With more than 200 million active users and 250,000 new registrants every day, Facebook has become a virtual world unto itself. But, what started as a dorm room exercise to extend the popular printed college directory of incoming freshmen online, Harvard drop-out Mark Zuckerberg has developed an international organization employing more than 400 programmers, graphic artists, and business develo…
Accounting and finance have a language of their own with a variety of statements and techniques that can mystify non-accounting colleagues. This new edition, like its predecessors, is written primarily for those non-financial students and managers who need to know about finance and accounting in any organization. The aim is to cut through as much of the jargon as possible and explain the variou…
I have a passion for frameworks. In more than 20 years as a professional developer, I’ve never worked on a computing platform that did everything I needed it to do to build applications productively. The Microsoft .NET platform is wonderful, but it doesn’t always do quite what I want or need. To address those needs, I’m always looking for tools and frameworks, and sometimes I end up creat…
An index is an optionally created database object used primarily to increase query performance. The purpose of a database index is similar to an index in the back of a book. A book index associates a topic with a page number. When you’re locating information in a book, it’s usually much faster to examine the index first, find the topic of interest, and identify associated page numbers. With…
There is a wealth of alternative literature on cryptography, thus presenting a healthy range of options for a reader wishing to pursue cryptography from a variety of different perspectives. A substantial number of cryptography books focus on presenting the mathematical aspects of cryptography. Many of these are textbooks targeted at computer science or mathematics undergraduate students.Forourp…
People on the outside of software development projects see them spew out a multitude of tools that shift work from people to computers. But the view inside a project is—all too often—different. There, we see days filled with repetitive manual chores. At one desk, a tester is entering test data into a database by hand. At another, a programmer is sifting through the output from a version co…
Philosophy and business don’t always get along well. Philosophy is generally not much concerned with the practical implications of its investigations and, conversely, business is often deeply interested in the tactical outcomes of its operations. And ethics is a loaded word. Preconceived notions of what ethics mean, even as a le gitimate field of study, often make people shy away from it as…
English Pronunciation in Use Advanced gives students of English practice in pronunciation to help improve both speaking and listening. Although it has been written so that it can be used for self-study, it will work equally well in a class situation with a teacher. It will be particularly useful for students whose English is adequate for most social, professional or educational purposes, bu…
The current financial crisis poses many challenges to all countries. The need for enhanced transparency and financial integrity in national financial systems is more important than ever. It is therefore critically important to have in place strong antimoney laundering/combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) oversight mechanisms, not only to protect the integrity of the financial syst…
The subprime financial crisis has forced several North American and European central banks to take extraordinary measures and to modify some of their operational procedures. These changes have made even clearer the deficiencies and lack of realism in mainstream monetary theory, as can be found in both undergraduate textbooks and most macroeconomic models. They have also forced monetary auth…