The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms


Donald Ervin Knuth - 1973
     -Byte, September 1995 I can't begin to tell you how many pleasurable hours of study and recreation they have afforded me! I have pored over them in cars, restaurants, at work, at home... and even at a Little League game when my son wasn't in the line-up. -Charles Long If you think you're a really good programmer... read [Knuth's] Art of Computer Programming... You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing. -Bill Gates It's always a pleasure when a problem is hard enough that you have to get the Knuths off the shelf. I find that merely opening one has a very useful terrorizing effect on computers. -Jonathan Laventhol This first volume in the series begins with basic programming concepts and techniques, then focuses more particularly on information structures-the representation of information inside a computer, the structural relationships between data elements and how to deal with them efficiently. Elementary applications are given to simulation, numerical methods, symbolic computing, software and system design. Dozens of simple and important algorithms and techniques have been added to those of the previous edition. The section on mathematical preliminaries has been extensively revised to match present trends in research. Ebook (PDF version) produced by Mathematical Sciences Publishers (MSP), http: //msp.org

How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Programming and Computing


Matthias Felleisen - 2001
    Unlike other introductory books, it focuses on the program design process. This approach fosters a variety of skills--critical reading, analytical thinking, creative synthesis, and attention to detail--that are important for everyone, not just future computer programmers. The book exposes readers to two fundamentally new ideas. First, it presents program design guidelines that show the reader how to analyze a problem statement; how to formulate concise goals; how to make up examples; how to develop an outline of the solution, based on the analysis; how to finish the program; and how to test. Each step produces a well-defined intermediate product. Second, the book comes with a novel programming environment, the first one explicitly designed for beginners. The environment grows with the readers as they master the material in the book until it supports a full-fledged language for the whole spectrum of programming tasks.All the book's support materials are available for free on the Web. The Web site includes the environment, teacher guides, exercises for all levels, solutions, and additional projects.A second edition is now available.

Game Programming Patterns


Robert Nystrom - 2011
    Commercial game development expert Robert Nystrom presents an array of general solutions to problems encountered in game development. For example, you'll learn how double-buffering enables a player to perceive smooth and realistic motion, and how the service locator pattern can help you provide access to services such as sound without coupling your code to any particular sound driver or sound hardware. Games have much in common with other software, but also a number of unique constraints. Some of the patterns in this book are well-known in other domains of software development. Other of the patterns are unique to gaming. In either case, Robert Nystrom bridges from the ivory tower world of software architecture to the in-the-trenches reality of hardcore game programming. You'll learn the patterns and the general problems that they solve. You'll come away able to apply powerful and reusable architectural solutions that enable you to produce higher quality games with less effort than before. Applies classic design patterns to game programming. Introduces new patterns specific to game programming. Brings abstract software architecture down to Earth with approachable writing and an emphasis on simple code that shows each pattern in practice. What you'll learn Overcome architectural challenges unique to game programming Apply lessons from the larger software world to games. Tie different parts of a game (graphics, sound, AI) into a cohesive whole. Create elegant and maintainable architecture. Achieve good, low-level performance. Gain insight into professional, game development. Who this book is forGame Programming Patterns is aimed at professional game programmers who, while successful in shipping games, are frustrated at how hard it sometimes is to add and modify features when a game is under development. Game Programming Patterns shows how to apply modern software practices to the problem of game development while still maintaining the blazing-fast performance demanded by hard-core gamers. Game Programming Patterns also appeals to those learning about game programming in their spare time. Hobbyists and aspiring professionals alike will find much to learn in this book about pathfinding, collision detection, and other game-programming problem domains.

Elixir in Action


Saša Jurić - 2015
    Revised and updated for the Elixir 1.7, Elixir in Action, Second Edition teaches you how to apply Elixir to practical problems associated with scalability, fault tolerance, and high availability. Along the way, you'll develop an appreciation for, and considerable skill in, a functional and concurrent style of programming.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future


Cory Doctorow - 2008
    Content is the first collection of Doctorow’s infamous articles, essays, and polemics.Here’s why Microsoft should stop treating its customers as criminals (through relentless digital-rights management); how America chose copyright and Happy Meal toys over jobs; why Facebook is taking a faceplant; how Wikipedia is a poor cousin of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; and, of course, why free e-books kick ass.Accessible to geeks and noobs (if you’re not sure what that means, it’s you) alike, Content is a must-have compilation from Cory Doctorow, who will be glad to take you along for the ride as he effortlessly surfs the zeitgeist.

Mastering Emacs


Mickey Petersen - 2015
    In the Mastering Emacs ebook you will learn the answers to all the concepts that take weeks, months or even years to truly learn, all in one place.“Emacs is such a hard editor to learn”But why is it so hard to learn? As it turns out, it's almost always the same handful of issues that everyone faces.If you have tried to learn Emacs you will have struggled with the same problems everyone faces, and few tutorials to see you through it.I have dedicated the first half of the book to explaining the essence of Emacs — and in doing so, how to overcome these issues:Memorizing Emacs’s keys: You will learn Emacs one key at a time, starting with the arrow keys. To feel productive in Emacs, it’s important you start on an equal footing — without too many new concepts and keys to memorize. Each chapter will introduce more keys and concepts so you can learn at your own pace. Discovering new modes and features: Emacs is a self-documenting editor, and I will teach you how to use the apropos, info, and describe system to discover new modes and features, or help you find things you forgot! Customizing Emacs: You don’t have to learn Emacs Lisp to alter a lot of Emacs’s functionality. Most changes you want to make are possible using Emacs’s Customize interface and I will show you how to use it efficiently. Understanding the terminology: Emacs is so old it predates almost every other editor and all modern user interfaces. I have an entire chapter dedicated to the unique terminology in Emacs; how it is different from other editors, and what that means to you.

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)


Christian Rudder - 2014
    In Dataclysm, Christian Rudder uses it to show us who we truly are.   For centuries, we’ve relied on polling or small-scale lab experiments to study human behavior. Today, a new approach is possible. As we live more of our lives online, researchers can finally observe us directly, in vast numbers, and without filters. Data scientists have become the new demographers.   In this daring and original book, Rudder explains how Facebook "likes" can predict, with surprising accuracy, a person’s sexual orientation and even intelligence; how attractive women receive exponentially more interview requests; and why you must have haters to be hot. He charts the rise and fall of America’s most reviled word through Google Search and examines the new dynamics of collaborative rage on Twitter. He shows how people express themselves, both privately and publicly. What is the least Asian thing you can say? Do people bathe more in Vermont or New Jersey? What do black women think about Simon & Garfunkel? (Hint: they don’t think about Simon & Garfunkel.) Rudder also traces human migration over time, showing how groups of people move from certain small towns to the same big cities across the globe. And he grapples with the challenge of maintaining privacy in a world where these explorations are possible.   Visually arresting and full of wit and insight, Dataclysm is a new way of seeing ourselves—a brilliant alchemy, in which math is made human and numbers become the narrative of our time.

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are


Seth Stephens-Davidowitz - 2017
    This staggering amount of information—unprecedented in history—can tell us a great deal about who we are—the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than twenty years ago, seemed unfathomable.Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and who’s more self-conscious about sex, men or women?Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential—revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we’re afraid to ask that might be essential to our health—both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data everyday, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry


John Markoff - 2005
    Many accounts of the birth of personal computing have been written, but this is the first close look at the drug habits of the earliest pioneers." --New York TimesMost histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology or business. John Markoff's landmark book is about the culture and consciousness behind the first PCs--the culture being counter- and the consciousness expanded, sometimes chemically. It's a brilliant evocation of Stanford, California, in the 1960s and '70s, where a group of visionaries set out to turn computers into a means for freeing minds and information. In these pages one encounters Ken Kesey and the phone hacker Cap'n Crunch, est and LSD, The Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Lab. What the Dormouse Said is a poignant, funny, and inspiring book by one of the smartest technology writers around.

Django for Beginners: Learn web development with Django 2.0


William S. Vincent - 2018
    Proceed step-by-step through five progressively more complex web applications: from a "Hello World" app all the way to a robust Newspaper app with a custom user model, complete user authentication flow, foreign key relationships, and more. Learn current best practices around class-based views, templates, urls, user authentication, testing, and deployment. The material is up-to-date with the latest versions of both Django (2.0) and Python (3.6). TABLE OF CONTENTS: * Introduction * Chapter 1: Initial Setup * Chapter 2: Hello World app * Chapter 3: Pages app * Chapter 4: Message Board app * Chapter 5: Blog app * Chapter 6: Forms * Chapter 7: User Accounts * Chapter 8: Custom User Model * Chapter 9: User Authentication * Chapter 10: Bootstrap * Chapter 11: Password Change and Reset * Chapter 12: Email * Chapter 13: Newspaper app * Chapter 14: Permissions and Authorizations * Chapter 15: Comments * Conclusion

Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman


Dave Hoover - 2009
    To grow professionally, you also need soft skills and effective learning techniques. Honing those skills is what this book is all about. Authors Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye have cataloged dozens of behavior patterns to help you perfect essential aspects of your craft. Compiled from years of research, many interviews, and feedback from O'Reilly's online forum, these patterns address difficult situations that programmers, administrators, and DBAs face every day. And it's not just about financial success. Apprenticeship Patterns also approaches software development as a means to personal fulfillment. Discover how this book can help you make the best of both your life and your career. Solutions to some common obstacles that this book explores in-depth include:Burned out at work? "Nurture Your Passion" by finding a pet project to rediscover the joy of problem solving.Feeling overwhelmed by new information? Re-explore familiar territory by building something you've built before, then use "Retreat into Competence" to move forward again.Stuck in your learning? Seek a team of experienced and talented developers with whom you can "Be the Worst" for a while. "Brilliant stuff! Reading this book was like being in a time machine that pulled me back to those key learning moments in my career as a professional software developer and, instead of having to learn best practices the hard way, I had a guru sitting on my shoulder guiding me every step towards master craftsmanship. I'll certainly be recommending this book to clients. I wish I had this book 14 years ago!" -Russ Miles, CEO, OpenCredo

The Systems Bible: The Beginner's Guide to Systems Large and Small: Being the Third Edition of Systemantics


John Gall - 1977
    Hardcover published by Quadragle/The New York Times Book Co., third printing, August 1977, copyright 1975.

Programming Pearls


Jon L. Bentley - 1986
    Jon has done a wonderful job of updating the material. I am very impressed at how fresh the new examples seem." - Steve McConnell, author, Code CompleteWhen programmers list their favorite books, Jon Bentley's collection of programming pearls is commonly included among the classics. Just as natural pearls grow from grains of sand that irritate oysters, programming pearls have grown from real problems that have irritated real programmers. With origins beyond solid engineering, in the realm of insight and creativity, Bentley's pearls offer unique and clever solutions to those nagging problems. Illustrated by programs designed as much for fun as for instruction, the book is filled with lucid and witty descriptions of practical programming techniques and fundamental design principles. It is not at all surprising that Programming Pearls has been so highly valued by programmers at every level of experience. In this revision, the first in 14 years, Bentley has substantially updated his essays to reflect current programming methods and environments. In addition, there are three new essays on (1) testing, debugging, and timing; (2) set representations; and (3) string problems. All the original programs have been rewritten, and an equal amount of new code has been generated. Implementations of all the programs, in C or C++, are now available on the Web.What remains the same in this new edition is Bentley's focus on the hard core of programming problems and his delivery of workable solutions to those problems. Whether you are new to Bentley's classic or are revisiting his work for some fresh insight, this book is sure to make your own list of favorites.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism


Evgeny Morozov - 2013
    But how will these be affected once we delegate much of the responsibility for them to technology? The temptation of the digital age is to fix everything—from crime to corruption to pollution to obesity—by digitally quantifying, tracking, or gamifiying behavior. But when we change the motivations for our moral, ethical, and civic behavior, we may also change the very nature of that behavior itself. Technology, Evgeny Morozov proposes, can be a force for improvement—but only if we abandon the idea that it is necessarily revolutionary and instead genuinely interrogate what we are doing with it and what it is doing to us.From urging us to abandon monolithic ideas of “the Internet” to showing how to design more humane and democratic technological solutions, To Save Everything, Click Here is a dazzling tour of our technological future, and a searching investigation into the digital version of an enduring struggle: between man and his machines.

An Introduction to Statistical Learning: With Applications in R


Gareth James - 2013
    This book presents some of the most important modeling and prediction techniques, along with relevant applications. Topics include linear regression, classification, resampling methods, shrinkage approaches, tree- based methods, support vector machines, clustering, and more. Color graphics and real-world examples are used to illustrate the methods presented. Since the goal of this textbook is to facilitate the use of these statistical learning techniques by practitioners in science, industry, and other fields, each chapter contains a tutorial on implementing the analyses and methods presented in R, an extremely popular open source statistical software platform. Two of the authors co-wrote The Elements of Statistical Learning (Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman, 2nd edition 2009), a popular reference book for statistics and machine learning researchers. An Introduction to Statistical Learning covers many of the same topics, but at a level accessible to a much broader audience. This book is targeted at statisticians and non-statisticians alike who wish to use cutting-edge statistical learning techniques to analyze their data. The text assumes only a previous course in linear regression and no knowledge of matrix algebra.