Book picks similar to
Superdistribution by Brad Cox


nonfiction
software
computer_software
computing

Learning SQL


Alan Beaulieu - 2005
    If you're working with a relational database--whether you're writing applications, performing administrative tasks, or generating reports--you need to know how to interact with your data. Even if you are using a tool that generates SQL for you, such as a reporting tool, there may still be cases where you need to bypass the automatic generation feature and write your own SQL statements.To help you attain this fundamental SQL knowledge, look to "Learning SQL," an introductory guide to SQL, designed primarily for developers just cutting their teeth on the language."Learning SQL" moves you quickly through the basics and then on to some of the more commonly used advanced features. Among the topics discussed: The history of the computerized databaseSQL Data Statements--those used to create, manipulate, and retrieve data stored in your database; example statements include select, update, insert, and deleteSQL Schema Statements--those used to create database objects, such as tables, indexes, and constraintsHow data sets can interact with queriesThe importance of subqueriesData conversion and manipulation via SQL's built-in functionsHow conditional logic can be used in Data StatementsBest of all, "Learning SQL" talks to you in a real-world manner, discussing various platform differences that you're likely to encounter and offering a series of chapter exercises that walk you through the learning process. Whenever possible, the book sticks to the features included in the ANSI SQL standards. This means you'll be able to apply what you learn to any of several different databases; the book covers MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle Database, but the features and syntax should apply just as well (perhaps with some tweaking) to IBM DB2, Sybase Adaptive Server, and PostgreSQL.Put the power and flexibility of SQL to work. With "Learning SQL" you can master this important skill and know that the SQL statements you write are indeed correct.

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You


Misha Glenny - 2011
    The world has become a law enforcer's nightmare and every criminal's dream. We bank online; shop online; date, learn, work and live online. But have the institutions that keep us safe on the streets learned to protect us in the burgeoning digital world? Have we become complacent about our personal security--sharing our thoughts, beliefs and the details of our daily lives with anyone who might care to relieve us of them?In this fascinating and compelling book, Misha Glenny, author of the international best seller "McMafia," explores the three fundamental threats facing us in the twenty-first century: cybercrime, cyberwarfare and cyberindustrial espionage. Governments and the private sector are losing billions of dollars each year fighting an ever-morphing, often invisible and often supersmart new breed of criminal: the hacker. Glenny has traveled and trawled the world. By exploring the rise and fall of the criminal website DarkMarket he has uncovered the most vivid, alarming and illuminating stories. Whether JiLsi or Matrix, Iceman, Master Splynter or Lord Cyric; whether Detective Sergeant Chris Dawson in Scunthorpe, England, or Agent Keith Mularski in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Glenny has tracked down and interviewed all the players--the criminals, the geeks, the police, the security experts and the victims--and he places everyone and everything in a rich brew of politics, economics and history.The result is simply unputdownable. DarkMarket is authoritative and completely engrossing. It's a must-read for everyone who uses a computer: the essential crime book for our times.

Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design


Dan Cederholm - 2009
    That's the theme running through Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design, by bestselling author Dan Cederholm, with a chapter contributed by renowned Web designer and developer Ethan Marcotte. This book explores CSS3 that works in today's browsers, and you'll be convinced that now's the time to start experimenting with it.Whether you're a Web designer, project manager, or a graphic designer wanting to learn more about the fluidity that's required when designing for the Web, you'll discover the tools to create the most flexible, reliable, and bulletproof Web designs. And you'll finally be able to persuade your clients to adopt innovative and effective techniques that make everyone's life easier while improving the end user's experience. This book's seven chapters deconstruct various aspects of a case-study Web site for the Tugboat Coffee Company, focusing on aspects that make it bulletproof and demonstrate progressive enrichment techniques over more traditional labor-intensive methods.Subjects covered in this book include: building for unanticipated future use progressively enriching designs using CSS3 properties using RGBA color for transparency with an alpha channel modular float management crafting flexible frameworks fluid layouts using grid-based design principles craftsmanship details on typography, jQuery, and shifting backgrounds

Writing Effective Use Cases


Alistair Cockburn - 2000
    Cockburn begins by answering the most basic questions facing anyone interested in use cases: What does a use case look like? When do I write one? Next, he introduces each key element of use cases: actors, stakeholders, design scope, goal levels, scenarios, and more. Writing Effective Use Cases contains detailed guidelines, formats, and project standards for creating use cases -- as well as a detailed chapter on style, containing specific do's and don'ts. Cockburn shows how use cases fit together with requirements gathering, business processing reengineering, and other key issues facing software professionals. The book includes practice exercises with solutions, as well as a detailed appendix on how to use these techniques with UML. For all application developers, object technology practitioners, software system designers, architects, and analysts.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism


Fred Turner - 2006
    Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place. From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing


Adam Greenfield - 2006
    How will it change us? how can we shape its emergence? Smart buildings, smart furniture, smart clothing... even smart bathtubs. networked street signs and self-describing soda cans. Gestural interfaces like those seen in Minority Report. The RFID tags now embedded in everything from credit cards to the family pet. All of these are facets of the ubiquitous computing author Adam Greenfield calls everyware. In a series of brief, thoughtful meditations, Greenfield explains how everyware is already reshaping our lives, transforming our understanding of the cities we live in, the communities we belong to--and the way we see ourselves. What are people saying about the book? Adam Greenfield is intense, engaged, intelligent and caring. I pay attention to him. I counsel you to do the same. --HOWARD RHEINGOLD, AUTHOR, SMART MOBS: THE NEXT SOCIAL REVOLUTION A gracefully written, fascinating, and deeply wise book on one of the most powerful ideas of the digital age--and the obstacles we must overcome before we can make ubiquitous computing a reality.--STEVE SILBERMAN, EDITOR, WIRED MAGAZINE Adam is a visionary. he has true compassion and respect for ordinary users like me who are struggling to use and understand the new technology being thrust on us at overwhelming speed.--REBECCA MACKINNON, BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET AND SOCIETY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY Everyware is an AIGA Design Press book, published under Peachpit's New Riders imprint in partnership with AIGA.

Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent


Ryan Russell - 2004
    While there will be the inevitable criticism that the material contained in the book could be used maliciously, the fact is that this knowledge is already in the hands of our enemies. This book is truly designed to inform while entertaining (and scaring) the reader, and it will instantly be in demand by readers of "Stealing the Network: How to Own the Box" * A meticulously detailed and technically accurate work of fiction that exposes the very real possibilities of such an event occurring* An informative and scary insight into the boundries of hacking and cyber-terrorism* Written by a team of the most accomplished cyber-security specialists in the world

The Victorian Internet


Tom Standage - 1998
    Generations of innovators tried and failed to develop speedier messaging devices. But in the mid-1800s, a few extraordinary pioneers at last succeeded. Their invention--the electric telegraph--shrank the world more quickly than ever before.A colorful tale of scientific discovery and technological cunning, The Victorian Internet tells the story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it. By 1865 telegraph cables spanned continents and oceans, revolutionizing the ways countries dealt with one another. The telegraph gave rise to creative business practices and new forms of crime. Romances blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some users, and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates and dismissed by its skeptics. And attitudes toward everything from news gathering to war had to be completely rethought. The telegraph unleashed the greatest revolution in communications since the development of the printing press. Its saga offers many parallels to that of the Internet in our own time--and is a fascinating episode in the history of technology.

Software Engineering (International Computer Science Series)


Ian Sommerville - 1982
    Restructured into six parts, this new edition covers a wide spectrum of software processes from initial requirements solicitation through design and development.

Hibernate in Action


Christian Bauer - 2004
    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

The Visible Ops Handbook: Starting ITIL in 4 Practical Steps


Kevin Behr - 2004
    Visible Ops is comprised of four prescriptive and self-fueling steps that take an organization from any starting point to a continually improving process. MAKING ITIL ACTIONABLE Although the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides a wealth of best practices, it lacks prescriptive guidance: What do you implement first, and how do you do it? Moreover, the ITIL books remain relatively expensive to distribute. Other information, publicly available from a variety of sources, is too general and vague to effectively aid organizations that need to start or enhance process improvement efforts. The Visible Ops booklet provides a prescriptive roadmap for organizations beginning or continuing their IT process improvement journey. WHY DO WE NEED VISIBLE OPS? The Visible Ops methodology was developed because there was not a satisfactory answer to the question: "I believe in the need for IT process improvement, but where do I start?" Since 2000, Gene Kim and Kevin Behr have met with hundreds of IT organizations and identified eight high-performing IT organizations with the highest service levels, best security, and best efficiencies. For years, they studied these high-performing organizations to figure out the secrets to their success. Visible Ops codifies how these organizations achieved their transformation from good to great, showing how interested organizations can replicate the key processes of these high-performing organizations in just four steps: 1. Stabilize Patient, Modify First Response - Almost 80% of outages are self-inflicted. The first step is to control risky changes and reduce MTTR by addressing how changes are managed and how problems are resolved. 2. Catch and Release, Find Fragile Artifacts - Often, infrastructure exists that cannot be repeatedly replicated. In this step, we inventory assets, configurations and services, to identify those with the lowest change success rates, highest MTTR and highest business downtime costs. 3. Establish Repeatable Build Library - The highest return on investment is implementing effective release management processes. This step creates repeatable builds for the most critical assets and services, to make it "cheaper to rebuild than to repair." 4. Enable Continuous Improvement - The previous steps have progressively built a closed-loop between the Release, Control and Resolution processes. This step implements metrics to allow continuous improvement of all of these process areas, to best ensure that business objectives are met.

Python Programming for Beginners: An Introduction to the Python Computer Language and Computer Programming (Python, Python 3, Python Tutorial)


Jason Cannon - 2014
    There can be so much information available that you can't even decide where to start. Or worse, you start down the path of learning and quickly discover too many concepts, commands, and nuances that aren't explained. This kind of experience is frustrating and leaves you with more questions than answers.Python Programming for Beginners doesn't make any assumptions about your background or knowledge of Python or computer programming. You need no prior knowledge to benefit from this book. You will be guided step by step using a logical and systematic approach. As new concepts, commands, or jargon are encountered they are explained in plain language, making it easy for anyone to understand. Here is what you will learn by reading Python Programming for Beginners: When to use Python 2 and when to use Python 3. How to install Python on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Screenshots included. How to prepare your computer for programming in Python. The various ways to run a Python program on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Suggested text editors and integrated development environments to use when coding in Python. How to work with various data types including strings, lists, tuples, dictionaries, booleans, and more. What variables are and when to use them. How to perform mathematical operations using Python. How to capture input from a user. Ways to control the flow of your programs. The importance of white space in Python. How to organize your Python programs -- Learn what goes where. What modules are, when you should use them, and how to create your own. How to define and use functions. Important built-in Python functions that you'll use often. How to read from and write to files. The difference between binary and text files. Various ways of getting help and find Python documentation. Much more... Every single code example in the book is available to download, providing you with all the Python code you need at your fingertips! Scroll up, click the Buy Now With 1 Click button and get started learning Python today!

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley


Antonio García Martínez - 2016
    Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (AirBnB) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder). One of Silicon Valley’s most audacious chaos monkeys is Antonio García Martínez.After stints on Wall Street and as CEO of his own startup, García Martínez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team, turning its users’ data into profit for COO Sheryl Sandberg and chairman and CEO Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg. Forced out in the wake of an internal product war over the future of the company’s monetization strategy, García Martínez eventually landed at rival Twitter. He also fathered two children with a woman he barely knew, committed lewd acts and brewed illegal beer on the Facebook campus (accidentally flooding Zuckerberg's desk), lived on a sailboat, raced sport cars on the 101, and enthusiastically pursued the life of an overpaid Silicon Valley wastrel.Now, this gleeful contrarian unravels the chaotic evolution of social media and online marketing and reveals how it is invading our lives and shaping our future. Weighing in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization and digital “privacy,” García Martínez shares his scathing observations and outrageous antics, taking us on a humorous, subversive tour of the fascinatingly insular tech industry. Chaos Monkeys lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world. The question is, will we survive?

Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure: Best Practices for DevOps, Data Storage, High Availability, and More (Developer Reference)


Scott Guthrie - 2014
    The patterns apply to the development process as well as to architecture and coding practices. The content is based on a presentation developed by Scott Guthrie and delivered by him at the Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) in June of 2013 (part 1, part 2), and at Microsoft Tech Ed Australia in September 2013 (part 1, part 2). Many others updated and augmented the content while transitioning it from video to written form. Who should read this book Developers who are curious about developing for the cloud, are considering a move to the cloud, or are new to cloud development will find here a concise overview of the most important concepts and practices they need to know. The concepts are illustrated with concrete examples, and each chapter includes links to other resources that provide more in-depth information. The examples and the links to additional resources are for Microsoft frameworks and services, but the principles illustrated apply to other web development frameworks and cloud environments as well. Developers who are already developing for the cloud may find ideas here that will help make them more successful. Each chapter in the series can be read independently, so you can pick and choose topics that you're interested in. Anyone who watched Scott Guthrie's "Building Real World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure" presentation and wants more details and updated information will find that here. Assumptions This ebook expects that you have experience developing web applications by using Visual Studio and ASP.NET. Familiarity with C# would be helpful in places.

Mastering Excel Macros: Introduction (Book 1)


Mark Moore - 2014
    Everybody wants to learn them. You're not a programmer though. How is a non technical user going to learn how to program? You do want to use macros to make your work easier but are you really going to sit down with a huge programming textbook and work your way through every. single. boring. page? Like most people, you'll start with great enthusiasm and vigor but after a few chapters, the novelty wears off. It gets boring. I'm going to try and change that and make learning macro programming entertaining and accessible to non-techies. First of all, programming Excel macros is a huge topic. Let's eat the elephant one bite at a time. Instead of sitting down with a dry, heavy text, you will read very focused, to the point topics. You can then immediately use what you learned in the real world. This is the first lesson in the series. You will learn what macros are, how to access them, a tiny bit of programming theory (just so you have a clue as to what's going on) and how to record macros. As with all my other lessons, this one has a follow along workbook that you can use to work through the exercises. The images in the lessons are based on Excel 2013 for Windows.