Ready to give your design skills a real boost? This eye-opening book helps you explore the design structure behind most of today’s hit video games. You’ll learn principles and practices for crafting games that generate emotionally charged experiences—a combination of elegant game mechanics, compelling fiction, and...

Automating repetitive programming tasks is easier than many Flash/AS3 developers think. With the Ant build tool, the Eclipse IDE, and this concise guide, you can set up your own "ultimate development machine" to code, compile, debug, and deploy projects faster. You’ll also get started with versioning systems, such as...

Building distributed applications is difficult enough without having to coordinate the actions that make them work. This practical guide shows how Apache ZooKeeper helps you manage distributed systems, so you can focus mainly on application logic. Even with ZooKeeper, implementing coordination tasks is not trivial, but this...

"Great for beginners -- even if you don't know object-oriented programming, you can learn from examples on the 'Net and be on your way very soon. You will be able to confidently build apps that rival the ones included by Apple itself."-- Josh Content, iPhone Developer

Developers everywhere are...

Take advantage of JavaScript’s power to build robust web-scale or enterprise applications that are easy to extend and maintain. By applying the design patterns outlined in this practical book, experienced JavaScript developers will learn how to write flexible and resilient code that’s easier—yes, easier—to...

When processing text files, the awk language is ideal for handling data extraction, reporting, and data-reformatting jobs. This practical guide serves as both a reference and tutorial for POSIX-standard awk and for the GNU implementation, called gawk. This book is useful for novices and awk experts...

Today’s highly interactive websites pose a challenge for traditional SQL databases—the ability to scale rapidly and serve loads of concurrent users. With this concise guide, you’ll learn how to build web applications on top of Couchbase Server 2.0, a NoSQL database that can handle websites and social media where...

Microsoft's MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) program is a rigorous testing and certification program for Windows NT system and network administrators. To achieve certification, one must pass four required exams and two elective exams. Close to twenty potential elective exams exist, although only nine of them are...

If you’re an experienced PHP developer, you already have a head start on learning how to write Node.js code. In this book, author Daniel Howard demonstrates the remarkable similarities between the two languages, and shows you how to port your entire PHP web application to Node.js. By comparing specific PHP features with their...

Once a little-known productivity boost for personal computers, Linux is now becoming a central part of computing environments everywhere. This operating system now serves as corporate hubs, Web servers, academic research platforms, and program development systems. All along it's also managed to keep its original role as an...