It aims to give readers a fundamental overview of the technologies that make up the telecommunications infrastructure.

    Star Schema: The Complete Reference offers in-depth coverage of design principles and their underlying rationales. Organized around design concepts and illustrated with detailed examples, this is a step-by-step guidebook for beginners and a comprehensive resource for experts.This all-inclusive volume begins with dimensional design fundamentals and shows how they fit into diverse data warehouse architectures, including those of W.H. Inmon and Ralph Kimball. The book progresses through a series of advanced techniques that help you address real-world complexity, maximize performance, and adapt to the requirements of BI and ETL software products. You are furnished with design tasks and deliverables that can be incorporated into any project, regardless of architecture or methodology.Master the fundamentals of star schema design and slow change processingIdentify situations that call for multiple stars or cubesEnsure compatibility across subject areas as your data warehouse growsAccommodate repeating attributes, recursive hierarchies, and poor data qualitySupport conflicting requirements for historic dataHandle variation within a business process and correlation of disparate activitiesBoost performance using derived schemas and aggregatesLearn when it's appropriate to adjust designs for BI and ETL tools

    Updated just in time for 2016, this guide is the freshest on the market. Amazon Echo is not just a piece of hardware, it is not just the cylindrical product it appears to be. It is a revolutionary facilitator of your dream lifestyle, and the great news is that it just keeps on improving with every update! Amazon Echo takes the Intelligent Personal Assistant market from binary to human. The times of receiving unconvincing, often unhelpful and completely robotic responses from our devices is over and Echo is here to lead the way. Aside from covering the basics in detail, from unpacking to set-up to synchronization with your home devices, this user guide will cover the full range of features on offer with your Amazon Echo. Changing your wake word Understanding and using your Dialog History Controlling parts of your home with your voice How to use the Amazon Echo app How to get Echo to give you information, from live sports scores to the weather in Dubai! How to stream music through Echo's impressive speakers How to shop with your voice Why you will never need an alarm clock again How to handle the Kitchen with Echo's help Travel and traffic information specific to your journey or commute How to manage your shopping and to-do list How to enjoy Audibles wide range of audio books with your Amazon Echo Getting the latest news Some funny little Easter eggs that are built into the device! And plenty more! Amazon Echo is changing people's lives all over the world and this guide will help you change your own. If you are deciding whether to purchase the device, have a read through my guide and I'm certain by the time you are finished, there will be only one option in your mind! This book is available through Kindle Unlimited.

    A practical approach to test-driven development for Ruby on Rails using RSpec and related tools.

    Windows 10 (a free update to users of Windows 8 or Windows 7) fixes a number of the problems introduced by the revolution in Windows 8 and offers plenty of new features, such as the new Spartan web browser, Cortana voice-activated "personal assistant," new universal apps (that run on tablet, phone, and computer), and more. But to really get the most out of the new operating system, you're going to need a guide.Thankfully, Windows 10: The Missing Manual will be there to help. Like its predecessors, this book from the founder of Yahoo Tech, previous New York Times columnist, bestselling author, and Missing Manuals creator David Pogue illuminates its subject with technical insight, plenty of wit, and hardnosed objectivity for beginners, veteran standalone PC users, new tablet owners, and those who know their way around a network.

    And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet. As we live in a world made of software, they're the architects. The decisions they make guide our behavior. When they make something newly easy to do, we do a lot more of it. If they make it hard or impossible to do something, we do less of it.If we want to understand how today's world works, we ought to understand something about coders. Who exactly are the people that are building today's world? What makes them tick? What type of personality is drawn to writing software? And perhaps most interestingly -- what does it do to them?One of the first pieces of coding a newbie learns is the program to make the computer say "Hello, world!" Like that piece of code, Clive Thompson's book is a delightful place to begin to understand this vocation, which is both a profession and a way of life, and which essentially didn't exist little more than a generation ago, but now is considered just about the only safe bet we can make about what the future holds. Thompson takes us close to some of the great coders of our time, and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first great coders, who were women. Ironically, if we're going to traffic in stereotypes, women are arguably "naturally" better at coding than men, but they were written out of the history, and shoved out of the seats, for reasons that are illuminating. Now programming is indeed, if not a pure brotopia, at least an awfully homogenous community, which attracts people from a very narrow band of backgrounds and personality types. As Thompson learns, the consequences of that are significant - not least being a fetish for disruption at scale that doesn't leave much time for pondering larger moral issues of collateral damage. At the same time, coding is a marvelous new art form that has improved the world in innumerable ways, and Thompson reckons deeply, as no one before him has, with what great coding in fact looks like, who creates it, and where they come from. To get as close to his subject has he can, he picks up the thread of his own long-abandoned coding practice, and tries his mightiest to up his game, with some surprising results.More and more, any serious engagement with the world demands an engagement with code and its consequences, and to understand code, we must understand coders. In that regard, Clive Thompson's Hello, World! is a marvelous and delightful master class.

    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.

    It has conquered developer mindshare at startups and enterprises alike with its focus of simplicity, convention and clean, maintainable code. The latest version, Rails 4, continues the tradition of enhanced performance, security and developer productivity, with improvements that enable professional developers to focus on what matters most: delivering business value quickly and consistently.The Rails™ 4 Way is the only comprehensive, authoritative guide to delivering production-quality code with Rails 4. Pioneering Rails expert Obie Fernandez and his team of leading Rails experts illuminate the entire set of Rails APIs, along with the idioms, design approaches, and libraries that make developing applications with Rails so powerful. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience and track record, they address the real challenges development teams face, showing how to use Rails to maximize your productivity.Using numerous detailed code examples, the author systematically cover Rails key capabilities and subsystems, making this book a reference that you depend on everyday. He presents advanced Rails programming techniques that have been proven effective in day-to-day usage on dozens of production Rails systems and offers important insights into behavior-driven development and production considerations such as scalability. Dive deep into the subtleties of the asset pipeline and other advanced Rails topics such as security and scalability. The Rails 4 Way is your best guide for making Rails do exactly what you want it to do.

    The topics covered in the exam include: network security, security management, systems development, cryptography, disaster recovery, law, and physical security. CISSP For Dummies, 3rd Edition is the bestselling guide that covers the CISSP exam and helps prepare those wanting to take this security exam. The 3rd Edition features 200 additional pages of new content to provide thorough coverage and reflect changes to the exam. Written by security experts and well-known Dummies authors, Peter Gregory and Larry Miller, this book is the perfect, no-nonsense guide to the CISSP certification, offering test-taking tips, resources, and self-assessment tools.Fully updated with 200 pages of new content for more thorough coverage and to reflect all exam changesSecurity experts Peter Gregory and Larry Miller bring practical real-world security expertiseCD-ROM includes hundreds of randomly generated test questions for readers to practice taking the test with both timed and untimed versions"CISSP For Dummies, 3rd Edition" can lead you down the rough road to certification successNote: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

    That's an odd way to begin a work of popular science . . . . but amusing.Please heed the warning from the Introduction by Bruce Sterling: "If you are examining Saucer Wisdom imagining that Rudy (or some fictional 'Frank Shook') has been actually logging a lot of on board saucer time, well, you can knock that off right now. Rudy Rucker made up the flying saucer part. There is no actual flying saucer. The saucer is not an interplanetary faster-than-light device. Its what we professional authors like to call a narrative device."I'm going to spill the beans as directly as I can here: Saucer Wisdom is a work of popular science speculation. Its a nonfiction book in which Prof. Rucker takes a few quirky grains of modern scientific fact, drops them into the colorful tide pool of his own imagination, and harvests a major swarm of abalones, jellyfish, and giant anemones."Pop-science writers didn't used to treat 'science' in this boisterous way, but there might well be a trend here, there may be a real future in this. Saucer Wisdom is a book by a well-qualified mathematician and computer scientist, a veteran pop science writer, in which 'science' is treated, not as some distant and rarefied quest for absolute knowledge, but as naturally great source material for a really long, cool rant."Rucker, in character, describes, and illustrates with delightful cartoon sketches (the way he would use chalk and a blackboard while talking science), the world of the progressively more distant future as it is transformed by computer technology, biotechnology, and human evolution. He also describes a hell of a party in Berkeley. Popular science writing will never be the same.

    Relentlessly practical, the book delivers insight, not documentation, to teach developers what they need to know to build the next generation of SOAs.After explaining the advantages of service-orientation for application design and teaching the basics of how to develop SOAs using WCF, the book shows how you can take advantage of built-in features such as service hosting, instance management, asynchronous calls, synchronization, reliability, transaction management, disconnected queued calls and security to build best in class applications. "Programming WCF Services" focuses on the rationale behind particular design decisions, often shedding light on poorly-documented and little-understood aspects of SOA development. Developers and architects will learn not only the "how" of WCF programming, but also relevant design guidelines, best practices, and pitfalls. Original techniques and utilities provided by the author throughout the book go well beyond anything that can be found in conventional sources.Based on experience and insight gained while taking part in the strategic design of WCF and working with the team that implemented it, "Programming WCF Services" provides experienced working professionals with the definitive work on WCF. Not only will this book make you a WCF expert, it will make you a better software engineer. It's the Rosetta Stone of WCF.

    Legendary testing expert James Whittaker, until recently a Google testing leader, and two top Google experts reveal exactly how Google tests software, offering brand-new best practices you can use even if you're not quite Google's size...yet! Breakthrough Techniques You Can Actually Use Discover 100% practical, amazingly scalable techniques for analyzing risk and planning tests...thinking like real users...implementing exploratory, black box, white box, and acceptance testing...getting usable feedback...tracking issues...choosing and creating tools...testing "Docs & Mocks," interfaces, classes, modules, libraries, binaries, services, and infrastructure...reviewing code and refactoring...using test hooks, presubmit scripts, queues, continuous builds, and more. With these techniques, you can transform testing from a bottleneck into an accelerator-and make your whole organization more productive!

    Explore applying the Hexagonal Architecture within your application, whether within an open source framework or your own bespoke system. Finally, look into integrating Bounded Contexts, using REST and Messaging approaches.

    Now he makes the case that living on Mars is not just plausible, but inevitable.It sounds like science fiction, but Stephen Petranek considers it fact: Within twenty years, humans will live on Mars. We'll need to. In this sweeping, provocative book that mixes business, science, and human reporting, Petranek makes the case that living on Mars is an essential back-up plan for humanity and explains in fascinating detail just how it will happen.The race is on. Private companies, driven by iconoclastic entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, and Sir Richard Branson; Dutch reality show and space mission Mars One; NASA; and the Chinese government are among the many groups competing to plant the first stake on Mars and open the door for human habitation. Why go to Mars? Life on Mars has potential life-saving possibilities for everyone on earth. Depleting water supplies, overwhelming climate change, and a host of other disasters — from terrorist attacks to meteor strikes — all loom large. We must become a space-faring species to survive. We have the technology not only to get humans to Mars, but to convert Mars into another habitable planet. It will likely take 300 years to "terraform" Mars, as the jargon goes, but we can turn it into a veritable second Garden of Eden. And we can live there, in specially designed habitations, within the next twenty years.In this exciting chronicle, Petranek introduces the circus of lively characters all engaged in a dramatic effort to be the first to settle the Red Planet. How We'll Live on Mars brings firsthand reporting, interviews with key participants, and extensive research to bear on the question of how we can expect to see life on Mars within the next twenty years.

    But when she discovers the sweet side of her childhood friend, Anthony, she finds herself trapped in a dilemma. Anthony has found pleasure in teasing his best friend’s little sister. But, when one day he takes it too far and she walks off leaving him standing in front of the crowd, embarrassed and furious as he is, Anthony starts plotting his revenge, until the moment he realizes his heart beats only for her. Will he manage to make up for the chaos he has created? Will they follow their instincts and find their path to true love?Bride for the Sake of DutyEleanor has wished for true love ever since she was a little girl, but she has no other choice but to marry a man she knows nothing about, due to her father’s definite will. To make matters worse, her new husband leaves right after their nuptials for a trip overseas. When he returns after two years, he’s even more handsome than she remembers, but he still remains a complete stranger to her. Now that he is finally back home, Eleanor’s husband, Miles will find himself longing for something more than the sea. Will he finally find a place to call home in Eleanor’s eyes? Could Eleanor and Miles make up for the lost time and eventually fall in love?A Beauty for the Scarred DukeWhen the Earl of Upperton sells off his daughter Isabella as a bride for the disfigured Elliot Covington, Isabella feels terrified. Due to marry a man she has never met and whom she has believed to be a monster, she truly believes her life is over. What she has yet to discover, though, is that beneath the scars, there is a caring and kind gentleman. Isabella starts seeing Elliot’s inner beauty, but the moment they both realise they are meant to be together, outside powers will try to tear them apart. Will the Duke be able to let go of the pain and guilt that has swallowed him whole? Will two heartbroken souls find love when least expected?Her Duke in the MakingAnne believes to have found her other half until she finds herself obliged to prepare the new Duke of Somerset for his first Season. The handsome Duke, who has recently returned from America, has to adjust to a new lifestyle and be taught proper British manners. Luckily for him, Anne agrees to be his mentor, but with a condition; he will need to help Anne convince her family that Lord Rawley is the perfect match for her. Their plans will take an unexpected turn, though, when the Duke falls hopelessly in love with the enchanting woman and realises that it might be destiny that brought them together. Could Anne’s unusual agreement with the dashing Duke lead to more than she ever dreamt of?Kind Ella and the Charming DukeAfter her father’s death, Ella is devastated when her mother marries the Earl of Dandridge.The Earl is the cold hearted father of two spoiled young ladies in search of a suitor. When Rufus, Duke of Hillington, is reported to be searching for a suitable bride, the Earl will plot the most appalling schemes to hide Ella away. Ella’s rebellious heart makes her defy the orders to abstain from the Duke’s masquerade ball. After encountering the mysterious lady, Rufus cannot take his mind off of her. Will Ella and Rufus escape the Earl’s evil plans? Will they eventually have the happily-ever-after they both deserve?If you love clean Regency romances that feature dynamic and inspiring women of the era and determined, yet charming, male protagonists, then you are going to love this collection!