Designing Distributed Systems: Patterns and Paradigms for Scalable, Reliable Services


Brendan Burns - 2018
    Building these systems is complicated and, because few formally established patterns are available for designing them, most of these systems end up looking very unique. This practical guide shows you how to use existing software design patterns for designing and building reliable distributed applications.Although patterns such as those developed more than 20 years ago by the Gang of Four were largely restricted to running on single machines, author Brendan Burns--a Partner Architect in Microsoft Azure--demonstrates how you can reuse several of them in modern distributed applications.Systems engineers and application developers will learn how these patterns provide a common language and framework for dramatically increasing the quality of your system.

Badass: Making Users Awesome


Kathy Sierra - 2015
    The rules? No marketing budget, no PR stunts, and it must be sustainably successful. No short-term fads.This is not a game of chance. It is a game of skill and strategy.And it begins with a single question: given competing products of equal pricing, promotion, and perceived quality, why does one outsell the others?The answer doesn’t live in the sustainably successful products or services. The answer lives in those who use them.Our goal is to craft a strategy for creating successful users. And that strategy is full of surprising, counter-intuitive, and astonishingly simple techniques that don’t depend on a massive marketing or development budget. Techniques typically overlooked by even the most well-funded, well-staffed product teams.Every role is a key player in this game. Product development, engineering, marketing, user experience, support—everyone on the team. Even if that team is a start-up of one. Armed with a surprisingly overlooked science and a unique POV, we can can reduce the role of luck. We can build sustainably successful products and services that rely not on unethical persuasive marketing tricks but on helping our users have deeper, richer experiences. Not just in the moments while they’re using our product but, more importantly, in the moments when they aren’t.

Practical Cryptography


Niels Ferguson - 2003
    The gold standard for attaining security is cryptography because it provides the most reliable tools for storing or transmitting digital information. Written by Niels Ferguson, lead cryptographer for Counterpane, Bruce Schneier's security company, and Bruce Schneier himself, this is the much anticipated follow-up book to Schneier's seminal encyclopedic reference, Applied Cryptography, Second Edition (0-471-11709-9), which has sold more than 150,000 copies. Niels Ferguson (Amsterdam, Netherlands) is a cryptographic engineer and consultant at Counterpane Internet Security. He has extensive experience in the creation and design of security algorithms, protocols, and multinational security infrastructures. Previously, Ferguson was a cryptographer for DigiCash and CWI. At CWI he developed the first generation of off-line payment protocols. He has published numerous scientific papers. Bruce Schneier (Minneapolis, MN) is Founder and Chief Technical Officer at Counterpane Internet Security, a managed-security monitoring company. He is also the author of Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World (0-471-25311-1).

The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations


Dietrich Dörner - 1996
    Working with imaginative and often hilarious computer simulations, he analyzes the roots of catastrophe, showing city planners in the very act of creating gridlock and disaster, or public health authorities setting the scene for starvation. The Logic of Failure is a compass for intelligent planning and decision-making that can sharpen the skills of managers, policymakers and everyone involved in the daily challenge of getting from point A to point B.

Domain-Driven Design Distilled


Vaughn Vernon - 2016
    Now, for the first time, there's an accessible guide to the basics of DDD: What it is, what problems it solves, how it works, and how to quickly gain value from it. Concise, readable, and actionable, Domain-Driven Design Distilled never buries you in detail-it focuses on what you need to know to get results. Vaughn Vernon, author of the best-selling Implementing Domain-Driven Design, draws on his twenty years of experience applying DDD principles to real-world situations. He is uniquely well-qualified to demystify its complexities, illuminate its subtleties, and help you solve the problems you might encounter. Vernon guides you through each core DDD technique for building better software. You'll learn how to segregate domain models using the powerful Bounded Contexts pattern, to develop a Ubiquitous Language within an explicitly bounded context, and to help domain experts and developers work together to create that language. Vernon shows how to use Subdomains to handle legacy systems and to integrate multiple Bounded Contexts to define both team relationships and technical mechanisms. Domain-Driven Design Distilled brings DDD to life. Whether you're a developer, architect, analyst, consultant, or customer, Vernon helps you truly understand it so you can benefit from its remarkable power. Coverage includes What DDD can do for you and your organization-and why it's so important The cornerstones of strategic design with DDD: Bounded Contexts and Ubiquitous Language Strategic design with Subdomains Context Mapping: helping teams work together and integrate software more strategically Tactical design with Aggregates and Domain Events Using project acceleration and management tools to establish and maintain team cadence

Architecting for the AWS Cloud: Best Practices (AWS Whitepaper)


Amazon We Services - 2016
    It discusses cloud concepts and highlights various design patterns and best practices. This documentation is offered for free here as a Kindle book, or you can read it in PDF format at https://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information


Edward R. Tufte - 1983
    Theory and practice in the design of data graphics, 250 illustrations of the best (and a few of the worst) statistical graphics, with detailed analysis of how to display data for precise, effective, quick analysis. Design of the high-resolution displays, small multiples. Editing and improving graphics. The data-ink ratio. Time-series, relational graphics, data maps, multivariate designs. Detection of graphical deception: design variation vs. data variation. Sources of deception. Aesthetics and data graphical displays. This is the second edition of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Recently published, this new edition provides excellent color reproductions of the many graphics of William Playfair, adds color to other images, and includes all the changes and corrections accumulated during 17 printings of the first edition.

The Spatial Web: How Web 3.0 Will Connect Humans, Machines, and AI to Transform the World


Gabriel Rene - 2019
    Blade Runner, The Matrix, Star Wars, Avatar, Star Trek, Ready Player One and Avengers show us futuristic worlds where holograms, intelligent robots, smart devices, virtual avatars, digital transactions, and universe-scale teleportation work together perfectly, somehow seamlessly combining the virtual and the physical with the mechanical and the biological. Science fiction has done an excellent job describing a vision of the future where the digital and physical merge naturally into one — in a way that just works everywhere, for everyone. However, none of these visionary fictional works go so far as to describe exactly how this would actually be accomplished. While it has inspired many of us to ask the question—How do we enable science fantasy to become....science fact? The Spatial Web achieves this by first describing how exponentially powerful computing technologies are creating a great “Convergence.” How Augmented and Virtual Reality will enable us to overlay our information and imaginations onto the world. How Artificial Intelligence will infuse the environments and objects around us with adaptive intelligence. How the Internet of Things and Robotics will enable our vehicles, appliances, clothing, furniture, and homes to become connected and embodied with the power to see, feel, hear, smell, touch and move things in the world, and how Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies will secure our data and enable real-time transactions between the human, machine and virtual economies of the future. The book then dives deeply into the challenges and shortcomings of the World Wide Web, the rise of fake news and surveillance capitalism in Web 2.0 and the risk of algorithmic terrorism and biological hacking and “fake-reality” in Web 3.0. It raises concerns about the threat that emerging technologies pose in the hands of rogue actors whether human, algorithmic, corporate or state-sponsored and calls for common sense governance and global cooperation. It calls for business leaders, organizations and governments to not only support interoperable standards for software code, but critically, for ethical, and social codes as well. Authors Gabriel René and Dan Mapes describe in vivid detail how a new “spatial” protocol is required in order to connect the various exponential technologies of the 21st century into an integrated network capable of tracking and managing the real-time activities of our cities, monitoring and adjusting the supply chains that feed them, optimizing our farms and natural resources, automating our manufacturing and distribution, transforming marketing and commerce, accelerating our global economies, running advanced planet-scale simulations and predictions, and even bridging the gap between our interior individual reality and our exterior collective one. Enabling the ability for humans, machines and AI to communicate, collaborate and coordinate activities in the world at a global scale and how the thoughtful application of these technologies could lead to an unprecedented opportunity to create a truly global “networked” civilization or "Smart World.” The book artfully shifts between cyberpunk futurism, cautionary tale-telling, and life-affirming call-to-arms. It challenges us to consider the importance of today’s technological choices as individuals, organizations, and as a species, as we face the historic opportunity we have to transform the web, the world, and our very definition of reality.

How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody


Abby Covert - 2014
     It is easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of information we encounter each day. Whether at work, at school, or in our personal endeavors, there’s a deepening (and inescapable) need for people to work with and understand information. Information architecture is the way that we arrange the parts of something to make it understandable as a whole. When we make things for others to use, the architecture of information that we choose greatly affects our ability to deliver our intended message to our users. We all face messes made of information and people. I define the word “mess” the same way that most dictionaries do: “A situation where the interactions between people and information are confusing or full of difficulties.” — Who doesn’t bump up against messes made of information and people every day? This book provides a seven step process for making sense of any mess. Each chapter contains a set of lessons as well as workbook exercises architected to help you to work through your own mess.

Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager


Michael Lopp - 2007
    Drawing on Lopp's management experiences at Apple, Netscape, Symantec, and Borland, this book is full of stories based on companies in the Silicon Valley where people have been known to yell at each other. It is a place full of dysfunctional bright people who are in an incredible hurry to find the next big thing so they can strike it rich and then do it all over again. Among these people are managers, a strange breed of people who through a mystical organizational ritual have been given power over your future and your bank account.Whether you're an aspiring manager, a current manager, or just wondering what the heck a manager does all day, there is a story in this book that will speak to you.

Machine Learning: A Visual Starter Course For Beginner's


Oliver Theobald - 2017
     If you have ever found yourself lost halfway through other introductory materials on this topic, this is the book for you. If you don't understand set terminology such as vectors, hyperplanes, and centroids, then this is also the book for you. This starter course isn't a picture story book but does include many visual examples that break algorithms down into a digestible and practical format. As a starter course, this book connects the dots and offers the crash course I wish I had when I first started. The kind of guide I wish had before I started taking on introductory courses that presume you’re two days away from an advanced mathematics exam. That’s why this introductory course doesn’t go further on the subject than other introductory books, but rather, goes a step back. A half-step back in order to help everyone make his or her first strides in machine learning and is an ideal study companion for the visual learner. In this step-by-step guide you will learn: - How to download free datasets - What tools and software packages you need - Data scrubbing techniques, including one-hot encoding, binning and dealing with missing data - Preparing data for analysis, including k-fold Validation - Regression analysis to create trend lines - Clustering, including k-means and k-nearest Neighbors - Naive Bayes Classifier to predict new classes - Anomaly detection and SVM algorithms to combat anomalies and outliers - The basics of Neural Networks - Bias/Variance to improve your machine learning model - Decision Trees to decode classification Please feel welcome to join this starter course by buying a copy, or sending a free sample to your preferred device.

The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book


Andriy Burkov - 2019
    During that week, you will learn almost everything modern machine learning has to offer. The author and other practitioners have spent years learning these concepts.Companion wiki — the book has a continuously updated wiki that extends some book chapters with additional information: Q&A, code snippets, further reading, tools, and other relevant resources.Flexible price and formats — choose from a variety of formats and price options: Kindle, hardcover, paperback, EPUB, PDF. If you buy an EPUB or a PDF, you decide the price you pay!Read first, buy later — download book chapters for free, read them and share with your friends and colleagues. Only if you liked the book or found it useful in your work, study or business, then buy it.

Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity - A Platform for Designing Business Architecture


Jamshid Gharajedaghi - 1999
    It's a holistic approach to systems methodology. It deals with all dimensions of a system: structure, function and process. Peter Senge introduced Systems Thinking/practice. Interact clients asked the author to write a book to take them "further down the Senge trail". This book does that by taking the reader into "real world" stories. It is based on experiences in five real companies using systems practice.It is about a new mode of seeing, doing and being in the world; a way of thinking through chaos and complexity. It speaks to those thinkers and practitioners who have come to realize that learning "to be" is as much a necessary part of a successful professional life as is the learning "to do."Natural science has discovered "chaos". Social science has encountered "complexity." But chaos and complexity are features of our perceptions and understanding. We see the world as increasingly more complex and chaotic because we use inadequate concepts to explain it. When we understand something, we no longer see it as chaotic or complex. It seems that playing the new game requires learning a new language. A language of interaction and design that will allow us to see through chaos and understand complexity.In a nutshell, this book is about systems. However, it goes beyond the simple declaration of desirability of systems thinking. With a practical orientation and yet a profound theoretical depth, the book offers an operational handle on the whole by introducing an elaborate scheme called iterative design. The iterative design explicitly recognizes that choice is at the heart of human development. Development is the capacity to choose; design is a vehicle for enhancement of choice and holistic thinking. Designers, in this book, seek to choose rather than predict the future. They try to understand rational, emotional, and cultural dimensions of choice and to produce a design that satisfies a multitude of functions. They learn how to use what they already know and also about how to learn what they need to know.

Windows PowerShell Cookbook: The Complete Guide to Scripting Microsoft's Command Shell


Lee Holmes - 2007
    Intermediate to advanced system administrators will find more than 100 tried-and-tested scripts they can copy and use immediately.Updated for PowerShell 3.0, this comprehensive cookbook includes hands-on recipes for common tasks and administrative jobs that you can apply whether you’re on the client or server version of Windows. You also get quick references to technologies used in conjunction with PowerShell, including format specifiers and frequently referenced registry keys to selected .NET, COM, and WMI classes.Learn how to use PowerShell on Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012Tour PowerShell’s core features, including the command model, object-based pipeline, and ubiquitous scriptingMaster fundamentals such as the interactive shell, pipeline, and object conceptsPerform common tasks that involve working with files, Internet-connected scripts, user interaction, and moreSolve tasks in systems and enterprise management, such as working with Active Directory and the filesystem

Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data


Stephen Few - 2006
    Although dashboards are potentially powerful, this potential is rarely realized. The greatest display technology in the world won't solve this if you fail to use effective visual design. And if a dashboard fails to tell you precisely what you need to know in an instant, you'll never use it, even if it's filled with cute gauges, meters, and traffic lights. Don't let your investment in dashboard technology go to waste.This book will teach you the visual design skills you need to create dashboards that communicate clearly, rapidly, and compellingly. Information Dashboard Design will explain how to:Avoid the thirteen mistakes common to dashboard design Provide viewers with the information they need quickly and clearly Apply what we now know about visual perception to the visual presentation of information Minimize distractions, cliches, and unnecessary embellishments that create confusion Organize business information to support meaning and usability Create an aesthetically pleasing viewing experience Maintain consistency of design to provide accurate interpretation Optimize the power of dashboard technology by pairing it with visual effectiveness Stephen Few has over 20 years of experience as an IT innovator, consultant, and educator. As Principal of the consultancy Perceptual Edge, Stephen focuses on data visualization for analyzing and communicating quantitative business information. He provides consulting and training services, speaks frequently at conferences, and teaches in the MBA program at the University of California in Berkeley. He is also the author of Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten. Visit his website at www.perceptualedge.com.