Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the definite goal of understanding intelligence and building intelligent systems. However, the methods and formalisms used on the way to this goal are not firmly set, which has resulted in AI consisting of a multitude of subdisciplines today. The difficulty in an introductory AI course lies in conveying...

Before starting a new task, you generally do research so you can avoid mistakes. In the computer realm, bootstrap sessions provide a head start and help you minimize mistakes and surprises. As an example, to design a protocol stack, build a bootstrap session so you can understand the protocol specification and the system on which it...

With more and more images and videos being available in the compressed format, researchers have started taking interest in the aspect of designing algorithms for different image operations directly in their domains of representation. This would not only avoid the inverse and forward transformation steps and potentially make the...

This book sprang from years of delivering the Marakana Android Bootcamp training class to thousands of software developers at some of the largest mobile companies located on four continents around the world. Teaching this class, over time I saw what works and what doesn’t. This book is a distilled version of the Android Bootcamp...

This book is designed to give the reader a practical introduction to fluid simulation for graphics. The field of fluid dynamics, even just in animation, is vast and so not every topic will be covered, and many wonderful papers will sadly be passed over in the hope of distilling the essentials; this is far from a thorough survey. The...

Color is one of the most fascinating areas to study. Color forms an integral part of nature, and we humans are exposed to it every day. We all have an intuitive understanding of what color is, but by studying the underlying physics, chemistry, optics, and human visual perception, the true beauty and complexity of color can be...

Five years ago, we authored “Text Mining: Predictive Methods for Analyzing Unstructured Information.” That book was geared mostly to professional practitioners, but was adaptable to course work with some effort by the instructor. Many topics were evolving, and this was one of the earliest efforts to collect material for predictive...

Moodle is becoming increasingly popular in schools worldwide due to its ease of use and flexibility. Science is the perfect subject to benefit from the features of Moodle as students will find it the easiest to learn with the help of interactive content, rather than reading textbooks. This book will teach you how to create quizzes, start...

Imagine this scenario: You create a hunter character with random stats and hit points and enter the dungeon to begin exploring for treasure. You stumble upon a zombie pacing near a pile of gear and gold! You attack the zombie and it strikes back! You roll 1D20 and score a critical hit! The 20 point die plus dexterity, against the...

Ever since the late 1990s when Java servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSPs) came into widespread use, web site developers have been switching from CGI scripting languages to servlets and JSPs. As a result, there has been tremendous growth in the use of servlets and JSPs. Today, there's little doubt that scrvlet and JSP technology is here to...

MATLAB is an abbreviation for MATrix LABoratory and it is ideally suited for computations involving matrices. Since all of the sciences routinely collect data in the form of (spreadsheet) matrices, MATLAB turns out to be particularly suitable for the analysis of mathematical problems in an assortment of fields. MATLAB is very easy to...

The Windows Presentation Framework (WPF), Silverlight, and Windows Phone 7 are the latest technologies for building flexible user interfaces (UI) for applications built with Microsoft technology. All three rely on the XAML markup language to describe UI elements and layout, and you can program applications for all three platforms with...