Agile project management is a proven approach for designing and delivering software with improved value to customers. Agility is all about self-directed teams, feedback, light documentation, and working software with shorter development cycles. The role of the project manager with agile differs significantly from traditional project management in that there is minimal up-front planning. Agile for Project Managers will help project managers from any industry transition to agile project management. The book examines the project management component of agility, concentrating on industry standards, certifications, and being agile. It also compares agile methods to traditional project management methods throughout to provide readers with a clear understanding of the differences between the two. The book's focus is in alignment with the Project Management Institute (PMI (R)) Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP (R)) credential-making it an ideal resource for anyone preparing for the PMI-ACP (R) exam. Coverage includes: Agile as a project management methodology Agile teams Agile tools and techniques Flavors of agile Agile principles Agile certifications The book provides readers with the understanding required to decide which projects will benefit from agile. It also includes information that can help readers to assess their organizations' readiness for agile methods. Complete with a list of agile training providers, the book will help certified project managers make a smooth transition to agile project management and will provide newcomers with the basic knowledge needed to pass the PMI-ACP (R) exam, the first time around.

"PIC Projects and Applications Using C" details how to program the PIC microcontroller in the C language. The book takes a learn-by-doing approach, with applications covering topics such as inputs, outputs, keypads, alphanumeric displays, analogue-to-digital conversion, radio transmitters and receivers, data EEPROM, interrupts and timing. To aid debugging, the book provides a section detailing the use of the simulator and in-circuit debugger.

With this book you will learn: How to program the PIC microcontroller in CTechniques for using the simulator and debuggers to find faults on your codeThe ins and outs of interfacing circuits, such as radio modules and liquid crystal displaysHow to use the PIC on-board functions, such as interrupts and timing modules, and make analogue measurements
Relevant parts of the language are introduced and explained when required for those new to the subjectCore principles are introduced gradually for self-paced learningExplains how and why a software program works, and how to alter and expand the code

A Functional Start to Computing with Python enables students to quickly learn computing without having to use loops, variables, and object abstractions at the start. Requiring no prior programming experience, the book draws on Python's flexible data types and operations as well as its capacity for defining new functions. Along with the specifics of Python, the text covers important concepts of computing, including software engineering motivation, algorithms behind syntax rules, advanced functional programming ideas, and, briefly, finite state machines. Taking a student-friendly, interactive approach to teach computing, the book addresses more difficult concepts and abstractions later in the text. The author presents ample explanations of data types, operators, and expressions. He also describes comprehensions-the powerful specifications of lists and dictionaries-before introducing loops and variables. This approach helps students better understand assignment syntax and iteration by giving them a mental model of sophisticated data first. Web ResourceThe book's supplementary website at http://functionalfirstpython.com/ provides many ancillaries, including: Interactive flashcards on Python language elements Links to extra support for each chapter Unit testing and programming exercises An interactive Python stepper tool Chapter-by-chapter points Material for lectures

Think in the Clojure way! Once you're familiar with Clojure, take the next step with extended lessons on the best practices and most critical decisions you'll need to make while developing. Learn how to model your domain with data, transform it with pure functions, manage state, spread your work across cores, and structure apps with components. Discover how to use Clojure in the real world, and unlock the speed and power of this beautiful language on the Java Virtual Machine. Clojure Applied gives you the practical, realistic advice and depth of field that's been missing from your development practice. You want to develop software in the most effective, efficient way possible. This book gives you the answers you've been looking for in friendly, clear language. Dive into the core concepts of Clojure: immutable collections, concurrency, pure functions, and state management. You'll finally get the complete picture you've been looking for, rather than dozens of puzzle pieces you must assemble yourself.First, explore the core concepts of Clojure development: learn how to model your domain with immutable data; choose the ideal collection; and write simple, pure functions for efficient transformation. Next you'll apply those core concepts to build applications: discover how Clojure manages state and identity; spread your work for concurrent programming; and create and assemble components. Finally, see how to manage external integration and deployment concerns by developing a testing strategy, connecting with other data sources, and getting your libraries and applications out the door. Go beyond the toy box and into Clojure's way of thinking. By the end of this book, you'll have the tools and information to put Clojure's strengths to work. What You Need: To follow along with the examples in the book, you will need Clojure 1.6, Leinegen 2, and Java 6 or higher.

Writing for the Web unites theory, technology, and practice to explore writing and hypertext for website creation. It integrates such key topics as XHTML/CSS coding, writing (prose) for the Web, the rhetorical needs of the audience, theories of hypertext, usability and architecture, and the basics of web site design and technology. Presenting information in digestible parts, this text enables students to write and construct realistic and manageable Web sites with a strong theoretical understanding of how online texts communicate to audiences. Key features of the book include: Screenshots of contemporary Web sites that will allow students to understand how writing for and linking to other layers of a Web site should work. Flow charts that describe how Web site architecture and navigation works. Parsing exercises in which students break down information into subsets to demonstrate how Web site architecture can be usable and scalable. Detailed step-by-step descriptions of how to use basic technologies such as file transfer protocols (FTP). Hands-on projects for students to engage in that allow them to connect the various components in the text. A companion website with downloadable code and additional pedagogical features: www.routledge.com/cw/applen Writing for the Web prepares students to work in professional roles, as it facilitates understanding of architecture and arrangement of written content of an organization's texts.

Writing for the Web unites theory, technology, and practice to explore writing and hypertext for website creation. It integrates such key topics as XHTML/CSS coding, writing (prose) for the Web, the rhetorical needs of the audience, theories of hypertext, usability and architecture, and the basics of web site design and technology. Presenting information in digestible parts, this text enables students to write and construct realistic and manageable Web sites with a strong theoretical understanding of how online texts communicate to audiences. Key features of the book include: Screenshots of contemporary Web sites that will allow students to understand how writing for and linking to other layers of a Web site should work. Flow charts that describe how Web site architecture and navigation works. Parsing exercises in which students break down information into subsets to demonstrate how Web site architecture can be usable and scalable. Detailed step-by-step descriptions of how to use basic technologies such as file transfer protocols (FTP). Hands-on projects for students to engage in that allow them to connect the various components in the text. A companion website with downloadable code and additional pedagogical features: www.routledge.com/cw/applen Writing for the Web prepares students to work in professional roles, as it facilitates understanding of architecture and arrangement of written content of an organization's texts.

A computationally oriented comparison of solution algorithms for two stage and jointly chance constrained stochastic linear programming problems, this is the first book to present comparative computational results with several major stochastic programming solution approaches.
The following methods are considered: regularized decomposition, stochastic decomposition and successive discrete approximation methods for two stage problems; cutting plane methods, and a reduced gradient method for jointly chance constrained problems.
The first part of the book introduces the algorithms, including a unified approach to decomposition methods and their regularized counterparts. The second part addresses computer implementation of the methods, describes a testing environment based on a model management system, and presents comparative computational results with the various algorithms. Emphasis is on the computational behavior of the algorithms.

Programming in Scala is the definitive book on Scala, the popular language for the Java platform that blends object-oriented and functional programming concepts into a unique and powerful tool for developers. The fifth edition has been updated to cover new features up to, and including, Scala version 3.0. The Scala language has been exploding in popularity in recent years. More than 54,000 copies of Programming in Scala have been sold since the first edition was published in 2008.

Why purchase expensive add-on cards or bus interfaces when you can develop effective and economical data acquisition and process controls using C programs? Using the under-employed printer adapter (that is, the parallel port of your PC), you can turn your computer into a powerful tool for developing microprocessor applications. Learn how to build a complete data acquisition system and such varied applications as a CCD camera controller, a photometer interface, and a wave form generator. The book also covers the enhanced parallel port (EPP), the extended capabilities port (ECP), interfacing analog-to-digital converters, and data acquisition under Linux. This extraordinary software approach to interfacing through the parallel port will be especially appealing to programmers involved in control systems design and device development, as well as to those who work with real-time and embedded systems. ;

If you want to be successful in any area of game development game design, programming, graphics, sound, or publishing you should know how standouts in the industry approach their work and address problems. In Honoring the Code: Conversations with Great Game Designers, 16 groundbreaking game developers share their stories and offer advice for anyone aspiring to a career in the games industry. You ll learn from their triumphs and failures and see how they dealt with sweeping changes in technology, including critical paradigm shifts from CD-ROMs and 3D graphic cards to the Internet and mobile revolution.

The book presents in-depth interviews with a diverse mix of game professionals, emphasizing the makers of adventure games, role-playing games, and real-time strategies. It focuses on developers who have contributed to multiple eras or genres as well as those who have hired, taught, or mentored newcomers. Since the mobile revolution has opened up new demographics and new gameplay mechanics, the book features current developers of games for mobile devices. It also explores how indie game developers are making commercial-quality games with a small team mostly using free tools and funded with crowdsourcing applications.

While there are plenty of resources available for aspiring game developers to learn the necessary technical skills, there is hardly any historical material on the culture that made the games industry possible. Filling the void, this book provides a historical and cultural context for the games industry. It takes you into the minds of the pioneers who blazed the trails and established the industry as we know it today."

This book examines how video game mechanics and narratives can teach players skills associated with increased psychological well-being. It integrates research from psychology, education, ludology, media studies, and communication science to demonstrate how game play can teach skills that have long been associated with increased happiness and prolonged life satisfaction, including flexible thinking, openness to experience, self-care, a growth mindset, solution-focused thinking, mindfulness, persistence, self-discovery and resilience. The chapters in this volume are written by leading voices in the field of game studies, including researchers from academia, the video gaming industry, and mental health practitioners paving the way in the field of "geek therapy." This book will advance our understanding of the potential of video games to increase our psychological well-being by helping to mitigate depression, anxiety, and stress and foster persistence, self-care, and resilience.

Programming is now parallel programming. Much as structured programming revolutionized traditional serial programming decades ago, a new kind of structured programming, based on patterns, is relevant to parallel programming today. Parallel computing experts and industry insiders Michael McCool, Arch Robison, and James Reinders describe how to design and implement maintainable and efficient parallel algorithms using a pattern-based approach. They present both theory and practice, and give detailed concrete examples using multiple programming models. Examples are primarily given using two of the most popular and cutting edge programming models for parallel programming: Threading Building Blocks, and Cilk Plus. These architecture-independent models enable easy integration into existing applications, preserve investments in existing code, and speed the development of parallel applications. Examples from realistic contexts illustrate patterns and themes in parallel algorithm design that are widely applicable regardless of implementation technology.
The patterns-based approach offers structure and insight that developers can apply to a variety of parallel programming modelsDevelops a composable, structured, scalable, and machine-independent approach to parallel computingIncludes detailed examples in both Cilk Plus and the latest Threading Building Blocks, which support a wide variety of computers

This book covers the most important topics in the area of pattern recognition, object recognition, computer vision, robot vision, medical computing, computational geometry, and bioinformatics systems. Students and researchers will find a comprehensive treatment of polygonal approximation and its real life applications. The book not only explains the theoretical aspects but also presents applications with detailed design parameters. The systematic development of the concept of polygonal approximation of digital curves and its scale-space analysis are useful and attractive to scholars in many fields.

Disability and New Media examines how digital design is triggering disability when it could be a solution. Video and animation now play a prominent role in the World Wide Web and new types of protocols have been developed to accommodate this increasing complexity. However, as this has happened, the potential for individual users to control how the content is displayed has been diminished. Accessibility choices are often portrayed as merely technical decisions but they are highly political and betray a disturbing trend of ableist assumption that serve to exclude people with disability. It has been argued that the Internet will not be fully accessible until disability is considered a cultural identity in the same way that class, gender and sexuality are. Kent and Ellis build on this notion using more recent Web 2.0 phenomena, social networking sites, virtual worlds and file sharing. Many of the studies on disability and the web have focused on the early web, prior to the development of social networking applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Second Life. This book discusses an array of such applications that have grown within and alongside Web 2.0, and analyzes how they both prevent and embrace the inclusion of people with disability.

This book compares the three most prominent representatives of evolutionary algorithms - genetic algorithms, evolution strategies, and evolutionary programming - computational methods at the border between computer science and evolutionary biology. The algorithms are explained within a common formal framework, thereby clarifying the similarities and differences of these methods. The author also presents new results regarding the role of mutation and selection in genetic algorithms and uses a meta-evolutionary approach to confirm some of the theoretical results.

The Knowledge Grid is an intelligent and sustainable interaction environment that consists of autonomous individuals, self-organized semantic communities, adaptive networking mechanisms, evolving semantic link networks keeping meaningful connection between individuals, flows for dynamic resource sharing, and mechanisms supporting effective resource management and providing appropriate knowledge services for learning, innovation, teamwork, problem solving, and decision making. This book presents its methodology, theory, models and applications systematically for the first time.Its second edition fulfils the ideal of the Knowledge Grid by includingmany new contents, including: (1) The insight of cyber-physical society; (2) The systematic method of semantic link network that supports uncertainty management, discovery of semantic links and semantic communities, autonomous semantic data model, and cyber-physical-socio semantic link network; (3) Semantic peer-to-peer infrastructures for efficient knowledge sharing; (4) A new centrality measure of network; and (5) The Energy-Knowledge Grid. This new edition will undoubtedly provide inspiring materials for researchers, academics, practitioners and students.

This edition provides a comprehensively updated and enhanced review of current quality methods and standards. It outlines causes of failure, current practice and standards and suggests an ideal approach to software control at each stage of the design cycle. The emphasis of this new edition has shifted towards safety critical software. This book should be of interest to systems designers, software engineers, and safety and reliability engineers.

Programming Graphical User Interfaces with R introduces each of the major R packages for GUI programming: RGtk2, qtbase, Tcl/Tk, and gWidgets. With examples woven through the text as well as stand-alone demonstrations of simple yet reasonably complete applications, the book features topics especially relevant to statisticians who aim to provide a practical interface to functionality implemented in R. The book offers: A how-to guide for developing GUIs within R The fundamentals for users with limited knowledge of programming within R and other languages GUI design for specific functions or as learning tools The accompanying package, ProgGUIinR, includes the complete code for all examples as well as functions for browsing the examples from the respective chapters. Accessible to seasoned, novice, and occasional R users, this book shows that for many purposes, adding a graphical interface to one's work is not terribly sophisticated or time consuming.

The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement demonstrates how labour can self-organise production, and, as is shown by the free operating system GNU/Linux, even compete with some of the worlds largest firms. The book examines the hopes of such thinkers as Friedrich Schiller, Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Negri, in the light of the recent achievements of the hacker movement. This book is the first to examine a different kind of political activism that consists in the development of technology from below.

This book introduces the basics in game usability and overall game UX mindset and techniques, as well as looking at current industry best practices and trends. Fully updated for its second edition, it includes practical advice on how to include usability in already tight development timelines, and how to advocate for UX and communicate results to higher-ups effectively. The book begins with an introduction to UX strategy considerations for games, and to UX design, before moving on to cover core user research and usability techniques as well as how to fit UX practices into the business process. It provides considerations of player differences and offers strategies for inclusion as well as chapters that give platform and context specific advice. With a wealth of new interviews with industry leaders and contributions from the very best in game UX, the book also includes brand new chapters on: Accessibility Mobile Game Usability Data Science Virtual and Augmented Reality Esports This book will be vital reading for all professional game developers and game UX advocates, as well as those students aspiring to work in game development and game UX.

This book introduces the basics in game usability and overall game UX mindset and techniques, as well as looking at current industry best practices and trends. Fully updated for its second edition, it includes practical advice on how to include usability in already tight development timelines, and how to advocate for UX and communicate results to higher-ups effectively. The book begins with an introduction to UX strategy considerations for games, and to UX design, before moving on to cover core user research and usability techniques as well as how to fit UX practices into the business process. It provides considerations of player differences and offers strategies for inclusion as well as chapters that give platform and context specific advice. With a wealth of new interviews with industry leaders and contributions from the very best in game UX, the book also includes brand new chapters on: Accessibility Mobile Game Usability Data Science Virtual and Augmented Reality Esports This book will be vital reading for all professional game developers and game UX advocates, as well as those students aspiring to work in game development and game UX.

Take your idea from concept to production with this unique guide

Whether it's called physical computing, ubiquitous computing, or the Internet of Things, it's a hot topic in technology: how to channel your inner Steve Jobs and successfully combine hardware, embedded software, web services, electronics, and cool design to create cutting-edge devices that are fun, interactive, and practical. If you'd like to create the next must-have product, this unique book is the perfect place to start.

Both a creative and practical primer, it explores the platforms you can use to develop hardware or software, discusses design concepts that will make your products eye-catching and appealing, and shows you ways to scale up from a single prototype to mass production.Helps software engineers, web designers, product designers, and electronics engineers start designing products using the Internet-of-Things approach Explains how to combine sensors, servos, robotics, Arduino chips, and more with various networks or the Internet, to create interactive, cutting-edge devices Provides an overview of the necessary steps to take your idea from concept through production

If you'd like to design for the future, "Designing the Internet of Things" is a great place to start.

The demand for SQL information and training continues to grow with the need for a database behind every website capable of offering web-based information queries. SQL is the de facto standard for database retrieval, and if you need to access, update, or utilize data in a modern database management system, youwill need SQL to do it. TheSecond Editionof "Joe Celko's Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties" covers two new sets of extensions over three entirelynew chapters and expounds upon the changes that have occurred in SQL standards since the previous edition's publication. Benefit from mastering the challenging aspects of these database applications in SQL as taught by Joe Celko, one of the most-read SQL authors in the world.

*Expert advice from a noted SQL authority and award-winning columnist who has given 10 years of service to the ANSI SQL standards committee

*Teaches scores of advanced techniques that can be used with any product, in any SQL environment

*Offers graph theory and programming techniques for working around deficiencies and gives insight into real-world challenges"

Graphics Shaders: Theory and Practice is intended for a second course in computer graphics at the undergraduate or graduate level, introducing shader programming in general, but focusing on the GLSL shading language. While teaching how to write programmable shaders, the authors also teach and reinforce the fundamentals of computer graphics. The second edition has been updated to incorporate changes in the OpenGL API (OpenGL 4.x and GLSL 4.x0) and also has a chapter on the new tessellation shaders, including many practical examples.

The book starts with a quick review of the graphics pipeline, emphasizing features that are rarely taught in introductory courses, but are immediately exposed in shader work. It then covers shader-specific theory for vertex, tessellation, geometry, and fragment shaders using the GLSL 4.x0 shading language. The text also introduces the freely available glman tool that enables you to develop, test, and tune shaders separately from the applications that will use them. The authors explore how shaders can be used to support a wide variety of applications and present examples of shaders in 3D geometry, scientific visualization, geometry morphing, algorithmic art, and more.

Features of the Second Edition:

• Written using the most recent specification releases (OpenGL 4.x and GLSL 4.x0) including code examples brought up-to-date with the current standard of the GLSL language.
• More examples and more exercises
• A chapter on tessellation shaders
• An expanded Serious Fun chapter with examples that illustrate using shaders to produce fun effects
• A discussion of how to handle the major changes occurring in the OpenGL standard, and some C++ classes to help you manage that transition

The authors thoroughly explain the concepts, use sample code to describe details of the concepts, and then challenge you to extend the examples. They provide sample source code for many of the book s examples at www.cgeducation.org