Do you think that only experts with a deep understanding of the inner workings of ASP.NET, SQL Server, and IIS can improve a website's performance? Think again - because this book tosses that notion out of the window. It will help you resolve every web developer's nightmare - a slow website - with angry managers looking over your...

Let me begin by saying that this is not a book about game level design; rather, it is about creating art for a game world. This is an important distinction. Game level design is the point at which all the planning, technology, and design converge; and creating the art for that game level is only one part that feeds into that huge process. Yet...

Learning Classifier Systems (LCS) constitute a fascinating concept at the intersection of machine learning and evolutionary computation. LCS’s genetic search, generally in combination with reinforcement learning techniques, can be applied to both temporal and spatial problem-solving and promotes powerful search in a wide variety of...

Mobile devices have evolved to focus on rich media production and consumption. Developers of mobile applications are able to create applications that allow people to play, capture, and share media in a variety of new ways on mobile devices. The popularity of Android has soared in part because the platform offers developers a...

SQL Azure is a database service in the cloud. Based on Microsoft's Windows Azure platform, SQL Azure is well suited for web facing database applications. Are you interested in moving your business applications and data to the cloud but are not sure how to go about it? Look no further; this book covers all you ever wanted to know about...

The new emphasis on physical security resulting from the terrorist threat has forced many information security professionals to struggle to maintain their organization's focus on protecting information assets. In order to command attention, they need to emphasize the broader role of information security in the strategy of their companies....

Often when people think about build, they think just about the act of compiling some source code – when I hit F5 in the IDE, it builds, right? Well yes, kind of. In a real production build system, there is so much more to it than that. There are many kinds of builds – F5, desktop, nightly, continuous, rolling, gated, buddy etc....

The book begins with...

Soils long have been taken for granted being so commonplace and lacking often striking features. However, soil is one of the most complex media on Earth, vital for the biogeosphere and human civilization. With increased usage of soil for world food production, building materials, waste repositories, etc awareness has grown for the need of...

With the right applications, the iPad can become more than just a content consumption device for videos, music, and electronic books. It can be a content production device as well -- generating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations for the workplace. This ability to produce content, given the right applications, immediately shifts the...

Linear Programming deals with the problem of minimizing or maximizing a linear function in the presence of linear inequalities. Since the development of the simplex method by George B. Dantzig in 1947, linear programming has been extensively used in the military, industrial, governmental, and urban planning fields, among others. The...