The latest volume in this major reference work covers all major areas of application of logic and theoretical computer science

Classifier systems play a major role in machine learning and knowledge-based systems, and Ross Quinlan's work on ID3 and C4.5 is widely acknowledged to have made some of the most significant contributions to their development. This book is a complete guide to the C4.5 system as implemented in C for the UNIX environment. It contains a comprehensive guide to the system's use, the source code (about 8,800 lines), and implementation notes. The source code and sample datasets are also available for download (see below).

C4.5 starts with large sets of cases belonging to known classes. The cases, described by any mixture of nominal and numeric properties, are scrutinized for patterns that allow the classes to be reliably discriminated. These patterns are then expressed as models, in the form of decision trees or sets of if-then rules, that can be used to classify new cases, with emphasis on making the models understandable as well as accurate. The system has been applied successfully to tasks involving tens of thousands of cases described by hundreds of properties. The book starts from simple core learning methods and shows how they can be elaborated and extended to deal with typical problems such as missing data and over hitting. Advantages and disadvantages of the C4.5 approach are discussed and illustrated with several case studies.

This book and software should be of interest to developers of classification-based intelligent systems and to students in machine learning and expert systems courses.

From the team behind Computer Science for Fun (cs4fn), The Power of Computational Thinking shows that learning to think can be fascinating fun.Yes, and this book shows you how.Computational thinking has changed the way we all live, work and play. It has changed the way science is done too; won wars, created whole new industries and saved lives. It is at the heart of computer programming and is a powerful approach to problem solving, with or without computers. It is so important that many countries now require that primary school children learn the skills.Professors Paul Curzon and Peter McOwan of Queen Mary University of London have written a unique and enjoyable introduction. They describe the elements of computational thinking - such as algorithmic thinking, decomposition, abstraction and pattern matching - in an entertaining and accessible way, using magic tricks, games and puzzles, as well as through real and challenging problems that computer scientists work on.This book gives you a head start in learning the skills needed for coding, and will improve your real life problem solving skills. It will help you design and evaluate new technologies, as well as understand both your own brain and the digital world in a deeper way.

This book takes you through all the basic steps of character design for games and animation, from brainstorming and references through to the development phase and final render. It covers a range of styles such as cartoon, stylized and semi-realistic, and explains how to differentiate between them and use them effectively. Using a step-by-step approach for each stage of the process, this book guides you through the process of creating a new character from scratch. It contains a wealth of design tips and tricks as well as checklists and worksheets for you to use in your own projects. The book covers how to work with briefs, as well as providing advice and practical strategies for working with clients and creating art as a product that can be tailored and sold. This book will be a valuable resource for all junior artists, hobby artists, and art students looking to develop and improve their character development skills for games and animation.

Web mining is the application of data mining strategies to excerpt learning from web information, i.e. web content, web structure, and web usage data. With the emergence of the web as the predominant and converging platform for communication, business and scholastic information dissemination, especially in the last five years, there are ever increasing research groups working on different aspects of web mining mainly in three directions. These are: mining of web content, web structure and web usage. In this context there are good number of frameworks and benchmarks related to the metrics of the websites which is certainly weighty for B2B, B2C and in general in any e-commerce paradigm. Owing to the popularity of this topic there are few books in the market, dealing more on such performance metrics and other related issues. This book, however, omits all such routine topics and lays more emphasis on the classification and clustering aspects of the websites in order to come out with the true perception of the websites in light of its usability. In nutshell, Web Mining: A Synergic Approach Resorting to Classifications and Clustering showcases an effective methodology for classification and clustering of web sites from their usability point of view. While the clustering and classification is accomplished by using an open source tool WEKA, the basic dataset for the selected websites has been emanated by using a free tool site-analyzer. As a case study, several commercial websites have been analyzed. The dataset preparation using site-analyzer and classification through WEKA by embedding different algorithms is one of the unique selling points of this book. This text projects a complete spectrum of web mining from its very inception through data mining and takes the reader up to the application level. Salient features of the book include: - Literature review of research work in the area of web mining - Business websites domain researched, and data collected using site-analyzer tool - Accessibility, design, text, multimedia, and networking are assessed - Datasets are filtered further by selecting vital attributes which are Search Engine Optimized for processing using the Weka attributed tool - Dataset with labels have been classified using J48, RBFNetwork, NaiveBayes, and SMO techniques using Weka - A comparative analysis of all classifiers is reported - Commercial applications for improving website performance based on SEO is given

"I was fortunate indeed to have worked with a fantastic team on the design and implementation of the concurrency features added to the Java platform in Java 5.0 and Java 6. Now this same team provides the best explanation yet of these new features, and of concurrency in general. Concurrency is no longer a subject for advanced users only. Every Java developer should read this book."
--Martin Buchholz
JDK Concurrency Czar, Sun Microsystems

"For the past 30 years, computer performance has been driven by Moore's Law; from now on, it will be driven by Amdahl's Law. Writing code that effectively exploits multiple processors can be very challenging. "Java Concurrency in Practice" provides you with the concepts and techniques needed to write safe and scalable Java programs for today's--and tomorrow's--systems."
--Doron Rajwan
Research Scientist, Intel Corp

"This is the book you need if you're writing--or designing, or debugging, or maintaining, or contemplating--multithreaded Java programs. If you've ever had to synchronize a method and you weren't sure why, you owe it to yourself and your users to read this book, cover to cover."
--Ted Neward
Author of "Effective Enterprise Java"

"Brian addresses the fundamental issues and complexities of concurrency with uncommon clarity. This book is a must-read for anyone who uses threads and cares about performance."
--Kirk Pepperdine
CTO, JavaPerformanceTuning.com

"This book covers a very deep and subtle topic in a very clear and concise way, making it the perfect Java Concurrency reference manual. Each page is filled with the problems (and solutions!) that programmers struggle with every day. Effectively exploitingconcurrency is becoming more and more important now that Moore's Law is delivering more cores but not faster cores, and this book will show you how to do it."
--Dr. Cliff Click
Senior Software Engineer, Azul Systems

"I have a strong interest in concurrency, and have probably written more thread deadlocks and made more synchronization mistakes than most programmers. Brian's book is the most readable on the topic of threading and concurrency in Java, and deals with this difficult subject with a wonderful hands-on approach. This is a book I am recommending to all my readers of "The Java Specialists' Newsletter," because it is interesting, useful, and relevant to the problems facing Java developers today."
--Dr. Heinz Kabutz
"The Java Specialists' Newsletter"

"I've focused a career on simplifying simple problems, but this book ambitiously and effectively works to simplify a complex but critical subject: concurrency. "Java Concurrency in Practice" is revolutionary in its approach, smooth and easy in style, and timely in its delivery--it's destined to be a very important book."
--Bruce Tate
Author of "Beyond Java"

""Java Concurrency in Practice" is an invaluable compilation of threading know-how for Java developers. I found reading this book intellectually exciting, in part because it is an excellent introduction to Java's concurrency API, but mostly because it captures in a thorough and accessible way expert knowledge on threading not easily found elsewhere."
--Bill Venners
Author of "Inside the Java Virtual Machine"

Threads are a fundamental part of the Java platform. As multicore processors become the norm, using concurrency effectively becomes essential forbuilding high-performance applications. Java SE 5 and 6 are a huge step forward for the development of concurrent applications, with improvements to the Java Virtual Machine to support high-performance, highly scalable concurrent classes and a rich set of new concurrency building blocks. In "Java Concurrency in Practice," the creators of these new facilities explain not only how they work and how to use them, but also the motivation and design patterns behind them.

However, developing, testing, and debugging multithreaded programs can still be very difficult; it is all too easy to create concurrent programs that appear to work, but fail when it matters most: in production, under heavy load. "Java Concurrency in Practice" arms readers with both the theoretical underpinnings and concrete techniques for building reliable, scalable, maintainable concurrent applications. Rather than simply offering an inventory of concurrency APIs and mechanisms, it provides design rules, patterns, and mental models that make it easier to build concurrent programs that are both correct and performant.

This book covers: Basic concepts of concurrency and thread safety Techniques for building and composing thread-safe classes Using the concurrency building blocks in java.util.concurrent Performance optimization dos and don'ts Testing concurrent programs Advanced topics such as atomic variables, nonblocking algorithms, and the Java Memory Model

Thorough, up-to-date, comprehensive coverage of 3-D image processing This authoritative guide presents and explains numerous 3-D image processing, analysis, and visualization techniques, including volume filtering, interpolation, 3-D discrete Fourier transform, evaluation of topological and geometrical features, region segmentation and edge detection, skeletonization and registration, and visualization. Necessary theoretical background is provided for each topic, along with a number of algorithms, selected on the basis of their acceptance by the scientific community.

The presentation of each technique includes a commented implementation, either in C code or in C-like pseudocode. Though presented in an almost ready-to-run form, the C code is simplified to expose the structure of the processing algorithms, rather than their programming details. This combination of theoretical treatment and C code implementation allows readers to gain a thorough insight into these techniques.

Important features of 3-D Image Processing Algorithms include:

• A demo version of EIKONA 3D image processing software
• Lab exercises based on EIKONA 3D
• Accompanying transparencies summarizing the most important topics.

The material can be downloaded from an ftp site

Based on the authors’ long experience in research and teaching of 2-D/3-D image processing, 3-D Image Processing Algorithms is an indispensable resource for electrical, computer, and biomedical engineers, as well as computer graphics professionals and programmers.

Mobile Applications Development with Android: Technologies and Algorithms presents advanced techniques for mobile app development, and addresses recent developments in mobile technologies and wireless networks. The book covers advanced algorithms, embedded systems, novel mobile app architecture, and mobile cloud computing paradigms. Divided into three sections, the book explores three major dimensions in the current mobile app development domain. The first section describes mobile app design and development skills, including a quick start on using Java to run an Android application on a real phone. It also introduces 2D graphics and UI design, as well as multimedia in Android mobile apps. The second part of the book delves into advanced mobile app optimization, including an overview of mobile embedded systems and architecture. Data storage in Android, mobile optimization by dynamic programming, and mobile optimization by loop scheduling are also covered. The last section of the book looks at emerging technologies, including mobile cloud computing, advanced techniques using Big Data, and mobile Big Data storage. About the Authors Meikang Qiu is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Pace University, and an adjunct professor at Columbia University. He is an IEEE/ACM Senior Member, as well as Chair of the IEEE STC (Special Technical Community) on Smart Computing. He is an Associate Editor of a dozen of journals including IEEE Transactions on Computers and IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. He has published 320+ peer-reviewed journal/conference papers and won 10+ Best Paper Awards. Wenyun Dai is pursuing his PhD at Pace University. His research interests include high performance computing, mobile data privacy, resource management optimization, cloud computing, and mobile networking. His paper about mobile app privacy has been published in IEEE Transactions on Computers. Keke Gai is pursuing his PhD at Pace University. He has published over 60 peer-reviewed journal or conference papers, and has received three IEEE Best Paper Awards. His research interests include cloud computing, cyber security, combinatorial optimization, business process modeling, enterprise architecture, and Internet computing. .

The Definitive Vulkan (TM) Developer's Guide and Reference: Master the Next-Generation Specification for Cross-Platform Graphics The next generation of the OpenGL specification, Vulkan, has been redesigned from the ground up, giving applications direct control over GPU acceleration for unprecedented performance and predictability. Vulkan (TM) Programming Guide is the essential, authoritative reference to this new standard for experienced graphics programmers in all Vulkan environments. Vulkan API lead Graham Sellers (with contributions from language lead John Kessenich) presents example-rich introductions to the portable Vulkan API and the new SPIR-V shading language. The author introduces Vulkan, its goals, and the key concepts framing its API, and presents a complex rendering system that demonstrates both Vulkan's uniqueness and its exceptional power. You'll find authoritative coverage of topics ranging from drawing to memory, and threading to compute shaders. The author especially shows how to handle tasks such as synchronization, scheduling, and memory management that are now the developer's responsibility. Vulkan (TM) Programming Guide introduces powerful 3D development techniques for fields ranging from video games to medical imaging, and state-of-the-art approaches to solving challenging scientific compute problems. Whether you're upgrading from OpenGL or moving to open-standard graphics APIs for the first time, this guide will help you get the results and performance you're looking for. Coverage includes Extensively tested code examples to demonstrate Vulkan's capabilities and show how it differs from OpenGL Expert guidance on getting started and working with Vulkan's new memory system Thorough discussion of queues, commands, moving data, and presentation Full explanations of the SPIR-V binary shading language and compute/graphics pipelines Detailed discussions of drawing commands, geometry and fragment processing, synchronization primitives, and reading Vulkan data into applications A complete case study application: deferred rendering using complex multi-pass architecture and multiple processing queues Appendixes presenting Vulkan functions and SPIR-V opcodes, as well as a complete Vulkan glossary

The influx of computer technology into classrooms during the past decade raises the questions -- how can we teach children to use computers productively and what effect will learning to program computers have on them? During this same period, researchers have investigated novice learning of computer programming. Teaching and Learning Computer Programming unites papers and perspectives by respected researchers of teaching and learning computer science while it summarizes and integrates major theoretical and empirical contributions. It gives a current and concise account of how instructional techniques affect student learning and how learning of programming affects students' cognitive skills. This collection is an ideal supplementary text for students and a valuable reference for professionals and researchers of education, technology and psychology, computer science, communication, developmental psychology, and industrial organization.

Welcome to Game Audio Programming: Principles and Practices! This book is the first of its kind: an entire book dedicated to the art of game audio programming. With over fifteen chapters written by some of the top game audio programmers and sound designers in the industry, this book contains more knowledge and wisdom about game audio programming than any other volume in history. One of the goals of this book is to raise the general level of game audio programming expertise, so it is written in a manner that is accessible to beginners, while still providing valuable content for more advanced game audio programmers. Each chapter contains techniques that the authors have used in shipping games, with plenty of code examples and diagrams. There are chapters on the fundamentals of audio representation and perception; advanced usage of several different audio middleware platforms (Audiokinetic Wwise, CRI ADX2, and FMOD Studio); advanced topics including Open Sound Control, Vector-Based Amplitude Panning, and Dynamic Game Data; and more! Whether you're an audio programmer looking for new techniques, an up-and-coming game developer looking for an area to focus on, or just the one who got saddled with the audio code, this book has something for you. Cutting-edge advanced game audio programming concepts, with examples from real games and audio engines Includes perspectives of both audio programmers and sound designers on working and communicating together Coverage not just on game audio engine design, but also on implementing audio tools and working with sound designers providing a comprehensive perspective on being an audio programmer

Modern software systems are composed of many servers, services, and other components that communicate through APIs. As a developer, your job is to make sure these APIs are stable, reliable, and easy to use for other developers. API Design Patterns provides you with a unique catalog of design standards and best practices to ensure your APIs are flexible and user-friendly. Fully illustrated with examples and relevant use-cases, this essential guide covers patterns for API fundamentals and real-world system designs, along with quite a few not-so-common scenarios and edge-cases. about the technologyAPI design patterns are a useful set of best practice specifications and common solutions to API design challenges. Using accepted design patterns creates a shared language amongst developers who create and consume APIs, which is especially critical given the explosion of mission-critical public-facing web APIs. API Patterns are still being developed and discovered. This collection, gathered and tested by Google API expert JJ Geewax, is the first of its kind. about the book API Design Patterns draws on the collected wisdom of the API community, including the internal developer knowledge base at Google, laying out an innovative set of design patterns for developing both internal and public-facing APIs. In this essential guide, Google Software Engineer JJ Geewax provides a unique and authoritative catalog of patterns that promote flexibility and ease-of-use in your APIs. Each pattern in the catalog is fully illustrated with its own example API, use-cases for solving common API design challenges, and scenarios for tricky edge issues using a pattern's more subtle features. With the best practices laid out in this book, you can ensure your APIs are adaptive in the face of change and easy for your clients to incorporate into their projects. what's inside A full case-study of building an API and adding features The guiding principles that underpin most API patterns Fundamental patterns for resource layout and naming Advanced patterns for special interactions and data transformations about the readerAimed at software developers with experience using APIs, who want to start building their own. about the author JJ Geewax is a software engineer at Google, focusing on Google Cloud Platform and API design. He is also the author of Google Cloud Platform in Action.

New Literacies and Teacher Learning examines the complexities of teacher professional development today in relation to new literacies and digital technologies, set within the wider context of strong demands for teachers to be innovative and to improve students' learning outcomes. Contributors hail from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Finland, Mexico, Norway, and the U.S., and work in a broad range of situations, grade levels, activities, scales, and even national contexts. Projects include early year education through to adult literacy education and university contexts, describing a range of approaches to taking up new literacies and digital technologies within diverse learning practices. While the authors present detailed descriptions of using various digital resources like movie editing software, wikis, video conferencing, Twitter, and YouTube, they all agree that digital "stuff" - while important - is not the central concern. Instead, what they foreground in their discussions are theory-informed pedagogical orientations, collaborative learning theories, the complexities of teachers' workplaces, and young people's interests. Thus, a key premise in this collection is that teaching and learning are about deep engagement, representing meanings in a range of ways. These include acknowledging relationships and knowledge; thinking critically about events, phenomena, and processes; and participating in valued social and cultural activities. The book shows how this kind of learning doesn't simply occur in a one-off session, but takes time, commitment, and multiple opportunities to interact with others, to explore, play, make mistakes, and get it right.

"Fundamentally, making games is designing with others, everyone contributing from different angles towards the best possible product. Conclusively, Garcia-Ruiz has chosen a collection of chapters that demonstrates several different aspects of working in gaming and working with others that stands to raise the level of expertise in the field." -Veronica Zammitto, Senior Lead Games User Research, Electronic Arts, Inc., from the Foreword Usability is about making a product easy to use while meeting the requirements of target users. Applied to video games, this means making the game accessible and enjoyable to the player. Video games with high usability are generally played efficiently and frequently while enjoying higher sales volumes. The case studies in this book present the latest interdisciplinary research and applications of games user research in determining and developing usability to improve the video game user experience at the human-computer interface level. Some of the areas examined include practical and ethical concerns in conducting usability testing with children, audio experiences in games, tangible and graphical game interfaces, controller testing, and business models in mobile gaming. Games User Research: A Case Study Approach provides a highly useful resource for researchers, practitioners, lecturers, and students in developing and applying methods for testing player usability as well as for conducting games user research. It gives the necessary theoretical and practical background for designing and conducting a test for usability with an eye toward modifying software interfaces to improve human-computer interaction between the player and the game.

Answer the question "Can we build this for ALL the devices?" with a resounding YES. Learn how to build apps using seven different platforms: Mobile Web, iOS, Android, Windows, RubyMotion, React Native, and Xamarin. Find out which cross-platform solution makes the most sense for your needs, whether you're new to mobile or an experienced developer expanding your options. Start covering all of the mobile world today. Understanding the idioms, patterns, and quirks of the modern mobile platforms gives you the power to choose how you develop. Over seven weeks you'll build seven different mobile apps using seven different tools. You'll start out with Mobile Web; develop native apps on iOS, Android, and Windows; and finish by building apps for multiple operating systems using the native cross-platform solutions RubyMotion, React Native, and Xamarin. For each platform, you'll build simple, but non-trivial, apps that consume JSON data, run on multiple screen sizes, or store local data. You'll see how to test, how to build views, and how to structure code. You'll find out how much code it's possible to share, how much of the underlying platform you still need to know, and ultimately, you'll get a firm understanding of how to build apps on whichever devices your users prefer. This book gives you enough first-hand experience to weigh the trade-offs when building mobile apps. You'll compare writing apps on one platform versus another and understand the benefits and hidden costs of cross-platform tools. You'll get pragmatic, hands-on experience writing apps in a multi-platform world. What You Need: You'll need a computer and some experience programming. When we cover iOS, you'll need a Mac, and when we cover Windows Phone you'll need a computer with Windows on it. It's helpful if you have access to an iPhone, Android phone, and Windows Phone to run the examples on the devices where mobile apps are ultimately deployed, but the simulators or emulator versions of those phones work great.

How do we connect with one another? How do the media portray different cultures and beliefs? What messages are often omitted from media? How do we connect what we see in the worldwide media to the classroom? This book, divided into four parts, serves to answer many of these questions. In Part 1, readers are provided with a historical look at media literacy education while glimpsing the future of this educational movement. Part 2 curates voices from around the globe, from practitioners to researchers, who provide a look at issues that are of consequence in our worldwide society. Part 3 focuses on education through cases studies that give educational perspectives and assessment opportunities. The final section, "Take Action", offers the reader resources for growing global media literacy around the world. This timely resource provides a look at how media literacy education has become a global and interconnected dialogue brought about by the evolution of technology.

While formal training and communication are a foundational approach to developing employees in the workplace, alternate reality games (ARGs) provide a framework for increased and sustained engagement within business organizations. ARGs are transmedia experiences designed to generate engagement and immersive learning beyond what is achieved in formal and conventional training and communication approaches. Alternate Reality Games: Gamification for Performance leads you through the fundamentals of ARGs. It includes a discussion of what is and is not an ARG, citing examples and identifying business challenges that can be addressed through ARGs. It presents case studies that illustrate the variety of forms that ARGs take and the issues to which they can be applied, such as improving performance and critical communication situations. It also gives guidelines for creating your own ARGs, reviewing the process and technological tools and considerations relevant to their creation. Presenting a thorough examination of the beneficial roles ARGs can play in the business environment as well as methods for creating effective ARGs, Alternate Reality Games: Gamification for Performance is an ideal reference for those approaching or considering ARGs for the first time as well as the training professional or professional game designer. It presents a comprehensive overview of the advantages of applying ARGs to the workplace as well as methods for designing and using them.

Shared Memory Application Programming presents the key concepts and applications of parallel programming, in an accessible and engaging style applicable to developers across many domains. Multithreaded programming is today a core technology, at the basis of all software development projects in any branch of applied computer science. This book guides readers to develop insights about threaded programming and introduces two popular platforms for multicore development: OpenMP and Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB). Author Victor Alessandrini leverages his rich experience to explain each platform's design strategies, analyzing the focus and strengths underlying their often complementary capabilities, as well as their interoperability. The book is divided into two parts: the first develops the essential concepts of thread management and synchronization, discussing the way they are implemented in native multithreading libraries (Windows threads, Pthreads) as well as in the modern C++11 threads standard. The second provides an in-depth discussion of TBB and OpenMP including the latest features in OpenMP 4.0 extensions to ensure readers' skills are fully up to date. Focus progressively shifts from traditional thread parallelism to modern task parallelism deployed by modern programming environments. Several chapter include examples drawn from a variety of disciplines, including molecular dynamics and image processing, with full source code and a software library incorporating a number of utilities that readers can adapt into their own projects.

What is good code? Writing good code is really a question about what the code is trying to solve. (And good code is not to be confused with patterns because not all pieces of good code are patterns.) We debate about good code because there is not just a single piece of good code, but so many good pieces of code. And each good piece of code depends on the context in which it is used.

"How to Code .NET: Tips and Tricks for Coding .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 Applications Effectively" provides solutions to certain problems. That is, specific problems. This book provides detailed, authoritative explanations of good .NET coding techniques. It's based on award-winning material that author -->Christian Gross--> has previously presented at conferences throughout the U.S. and Europe. What's more, the author is at the forefront of the .NET technology wave and an acknowledged expert on the subject of .NET coding style and techniques.-->Table of Contents-->Testing Your Code .NET Runtime- and Framework-Related Solutions Text-Related Solutions C# Coding Solutions

Since the emergence of digital game studies, a number of debates have engaged scholars. The debate between ludic (play) and narrative (story) paradigms remains the one that famously ""never happened."" This collection of new essays critically frames that debate and urges game scholars to consider it central to the field. The contributors examine various digital games, assessing the applicability of play versus narrative approaches or considering the failure of each. The essays consider the broader history of game studies, while applying notions of play and story to recent games in an attempt to foster serious debate and analysis.

This book takes the practicality of other "Gems" series such as "Graphics Gems" and "Game Programming Gems" and provide a quick reference for novice and expert programmers alike to swiftly track down a solution to a task needed for their VR project. Reading the book from cover to cover is not the expected use case, but being familiar with the territory from the Introduction and then jumping to the needed explanations is how the book will mostly be used. Each chapter (other than Introduction) will contain between 5 to 10 "tips", each of which is a self-contained explanation with implementation detail generally demonstrated as pseudo code, or in cases where it makes sense, actual code. Key Features Sections written by veteran virtual reality researchers and developers Usable code snipits that readers can put to immediate use in their own projects. Tips of value both to readers entering the field as well as those looking for solutions that expand their repertoire.

Have you ever wanted to learn how to program but never found quite the right book to get you started? Programming: A Primer gets you going straight away with the fundamentals of what programming is, basic programming with Python and the fundamental aspects of practical web development. In this book, you'll learn about:Programming: A Primer offers an easy way into coding for anyone with an interest in using technology to solve problems, whether a school or new undergraduate computer science student or a working professional. It gives everyone, regardless of background, the ideal foundations and motivation needed to get to grips with programming.A companion website can be found here: .

Have you ever wanted to learn how to program but never found quite the right book to get you started? Programming: A Primer gets you going straight away with the fundamentals of what programming is, basic programming with Python and the fundamental aspects of practical web development. In this book, you'll learn about:Programming: A Primer offers an easy way into coding for anyone with an interest in using technology to solve problems, whether a school or new undergraduate computer science student or a working professional. It gives everyone, regardless of background, the ideal foundations and motivation needed to get to grips with programming.A companion website can be found here: .

Imagine a time in the not too distant future when not only game companies but also the human resources, marketing and product development divisions of major corporations are hiring game designers. The time is coming when companies large and small, creative agencies, school systems, museums, libraries and public and governmental institutions will employ game designers to engage employees, customers, students and volunteers to generate new audiences and deepen commitments. The skills that a game designer brings, organizing and presenting a body of information in the most appropriate and entertaining way, are the ones needed by the twenty-first century organization. Designing Gamified Systems is a practical guide for practicing and aspiring game designers to put their unique and valuable skills to work to drive engagement, build motivation, and facilitate positive behavior.

Rather than the overused ideas of pervasive games or "gamification," this book uniquely focuses first and foremost on the partnership between the content expert or client and the game designer. It assumes that game systems are one more meaningful tool that can now be used to help organizations and individuals encourage people to care about them and support them. Providing a solid introduction to the fundamental principles of the game layer, it also offers a practical set of tools and activities to contextualize the practice within a variety of different scenarios. It includes interviews with industry leaders, content experts, game designers, museum professionals, and educators who are all using game practices and ideas in new and innovative ways. Catching a snapshot of this exciting moment while delivering enduring fundamentals, the book can be used in the classroom or can be read as a trade book, and will appeal to industry professionals, game designers and game design students."

You don't have to accept slow Ruby or Rails performance. In this comprehensive guide to Ruby optimization, you'll learn how to write faster Ruby code--but that's just the beginning. See exactly what makes Ruby and Rails code slow, and how to fix it. Alex Dymo will guide you through perils of memory and CPU optimization, profiling, measuring, performance testing, garbage collection, and tuning. You'll find that all those "hard" things aren't so difficult after all, and your code will run orders of magnitude faster. This is the first book ever that consolidates all the Ruby performance optimization advice in one place. It's your comprehensive guide to memory optimization, CPU optimization, garbage collector tuning, profiling, measurements, performance testing, and more. You'll go from performance rookie to expert. First, you'll learn the best practices for writing Ruby code that's easy not only on the CPU, but also on memory, and that doesn't trigger the dreaded garbage collector. You'll find out that garbage collection accounts for 80% of slowdowns, and often takes more than 50% of your program's execution time.And you'll discover the bottlenecks in Rails code and learn how selective attribute loading and preloading can mitigate the performance costs of ActiveRecord. As you advance to Ruby performance expert, you'll learn how profile your code, how to make sense out of profiler reports, and how to make optimization decisions based on them. You'll make sure slow code doesn't creep back into your Rails application by writing performance tests, and you'll learn the right way to benchmark Rails. And finally, you'll dive into the Ruby interpreter internals to really understand why garbage collection makes Ruby so slow, and how you can tune it up. What You Need: Some version of Ruby. The advice from this book applies to all modern Ruby versions from 1.9 to 2.2. 80% of the material will also be useful for legacy Ruby 1.8 users, and there is 1.8-specific advice as well.