There was a time when people believed that the stars were bonfires lit by other tribes in the sky, that the universe was a flat plate resting on the shell of a giant turtle, and that the Earth, according to the Greek astronomer Ptolemy, was at the center of the universe. From the most remote of times, people have been curious...

The Foundry’s Nuke is fast becoming the industry leader in compositing software for film and TV. Virtually all the leading visual effects studios—ILM, Digital Domain, Weta Digital, MPC, Framestore, The Mill, and Sony Pictures Imageworks—now use Nuke as their main compositing tool. This is not surprising, as Nuke offers...

Welcome to Computer Science Made Simple, a novice’s guide to one of the most important fields today. I wrote this book with several kinds of readers in mind. For the person curious about how computers work and what the computer terms used in magazine advertisements mean, this book will provide the answers. For those considering...

Google's Android operating system for phones is definitely a moving target. During the production of this book's first version, the latest Android version available on a cutting-edge phone jumped from 1.6 to 2.2. In that time, too, phones made by HTC and Motorola became exceedingly popular, and modified versions of the Android...

It is appropriate that I first acknowledge my appreciation to Professor Leo Grigsby for inviting me to prepare the chapter on power transformers for the first edition (2001) of his now very popular Electric Power Engineering Handbook. From this evolved the recognition that two chapters from the 2001 Handbook, those for (1) substations...

When Android was first introduced by Google and the Open Handset Alliance, my first thought was of how awesome it would be to have a free open-source application environment for the growing smart phone revolution. The harsh reality hit when I tried to apply my rusty programming skills to the Java and Android software development kit (SDK)....

In response to the success of the first edition of Foundation Game Design with Flash, Rex van der Spuy has revised and updated all the code to meet current programming best practices, and the focus is now on accurate ActionScript 3.0, regardless of the IDE that you use.

We’ve all sneaked the...

A new novel from Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist. A stranger arrives in the small mountain village. He carries with him a backpack containing a notebook and eleven gold bars. Burying these in the vicinity, the stranger strikes up a curious friendship with a young woman from the village -- Miss Prym. His mission is to discover whether...