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.

Clojure for the Brave and True


Daniel Higginbotham - 2015
    At long last you'll be united with the programming language you've been longing for: Clojure!As a Lisp-style functional programming language, Clojure lets you write robust and elegant code, and because it runs on the Java Virtual Machine, you can take advantage of the vast Java ecosystem. Clojure for the Brave and True offers a "dessert-first" approach: you'll start playing with real programs immediately, as you steadily acclimate to the abstract but powerful features of Lisp and functional programming. Inside you'll find an offbeat, practical guide to Clojure, filled with quirky sample programs that catch cheese thieves and track glittery vampires.Learn how to: Wield Clojure's core functions Use Emacs for Clojure development Write macros to modify Clojure itself Use Clojure's tools to simplify concurrency and parallel programmingClojure for the Brave and True assumes no prior experience with Clojure, the Java Virtual Machine, or functional programming. Are you ready, brave reader, to meet your true destiny? Grab your best pair of parentheses—you're about to embark on an epic journey into the world of Clojure!

Algorithms


Robert Sedgewick - 1983
    This book surveys the most important computer algorithms currently in use and provides a full treatment of data structures and algorithms for sorting, searching, graph processing, and string processing -- including fifty algorithms every programmer should know. In this edition, new Java implementations are written in an accessible modular programming style, where all of the code is exposed to the reader and ready to use.The algorithms in this book represent a body of knowledge developed over the last 50 years that has become indispensable, not just for professional programmers and computer science students but for any student with interests in science, mathematics, and engineering, not to mention students who use computation in the liberal arts.The companion web site, algs4.cs.princeton.edu contains An online synopsis Full Java implementations Test data Exercises and answers Dynamic visualizations Lecture slides Programming assignments with checklists Links to related material The MOOC related to this book is accessible via the "Online Course" link at algs4.cs.princeton.edu. The course offers more than 100 video lecture segments that are integrated with the text, extensive online assessments, and the large-scale discussion forums that have proven so valuable. Offered each fall and spring, this course regularly attracts tens of thousands of registrants.Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne are developing a modern approach to disseminating knowledge that fully embraces technology, enabling people all around the world to discover new ways of learning and teaching. By integrating their textbook, online content, and MOOC, all at the state of the art, they have built a unique resource that greatly expands the breadth and depth of the educational experience.

Computer Organization & Design: The Hardware/Software Interface


David A. Patterson - 1993
    More importantly, this book provides a framework for thinking about computer organization and design that will enable the reader to continue the lifetime of learning necessary for staying at the forefront of this competitive discipline. --John Crawford Intel Fellow Director of Microprocessor Architecture, Intel The performance of software systems is dramatically affected by how well software designers understand the basic hardware technologies at work in a system. Similarly, hardware designers must understand the far reaching effects their design decisions have on software applications. For readers in either category, this classic introduction to the field provides a deep look into the computer. It demonstrates the relationship between the software and hardware and focuses on the foundational concepts that are the basis for current computer design. Using a distinctive learning by evolution approach the authors present each idea from its first principles, guiding readers through a series of worked examples that incrementally add more complex instructions until they ha

Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought


Drew Neil - 2012
    It's available on almost every OS--if you master the techniques in this book, you'll never need another text editor. Practical Vim shows you 120 vim recipes so you can quickly learn the editor's core functionality and tackle your trickiest editing and writing tasks. Vim, like its classic ancestor vi, is a serious tool for programmers, web developers, and sysadmins. No other text editor comes close to Vim for speed and efficiency; it runs on almost every system imaginable and supports most coding and markup languages. Learn how to edit text the "Vim way:" complete a series of repetitive changes with The Dot Formula, using one keystroke to strike the target, followed by one keystroke to execute the change. Automate complex tasks by recording your keystrokes as a macro. Run the same command on a selection of lines, or a set of files. Discover the "very magic" switch, which makes Vim's regular expression syntax more like Perl's. Build complex patterns by iterating on your search history. Search inside multiple files, then run Vim's substitute command on the result set for a project-wide search and replace. All without installing a single plugin! You'll learn how to navigate text documents as fast as the eye moves--with only a few keystrokes. Jump from a method call to its definition with a single command. Use Vim's jumplist, so that you can always follow the breadcrumb trail back to the file you were working on before. Discover a multilingual spell-checker that does what it's told.Practical Vim will show you new ways to work with Vim more efficiently, whether you're a beginner or an intermediate Vim user. All this, without having to touch the mouse.What You Need: Vim version 7

Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement


Eric Redmond - 2012
    As a modern application developer you need to understand the emerging field of data management, both RDBMS and NoSQL. Seven Databases in Seven Weeks takes you on a tour of some of the hottest open source databases today. In the tradition of Bruce A. Tate's Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, this book goes beyond your basic tutorial to explore the essential concepts at the core each technology. Redis, Neo4J, CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase, Riak and Postgres. With each database, you'll tackle a real-world data problem that highlights the concepts and features that make it shine. You'll explore the five data models employed by these databases-relational, key/value, columnar, document and graph-and which kinds of problems are best suited to each. You'll learn how MongoDB and CouchDB are strikingly different, and discover the Dynamo heritage at the heart of Riak. Make your applications faster with Redis and more connected with Neo4J. Use MapReduce to solve Big Data problems. Build clusters of servers using scalable services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Discover the CAP theorem and its implications for your distributed data. Understand the tradeoffs between consistency and availability, and when you can use them to your advantage. Use multiple databases in concert to create a platform that's more than the sum of its parts, or find one that meets all your needs at once.Seven Databases in Seven Weeks will take you on a deep dive into each of the databases, their strengths and weaknesses, and how to choose the ones that fit your needs.What You Need: To get the most of of this book you'll have to follow along, and that means you'll need a *nix shell (Mac OSX or Linux preferred, Windows users will need Cygwin), and Java 6 (or greater) and Ruby 1.8.7 (or greater). Each chapter will list the downloads required for that database.

C++ Primer


Stanley B. Lippman - 1989
    This Fourth Edition not only keeps this tradition alive, it actually improves on it."--Steve Vinoski, Chief Engineer, Product Innovation, IONA Technologies" The Primer really brings this large and complex language down to size."--Justin Shaw, Senior Member of Technical Staff, Electronic Programs Division, The Aerospace Corporation"It not only gets novices up and running early, but gets them to do so using good programming practices."--Nevin ": -)" Liber, Senior Principal Engineer (C++ developer since 1988)This popular tutorial introduction to standard C++ has been completely updated, reorganized, and rewritten to help programmers learn the language faster and use it in a more modern, effective way.Just as C++ has evolved since the last edition, so has the authors' approach to teaching it. They now introduce the C++ standard library from the beginning, giving readers the means to write useful programs without first having to master every language detail. Highlighting today's best practices, they show how to write programs that are safe, can be built quickly, and yet offer outstanding performance. Examples that take advantage of the library, and explain the features of C++, also show how to make the best use of the language. As in its previous editions, the book's authoritative discussion of fundamental C++ concepts and techniques makes it a valuable resource even for more experienced programmers.Program Faster and More Effectively with This Rewritten ClassicRestructured for quicker learning, using the C++ standard libraryUpdated to teach the most current programming styles and program design techniquesFilled with new learning aids that emphasize important points, warn about common pitfalls, suggest good programming practices, and provide general usage tipsComplete with exercises that reinforce skills learnedAuthoritative and comprehensive in its coverage The source code for the book's extended examples is available on the Web at the address below.www.awprofessional.com/cpp_primer

Hacking: The Art of Exploitation


Jon Erickson - 2003
    This book explains the technical aspects of hacking, including stack based overflows, heap based overflows, string exploits, return-into-libc, shellcode, and cryptographic attacks on 802.11b.

The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles


Noam Nisan - 2005
    The books also provides a companion web site that provides the toold and materials necessary to build the hardware and software.

The Nature of Code


Daniel Shiffman - 2012
    Readers will progress from building a basic physics engine to creating intelligent moving objects and complex systems, setting the foundation for further experiments in generative design. Subjects covered include forces, trigonometry, fractals, cellular automata, self-organization, and genetic algorithms. The book's examples are written in Processing, an open-source language and development environment built on top of the Java programming language. On the book's website (http://www.natureofcode.com), the examples run in the browser via Processing's JavaScript mode.

Practical Electronics for Inventors


Paul Scherz - 1998
    Instead, it tells you-and shows you-what basic and advanced electronics parts and components do, and how they work. Chock-full of illustrations, Practical Electronics for Inventors offers over 750 hand-drawn images that provide clear, detailed instructions that can help turn theoretical ideas into real-life inventions and gadgets.

Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide


Dave Thomas - 2000
    When Ruby first burst onto the scene in the Western world, the Pragmatic Programmers were there with the definitive reference manual, Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide.Now in its second edition, author Dave Thomas has expanded the famous Pickaxe book with over 200 pages of new content, covering all the improved language features of Ruby 1.8 and standard library modules. The Pickaxe contains four major sections:An acclaimed tutorial on using Ruby.The definitive reference to the language.Complete documentation on all built-in classes, modules, and methodsComplete descriptions of all 98 standard libraries.If you enjoyed the First Edition, you'll appreciate the expanded content, including enhanced coverage of installation, packaging, documenting Ruby source code, threading and synchronization, and enhancing Ruby's capabilities using C-language extensions. Programming for the World Wide Web is easy in Ruby, with new chapters on XML/RPC, SOAP, distributed Ruby, templating systems, and other web services. There's even a new chapter on unit testing.This is the definitive reference manual for Ruby, including a description of all the standard library modules, a complete reference to all built-in classes and modules (including more than 250 significant changes since the First Edition). Coverage of other features has grown tremendously, including details on how to harness the sophisticated capabilities of irb, so you can dynamically examine and experiment with your running code. Ruby is a wonderfully powerful and useful language, and whenever I'm working with it this book is at my side --Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks

Operating System Concepts


Abraham Silberschatz - 1985
    By staying current, remaining relevant, and adapting to emerging course needs, this market-leading text has continued to define the operating systems course. This Seventh Edition not only presents the latest and most relevant systems, it also digs deeper to uncover those fundamental concepts that have remained constant throughout the evolution of today's operation systems. With this strong conceptual foundation in place, students can more easily understand the details related to specific systems. New Adaptations * Increased coverage of user perspective in Chapter 1. * Increased coverage of OS design throughout. * A new chapter on real-time and embedded systems (Chapter 19). * A new chapter on multimedia (Chapter 20). * Additional coverage of security and protection. * Additional coverage of distributed programming. * New exercises at the end of each chapter. * New programming exercises and projects at the end of each chapter. * New student-focused pedagogy and a new two-color design to enhance the learning process.

HTML Pocket Reference


Jennifer Niederst Robbins - 1999
    In this pocket reference, Jennifer Niederst, the author of the best-selling Web Design in a Nutshell, delivers a concise guide to every HTML tag.Each tag entry includes:Detailed information on the tag's attributes Support information on browsers such as Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and WebTV HTML 4.0 support information, including whether the tag is deprecated in the current spec In addition to tag-by-tag descriptions, you'll find useful charts on such topics as:Character entities Decimal-to-hexadecimal conversions Color names Niederst also provides context for the tags, indicating which tags are grouped together and bare-bones examples of how standard web page elements are constructed.This pocket reference is targeted at web designers and web authors and is likely to be the most dog-eared book on every web professional's desk.

Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability


Steve Krug - 2000
    And it’s still short, profusely illustrated…and best of all–fun to read.If you’ve read it before, you’ll rediscover what made Don’t Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you’ve never read it, you’ll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on Web sites.