The Craftsman


Richard Sennett - 2008
    The computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen all engage in a craftsman’s work. In this thought-provoking book, Sennett explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world. The Craftsman engages the many dimensions of skill—from the technical demands to the obsessive energy required to do good work. Craftsmanship leads Sennett across time and space, from ancient Roman brickmakers to Renaissance goldsmiths to the printing presses of Enlightenment Paris and the factories of industrial London; in the modern world he explores what experiences of good work are shared by computer programmers, nurses and doctors, musicians, glassblowers, and cooks. Unique in the scope of his thinking, Sennett expands previous notions of crafts and craftsmen and apprises us of the surprising extent to which we can learn about ourselves through the labor of making physical things.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work


Nick Srnicek - 2015
    Austerity is forcing millions into poverty and many more into precarious work, while the left remains trapped in stagnant political practices that offer no respite. Inventing the Future is a bold new manifesto for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitaiist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms.

Robot Futures


Illah Reza Nourbakhsh - 2013
    The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond the effort to make walking, talking androids that are indistinguishable from people. Future robots will have superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. They will be embedded in our physical spaces, with the ability to go where we cannot, and will have minds of their own, thanks to artificial intelligence. In Robot Futures, the roboticist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh considers how we will share our world with these creatures, and how our society could change as it incorporates a race of stronger, smarter beings.Nourbakhsh imagines a future that includes adbots offering interactive custom messaging; robotic flying toys that operate by means of "gaze tracking"; robot-enabled multimodal, multicontinental telepresence; and even a way that nanorobots could allow us to assume different physical forms. Nourbakhsh examines the underlying technology and the social consequences of each scenario. He also offers a counter-vision: a robotics designed to create civic and community empowerment. His book helps us understand why that is the robot future we should try to bring about.

Working with UNIX Processes


Jesse Storimer - 2011
    Want to impress your coworkers and write the fastest, most efficient, stable code you ever have? Don't reinvent the wheel. Reuse decades of research into battle-tested, highly optimized, and proven techniques available on any Unix system.This book will teach you what you need to know so that you can write your own servers, debug your entire stack when things go awry, and understand how things are working under the hood.http://www.jstorimer.com/products/wor...

Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk


Massimo Pigliucci - 2008
    More and more parents are refusing to vaccinate their children for fear it causes autism, though this link can been consistently disproved. And about 40 percent of Americans believe that the threat of global warming is exaggerated, despite near consensus in the scientific community that manmade climate change is real.Why do people believe bunk? And what causes them to embrace such pseudoscientific beliefs and practices? Noted skeptic Massimo Pigliucci sets out to separate the fact from the fantasy in this entertaining exploration of the nature of science, the borderlands of fringe science, and—borrowing a famous phrase from philosopher Jeremy Bentham—the nonsense on stilts. Presenting case studies on a number of controversial topics, Pigliucci cuts through the ambiguity surrounding science to look more closely at how science is conducted, how it is disseminated, how it is interpreted, and what it means to our society. The result is in many ways a “taxonomy of bunk” that explores the intersection of science and culture at large.No one—not the public intellectuals in the culture wars between defenders and detractors of science nor the believers of pseudoscience themselves—is spared Pigliucci’s incisive analysis. In the end, Nonsense on Stilts is a timely reminder of the need to maintain a line between expertise and assumption. Broad in scope and implication, it is also ultimately a captivating guide for the intelligent citizen who wishes to make up her own mind while navigating the perilous debates that will affect the future of our planet.

The Practice of Network Security Monitoring: Understanding Incident Detection and Response


Richard Bejtlich - 2013
    The most effective computer security strategies integrate network security monitoring (NSM): the collection and analysis of data to help you detect and respond to intrusions.In The Practice of Network Security Monitoring, Mandiant CSO Richard Bejtlich shows you how to use NSM to add a robust layer of protection around your networks — no prior experience required. To help you avoid costly and inflexible solutions, he teaches you how to deploy, build, and run an NSM operation using open source software and vendor-neutral tools.You'll learn how to:Determine where to deploy NSM platforms, and size them for the monitored networks Deploy stand-alone or distributed NSM installations Use command line and graphical packet analysis tools, and NSM consoles Interpret network evidence from server-side and client-side intrusions Integrate threat intelligence into NSM software to identify sophisticated adversaries There's no foolproof way to keep attackers out of your network. But when they get in, you'll be prepared. The Practice of Network Security Monitoring will show you how to build a security net to detect, contain, and control them. Attacks are inevitable, but losing sensitive data shouldn't be.

Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism


Jillian York - 2021
    From the online calls to arms in the thick of the Arab Spring to the contemporary front line of misinformation, Jillian York charts the war over our digital rights. She looks at both how the big corporations have become unaccountable censors, and the devastating impact it has had on those who have been censored.In Silicon Values, leading campaigner Jillian York, looks at how our rights have become increasingly undermined by the major corporations desire to harvest our personal data and turn it into profit. She also looks at how governments have used the same technology to monitor citizens and threatened our ability to communicate. As a result our daily lives, and private thoughts, are being policed in an unprecedented manner. Who decides the difference between political debate and hate speech? How does this impact on our identity, our ability to create communities and to protest? Who regulates the censors? In response to this threat to our democracy, York proposes a user-powered movement against the platforms that demands change and a new form of ownership over our own data.

Python Machine Learning


Sebastian Raschka - 2015
    We are living in an age where data comes in abundance, and thanks to the self-learning algorithms from the field of machine learning, we can turn this data into knowledge. Automated speech recognition on our smart phones, web search engines, e-mail spam filters, the recommendation systems of our favorite movie streaming services – machine learning makes it all possible.Thanks to the many powerful open-source libraries that have been developed in recent years, machine learning is now right at our fingertips. Python provides the perfect environment to build machine learning systems productively.This book will teach you the fundamentals of machine learning and how to utilize these in real-world applications using Python. Step-by-step, you will expand your skill set with the best practices for transforming raw data into useful information, developing learning algorithms efficiently, and evaluating results.You will discover the different problem categories that machine learning can solve and explore how to classify objects, predict continuous outcomes with regression analysis, and find hidden structures in data via clustering. You will build your own machine learning system for sentiment analysis and finally, learn how to embed your model into a web app to share with the world

The Guru's Guide to Transact-Sql


Ken Henderson - 2000
    Beginners and intermediate developers will appreciate the comprehensive tutorial that walks step-by-step through building a real client/server database, from concept to deployment and beyond -- and points out key pitfalls to avoid throughout the process. Experienced users will appreciate the book's comprehensive coverage of the Transact-SQL language, from basic to advanced level; detailed ODBC database access information; expert coverage of concurrency control, and more. The book includes thorough, up-to-the-minute guidance on building multi-tier applications; SQL Server performance tuning; and other crucial issues for advanced developers. For all database developers, system administrators, and Web application developers who interact with databases in Microsoft-centric environments.

How to Count (Programming for Mere Mortals, #1)


Steven Frank - 2011
    unsigned numbers- Floating point and fixed point arithmeticThis short, easily understood book will quickly get you thinking like a programmer.

Regular Expressions Cookbook


Jan Goyvaerts - 2009
    Every programmer can find uses for regular expressions, but their power doesn't come worry-free. Even seasoned users often suffer from poor performance, false positives, false negatives, or perplexing bugs. Regular Expressions Cookbook offers step-by-step instructions for some of the most common tasks involving this tool, with recipes for C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and VB.NET.With this book, you will:Understand the basics of regular expressions through a concise tutorial Use regular expressions effectively in several programming and scripting languages Learn how to validate and format input Manage words, lines, special characters, and numerical values Find solutions for using regular expressions in URLs, paths, markup, and data exchange Learn the nuances of more advanced regex features Understand how regular expressions' APIs, syntax, and behavior differ from language to language Write better regular expressions for custom needs Whether you're a novice or an experienced user, Regular Expressions Cookbook will help deepen your knowledge of this unique and irreplaceable tool. You'll learn powerful new tricks, avoid language-specific gotchas, and save valuable time with this huge library of proven solutions to difficult, real-world problems.

Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations


Garr Reynolds - 2009
    Now, he takes us further into the design realm and shows how we can apply time-honored design principles to presentation layouts.Throughout Presentation Zen Design, Garr shares his lessons on designing effective presentations that contain text, graphs, color, images, and video. After establishing guidelines for each of the various elements, he explains how to achieve an overall harmony and balance using the tenets of Zen simplicity. Not only will you discover how to design your slides for more professional-looking presentations, you'll learn to communicate more clearly and will accomplish the goal of making a stronger, more lasting connection with your audience.

Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform


Ed Burnette - 2008
    In a few years, it's expected to be found inside millions of cell phones and other mobile devices, making Android a major platform for application developers. That could be your own program running on all those devices.Getting started developing with Android is easy. You don't even need access to an Android phone, just a computer where you can install the Android SDK and the phone emulator that comes with it. Within minutes, "Hello, Android" will get you creating your first working application: Android's version of "Hello, World."From there, you'll build up a more substantial example: an Android Sudoku game. By gradually adding features to the game throughout the course of the book, you'll learn about many aspects of Android programming including user interfaces, multimedia, and the Android life cycle.If you're a busy developer who'd rather be coding than reading about coding, this book is for you. To help you find what you need to know fast, each chapter ends with "Fast forward" section. These sections provide guidance for where you should go next when you need to read the book out of order.

Easy Recipes for Summer Cooking: A short collection of receipes from Donal Skehan, Sheila Kiely and Rosanne Hewitt-Cromwell


Donal Skehan - 2013
    Recipes to enjoy with friends and family during fine summer evenings and lazy weekends.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs


Harold Abelson - 1984
    This long-awaited revision contains changes throughout the text. There are new implementations of most of the major programming systems in the book, including the interpreters and compilers, and the authors have incorporated many small changes that reflect their experience teaching the course at MIT since the first edition was published. A new theme has been introduced that emphasizes the central role played by different approaches to dealing with time in computational models: objects with state, concurrent programming, functional programming and lazy evaluation, and nondeterministic programming. There are new example sections on higher-order procedures in graphics and on applications of stream processing in numerical programming, and many new exercises. In addition, all the programs have been reworked to run in any Scheme implementation that adheres to the IEEE standard.