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...

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 intended...

Ensemble methods have been called the most influential development in Data Mining and Machine Learning in the past decade. They combine multiple models into one usually more accurate than the best of its components. Ensembles can provide a critical boost to industrial challenges -- from investment timing to drug discovery, and fraud detection...

It was a blustery fall day in 1939. In the streets outside the apartment building, fallen leaves were swirling in little whirlwinds, each with a life of its own. It was good to be inside and warm and safe, with my mother preparing dinner in the next room. In our apartment there were no older kids who picked on you for no reason. Just the week...

Are we noble in reason? Perfect, in God's image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but rather a "kluge," a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human...

Why get into furniture restoration? One reason is that there probably is no greater feeling of satisfaction than the one you get when you bring that newly restored chair to its place of honor in the living room. You put it in exactly the right place, stand back - and feel good. A few months ago, that chair was battered and bruised, an...

Anyone who has been developing on the Microsoft platform for the last several years knows the drill: every few years, there’s a new database access technology. There was ODBC; then DAO and RDO; OLEDB, ADO, and ADO.NET; LINQ to SQL; and now Entity Framework! In many ways, this progression of technologies has been confusing, but in other...

Imagine a windowless room in a nondescript office building. Inoffensive tan carpet lines the floors, fluorescent lights hum softly overhead, and 20 seated Microsoft employees flank a rectangular folding table in the center of...

Are you a parent with kids in elementary, middle, or high school? This book is for you. You may feel that your children are experts on using the Web, technology wizards, computer geniuses. Please don’t despair. First of all, they are not necessarily all of these things simply because they may know more than you do about using the Web....

According to a report published by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2008, nearly one in five college students experienced some sort of Web-based instruction. That’s a lot of students learning online! And, considering that college is no longer limited to advantaged 18- to 22-year-olds, that means a lot of those online students may be...

C# is a relatively new language that was unveiled to the world when Microsoft announced the first version of its .NET Framework in July 2000. Since then its popularity has rocketed, and it has arguably become the language of choice for both Windows and Web developers who use the .NET Framework. Part of the appeal of C# comes from its clear...