Recent trends in computer architecture make concurrency and parallelism an essential ingredient of efficient program execution. The actor model of concurrency allows you to express real-world concurrency in a natural way using concurrent processes that communicate via asynchronous messages. Scala is a programming language for the Java...

Linux is truly amazing when you consider how it originated and how it continues to evolve. From its modest beginning as the hobby of one person — Linus Torvalds of Finland — Linux has grown into a full-fledged operating system with features that rival those of any commercial UNIX operating system. To top it off, Linux — with...

This book is an indispensable resource for everyone involved in the hiring process. That includes managers, human resources (HR) personnel, and most of all, the front line hiring folks. If you review résumés, conduct phone or on-site interviews, or if you are responsible for making offers to candidates, this book is...

Welcome to the world of CRM! This chapter introduces you to the concepts of customer relationship management (CRM) without getting into many of the specifics about Dynamics CRM. If you are a long-time Dynamics CRM administrator, then you can focus on the XRM section of this chapter. If you have administered or used other CRM...

First I put myself in...

This is one book where, in fact, we do wish to compare apples to oranges. As often as possible, we describe an Avid function and then describe the equivalent Final Cut Pro function and how to access and apply it. In addition, the book offers images of Avid screens, buttons, and icons so you can get your bearings...

We were early adopters of Extreme Programming (XP), testing on XP teams that weren’t at all sure where testers or their brand of testing fit in. At the time, there wasn’t much in the agile (which wasn’t called agile yet) literature about acceptance testing, or how professional testers might contribute. We learned not...

If your website content is out of date, off-brand, and out of control, you're missing a huge opportunity to engage, convert, and retain customers online. Redesigning your home page won't help. Investing in a new content management system won't fix it, either. So, where do you start?   Without meaningful content, your...

Walk into any bookseller, go to the photography section, and you will see countless books on the subject of photography. Look a little further and you will locate the camera-specifi c books. It is this divide between the camera-specifi c and instructional photography books that inspired me to write this book. What I was seeing in the...

Are you a software developer? Are you interested in how build systems work? You’re reading this book; so there’s a good chance you answered “Yes” to both questions. On the other hand, many software developers aren’t interested in how their program is compiled. Most people just want to press a button and...

What is "Fractal Image Compression" anyway? You will have to read (he book to find out everything about it, and if you read the book, you really will find out almost everything that is currently known about it. In a sentence or two: fractal image compression is a method, or class of methods, that allows images to be stored on...

THE RISE OF THE INTERNET, sophisticated computing and communications technologies, and globalization have raised customers’ expectations of powerful “always on” services. A crucial characteristic of these “always on” services is that they are highly available; if the customer cannot get a search result,...