And they did it without fanfare or recognition from their employer. Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning provides a fascinating look at technohistory that sets the record straight. In Dealers of Lightning, Hiltzik describes the forces and faces behind the revolution that the Xerox PARC team single-handedly spawned. The Xerox PARC group was composed solely of top technical minds. The decision was made at Xerox headquarters to give the team complete freedom from deadlines and directives, in hopes of fostering a true creative environment. It worked — perhaps too well. The team responded with a steady output of amazing technology, including the first version of the Internet, the first personal computer, user-friendly word-processing programs, and pop-up menus. Xerox, far from ready for the explosion of innovation, failed to utilize the technology dreamed up by the group. Out of all the dazzling inventions born at Xerox PARC, only a handful were developed and marketed by Xerox. However, one of these inventions, the laser printer, proved successful enough to earn billions for the company, therefore justifying its investment in the research center. Most oftheteam's creations would go on to be developed and perfected by other companies, such as IBM, Apple, and Microsoft. Drawing from interviews with the engineers, executives, and scientists involved in the Xerox PARC, Dealers of Lightning chronicles an amazing era of egos, ideas, and inventions at the dawn of the computer age.

    This book provides information on software tools, specific work flow for specific kinds of projects, and information on various topics. It includes resources for both instructors and students such as checklists, 700 categorized web references, and more.

    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.

    How can you work with it efficiently? Recently updated for Spark 1.3, this book introduces Apache Spark, the open source cluster computing system that makes data analytics fast to write and fast to run. With Spark, you can tackle big datasets quickly through simple APIs in Python, Java, and Scala. This edition includes new information on Spark SQL, Spark Streaming, setup, and Maven coordinates. Written by the developers of Spark, this book will have data scientists and engineers up and running in no time. You’ll learn how to express parallel jobs with just a few lines of code, and cover applications from simple batch jobs to stream processing and machine learning. Quickly dive into Spark capabilities such as distributed datasets, in-memory caching, and the interactive shell Leverage Spark’s powerful built-in libraries, including Spark SQL, Spark Streaming, and MLlib Use one programming paradigm instead of mixing and matching tools like Hive, Hadoop, Mahout, and Storm Learn how to deploy interactive, batch, and streaming applications Connect to data sources including HDFS, Hive, JSON, and S3 Master advanced topics like data partitioning and shared variables

    Designed for readers who don't need the academic formality, it's a fast and easy computer science guide. It teaches essential concepts for people who want to program computers effectively. First, it introduces discrete mathematics, then it exposes the most common algorithms and data structures. It also shows the principles that make computers and programming languages work.

    Through the book’s many examples, you’ll quickly learn how OCaml stands out as a tool for writing fast, succinct, and readable systems code.Real World OCaml takes you through the concepts of the language at a brisk pace, and then helps you explore the tools and techniques that make OCaml an effective and practical tool. In the book’s third section, you’ll delve deep into the details of the compiler toolchain and OCaml’s simple and efficient runtime system.Learn the foundations of the language, such as higher-order functions, algebraic data types, and modulesExplore advanced features such as functors, first-class modules, and objectsLeverage Core, a comprehensive general-purpose standard library for OCamlDesign effective and reusable libraries, making the most of OCaml’s approach to abstraction and modularityTackle practical programming problems from command-line parsing to asynchronous network programmingExamine profiling and interactive debugging techniques with tools such as GNU gdb

    Built for your brain, this book covers C# 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008, and teaches everything from language fundamentals to advanced topics including garbage collection, extension methods, and double-buffered animation. You'll also master C#'s hottest and newest syntax, LINQ, for querying SQL databases, .NET collections, and XML documents. By the time you're through, you'll be a proficient C# programmer, designing and coding large-scale applications. Every few chapters you will come across a lab that lets you apply what you've learned up to that point. Each lab is designed to simulate a professional programming task, increasing in complexity until-at last-you build a working Invaders game, complete with shooting ships, aliens descending while firing, and an animated death sequence for unlucky starfighters. This remarkably engaging book will have you going from zero to 60 with C# in no time flat.

    New JVM-based languages like Groovy, Scala, and Clojure are redefining what it means to be a Java developer. The core Standard and Enterprise APIs now co-exist with a large and growing body of open source technologies. Multicore processors, concurrency, and massive data stores require new patterns and approaches to development. And with Java 7 due to release in 2011, there's still more to absorb.The Well-Grounded Java Developer is a unique guide written for developers with a solid grasp of Java fundamentals. It provides a fresh, practical look at new Java 7 features along with the array of ancillary technologies that a working developer will use in building the next generation of business software.

    In this book, Chris Bernhardt offers an introduction to quantum computing that is accessible to anyone who is comfortable with high school mathematics. He explains qubits, entanglement, quantum teleportation, quantum algorithms, and other quantum-related topics as clearly as possible for the general reader. Bernhardt, a mathematician himself, simplifies the mathematics as much as he can and provides elementary examples that illustrate both how the math works and what it means.Bernhardt introduces the basic unit of quantum computing, the qubit, and explains how the qubit can be measured; discusses entanglement--which, he says, is easier to describe mathematically than verbally--and what it means when two qubits are entangled (citing Einstein's characterization of what happens when the measurement of one entangled qubit affects the second as "spooky action at a distance"); and introduces quantum cryptography. He recaps standard topics in classical computing--bits, gates, and logic--and describes Edward Fredkin's ingenious billiard ball computer. He defines quantum gates, considers the speed of quantum algorithms, and describes the building of quantum computers. By the end of the book, readers understand that quantum computing and classical computing are not two distinct disciplines, and that quantum computing is the fundamental form of computing. The basic unit of computation is the qubit, not the bit.

    The book covers lambdas, streams, and functional-style programming. With Java 8's functional features you can now write more concise code in less time, and also automatically benefit from multicore architectures. It's time to dig in!

    Land of Lisp brings the language into the real world, teaching Lisp by showing readers how to write several complete Lisp-based games, including a text adventure, an evolution simulation, and a robot battle. While building these games, readers learn the core concepts of Lisp programming, such as data types, recursion, input/output, object-oriented programming, and macros. And thanks to the power of Lisp, the code is short. Rather than bogging things down with reference information that is easily found online, Land of Lisp focuses on using Lisp for real programming. The book is filled with the author Conrad Barski's famous Lisp cartoons, featuring the Lisp alien and other zany characters.

    Tracy Kidder got a preview of this world in the late 1970s when he observed the engineers of Data General design and build a new 32-bit minicomputer in just one year. His thoughtful, prescient book, The Soul of a New Machine, tells stories of 35-year-old "veteran" engineers hiring recent college graduates and encouraging them to work harder and faster on complex and difficult projects, exploiting the youngsters' ignorance of normal scheduling processes while engendering a new kind of work ethic.These days, we are used to the "total commitment" philosophy of managing technical creation, but Kidder was surprised and even a little alarmed at the obsessions and compulsions he found. From in-house political struggles to workers being permitted to tease management to marathon 24-hour work sessions, The Soul of a New Machine explores concepts that already seem familiar, even old-hat, less than 20 years later. Kidder plainly admires his subjects; while he admits to hopeless confusion about their work, he finds their dedication heroic. The reader wonders, though, what will become of it all, now and in the future. —Rob Lightner

    This one's a keeper." --Robert C. Martin "If you want to be an expert in the state of the art in TDD, you need to understand the ideas in this book."--Michael Feathers Test-Driven Development (TDD) is now an established technique for delivering better software faster. TDD is based on a simple idea: Write tests for your code before you write the code itself. However, this simple idea takes skill and judgment to do well. Now there's a practical guide to TDD that takes you beyond the basic concepts. Drawing on a decade of experience building real-world systems, two TDD pioneers show how to let tests guide your development and "grow" software that is coherent, reliable, and maintainable. Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce describe the processes they use, the design principles they strive to achieve, and some of the tools that help them get the job done. Through an extended worked example, you'll learn how TDD works at multiple levels, using tests to drive the features and the object-oriented structure of the code, and using Mock Objects to discover and then describe relationships between objects. Along the way, the book systematically addresses challenges that development teams encounter with TDD--from integrating TDD into your processes to testing your most difficult features. Coverage includes - Implementing TDD effectively: getting started, and maintaining your momentum throughout the project - Creating cleaner, more expressive, more sustainable code - Using tests to stay relentlessly focused on sustaining quality - Understanding how TDD, Mock Objects, and Object-Oriented Design come together in the context of a real software development project - Using Mock Objects to guide object-oriented designs - Succeeding where TDD is difficult: managing complex test data, and testing persistence and concurrency

    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

    In this richly illustrated book, accessible examples are used to show how information theory can be understood in terms of everyday games like '20 Questions', and the simple MatLab programs provided give hands-on experience of information theory in action. Written in a tutorial style, with a comprehensive glossary, this text represents an ideal primer for novices who wish to become familiar with the basic principles of information theory.Download chapter 1 from http://jim-stone.staff.shef.ac.uk/Boo...