Apparently, they are the unequivocal source of many societal ills. But what does science actually have to say about the effects that playing them can have on us?In Lost in a Good Game, psychologist Pete Echells takes us on a journey through that scientific data and research, as well as his own past experiences with video games, which helped him cope in the aftermath of a tragedy.His story reveals that, really, our worries are unfounded - and that in playing, studying and living through them we can understand what it means to be human.

    But can you also build web sites that are usable by machines? That's where the future lies, and that's what RESTful Web Services shows you how to do. The World Wide Web is the most popular distributed application in history, and Web services and mashups have turned it into a powerful distributed computing platform. But today's web service technologies have lost sight of the simplicity that made the Web successful. They don't work like the Web, and they're missing out on its advantages. This book puts the "Web" back into web services. It shows how you can connect to the programmable web with the technologies you already use every day. The key is REST, the architectural style that drives the Web. This book:Emphasizes the power of basic Web technologies -- the HTTP application protocol, the URI naming standard, and the XML markup language Introduces the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA), a common-sense set of rules for designing RESTful web services Shows how a RESTful design is simpler, more versatile, and more scalable than a design based on Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) Includes real-world examples of RESTful web services, like Amazon's Simple Storage Service and the Atom Publishing Protocol Discusses web service clients for popular programming languages Shows how to implement RESTful services in three popular frameworks -- Ruby on Rails, Restlet (for Java), and Django (for Python) Focuses on practical issues: how to design and implement RESTful web services and clients This is the first book that applies the REST design philosophy to real web services. It sets down the best practices you need to make your design a success, and the techniques you need to turn your design into working code. You can harness the power of the Web for programmable applications: you just have to work with the Web instead of against it. This book shows you how.

    It gives detailed explanations of game art techniques and their importance, while also highlighting their dependence on artistic aspects of game design and programming.” — John Romero, co-founder of id Software and CEO of Loot Drop, Inc."Solarski’s methodology here is to show us the artistic techniques that every artist should know, and then he transposes them to the realm of video games to show how they should be used to create a far more artful gaming experience ... if I were an artist planning to do video game work, I’d have a copy of this on my shelf."— Marc Mason, Comics Waiting RoomVideo games are not a revolution in art history, but an evolution. Whether the medium is paper or canvas—or a computer screen—the artist’s challenge is to make something without depth seem like a window into a living, breathing world. Video game art is no different.  Drawing Basics and Video Game Art is first to examine the connections between classical art and video games, enabling developers to create more expressive and varied emotional experiences in games. Artist game designer Chris Solarski gives readers a comprehensive introduction to basic and advanced drawing and design skills—light, value, color, anatomy, concept development—as well as detailed instruction for using these methods to design complex characters, worlds, and gameplay experiences. Artwork by the likes of Michelangelo, Titian, and Rubens are studied alongside AAA games like BioShock, Journey, the Mario series, and Portal 2, to demonstrate perpetual theories of depth, composition, movement, artistic anatomy, and expression. Although Drawing Basics and Video Game Art is primarily a practical reference for artists and designers working in the video games industry, it’s equally accessible for those interested to learn about gaming’s future, and potential as an artistic medium.Also available as an eBook

    Konami's secret games console, the origin of Game Arts and Quintet, unusual events at Telenet, stories on Falcom, politics behind Enix's game programming contests, a tour of the Love-de-Lic and WARP offices (with layout sketches). Every interviewee is asked about unreleased titles. Foreword by GAMESIDE magazine's editor-in-chief, Yusaku Yamamoto. INTERVIEWEES INCLUDE: Hitoshi YONEDA / Tatsuo NOMURA / Katsutoshi EGUCHI / Toru HIDAKA / Roy OZAKI / Kouichi YOTSUI / Masaaki KUKINO / Yoshitaka Murayama / Harry Inaba / Ryukushi07 / Kotaro UCHIKOSHI / ZUN / Yoshiro KIMURA / Kouji YOKOTA / Jun Nagashima / Yuzo KOSHIRO / Masamoto MORITA / Akira TAKIGUCHI / Masakuni MITSUHASHI / Kohei IKEDA / Hiroshi SUZUKI / Tomonori SUGIYAMA / Yutaka ISOKAWA / Yasuhito SAITO / Takaki KOBAYASHI / Keite ABE / Keiji INAFUNE / Makoto GOTO

    You'll get several case studies, including Airbnb, along with interviews with UX strategists from different work environments (startup, agency, and enterprise) about their roles and experience.With this book, UX designers, product stakeholders, and startup founders will learn how to: • Conduct a competitive analysis on the online marketplace• Perform guerrilla user research for your MVP• Design for conversion and develop a funnel matrix for understanding customer acquisition• Extract innovative online opportunities from market research• Validate customer research with continuous feedback loops• Adapt traditional and contemporary business approaches (such as Lean Startup) to implement a successful strategy

    In The Master Algorithm, Pedro Domingos lifts the veil to give us a peek inside the learning machines that power Google, Amazon, and your smartphone. He assembles a blueprint for the future universal learner--the Master Algorithm--and discusses what it will mean for business, science, and society. If data-ism is today's philosophy, this book is its bible.

    Vaughn Vernon couples guided approaches to implementation with modern architectures, highlighting the importance and value of focusing on the business domain while balancing technical considerations.Building on Eric Evans’ seminal book, Domain-Driven Design, the author presents practical DDD techniques through examples from familiar domains. Each principle is backed up by realistic Java examples–all applicable to C# developers–and all content is tied together by a single case study: the delivery of a large-scale Scrum-based SaaS system for a multitenant environment.The author takes you far beyond “DDD-lite” approaches that embrace DDD solely as a technical toolset, and shows you how to fully leverage DDD’s “strategic design patterns” using Bounded Context, Context Maps, and the Ubiquitous Language. Using these techniques and examples, you can reduce time to market and improve quality, as you build software that is more flexible, more scalable, and more tightly aligned to business goals.

    Describes the five-year, 150 million dollar project Microsoft undertook to develop an advanced PC operating system.

    Learn them fast and learn them well. Have you always wanted to learn to build your own website but are afraid it'll be too difficult for you? Or perhaps you are a blogger who wants to tweak your blog's design, without having to spend money on an expensive theme. This book is for you. You no longer have to waste your time and money learning HTML and CSS from lengthy books, expensive online courses or complicated tutorials. What this book offers... HTML and CSS for Beginners Complex concepts are broken down into simple steps to ensure that you can easily master the two languages even if you have never coded before. Carefully Chosen Examples (with images) Examples are carefully chosen to illustrate all concepts. In addition, images are provided whenever necessary so that you can immediately see the visual effects of various CSS properties. Learn The Languages Fast Concepts are presented in a "to-the-point" style to cater to the busy individual. With this book, you can learn HTML and CSS in just one day and start coding immediately. How is this book different... The best way to learn programming is by doing. End-of-Chapter Exercises Each CSS chapter comes with an end-of-chapter exercise where you get to practice the different CSS properties covered in the chapter and see first hand how different CSS values affect the design of the website. Bonus Project The book also includes a bonus project that requires the application of all the HTML and CSS concepts taught previously. Working through the project will not only give you an immense sense of achievement, it’ll also help you see how the various concepts tie together. Are you ready to dip your toes into the exciting world of web development? This book is for you. Click the BUY button and download it now. What you'll learn: - What is CSS and HTML? - What software do you need to write and run CSS codes? - What are HTML tags and elements? - What are the commonly used HTML tags and how to use them? - What are HTML IDs and Classes? - What is the basic CSS syntax? - What are CSS selectors? - What are pseudo classes and pseudo elements? - How to apply CSS rules to your website and what is the order of precedence? - What is the CSS box model? - How to position and float your CSS boxes - How to hide HTML content - How to change the background of CSS boxes - How to use the CSS color property to change colors - How to modify text and font of a website - How to create navigation bars - How to create gorgeous looking tables to display your data .. and more... Click the BUY button and download the book now to start learning HTML and CSS now. Learn them fast and learn them well. Tags: ------------ CSS, HTML5, web development, web page design, CSS examples, CSS tutorials, CSS coding, CSS for Dummies

    Each chapter is relatively self-contained and can be used as a unit of study. The algorithms are described in English and in a pseudocode designed to be readable by anyone who has done a little programming. The explanations have been kept elementary without sacrificing depth of coverage or mathematical rigor.

    Developers of every stripe-hobbyists and professionals alike-fall in love with jQuery the minute they've reduced 20 lines of clunky JavaScript into three lines of elegant, readable code. This new, concise JavaScript library radically simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages.jQuery in Action, like jQuery itself, is a concise tool designed to make you a more efficient and effective web developer. In a short 300 pages, this book introduces you to the jQuery programming model and guides you through the major features and techniques you'll need to be productive immediately. The book anchors each new concept in the tasks you'll tackle in day-to-day web development and offers unique lab pages where you immediately put your jQuery knowledge to work.There are dozens of JavaScript libraries available now, with major companies like Google, Yahoo and AOL open-sourcing their in-house tools. This book shows you how jQuery stacks up against other libraries and helps you navigate interaction with other tools and frameworks.jQuery in Action offers a rich investigation of the up-and-coming jQuery library for client-side JavaScript. This book covers all major features and capabilities in a manner focused on getting the reader up and running with jQuery from the very first sections. Web Developers reading this book will gain a deep understanding of how to use jQuery to simplify their pages and lives, as well as learn the philosophy behind writing jQuery-enhanced pages.

    Combining tools, core principles, and plenty of humor, The Agile Samurai gives you the tools and the attitude to deliver something of value every week, and make rolling software into production a non-event. You’ll see how agile software delivery really works and how to help your team get agile fast, while having fun along the way.

    "Web Analytics 2.0" presents a new framework that will permanently change how you think about analytics. It provides specific recommendations for creating an actionable strategy, applying analytical techniques correctly, solving challenges such as measuring social media and multichannel campaigns, achieving optimal success by leveraging experimentation, and employing tactics for truly listening to your customers. The book will help your organization become more data driven while you become a super analysis ninja Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

    This causes real problems for everyday users who need to make sense of all the information available, and for software engineers who want to make their text-based applications more useful and user-friendly. Whether building a search engine for a corporate website, automatically organizing email, or extracting important nuggets of information from the news, dealing with unstructured text can be daunting.Taming Text is a hands-on, example-driven guide to working with unstructured text in the context of real-world applications. It explores how to automatically organize text, using approaches such as full-text search, proper name recognition, clustering, tagging, information extraction, and summarization. This book gives examples illustrating each of these topics, as well as the foundations upon which they are built.Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.

    Every piece of the web application stack, from HTTP requests to browser-side scripts, comes with important yet subtle security consequences. To keep users safe, it is essential for developers to confidently navigate this landscape.In The Tangled Web, Michal Zalewski, one of the world's top browser security experts, offers a compelling narrative that explains exactly how browsers work and why they're fundamentally insecure. Rather than dispense simplistic advice on vulnerabilities, Zalewski examines the entire browser security model, revealing weak points and providing crucial information for shoring up web application security. You'll learn how to:Perform common but surprisingly complex tasks such as URL parsing and HTML sanitization Use modern security features like Strict Transport Security, Content Security Policy, and Cross-Origin Resource Sharing Leverage many variants of the same-origin policy to safely compartmentalize complex web applications and protect user credentials in case of XSS bugs Build mashups and embed gadgets without getting stung by the tricky frame navigation policy Embed or host user-supplied content without running into the trap of content sniffing For quick reference, "Security Engineering Cheat Sheets" at the end of each chapter offer ready solutions to problems you're most likely to encounter. With coverage extending as far as planned HTML5 features, The Tangled Web will help you create secure web applications that stand the test of time.