When I was in college, I worked on the Alice project, run by Randy Pausch of “Last Lecture” fame. Alice was a system for virtual reality and 3D graphics—working on it got me the few cool points I had in college. However, the primary goal of Randy’s project had nothing to do with virtual reality or being cool. It was all about making computer programming easy. Randy wanted high school ki…
My background is in Java from back before it was even called that. From the beginning, I was very interested in embedded development as a way to program various devices that surround us in everyday life. Because Java primarily took off in web application development, most of my experience in the previous decade has been in building large enterprise systems. Then Android arrived, and once again …
Imagine that you create a cool Rails web application that does different things for different users. To do so, your application needs to be able to identify users (at least users who are logged in versus anonymous visitors) to restrict its many functionalities. Before building your core Rails application logic, you will need a few authentication-related features working, that is, sign-up, sign-…
Executives and security technologists need a common understanding of web application security risks and how to find and fix them. This book provides common points of understanding to enable both groups to collaborate on building secure web application frameworks. The book translates with simplicity and brevity the technical world of threats, vulnerabilities, mitigation, prevention, and level o…
We hope that our text, Advanced Modelling in Finance, is conclusive proof that a wide range of models can now be successfully implemented using spreadsheets. The models range across the complete spectrum of finance including equities, equity options and bond options spanning developments from the early fifties to the late nineties. The models are implemented in Excel spreadsheets, complemen…
The above quote by Theodor Holm Nelson, the pioneer of information technology, states a deep interconnectedness among the myriad topics of this world. The biological systems are no exceptions, which comprise of a complex web of biomolec- ular interactions and regulation processes. In particular, the field of computational systems biology aims to arrive at a theory that reveals complicated inte…
This is where things start to get interesting, so hold on to your hats because we have a lot of ground to cover and only one chapter to do it in! This chapter will help you with both planning and installing your SolarWinds Orion NPM implementation by discussing its system requirements, Microsoft SQL Server configuration, and Windows Server configuration. By the end of this chapter, you will hav…
With this book, we've aimed to cover and resolve the typically common tasks when working with CakePHP. To do this, we collected the most popular questions from support websites around the Web on how to use certain features or perform common actions with the framework, and ranked them in order of frequency. We then proposed a solution for each of these; once this was done, we put together what …
In the summer of 2005, systems administrators and security researchers from all over the world gathered in Las Vegas, Nevada for Black Hat, one of the largest computer security conferences in the world. On the morning of the first day, Michael Lynn, one of the authors of this book, was scheduled to speak about vulnerabilities in Cisco routers. These vulnerabilities were serious: an attacker cou…
It was mid-January 2003. Things were going well in my role as a network engineer supporting data center networks at Cisco. My team celebrated on January 21 when our site vice president powered off the last Avaya PBX; the Research Triangle Park (RTP) campus telephony was now 100% VoIP. We had just completed several WAN circuit and hardware upgrades and were beginning to see the highest availabil…
This series is the result of a collaborative effort of several people and institutions. The contributions presented here consolidate the findings of the project ‘Comparative Study of the National Innovation Systems of BRICS’ sponsored by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). The project is rooted in a larger research effort on BRICS National Innovation Systems being develope…
Node.js and MongoDB are quickly becoming very popular tech stacks for the Web. Powered by Google's V8 engine, Node.js caters to easily building fast, scalable network applications while MongoDB is the perfect fit as a scalable, high-performance, open source NoSQL database solution. Using these two technologies together, web applications can be built quickly and easily and deployed to the clou…
If you’re in a security-based startup company, then you’ll know that making money requires making excitement, even if the excitement is somebody else’s public humiliation.
The evolution of the secure proxy is a reflection of the evolution of the web. The proxy began as a gateway that bridged content that was processed and managed by various information systems, and served that content to the open web dur- ing the early days of Internet web construction. The term web proxy server was given to this general intermediary to reflect its main duty at the time, namely, …
In this part of the book, you discover how to create a security plan that you can use when writing applications. Having a good security plan ensures that your application actually meets specific goals and that others can discuss how to implement security with the development team. Without a good security plan in place, hackers often find easy access to the application and cause all kinds of pro…
Like any development project, the ones in Hadoop start with proof of concept (POC). Especially because the technology is new and continuously evolving, the focus always begins with figuring out what it can offer and how to leverage it to solve different business problems, be it consumer analysis, breaking news processing, and so on. Being an open source framework, it has its own nuances and req…
Welcome to Joomla! If you’re new to content management systems or even new to building websites, this book will help you get up and running in no time. All you need is a basic understanding of HTML and CSS to create high-quality websites and powerful web applications. Whether you’re a web designer or an experienced devel- oper, this tome will help you get to know one of the most popular con…
This book is a starting point to meet the most important concepts and frameworks involved in modern web application production. Delivering a web application nowadays consists of building a complete development environment, starting with a proper design and its testing, and ending with an automated build process. Every chapter sequentially introduces a library or a tool as a specific building bl…
The Yii framework, hosted at http://www.yiiframework.com/, is a PHP-based application framework built around the Model-View-Controller composite pattern. It is suitable for building both web and console applications, but its feature set makes it most useful for web applications. It has several code generation facilities, including the full create-read-update-delete (CRUD) interface maker. It re…
REST is an architecture that uses the strengths of the Web to build services. It proposes a set of constraints that simplifies development and encourages more scalable designs. Developers (the majority of whom were outside the Microsoft world) began to adopt this set of architectural constraints shortly after it was proposed (although, to be fair, there were a few inside the Microsoft camp who …
If the APL community debated this topic, it would certainly be making the case for APL as a development tool. The decisive question is: Use APL exclusively or in conjunction with other tools? Whatever the merits, this would be a misplaced debate: the objective is to vindicate APL as a contemporary development tool, with or without other tools. The graphical user interface and a grid object are …
By its resolutions 39/79 and 39/88 of 13 December 1984, the General Assembly requested the Secretary-General to prepare, on the basis of the outline elaborated by the Special Committee on the Charter of the United Nations and on the Strengthening of the Role of the Organization and in the light of the views expressed in the course of the discussions in the Sixth Committee and in the Special Com…
Up until a few years ago, storage, computing, and network resources were intentionally kept physically and operationally separate from one another. Even the systems used to manage those resources were separated—often physically. Applications that interacted with any of these resources, such as an operational monitoring system, were also kept at arm’s length significantly involved access pol…
Deciding to add security to a web application is like deciding whether to wear clothes in the morning. Both decisions provide comfort and protection throughout the day, and in both cases the decisions are better made beforehand rather than later. Just look around and ask yourself, “How open do I really want to be with my neigh- bors?” Or, “How open do I really want them to be with me?” …
Welcome to Rootkits For Dummies, a book written for regular folks who need a better understanding of what rootkits are, what we can do to protect our computers and networks against them, and how to detect and remove them. Like Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes, you may be among those who know “nothing, nothing” at all about them. Even the name rootkit may be unfamiliar to you — but soo…
Software engineering is the only engineering discipline where product testing is a major technical and organizational concern, as well as an important cost factor. Several factors contribute to this state of affairs: • The first factor that makes software testing such a big concern is, of course, the size and complexity of software products, which make the design of software products a high-…