The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity


Alan Cooper - 1999
    Cooper details many of these meta functions to explain his central thesis: programmers need to seriously re-evaluate the many user-hostile concepts deeply embedded within the software development process. Rather than provide users with a straightforward set of options, programmers often pile on the bells and whistles and ignore or de-prioritise lingering bugs. For the average user, increased functionality is a great burden, adding to the recurrent chorus that plays: "computers are hard, mysterious, unwieldy things." (An average user, Cooper asserts, who doesn't think that way or who has memorised all the esoteric commands and now lords it over others, has simply been desensitised by too many years of badly designed software.) Cooper's writing style is often overblown, with a pantheon of cutesy terminology (i.e. "dancing bearware") and insider back-patting. (When presenting software to Bill Gates, he reports that Gates replied: "How did you do that?" to which he writes: "I love stumping Bill!") More seriously, he is also unable to see beyond software development's importance--a sin he accuses programmers of throughout the book. Even with that in mind, the central questions Cooper asks are too important to ignore: Are we making users happier? Are we improving the process by which they get work done? Are we making their work hours more effective? Cooper looks to programmers, business managers and what he calls "interaction designers" to question current assumptions and mindsets. Plainly, he asserts that the goal of computer usage should be "not to make anyone feel stupid." Our distance from that goal reinforces the need to rethink entrenched priorities in software planning. -- Jennifer Buckendorff, Amazon.com

sed & awk


Dale Dougherty - 1990
    The most common operation done with sed is substitution, replacing one block of text with another. awk is a complete programming language. Unlike many conventional languages, awk is "data driven" -- you specify what kind of data you are interested in and the operations to be performed when that data is found. awk does many things for you, including automatically opening and closing data files, reading records, breaking the records up into fields, and counting the records. While awk provides the features of most conventional programming languages, it also includes some unconventional features, such as extended regular expression matching and associative arrays. sed & awk describes both programs in detail and includes a chapter of example sed and awk scripts. This edition covers features of sed and awk that are mandated by the POSIX standard. This most notably affects awk, where POSIX standardized a new variable, CONVFMT, and new functions, toupper() and tolower(). The CONVFMT variable specifies the conversion format to use when converting numbers to strings (awk used to use OFMT for this purpose). The toupper() and tolower() functions each take a (presumably mixed case) string argument and return a new version of the string with all letters translated to the corresponding case. In addition, this edition covers GNU sed, newly available since the first edition. It also updates the first edition coverage of Bell Labs nawk and GNU awk (gawk), covers mawk, an additional freely available implementation of awk, and briefly discusses three commercial versions of awk, MKS awk, Thompson Automation awk (tawk), and Videosoft (VSAwk).

Design for Hackers


David Kadavy - 2011
    The term 'hacker' has been redefined to consist of anyone who has an insatiable curiosity as to how things work--and how they can try to make them better. This book is aimed at hackers of all skill levels and explains the classical principles and techniques behind beautiful designs by deconstructing those designs in order to understand what makes them so remarkable. Author and designer David Kadavy provides you with the framework for understanding good design and places a special emphasis on interactive mediums. You'll explore color theory, the role of proportion and geometry in design, and the relationship between medium and form. Packed with unique reverse engineering design examples, this book inspires and encourages you to discover and create new beauty in a variety of formats. Breaks down and studies the classical principles and techniques behind the creation of beautiful design. Illustrates cultural and contextual considerations in communicating to a specific audience. Discusses why design is important, the purpose of design, the various constraints of design, and how today's fonts are designed with the screen in mind. Dissects the elements of color, size, scale, proportion, medium, and form. Features a unique range of examples, including the graffiti in the ancient city of Pompeii, the lack of the color black in Monet's art, the style and sleekness of the iPhone, and more.By the end of this book, you'll be able to apply the featured design principles to your own web designs, mobile apps, or other digital work.

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.

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.

Programming JavaScript Applications: Robust Web Architecture With Node, HTML5, and Modern JS Libraries


Eric Elliott - 2012
    By applying the design patterns outlined in this book, you’ll learn how to write flexible and resilient code that’s easier—not harder—to work with as your code base grows.JavaScript has become one of the most widely used—and essential—programming languages for the Web, on both the client-side and server-side. In the real world, JavaScript applications are fragile, and when you change them things often break. Author Eric Elliott shows you how to add features without creating bugs or negatively impacting the rest of your code during the course of building a large JavaScript application.Examine the anatomy of a modern JavaScript applicationLearn best practices for code organization, modularity, and reuseApply Model-View-Controller architectures to client-side web developmentDelve into client-side (browser) and server-side (Node) approachesUse Node to design and program RESTful APIsLearn the processes teams use to build, test, deploy, and scale large JavaScript applicationsExpand your application’s reach through platform targets and internationalization

Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications


Kenneth H. Rosen - 2000
    These themes include mathematical reasoning, combinatorial analysis, discrete structures, algorithmic thinking, and enhanced problem-solving skills through modeling. Its intent is to demonstrate the relevance and practicality of discrete mathematics to all students. The Fifth Edition includes a more thorough and linear presentation of logic, proof types and proof writing, and mathematical reasoning. This enhanced coverage will provide students with a solid understanding of the material as it relates to their immediate field of study and other relevant subjects. The inclusion of applications and examples to key topics has been significantly addressed to add clarity to every subject. True to the Fourth Edition, the text-specific web site supplements the subject matter in meaningful ways, offering additional material for students and instructors. Discrete math is an active subject with new discoveries made every year. The continual growth and updates to the web site reflect the active nature of the topics being discussed. The book is appropriate for a one- or two-term introductory discrete mathematics course to be taken by students in a wide variety of majors, including computer science, mathematics, and engineering. College Algebra is the only explicit prerequisite.

MongoDB: The Definitive Guide


Kristina Chodorow - 2010
    Learn how easy it is to handle data as self-contained JSON-style documents, rather than as records in a relational database.Explore ways that document-oriented storage will work for your projectLearn how MongoDB’s schema-free data model handles documents, collections, and multiple databasesExecute basic write operations, and create complex queries to find data with any criteriaUse indexes, aggregation tools, and other advanced query techniquesLearn about monitoring, security and authentication, backup and repair, and moreSet up master-slave and automatic failover replication in MongoDBUse sharding to scale MongoDB horizontally, and learn how it impacts applicationsGet example applications written in Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby

The Soul of a New Machine


Tracy Kidder - 1981
    Tracy Kidder got a preview of this world in the late 1970s when he observed the engineers of Data General design and build a new 32-bit minicomputer in just one year. His thoughtful, prescient book, The Soul of a New Machine, tells stories of 35-year-old "veteran" engineers hiring recent college graduates and encouraging them to work harder and faster on complex and difficult projects, exploiting the youngsters' ignorance of normal scheduling processes while engendering a new kind of work ethic.These days, we are used to the "total commitment" philosophy of managing technical creation, but Kidder was surprised and even a little alarmed at the obsessions and compulsions he found. From in-house political struggles to workers being permitted to tease management to marathon 24-hour work sessions, The Soul of a New Machine explores concepts that already seem familiar, even old-hat, less than 20 years later. Kidder plainly admires his subjects; while he admits to hopeless confusion about their work, he finds their dedication heroic. The reader wonders, though, what will become of it all, now and in the future. —Rob Lightner

Python for Everybody: Exploring Data in Python 3


Charles Severance - 2016
    You can think of the Python programming language as your tool to solve data problems that are beyond the capability of a spreadsheet.Python is an easy to use and easy to learn programming language that is freely available on Macintosh, Windows, or Linux computers. So once you learn Python you can use it for the rest of your career without needing to purchase any software.This book uses the Python 3 language. The earlier Python 2 version of this book is titled "Python for Informatics: Exploring Information".

Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective


Kevin P. Murphy - 2012
    Machine learning provides these, developing methods that can automatically detect patterns in data and then use the uncovered patterns to predict future data. This textbook offers a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to the field of machine learning, based on a unified, probabilistic approach.The coverage combines breadth and depth, offering necessary background material on such topics as probability, optimization, and linear algebra as well as discussion of recent developments in the field, including conditional random fields, L1 regularization, and deep learning. The book is written in an informal, accessible style, complete with pseudo-code for the most important algorithms. All topics are copiously illustrated with color images and worked examples drawn from such application domains as biology, text processing, computer vision, and robotics. Rather than providing a cookbook of different heuristic methods, the book stresses a principled model-based approach, often using the language of graphical models to specify models in a concise and intuitive way. Almost all the models described have been implemented in a MATLAB software package—PMTK (probabilistic modeling toolkit)—that is freely available online. The book is suitable for upper-level undergraduates with an introductory-level college math background and beginning graduate students.

Make Your Own Neural Network


Tariq Rashid - 2016
     Neural networks are a key element of deep learning and artificial intelligence, which today is capable of some truly impressive feats. Yet too few really understand how neural networks actually work. This guide will take you on a fun and unhurried journey, starting from very simple ideas, and gradually building up an understanding of how neural networks work. You won't need any mathematics beyond secondary school, and an accessible introduction to calculus is also included. The ambition of this guide is to make neural networks as accessible as possible to as many readers as possible - there are enough texts for advanced readers already! You'll learn to code in Python and make your own neural network, teaching it to recognise human handwritten numbers, and performing as well as professionally developed networks. Part 1 is about ideas. We introduce the mathematical ideas underlying the neural networks, gently with lots of illustrations and examples. Part 2 is practical. We introduce the popular and easy to learn Python programming language, and gradually builds up a neural network which can learn to recognise human handwritten numbers, easily getting it to perform as well as networks made by professionals. Part 3 extends these ideas further. We push the performance of our neural network to an industry leading 98% using only simple ideas and code, test the network on your own handwriting, take a privileged peek inside the mysterious mind of a neural network, and even get it all working on a Raspberry Pi. All the code in this has been tested to work on a Raspberry Pi Zero.

The Imposter's Handbook


Rob Conery - 2016
    New languages, new frameworks, new ways of doing things - a constant struggle just to stay current in the industry. This left no time to learn the foundational concepts and skills that come with a degree in Computer Science.

Problem Solving with Algorithms and Data Structures Using Python


Bradley N. Miller - 2005
    It is also about Python. However, there is much more. The study of algorithms and data structures is central to understanding what computer science is all about. Learning computer science is not unlike learning any other type of difficult subject matter. The only way to be successful is through deliberate and incremental exposure to the fundamental ideas. A beginning computer scientist needs practice so that there is a thorough understanding before continuing on to the more complex parts of the curriculum. In addition, a beginner needs to be given the opportunity to be successful and gain confidence. This textbook is designed to serve as a text for a first course on data structures and algorithms, typically taught as the second course in the computer science curriculum. Even though the second course is considered more advanced than the first course, this book assumes you are beginners at this level. You may still be struggling with some of the basic ideas and skills from a first computer science course and yet be ready to further explore the discipline and continue to practice problem solving. We cover abstract data types and data structures, writing algorithms, and solving problems. We look at a number of data structures and solve classic problems that arise. The tools and techniques that you learn here will be applied over and over as you continue your study of computer science.

Kubernetes in Action


Marko Luksa - 2017
    Each layer in their application is decoupled from other layers so they can scale, update, and maintain them independently.Kubernetes in Action teaches developers how to use Kubernetes to deploy self-healing scalable distributed applications. By the end, readers will be able to build and deploy applications in a proper way to take full advantage of the Kubernetes platform.Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.