In September 2008, the BBC launched an ambitious project to follow The Box. The Box in question was an ordinary shipping container, except it had been painted with the BBC logo and equipped with a GPS transmitter. The plan was to follow it as it moved around the world. (The project is named after a book by Marc Levinson that describes how the humble container changed the face of world trade.) W…
The Kinect sensor provides a genuinely new way for a computer to make some sense of the world around it. The fusion of a camera, a directional microphone system, and a depth sensor into a single, mass-market device provides an opportunity for software developers to advance the field of computer interaction in all kinds of exciting ways. It is now possible to create programs that use the Kinect …
Welcome to Web Programming with Dart. Early, in our careers we came to recognize how our world would change thanks to the Internet and especially to web applications. Every device we use in our daily lives uses the Internet intensively. If we consider the different sizes and characteristics of devices and the different operating systems available, we understand the complexity of software applic…
The purpose of this book is to describe some of the main ideas and methods used in semantics, to illustrate these on interesting applications, and investigate the relationship between the various methods.
ONE OF THE MAJOR DRIVING FORCES BEHIND the boom in smartphones and tablet devices is mobile applications. Since the Apple iPhone was launched in 2007, the mobile developer community has created a vast number of ubiquitous applications for iOS devices and Google Android devices. Mobile applications for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) are poised to grow in the next several years, driven by the software gia…
Xamarin is the leading company in cross-platform application development. This company was created by the same people who brought us Mono, MonoTouch, and Mono for Android, which were the very first cross-platform implementations of the Microsoft CLI (Common Language Structure) and CLS (Common Language Specification). Having a cross-platform CLI and CLS, which is often called .NET, allows us to …
A program is a description of an abstract, general solution to a specific problem. It is typically written in a formal language called a programming language. The primary purpose of a program is to be understood by fellow human beings, thereby spreading knowledge. In order to achieve maximal readability,a programming language should have certain properties: 1. It should be small and uniform; …
With the invention of the steamship and the opening of the Suez Canal, the time was reduced to a month or two. Air mail reduced the time further to a week or two, and eventually to a few days (“when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”). The deployment of commercial email systems introduced us to wait times of only a few minutes (depending on how often you polled your server…
If we had to summarize design patterns in a single sentence, we’d say that they’re tools for coping with constant change in software design and development. When you look at the different design patterns in this book, they’re optimized to allow the programmer to make changes and reuse most of the software developed. The key concepts are change and flexibility. That same theme will be repe…
The goal of having computers automatically solve problems is central to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the broad area encompassed by what Turing called “machine intelligence” (Turing, 1948). Machine learning pioneer Arthur Samuel, in his 1983 talk entitled “AI: Where It Has Been and Where It Is Going” (Samuel, 1983), stated that the main goal of the fields of machine l…
e purpose of this study book is to review all issues of R&D project management with the focus on duality R&D activities and adapt the project management technics to the best needs of R&D management.
Global competition encourages companies to seek for a more innovative way to survive. More and more complex R&D-based activities are introduced and the managerial approach is extremely important, while R&D by its nature requires special managerial attitude. However, as time and money-consuming activities, R&D activities are under high risk and uncertainty. Therefore, public and private par…
This book is written by an experienced application performance specialist for the benefit of those who would like to become specialists or have started working at application performance testing. Businesses in today’s world live and die by the performance of mission-critical software applications. Sadly, many applications are deployed without being adequately tested for scalability and perfo…
Initially, the notion of a business case for cloud computing seemed almost redun- dant. It seemed to me that the cost savings associated with cloud computing were self-evident and therefore no further explanation was needed. Based on my conver- sations with people in the industry—consumers, providers, and manufacturers of IT goods and services—cloud adoption appeared to be a foregone conclu…
Accounting knowledge is a core business skill that both complements and enhances your other talents. Individuals promoted to management or supervisory roles from either line or staff jobs find that many of their new responsibilities involve knowing something about accounting. Congratulations on your promotion! You’ve come to the right place to start developing those accounting skills. If you …
Accounting knowledge is a core business skill that both complements and enhances your other talents. Individuals promoted to management or supervisory roles from either line or staff jobs find that many of their new responsibilities involve knowing something about accounting. Congratulations on your promotion! You’ve come to the right place to start developing those accounting skills. If you …