Everybody develops new health problems sometimes. Often, these problems are familiar and not especially worrying. When you wake up with a slightly sore throat or get a mild headache after a long, busy day, for example, the chances are that you’ve already had this kind of thing before and you know instinctively what to do about it. You...

Want to save time, money, and frustration on plumbing repair and replacement? Do it yourself! Plumbing Do-It-Yourself For Dummies turns even the most daunting household plumbing project into a simple, step-by-step process that delivers professional-quality results at a fraction of what you'd have to pay a plumber—and you...

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...

What is programming? Programming, according to Dictionary.com, is ‘‘a set of coded instructions that enables a machine, especially a computer, to perform a desired sequence of operations.’’ In other words, programming allows...

Imagine this scenario: You create a hunter character with random stats and hit points and enter the dungeon to begin exploring for treasure. You stumble upon a zombie pacing near a pile of gear and gold! You attack the zombie and it strikes back! You roll 1D20 and score a critical hit! The 20 point die plus dexterity, against the...

As depicted in David Lodge’s celebrated novel Small World, the perceived size of our world experienced a progressive decrease as jet airplanes became affordable to ever greater shares of the earth’s population. Yet, the really dramatic shrinking had to wait until the mid-1990s, when Internet became widespread and the information...

We are entering the golden age of GPU computing. Since the introduction of CUDA in 2007, more than 100 million computers with CUDA-capable GPUs have been shipped to end users. Unlike the previous GPGPU shader programming models, CUDA supports parallel programming in C. From my own experience in teaching CUDA programming, C programmers...

In 1862, the gardener James Bateman sent several specimens of the Christmas orchid to Charles Darwin. This orchid was first planted in Britain in 1855 and it did not blossom until 1857. It had been discovered several decades before by the French botanist Louis-Marie Aubert du Petit-Thouars in Madagascar in 1822. The most significant...

In 2009, it is estimated that more than 1.5 billion people have access to the Internet, including 220 million in the U.S. alone. Throw in 338 million Chinese users, 55 million German users, 48 million British users, 38 million Russian users, and 67 million Brazilians, and you can see the meaning of the word “world” in the...

The Internet has had and will continue to have a profound effect on society. It is hard to imagine life without such technologies as computers, cell phones, gaming devices, and so on. The Internet, World Wide Web, and their associated technologies have altered our social and personal experience of the world. In no other time in...