Well, it’s been a wild ride since the first edition of this book was released. At that time, PowerShell had just shipped and had a fairly limited scope of influence. Things have changed a lot. PowerShell now ships in the box with Windows (at least Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2). The number of PowerShell users is now in the hundreds...

This has been a very long journey. We found that writing this book was a challenging task, a much harder one than we had anticipated, but there were also moments of joy and discovery along the way! The idea for the book first came to us 18 months ago, and many days and nights have come and gone between the first sentence we wrote and...

Good system administrators recognize problems long before anyone asks, "Hey, is the Internet down?" Nagios, an open source system and network monitoring tool, has emerged as the most popular solution for sys admins in organizations of all sizes. It's robust but also complex, and Nagios: System and Network Monitoring, 2nd...

As you study Spanish, you can choose to approach it as an art form or as a...

One of the most challenging tasks in today’s business and information technology (IT) environments is to communicate a solution to an organizational problem in a simple manner that can be easily understood by business and IT personnel alike. Is it also arduous to explain in simple words how a remedy to an enterprise concern can be...

Think of all the popular data visualization works out there—the ones that you always hear in lectures or read about in blogs, and the ones that popped into your head as you were reading this sentence. What do they all have in common? They all tell an interesting story. Maybe the story was to convince you of something. Maybe it was to...

Grid Computing was a vision of using and sharing computers and data in the early 1990s. The integration, coordination, and sharing of computer resources which are geographically disperse among different physical domains and organizations became an every day reality. This emerging infrastructure aims to provide a mechanism for sharing...

The use of symbol sequences to study dynamical systems originates in the work of Kocbe [Koc27, Koe29] and Morse [Mor87j, who both used symbol saliences to code geodesies on a...

But respect, fame, and money aren't the only reasons for writing a...

When I first discovered DMVs, I was enthralled because they made many difficult things so easy. It was simple to identify, typically within seconds, the core performance problems that affect SQL Server databases. For example, I could quickly discover which queries were taking the longest time to run, which indexes were missing, and...

Event-based distributed systems are playing an ever increasing role in areas such as enterprise management, information dissemination, finance, environmental monitoring and geo-spatial systems. Event-based processing originated with the introduction of Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules to database systems in the 1980s. Since then,...