The success of a learning endeavor rests on several factors, including the complexity of the material and the level of direct involvement on the part of the student. It takes more than passive attendance at a lecture to learn most complex subjects. To truly learn and understand all of the elements of a complex issue requires exploration...

This landmark volume represents the culmination of over 40 years of research in the use of logic as a basis for representing and manipulating problems in the field of artificial intelligence. The use of logic as a basis for commonsense reasoning was started by John McCarthy in 1959. The collection consists of both original research and...

We expect our readers to already understand basic programming concepts, and many...

Soft computing, as a collection of techniques exploiting approximation and tolerance for imprecision and uncertainty in traditionally intractable problems, has become very effective and popular especially because of the synergy derived from its components. The integration of constituent technologies provides complementary methods that allow...

I was first exposed to what would become the Internet way back in 1969, while I was still an undergraduate at Brandeis University working on ARPANet, the forerunner to the present Internet, which operated at the then blazing speed of 2,400 bps, ultimately increased to 50 Kbps (see http://www.computerhistory.org/internet_history/). I...

Since its release, Spring Framework has transformed virtually every aspect of Java development including web applications, security, aspect-oriented programming, persistence, and messaging. Spring Batch, one of its newer additions, now brings the same familiar Spring idioms to batch processing. Spring Batch addresses the needs of any batch...

I first began developing social applications when Facebook opened up its developer platform in 2007, giving people like me a taste of the extensive social data that an application can use to improve growth and target personalization settings. At the time, I was building social fantasy sports applications for CBSSports.com, pulling user...

Programming is a fascinating and challenging subject. Unfortunately, it is rarely presented as such. Most often it is taught by "induction": features of some famous programming languages are given operational meaning (e.g. a loop "goes round and round"), a number of examples are shown, and by induction, we are asked to...

In developing the New Perspectives Series, our goal was to create books that give...

Written in a cookbook style, this book offers solutions using a recipe-based approach. Each recipe contains step-by-step instructions followed by an analysis of what was done in each task and other useful information. This Cookbook is targeted towards those with at least a basic understanding of the Flash Builder IDE and the Flex framework....

One day,Erica and her husband took the kids out for ice cream, and she noticed a big advertisement hanging above the counter. It said, “Bring in your digital photographs. We’ll put them on ice cream cakes.” She found the manager and asked what was involved. “It’s simple,” she said. “Just bring...

In developing the New Perspectives Series, our goal was to create books that give students the software...