This book provides a foundation in digital design for students in computer engineering, electrical engineering and computer science courses. It deals with digital design as an activity in a larger systems design context. Instead of focusing on gate-level design and aspects of digital design that have diminishing relevance in a...

In 2009, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced the company's leading web application platform for organizations, SharePoint, has exceeded 1 billion dollars in profits with over 100 million licenses sold. I was in the audience when he said that and couldn't help but reflect on how far SharePoint has come in less than a decade. In the...

When I first discovered DMVs, I was enthralled because they made many difficult things so easy. It was simple to identify, typically within seconds, the core performance problems that affect SQL Server databases. For example, I could quickly discover which queries were taking the longest time to run, which indexes were missing, and...

Privacy is a basic human need, and losing privacy is perceived as an extremely threatening experience. Privacy embraces solitude, personal space, or intimacy with family and friends and as such, it is a ubiquitous and trans-cultural phenomenon. Privacy leverages well-being; without privacy we are at risk of becoming physically or...

People often ask me why I chose to publish this work. Primarily, this book was motivated by my experience in industry after having been in the academic world for many years. We often hear about the need to bridge the gap between industry and academia, but one can easily intellectually understand something without having experienced it...

In the last three decades, machine learning research and practice have focused on batch learning usually using small datasets. In batch learning, the whole training data is available to the algorithm, which outputs a decision model after processing the data eventually (or most of the times) multiple times. The rationale behind this...

Microsoft has recently changed its certification program to contain three primary series: Technology, Professional, and Architect. The Technology Series of certifications are intended to allow candidates to target specific technologies and are the basis for obtaining the Profes sional Series and Architect Series of certifications. The...

In this textbook, I take an unconventional approach to data analysis. Its contents are heavily influenced by the idea that data analysis should help in enhancing and augmenting knowledge of the domain as represented by the concepts and statements of relation between them. According to this view, two main pathways for data analysis are...

There is a software gap between hardware potential and the performance that can be attained using today ’ s software parallel program development tools. The tools need manual intervention by the programmer to parallelize the code. This book is intended to give the programmer the techniques necessary to explore parallelism in...

Color is one of the most fascinating areas to study. Color forms an integral part of nature, and we humans are exposed to it every day. We all have an intuitive understanding of what color is, but by studying the underlying physics, chemistry, optics, and human visual perception, the true beauty and complexity of color can be...

Are you a software developer? Are you interested in how build systems work? You’re reading this book; so there’s a good chance you answered “Yes” to both questions. On the other hand, many software developers aren’t interested in how their program is compiled. Most people just want to press a button and...

On the other hand, marketing online isn’t rocket science. This book charts a practical course of action to put your business Web site to work,...