In the fall of 2004, at a popular software conference I realized how all major component vendors were advertising their ASP.NET products using a new word—Ajax. Only a few weeks later, a brand new module in my popular ASP.NET master class made its debut—using Ajax to improve the user experience. At its core, Ajax is a little...

Experienced data analysts know that a successful analysis or meaningful report often requires more work in acquiring, merging, and transforming data than in specifying the analysis or report itself. SPSS contains powerful tools for accomplishing and automating these tasks. While much of this capability is available through the...

Mainstream data mining techniques significantly limit the role of human reasoning and insight. Likewise, in data visualization, the role of computational analysis is relatively small. The power demonstrated individually by these approaches to knowledge discovery suggests that somehow uniting the two could lead to increased efficiency and more...

Donald Lobo, Michal Mach, and I started CiviCRM almost six years ago. Back then, open source software had gained traction in the operating system arena, but the idea of an open source application designed from the ground up to meet the needs of non-profits and other civic sector organizations was pretty radical. We were convinced that there...

Ever since it was created in 1995. PHP has been a favorite of developers for server-side web programming. In fact, in some surveys, it now stands as today's most popular web programming language. By most counts, over a million web sites have been written in PHP, including portions of today's largest, most recognizable sites, and often...

Moving your classes and resources online with a Learning Management System such as Moodle opens up a whole world of possibilities for teaching your students. However, it also opens up a number of threats as your students, private information, and resources become vulnerable to cyber attacks. Learn how to safeguard Moodle to keep the bad guys...

At least some people reading the title of this book may wonder why there should be one more book on the topic of Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD). The short answer to this question is that in our teaching of the subject for over a decade, we have not been able to find a suitable textbook on this topic at our respective...

The developed economy is shifting from being manufacturing based to services based. Different from the traditional manufacturing business, the services business is more complicated and dynamic, and end-user driven rather than product driven. To stay competitive, an enterprise thus has to rethink its business strategies and revamp its...

The Windows Presentation Framework (WPF), Silverlight, and Windows Phone 7 are the latest technologies for building flexible user interfaces (UI) for applications built with Microsoft technology. All three rely on the XAML markup language to describe UI elements and layout, and you can program applications for all three platforms with...