The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography


Simon Singh - 1999
    From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logisitical breakthrough that made Internet commerce secure, The Code Book tells the story of the most powerful intellectual weapon ever known: secrecy.Throughout the text are clear technical and mathematical explanations, and portraits of the remarkable personalities who wrote and broke the world’s most difficult codes. Accessible, compelling, and remarkably far-reaching, this book will forever alter your view of history and what drives it. It will also make you wonder how private that e-mail you just sent really is.

High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More


Baron Schwartz - 2008
    Written by noted experts with years of real-world experience building very large systems, this book covers every aspect of MySQL performance in detail, and focuses on robustness, security, and data integrity.High Performance MySQL teaches you advanced techniques in depth so you can bring out MySQL's full power. Learn how to design schemas, indexes, queries and advanced MySQL features for maximum performance, and get detailed guidance for tuning your MySQL server, operating system, and hardware to their fullest potential. You'll also learn practical, safe, high-performance ways to scale your applications with replication, load balancing, high availability, and failover. This second edition is completely revised and greatly expanded, with deeper coverage in all areas. Major additions include: Emphasis throughout on both performance and reliability Thorough coverage of storage engines, including in-depth tuning and optimizations for the InnoDB storage engine Effects of new features in MySQL 5.0 and 5.1, including stored procedures, partitioned databases, triggers, and views A detailed discussion on how to build very large, highly scalable systems with MySQL New options for backups and replication Optimization of advanced querying features, such as full-text searches Four new appendices The book also includes chapters on benchmarking, profiling, backups, security, and tools and techniques to help you measure, monitor, and manage your MySQL installations.

Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms


Hannah Fry - 2018
    It’s time we stand face-to-digital-face with the true powers and limitations of the algorithms that already automate important decisions in healthcare, transportation, crime, and commerce. Hello World is indispensable preparation for the moral quandaries of a world run by code, and with the unfailingly entertaining Hannah Fry as our guide, we’ll be discussing these issues long after the last page is turned.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid


Douglas R. Hofstadter - 1979
    However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground


Kevin Poulsen - 2011
    Max 'Vision' Butler was a white-hat hacker and a celebrity throughout the programming world, even serving as a consultant to the FBI. But there was another side to Max. As the black-hat 'Iceman', he'd seen the fraudsters around him squabble, their ranks riddled with infiltrators, their methods inefficient, and in their dysfunction was the ultimate challenge: he would stage a coup and steal their ill-gotten gains from right under their noses.Through the story of Max Butler's remarkable rise, KINGPIN lays bare the workings of a silent crime wave affecting millions worldwide. It exposes vast online-fraud supermarkets stocked with credit card numbers, counterfeit cheques, hacked bank accounts and fake passports. Thanks to Kevin Poulsen's remarkable access to both cops and criminals, we step inside the quiet,desperate battle that law enforcement fights against these scammers. And learn that the boy next door may not be all he seems.

Two Scoops of Django: Best Practices for Django 1.6


Daniel Roy Greenfeld - 2014
    

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software


Scott Rosenberg - 2007
    Along the way, we encounter black holes, turtles, snakes, dragons, axe-sharpening, and yak-shaving—and take a guided tour through the theories and methods, both brilliant and misguided, that litter the history of software development, from the famous ‘mythical man-month’ to Extreme Programming. Not just for technophiles but for anyone captivated by the drama of invention, Dreaming in Code offers a window into both the information age and the workings of the human mind.

Effective Perl Programming


Joseph Hall - 1997
    The language features full support for regular expressions, object-oriented modules, network programming, and process management. Perl is extensible, and supports modular, cross-platform development.In "Effective Perl Programming," Perl experts Joseph Hall and Randal Schwartz share programming solutions, techniques, programming pointers, rules of thumb, and the pitfalls to avoid, enabling you to make the most of Perl's power and capabilities.The authors will help you develop a knack for the right ways to do things. They show you how to solve problems with Perl, and how to debug and improve your Perl programs. Offering examples, they help you learn good Perl style. Geared for programmers who have already acquired Perl basics, the book will extend your skill range, providing the tactics and deeper understanding you need to create Perl programs that are more elegant, effective, and succinct. This book also speaks to those who want to become more fluent, expressive, and individualistic Perl programmers.To help you design and write effective Perl progams, Effective Perl Programming includes: Perl basics Idiomatic Perl Regular expressions Subroutines References Debugging Usage of packages and modules Object-oriented programming Useful and interesting Perl miscellanyNumerous thought-provoking examples appear throughout the book, highlighting many of the subtleties that make Perl such a fascinating, fun, and effective language to work with.

Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary


Linus Torvalds - 2001
    Then he wrote a groundbreaking operating system and distributed it via the Internet -- for free. Today Torvalds is an international folk hero. And his creation LINUX is used by over 12 million people as well as by companies such as IBM.Now, in a narrative that zips along with the speed of e-mail, Torvalds gives a history of his renegade software while candidly revealing the quirky mind of a genius. The result is an engrossing portrayal of a man with a revolutionary vision, who challenges our values and may change our world.

Implementing Domain-Driven Design


Vaughn Vernon - 2013
    Vaughn Vernon couples guided approaches to implementation with modern architectures, highlighting the importance and value of focusing on the business domain while balancing technical considerations.Building on Eric Evans’ seminal book, Domain-Driven Design, the author presents practical DDD techniques through examples from familiar domains. Each principle is backed up by realistic Java examples–all applicable to C# developers–and all content is tied together by a single case study: the delivery of a large-scale Scrum-based SaaS system for a multitenant environment.The author takes you far beyond “DDD-lite” approaches that embrace DDD solely as a technical toolset, and shows you how to fully leverage DDD’s “strategic design patterns” using Bounded Context, Context Maps, and the Ubiquitous Language. Using these techniques and examples, you can reduce time to market and improve quality, as you build software that is more flexible, more scalable, and more tightly aligned to business goals.

JavaScript and HTML5 Now


Kyle Simpson - 2012
    This insightful overview provides striking examples of how these technologies have teamed up to give the Web a truly open platform.Author Kyle Simpson (HTML5 Cookbook) shows you how JavaScript unlocks the power of all of the new functionality in HTML5, giving web applications the capabilities developers have wanted for years. These technologies now provide the raw tools you need in the presentation layer to replace everything you used to do with Flash.You’ll discover how:> HTML5 builds natively into the web platform things we find most commonly useful, such as audio, video, and drawing> The Canvas element is changing graphic animations, games, audio visualization, charting, and video effects> Geolocation has spawned “geofencing” and augmented reality> Web Workers allows calculations to be performed in the background, rather than compete with the UI> Web Sockets is enabling realtime communication for chat, live tech support, multi-user collaboration, and gaming> Mobile device APIs will give web apps direct access the phone’s camera, vibration, and other capabilities

Game Project Completed: How Successful Indie Game Developers Finish Their Projects


Thomas Schwarzl - 2014
    They teach you how to make games. This book does not show you how to make games. It shows you how to take your game project to the finish line. Many game projects never make it beyond the alpha state.Game Development Success Is All About The Inner Game.Being a successful game developer does not (just) mean being a great programmer, a smart game designer or a gifted artist. It means dominating the inner game of game making. This separates the pros from the wannabes. It's the knowledge of how to stay focused, motivated and efficient during your game projects. It's the skillset of keeping things simple and avoiding misleading dreams of the next overnight success. Finally it's about thinking as a salesperson, not just as a designer, programmer or artist.

Mastering Algorithms with Perl


Jon Orwant - 1999
    Computer scientists have identified many techniques that a wide range of programs need, such as: Fuzzy pattern matching for text (identify misspellings!) Finding correlations in data Game-playing algorithms Predicting phenomena such as Web traffic Polynomial and spline fitting Using algorithms explained in this book, you too can carry out traditional programming tasks in a high-powered, efficient, easy-to-maintain manner with Perl.This book assumes a basic understanding of Perl syntax and functions, but not necessarily any background in computer science. The authors explain in a readable fashion the reasons for using various classic programming techniques, the kind of applications that use them, and -- most important -- how to code these algorithms in Perl.If you are an amateur programmer, this book will fill you in on the essential algorithms you need to solve problems like an expert. If you have already learned algorithms in other languages, you will be surprised at how much different (and often easier) it is to implement them in Perl. And yes, the book even has the obligatory fractal display program.There have been dozens of books on programming algorithms, some of them excellent, but never before has there been one that uses Perl.The authors include the editor of The Perl Journal and master librarian of CPAN; all are contributors to CPAN and have archived much of the code in this book there."This book was so exciting I lost sleep reading it." Tom Christiansen

Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming


Marijn Haverbeke - 2010
    I loved the tutorial-style game-like program development. This book rekindled my earliest joys of programming. Plus, JavaScript!" —Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScriptJavaScript is the language of the Web, and it's at the heart of every modern website from the lowliest personal blog to the mighty Google Apps. Though it's simple for beginners to pick up and play with, JavaScript is not a toy—it's a flexible and complex language, capable of much more than the showy tricks most programmers use it for.Eloquent JavaScript goes beyond the cut-and-paste scripts of the recipe books and teaches you to write code that's elegant and effective. You'll start with the basics of programming, and learn to use variables, control structures, functions, and data structures. Then you'll dive into the real JavaScript artistry: higher-order functions, closures, and object-oriented programming.Along the way you'll learn to:Master basic programming techniques and best practices Harness the power of functional and object-oriented programming Use regular expressions to quickly parse and manipulate strings Gracefully deal with errors and browser incompatibilities Handle browser events and alter the DOM structure Most importantly, Eloquent JavaScript will teach you to express yourself in code with precision and beauty. After all, great programming is an art, not a science—so why settle for a killer app when you can create a masterpiece?

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World


Pedro Domingos - 2015
    In The Master Algorithm, Pedro Domingos lifts the veil to give us a peek inside the learning machines that power Google, Amazon, and your smartphone. He assembles a blueprint for the future universal learner--the Master Algorithm--and discusses what it will mean for business, science, and society. If data-ism is today's philosophy, this book is its bible.