CCNA Portable Command Guide


Scott D. Empson - 2005
    The 'CCNA Portable Command Guide' is a supplementary guide to assist network administrators in the proper use of the Cisco IOS and of the commands needed to pass the CCNA vendor exam.

Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms


Hannah Fry - 2018
    It’s time we stand face-to-digital-face with the true powers and limitations of the algorithms that already automate important decisions in healthcare, transportation, crime, and commerce. Hello World is indispensable preparation for the moral quandaries of a world run by code, and with the unfailingly entertaining Hannah Fry as our guide, we’ll be discussing these issues long after the last page is turned.

Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation


John E. Hopcroft - 1979
    With this long-awaited revision, the authors continue to present the theory in a concise and straightforward manner, now with an eye out for the practical applications. They have revised this book to make it more accessible to today's students, including the addition of more material on writing proofs, more figures and pictures to convey ideas, side-boxes to highlight other interesting material, and a less formal writing style. Exercises at the end of each chapter, including some new, easier exercises, help readers confirm and enhance their understanding of the material. *NEW! Completely rewritten to be less formal, providing more accessibility to todays students. *NEW! Increased usage of figures and pictures to help convey ideas. *NEW! More detail and intuition provided for definitions and proofs. *NEW! Provides special side-boxes to present supplemental material that may be of interest to readers. *NEW! Includes more exercises, including many at a lower level. *NEW! Presents program-like notation for PDAs and Turing machines. *NEW! Increas

Learning From Data: A Short Course


Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa - 2012
    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.

Laravel: Up and Running: A Framework for Building Modern PHP Apps


Matt Stauffer - 2016
    This rapid application development framework and its vast ecosystem of tools let you quickly build new sites and applications with clean, readable code. With this practical guide, Matt Stauffer--a leading teacher and developer in the Laravel community--provides the definitive introduction to one of today's most popular web frameworks.The book's high-level overview and concrete examples will help experienced PHP web developers get started with Laravel right away. By the time you reach the last page, you should feel comfortable writing an entire application in Laravel from scratch.Dive into several features of this framework, including:Blade, Laravel's powerful, custom templating toolTools for gathering, validating, normalizing, and filtering user-provided dataLaravel's Eloquent ORM for working with the application's databasesThe Illuminate request object, and its role in the application lifecyclePHPUnit, Mockery, and PHPSpec for testing your PHP codeLaravel's tools for writing JSON and RESTful APIsInterfaces for file system access, sessions, cookies, caches, and searchTools for implementing queues, jobs, events, and WebSocket event publishingLaravel's specialty packages: Scout, Passport, Cashier, Echo, Elixir, Valet, and Socialite

The C# Programming Yellow Book


Rob Miles - 2010
    With jokes, puns, and a rigorous problem solving based approach. You can download all the code samples used in the book from here: http://www.robmiles.com/s/Yellow-Book...

Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques


Daphne Koller - 2009
    The framework of probabilistic graphical models, presented in this book, provides a general approach for this task. The approach is model-based, allowing interpretable models to be constructed and then manipulated by reasoning algorithms. These models can also be learned automatically from data, allowing the approach to be used in cases where manually constructing a model is difficult or even impossible. Because uncertainty is an inescapable aspect of most real-world applications, the book focuses on probabilistic models, which make the uncertainty explicit and provide models that are more faithful to reality.Probabilistic Graphical Models discusses a variety of models, spanning Bayesian networks, undirected Markov networks, discrete and continuous models, and extensions to deal with dynamical systems and relational data. For each class of models, the text describes the three fundamental cornerstones: representation, inference, and learning, presenting both basic concepts and advanced techniques. Finally, the book considers the use of the proposed framework for causal reasoning and decision making under uncertainty. The main text in each chapter provides the detailed technical development of the key ideas. Most chapters also include boxes with additional material: skill boxes, which describe techniques; case study boxes, which discuss empirical cases related to the approach described in the text, including applications in computer vision, robotics, natural language understanding, and computational biology; and concept boxes, which present significant concepts drawn from the material in the chapter. Instructors (and readers) can group chapters in various combinations, from core topics to more technically advanced material, to suit their particular needs.

Who Owns the Future?


Jaron Lanier - 2013
    Who Owns the Future? is his visionary reckoning with the most urgent economic and social trend of our age: the poisonous concentration of money and power in our digital networks.Lanier has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades, and his insight has never been more urgently needed. He shows how Siren Servers, which exploit big data and the free sharing of information, led our economy into recession, imperiled personal privacy, and hollowed out the middle class. The networks that define our world—including social media, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies—now threaten to destroy it.But there is an alternative. In this provocative, poetic, and deeply humane book, Lanier charts a path toward a brighter future: an information economy that rewards ordinary people for what they do and share on the web.

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins


Garry Kasparov - 2017
    It was the dawn of a new era in artificial intelligence: a machine capable of beating the reigning human champion at this most cerebral game. That moment was more than a century in the making, and in this breakthrough book, Kasparov reveals his astonishing side of the story for the first time. He describes how it felt to strategize against an implacable, untiring opponent with the whole world watching, and recounts the history of machine intelligence through the microcosm of chess, considered by generations of scientific pioneers to be a key to unlocking the secrets of human and machine cognition. Kasparov uses his unrivaled experience to look into the future of intelligent machines and sees it bright with possibility. As many critics decry artificial intelligence as a menace, particularly to human jobs, Kasparov shows how humanity can rise to new heights with the help of our most extraordinary creations, rather than fear them. Deep Thinking is a tightly argued case for technological progress, from the man who stood at its precipice with his own career at stake.

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.

Technology Matters: Questions to Live with


David E. Nye - 2006
    This book addresses questions such as: can we define technology? Does technology shape us, or do we shape it? Is technology inevitable or unpredictable?

There Is No App for Happiness: How to Avoid a Near-Life Experience


Max Strom - 2013
    Instead, we find that the wealthiest societies of the world have become depressed, anxious, sleep deprived, and overmedicated.Max Strom, author of A Life Worth Breathing and global teacher of personal transformation, reveals that we each have internal, human technology capable of empowering our lives and leading us to deeper levels of happiness. In his new book, There Is No App for Happiness, Strom illustrates three imperatives to take back control of our lives.Imperative One: Self-study. Overcoming our negative presets.Imperative Two: Live as if your time and your lifespan were the same thing.Imperative Three: Learn a daily regimen that heals and empowers you, and practice it one hour a day.Learn that joy and fulfillment require us to be active participants and that we should not strive for a virtual life—but a life truly lived. There Is No App for Happiness will propel you into a new and more meaningful experience of living.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order


Kai-Fu Lee - 2018
    Kai-Fu Lee—one of the world’s most respected experts on AI and China—reveals that China has suddenly caught up to the US at an astonishingly rapid and unexpected pace.In AI Superpowers, Kai-Fu Lee argues powerfully that because of these unprecedented developments in AI, dramatic changes will be happening much sooner than many of us expected. Indeed, as the US-Sino AI competition begins to heat up, Lee urges the US and China to both accept and to embrace the great responsibilities that come with significant technological power.Most experts already say that AI will have a devastating impact on blue-collar jobs. But Lee predicts that Chinese and American AI will have a strong impact on white-collar jobs as well. Is universal basic income the solution? In Lee’s opinion, probably not.  But he provides a clear description of which jobs will be affected and how soon, which jobs can be enhanced with AI, and most importantly, how we can provide solutions to some of the most profound changes in human history that are coming soon.

Natural Language Processing with Python


Steven Bird - 2009
    With it, you'll learn how to write Python programs that work with large collections of unstructured text. You'll access richly annotated datasets using a comprehensive range of linguistic data structures, and you'll understand the main algorithms for analyzing the content and structure of written communication.Packed with examples and exercises, Natural Language Processing with Python will help you: Extract information from unstructured text, either to guess the topic or identify "named entities" Analyze linguistic structure in text, including parsing and semantic analysis Access popular linguistic databases, including WordNet and treebanks Integrate techniques drawn from fields as diverse as linguistics and artificial intelligenceThis book will help you gain practical skills in natural language processing using the Python programming language and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) open source library. If you're interested in developing web applications, analyzing multilingual news sources, or documenting endangered languages -- or if you're simply curious to have a programmer's perspective on how human language works -- you'll find Natural Language Processing with Python both fascinating and immensely useful.

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor


Virginia Eubanks - 2018
    In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems—rather than humans—control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.Naomi Klein: "This book is downright scary."Ethan Zuckerman, MIT: "Should be required reading."Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: "A must-read for everyone concerned about modern tools of inequality in America."Astra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: "This is the single most important book about technology you will read this year."