In a very short amount of time, he is able to present an issue, fix it and conclude it; each chapter is tight, succinct, and to the point." --Josh Holmes, Independent Contractor "The book provides a good introduction to the C# language elements from a pragmatic point of view, identifying best practices along the way, and following a clear and logical progression from the basic syntax to creating components to improving your code writing skills. Since each topic is covered in short entries, it is very easy to read and you'll quickly realize the benefits of the book." --Tomas Restrepo, Microsoft MVP "The book covers the basics well, especially with respect to the decisions needed when deriving classes from System.Object. It is easy to read with examples that are clear, concise and solid. I think it will bring good value to most readers." --Rob Steel, Central Region Integration COE & Lead Architect, Microsoft "Effective C# provides the C# developer with the tools they need to rapidly grow their experience in Visual C# 2003 while also providing insight into the many improvements to the language that will be hitting a desktop near you in the form of Visual C# 2005." --Doug Holland, Precision Objects "Part of the point of the .NET Framework--and the C# Language, in particular--is to let the developer focus solving customer problems and deliver product, rather than spending hours (or even weeks) writing plumbing code. Bill Wagner's Effective C#, not only shows you what's going on behind the scenes, but shows you how to take advantage of particular C# code constructs. Written in a dispassionate style that focuses on the facts--and just the facts--of writing effective C# code, Wagner's book drills down into practices that will let you write C# applications and components that are easier to maintain as well as faster to run. I'm recommending Effective C# to all students of my .NET BootCamp and other C#-related courses." --Richard Hale Shaw, www.RichardHaleShawGroup.com C#'s resemblances to C++, Java, and C make it easier to learn, but there's a downside: C# programmers often continue to use older techniques when far better alternatives are available. In Effective C#, respected .NET expert Bill Wagner identifies fifty ways you can start leveraging the full power of C# in order to write faster, more efficient, and more reliable software. Effective C# follows the format that made Effective C++ (Addison-Wesley, 1998) and Effective Java (Addison-Wesley, 2001) indispensable to hundreds of thousands of developers: clear, practical explanations, expert tips, and plenty of realistic code examples. Drawing on his unsurpassed C# experience, Wagner addresses everything from value types to assemblies, exceptions to reflection. Along the way, he shows exactly how to avoid dozens of common C# performance and reliability pitfalls. You'll learn how to: Use both types of C# constants for efficiency and maintainability, see item 2 Use immutable data types to eliminate unnecessary error checking, see item 7 Avoid the C# function that'll practically always get you in trouble, see item 10 Minimize garbage collection, boxing, and unboxing, see items 16 and 17

    Wolfram lets the world see his work in A New Kind of Science, a gorgeous, 1,280-page tome more than a decade in the making. With patience, insight, and self-confidence to spare, Wolfram outlines a fundamental new way of modeling complex systems. On the frontier of complexity science since he was a boy, Wolfram is a champion of cellular automata--256 "programs" governed by simple nonmathematical rules. He points out that even the most complex equations fail to accurately model biological systems, but the simplest cellular automata can produce results straight out of nature--tree branches, stream eddies, and leopard spots, for instance. The graphics in A New Kind of Science show striking resemblance to the patterns we see in nature every day. Wolfram wrote the book in a distinct style meant to make it easy to read, even for nontechies; a basic familiarity with logic is helpful but not essential. Readers will find themselves swept away by the elegant simplicity of Wolfram's ideas and the accidental artistry of the cellular automaton models. Whether or not Wolfram's revolution ultimately gives us the keys to the universe, his new science is absolutely awe-inspiring. --Therese Littleton

    A simple web search picks out a handful of relevant needles from the world's biggest haystack: the billions of pages on the World Wide Web. Uploading a photo to Facebook transmits millions of pieces of information over numerous error-prone network links, yet somehow a perfect copy of the photo arrives intact. Without even knowing it, we use public-key cryptography to transmit secret information like credit card numbers; and we use digital signatures to verify the identity of the websites we visit. How do our computers perform these tasks with such ease? This is the first book to answer that question in language anyone can understand, revealing the extraordinary ideas that power our PCs, laptops, and smartphones. Using vivid examples, John MacCormick explains the fundamental "tricks" behind nine types of computer algorithms, including artificial intelligence (where we learn about the "nearest neighbor trick" and "twenty questions trick"), Google's famous PageRank algorithm (which uses the "random surfer trick"), data compression, error correction, and much more. These revolutionary algorithms have changed our world: this book unlocks their secrets, and lays bare the incredible ideas that our computers use every day.

    Most developers have a limited understanding of compositional techniques. It's time for that to change.In "Composing Software", Eric Elliott shares the fundamentals of composition, including both function composition and object composition, and explores them in the context of JavaScript. The book covers the foundations of both functional programming and object oriented programming to help the reader better understand how to build and structure complex applications using simple building blocks.You'll learn: • Functional programming • Object composition • How to work with composite data structures • Closures • Higher order functions • Functors (e.g., array.map) • Monads (e.g., promises) • Transducers • LensesAll of this in the context of JavaScript, the most used programming language in the world. But the learning doesn't stop at JavaScript. You'll be able to apply these lessons to any language. This book is about the timeless principles of software composition and its lessons will outlast the hot languages and frameworks of today. Unlike most programming books, this one may still be relevant 20 years from now.This book began life as a popular blog post series that attracted hundreds of thousands of readers and influenced the way software is built at many high growth tech startups and fortune 500 companies.

    Why is this open-source tool so popular? Because it automates a tedious task: persisting your Java objects to a relational database. The inevitable mismatch between your object-oriented code and the relational database requires you to write code that maps one to the other. This code is often complex, tedious and costly to develop. Hibernate does the mapping for you.Not only that, Hibernate makes it easy. Positioned as a layer between your application and your database, Hibernate takes care of loading and saving of objects. Hibernate applications are cheaper, more portable, and more resilient to change. And they perform better than anything you are likely to develop yourself."Hibernate in Action" carefully explains the concepts you need, then gets you going. It builds on a single example to show you how to use Hibernate in practice, how to deal with concurrency and transactions, how to efficiently retrieve objects and use caching.The authors created Hibernate and they field questions from the Hibernate community every day-they know how to make Hibernate sing. Knowledge and insight seep out of every pore of this book."What's Inside"- ORM concepts- Getting started- Many real-world tasks- The Hibernate application development process

    This book will show you how to write robust multithreaded applications in C++ while avoiding many common pitfalls.About the TechnologyMultiple processors with multiple cores are the norm these days. The C++11 version of the C++ language offers beefed-up support for multithreaded applications, and requires that you master the principles, techniques, and new language features of concurrency to stay ahead of the curve.About the BookWithout assuming you have a background in the subject, CC++ Concurrency in Action gradually enables you to write robust and elegant multithreaded applications in C++11. You'll explore the threading memory model, the new multithreading support library, and basic thread launching and synchronization facilities. Along the way, you'll learn how to navigate the trickier bits of programming for concurrency.Written for C++ programmers who are new to concurrency and others who may have written multithreaded code using other languages, APIs, or platforms.Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.What's InsideWritten for the new C++11 Standard Programming for multiple cores and processors Small examples for learning, big examples for practice====================Table of ContentsHello, world of concurrency in C++! Managing threads Sharing data between threads Synchronizing concurrent operations The C++ memory model and operations on atomic types Designing lock-based concurrent data structures Designing lock-free concurrent data structures Designing concurrent code Advanced thread management Testing and debugging multithreaded applications

    Thread programming enables developers to design applications that are more responsive to user demands, faster, and more easily controlled. This book offers comprehensive coverage of this vital aspect of the Java language. The book is completely up-to-date with the new thread model that is now incorporated into the most recent version of the Java Virtual Machine. All Java programmers interested in doing concurrent programming must understand these new concepts. The book approaches the topic from a design pattern point of view. It introduces and summarizes Java's concurrency support, shows readers how to initiate, control, and coordinate concurrent activities, and offers numerous recipe-like techniques for designing and implementing Java structures that solve common concurrent programming challenges. Specifically, the book presents important strategies for avoiding the inconsistencies that can crop up in multi-threaded programs, addresses the concept of liveness-how to ensure that all threads in use are kept active simultaneously, examines state-dependent action, and demonstrates effective methods for handling user requests in a multi-threaded environment.

    Its techniques are widely applied in engineering, science, finance, and commerce. This book is designed for a short course on machine learning. It is a short course, not a hurried course. From over a decade of teaching this material, we have distilled what we believe to be the core topics that every student of the subject should know. We chose the title `learning from data' that faithfully describes what the subject is about, and made it a point to cover the topics in a story-like fashion. Our hope is that the reader can learn all the fundamentals of the subject by reading the book cover to cover. ---- Learning from data has distinct theoretical and practical tracks. In this book, we balance the theoretical and the practical, the mathematical and the heuristic. Our criterion for inclusion is relevance. Theory that establishes the conceptual framework for learning is included, and so are heuristics that impact the performance of real learning systems. ---- Learning from data is a very dynamic field. Some of the hot techniques and theories at times become just fads, and others gain traction and become part of the field. What we have emphasized in this book are the necessary fundamentals that give any student of learning from data a solid foundation, and enable him or her to venture out and explore further techniques and theories, or perhaps to contribute their own. ---- The authors are professors at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and National Taiwan University (NTU), where this book is the main text for their popular courses on machine learning. The authors also consult extensively with financial and commercial companies on machine learning applications, and have led winning teams in machine learning competitions.

    Lead your team as a software architect, ask the right stakeholders the right questions, explore design options, and help your team implement a system that promotes the right -ilities. Share your design decisions, facilitate collaborative design workshops that are fast, effective, and fun-and develop more awesome software!With dozens of design methods, examples, and practical know-how, Design It! shows you how to become a software architect. Walk through the core concepts every architect must know, discover how to apply them, and learn a variety of skills that will make you a better programmer, leader, and designer. Uncover the big ideas behind software architecture and gain confidence working on projects big and small. Plan, design, implement, and evaluate software architectures and collaborate with your team, stakeholders, and other architects. Identify the right stakeholders and understand their needs, dig for architecturally significant requirements, write amazing quality attribute scenarios, and make confident decisions. Choose technologies based on their architectural impact, facilitate architecture-centric design workshops, and evaluate architectures using lightweight, effective methods. Write lean architecture descriptions people love to read. Run an architecture design studio, implement the architecture you've designed, and grow your team's architectural knowledge. Good design requires good communication. Talk about your software architecture with stakeholders using whiteboards, documents, and code, and apply architecture-focused design methods in your day-to-day practice. Hands-on exercises, real-world scenarios, and practical team-based decision-making tools will get everyone on board and give you the experience you need to become a confident software architect.

    This book introduces you to R, RStudio, and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages designed to work together to make data science fast, fluent, and fun. Suitable for readers with no previous programming experience, R for Data Science is designed to get you doing data science as quickly as possible. Authors Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund guide you through the steps of importing, wrangling, exploring, and modeling your data and communicating the results. You’ll get a complete, big-picture understanding of the data science cycle, along with basic tools you need to manage the details. Each section of the book is paired with exercises to help you practice what you’ve learned along the way. You’ll learn how to: Wrangle—transform your datasets into a form convenient for analysis Program—learn powerful R tools for solving data problems with greater clarity and ease Explore—examine your data, generate hypotheses, and quickly test them Model—provide a low-dimensional summary that captures true "signals" in your dataset Communicate—learn R Markdown for integrating prose, code, and results

    Unfortunately, developers are creating mountains of unmaintainable tests as a side effect. I've been fighting the maintenance battle pretty aggressively for years, and this book captures the what I believe is the most effective way to test.This book details my strong opinions on the best way to test, while acknowledging alternative styles and various contexts in which tests are written. Whether you prefer my style or not, this book will help you write better Unit and Functional Tests.

    Written from a computer science perspective by three leading experts in the field, it gives an up-to-date treatment of all aspects of the design and implementation of systems for gathering, indexing, and searching documents; methods for evaluating systems; and an introduction to the use of machine learning methods on text collections. All the important ideas are explained using examples and figures, making it perfect for introductory courses in information retrieval for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in computer science. Based on feedback from extensive classroom experience, the book has been carefully structured in order to make teaching more natural and effective. Although originally designed as the primary text for a graduate or advanced undergraduate course in information retrieval, the book will also create a buzz for researchers and professionals alike.

    In this new edition, the authors explain how SQL Server 2008 R2 provides a collection of powerful new tools that extend the power of its BI toolset to Excel and SharePoint users and they show how to use SQL Server to build a successful data warehouse that supports the business intelligence requirements that are common to most organizations. Covering the complete suite of data warehousing and BI tools that are part of SQL Server 2008 R2, as well as Microsoft Office, the authors walk you through a full project lifecycle, including design, development, deployment and maintenance.Features more than 50 percent new and revised material that covers the rich new feature set of the SQL Server 2008 R2 release, as well as the Office 2010 release Includes brand new content that focuses on PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint, Master Data Services, and discusses updated capabilities of SQL Server Analysis, Integration, and Reporting Services Shares detailed case examples that clearly illustrate how to best apply the techniques described in the book The accompanying Web site contains all code samples as well as the sample database used throughout the case studies The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit, Second Edition provides you with the knowledge of how and when to use BI tools such as Analysis Services and Integration Services to accomplish your most essential data warehousing tasks.

    This logic extends far beyond the realm of computer science and into the wide and entertaining world of puzzles. In Algorithmic Puzzles, Anany and Maria Levitin use many classic brainteasers as well as newer examples from job interviews with major corporations to show readers how to apply analytical thinking to solve puzzles requiring well-defined procedures.The book's unique collection of puzzles is supplemented with carefully developed tutorials on algorithm design strategies and analysis techniques intended to walk the reader step-by-step through the various approaches to algorithmic problem solving. Mastery of these strategies--exhaustive search, backtracking, and divide-and-conquer, among others--will aid the reader in solving not only the puzzles contained in this book, but also others encountered in interviews, puzzle collections, and throughout everyday life. Each of the 150 puzzles contains hints and solutions, along with commentary onthe puzzle's origins and solution methods. The only book of its kind, Algorithmic Puzzles houses puzzles for all skill levels. Readers with only middle school mathematics will develop their algorithmic problem-solving skills through puzzles at the elementary level, while seasoned puzzle solvers will enjoy the challenge of thinking throughmore difficult puzzles.

    The authors have taken the mystery out of complex queries and explained principles and techniques with such clarity that a "Mere Mortal" will indeed be empowered to perform the superhuman. Do not walk past this book "--Graham Mandeno, Database Consultant""SQL Queries for Mere Mortals" provides a step-by-step, easy-to-read introduction to writing SQL queries. It includes hundreds of examples with detailed explanations. This book provides the tools you need to understand, modify, and create SQL queries"--Keith W. Hare, Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC1 SC32 WG3--the International SQL Standards Committee"I learned SQL primarily from the first edition of this book, and I am pleased to see a second edition of this book so that others can continue to benefit from its organized presentation of the language. Starting from how to design your tables so that SQL can be effective (a common problem for database beginners), and then continuing through the various aspects of SQL construction and capabilities, the reader can become a moderate expert upon completing the book and its samples. Learning how to convert a question in English into a meaningful SQL statement will greatly facilitate your mastery of the language. Numerous examples from real life will help you visualize how to use SQL to answer the questions about the data in your database. Just one of the "watch out for this trap" items will save you more than the cost of the book when you avoid that problem when writing your queries. I highly recommend this book if you want to tap the full potential of your database."--Kenneth D. Snell, Ph.D., Database Designer/Programmer"I don't think they do this in public schools any more, and it is a shame, but do you remember in the seventh and eighth grades when you learned to diagram a sentence? Those of you who do may no longer remember how you did it, but all of you do write better sentences because of it. John Viescas and Mike Hernandez must have remembered because they take everyday English queries and literally translate them into SQL. This is an important book for all database designers. It takes the complexity of mathematical Set Theory and of First Order Predicate Logic, as outlined in E. F. Codd's original treatise on relational database design, and makes it easy for anyone to understand. If you want an elementary- through intermediate-level course on SQL, this is the one book that is a requirement, no matter how many others you buy."--Arvin Meyer, MCP, MVP"Even in this day of wizards and code generators, successful database developers still require a sound knowledge of Structured Query Language (SQL, the standard language for communicating with most database systems). In this book, John and Mike do a marvelous job of making what's usually a dry and difficult subject come alive, presenting the material with humor in a logical manner, with plenty of relevant examples. I would say that this book should feature prominently in the collection on the bookshelf of all serious developers, except that I'm sure it'll get so much use that it won't spend much time on the shelf "-- Doug Steele, Microsoft Access Developer and author"Over the last several decades, SQL has evolved from a language known only to computer specialists to a widely used international standard of the computer industry. The number of new applications deployed each year using SQL now totals in the millions. If you are accessing corporate information from the Internet or from an internal network, you are probably using SQL. This new edition of "SQL Queries for Mere Mortals" helps new users learn the foundations of SQL queries, and is an essential reference guide for intermediate and advanced users.The accompanying CD contains five sample databases used for the example queries throughout the book in four different formats: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and later, Microsoft Access 2000 and later, MySQL version 5.0 and later, and SQL scripts that can be used with most other implementations of the language.