This volume contains the proceedings of the 17th International SPIN Workshop on Model Checking Software (SPIN 2010). The workshop was organized by and held at the University of Twente, The Netherlands, on 27–29 September 2010. The workshop was co-located with the 5th International Conference on Graph Transformation (ICGT 2010)...

When people speak of Ruby web development, it has historically been in reference to the opinionated juggernaut that is Rails. This is certainly not an unfounded association; Hulu, Yellow Pages, Twitter, and countless others have relied on Rails to power their (often massive) web presences, and Rails facilitates that process with zeal....

Many of us wish to create our own video games. For some, gaming is a hobby, and for others it is something fun to participate in casually. But for the rest of us, gaming and the dream of making our own games is more like a passion. Chances are, if you’ve purchased this book, you are looking to turn your desire and passion into...

Casino card games such as baccarat and blackjack differ significantly from casino games such as craps, roulette, and slot machines in that they are not indepen- dent trial processes-that is, the cards that already have been played do affect the odds on subsequent hands. Consider for a moment the game of blackjack, where the cards...

Iwhat has happened in that time. We have seen the transformation of the Web from a small experiment to a World Wide phenomenon. We have seen the emergence of voice over IP and peer-to-peer content sharing. We have seen technology speed up a hundred-fold, the emergence of broadband to the home, and the rise of botnets and other horrid...

Beautiful mathematical ideas abound in multimedia software! Some are not encountered until late in undergraduate or even postgraduate study, whereas they can be appreciated and used much earlier. This book presents a few dozen such pearls, strung together by their ubiquity in many applications. It is based on the course Topics in...

Anticipatory optimization for dynamic decision making relies on a number of different scientific disciplines. On a general level, the foundations of the field may be localized at the intersection of operations research, computer science and decision theory. Closer inspection reveals the important role of branches such as simulation,...

Michael’s current and former students often like to tell stories about their experience with Michael as...

Your encounters with GIS to date may be similar to those of a Martian arriving on Earth and being faced with a motor car. Imagine a Martian coming to Earth and stumbling across a motor car showroom. Very soon he (or she) has heard of a ‘car’ and may even have seen a few glossy brochures. Perhaps you are in the same...

The main purpose of statistical theory is to derive from observations of a random phenomenon an inference about the probability distribution underlying this phenomenon. That is, it provides either an analysis (description) of a past phenomenon, or some predictions about a future phenomenon of a similar nature. In this book, we insist...

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is getting a lot of attention in corporations around the world today. Corporations create a large amount of unstructured content in the form of documents, scanned content, videos, audio, photos, images, and so on. Some statistics show that more than 80 percent of a corporation's intellectual property...

Building on the first edition of Joomla!: Visual QuickStart Guide, this task-based guide is the perfect tool for those just starting with Joomla, as well as, seasoned professionals who want to know how to use the latest version of the software to its fullest. It shows how to create, customize, and maintain a dynamic Joomla 1.6 website...