This easy-to-follow textbook provides a student-friendly introduction to programming and algorithms. Emphasis is placed on the threshold concepts that present barriers to learning, including the questions that students are often too embarrassed to ask. The book promotes an active learning style in which a deeper understanding is gained from evaluating, questioning, and discussing the material, and practised in hands-on exercises. Although R is used as the language of choice for all programs, strict assumptions are avoided in the explanations in order for these to remain applicable to other programming languages. Features: provides exercises at the end of each chapter; includes three mini projects in the final chapter; presents a list of titles for further reading at the end of the book; discusses the key aspects of loops, recursions, program and algorithm efficiency and accuracy, sorting, linear systems of equations, and file processing; requires no prior background knowledge in this area.

Although industry has been leveraging the advancements of component-oriented development and assembly (CODA) technology for some time, there has long been a need for a book that provides a complete overview of the multiple technologies that support CODA. Filling this need, Component-Oriented Development and Assembly supplies comprehensive coverage of the principles, practice, and paradigm of component-oriented development and assembly. The first part of the book provides the conceptual foundation for component-oriented software. Part II focuses on the various standard Java component models and describes how to develop a component-oriented system using these component models. Part III covers the various aspects of the component-oriented development paradigm. Based on the authors' research and teaching experience, the text focuses on the principles of component-oriented software development from a technical concepts perspective, designer's perspective, programmer's perspective, and manager's perspective. Covering popular component development frameworks based on Java, it is suitable as a textbook for component-oriented software for undergraduate and postgraduate courses. It is also an ideal reference for anyone looking to adopt the component-oriented development paradigm. The book provides readers with access to all the source code used in the book on a companion site (http://www.codabook.com). The source code for the CODA implementation of the case study presented in Chapter 11 is also hosted on the website. The website will also serve as a technical forum for further discussions on the topic and for any updates to the book.

For courses in Java programming The Deitels' groundbreaking How to Program series offers unparalleled breadth and depth of programming fundamentals, object-oriented programming concepts and intermediate-level topics for further study. Java How to Program, Early Objects, 11th Edition, presents leading-edge computing technologies using the Deitel signature live-code approach, which demonstrates concepts in hundreds of complete working programs. The 11th Edition presents updated coverage of Java SE 8 and new Java SE 9 capabilities, including JShell, the Java Module System, and other key Java 9 topics.

PhoneGap is a standards-based, open-source development framework that can be deployed to any mobile device without losing the features of the native app-allowing for access to device contacts, the local file system, camera, and media on multiple platforms without requiring users to write a single line of code. Ideal for intermediate to advanced users, PhoneGap Build: Developing Cross Platform Mobile Applications in the Cloud offers the comprehensive coverage you need to harness the power of this dynamic tool. It provides complete coverage of the cloud computing platform and the theories behind cloud computing, using a series of engaging examples. The book explains the differences between existing mobile platforms, the different types of browsers they support, and the programming languages and integrated development environment required to develop apps for each of them. It then describes how PhoneGap makes the task of developing cross-platform mobile apps easier. This book will teach you how to use: HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript to develop apps for devices across various mobile operating systems PhoneGap Build to develop mobile apps in the cloud PhoneGap with Sencha Touch and jQuery Mobile Back end databases to store and retrieve information The text starts with simpler applications and gradually moves toward describing advanced concepts and how to exploit different application programming interfaces and methods. By the time you finish the book, you will learn how to develop feature-rich mobile applications that can run on the cloud to support different platforms. Supplying authoritative guidance and proven best practices for designing cloud-based applications, the book is an ideal reference for cloud system developers, architects, and IT professionals. It is also suitable for use in instructional settings.

Software tools are a great aid to process engineers, but too much dependence on such tools can often lead to inappropriate and suboptimal designs. Reliance on software is also a hindrance without a firm understanding of the principles underlying its operation, since users are still responsible for devising the design.
In Process Engineering and Design Using Visual Basic, Arun K. Datta provides a unique and versatile suite of programs along with simultaneous development of the underlying concepts, principles, and mathematics. Each chapter details the theory and techniques that provide the basis for design and engineering software and then showcases the development and utility of programs developed using the material outlined in the chapter. This all-inclusive guide works systematically from basic mathematics to fluid mechanics, separators, overpressure protection, and glycol dehydration, providing basic design guidelines based on international codes. Worked examples demonstrate the utility of each program, while the author also explains problems and limitations associated with the simulations.
After reading this book you will be able to immediately put these programs into action and have total confidence in the result, regardless of your level of experience. Companion Visual Basic and Excel files are available for download on under the "Downloads/Updates" tab on this web page.

Classroom-tested by tens of thousands of students, this new edition of the bestselling intro to programming book is for anyone who wants to understand computer science. Learn about design, algorithms, testing, and debugging. Discover the fundamentals of programming with Python 3.6--a language that's used in millions of devices. Write programs to solve real-world problems, and come away with everything you need to produce quality code. This edition has been updated to use the new language features in Python 3.6. No programming experience required! Incremental examples show you the steps and missteps that happen while developing programs, so you know what to expect when you tackle a problem on your own. Inspired by "How to Design Programs" (HtDP), discover a five-step recipe for designing functions, which helps you learn the concepts--and becomes an integral part of writing programs. In this detailed introduction to Python and to computer programming, find out exactly what happens when your programs are executed. Work with numbers, text, big data sets, and files using real-world examples. Create and use your own data types. Make your programs reliable, work with databases, download data from the web automatically, and build user interfaces. As you use the fundamental programming tools in this book, you'll see how to document and organize your code so that you and other programmers can more easily read and understand it. This new edition takes advantage of Python 3.6's new features, including type annotations on parameters, return types and variable declarations, and changes to string formatting. Most importantly, you'll learn how to think like a professional programmer. What You Need: You'll need to download Python 3.6, available from https://python.org. With that download comes IDLE, the editor we use for writing and running Python programs. (If you use Linux, you may need to install Python 3.6 and IDLE separately.)

It's time to dispel the myth that machine learning is difficult. Grokking Machine Learning teaches you how to apply ML to your projects using only standard Python code and high school-level math. No specialist knowledge is required to tackle the hands-on exercises using readily available machine learning tools! In Grokking Machine Learning, expert machine learning engineer Luis Serrano introduces the most valuable ML techniques and teaches you how to make them work for you. Practical examples illustrate each new concept to ensure you're grokking as you go. You'll build models for spam detection, language analysis, and image recognition as you lock in each carefully-selected skill. Packed with easy-to-follow Python-based exercises and mini-projects, this book sets you on the path to becoming a machine learning expert. Key Features * Different types of machine learning, including supervised and unsupervised learning * Algorithms for simplifying, classifying, and splitting data * Machine learning packages and tools * Hands-on exercises with fully-explained Python code samples For readers with intermediate programming knowledge in Python or a similar language. About the technology Machine learning is a collection of mathematically-based techniques and algorithms that enable computers to identify patterns and generate predictions from data. This revolutionary data analysis approach is behind everything from recommendation systems to self-driving cars, and is transforming industries from finance to art. Luis G. Serrano has worked as the Head of Content for Artificial Intelligence at Udacity and as a Machine Learning Engineer at Google, where he worked on the YouTube recommendations system. He holds a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan, a Bachelor and Masters from the University of Waterloo, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Quebec at Montreal. He shares his machine learning expertise on a YouTube channel with over 2 million views and 35 thousand subscribers, and is a frequent speaker at artificial intelligence and data science conferences.

A growing concern of mine has been the unrealistic expectations for new computer-related technologies introduced into all kinds of organizations. Unrealistic expectations lead to disappointment, and a schizophrenic approach to the introduction of new technologies. The UNIX and real-time UNIX operating system technologies are major examples of emerging technologies with great potential benefits but unrealistic expectations. Users want to use UNIX as a common operating system throughout large segments of their organizations. A common operating system would decrease software costs by helping to provide portability and interoperability between computer systems in today's multivendor environments. Users would be able to more easily purchase new equipment and technologies and cost-effectively reuse their applications. And they could more easily connect heterogeneous equipment in different departments without having to constantly write and rewrite interfaces. On the other hand, many users in various organizations do not understand the ramifications of general-purpose versus real-time UNIX. Users tend to think of "real-time" as a way to handle exotic heart-monitoring or robotics systems. Then these users use UNIX for transaction processing and office applications and complain about its performance, robustness, and reliability. Unfortunately, the users don't realize that real-time capabilities added to UNIX can provide better performance, robustness and reliability for these non-real-time applications. Many other vendors and users do realize this, however. There are indications even now that general-purpose UNIX will go away as a separate entity. It will be replaced by a real-time UNIX. General-purpose UNIX will exist only as a subset of real-time UNIX.

Open Source Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence is an all-in-one reference for developing open source based data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) solutions that are business-centric, cross-customer viable, cross-functional, cross-technology based, and enterprise-wide. Considering the entire lifecycle of an open source DW & BI implementation, its comprehensive coverage spans from basic concepts all the way through to customization. Highlighting the key differences between open source and vendor DW and BI technologies, the book identifies end-to-end solutions that are scalable, high performance, and stable. It illustrates the practical aspects of implementing and using open source DW and BI technologies to supply you with valuable on-the-project experience that can help you improve implementation and productivity. Emphasizing analysis, design, and programming, the text explains best-fit solutions as well as how to maximize ROI. Coverage includes data warehouse design, real-time processing, data integration, presentation services, and real-time reporting. With a focus on real-world applications, the author devotes an entire section to powerful implementation best practices that can help you build customer confidence while saving valuable time, effort, and resources.

- the book provides a unique overview of the NCBI resources, including BLAST (which are foundational to bioinformatics), and how to use them, making it a great introduction to bioinformatics and a great resource for those just starting in an industry lab - whereas many bioinformatics books try to cover every aspect of the topic and easily confuse readers, this is highly practical and focuses on key resources and tools, and how to use them - the companion website contains tutorials, R and Python codes, instructor materials including slides, exercises, and problems for students

New in the second edition:

* MPLAB X support and MPLAB C for the PIC24F v3 and later libraries

* I2C interface

* 100% assembly free solutions

* Improved video, PAL/NTSC

* Improved audio, RIFF files decoding

* PIC24F GA1, GA2, GB1 and GB2 support

Most readers will associate Microchip's name with the ubiquitous 8-bit PIC microcontrollers but it is the new 16-bit PIC24F family that is truly stealing the scene. Orders of magnitude increases of performance, memory size and the rich peripheral set make programming these devices in C a must. This new guide by Microchip insider Lucio Di Jasio teaches readers everything they need to know about the architecture of these new chips: How to program them, how to test them, and how to debug them. Di Jasio s common-sense, practical, hands-on approach starts out with basic functions and guides the reader step-by-step through even the most sophisticated programming scenarios. Experienced PIC users, including embedded engineers, programmers, designers, and SW and HW engineers, and new comers alike will benefit from the text s many thorough examples, which demonstrate how to nimbly sidestep common obstacles and take full advantage of the many new features.

* A Microchip insider introduces you to 16-bit PIC programming the easy way * Condenses typical introductory "fluff" focusing instead on examples and exercises that show how to solve common, real-world design problems quickly * Includes handy checklists to help readers perform the most common programming and debugging tasks"

Description Functional languages help developers support concurrency by encouraging immutable data structures that can be passed between threads without having to worry about a shared state, all while avoiding side effects. Functional Concurrency in .NET teaches readers how to build concurrent and scalable programs in .NET using the functional paradigm. This intermediate-level guide is aimed at developers, architects, and passionate computer programmers. Key Features * In-depth explanations * Hands-on examples * Step-by-step instructions Audience This book is for readers with solid knowledge of a mainstream programming language, preferably C# or F#. About the technology To maximize the utilization of the computational resources available, the Microsoft .NET platform provides parallel execution of code through multithreading. By leveraging parallelism, a program can take full advantage of the resources available. Riccardo Terrell is a .NET seasoned software engineer, senior software architect and Microsoft MVP who is passionate about functional programming. He is well known and actively involved in the functional programming community including .NET meet ups and conferences and is the organizer for the Washington DC F# User Group. MANNING

Your customers want rock-solid, bug-free software that does exactly what they expect it to do. Yet they can't always articulate their ideas clearly enough for you to turn them into code. You need Cucumber: a testing, communication, and requirements tool-all rolled into one. All the code in this book is updated for Cucumber 2.4, Rails 5, and RSpec 3.5. Express your customers' wild ideas as a set of clear, executable specifications that everyone on the team can read. Feed those examples into Cucumber and let it guide your development. Build just the right code to keep your customers happy. You can use Cucumber to test almost any system or any platform. Get started by using the core features of Cucumber and working with Cucumber's Gherkin DSL to describe-in plain language-the behavior your customers want from the system. Then write Ruby code that interprets those plain-language specifications and checks them against your application. Next, consolidate the knowledge you've gained with a worked example, where you'll learn more advanced Cucumber techniques, test asynchronous systems, and test systems that use a database. Recipes highlight some of the most difficult and commonly seen situations the authors have helped teams solve. With these patterns and techniques, test Ajax-heavy web applications with Capybara and Selenium, REST web services, Ruby on Rails applications, command-line applications, legacy applications, and more. Written by the creator of Cucumber and the co-founders of Cucumber Ltd., this authoritative guide will give you and your team all the knowledge you need to start using Cucumber with confidence. What You Need: Windows, Mac OS X (with XCode) or Linux, Ruby 1.9.2 and upwards, Cucumber 2.4, Rails 5, and RSpec 3.5

This book successfully balances the introduction of object-oriented concepts with data structures in C++.
KEY TOPICS: Provides interfaces for the principal example classes, which are compliant with the ANSI/ISO C++ Standard Library classes. Thorough coverage of the role of the const keyword in the C++ Standard Library. Covers C++ features such as namespaces, static member constants, typename keyword, and inheritance. Thorough review of C++ syntax and OOP concepts, make the book accessible for programmers at various levels. The book also gives readers a firm grasp of key concepts and allows programmers experienced in another language to adjust easily. A solid foundation in building and using abstract data types is also provided, along with an assortment of advanced topics such as B-trees for project building and graphs.
This book is designed for novice programmers who have learned the concepts of objects and classes and want to move on to the data structures topics of recursion and data abstraction.

"To the best of my knowledge, D offers an unprecedentedly adroit integration of several powerful programming paradigms: imperative, object-oriented, functional, and meta."
--From the Foreword by Walter Bright
"This is a book by a skilled author describing an interesting programming language. I'm sure you'll find the read rewarding."
--From the Foreword by Scott Meyers D is a programming language built to help programmers address the challenges of modern software development. It does so by fostering modules interconnected through precise interfaces, a federation of tightly integrated programming paradigms, language-enforced thread isolation, modular type safety, an efficient memory model, and more."The D Programming Language "is an authoritative and comprehensive introduction to D. Reflecting the author's signature style, the writing is casual and conversational, but never at the expense of focus and precision. It covers all aspects of the language (such as expressions, statements, types, functions, contracts, and modules), but it is much more than an enumeration of features.Inside the book you will findIn-depth explanations, with idiomatic examples, for all language featuresHow feature groups support major programming paradigmsRationale and best-use advice for each major featureDiscussion of cross-cutting issues, such as error handling, contract programming, and concurrencyTables, figures, and "cheat sheets" that serve as a handy quick reference for day-to-day problem solving with DWritten for the working programmer, "The D Programming Language "not only introduces the D language--it presents a compendium of good practices and idioms to help both your coding with D and your coding in general.

You won't get far as a Visual Basic developer unless you know how to write database applications. That's where this book comes in. It shows you how to use Visual Studio 2008 and ADO.NET 3.5 to develop database applications the way the best professionals do. That includes the full gamut of skills you need, from using prototyping features that generate ADO.NET code...to writing your own ADO.NET code from scratch so you can closely control how the database processing works...to using .NET 3.5 features like LINQ and the ADO.NET Entity Framework that actually change the way you think about handling data. What's more, this book takes you from beginner to database professional in a logical progression that makes each step easier to master: In section 1, you will get a basic introduction to databases, SQL, and ADO.NET. If you already have ADO.NET experience, you can skip ahead. In section 2, you will quickly be prototyping database applications using Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools like data sources. In section 3, you will learn how to build 3-layer applications the ways the pros do, with presentation, business, and database classes. This is where you'll get into ADO.N ET coding to create your own database classes. Section 4 covers LINQ (Language-Integrated Query), a .NET 3.5 feature that lets you handle all types of data using a query language that's integrated into Visual Basic and that saves you a lot of ADO.NET coding. That means you'll learn how to: Use LINQ to DataSet to query the data in typed or untyped datasets; Use LINQ to SQL, which allows you to generate an object model from the objects in a SQL Server database that can then be used to access and update the database data...a feature that offers you some of the same benefits as the Entity Framework; Use LINQ to XML to manipulate XML data much more easily than you can using the Document Object Model; Use LINQ data source controls with web applications. In section 5, you will learn to work with the ADO.NET Entity Framework...another way to let .NET generate the code you need and do more of the work for you. Using this feature, you create an Entity Data Model that defines a conceptual model for the business objects used by an application, a storage model for the objects in a database, and mappings that relate the two. Then: You can use LINQ or a special form of SQL to retrieve data into the business objects; You can work with the business objects and save changes to the database using generated code; You can use Entity data source controls with web applications.

Get productive quickly with Pentaho Data Integration Key Features Take away the pain of starting with a complex and powerful system Simplify your data transformation and integration work Explore, transform, and validate your data with Pentaho Data Integration Book DescriptionPentaho Data Integration(PDI) is an intuitive and graphical environment packed with drag and drop design and powerful Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) capabilities. Given its power and flexibility, initial attempts to use the Pentaho Data Integration tool can be difficult or confusing. This book is the ideal solution. This book reduces your learning curve with PDI. It provides the guidance needed to make you productive, covering the main features of Pentaho Data Integration. It demonstrates the interactive features of the graphical designer, and takes you through the main ETL capabilities that the tool offers. By the end of the book, you will be able to use PDI for extracting, transforming, and loading the types of data you encounter on a daily basis. What you will learn Design, preview and run transformations in Spoon Run transformations using the Pan utility Understand how to obtain data from different types of files Connect to a database and explore it using the database explorer Understand how to transform data in a variety of ways Understand how to insert data into database tables Design and run jobs for sequencing tasks and sending emails Combine the execution of jobs and transformations Who this book is forThis book is for software developers, business intelligence analysts, and others involved or interested in developing ETL solutions, or more generally, doing any kind of data manipulation.

"The NCL Natural Constraint Language"" "presents the NCL language which is a description language in conventional mathematical logic for modeling and solving constraint satisfaction problems. NCL differs from other declarative languages: It models problems naturally in a simplified form of first-order logic with quantifiers, Boolean logic, numeric constraints, set operations and logical functions; it solves problems by mixed set programming over the mixed domain of real numbers, integers, Booleans, dates/times, references, and in particular sets. The book uses plenty of examples and tutorials to illustrate NCL and its applications. It is intended for researchers and developers in the fields of logic programming, constraint programming, optimization, modeling, operations research and artificial intelligence, who will learn from a new programming language and theoretical foundations for industrial applications.

Dr. Jianyang Zhou is the inventor of NCL and has worked for its industrialization for more than 10 years.

This study centers on issues of marginality and monstrosity in medieval England. In the middle ages, geography was viewed as divinely ordered, so Britain's location at the periphery of the inhabitable world caused anxiety among its inhabitants. Far from the world's holy center, the geographic margins were considered monstrous. Medieval geography, for centuries scorned as crude, is now the subject of several careful studies. Monsters have likewise been the subject of recent attention in the growing field of "monster studies," though few works situate these creatures firmly in their specific historical contexts. This book sits at the crossroads of these two discourses (geography and monstrosity), treated separately in the established scholarship but inseparable in the minds of medieval authors and artists.

Unit Integration Testing (UIT) had been a challenge because there was no tool that could help in XHR programming and unit integration validations in an efficient way until Cypress arrived. Cypress started releasing versions in 2015 and became popular in 2018 with version 2.0.0. This book explores Cypress scripts that help implement 'shift left testing', which is a dream come true for many software testers. Shift left occurs in the majority of testing projects, but could not be implemented fully because tools were unavailable and knowledge was lacking about the possibilities of testing early in the life cycle. Shift left is a key testing strategy to help testing teams focus less on defect identifications and more on developing practices to prevent defects. Cypress scripts can help front-end developers and quality engineers to work together to find defects soon after web components are built. These components can be tested immediately after they are built with Cypress Test Driven Development (TDD) scripts. Thus, defects can be fixed straight away during the development stage. Testing teams do not have to worry about finding these same defects in a later development stage because Cypress tests keep verifying components in the later stages. Defect fixing has become much cheaper with Cypress than when other tools are used. The book also covers Behaviour Driven Development (BDD)-based Gherkin scripts and the Cypress Cucumber preprocessor, which can improve test scenario coverage. Automated Software Testing with Cypress is written to fulfil the BDD and TDD needs of testing teams. Two distinct open source repositories are provided in Github to help start running Cypress tests in no time!

"Kent is a master at creating code that communicates well, is easy to understand, and is a pleasure to read. Every chapter of this book contains excellent explanations and insights into the smaller but important decisions we continuously have to make when creating quality code and classes." -Erich Gamma, IBM Distinguished Engineer "Many teams have a master developer who makes a rapid stream of good decisions all day long. Their code is easy to understand, quick to modify, and feels safe and comfortable to work with. If you ask how they thought to write something the way they did, they always have a good reason. This book will help you become the master developer on your team. The breadth and depth of topics will engage veteran programmers, who will pick up new tricks and improve on old habits, while the clarity makes it accessible to even novice developers." -Russ Rufer, Silicon Valley Patterns Group "Many people don't realize how readable code can be and how valuable that readability is. Kent has taught me so much, I'm glad this book gives everyone the chance to learn from him." -Martin Fowler, chief scientist, ThoughtWorks "Code should be worth reading, not just by the compiler, but by humans. Kent Beck distilled his experience into a cohesive collection of implementation patterns. These nuggets of advice will make your code truly worth reading." -Gregor Hohpe, author of Enterprise Integration Patterns "In this book Kent Beck shows how writing clear and readable code follows from the application of simple principles. Implementation Patterns will help developers write intention revealing code that is both easy to understand and flexible towards future extensions. A must read for developers who are serious about their code." -Sven Gorts "Implementation Patterns bridges the gap between design and coding. Beck introduces a new way of thinking about programming by basing his discussion on values and principles." -Diomidis Spinellis, author of Code Reading and Code Quality Software Expert Kent Beck Presents a Catalog of Patterns Infinitely Useful for Everyday Programming Great code doesn't just function: it clearly and consistently communicates your intentions, allowing other programmers to understand your code, rely on it, and modify it with confidence. But great code doesn't just happen. It is the outcome of hundreds of small but critical decisions programmers make every single day. Now, legendary software innovator Kent Beck-known worldwide for creating Extreme Programming and pioneering software patterns and test-driven development-focuses on these critical decisions, unearthing powerful "implementation patterns" for writing programs that are simpler, clearer, better organized, and more cost effective. Beck collects 77 patterns for handling everyday programming tasks and writing more readable code. This new collection of patterns addresses many aspects of development, including class, state, behavior, method, collections, frameworks, and more. He uses diagrams, stories, examples, and essays to engage the reader as he illuminates the patterns. You'll find proven solutions for handling everything from naming variables to checking exceptions. This book covers The value of communicating through code and the philosophy behind patterns How and when to create classes, and how classes encode logic Best practices for storing and retrieving state Behavior: patterns for representing logic, including alternative paths Writing, naming, and decomposing methods Choosing and using collections Implementation pattern variations for use in building frameworks Implementation Patterns will help programmers at all experience levels, especially those who have benefited from software patterns or agile methods. It will also be an indispensable resource for development teams seeking to work together more efficiently and build more maintainable software. No other programming book will touch your day-to-day work more often.

This book describes the concepts and application of model-based development (MBD), model transformations, and Agile MBD to a wide range of software systems. It covers systems requirements engineering, system specification and design, verification, reuse, and system composition in the context of Agile MBD. Examples of applications in finance, system migration, internet systems and software refactoring are given. An established open-source MBD technology, UML-RSDS, is used throughout to illustrate the concepts. The book is suitable for industrial practitioners who need training in Agile MBD, and those who need to understand the issues to be considered when introducing MBD in an industrial context. It is also suitable for academic researchers, and for use as text for undergraduate or postgraduate courses in MBD. Examples for educational use of UML-RSDS are included in the book.

The Distinguished Dissertation series is published on behalf of the Conference of Professors and Heads of Computing and The British Computer Society, who annually select the best British PhD dissertations in computer science for publication. The dissertations are selected on behalf of the CPHC by a panel of eight academics. Each dissertation chosen makes a noteworthy contribution to the subject and reaches a high standard of exposition, placing all results clearly in the context of computer science as a whole. In this way computer scientists with significantly different interests are able to grasp the essentials - or even find a means of entry - to an unfamiliar research topic. This book develops a theory of game semantics, a recently discovered setting for modelling and reasoning about sequential programming languages, suitable for interpreting higher-order functional languages with rich type structure, and applies it to constr uct a fully abstract model of the metalanguage FPC.