Understanding the Linux Kernel


Daniel P. Bovet - 2000
    The kernel handles all interactions between the CPU and the external world, and determines which programs will share processor time, in what order. It manages limited memory so well that hundreds of processes can share the system efficiently, and expertly organizes data transfers so that the CPU isn't kept waiting any longer than necessary for the relatively slow disks.The third edition of Understanding the Linux Kernel takes you on a guided tour of the most significant data structures, algorithms, and programming tricks used in the kernel. Probing beyond superficial features, the authors offer valuable insights to people who want to know how things really work inside their machine. Important Intel-specific features are discussed. Relevant segments of code are dissected line by line. But the book covers more than just the functioning of the code; it explains the theoretical underpinnings of why Linux does things the way it does.This edition of the book covers Version 2.6, which has seen significant changes to nearly every kernel subsystem, particularly in the areas of memory management and block devices. The book focuses on the following topics:Memory management, including file buffering, process swapping, and Direct memory Access (DMA)The Virtual Filesystem layer and the Second and Third Extended FilesystemsProcess creation and schedulingSignals, interrupts, and the essential interfaces to device driversTimingSynchronization within the kernelInterprocess Communication (IPC)Program executionUnderstanding the Linux Kernel will acquaint you with all the inner workings of Linux, but it's more than just an academic exercise. You'll learn what conditions bring out Linux's best performance, and you'll see how it meets the challenge of providing good system response during process scheduling, file access, and memory management in a wide variety of environments. This book will help you make the most of your Linux system.

Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, and Artificial Intelligence


John Haugeland - 1997
    Unlike traditional empirical psychology, it is more oriented toward the how than the what. An experiment in mind design is more likely to be an attempt to build something and make it work--as in artificial intelligence--than to observe or analyze what already exists. Mind design is psychology by reverse engineering.When Mind Design was first published in 1981, it became a classic in the then-nascent fields of cognitive science and AI. This second edition retains four landmark essays from the first, adding to them one earlier milestone (Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence) and eleven more recent articles about connectionism, dynamical systems, and symbolic versus nonsymbolic models. The contributors are divided about evenly between philosophers and scientists. Yet all are philosophical in that they address fundamental issues and concepts; and all are scientific in that they are technically sophisticated and concerned with concrete empirical research.ContributorsRodney A. Brooks, Paul M. Churchland, Andy Clark, Daniel C. Dennett, Hubert L. Dreyfus, Jerry A. Fodor, Joseph Garon, John Haugeland, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, Zenon W. Pylyshyn, William Ramsey, Jay F. Rosenberg, David E. Rumelhart, John R. Searle, Herbert A. Simon, Paul Smolensky, Stephen Stich, A.M. Turing, Timothy van Gelder

Rearview Mirror


Alana Stewart - 2012
    But despite her many accomplishments and successes, the truth is, her life has been rife with abandonment, abject poverty, tragedy, and even violence. In Rearview Mirror, she takes the reader through her mesmerizing journey from her beginnings in poor rural Texas, her escape to New York to become a Ford model, and finally, her seemingly fairytale, but often heartbreaking life in the glittering world of Hollywood. With compelling openness and honesty, Alana chronicles her unstable, chaotic childhood, her traumatic and violent rape, and her struggles with bulimia, depression, and self-worth. She also writes about her marriages and divorces with two iconic stars, raising three children on her own, the devastating effects of drug addiction in her family, and the tragic deaths of her mother as well as her best friend, Farrah Fawcett.Rearview Mirror is an inspiring, rags-to-riches story in which Alana also shares the valuable life lessons she has learned from her many challenges and heartaches: unconditional love, faith, gratitude, perseverance, and the importance of finding your higher purpose in life.

Digital Design and Computer Architecture


David Money Harris - 2007
    Digital Design and Computer Architecture begins with a modern approach by rigorously covering the fundamentals of digital logic design and then introducing Hardware Description Languages (HDLs). Featuring examples of the two most widely-used HDLs, VHDL and Verilog, the first half of the text prepares the reader for what follows in the second: the design of a MIPS Processor. By the end of Digital Design and Computer Architecture, readers will be able to build their own microprocessor and will have a top-to-bottom understanding of how it works--even if they have no formal background in design or architecture beyond an introductory class. David Harris and Sarah Harris combine an engaging and humorous writing style with an updated and hands-on approach to digital design.Unique presentation of digital logic design from the perspective of computer architecture using a real instruction set, MIPS.Side-by-side examples of the two most prominent Hardware Design Languages--VHDL and Verilog--illustrate and compare the ways the each can be used in the design of digital systems.Worked examples conclude each section to enhance the reader's understanding and retention of the material.

Land the Tech Job You Love


Andy Lester - 2008
    Your competition is smart, tech-savvy, and highly resourceful. Expectations among employers are higher. Your competition will run you over if you're not up to the challenge. Land the Tech Job You Love gives you the background, the skills, and the hard-won wisdom to bypass the mistakes of those who don't prepare. You might not think you need this book. Conventional Wisdom has it that finding a job is simple: send some resumes, go on some interviews, and take the offer that sounds best. But that's only the start. You've got the background and skills to work the Web and other resources that the general job seeker doesn't. This book shows you how to take advantage of those skills or be left behind by competing techies who do. It all starts with an examination of you, your strengths, and where you want your career to take you. Without a roadmap, you'll wind up in any old job. Life's too short to spend in a job that you don't love. From there, you'll see how to find the job you want that fits you and the employer, using your technical and web savvy to find the hidden jobs that never make it into the classifieds or Monster. "Marketing" is not a dirty word, and you'll learn how to present yourself, your skills, and your background in the way that shows the hiring company that you're the right person for the job. Create a resume that tosses out conventional wisdom, write cover letters that sell your background, and assemble a portfolio of work that will wow the interviewer. Social networking has been the darling of the Web in the past few years, but it's no substitute for the sort of personal interaction that makes relationships that help in future careers. As one manager said, "One recommendation is worth a million resumes." This book shows you how to make and maintain the connections that will drive your future career moves.Land the Tech Job You Love pulls no punches and lays out the details for what gets you an interview, and gets you hired in a job in the technical world that makes you happy.

Cocoa Design Patterns


Erik M. Buck - 2009
    Although Cocoa is indeed huge, once you understand the object-oriented patterns it uses, you'll find it remarkably elegant, consistent, and simple. Cocoa Design Patterns begins with the mother of all patterns: the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, which is central to all Mac and iPhone development. Encouraged, and in some cases enforced by Apple's tools, it's important to have a firm grasp of MVC right from the start. The book's midsection is a catalog of the essential design patterns you'll encounter in Cocoa, including Fundamental patterns, such as enumerators, accessors, and two-stage creation Patterns that empower, such as singleton, delegates, and the responder chain Patterns that hide complexity, including bundles, class clusters, proxies and forwarding, and controllers And that's not all of them! Cocoa Design Patterns painstakingly isolates 28 design patterns, accompanied with real-world examples and sample code you can apply to your applications today. The book wraps up with coverage of Core Data models, AppKit views, and a chapter on Bindings and Controllers. Cocoa Design Patterns clearly defines the problems each pattern solves with a foundation in Objective-C and the Cocoa frameworks and can be used by any Mac or iPhone developer.

Weekend Homesteader: August


Anna Hess - 2011
    If you need to fit homesteading into a few hours each weekend and would like to have fun while doing it, these projects will be right up your alley, whether you live on a forty-acre farm, a postage-stamp lawn in suburbia, or a high rise.The August volume includes the following projects: Saving seeds Drying food Building a chicken coop or tractor Making a rain barrel The second edition has been revised and expanded to match the paperback, with extra photos and feedback from weekend homesteaders just like you, plus permaculture-related avenues for the more advanced homesteader to explore.

Learn to Read Hebrew in 6 Weeks!


Miiko Shaffier - 2016
    Even people who have tried other books without success have learned to read Hebrew using this book. Here's what makes it different: * Fun memory tricks make it super simple to remember the sounds of the letters * Pace - The book is divided into 12 simple lessons. Two a week for 6 weeks. * The cheerful style of the book is great for adults and children alike. * From week one you are given words you can read from the Hebrew Bible! * The charming illustrations make learning Hebrew a pleasure. At the end of six weeks you WILL be able to read from the original Hebrew Bible, Psalms or the Siddur (Jewish prayer book) and you will have taken the first big step towards learning the Hebrew Language!

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners


Al Sweigart - 2014
    But what if you could have your computer do them for you?In "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python," you'll learn how to use Python to write programs that do in minutes what would take you hours to do by hand no prior programming experience required. Once you've mastered the basics of programming, you'll create Python programs that effortlessly perform useful and impressive feats of automation to: Search for text in a file or across multiple filesCreate, update, move, and rename files and foldersSearch the Web and download online contentUpdate and format data in Excel spreadsheets of any sizeSplit, merge, watermark, and encrypt PDFsSend reminder emails and text notificationsFill out online formsStep-by-step instructions walk you through each program, and practice projects at the end of each chapter challenge you to improve those programs and use your newfound skills to automate similar tasks.Don't spend your time doing work a well-trained monkey could do. Even if you've never written a line of code, you can make your computer do the grunt work. Learn how in "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python.""

Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made


Andy Hertzfeld - 2004
    Revolution in the Valley traces this vision back to its earliest roots: the hallways and backrooms of Apple, where the groundbreaking Macintosh computer was born. The book traces the development of the Macintosh, from its inception as an underground skunkworks project in 1979 to its triumphant introduction in 1984 and beyond.The stories in "Revolution in the Valley" come on extremely good authority. That's because author Andy Hertzfeld was a core member of the team that built the Macintosh system software, and a key creator of the Mac's radically new user interface software. One of the chosen few who worked with the mercurial Steve Jobs, you might call him the ultimate insider.When "Revolution in the Valley" begins, Hertzfeld is working on Apple's first attempt at a low-cost, consumer-oriented computer: the Apple II. He sees that Steve Jobs is luring some of the company's most brilliant innovators to work on a tiny research effort the Macintosh. Hertzfeld manages to make his way onto the Macintosh research team, and the rest is history.Through lavish illustrations, period photos, and Hertzfeld's vivid first-hand accounts, Revolution in the Valley reveals what it was like to be there at the birth of the personal computer revolution. The story comes to life through the book's portrait of the talented and often eccentric characters who made up the Macintosh team. Now, over 20 years later, millions of people are benefiting from the technical achievements of this determined and brilliant group of people.

Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-Free Development


Brian P. Hogan - 2016
    The time you spend context switching between your editor and your consoles eats away at your productivity. Take control of your environment with tmux, a terminal multiplexer that you can tailor to your workflow. With this updated second edition for tmux 2.3, you'll customize, script, and leverage tmux's unique abilities to craft a productive terminal environment that lets you keep your fingers on your keyboard's home row.You have a database console, web server, test runner, and text editor running at the same time, but switching between them and trying to find what you need takes up valuable time and breaks your concentration. By using tmux 2.3, you can improve your productivity and regain your focus. This book will show you how.This second edition includes many features requested by readers, including how to integrate plugins into your workflow, how to integrate tmux with Vim for seamless navigation - oh, and how to use tmux on Windows 10.Use tmux to manage multiple terminal sessions in a single window using only your keyboard. Manage and run programs side by side in panes, and create the perfect development environment with custom scripts so that when you're ready to work, your programs are waiting for you. Manipulate text with tmux's copy and paste buffers, so you can move text around freely between applications. Discover how easy it is to use tmux to collaborate remotely with others, and explore more advanced usage as you manage multiple tmux sessions, add custom scripts into the tmux status line, and integrate tmux with your system.Whether you're an application developer or a system administrator, you'll find many useful tricks and techniques to help you take control of your terminal.

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

The Little Book on CoffeeScript


Alex MacCaw - 2012
    Through example code, this guide demonstrates how CoffeeScript abstracts JavaScript, providing syntactical sugar and preventing many common errors. You’ll learn CoffeeScript’s syntax and idioms step by step, from basic variables and functions to complex comprehensions and classes.Written by Alex MacCaw, author of JavaScript Web Applications (O’Reilly), with contributions from CoffeeScript creator Jeremy Ashkenas, this book quickly teaches you best practices for using this language—not just on the client side, but for server-side applications as well. It’s time to take a ride with the little language that could.Discover how CoffeeScript’s syntax differs from JavaScriptLearn about features such as array comprehensions, destructuring assignments, and classesExplore CoffeeScript idioms and compare them to their JavaScript counterpartsCompile CoffeeScript files in static sites with the Cake build systemUse CommonJS modules to structure and deploy CoffeeScript client-side applicationsExamine JavaScript’s bad parts—including features CoffeeScript was able to fix

Malware Analyst's Cookbook and DVD: Tools and Techniques for Fighting Malicious Code


Michael Hale Ligh - 2010
    Security professionals will find plenty of solutions in this book to the problems posed by viruses, Trojan horses, worms, spyware, rootkits, adware, and other invasive software. Written by well-known malware experts, this guide reveals solutions to numerous problems and includes a DVD of custom programs and tools that illustrate the concepts, enhancing your skills. Security professionals face a constant battle against malicious software; this practical manual will improve your analytical capabilities and provide dozens of valuable and innovative solutions Covers classifying malware, packing and unpacking, dynamic malware analysis, decoding and decrypting, rootkit detection, memory forensics, open source malware research, and much more Includes generous amounts of source code in C, Python, and Perl to extend your favorite tools or build new ones, and custom programs on the DVD to demonstrate the solutions Malware Analyst's Cookbook is indispensible to IT security administrators, incident responders, forensic analysts, and malware researchers.

Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems


Ross J. Anderson - 2008
    Spammers, virus writers, phishermen, money launderers, and spies now trade busily with each other in a lively online criminal economy and as they specialize, they get better. In this indispensable, fully updated guide, Ross Anderson reveals how to build systems that stay dependable whether faced with error or malice. Here's straight talk on critical topics such as technical engineering basics, types of attack, specialized protection mechanisms, security psychology, policy, and more.