“Big data” refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena—from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books—into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. A revolution on par with the Internet or perhaps even the printing press, big data will change the way we think about business, health, politics, education, and innovation in the years to come. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior.In this brilliantly clear, often surprising work, two leading experts explain what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards. Big Data is the first big book about the next big thing.www.big-data-book.com

    It is offered for sale in print format as a convenience.Get a head start evaluating Windows Azure - with technical insights from a Microsoft MVP Mitch Tulloch. This guide introduces the latest features and capabilities, with scenario-based advice on how the platform can meet the needs of your business. Get the high-level overview you need to begin preparing your deployment now.Topics include: Understanding Windows Azure Windows Azure Compute Services Windows Azure Network Services Windows Azure Data Services Windows Azure App Services Getting Started with Windows Azure

    Jason Briggs, author of the popular online tutorial "Snake Wrangling for Kids," begins with the basics of how to install Python and write simple commands. In bite-sized chapters, he instructs readers on the essentials of Python, including how to use Python's extensive standard library, the difference between strings and lists, and using for-loops and while-loops. By the end of the book, readers have built a game and created drawings with Python's graphics library, Turtle. Each chapter closes with fun and relevant exercises that challenge the reader to put their newly acquired knowledge to the test.

    Updated for Python 3, this expanded edition shows you how to locate performance bottlenecks and significantly speed up your code in high-data-volume programs. By exploring the fundamental theory behind design choices, High Performance Python helps you gain a deeper understanding of Python's implementation.How do you take advantage of multicore architectures or clusters? Or build a system that scales up and down without losing reliability? Experienced Python programmers will learn concrete solutions to many issues, along with war stories from companies that use high-performance Python for social media analytics, productionized machine learning, and more.Get a better grasp of NumPy, Cython, and profilersLearn how Python abstracts the underlying computer architectureUse profiling to find bottlenecks in CPU time and memory usageWrite efficient programs by choosing appropriate data structuresSpeed up matrix and vector computationsUse tools to compile Python down to machine codeManage multiple I/O and computational operations concurrentlyConvert multiprocessing code to run on local or remote clustersDeploy code faster using tools like Docker

    Too often, lessons about requirements engineering processes lack the no-nonsense guidance that supports real-world solutions. Complementing the best practices presented in his book, Software Requirements, Second Edition, requirements engineering authority Karl Wiegers tackles even more of the real issues head-on in this book. With straightforward, professional advice and practical solutions based on actual project experiences, this book answers many of the tough questions raised by industry professionals. From strategies for estimating and working with customers to the nuts and bolts of documenting requirements, this essential companion gives developers, analysts, and managers the cosmic truths that apply to virtually every software development project. Discover how to: - Make the business case for investing in better requirements practices - Generate estimates using three specific techniques - Conduct inquiries to elicit meaningful business and user requirements - Clearly document project scope - Implement use cases, scenarios, and user stories effectively - Improve inspections and peer reviews - Write requirements that avoid ambiguity

    You'd like to learn how to do more work with SQL inside the database before pushing data across the network to your applications. You'd like to take your SQL skills to the next level.Let's face it, SQL is a deceptively simple language to learn, and many database developers never go far beyond the simple statement: SELECT columns FROM table WHERE conditions. But there is so much more you can do with the language. In the SQL Cookbook, experienced SQL developer Anthony Molinaro shares his favorite SQL techniques and features. You'll learn about:Window functions, arguably the most significant enhancement to SQL in the past decade. If you're not using these, you're missing outPowerful, database-specific features such as SQL Server's PIVOT and UNPIVOT operators, Oracle's MODEL clause, and PostgreSQL's very useful GENERATE_SERIES functionPivoting rows into columns, reverse-pivoting columns into rows, using pivoting to facilitate inter-row calculations, and double-pivoting a result setBucketization, and why you should never use that term in Brooklyn.How to create histograms, summarize data into buckets, perform aggregations over a moving range of values, generate running-totals and subtotals, and other advanced, data warehousing techniquesThe technique of walking a string, which allows you to use SQL to parse through the characters, words, or delimited elements of a stringWritten in O'Reilly's popular Problem/Solution/Discussion style, the SQL Cookbook is sure to please. Anthony's credo is: When it comes down to it, we all go to work, we all have bills to pay, and we all want to go home at a reasonable time and enjoy what's still available of our days. The SQL Cookbook moves quickly from problem to solution, saving you time each step of the way.

    Anyone with a modest knowledge of HTML and web site management can learn to create dynamic content through the PHP programming language and the MySQL database. This book gives you the background and tools to do the job safely and reliably.Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL, Second Edition thoroughly reflects the needs of real-world applications. It goes into detail on such practical issues as validating input (do you know what a proper credit card number looks like?), logging in users, and using templates to give your dynamic web pages a standard look.But this book goes even further. It shows how JavaScript and PHP can be used in tandem to make a user's experience faster and more pleasant. It shows the correct way to handle errors in user input so that a site looks professional. It introduces the vast collection of powerful tools available in the PEAR repository and shows how to use some of the most popular tools.Even while it serves as an introduction to new programmers, the book does not omit critical tasks that web sites require. For instance, every site that allows updates must handle the possibility of multiple users accessing data at the same time. This book explains how to solve the problem in detail with locking.Through a sophisticated sample application--Hugh and Dave's Wine Store--all the important techniques of dynamic content are introduced. Good design is emphasized, such as dividing logic from presentation. The book introduces PHP 5 and MySQL 4.1 features, while providing techniques that can be used on older versions of the software that are still in widespread use.This new edition has been redesigned around the rich offerings of PEAR. Several of these, including the Template package and the database-independent query API, are fully integrated into examples and thoroughly described in the text. Topics include:Installation and configuration of Apache, MySQL, and PHP on Unix®, Windows®, and Mac OS® X systems Introductions to PHP, SQL, and MySQL administration Session management, including the use of a custom database for improved efficiency User input validation, security, and authentication The PEAR repository, plus details on the use of PEAR DB and Template classes Production of PDF reports

    

    Browsers iterate at a remarkable pace. Faced with this volatile landscape we can either struggle for control or we can embrace the inherent flexibility of the web.Responsive design is not just another technique—it is the beginning of the maturation of a medium and a fundamental shift in the way we think about the web.Implementing Responsive Design is a discussion about how this affects the way we design, build, and think about our sites. Readers will learn how to:- Build responsive sites using a combination of fluid layouts, media queries and fluid media- Adopt a responsive workflow from the very start of a project- Enhance content for different devices- Use feature-detection and server-side enhancement to provide a richer experience

    Gigabytes, exabytes (that’s one quintillion bytes) of data are sitting on servers across the world. So how can we start to access this explosion of information, this “big data,” and what can it tell us?   Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel are two young scientists at Harvard who started to ask those questions. They teamed up with Google to create the Ngram Viewer, a Web-based tool that can chart words throughout the massive Google Books archive, sifting through billions of words to find fascinating cultural trends. On the day that the Ngram Viewer debuted in 2010, more than one million queries were run through it.   On the front lines of Big Data, Aiden and Michel realized that this big dataset—the Google Books archive that contains remarkable information on the human experience—had huge implications for looking at our shared human history. The tool they developed to delve into the data has enabled researchers to track how our language has evolved over time, how art has been censored, how fame can grow and fade, how nations trend toward war. How we remember and how we forget. And ultimately, how Big Data is changing the game for the sciences, humanities, politics, business, and our culture.

    With it has come vast amounts of data in a variety of fields such as medicine, biology, finance, and marketing. The challenge of understanding these data has led to the development of new tools in the field of statistics, and spawned new areas such as data mining, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Many of these tools have common underpinnings but are often expressed with different terminology. This book describes the important ideas in these areas in a common conceptual framework. While the approach is statistical, the emphasis is on concepts rather than mathematics. Many examples are given, with a liberal use of color graphics. It should be a valuable resource for statisticians and anyone interested in data mining in science or industry. The book's coverage is broad, from supervised learning (prediction) to unsupervised learning. The many topics include neural networks, support vector machines, classification trees and boosting—the first comprehensive treatment of this topic in any book. Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman are professors of statistics at Stanford University. They are prominent researchers in this area: Hastie and Tibshirani developed generalized additive models and wrote a popular book of that title. Hastie wrote much of the statistical modeling software in S-PLUS and invented principal curves and surfaces. Tibshirani proposed the Lasso and is co-author of the very successful An Introduction to the Bootstrap. Friedman is the co-inventor of many data-mining tools including CART, MARS, and projection pursuit.

    Theory and practice in the design of data graphics, 250 illustrations of the best (and a few of the worst) statistical graphics, with detailed analysis of how to display data for precise, effective, quick analysis. Design of the high-resolution displays, small multiples. Editing and improving graphics. The data-ink ratio. Time-series, relational graphics, data maps, multivariate designs. Detection of graphical deception: design variation vs. data variation. Sources of deception. Aesthetics and data graphical displays. This is the second edition of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Recently published, this new edition provides excellent color reproductions of the many graphics of William Playfair, adds color to other images, and includes all the changes and corrections accumulated during 17 printings of the first edition.

    This guide also helps you understand the many data-mining techniques in use today.Based on an MBA course Provost has taught at New York University over the past ten years, Data Science for Business provides examples of real-world business problems to illustrate these principles. You’ll not only learn how to improve communication between business stakeholders and data scientists, but also how participate intelligently in your company’s data science projects. You’ll also discover how to think data-analytically, and fully appreciate how data science methods can support business decision-making.Understand how data science fits in your organization—and how you can use it for competitive advantageTreat data as a business asset that requires careful investment if you’re to gain real valueApproach business problems data-analytically, using the data-mining process to gather good data in the most appropriate wayLearn general concepts for actually extracting knowledge from dataApply data science principles when interviewing data science job candidates

    This practical guide not only shows you how to search, analyze, and explore data with Elasticsearch, but also helps you deal with the complexities of human language, geolocation, and relationships.If you're a newcomer to both search and distributed systems, you'll quickly learn how to integrate Elasticsearch into your application. More experienced users will pick up lots of advanced techniques. Throughout the book, you'll follow a problem-based approach to learn why, when, and how to use Elasticsearch features.Understand how Elasticsearch interprets data in your documentsIndex and query your data to take advantage of search concepts such as relevance and word proximityHandle human language through the effective use of analyzers and queriesSummarize and group data to show overall trends, with aggregations and analyticsUse geo-points and geo-shapes--Elasticsearch's approaches to geolocationModel your data to take advantage of Elasticsearch's horizontal scalabilityLearn how to configure and monitor your cluster in production

    The Art of Community will help you develop the broad range of talents you need to recruit members to your community, motivate and manage them, and help them become active participants. Author Jono Bacon offers a collection of experiences and observations from his decade-long involvement in building and managing communities, including his current position as manager for Ubuntu, arguably the largest community in open source software. You'll discover how a vibrant community can provide you with a reliable support network, a valuable source of new ideas, and a powerful marketing force.The Art of Community will help you:Develop a strategy, with specific objectives and goals, for building your communityBuild simple, non-bureaucratic processes to help your community perform tasks, work together, and share successesProvide tools and infrastructure that let contributors work quicklyCreate buzz around your community to get more people involvedTrack the community's work so it can be optimized and simplifiedExplore a capable, representative governance strategy for your communityIdentify and manage conflict, including dealing with divisive personalities