to explore the production and consumption of risk, risky places, risk technology, the gambling industry, and connections between gambling and other kinds of speculation such as financial derivatives. In doing so it addresses some of the most important issues in contemporary social science, including the challenges of studying deterritorialised social phenomena; globalizing technologies and local markets; regulation as it operates across local, regional and international scales; globalization, and the rise of games, virtual worlds, and social media.

This book covers the distinguishing characteristics and tropes of visual novels (VNs) as choice-based games and analyzes VNs like 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors; Hatoful Boyfriend; and Monster Prom, some of the best examples of the genre as illustrations. The author covers structuring branching narrative and plot, designing impactful and compelling choices, writing entertaining relationships and character interactions, understanding the importance of a VN's prose, and planning a VN's overall narrative design and story delivery. The book contains exercises at the end of chapters to practice the techniques discussed. By the end of the book, if the reader finishes all the exercises, they may have several portfolio pieces or a significant portion of their own VN project designed. Features: Discusses different aspects and genres of VNs, what makes them enjoyable, and successful techniques developers can incorporate into their own games Analyzes various VNs and choice-based games that use these successful techniques Shares tips from developers on portfolio pieces, hiring a team to work on VNs, and plotting and outlining VNs Branching Story, Unlocked Dialogue: Designing and Writing Visual Novels is a valuable resource for developers and narrative designers interested in working on VNs. The book will show them how they can design their own VN projects, design branching narratives, develop entertaining plots and relationships, design impactful and compelling choices, and write prose that's a pleasure to read.

Computer games represent a significant software application domain for innovative research in software engineering techniques and technologies. Game developers, whether focusing on entertainment-market opportunities or game-based applications in non-entertainment domains, thus share a common interest with software engineers and developers on how to best engineer game software. Featuring contributions from leading experts in software engineering, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to computer game software development that includes its history as well as emerging research on the interaction between these two traditionally distinct fields. An ideal reference for software engineers, developers, and researchers, this book explores game programming and development from a software engineering perspective. It introduces the latest research in computer game software engineering (CGSE) and covers topics such as HALO (Highly Addictive, sociaLly Optimized) software engineering, multi-player outdoor smartphone games, gamifying sports software, and artificial intelligence in games. The book explores the use of games in software engineering education extensively. It also covers game software requirements engineering, game software architecture and design approaches, game software testing and usability assessment, game development frameworks and reusability techniques, and game scalability infrastructure, including support for mobile devices and web-based services.

The Handbook of Logic in Computer Science is a multi-volume work covering all the major areas of the application of logic to theoretical computer science. It comprises six volumes, each containing five or six chapters giving an in-depth overview of one of the major topics in the field. The handbook is the result of many years of cooperative effort by eminent researchers in the area, and will no doubt be the standard reference work in logic and theoretical computer science for years to come. Volume 4: Semantic Modelling covers the fundamental topics of semantic modelling in logic and computation. Contents include models for concurrency, concrete process algebra, correspondence between operational and denotational semantics, effective algebras, and abstract interpretation.

In social sciences the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) is an ever growing phenomenon. Emanating from the need of knowledge about society and economy, we are constantly striving to create ideas and methods for a better use of information. This study analyses different practices such as business process management, business process modelling or relationship marketing. It also discusses the use of ICT in a variety of examples taken from different fields such as education, web clipping, public safety, tactic knowledge, or protection of intellectual property and offers an outline of state-of-the-art applications of ICT in social sciences.

Computational Social Science is an interdisciplinary field where social science questions are investigated with modern computational tools. The book provides insight into different social problems and calls for new practices offered by computational social science, discussing methods for efficient management of complex engineering design, cybersecurity and the prediction of malicious threads of information systems. It is also a study of awareness of privacy in social networks, prosodic modelling for speech synthesis, the structure of co-occurrence networks and cloud applications. The authors propose an extension of synergy models in IMC environment to n-communication channels, and identification and evaluation of knowledge management through information system analysis.

Heterogeneous Computing with OpenCL 2.0 teaches OpenCL and parallel programming for complex systems that may include a variety of device architectures: multi-core CPUs, GPUs, and fully-integrated Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). This fully-revised edition includes the latest enhancements in OpenCL 2.0 including: * Shared virtual memory to increase programming flexibility and reduce data transfers that consume resources * Dynamic parallelism which reduces processor load and avoids bottlenecks * Improved imaging support and integration with OpenGL Designed to work on multiple platforms, OpenCL will help you more effectively program for a heterogeneous future. Written by leaders in the parallel computing and OpenCL communities, this book explores memory spaces, optimization techniques, extensions, debugging and profiling. Multiple case studies and examples illustrate high-performance algorithms, distributing work across heterogeneous systems, embedded domain-specific languages, and will give you hands-on OpenCL experience to address a range of fundamental parallel algorithms.

In this book, Graham Mayeda demonstrates how Watsuji Tetsuro and Kuki Shuzo, two twentieth-century Japanese philosophers, criticize and interpret Heideggerian philosophy, articulating traditional Japanese ethics in a modern idiom.

Chaocan Xiang is an Associate Professor at the College of Computer Science, Chongqing University, China. He received his bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. from Nanjing Institute of Communication Engineering, China, in 2009 and 2014, respectively. He subsequently studied at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 2017 (supervised by Prof. Kang G. Shin, IEEE Life Fellow, ACM Fellow). His research interests mainly include UAVs/vehicle-based crowdsensing, urban computing, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, and big data. He has published more than 50 papers, including over 20 in leading venues such as IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE INFOCOM, and ACM Ubicomp. He has received a best paper award and a best poster award at two international conferences. Panlong Yang is a full Professor at the University of Science and Technology of China. He has been supported by the NSF Jiangsu through a Distinguished Young Scholarship and was honored as a CCF Distinguished Lecturer in 2015. He has published over 150 papers, including 40 in CCF Class A. Since 2012, he has supervised 14 master’s and Ph.D. candidates, including two excellent dissertation winners in Jiangsu Province and the PLA education system. He has been supported by the National Key Development Project and NSFC projects. He has nominated by ACM MobiCom 2009 for the best demo honored mention awards, and won best paper awards at the IEEE MSN and MASS. He has served as general chair of BigCom and TPC chair of IEEE MSN. In addition, he has served as a TPC member of INFOCOM (CCF Class A) and an associate editor of the Journal of Communication of China. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE (2019). Fu Xiao received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Technology from the Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China, in 2007. He is currently a Professor and Dean of the School of Computer, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications. He has authored more than 60 papers in respected conference proceedings and journals, including IEEE INFOCOM, ACM Mobihoc, IEEE JASC, IEEE/ACM ToN, IEEE TPDS, IEEE TMC, etc. His main research interest is in the Internet of Things. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery. Xiaochen Fan received his B.S. degree in Computer Science from Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, in 2013, and his Ph.D. from the University of Technology Sydney, NSW, Australia, in 2021. His research interests include mobile/pervasive computing, deep learning, and Internet of Things (IoT). He has published over 25 peer-reviewed papers in high-quality journals and IEEE/ACM international conference proceedings.

Game AI Pro2: Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals presents cutting-edge tips, tricks, and techniques for artificial intelligence (AI) in games, drawn from developers of shipped commercial games as well as some of the best-known academics in the field. It contains knowledge, advice, hard-earned wisdom, and insights gathered from across the community of developers and researchers who have devoted themselves to game AI. In this book, 47 expert developers and researchers have come together to bring you their newest advances in game AI, along with twists on proven techniques that have shipped in some of the most successful commercial games of the last few years. The book provides a toolbox of proven techniques that can be applied to many common and not-so-common situations. It is written to be accessible to a broad range of readers. Beginners will find good general coverage of game AI techniques and a number of comprehensive overviews, while intermediate to expert professional game developers will find focused, deeply technical chapters on specific topics of interest to them. Covers a wide range of AI in games, with topics applicable to almost any game Touches on most, if not all, of the topics necessary to get started in game AI Provides real-life case studies of game AI in published commercial games Gives in-depth, technical solutions from some of the industry's best-known games Includes downloadable demos and/or source code, available at http://www.gameaipro.com

Your software needs to leverage multiple cores, handle thousands of users and terabytes of data, and continue working in the face of both hardware and software failure. Concurrency and parallelism are the keys, and Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks equips you for this new world. See how emerging technologies such as actors and functional programming address issues with traditional threads and locks development. Learn how to exploit the parallelism in your computer's GPU and leverage clusters of machines with MapReduce and Stream Processing. And do it all with the confidence that comes from using tools that help you write crystal clear, high-quality code. This book will show you how to exploit different parallel architectures to improve your code's performance, scalability, and resilience. Learn about the perils of traditional threads and locks programming and how to overcome them through careful design and by working with the standard library. See how actors enable software running on geographically distributed computers to collaborate, handle failure, and create systems that stay up 24/7/365. Understand why shared mutable state is the enemy of robust concurrent code, and see how functional programming together with technologies such as Software Transactional Memory (STM) and automatic parallelism help you tame it. You'll learn about the untapped potential within every GPU and how GPGPU software can unleash it. You'll see how to use MapReduce to harness massive clusters to solve previously intractible problems, and how, in concert with Stream Processing, big data can be tamed. With an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each of the different models and hardware architectures, you'll be empowered to tackle any problem with confidence. What You Need: The example code can be compiled and executed on *nix, OS X, or Windows. Instructions on how to download the supporting build systems are given in each chapter.

This book is intended for individuals and students learning to program. You may already have done some programming in other languages, but not be familiar with Python. Novice programmers should work through the book sequentially, starting at Chapter 1. It will also be a useful reference book for students on a programming course or anyone working on a programming project. It teaches basic syntax and programming techniques, and introduces three inbuilt Python modules: "> Tkinter, used for building a graphical user interface, which is an option that some users may like to include in their project work. "> SQLite, which enables the creation and processing of a database from within a Python program. This provides an alternative to writing to a text file when data needs to be stored and retrieved "> .pdb, Python's debugging module, which can be used to help find elusive logic errors. Questions and exercises are included in every chapter. Answers to these as well as over 120 Python programs for all the examples and exercises given in the book may be downloaded from www.pgonline.co.uk. These programs enable users of the book to try out the in-text examples and check possible solutions to the exercises.

This is the first of two comprehensive volumes that provide a thorough and multi-faceted research into the emerging field of augmented reality games and consider a wide range of its major issues. These first ever research monographs on augmented reality games have been written by a team of 70 leading researchers, practitioners and artists from 20 countries. In Volume I, the phenomenon of the Pokemon GO game is analysed in theoretical, cultural and conceptual contexts, with emphasis on its nature and the educational use of the game in children and adolescents. Game transfer phenomena, motives for playing Pokemon GO, players' experiences and memorable moments, social interaction, long-term engagement, health implications and many other issues raised by the Pokemon GO game are systematically examined and discussed. Augmented Reality Games I is essential reading not only for researchers, practitioners, game developers and artists, but also for students (graduates and undergraduates) and all those interested in the rapidly developing area of augmented reality games.

Are you interested in learning to program computers? PROGRAMMING FOR THE ABSOLUTE BEGINNER, SECOND EDITION is a friendly guide that will teach you the fundamentals of computer programming through the hands-on (and fun!) development of computer games. This book teaches programming using Just BASIC, a free, easy-to-learn software that lets you create programs for computers running Windows. Popular author and educator Jerry Ford, Jr., teaches you fundamental programming principles and gives you a broad view of computer programming and its many possibilities. As you work through this book, you will not only learn the basics of programming, but you'll also build a foundation from which you can advance into other programming languages with confidence. Get started programming today with PROGRAMMING FOR THE ABSOLUTE BEGINNER, SECOND EDITION.

PRAISE FOR Professional Services Automation

"SPO/PSA should be viewed by the market as a cost of doing business or, in other words, a competitive necessity for conducting business in the services economy."
–Ted Kempf, Principal Analyst, Gartner

"The depth and breadth of coverage is extraordinary. Any professional or firm considering the implementation of PSA must stop here first–to make a PSA decision without consulting this book first would be foolish."
–Rick Freedman, author, The IT Consultant and The eConsultant

"I have requested each and every department in my organization to look at their respective chapters for incredible insight and concrete solutions."
–Jean Denis Talon, President and CEO, AXA

"This is the reference book that you need to pick up and consider periodically as you plan, analyze, select, and roll out enterprise software."
–Stuart Sackman, Vice President, ADP

"This book is a perfect starting point for any organization wishing to improve their services delivery through the implementation of a PSA product. It provides a clear overview of all of the aspects to consider when evaluating PSA products as well as how to avoid the stumbling blocks to successful PSA implementation."
–Michael Lines, PMP, Publisher, allPM.com–The Project Manager’s Homepage

"This guide addresses appropriately the subject of project management as an integral component of the PSA business environment–a sensible and pragmatic approach."
–Lloyd Bartlett, P. Eng., MBA, PMP, Lecturer in Project Management, McGill University

Systems development is the process of creating and maintaining information systems, including hardware, software, data, procedures and people. It combines technical expertise with business knowledge and management skill. This practical book provides a comprehensive introduction to the topic and can also be used as a handy reference guide. It discusses key elements of systems development and is the only textbook that supports the BCS Certificate in Systems Development.

SQL for Smarties was hailed as the first book devoted explicitly to the advanced techniques needed to transform an experienced SQL programmer into an expert. Now, 20 years later and in its fifth edition, this classic reference still reigns supreme as the only book written by a SQL master that teaches programmers and practitioners to become SQL masters themselves! These are not just tips and techniques; also offered are the best solutions to old and new challenges. Joe Celko conveys the way you need to think in order to get the most out of SQL programming efforts for both correctness and performance. New to the fifth edition, Joe features new examples to reflect the ANSI/ISO Standards so anyone can use it. He also updates data element names to meet new ISO-11179 rules with the same experience-based teaching style that made the previous editions the classics they are today. You will learn new ways to write common queries, such as finding coverings, partitions, runs in data, auctions and inventory, relational divisions and so forth. SQL for Smarties explains some of the principles of SQL programming as well as the code. A new chapter discusses design flaws in DDL, such as attribute splitting, non-normal forum redundancies and tibbling. There is a look at the traditional acid versus base transaction models, now popular in NoSQL products. You'll learn about computed columns and the DEFERRABLE options in constraints. An overview of the bi-temporal model is new to this edition and there is a longer discussion about descriptive statistic aggregate functions. The book finishes with an overview of SQL/PSM that is applicable to proprietary 4GL vendor extensions.

The world is becoming increasingly mobile. Smartphones and tablets have become more powerful and popular, with many of these devices now containing confidential business, financial, and personal information. This has led to a greater focus on mobile software security. Establishing mobile software security should be of primary concern to every mobile application developer. This book explains how you can create mobile social applications that incorporate security throughout the development process. Although there are many books that address security issues, most do not explain how to incorporate security into the building process. Secure Development for Mobile Apps does exactly that. Its step-by-step guidance shows you how to integrate security measures into social apps running on mobile platforms. You'll learn how to design and code apps with security as part of the process and not an afterthought. The author outlines best practices to help you build better, more secure software. This book provides a comprehensive guide to techniques for secure development practices. It covers PHP security practices and tools, project layout templates, PHP and PDO, PHP encryption, and guidelines for secure session management, form validation, and file uploading. The book also demonstrates how to develop secure mobile apps using the APIs for Google Maps, YouTube, jQuery Mobile, Twitter, and Facebook. While this is not a beginner's guide to programming, you should have no problem following along if you've spent some time developing with PHP and MySQL.

Makes Numerical Programming More Accessible to a Wider Audience Bearing in mind the evolution of modern programming, most specifically emergent programming languages that reflect modern practice, Numerical Programming: A Practical Guide for Scientists and Engineers Using Python and C/C++ utilizes the author's many years of practical research and teaching experience to offer a systematic approach to relevant programming concepts. Adopting a practical, broad appeal, this user-friendly book offers guidance to anyone interested in using numerical programming to solve science and engineering problems. Emphasizing methods generally used in physics and engineering-from elementary methods to complex algorithms-it gradually incorporates algorithmic elements with increasing complexity. Develop a Combination of Theoretical Knowledge, Efficient Analysis Skills, and Code Design Know-How The book encourages algorithmic thinking, which is essential to numerical analysis. Establishing the fundamental numerical methods, application numerical behavior and graphical output needed to foster algorithmic reasoning, coding dexterity, and a scientific programming style, it enables readers to successfully navigate relevant algorithms, understand coding design, and develop efficient programming skills. The book incorporates real code, and includes examples and problem sets to assist in hands-on learning. Begins with an overview on approximate numbers and programming in Python and C/C++, followed by discussion of basic sorting and indexing methods, as well as portable graphic functionality Contains methods for function evaluation, solving algebraic and transcendental equations, systems of linear algebraic equations, ordinary differential equations, and eigenvalue problems Addresses approximation of tabulated functions, regression, integration of one- and multi-dimensional functions by classical and Gaussian quadratures, Monte Carlo integration techniques, generation of random variables, discretization methods for ordinary and partial differential equations, and stability analysis This text introduces platform-independent numerical programming using Python and C/C++, and appeals to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in natural sciences and engineering, researchers involved in scientific computing, and engineers carrying out applicative calculations.

A Thorough Introduction to the Agile Framework and Methodologies That Are Used Worldwide Organizations of all shapes and sizes are embracing the Agile methodologies as a way to transform their products, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement. Many people with varying levels of work experience are interested in understanding the architecture and nuances of Agile, but it is difficult to know where to start. Numerous practitioner books are available, but there has never been a single source for unbiased information about the Agile methodologies--until now. ""Introduction to Agile Methods"" is the place to start for students and professionals who want to understand Agile and become conversant with Agile values, principles, framework, and processes. Authors Sondra Ashmore and Kristin Runyan use their experiences with numerous Agile implementations and academic research to present a clear description of the essential concepts. They address all key roles and the entire development life cycle, including common roadblocks that must be overcome to be successful. Through the authors' realistic use cases, practical examples, and thought-provoking interviews with pioneering practitioners, complex concepts are made relatable. No matter what your role or level of experience, this book provides a foundational understanding that can be used to start or enhance any Agile effort. Coverage includes

• How Agile compares with the Waterfall method and when to use each
• Why Agile demands a cultural transformation--and how that looks to each participant
• Comparing various Agile methodologies, including Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), Crystal, Feature Driven Development (FDD), Lean, and DSDM
• Understanding the roles within Agile and how they work together to create superior results
• Agile approaches to requirements gathering, planning, estimating, tracking, reporting, testing, quality, and integration
• Extending Agile beyond IT

iOS 11, Swift 4, and Xcode 9 provide many new APIs for iOS developers. With this cookbook, you'll learn more than 170 proven solutions for tackling the latest features in iOS 11 and watchOS 4, including new ways to use Swift and Xcode to make your day-to-day app development life easier. This collection of code-rich recipes also gets you up to speed on continuous delivery and continuous integration systems. Ideal for intermediate and advanced iOS developers looking to work with the newest version of iOS, these recipes include reusable code on GitHub, so you can put them to work in your project right away. Among the topics covered by this book: New features in Swift 4 and Xcode 9 Tools for continuous delivery and continuous integration Snapshot testing and test automation Creating document-based applications Updated Map view and Core Location features iOS 11's Security and Password Autofill Data storage with Apple's Core Data Creating lively user interfaces with UI Dynamics Building iMessage applications and sticker packages Integrating Siri into your apps with Siri Kit Creating fascinating apps for Apple Watch