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...

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 less than a decade, the online delivery of software has transformed the business software landscape. The concept of online delivery is simple: A software company develops an application, hosts the software on its own servers, and makes it available to companies over the Internet. Companies sign up to use the application and pay for...

This book suits both graduate students and researchers with a focus on discovering knowledge from scientific data. The use of computational power for data analysis and knowledge discovery in scientific disciplines has found its roots with the revolution of high-performance computing systems. Computational science in physics,...

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...

Indeed, this volume...

Excel is an extremely powerful tool that is made to handle many varieties of data. Regardless of the job you do, chances are you have had to use Excel at some time in your career, or you will. Regardless of your reason for using Excel, many users never realize the full potential of the software, relegating Excel to not much more than a list...

I got started in Blender approximately eight and a half years ago. At the time, there were very few tutorials or other training resources available. Essentially, the only resource around was the people of the Blender Community, who was active through the online forum, http://blenderartists.org. With nothing but the generous time of...

You may be reading this book for many reasons. It could be because you heard all about Hadoop and what it can do to crunch petabytes of data in a reasonable amount of time. While reading into Hadoop you found that, for random access to the accumulated data, there is something called HBase. Or it was the hype that is prevalent these days...

Slate-style computers have been around for a few years, but it took Apple to make them catch on with the general public in a big way when it introduced the iPad. This small, less than a pound-and-a-half wonder has sold millions of units in its first year for good reason: It’s well designed, feature rich, and opens up a world of...

I used to think plug-ins were for people who could afford to buy creativity. Then I realized it was for those who had creativity, but were burdened and held back by the process, or lack of tools, for their creativity. After Effects plug-ins are not someone’s project files or templates for you to copy, but rather tools for...

Results matter, whether you are a mathematician, scientist, or engineer. The time that you spend doing tedious mathematical calculations could be spent in more productive ways. Sage is an open-source mathematical software system that helps you perform many mathematical tasks. There is no reason to compute integrals or perform algebraic...