This book follows an informal, demystifying approach to the world of game development with the Unity game engine. With no prior knowledge of game development or 3D required, you will learn from scratch, taking each concept at a time working up to a full 3D mini-game. You'll learn scripting with JavaScript and master the Unity development environment with easy to follow stepwise tasks. The printed version of the book is in black and white, but a full color version of the images is available for download here. The eBook version, available from Packt, is in full color. If you're a designer or animator who wishes to take their first steps into game development, or if you've simply spent many hours sitting in front of video games, with ideas bubbling away in the back of your mind, Unity and this book should be your starting point. No prior knowledge of game production is required, inviting you to simply bring with you a passion for making great games.

"Rank high in search engines with professional SEO tips, modules, and best practices for Drupal Web sites."

This hands-on tutorial, filled with exercises and examples, introduces the reader to a variety of concepts within Pentaho Reporting. With screenshots that show you how reports look at design time as well as how they should look when rendered as PDF, Excel, or HTML, this book also contains complete example source code that you can copy and paste into your environment to get up and running quickly. This book is primarily written for Java developers who want to assemble custom reporting solutions with Pentaho Reporting. Their main interest is in the technical details of creating reports and they want to see how to solve common report problems with a minimum of fuss; they do not need an overview of BI or the importance of reporting. Secondary audiences of this book are IT professionals who need to install a reporting solution in their environment, and want to learn advanced concepts within Pentaho Reporting such as sub-reports, cross-tabs, data source configuration, and metadata-based reporting.

This book looks into PHP projects mainly from an enterprise view. The author's experience enables him to give you an overall picture of PHP projects and discuss factors that contribute to project success in a clear and precise manner. Each chapter focuses specifically on how the techniques covered will make team work easier. Examples (rather than abstract best practices) are used to illustrate the practical benefits. This book is for PHP developers who work in teams on complex PHP projects. With this book in hand, it is easy to discover the secrets of successful PHP projects that meet today's complex enterprise demands. This book can also be useful for project managers who are looking to be successful with PHP projects. Those who are stakeholders in PHP projects, such as clients, or those who want to sponsor PHP projects, can also learn what to expect and how to deal with a PHP project team with this book.

This book is an example-driven tutorial that introduces you to the WebSphere application server and then takes you through all the major aspects of server configuration. It covers everything you need to deploy and tune your applications for best performance. This book is for administrators with some experience in Java who want to get started with WebSphere. Existing WebSphere users will also find this book useful, especially as there are so many new features in the new version. No previous knowledge of WebSphere is assumed.

This book is a comprehensive and practical guide aimed at getting the results you want as quickly as possible. The chapters gradually build up your skills and by the end of the book you will be confident enough to design powerful reports. Each concept is clearly illustrated with diagrams and screen shots and easy-to-understand code. If you are a Java developer who wants to create rich reports for either the Web or print, and wants to get started quickly with JasperReports to do this, this book is for you. No knowledge of JasperReports is presumed.

For a period of 6 years, the course retention rate for Marylhurst University's (MU) online courses was 91%, which is within four percentage points of its on-campus course retention rate (Schreck, 2001). This grounded theory, web-based, research study aims to explicate the reasons why MU online students complete courses at high rates and develop this understanding into an online student retention model. A grounded theory approach was used to conduct this study, which is described by Creswell (2002) as, "a systematic, qualitative procedure used to generate a theory that explains, at a broad conceptual level, a process, an action, or interaction about a substantive topic" (p. 439).

University websites hold considerable power for reaching prospective students via a cost-effective means as many view the Internet as the great equalizer among institutions. Unlike traditional forms of marketing, the quality of a website does not have to be limited by university size or budget as the price of accessing the medium and distributing the message can be equal for all. Therefore, in terms of marketing activities, websites have the potential to remove the disparity between what larger universities are able to accomplish and what smaller ones would like to achieve. But establishment of a website provides no guarantee that visitors, especially prospective students, will find what they seek within a reasonable time frame. Therein rests the dilemma for institutions - failure to locate desired information or difficulty negotiating the site might, and likely do, lead prospective students to exit. The focus of this research study was two-fold: to evaluate the extent to which university websites use relationship marketing techniques to communicate with prospective students and to evaluate the usability of these sites. This book is addressed to professionals in higher education responsible for student recruitment and marketing.

With loads of screenshots and illustrations and easy step-by-step instructions, this book is ideal for beginners in the network monitoring business. This book is for anyone who wants to manage a network using Cacti. You don't have to be a Linux Guru to use this book.

This book was written to be a step by step approach to building a communications system for any organization. Care was taken to clearly illustrate with diagrams and screen shots all of the steps and concepts along the way. This book is written for network engineers who have been asked to deploy and maintain communications systems for their organizations.

This is a Packt Cookbook, which means it contains step-by-step instructions to achieve a particular goal or solve a particular problem. The book can be read chapter by chapter, or you can look at the table of contents and read the recipes in no particular order. This book is for anyone who wants to enhance their WordPress blog to make it engaging and feature-rich. It is not specifically for developers or programmers; rather it can be used by anyone who wants to get more out of their WordPress blog by following step-by-step instructions. A basic knowledge of PHP/XHTML/CSS/WordPress is desirable but not necessary.

Munwar Shariff is an experienced software trainer for CIGNEX Technologies Inc. He has trained many users, administrators, and developers in Alfresco and many other CMS systems. This book distils the hands-on approach of his training courses into a concise, practical book. The emphasis is on getting up and running fast and discovering the scope and power of Alfresco 3 incrementally through practical examples. This book is designed for system administrators, experienced users, and business owners who want to install and use Alfresco in their teams or businesses. Because Alfresco is free, many teams can install and experiment with its ECM features without any upfront cost, often without management approval. The book assumes a degree of technical confidence but does not require specialist system administration or developer skills to get a basic system up and running. Alfresco is particularly suitable for IT consultants who want or need to set up a flexible enterprise content management system for their clients, be that for demonstration, development, or as a mission-critical platform.

This book is a guide to building a rich web application using Grails. The approach taken for building the application is incremental and iterative; each chapter will produce a working addition to the application, or iterate over existing features, as well as introduce and carefully explain the new part of the Grails framework used. The book does not go into exhaustive descriptions of every detail of Grails. While there is a lot of code in the book, there are very few large code listings. As you will find, it is not necessary to write reams of code to get results using Groovy and Grails. This book is aimed at Java web developers looking for ways to build web applications quickly, and wanting to find out how it's done quickly. If you are frustrated with integrating the many different frameworks that are available for web development and want to get on with building slick web applications for your users, then this book is for you. Grails is built on the Groovy language, but experience in Groovy is not required, as you will learn enough about Groovy to understand how to use Grails.

This book will give you a long list of powerful recipes. Choose the ones that suit your needs and use them through step-by-step instructions. Most of the recipes are code-free, but a number of the recipes contain code snippets. This book is primarily written for Drupal site builders, administrators, and themers who want to develop custom content displays using Views. It can be used by anyone who has a Drupal 5 web site, including original site developers as well as people who have inherited a Drupal 5 site. Some knowledge of HTML and CSS is required; PHP basics will be handy for some of the recipes.

As Web-based interactive 3D graphics, popularly referred to as Virtual Reality (VR), continue to become more affordable, research and development groups in various fields have been adopting Web-based VR technology. Despite substantial adoption, how and how much the technology benefits target users and the providers who choose to adapt the technology is not well understood. Previous research has established that VR provides users with unique human-computer interaction. However, little is known about how users experience the Web-based VR technology and how user-system interaction contributes to system usability. This book investigates user perception of Webbased VR comparing to conventional 2D graphics and system usability affected by the user-system interaction process. The impact of Web-based VR on system usability was empirically examined from an integrated view of technology acceptance in information systems and human-computer interaction. In addition, the impact of user characteristics on user-system interaction while using a VR system was examined. This book provides new knowledge about usability, sense of presence and technology acceptance in VR and provides insights for future research, which should be important to anyone designing, developing and evaluating a VR system in general and to an electronic commerce or market research system in particular.

Web 2.0 consists of many components. Knowing where to start can be difficult and confusing. "Web 2.0 for Non-profit Organizations" demystifies these technologies and explains them in everyday English. One at a time, this book explains: -Blogs -RSS -Podcasts and webcasts -Wikis -Tag Clouds -Forums/bulletin boards, Message boads chat, IM Social networking This book goes beyond merely explaining Web 2.0 components. This book shows you how you can use these tools to help your organization find volunteers, increase donations and reduce operating expenses.

Since these technologies covered are different from each other, they are covered in separate chapters that are not interdependent; therefore you can learn to use whichever tool you want, without exploring the previous chapters. This approach sustains the learning per example paradigm and helps you to use the book as a quick guide for your favorite technologies. This book is recommended for Java developers who use at least one of the covered technologies (JSF, Struts, Hibernate, Seam, and so on). It is for all Java developers who are looking for a powerful, unitary tool, especially designed to increase the speed of development and quality of Java web applications. No matter how much (or how little) experience they have, developers of all levels will benefit as their use of JBoss Tools is directly proportional to the complexity of their application. Since JBoss Tools covers all levels of experience, you can use it at your own level for your own applications, without involving unnecessary features. All you need is to be familiar with the Eclipse environment and Java core, and to have some expertise in the technology for which you want to use the JBoss Tools. Basic expertise for each technology is provided in the book, but for more complete and detailed aspects you should read dedicated specifications, tutorials, and articles.

The simple and clear approach is ideal for beginners to Django. Packed with examples and screenshots, this book will help you learn the features of Django 1.0 and help you build a dynamic website using those features. This book is for web developers who want to learn to build a complete site with Web 2.0 features, using the power of a proven and popular development system, Django, but do not necessarily want to learn how the complete framework functions in order to do this. Basic knowledge of Python development is required for this book, but no knowledge of Django is expected.