Ruby inherits characteristics from various languages—Lisp, Smalltalk, C, and Perl, to name a few. Metaprogramming comes from Lisp (and Smalltalk). It’s a bit like magic, which makes something astonishing possible. There are two kinds of magic: white magic, which does good things, and black magic, which can do nasty things. Likewise,...

was very pleased to be asked to produce the sixth edition of my artificial intelligence book. It is a compliment to the earlier editions, started over twenty years ago, that our approach to AI has been so highly valued. It is also exciting that, as new development in the field emerges, we are able to present much of it in each new...

For weeks, months—nay!—from the very moment you were born, you’ve felt it calling to you. At long last you’ll be united with the programming language you’ve been longing for: Clojure!

As a Lisp-style functional programming language, Clojure lets you write robust and elegant code, and because it...

Today's Perl developers spend 60-80% of their time working with existing Perl code. Now, there's a start-to-finish guide to understanding that code, maintaining it, updating it, and refactoring it for maximum performance and reliability. Peter J. Scott, lead author of...

Setting the standard for a premium C# reference, Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Unleashed provides practical examples for virtually every aspect of the C# programming language. The book is structured for progressive learning, so it can be read cover-to-cover or used as a comprehensive reference guide....