Given Apple’s advertising budget and ubiquitous ads, plus an enormous amount of media attention, it’s still difficult to determine just what an iPad is. Is it a media player or a business machine? Does it replace a laptop? There are other tablet computers on the market, as well as “netbooks” that act like...

Scientists in the throes of research use an extensive data bank to access structural information on proteins and nucleic acids. Meanwhile, geneticists use a highly specialized form of software to analyze the hybridization pattern of DNA chips. The past decade has been tremendously successful for biotechnology and pharmaceutical...

Few technical lerms have gained such rapid notoriety as the appela tion "NP-complete." In the short lime since its introduction in the early 1970's, this term has come to symbolize the abyss of inherent intractability that algorithm designers increasingly face as they seek to solve larger and more complex problems. A...

In late breaking news as this book goes to press, Google and...

The Handbook of Human Factors in Web Design covers basic human factors issues relating to screen design, input devices, and information organization and processing, as well as addresses newer features which will become prominent in the next generation of Web technologies. These include multimodal interfaces, wireless capabilities,...

The Internet encompasses all types of websites, from social media monoliths to individual blogs, from Justin Timberlake fan sites to Fortune 500 businesses. Everyone has a voice, and the medium has become the ultimate level playing field for those seeking to interact with the world through an always-on, instantly available, nearly...

The explosive growth of e-commerce and online environments has made the issue of information search and selection increasingly serious; users are overloaded by options to consider and they may not have the time or knowledge to personally evaluate these options. Recommender systems have proven to be a valuable way for online users to cope with...

GRAPHS AND GRAPH algorithms are pervasive in modern computing applications. This book describes the most important known methods for solving the graph-processing problems that arise in practice. Its primary aim is to make these methods and the basic principles behind them accessible to the growing number of people in need of knowing them. The...

MariaDB is a database server that offers drop-in replacement functionality for MySQL. Built by some of the original authors of MySQL, with assistance from the broader community of free and open source software developers, MariaDB offers a rich set of feature enhancements to MySQL, including alternate storage engines,...