Russia breathes superlatives: the world’s biggest country; its largest supplier of natural gas and second-largest oil producer; home of the planet’s longest railroads, busiest subway system (Moscow’s), and one of its deepest, biggest, and oldest lakes (Baikal, in Siberia). It even boasts balmy beach resorts (on the Black...

Human civilization in the 21st century can be defined by diversity and duality. One-fifth of the world’s population is Chinese, another fifth Muslim. A hundred million of us are homeless children living in extreme poverty. More than two percent of the human population is mentally retarded. There are over 10,000 spoken languages. Yet, a...

The iPhone is the hottest gadget of our generation, and much of its success has been fueled by the App Store, Apple’s online marketplace for iPhone applications. Over 1 billion apps have been downloaded in the 9 months the App Store has been open, ranging from the simplest games to the most complex business apps. Everyone has an idea...

James Kelly’s LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT-G Programming Guide, Second Edition is a fountain of wisdom and ideas for those looking to master the art of programming LEGO’s MINDSTORMS NXT robotics kits. This second edition is fully-updated to cover all the latest features and parts in the NXT 2.0 series. It also...

This is a book about object-oriented analysis and design for software developers. There are many such books, so why write another one? The answer is that we wish to make some specific contributions to the philosophy and practice of object-oriented software development which are significantly different from those that can be found in any of...

In 1859 Bernhard Riemann, a shy German mathematician, wrote an eight-page article, suggesting an answer to a problem that had long puzzled mathematicians. For the next 150 years, the world's mathematicians have longed to confirm the Riemann hypothesis. So great is the interest in its solution that in 2001, an American foundation offered a...

Distributed applications are difficult to write as programmers need to adhere to specific distributed systems programming conventions and frameworks, which makes distributed systems development complex and error prone and ties the resultant application to the distributed system because the application's code is tangled with the...

This...

SimpleDB is a highly scalable, simple-to-use, and inexpensive database in the cloud from Amazon Web Services. But in order to use SimpleDB, you really have to change your mindset. This isn't a traditional relational database; in fact it's not relational at all. For developers who have experience working with relational databases, this...

Want to build and maintain dynamic websites without having to learn HTML and CSS? Joomla! open-source web content management system and this beginner's guide are all you need. This book walks you step-by-step through the...

The...

World of Warcraft (WoW) is currently the world's largest massively multiplayer online role-playing game. The newest release, "Wrath of the Lich King," has created a demand for updated information on writing...