Animation as both an art form and popular entertainment has existed for almost a century now. The early attempts were received enthusiastically more for their novelty than for the quality of their craft. That even holds true today: animated movies often make it through the studio process not because of their true entertainment value,...

Themes are among the most powerful and flexible features available when it comes to the presentation of a website. The greatest strength of Drupal lies in its design, which, when done correctly, allows developers and designers to customize and micromanage each and every aspect of the site. Furthermore, the Drupal theming system and its...

PHP has changed the world: no other language has influenced and spurred web development so strongly. From simple home pages to social software and business applications to the largest global websites, PHP has played a leading role for years. Simultaneously, Microsoft and its Windows operating system has made computers available to all...

This book addresses the fundamentals of communications systems and networks, providing models and analytical methods for evaluating their performance. It is divided into ten chapters, which are the result of a joint effort by the authors and contributors. The authors and the contributors have a long history of collaboration, both in...

While books and journals of high quality have proliferated in discrete and compu- tational geometry during recent years, there has been to date no single reference work fully accessible to the nonspecialist as well as to the specialist, covering all the major aspects of both fields. The Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry...

This is an unconventional book for an unconventional reader. It is intended for those professionals who, in addition to their specialized knowledge, would like to get a handle on life so they may put their special text into its proper context. It speaks to those thinkers and practitioners who have come to realize that learning to be...

From its inception in the 1930s, the rich and vigorous field of computer science has been concerned with the resources, both in time and in memory, needed to carry out a computation. A number of fundamental theorems were discovered that resorted to a worst-case analysis. The central question was whether a given algorithm could be...

This earliest recorded attempt to regulate the engineering profession reminds us, in the bluntest way possible, that the paramount purpose of engineering and engineering design is to serve the user. One would assume that the engineer’s responsibility to users is so self evident that it goes without saying. Various professional...

You may know When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth as a goofy humans-coexisting-withdinosaurs movie from the 1970s. However, in technology circles, “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” refers to a grim humans-coexisting-with-mainframes story from the 1970s. I refer, of course, to IBM and its brontosaurus-size computers (called...

Moodle is the leading open source learning management system. Using Moodle, teachers can easily construct richly-textured web-based courses. A course can consist of a number of lessons, with each lesson including reading materials; activities such as quizzes, tests, surveys, and projects; and social elements that encourage interaction and...