Ruby inherits characteristics from various languages—Lisp, Smalltalk, C, and Perl, to name a few. Metaprogramming comes from Lisp (and Smalltalk). It’s a bit like magic, which makes something astonishing possible. There are two kinds of magic: white magic, which does good things, and black magic, which can do nasty things. Likewise,...

The academic literature commonly examines issues relating to bank behavior, market structure, or bank regulation by abstracting from interrelationships among these factors. From a policy perspective, however, these elements of the industrial organization of banking are inextricably linked. The goal of this book is to provide a complete overview,...

Object-Oriented Behavioral Specifications encourages builders of complex information systems to accelerate their move to using the approach of a scientific discipline in analysis rather than the approach of a craft. The focus is on understanding customers' needs and on precise specification of understanding gained through analysis....

Jews and Judaism in Modern China explores and compares the dynamics at work in two of the oldest, intact and starkly contrasting civilizations on earth; Jewish and Chinese. The book studies how they interact in modernity and how each civilization views the other, and analyses areas of cooperation between scholars, activists and...

“This book should be in every trader/investor’s library. As we come out of this depressed market . . . this book can be your companion, helping you avoid mistakes and enhance your trading/investment program.”
—Bill M. Williams,...

A continually evolving discipline, Human Reliability Assessment (HRA) has elements of controversy from the definition of terms to the application of appropriate methods for the representation of human failure probability. The idea that human error is a random event is falling out of favor and the concept that humans can be set up to fail or...

There is perhaps no more compelling discipline in the behavioral and brain sciences today than cognitive neuroscience. This book provides a systematic examination of the cognitive neuroscience of attention, taking as its thesis that attention is not a unitary function of the brain. To fully understand attention, therefore, requires examination...

Over the last several years, fiscal discipline has really dominated the industry. Both consumers and businesses expect far more from their communications providers than they did just a few years ago. Offering simple telephone dial tone and an Internet connection are not going to be enough for success. At the same time, however, service providers...

As future generation information technology (FGIT) becomes specialized and fragmented, it is easy to lose sight that many topics in FGIT have common threads and, because of this, advances in one discipline may be transmitted to others. Presentation of recent results obtained in different disciplines encourages this interchange for the...

Joomla! is a content management system designed to organize and deliver content within a web site environment. Multimedia provides us with stunning interactive user experiences and wonderful design options, but it requires discipline and knowledge to utilize it effectively so that we do not alienate our audiences. If you want to display more...

Prepared under the auspices of the Optical Society of America, the five carefully architected and cross-referenced volumes of the Handbook of Optics, Third Edition, contain everything a student, scientist, or engineer requires to actively work in the field. From the...

Prepared under the auspices of the Optical Society of America, the five carefully architected and cross-referenced volumes of the Handbook of Optics, Third Edition, contain everything a student, scientist, or engineer requires to actively work in the field. From the...