I had been playing the Ultima series of games by Richard Garriott since I was in high school, and I was a die-hard fan. Every game he published, I played all the way through, from Ultima I on the Apple ][ to Ultima V on the IBM PC. Ultima VI came out right as I graduated from college, and I noticed that the contact information for Origin...

In Henry Fielding’s great novel Tom Jones, the young hero and his friend Partridge go to see a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet—a play that had been around for less than 50 years at that point. Partridge, always opinionated and usually wrong, is not impressed by the actor playing Hamlet: “Why, I could act as well as...

This book is for users of Office 2010 who want to get to the heart of the program without wasting time. Don’t look in this book to find out how the different programs in the Office suite work. Look in this book to find out how you can get your work done better and faster with these programs. I show you everything you need to make the...

Project management probably started back when a few cave dwellers got together and figured out how to work as a team to bag a wooly mammoth for their Sunday dinner. Some fellow — I’ll call him Ogg — probably took the lead as the very first project manager. He drew things in the dirt with a stick to help his team members...

To build effective and attractive database-driven web sites, you need two things: a solid and fast framework to run your web pages on and a rich and extensive environment to create and program these web pages. With ASP.NET 4 and Visual Web Developer 2010 you get both. Together they form the platform to create dynamic and interactive web...

There is no question that the Web has become an integral part of modern life for people around the world, connecting us to each other and to seemingly infinite portals of information in real time. In the era of Web 2.0, barriers to participation have been lowered further and further, and we’ve seen the birth of myriad new people to...

Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plugin that enables features including animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback - features that characterize Rich Internet Applications. However, Silverlight is a great (and growing) Line-Of-Business platform and is increasingly being used to build data-driven business...

Controversy over the conduct and coordination of international trade policy has become a politically charged issue in current times. At the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle in 1999, groups from civil society went to the barricades to protest various facets of ‘globalization’. Similar spectacles have been...

With 100,000 copies sold, Graphic Design Cookbook is one of the most useful all-purpose resources for designers and anyone who wants to create a dynamic layout for magazines, newsletters, books, posters, and other media. Now released with a fresh new cover, its more than a thousand line drawings illustrate effective design devices, type...

Since its inception in 1876, the telephone has captured the imagination of people around the world. From its simple origins, the telephone has evolved from the humble device it once was to the modern cell phone or satellite phone. The telephone has fundamentally and instantaneously changed the human race’s ability to communicate over...

Imagine a windowless room in a nondescript office building. Inoffensive tan carpet lines the floors, fluorescent lights hum softly overhead, and 20 seated Microsoft employees flank a rectangular folding table in the center of...

This book presents contributions from a global selection of experts in the field. This useful text offers new insights and solutions for the development of theorems, algorithms and advanced methods for real-time applications across a range of disciplines. Written in an accessible style, the discussion of all applications is enhanced by the...