In the decade and a half since Napster first emerged, forever changing the face of digital culture, the claim that "internet pirates killed the music industry" has become so ubiquitous that it is treated as common knowledge. Piracy is a scourge on legitimate businesses and hard-working artists, we are told, a "cybercrime" simila...
Developing web apps can be made more difficult by the fact that they do not easily or natively run in desktop environments. This can make a variety of development skills useless, reducing the amount of expertise even the best developers can bring to a project and increasing the workload for producing cross-platform apps. But with the Electron frame...
Azure Functions is a new service available in Microsoft Azure to help developers run code on serverless architectures. In essence, Azure Functions is about events and code - developers write some code that will be executed upon some triggering event - but what sets Azure Functions apart is its simplicity. Developers can write just the code they nee...
Today we are witnessing an increased use of data visualization in society. Across domains such as work, education and the news, various forms of graphs, charts and maps are used to explain, convince and tell stories. In an era in which more and more data are produced and circulated digitally, and digital tools make visualization production increasi...
he World Wide Web has now been in use for more than 20 years. From early browsers to today's principal source of information, entertainment and much else, the Web is an integral part of our daily lives, to the extent that some people believe 'if it's not online, it doesn't exist.' While this statement is not entirely true, ...
Conferences, meet-ups, and user groups are an enormous part of both cultivating a developer community and continuing education in the industry. The stars of such events aren't the free food or the giveaways - they're the speakers, the ones who effectively and efficiently communicate something of value to attendees. In Public Speaking for ...
Video games are a massive market, but reaching an audience requires supporting many platforms. MonoGame offers a near-complete implementation of XNA 4 that makes it possible to develop games for iOS, Android, Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. In MonoGame Succinctly, author Jim Perry offers an introduction to M...
TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks.
This book is a somewhat intermediate-level introduction to Tensorflow 2. We will eventually cover everything tf.keras, but no so fast until we implemented t...
If you love being involved in theatre and you're also searching for opportunities to make a positive difference in your community, this workbook was written for you. You may think that theatre and all the other things you are passionate about represent different directions in your life, but they don't have to be separate. They can converg...
The purpose of this book is to shed light on the performance and personal competencies of information technology (IT) project managers in South Africa. Predictive models are built to determine what project managers consider the crucial competencies they should possess to deliver an IT project successfully. This investigation takes place in the cont...
The Internet Myth retraces and challenges the myth laying at the foundations of the network ideologies - the idea that networks, by themselves, are the main agents of social, economic, political and cultural change. By comparing and integrating different sources related to network histories, this book emphasizes how a dominant narrative has extensi...
Since the growth of social media, human communication has become much more visual. This book presents a scholarly analysis of the images people post on a regular basis to Facebook. By including hundreds of examples, readers can see for themselves the differences between postings from a village north of London, and those from a small town in Trinida...
Historians often assume a one-directional transmission of knowledge and ideas, leading to the establishment of spatial hierarchies defined as centres and peripheries. In recent decades, transnational and global history have contributed to a more inclusive understanding of intellectual and cultural exchanges that profoundly challenged the ways in wh...
Brexit will have significant consequences for the country, for Europe, and for global order. And yet much discussion of Brexit in the UK has focused on the causes of the vote and on its consequences for the future of British politics. This volume examines the consequences of Brexit for the future of Europe and the European Union, adopting an explic...
There's a lot of outdated information on the Web that leads new PHP users astray, propagating bad practices and insecure code. PHP: The Right Way is an easy-to-read, quick reference for PHP popular coding standards, links to authoritative tutorials around the Web and what the contributors consider to be best practices at the present time.
T...
This book is based on the MOOC Responsible Innovation offered by the TU Delft. It provides a framework to reflect on the ethics and risks of new technologies. How can we make sure that innovations do justice to social and ethical values? How can we minimize (unknown) risks?
The book explains:
- The concept and importance of responsible innovati...
Cloud applications have a unique set of characteristics. They run on commodity hardware, provide services to untrusted users, and deal with unpredictable workloads. These factors impose a range of problems that you, as a designer or developer, need to resolve. Your applications must be resilient so that they can recover from failures, secure to pro...
The Python Notes for Professionals book is compiled from Stack Overflow Documentation, the content is written by the beautiful people at Stack Overflow....
Games are increasingly becoming the focus for research due to their cultural and economic impact on modern society. However, there are many different types of approaches and methods than can be applied to understanding games or those that play games. This book provides an introduction to various game research methods that are useful to students in ...
Given the increasing attention to managing, publishing, and preserving research datasets as scholarly assets, what competencies in working with research data will graduate students in STEM disciplines need to be successful in their fields? And what role can librarians play in helping students attain these competencies? In addressing these questions...
Software developers work rhetorically to make meaning through the code they write. In some ways, writing code is like any other form of communication; in others, it proves to be new, exciting, and unique. In Rhetorical Code Studies, Kevin Brock explores how software code serves as meaningful communication through which software developers construct...
Most creative writing textbooks cover the three popular categories of literature: poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. This textbook is different in two ways, then, because not only does it attempt to cover more genres.
Creative writing is a massive and inexact field. Telling stories by ways of poetry, short stories, novels, and other media can be c...
This book takes a single line of code - the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title - and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture. The authors of this collaboratively written book treat code not as merely functional but as a t...
The technology of mechanized program verification can play a supporting role in many kinds of research projects in computer science, and related tools for formal proof-checking are seeing increasing adoption in mathematics and engineering. This book provides an introduction to the Coq software for writing and checking mathematical proofs. It takes ...
This book is a collection of short interviews with 14 prominent individuals from different parts of the world, from Australia to Canada, and of different occupations, from low-level programmers to physicists and musicians, asking them a more-or-less similar set of questions on the following topics: their general attitude to programming, attitude to...
Even connecting a few programs across a few sockets is plain nasty when you start to handle real life situations. Trillions? The cost would be unimaginable. Connecting computers is so difficult that software and services to do this is a multi-billion dollar business. So today we're still connecting applications using raw UDP and TCP, proprieta...
Illicit financial flows constitute a global phenomenon of massive but uncertain scale, which erodes government revenues and drives corruption in countries rich and poor. In 2015, the countries of the world committed to a target to reduce illicit flows, as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. But five years later, there is still no agreemen...
This text is a practical guide for linguists, and programmers, who work with data in multilingual computational environments. We introduce the basic concepts needed to understand how writing systems and character encodings function, and how they work together at the intersection between the Unicode Standard and the International Phonetic Alphabet. ...
Java is a high-level, cross-platform, object-oriented programming language that allows applications to be written once and run on a multitude of different devices. Java applications are ubiquitous, and the language is consistently ranked as one of the most popular and dominant in the world. Christopher Rose's Java Succinctly Part 1 describes t...
The Coder's Apprentice is a course book, written by Pieter Spronck, that is aimed at teaching Python 3 to students and teenagers who are completely new to programming. Contrary to many of the other books that teach Python programming, this book assumes no previous knowledge of programming on the part of the students, and contains numerous exer...
Researchers and practitioners from within the continent explore why Africa is so vulnerable to disease, and show how this vulnerability is closely linked to political and economic factors. They demonstrate how these same factors determine the way epidemics are treated.
Authors extract lessons from case studies in different parts of Africa; chall...
PicoLisp Works is a compilation of (almost) all available information about the technological gem PicoLisp - a programming language and environment that definitely deserves wider attention.
Built on the unique characteristics of Lisp (almost no syntax, code is equivalent to data), PicoLisp combines powerful abstractions with simplicity and purit...