Flash MX provides the perfect platform to create fun games for Internet distribution. This book takes the reader through the entire process from creating the art and animation for these games, through to programming them ready for users across the world to enjoy the results. The book is split into four sections. The first section...

What really makes a video game story interactive? What's the best way to create an interactive story? How much control should players be given? Do they really want that control in the first place? Do they even know what they want-or are their stated desires at odds with the unconscious preferences? All of these questions and more are...

Introduction to Microcontrollers is a comprehensive introductory text/reference for electrical and computer engineers, students, and even hobbyists who have little experience in a high-level programming language. The book helps them understand how a typical microcontroller executes assembly language instructions and addressing modes on...

The telegraph, telephone, radio, and especially the computer have put everyone on the globe within earshot— at the price of our privacy. It may feel like we're performing an intimate act when, sequestered in our rooms and cubicles, we casually use our cell phones and computers to transmit our thoughts, confidences,...

Materialized views have recently seen a renewed interest in the research and commercial communitites because of their applications in warehousing, retailing, billing, visualization, integrity constraints, query optimization, and decision support. All leading database vendors are currently implementing in their systems materialized views...

The Committee for Advancing Software-Intensive Systems Producibility was appointed by the National Research Council (NRC) and convened under the auspices of the NRC’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) to assess the nature of the national investment in software research and, in particular, to consider ways to...

From its inception in the 1930s, the rich and vigorous field of computer science has been concerned with the resources, both in time and in memory, needed to carry out a computation. A number of fundamental theorems were discovered that resorted to a worst-case analysis. The central question was whether a given algorithm could be...

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...

Animation as both an art form and popular entertainment has existed for almost a century now. The early attempts were received enthusiastically more for their novelty than for the quality of their craft. That even holds true today: animated movies often make it through the studio process not because of their true entertainment value,...