Book picks similar to
The Personal Computer by Time-Life Books
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The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution
T.R. Reid - 1984
The world's brightest engineers were stymied in their quest to make these machines small and affordable until the solution finally came from two ingenious young Americans. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce hit upon the stunning discovery that would make possible the silicon microchip, a work that would ultimately earn Kilby the Nobel Prize for physics in 2000. In this completely revised and updated edition of The Chip, T.R. Reid tells the gripping adventure story of their invention and of its growth into a global information industry. This is the story of how the digital age began.
The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer
David Leavitt - 2006
Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating "treatment" that may have led to his suicide.With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity—his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor—and elegantly explains his work and its implications.
Kindle Fire For Dummies
Nancy C. Muir - 2011
It walks you through all the tablet's features, shows you how to set up the device, navigate the touchscreen interface, buy music, stream video, download apps, and read e-books from Amazon.com. The book demystifies this all-new tablet and provides a handy reference that can be conveniently downloaded and read right on your Kindle Fire device.Looks at the new Kindle Fire, which features revolutionary technology and access to cool new services; this e-book explains both in plain English Is only available in e-book format and downloads directly to the Kindle Fire and other Kindle devices, making it a handy reference you can take virtually anywhere Covers not only the basics, but also tips and tricks for taking full advantage of the Kindle Fire and the services of Amazon's online stores Kindle Fire For Dummies is packed with powerful tips designed to help you get more punch out of your Kindle Fire tablet.
Head First jQuery
Ryan Benedetti - 2011
With Head First jQuery, you'll quickly get up to speed on this amazing JavaScript library by learning how to navigate HTML documents while handling events, effects, callbacks, and animations. By the time you've completed the book, you'll be incorporating Ajax apps, working seamlessly with HTML and CSS, and handling data with PHP, MySQL and JSON.If you want to learn—and understand—how to create interactive web pages, unobtrusive script, and cool animations that don't kill your browser, this book is for you.Use jQuery with DOM to overcome the limitations of HTML and CSSLearn how jQuery selectors and actions work togetherWrite functions and wire them to interface elementsUse jQuery effects to create actions on the pageMake your pages come alive with animationBuild interactive web pages with jQuery and AjaxBuild forms in web applications
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
Robert C. Martin - 2007
But if code isn't clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn't have to be that way. Noted software expert Robert C. Martin presents a revolutionary paradigm with Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship . Martin has teamed up with his colleagues from Object Mentor to distill their best agile practice of cleaning code on the fly into a book that will instill within you the values of a software craftsman and make you a better programmer but only if you work at it. What kind of work will you be doing? You'll be reading code - lots of code. And you will be challenged to think about what's right about that code, and what's wrong with it. More importantly, you will be challenged to reassess your professional values and your commitment to your craft. Clean Code is divided into three parts. The first describes the principles, patterns, and practices of writing clean code. The second part consists of several case studies of increasing complexity. Each case study is an exercise in cleaning up code - of transforming a code base that has some problems into one that is sound and efficient. The third part is the payoff: a single chapter containing a list of heuristics and "smells" gathered while creating the case studies. The result is a knowledge base that describes the way we think when we write, read, and clean code. Readers will come away from this book understanding ‣ How to tell the difference between good and bad code‣ How to write good code and how to transform bad code into good code‣ How to create good names, good functions, good objects, and good classes‣ How to format code for maximum readability ‣ How to implement complete error handling without obscuring code logic ‣ How to unit test and practice test-driven development This book is a must for any developer, software engineer, project manager, team lead, or systems analyst with an interest in producing better code.
Laravel: Code Bright
Dayle Rees - 2013
At $29 and cheaper than a good pizza, you will get the book in its current partial form, along with all future chapters, updates, and fixes for free. As of the day I wrote this description, Code Bright had 130 pages and was just getting started. To give you some perspective on how detailed it is, Code Happy was 127 pages in its complete state. Want to know more? Carry on reading.Welcome back to Laravel. Last year I wrote a book about the Laravel PHP framework. It started as a collection of tutorials on my blog, and eventually became a full book. I definitely didn’t expect it to be as popular as it was. Code Happy has sold almost 3000 copies, and is considered to be one of the most valuable resourcesfor learning the Laravel framework.Code Bright is the spiritual successor to Code Happy. The framework has grown a lot in the past year, and has changed enough to merit a new title. With Code Bright I hope to improve on Code Happy with every way, my goal is, to once again, build the most comprehensive learning experience for the framework. Oh, and to still be funny. That’s very important to me.Laravel Code Bright will contain a complete learning experience for all of the framework’s features. The style of writing will make it approachable for beginners, and a wonderful reference resource for experienced developers alike.You see, people have told me that they enjoyed reading Code Happy, not only for its educational content, but for its humour, and for my down to earth writing style. This is very important to me. I like to write my books as if we were having a conversation in a bar.When I wrote Code Happy last year, I was simply a framework enthusiast. One of the first to share information about the framework. However, since then I have become a committed member of the core development team. Working directly with the framework author to make Laravel a wonderful experience for the developers of the world.One other important feature of both books, is that they are published while in progress. This means that the book is available in an incomplete state, but will grow over time into a complete title. All future updates will be provided for free.What this means is that I don’t have to worry about deadlines, or a fixed point of completion. It leads to less stress and better writing. If I think of a better way to explain something, I can go back and change it. In a sense, the book will never be completed. I can constantly add more information to it, until it becomes the perfect resource.Given that this time I am using the majority of my spare time to write the title (yes, I have a full time job too!), I have raised the price a little to justify my invested time. I was told by many of my past readers that they found the previous title very cheap for the resource that it grew into, so if you are worried about the new price, then let me remind you what you will get for your 29 bucks.The successor to Code Happy, seen by many as the #1 learning resource for the Laravel PHP framework.An unending source of information, chapters will be constantly added as needed until the book becomes a giant vault of framework knowledge.Comedy, and a little cheesy, but very friendly writing.
Get Your Hands Dirty on Clean Architecture: A hands-on guide to creating clean web applications with code examples in Java
Tom Hombergs - 2019
Data Science For Dummies
Lillian Pierson - 2014
Data Science For Dummies is the perfect starting point for IT professionals and students interested in making sense of their organization’s massive data sets and applying their findings to real-world business scenarios. From uncovering rich data sources to managing large amounts of data within hardware and software limitations, ensuring consistency in reporting, merging various data sources, and beyond, you’ll develop the know-how you need to effectively interpret data and tell a story that can be understood by anyone in your organization. Provides a background in data science fundamentals before moving on to working with relational databases and unstructured data and preparing your data for analysis Details different data visualization techniques that can be used to showcase and summarize your data Explains both supervised and unsupervised machine learning, including regression, model validation, and clustering techniques Includes coverage of big data processing tools like MapReduce, Hadoop, Dremel, Storm, and Spark It’s a big, big data world out there – let Data Science For Dummies help you harness its power and gain a competitive edge for your organization.
Hacker's Delight
Henry S. Warren Jr. - 2002
Aiming to tell the dark secrets of computer arithmetic, this title is suitable for library developers, compiler writers, and lovers of elegant hacks.
Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight
John W. Foreman - 2013
Major retailers are predicting everything from when their customers are pregnant to when they want a new pair of Chuck Taylors. It's a brave new world where seemingly meaningless data can be transformed into valuable insight to drive smart business decisions.But how does one exactly do data science? Do you have to hire one of these priests of the dark arts, the "data scientist," to extract this gold from your data? Nope.Data science is little more than using straight-forward steps to process raw data into actionable insight. And in Data Smart, author and data scientist John Foreman will show you how that's done within the familiar environment of a spreadsheet. Why a spreadsheet? It's comfortable! You get to look at the data every step of the way, building confidence as you learn the tricks of the trade. Plus, spreadsheets are a vendor-neutral place to learn data science without the hype. But don't let the Excel sheets fool you. This is a book for those serious about learning the analytic techniques, the math and the magic, behind big data.Each chapter will cover a different technique in a spreadsheet so you can follow along: - Mathematical optimization, including non-linear programming and genetic algorithms- Clustering via k-means, spherical k-means, and graph modularity- Data mining in graphs, such as outlier detection- Supervised AI through logistic regression, ensemble models, and bag-of-words models- Forecasting, seasonal adjustments, and prediction intervals through monte carlo simulation- Moving from spreadsheets into the R programming languageYou get your hands dirty as you work alongside John through each technique. But never fear, the topics are readily applicable and the author laces humor throughout. You'll even learn what a dead squirrel has to do with optimization modeling, which you no doubt are dying to know.
Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control
George Dyson - 2020
In his classic books, Darwin Among the Machines and Turing’s Cathedral, Dyson chronicled the realization of Leibniz’s dream at the hands of a series of iconoclasts who brought his ideas to life. Now, in his pathbreaking new book, Analogia, he offers a chronicle of people who fought for the other side—the Native American leader Geronimo and physicist Leo Szilard, among them—a series of stories that will change our view not only of the past but also of the future.The convergence of a startling historical archaeology with Dyson’s unusual personal story—set alternately in the rarified world of cutting-edge physics and computer science, in Princeton, and in the rainforest of the Northwest Coast—leads to a prophetic vision of an analog revolution already under way. We are, Dyson reveals, on the cusp of a new moment in human history, driven by a generation of machines whose powers are beyond programmable control.Includes black-and-white illustrations
JavaScript: The Good Parts
Douglas Crockford - 2008
This authoritative book scrapes away these bad features to reveal a subset of JavaScript that's more reliable, readable, and maintainable than the language as a whole--a subset you can use to create truly extensible and efficient code.Considered the JavaScript expert by many people in the development community, author Douglas Crockford identifies the abundance of good ideas that make JavaScript an outstanding object-oriented programming language-ideas such as functions, loose typing, dynamic objects, and an expressive object literal notation. Unfortunately, these good ideas are mixed in with bad and downright awful ideas, like a programming model based on global variables.When Java applets failed, JavaScript became the language of the Web by default, making its popularity almost completely independent of its qualities as a programming language. In JavaScript: The Good Parts, Crockford finally digs through the steaming pile of good intentions and blunders to give you a detailed look at all the genuinely elegant parts of JavaScript, including:SyntaxObjectsFunctionsInheritanceArraysRegular expressionsMethodsStyleBeautiful featuresThe real beauty? As you move ahead with the subset of JavaScript that this book presents, you'll also sidestep the need to unlearn all the bad parts. Of course, if you want to find out more about the bad parts and how to use them badly, simply consult any other JavaScript book.With JavaScript: The Good Parts, you'll discover a beautiful, elegant, lightweight and highly expressive language that lets you create effective code, whether you're managing object libraries or just trying to get Ajax to run fast. If you develop sites or applications for the Web, this book is an absolute must.
How Computers Work
Ron White - 1992
The full-color, detailed illustrations will take you deep inside your PC and show you just how intricate it is. This latest edition has been updated with information on all of the latest technologies, including: PCI Express Bus Serial ATA Connections Digital Photography Software TiVos, Gas Plasma Screens, iPods, and Other Home Entertainment Equipment Google and eBay 3D Game Development, Two-Slot Video Cards, and Overclocking How Computers Work has sold over two million copies world wide. But don't take our word for it � get your copy today!
The Timeless Way of Building
Christopher W. Alexander - 1978
It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form as the trees and hills, and as our faces are.”The Timeless Way of Building is the introductory volume to Alexander’s other works, A Pattern Language and The Oregon Experiment, in the Center for Environmental Structure series.
HTML and XHTML Pocket Reference
Jennifer Niederst Robbins - 2006
You no longer use HTML and XHTML as design tools, but strictly as ways to define the meaning and structure of web content. And Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are no longer just something interesting to tinker with, but a reliable method for handling all matters of presentation, from fonts and colors to page layout. When you follow the standards, both the site's design and underlying code are much cleaner. But how do you keep all those HTML and XHTML tags and CSS values straight?
Jennifer Niederst-Robbins, the author of our definitive guide on standards-compliant design, Web Design in a Nutshell, offers you the perfect little guide when you need answers immediately: HTML and XHTML Pocket Reference. This revised and updated new edition takes the top 20% of vital reference information from her Nutshell book, augments it judiciously, cross-references everything, and organizes it according to the most common needs of web developers. The result is a handy book that offers the bare essentials on web standards in a small, concise format that you can use carry anywhere for quick reference. This guide will literally fit into your back pocket.
Inside HTML and XHTML Pocket Reference, you'll find instantly accessible alphabetical listings of every element and attribute in the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 Recommendations. This is an indispensable reference for any serious web designer, author, or programmer who needs a fast on-the-job resource when working with established web standards.