AS WE WRITE THIS, it has been several years since we penned the first edition of The Official Ubuntu Book. Over that time, we have seen Ubuntu continue its explosive growth. Updating this book drives this fact home in striking ways. For example, the number of users and posts in the Ubuntu Forums has nearly doubled since the last...

Parallel complexity theory, the study of resource-bounded parallel computation, is surely one of the fastest-growing areas of theoretical Computer Science. In the light of this, it would be foolish to attempt an encyclopedic coverage of the field. However, it is the belief of the author that its foundations are becoming increas ingly...

Service-Oriented Architecture is becoming the leading architecture for IT, and it is changing the way organisations work. IT is slowly but steadily gaining maturity, and becoming the flexible yet stable and reliable support for business it should be. At the same time, IT is regaining its potential to create real business innovation. SOA will...

Information technology (IT) quality engineering and quality improvement methods are constantly getting more attention from world corporate leaders, all levels of management, design engineers, and academia. This trend can be seen easily by the widespread of “Six Sigma” initiatives in many Fortune IT 500 companies. For a Six...

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...

The area of pattern recognition and computer vision, after over 35 years of continued development, has now reached its maturity. The theories, techniques and algorithms are mostly well developed. There are a number of applications which are still being explored. New approaches motivated by applications and new computer architectures...

There exists a strong demand for fully extending emerging Internet services, including collaborative applications and social networking, to the mobile and wireless domain. Delivering such services can be possible only through realizing broadband...

THIS IS THE FIFTH EDITION OF A BOOK that has proven popular with professional developers and academic institutions. It strives to impart knowledge on a subject that at fi rst was seen by some as just another fad, but that instead has come to maturity and is now often just taken for granted. Almost six years have passed since the previous...

This chapter introduces you to the core principles of Agile software development. The core principles were...