With their ability to cross traditional boundaries and achieve a level of functionality greater than their component elements, mega-systems have helped corporations and government organizations around the world resolve complex challenges that they otherwise couldn’t address with stand-alone systems. Engineering Mega-Systems: The...

AMPL is a language for large-scale optimization and mathematical programming problems in production, distribution, blending, scheduling, and many other applications. Combining familiar algebraic notation and a powerful interactive command environment, AMPL makes it easy to create models, use a wide variety of solvers, and examine solutions....

Need to launch a feature-rich website quickly where you have one or more people authoring the content? Want to use a powerful, robust, and scalable Content Management System (CMS) you can trust? This Short Cut will get you up and running with Joomla 1.5, a freely available open source CMS. Learn how to install, configure, customize, and...

Although vast activity exists, especially recent, the editors did not find any book that treats applied algorithms in a comprehensive manner. The editors discovered a number of graduate courses in computer science programs with titles such as “Design and Analysis of Algorithms, “Combinatorial Algorithms” “Evolutionary...

Object-oriented databases have been...

Now considered an essential reference in the game industry, 3D Game Engine Design is the first book to go beyond basic descriptions of algorithms and accurately demonstrate the complex engineering process required to design and build a real-time graphics engine to support physical realism. Faster algorithms will always win out over...

In its relatively short life, Drupal has had a tremendous impact on the landscape of the Internet. As a web content management system, Drupal has enabled the creation of feature- and content-rich web sites for organizations large and small. As a web application framework, Drupal is changing the way that people think about web application...

Once upon a time, Unix came with only a few standard utilities. If you were lucky, it included a C compiler. When setting up a new Unix system, you’d have to crawl the Net looking for important software: Perl, gcc, bison, flex, less, Emacs, and other utilities and languages. That was a lot of software to download through a 28.8-Kbps...

Electronic commerce has been an important and viable part of the Internet for well over a decade now. From the behemoths like Amazon.com to the mom-and-pop online stores, e-commerce is performed in a number of ways. Despite the dozen, or hundred, of failures for every single commercial success, e-commerce can still be an excellent business...