In the field of IT, the markets, business activities, needs and requirements of internal and external service providers and customers are changing in ever-shortening cycles. This forces companies to increase their organizational flexibility not only as far as their structure is concerned but also with regard to established business...

A 2009 Game Developer Magazine Front Line Award Finalist, this book covers both the theory and practice of game engine software development, bringing together complete coverage of a wide range of topics. The concepts and techniques described are the actual ones used by real game studios like Electronic Arts and Naughty Dog. The examples are...

Soft computing, as a collection of techniques exploiting approximation and tolerance for imprecision and uncertainty in traditionally intractable problems, has become very effective and popular especially because of the synergy derived from its components. The integration of constituent technologies provides complementary methods that allow...

The Blender 3D suite is probably one of the most used 3D creation and animation tools currently in existence. The reason for that popularity is both its tool set and the extraordinary fact that it can be downloaded free of charge. Blender has been around since 1998 but it was not until it entered the GNU General Public License, open source...

This book is about inductive databases and constraint-based data mining, emerging research topics lying at the intersection of data mining and database research. The aim of the book as to provide an overview of the state-of- the art in this novel and exciting research area. Of special interest are the recent methods for constraint-based...

It teaches risk-driven architecting. There is no need for meticulous designs when risks are small, nor any excuse for sloppy designs when risks threaten your success. This book describes a way to do just...

In the past decade, the movement to lighter-weight and increasingly agile methods has been the most significant change to affect the software enterprise since the advent of the waterfall model in the 1970s. Originated by a variety of thought and practice leaders and proven in real-world, successful experiments, the methods have proven...

This book is about writing real-world applications for the Android platform primarily using the Python language and a little bit of JavaScript. While there is nothing wrong with Java, it really is overkill when all you need to do is turn on or off a handful of settings on your Android device. The Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A)...

The rapid growth of the Web in the past two decades has made it the largest publicly accessible data source in the world. Web mining aims to discover useful information or knowledge from Web hyperlinks, page contents, and usage logs. Based on the primary kinds of data used in the mining process, Web mining tasks can be categorized...

I FIRST STARTED PLAYING WITH THE ANDROID SDK before it was offi cially released as a 1.0 release. Back then, the tools were unpolished, the APIs in the SDK were unstable, and the documentation was sparse. Fast forward two and a half years, Android is now a formidable mobile operating system, with a following no less impressive that the...

Large volumes of data and complex problems inspire research in computing and data, text, and web mining. However, analyzing data is not sufficient, as it has to be presented visually with analytical capabilities, i.e., a chart/diagram/image illustration that enables humans to perceive, relate, and conclude in the knowledge discovery...