Better performance, newer features, and an enhanced user experience. Microsoft has brought all this and more to its latest operating system, Windows 7. Using Windows 7 provides an introduction to all the new features and shows you how to get the most out of them. For users coming from Windows XP, the transition will be...

Discover how to create exciting and challenging games for the Xbox 360 using XNA Game Studio 4.0 and the Visual C# programming language. XNA Game Studio 4.0 for Xbox 360 Developers provides experienced game developers with a comprehensive overview of the XNA Framework, providing all the tools,...

Joomla! is one of the most popular open source content management systems. It's powerful, it's relatively easy to learn, and it's freely available, which explains why over the last few years it's become the engine behind millions and millions of websites worldwide. In January 2011, the much awaited version 1.6 was released....

The word "render" isn't unique to the vocabulary of computer graphics. We can talk about a "watercolor rendering," a "musical rendering" or a "poetic rendering." In each of these, there is a transformation from one domain to another: from the landscape before the painter to color on paper, from...

If you're developing applications that access Oracle databases, you can save time and work by having SQL do more of the data handling for you: This new book shows you how. It teaches you how to create effective SQL queries to extract and update the data in an Oracle database. It teaches you how to design and implement a database, giving...

Five years ago, we authored “Text Mining: Predictive Methods for Analyzing Unstructured Information.” That book was geared mostly to professional practitioners, but was adaptable to course work with some effort by the instructor. Many topics were evolving, and this was one of the earliest efforts to collect material for predictive...

OpenAM is an open source continuation of the OpenSSO project that was taken over, and later scrapped, by Oracle. OpenAM is the only commercial-grade, feature-rich web application that provides SSO solutions. It has a variety of features and a powerful Single Sign-On (SSO) capability, but the implementation can be tricky, and the unorganized...

This book is designed to give the reader a practical introduction to fluid simulation for graphics. The field of fluid dynamics, even just in animation, is vast and so not every topic will be covered, and many wonderful papers will sadly be passed over in the hope of distilling the essentials; this is far from a thorough survey. The...

We started work on this handbook three years ago and, while bringing it to fruition has involved a great deal of work, we have enjoyed the process. We are grateful to our colleagues who have contributed chapters to the volume. Its quality is due to their labor and commitment. We appreciate the considerable time and effort that they...

The command line can be an intimidating and unforgiving environment. Unlike working in graphical environments, it's not entirely clear what commands one must execute in a terminal to accomplish a given task. Couple this with the fact that the command line does not prevent you from doing things that might cause irreparable damage to your...

Webmin is a web-based graphical UNIX system administration tool written by Jamie Cameron in the Perl programming language that is designed to be lightweight, functional, and easily extensible. Webmin has been translated to over 20 languages and dialects at the time of this writing, and it has been embraced by a number of...

Mainstream data mining techniques significantly limit the role of human reasoning and insight. Likewise, in data visualization, the role of computational analysis is relatively small. The power demonstrated individually by these approaches to knowledge discovery suggests that somehow uniting the two could lead to increased efficiency and more...