It is a great pleasure for me to write this foreword about a book that comes out of one of the first research projects funded by ANR, the French National Research Agency. ANR was established by the French government in 2005 to fund research projects, based on competitive schemes giving researchers the best opportunities to realize...

It’s been five years since the first edition of Introducing Character Animation with Blender came out, and a lot has changed in the world of Blender. Interest in Blender has exploded. When the first edition of this book came out, it was the only English-language book on Blender in print. Now, as this second edition of the book arrives,...

CSS3, the newest version of the style sheet language of the web, is less about creating new effects and more about accomplishing the beautiful web design effects you’re familiar with in fantastic new ways—ways that are more efficient and produce more usable and flexible results than the techniques we’ve been using...

Today’s enterprises are investing massive resources in data integration. Many possess thousands of point-to-point data...

Brimming with beautiful pictures, this successful book guides you through a project-based, progressive curriculum so that you can build all the essential skills to enhance photographs creatively and professionally with Photoshop CS3. If you are an aspiring professional, enthusiastic amateur photographer, or a student learning photography,...

I was first exposed to what would become the Internet way back in 1969, while I was still an undergraduate at Brandeis University working on ARPANet, the forerunner to the present Internet, which operated at the then blazing speed of 2,400 bps, ultimately increased to 50 Kbps (see http://www.computerhistory.org/internet_history/). I...

With the availability of chips offering constantly increasing computational performance and functionality, design of more and more complex applications becomes possible. This is particularly true for the domain of image processing, which is characterized by huge computation efforts. Unfortunately, this evolution risks to be stopped by...

The OCP Java SE Programmer exam is considered one of the hardest in the IT industry, and we can tell you from experience that a large percentage of exam candidates go in to the test...

When I started creating the outline for this book, I had just finished teaching a semester-long web design course for a local community college. That experience couldn’t have come at a better time because it helped me refine my approach to teaching web design. I took my years of experience creating websites and writing about...

The need for this project was born of frustration while working towards my PhD. I was investigating optimization algorithms and was implementing a large number of them for a software platform called the Optimization Algorithm Toolkit (OAT)1. Each algorithm required considerable effort to locate the relevant source material (from...