The Ultimate History of Video Games reveals everything you ever wanted to know and more about the unforgettable games that changed the world, the visionaries who made them, and the fanatics who played them. From the arcade to television and from the PC to the handheld device, video games have entraced kids at heart for nearly 30 years. And author and gaming historian Steven L. Kent has been there to record the craze from the very beginning.This engrossing book tells the incredible tale of how this backroom novelty transformed into a cultural phenomenon. Through meticulous research and personal interviews with hundreds of industry luminaries, you'll read firsthand accounts of how yesterday's games like Space Invaders, Centipede, and Pac-Man helped create an arcade culture that defined a generation, and how today's empires like Sony, Nintendo, and Electronic Arts have galvanized a multibillion-dollar industry and a new generation of games. Inside, you'll discover:·The video game that saved Nintendo from bankruptcy ·The serendipitous story of Pac-Man's design ·The misstep that helped topple Atari's $2 billion-a-year empire·The coin shortage caused by Space Invaders ·The fascinating reasons behind the rise, fall, and rebirth of Sega ·And much more! Entertaining, addictive, and as mesmerizing as the games it chronicles, this book is a must-have for anyone who's ever touched a joystick.

    Madhusudhan Konda provides an overview of these, including strings in switch statements, multi-catch exception handling, try-with-resource statements, the new File System API, extensions of the JVM, support for dynamically-typed languages, and the fork and join framework for task parallelism.

    In this book, Agile Alliance cofounder Mike Cohn discusses the philosophy of agile estimating and planning and shows you exactly how to get the job done, with real-world examples and case studies.Concepts are clearly illustrated and readers are guided, step by step, toward how to answer the following questions: What will we build? How big will it be? When must it be done? How much can I really complete by then? You will first learn what makes a good plan-and then what makes it agile.Using the techniques in Agile Estimating and Planning , you can stay agile from start to finish, saving time, conserving resources, and accomplishing more. Highlights include:Why conventional prescriptive planning fails and why agile planning works How to estimate feature size using story points and ideal days--and when to use each How and when to re-estimate How to prioritize features using both financial and nonfinancial approaches How to split large features into smaller, more manageable ones How to plan iterations and predict your team's initial rate of progress How to schedule projects that have unusually high uncertainty or schedule-related risk How to estimate projects that will be worked on by multiple teams Agile Estimating and Planning supports any agile, semiagile, or iterative process, including Scrum, XP, Feature-Driven Development, Crystal, Adaptive Software Development, DSDM, Unified Process, and many more. It will be an indispensable resource for every development manager, team leader, and team member.

    In How the Internet Happened, he chronicles the whole fascinating story for the first time, beginning in a dusty Illinois basement in 1993, when a group of college kids set off a once-in-an-epoch revolution with what would become the first “dotcom.”Depicting the lives of now-famous innovators like Netscape’s Marc Andreessen and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, McCullough also reveals surprising quirks and unknown tales as he tracks both the technology and the culture around the internet’s rise. Cinematic in detail and unprecedented in scope, the result both enlightens and informs as it draws back the curtain on the new rhythm of disruption and innovation the internet fostered, and helps to redefine an era that changed every part of our lives.

    However, most discussions of Bayesian inference rely on intensely complex mathematical analyses and artificial examples, making it inaccessible to anyone without a strong mathematical background. Now, though, Cameron Davidson-Pilon introduces Bayesian inference from a computational perspective, bridging theory to practice-freeing you to get results using computing power. Bayesian Methods for Hackers illuminates Bayesian inference through probabilistic programming with the powerful PyMC language and the closely related Python tools NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib. Using this approach, you can reach effective solutions in small increments, without extensive mathematical intervention. Davidson-Pilon begins by introducing the concepts underlying Bayesian inference, comparing it with other techniques and guiding you through building and training your first Bayesian model. Next, he introduces PyMC through a series of detailed examples and intuitive explanations that have been refined after extensive user feedback. You'll learn how to use the Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm, choose appropriate sample sizes and priors, work with loss functions, and apply Bayesian inference in domains ranging from finance to marketing. Once you've mastered these techniques, you'll constantly turn to this guide for the working PyMC code you need to jumpstart future projects. Coverage includes - Learning the Bayesian "state of mind" and its practical implications - Understanding how computers perform Bayesian inference - Using the PyMC Python library to program Bayesian analyses - Building and debugging models with PyMC - Testing your model's "goodness of fit" - Opening the "black box" of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to see how and why it works - Leveraging the power of the "Law of Large Numbers" - Mastering key concepts, such as clustering, convergence, autocorrelation, and thinning - Using loss functions to measure an estimate's weaknesses based on your goals and desired outcomes - Selecting appropriate priors and understanding how their influence changes with dataset size - Overcoming the "exploration versus exploitation" dilemma: deciding when "pretty good" is good enough - Using Bayesian inference to improve A/B testing - Solving data science problems when only small amounts of data are available Cameron Davidson-Pilon has worked in many areas of applied mathematics, from the evolutionary dynamics of genes and diseases to stochastic modeling of financial prices. His contributions to the open source community include lifelines, an implementation of survival analysis in Python. Educated at the University of Waterloo and at the Independent University of Moscow, he currently works with the online commerce leader Shopify.

    This ebook documents the most egregious – and most hilarious – offenders from the moment Superman flew onto the Atari 2600 in 1978 all the way through 1992, when Konami's classic X-Men sucked in quarter after quarter in arcades. NEARLY 80 SUPERHERO GAMES Some you've played. Some you haven't. And quite a few you never even knew existed in the first place. Some high-/lowlights: Purple Dark Knight vs. Green Joker in Batman: The Video Game (NES) Proven instances of "slapping a license" on an already-developed game Games that stripped Wolverine and He-Man of their most iconic weaponry A questionable transportation method for the Man of Steel in Superman (NES) A Transformers game from the creator of Pitfall! The strangest comic book license ever to hit the Sega Genesis The most unnecessary tie-in to a superhero animated series of all time The Danger Mouse Trilogy That one lonely Thundercats game ANSWERS TO BURNING QUESTIONS YOU DIDN'T EVEN KNOW TO ASK Who is "the Princess Peach of superhero games"? Who was the first Marvel character to be featured in three games? And what's the single gaming appearance he's had since 1985? Which super-character is most consistently misrepresented in games? What common superhero gaming feature was pioneered by LJN's otherwise absolutely horrible X-Men NES game? Which hero's primary gaming nemesis is someone he still has yet to even meet in the comics? What do an NES game and a major restaurant chain agree is Wolverine's favorite food? Why is Carnage getting naked on my SNES?! GAMING PLATFORMS YOU LOVED...OR DIDN'T KNOW EXISTED Atari 2600 | Intellivision | Commodore 64 | Nintendo Entertainment System | Game Boy | Super NES | Sega Master System | Genesis | Game Gear | Lynx | ZX Spectrum | MSX | PC-DOS | MORE! YOUR FAVORITE HEROES (AND SOME YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF) From Marvel! Spider-Man | Wolverine and the X-Men | Hulk | Captain America, Iron Man, Hawkeye, Vision, and a bunch of other Avengers | Punisher | Human Torch and the Thing from the Fantastic Four | Silver Surfer | Howard the Duck From DC! Superman | Batman | Flash | Swamp Thing From Other Comic Publishers! Conan | Flash Gordon | Judge Dredd | Ex-Mutants From Toy Lines and Cartoons! Transformers | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles | He-Man and the Masters of the Universe | Bartman and Radioactive Man from The Simpsons | G.I.

    But if one per year is good, how about Seven Languages in Seven Weeks? In this book you'll get a hands-on tour of Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby. Whether or not your favorite language is on that list, you'll broaden your perspective of programming by examining these languages side-by-side. You'll learn something new from each, and best of all, you'll learn how to learn a language quickly. Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell. With Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, by Bruce A. Tate, you'll go beyond the syntax-and beyond the 20-minute tutorial you'll find someplace online. This book has an audacious goal: to present a meaningful exploration of seven languages within a single book. Rather than serve as a complete reference or installation guide, Seven Languages hits what's essential and unique about each language. Moreover, this approach will help teach you how to grok new languages. For each language, you'll solve a nontrivial problem, using techniques that show off the language's most important features. As the book proceeds, you'll discover the strengths and weaknesses of the languages, while dissecting the process of learning languages quickly--for example, finding the typing and programming models, decision structures, and how you interact with them. Among this group of seven, you'll explore the most critical programming models of our time. Learn the dynamic typing that makes Ruby, Python, and Perl so flexible and compelling. Understand the underlying prototype system that's at the heart of JavaScript. See how pattern matching in Prolog shaped the development of Scala and Erlang. Discover how pure functional programming in Haskell is different from the Lisp family of languages, including Clojure. Explore the concurrency techniques that are quickly becoming the backbone of a new generation of Internet applications. Find out how to use Erlang's let-it-crash philosophy for building fault-tolerant systems. Understand the actor model that drives concurrency design in Io and Scala. Learn how Clojure uses versioning to solve some of the most difficult concurrency problems. It's all here, all in one place. Use the concepts from one language to find creative solutions in another-or discover a language that may become one of your favorites.

    In this one-of-a-kind account, you'll see how the developers responsible for these flaws patched the bugs—or failed to respond at all. As you follow Klein on his journey, you'll gain deep technical knowledge and insight into how hackers approach difficult problems and experience the true joys (and frustrations) of bug hunting.Along the way you'll learn how to:Use field-tested techniques to find bugs, like identifying and tracing user input data and reverse engineering Exploit vulnerabilities like NULL pointer dereferences, buffer overflows, and type conversion flaws Develop proof of concept code that verifies the security flaw Report bugs to vendors or third party brokersA Bug Hunter's Diary is packed with real-world examples of vulnerable code and the custom programs used to find and test bugs. Whether you're hunting bugs for fun, for profit, or to make the world a safer place, you'll learn valuable new skills by looking over the shoulder of a professional bug hunter in action.

    You'll also learn how to make your programs interactive and how to test your code safely before adding it to a project. In the second half of the book, you'll put your new knowledge into practice with three substantial projects: a Space Invaders-inspired arcade game, data visualizations with Python's super-handy libraries, and a simple web app you can deploy online.As you work through Python Crash Course, you'll learn how to: Use powerful Python libraries and tools, including matplotlib, NumPy, and PygalMake 2D games that respond to keypresses and mouse clicks, and that grow more difficult as the game progressesWork with data to generate interactive visualizationsCreate and customize simple web apps and deploy them safely onlineDeal with mistakes and errors so you can solve your own programming problemsIf you've been thinking seriously about digging into programming, Python Crash Course will get you up to speed and have you writing real programs fast. Why wait any longer? Start your engines and code!

    It is also the most powerful, and in some ways, the most confusing. What do accessible, content-focused standards-based web designers and front-end developers need to know? And how can we harness the power of HTML5 in today’s browsers?In this brilliant and entertaining user’s guide, Jeremy Keith cuts to the chase, with crisp, clear, practical examples, and his patented twinkle and charm.

    Difficult issues need to be figured out, such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. In addition, we have an overwhelming variety of tools, including relational databases, NoSQL datastores, stream or batch processors, and message brokers. What are the right choices for your application? How do you make sense of all these buzzwords?In this practical and comprehensive guide, author Martin Kleppmann helps you navigate this diverse landscape by examining the pros and cons of various technologies for processing and storing data. Software keeps changing, but the fundamental principles remain the same. With this book, software engineers and architects will learn how to apply those ideas in practice, and how to make full use of data in modern applications. Peer under the hood of the systems you already use, and learn how to use and operate them more effectively Make informed decisions by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of different tools Navigate the trade-offs around consistency, scalability, fault tolerance, and complexity Understand the distributed systems research upon which modern databases are built Peek behind the scenes of major online services, and learn from their architectures

    "More concretely," the authors explain, "it is the controlled manipulation of mathematical formulas, using a collection of techniques for solving problems."

    Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is the recommended technology for creating Windows user interfaces, giving you the power to create richer and more compelling applications than you dreamed possible. Whether you want to develop traditional user interfaces or integrate 3D graphics, audio/video, animation, dynamic skinning, multi-touch, rich document support, speech recognition, or more, WPF enables you to do so in a seamless, resolution-independent manner. WPF 4 Unleashed is the authoritative book that covers it all, in a practical and approachable fashion, authored by WPF guru and Microsoft developer Adam Nathan. Covers everything you need to know about Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) Examines the WPF feature areas in incredible depth: controls, layout, resources, data binding, styling, graphics, animation, and more Highlights the latest features, such as multi-touch, text rendering improvements, XAML language enhancements, new controls, the Visual State Manager, easing functions, and much more Delves into topics that aren't covered by most books: 3D, speech, audio/video, documents, effects Shows how to create popular UI elements, such as Galleries, ScreenTips, and more Demonstrates how to create sophisticated UI mechanisms, such as Visual Studio-like collapsible/dockable panes Explains how to create first-class custom controls for WPF Demonstrates how to create hybrid WPF software that leverages Windows Forms, DirectX, ActiveX, or other non-WPF technologies Explains how to exploit new Windows 7 features, such as Jump Lists and taskbar customizations

    This practical introduction illuminates new features and capabilities, with scenarios demonstrating how the platform can meet the needs of your business.Based on beta software, this book provides the early, high-level information you need to begin preparing now for deployment and management. Topics include:Virtualization and cloud solutions Availability Provisioning and storage management Security and scalability Infrastructure options Server administration

    In this one-of-a-kind text, author V. Anton Spraul breaks down the ways that programmers solve problems and teaches you what other introductory books often ignore: how to Think Like a Programmer. Each chapter tackles a single programming concept, like classes, pointers, and recursion, and open-ended exercises throughout challenge you to apply your knowledge. You'll also learn how to:Split problems into discrete components to make them easier to solve Make the most of code reuse with functions, classes, and libraries Pick the perfect data structure for a particular job Master more advanced programming tools like recursion and dynamic memory Organize your thoughts and develop strategies to tackle particular types of problems Although the book's examples are written in C++, the creative problem-solving concepts they illustrate go beyond any particular language; in fact, they often reach outside the realm of computer science. As the most skillful programmers know, writing great code is a creative art—and the first step in creating your masterpiece is learning to Think Like a Programmer.