Designing sites that foster user interaction and community-building is a valuable skill for web developers and designers today, but it's not that easy to understand the nuances of the social web. Now you have help. Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.Understand the overarching principles you need to consider for every website you createLearn basic design patterns for adding social components to an existing siteRein in misbehaving users on an active community siteBuild a social experience around a product or service and invite people to joinDevelop a social utility without having to build an entirely new infrastructureEnable users of your site's content to interact with one anotherOffer your members the opportunity to connect in the real worldLearn to recognize and avoid antipatterns: emergent bad practices in the social network and social media space

    Polya, How to Solve It will show anyone in any field how to think straight. In lucid and appealing prose, Polya reveals how the mathematical method of demonstrating a proof or finding an unknown can be of help in attacking any problem that can be reasoned out--from building a bridge to winning a game of anagrams. Generations of readers have relished Polya's deft--indeed, brilliant--instructions on stripping away irrelevancies and going straight to the heart of the problem.

    With this practical, hands-on book, you’ll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market.No prior experience in UX or design is necessary to get started. If you’re an entrepreneur or an innovator, this book puts you right to work with proven tips and tools for researching, identifying, and designing an intuitive, easy-to-use product.Determine whether people will buy your product before you build itListen to your customers throughout the product’s lifecycleUnderstand why you should design a test before you design a productGet nine tools that are critical to designing your productDiscern the difference between necessary features and nice-to-havesLearn how a Minimum Viable Product affects your UX decisionsUse A/B testing in conjunction with good UX practicesSpeed up your product development process without sacrificing quality

    With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you've found it.Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general -- all from information that you and others collect every day. Each algorithm is described clearly and concisely with code that can immediately be used on your web site, blog, Wiki, or specialized application. This book explains:Collaborative filtering techniques that enable online retailers to recommend products or media Methods of clustering to detect groups of similar items in a large dataset Search engine features -- crawlers, indexers, query engines, and the PageRank algorithm Optimization algorithms that search millions of possible solutions to a problem and choose the best one Bayesian filtering, used in spam filters for classifying documents based on word types and other features Using decision trees not only to make predictions, but to model the way decisions are made Predicting numerical values rather than classifications to build price models Support vector machines to match people in online dating sites Non-negative matrix factorization to find the independent features in a dataset Evolving intelligence for problem solving -- how a computer develops its skill by improving its own code the more it plays a game Each chapter includes exercises for extending the algorithms to make them more powerful. Go beyond simple database-backed applications and put the wealth of Internet data to work for you. "Bravo! I cannot think of a better way for a developer to first learn these algorithms and methods, nor can I think of a better way for me (an old AI dog) to reinvigorate my knowledge of the details."-- Dan Russell, Google "Toby's book does a great job of breaking down the complex subject matter of machine-learning algorithms into practical, easy-to-understand examples that can be directly applied to analysis of social interaction across the Web today. If I had this book two years ago, it would have saved precious time going down some fruitless paths."-- Tim Wolters, CTO, Collective Intellect

    We’re building more products than ever before, but most of them fail—not because we can’t complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product.What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That’s the promise of Running Lean.In this inspiring book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving a "product/market fit" for your fledgling venture, based on his own experience in building a wide array of products from high-tech to no-tech. Throughout, he builds on the ideas and concepts of several innovative methodologies, including the Lean Startup, Customer Development, and bootstrapping.Running Lean is an ideal tool for business managers, CEOs, small business owners, developers and programmers, and anyone who’s interested in starting a business project.Find a problem worth solving, then define a solutionEngage your customers throughout the development cycleContinually test your product with smaller, faster iterationsBuild a feature, measure customer response, and verify/refute the ideaKnow when to "pivot" by changing your plan’s courseMaximize your efforts for speed, learning, and focusLearn the ideal time to raise your "big round" of fundingGet on track with The Lean Series Presented by Eric Ries—bestselling author of The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses—The Lean Series gives you solid footing in a proven methodology that will help your business succeed.

    Over the past few years, incremental developments in core engineering practices for software development have created the foundations for rethinking how architecture changes over time, along with ways to protect important architectural characteristics as it evolves. This practical guide ties those parts together with a new way to think about architecture and time.

    You'll learn the SPA design approach, and then start exploring new techniques like structured JavaScript and responsive design. And you'll learn how to capitalize on trends like server-side JavaScript and NoSQL data stores, as well as new frameworks that make JavaScript more manageable and testable as a first-class language.About this BookIf your website is a jumpy collection of linked pages, you are behind. Single page web applications are your next step: pushing UI rendering and business logic to the browser and communicating with the server only to synchronize data, they provide a smooth user experience, much like a native application. But, SPAs can be hard to develop, manage, and test.Single Page Web Applications shows how your team can easily design, test, maintain, and extend sophisticated SPAs using JavaScript end-to-end, without getting locked into a framework. Along the way, you'll develop advanced HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript skills, and use JavaScript as the language of the web server and the database.This book assumes basic knowledge of web development. No experience with SPAs is required.Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.What's InsideDesign, build, and test a full-stack SPA Best-in-class tools like jQuery, TaffyDB, Node.js, and MongoDB Real-time web with web sockets and Socket.IO Touch controls for tablets and smartphones Common SPA design mistakesAbout the AuthorsThe authors are architects and engineering managers. Michael Mikowski has worked on many commercial SPAs and a platform that processes over 100 billion requests per year. Josh Powell has built some of the most heavily trafficked sites on the web.Table of ContentsPART 1: INTRODUCING SPAS Our first single page application Reintroducing JavaScript PART 2: SPA CLIENT Develop the Shell Add feature modules Build the Model Finish the Model and Data modules PART 3: THE SPA SERVER The web server The server database Readying our SPA for production

    At under 200 pages it's quick reading too. Makes a great airplane book.

    This concise book shows you how to use the API to perform set operations with the DbSet class, handle change tracking and resolve concurrency conflicts with the Change Tracker API, and validate changes to your data with the Validation API.With DbContext, you’ll be able to query and update data, whether you’re working with individual objects or graphs of objects and their related data. You’ll find numerous C# code samples to help you get started. All you need is experience with Visual Studio and database management basics.Use EF’s query capabilities to retrieve data, and use LINQ to sort and filter dataLearn how to add new data, and change and delete existing dataUse the Change Tracker API to access information EF keeps about the state of entity instancesControl change tracking information of entities in disconnected scenarios, including NTier applicationsValidate data changes before they’re sent to the database, and set up validation rulesBypass EF’s query pipeline and interact directly with the database

    You no longer use HTML and XHTML as design tools, but strictly as ways to define the meaning and structure of web content. And Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are no longer just something interesting to tinker with, but a reliable method for handling all matters of presentation, from fonts and colors to page layout. When you follow the standards, both the site's design and underlying code are much cleaner. But how do you keep all those HTML and XHTML tags and CSS values straight? Jennifer Niederst-Robbins, the author of our definitive guide on standards-compliant design, Web Design in a Nutshell, offers you the perfect little guide when you need answers immediately: HTML and XHTML Pocket Reference. This revised and updated new edition takes the top 20% of vital reference information from her Nutshell book, augments it judiciously, cross-references everything, and organizes it according to the most common needs of web developers. The result is a handy book that offers the bare essentials on web standards in a small, concise format that you can use carry anywhere for quick reference. This guide will literally fit into your back pocket. Inside HTML and XHTML Pocket Reference, you'll find instantly accessible alphabetical listings of every element and attribute in the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 Recommendations. This is an indispensable reference for any serious web designer, author, or programmer who needs a fast on-the-job resource when working with established web standards.

    With the same insight and authority that made their book The Unix programming Environment a classic, Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike have written The Practice of Programming to help make individual programmers more effective and productive.

    With more traditional web servers becoming obsolete, having knowledge on servers that achieve high scalability and optimal resource consumption using Node.js is the key to your app development success. Teaching you the essentials to making event-driven server-side apps, this book demonstrates how you can use less space and take less time for communication between web client and server.Contains numerous hands-on examples Explains implementation of real-time apps including Socket.IO and HTML5, and WebSockets Addresses practical Node.js advantages from specific design choices Demonstrates why knowledge and use of JavaScript is beneficial Includes an interactive online component with sample chapters Explains components of stand out apps including brevity and benchmarks Looking to enhance your abilities even further? Smashing Node.js: JavaScript Everywhere makes developing server-side apps accessible with its focus on JavaScript, open source, and easy-to-use language.

    In this book, Steve Souders, web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, provides valuable techniques to help you optimize your site's performance.Souders' previous book, the bestselling High Performance Web Sites, shocked the web development world by revealing that 80% of the time it takes for a web page to load is on the client side. In Even Faster Web Sites, Souders and eight expert contributors provide best practices and pragmatic advice for improving your site's performance in three critical categories:JavaScript-Get advice for understanding Ajax performance, writing efficient JavaScript, creating responsive applications, loading scripts without blocking other components, and more.Network-Learn to share resources across multiple domains, reduce image size without loss of quality, and use chunked encoding to render pages faster.Browser-Discover alternatives to iframes, how to simplify CSS selectors, and other techniques. Speed is essential for today's rich media web sites and Web 2.0 applications. With this book, you'll learn how to shave precious seconds off your sites' load times and make them respond even faster.This book contains six guest chapters contributed by Dion Almaer, Doug Crockford, Ben Galbraith, Tony Gentilcore, Dylan Schiemann, Stoyan Stefanov, Nicole Sullivan, and Nicholas C. Zakas.

    Building on two widely acclaimed previous editions, Craig Larman has updated this book to fully reflect the new UML 2 standard, to help you master the art of object design, and to promote high-impact, iterative, and skillful agile modeling practices.Developers and students will learn object-oriented analysis and design (OOA/D) through three iterations of two cohesive, start-to-finish case studies. These case studies incrementally introduce key skills, essential OO principles and patterns, UML notation, and best practices. You won’t just learn UML diagrams - you’ll learn how to apply UML in the context of OO software development.Drawing on his unsurpassed experience as a mentor and consultant, Larman helps you understand evolutionary requirements and use cases, domain object modeling, responsibility-driven design, essential OO design, layered architectures, “Gang of Four” design patterns, GRASP, iterative methods, an agile approach to the Unified Process (UP), and much more. This edition’s extensive improvements include:- A stronger focus on helping you master OOA/D through case studies that demonstrate key OO principles and patterns, while also applying the UML- New coverage of UML 2, Agile Modeling, Test-Driven Development, and refactoring- Many new tips on combining iterative and evolutionary development with OOA/D- Updates for easier study, including new learning aids and graphics- New college educator teaching resources- Guidance on applying the UP in a light, agile spirit, complementary with other iterative methods such as XP and Scrum- Techniques for applying the UML to documenting architectures- A new chapter on evolutionary requirements, and much moreApplying UML and Patterns, Third Edition, is a lucid and practical introduction to thinking and designing with objects - and creating systems that are well crafted, robust, and maintainable.

    For seven years, Maeda and his students—several of whom are already internationally celebrated—have created some of the most digitally sophisticated and exciting pieces of design to emerge anywhere. Little of this research has been seen outside the laboratory.This book presents the most fascinating work produced by the group, arranged into themes that apply to today's design issues: information visualization, digital typography, abstraction, interaction design, and education. Each section also features brief essays by leading names in the field of interaction and digital design—Casey Reas, David Small, Yogo Nakamura, Joshua Davis, and Gillian Crampton-Smith.Deftly bridging the chasm between art and science, John Maeda, a true pioneer in the digital realm, leads the way to a greater understanding and richness of experience.