This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2016, held in Edinburgh, UK, in May 2016.While agile development has already become mainstream in industry, this field is still constantly evolving and continues to spur an enormous interest both in industry and academia. To this end, ...
Sustainability imposes an unprecedented challenge on society and has become the driving force of an urgent search for innovative solutions in all branches of economy. Manufacturing plays a key role in many areas of human living, and it is both part of the problem and of the solution. This book offers an overview of the broad field of research on s...
This open access monograph argues established democratic norms for freedom of expression should be implemented on the internet. Moderating policies of tech companies as Facebook, Twitter and Google have resulted in posts being removed on an industrial scale. While this moderation is often encouraged by governments - on the pretext that terrorism, b...
This free book examines the triangle between family, gender, and health in Europe from a demographic perspective. It helps to understand patterns and trends in each of the three components separately, as well as their interdependencies. It overcomes the widely observable specialization in demographic research, which usually involves researchers stu...
This open access book provides an alternative theoretical framework of irregular migration that allows to overcome many of the contradictions and theoretical impasses displayed by the majority of approaches in current literature. The analytical framework allows moving from an interpretation biased by methodological nationalism, to a more general sy...
This open access textbook welcomes students into the fundamental theory of measure, integration, and real analysis. Focusing on an accessible approach, Axler lays the foundations for further study by promoting a deep understanding of key results. Content is carefully curated to suit a single course, or two-semester sequence of courses, creating a v...
If you're a student studying computer science or a software developer preparing for technical interviews, this practical book will help you learn and review some of the most important ideas in software engineering - data structures and algorithms - in a way that's clearer, more concise, and more engaging than other materials.
By emphas...
There could be no more opportune time than the start of the third millennium AD to produce an entirely new atlas of world history. Not only does this symbolic (if arbitrary) moment provoke a mood of public retrospection, but the pace of global change itself demands a greater awareness of "whole world" history.
More than 20 years have p...
Containing ballads of martial heroism, tales of tragic lovers and visions of the nature of the world, Long Narrative Songs from the Mongghul of Northeast Tibet: Texts in Mongghul, Chinese, and English is a rich repository of songs collected amongst the Mongghul of the Seven Valleys, on the northeast Tibetan Plateau in western China. These songs rep...
Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) are a significant and valuable addition to the DBA's troubleshooting armory, laying bare previously unavailable information regarding the under-the-covers activity of your database sessions and transactions.
Why, then, aren't all DBAs using them? Why do many DBAs continue to ignore them in favour of &quo...
Resilient T-SQL code is code that is designed to last, and to be safely reused by others. The goal of defensive database programming, the goal of this book, is to help you to produce resilient T-SQL code that robustly and gracefully handles cases of unintended use, and is resilient to common changes to the database environment.
Too often as deve...
The next frontier for wireless LANs is 802.11ac, a standard that increases throughput beyond one gigabit per second. This concise guide provides in-depth information to help you plan for 802.11ac, with technical details on design, network operations, deployment, and monitoring.
Author Matthew Gast - an industry expert who led the development of ...
The mission of the first edition of this book was to introduce the anykernel and rump kernels and motivate their existence. Additionally, we explored the characteristics of the technology through various experiments. The paramount, often criminally overlooked experiment was the one hiding in plain sight: is it possible to construct the system in a ...
I've already accepted the fact that Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) is a business trend that's here to stay. According to one report I recently read, just 23 percent of enterprise employees use company-sanctioned mobile devices only - meaning 77 percent of employees are using their own devices in some capacity to do their job. 1 As the Chief...
This book is about digital games, the people who play digital games, and how they play them. This poses a large problem: even when discussing one game, each instance of play is different. Combine this with the thousands of digital games, and the millions of players, and it is apparent that the number of individual instances of game play is unfathom...
This project was initiated in 2009 with the aim to spread knowledge about mobile technologies and encourage people to enter our community or deepen their existing knowledge.
More than twenty writers from the mobile community share their know-how in dealing with topics such as accessibility in mobile apps, UX design, mobile analytics, prototyping...
Organized, authored, and edited over the course of five months by a class of eighteen Virginia Tech undergraduate students, Welcome to the Beatles represents their collective contribution to the larger scholarship on the most important band in rock history. The chapters build upon the work of noted author and historian Mark Lewisohn and take into a...
An Introduction to Computer Networks, a free and open general-purpose computer-networking free book, complete with diagrams and exercises. It covers the LAN, internetworking and transport layers, focusing primarily on TCP/IP. Particular attention is paid to congestion; other special topics include queuing, real-time traffic, network management, sec...
This free book, or really a "coursebook" for a college freshman-level class, has been updated for Spring 2014 and provides an introduction to programming and problem solving using both Matlab and Mathcad. We provide a balanced selection of introductory exercises and real-world problems (i.e. no "contrived" problems). We include ...
Microsoft Press is pleased to offer the second edition of Kraig Brockschmidt's in-depth ebook on writing Windows Store apps using HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript on the Windows 8.1 platform. The ebook includes 20 chapters and 4 appendices....
In this book, you'll discover how to perform each of these backup and restore operations using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), basic T-SQL scripts and Redgate's SQL Backup tool. Capturing backups using SSMS or simple scripts is perfectly fine for one-off backup operations, but any backups that form part of the recovery strategy for a...
If you've designed your SQL code intelligently and implemented a sensible indexing strategy, there's a good chance your queries will "fly", when tested in isolation. In the real world, however, where multiple processes can access the same data at the same time, SQL Server often has to make one process wait, sacrificing concurren...
The Little Book of Semaphores is a free textbook that introduces the principles of synchronization for concurrent programming.
In most computer science curricula, synchronization is a module in an Operating Systems class. OS textbooks present a standard set of problems with a standard set of solutions, but most students don't get a good und...
This open book shows you how to set up a Raspberry Pi to play classic games, and a whole lot more. Build your own portable console, full-size arcade cabinet, and pinball machine with our step-by-step guides. And learn how to program your own games, using Python and Pygame Zero.
- Set up your Raspberry Pi for retro gaming
- Emulate classic computers...
Read the tips and tricks that top developers from the .NET and SQL Server communities use to boost code and query performance in their applications.
50 tips from the .NET and SQL Server communities for boosting performance in your .NET application; Learn the secrets of your fellow developers and read advice from MVPs and other experts; Covers pe...
Read the tips and tricks recommended by some of the smartest minds in the ASP.NET community.
25 tips from the ASP.NET community for boosting performance in your web applications; Learn the secrets of your fellow developers and read advice from MVPs and other experts; Covers async/await, Web API, ORMs, interactions between your code and your data...
This book is an outcome of the EU's Horizon 2020 project 'Financial and Institutional Reforms for an Entrepreneurial Society' (FIRES). Building on historical, economic and legal analysis, and combining methods and data across disciplines, the authors provide policymakers, stakeholders and scholars with valuable new tools for assessin...
This comprehensive textbook describes the synthesis, characterization and technical and engineering applications of polymers. Offering a broad and balanced introduction to the basic concepts of macromolecular chemistry and to the synthesis and physical chemistry of polymers, it is the ideal text for graduate students and advanced Masters students s...
This book has been designed for a first course on digital design for engineering and computer science students. It offers an extensive introduction on fundamental theories, from Boolean algebra and binary arithmetic to sequential networks and finite state machines, together with the essential tools to design and simulate systems composed of a contr...
This book focuses on the fundamentals of plant physiology for undergraduate and graduate students. It consists of 34 chapters divided into five major units. Unit I discusses the unique mechanisms of water and ion transport, while Unit II describes the various metabolic events essential for plant development that result from plants’ ability to cap...
This book provides a global, chronological mapping of significant areas of theatre, sketched from its deepest history in the evolution of our brain's 'inner theatre' to ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern developments. It considers prehistoric cave art and built temples, African trance dances, ancient Egyptian and Middle-Easter...
This book deals with one the most interesting aspects of human life - the search for meaning. It discusses how the science of semiotics is equipped to provide insight on what meaning is and how we produce it. Why is it that certain people routinely put their survival at risk by smoking? Why is it that some women make locomotion difficult for themse...