You may be wondering why we chose a photo of astronauts working in space on the Space Station for the cover. We actually chose it for several reasons. Obviously, it is very exciting; in fact, space represents the most exciting frontier for the entire world! In addition, much of the station itself consists of all kinds of circuits! One...

Designing Interactive Systems: People, Activities, Contexts, Technologies is an exciting, new, forward-looking textbook in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Authoritative in its coverage, this innovative book takes a top-down approach, starting with what is familiar to students and working down to theory/abstract underpinnings. This makes it...

The Unity Game Engine has been shaking things up. The engine is only a little over five years old now and in 2010 they have earned Develop Magazine's Grand Prix Award and surpassed 170,000 developers. The user base of consuming Unity products has grown dynamically as well. There are over 30 million total Unity Web Player...

SolidWorks as a topic of learning is a huge, sprawling expanse. There is a lot to know, and a lot to write about. While I have made every effort to be complete in this book, I'm sure there are some niche topics that have gone untreated. New in 2011, I have taken this book from a single volume of an immense scope to two individual volumes,...

In the early days of pattern recognition and statistical data analysis life was rather simple: datasets were relatively small, collected from well-designed experiments, analyzed using a few methods that had good theoretical background. Explosive growth of the use of computers led to the creation of huge amounts of data of all kinds,...

When I was asked to update Sams Teach Yourself SAP in 24 Hours, I was completely thrilled. Seriously! The world of SAP and our world in general have gone through major upheavals in the last few years, and I was excited to share with SAPlings and veterans alike just how much had changed. In the same way, I was anxious to realign and...

Since the publication of the first edition of The Description Logic Handbook in 2003, the interest in Description Logics (DL) has steadily increased. This applies both to the number of active DL researchers working on DL theory and implementations of reasoning services, and to the number of applications based on DL technology. One...

The constant and speedy progress made by humankind in the industrial revolution, and more recently in the information technology era can be directly attributed to sharing of knowledge between various disciplines, reuse of the knowledge as science and technology advanced, and inclusion of this knowledge in the curriculum. The phrases...

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...

This has been a very long journey. We found that writing this book was a challenging task, a much harder one than we had anticipated, but there were also moments of joy and discovery along the way! The idea for the book first came to us 18 months ago, and many days and nights have come and gone between the first sentence we wrote and...

Beginning iOS Game Center and Game...