The computer ushers us into the information age. Born a mere fifty years ago, it now exerts a profound influence on almost every facet of our lives. What is the nature of this machine? How does it work inside? How is it programmed internally? What are the nature of its connections to the outside world? These are the questions that this book...

The software industry has evolved to tackle new approaches aligned with the Internet, object-orientation, distributed components and new platforms. However, the majority of the large information systems running today in many organizations were developed many years ago with technologies that are now obsolete. These old systems, known as legacy...

Oracle RAC or Real Application Clusters is a grid computing solution that allows multiple nodes (servers) in a clustered system to mount and open a single database that resides on shared disk storage. Should a single system (node) fail, the database service will still be available on the remaining nodes. Oracle RAC is an integral part of the...

One of the most important things an architect can do is reflection. That is, examine systems, organizations, people and ask “What alternatives were considered and why was that particular decision made?” Thinking about the response gives an architect insight into the motivations and decision processes that others have used...

FASE (Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering) is concerned with the foundations on which software engineering is built. Its focus is on novel techniques and the way in which they contribute to making software engineering a more mature and soundly based discipline. This year, we particularly encouraged contributions that combine the...

What you are holding in your hands is the first Revit book in a new series. When we authors first sat down to learn Revit (eons ago), each of us was put into a room with a trainer, and over the course of four days, we clicked...

People often ask me why I chose to publish this work. Primarily, this book was motivated by my experience in industry after having been in the academic world for many years. We often hear about the need to bridge the gap between industry and academia, but one can easily intellectually understand something without having experienced it...

This book began when I was assigned to help salvage an undergraduate computer organization course. The course had suffered years of neglect: it had been taught by a series of professors, mostly visitors, who had little or no interest or background in digital hardware, and the curriculum had deteriorated to a potpourri of topics that...

Advances in signal and image processing together with increasing computing power are bringing mobile technology closer to applications in a variety of domains like automotive, health, telecommunication, multimedia, entertainment and many others. The development of these leading applications, involving a large diversity of algorithms...

Harry Grinnell, who was co-author James Coplien’s grandfather, was a life-long postal worker, but many of his life’s accomplishments can be found in his avocations. His father was an alcoholic and his mother a long-suffering religious woman. Grandpa Harry dropped out of school after eighth year to take a job in a coal yard...