Bestselling author Jeff Carlson is back with a fully updated revision of the  iMovie Visual QuickStart Guide. Completely overhauled for iMovie HD and iDVD 5, this book uses step-by-step instructions and loads of illustrations to get readers up to speed quickly in the process of making movies with iMovie and creating Hollywood-quality...

We were early adopters of Extreme Programming (XP), testing on XP teams that weren’t at all sure where testers or their brand of testing fit in. At the time, there wasn’t much in the agile (which wasn’t called agile yet) literature about acceptance testing, or how professional testers might contribute. We learned not...

Do you know why experienced Ruby programmers tend to reach for basic collections and hashes while programmers from other languages go for more specialized classes? Do you know the difference between strip, chop, and chomp, and why there are three such similar methods when apparently one might suffice? (Not to mention lstrip and...

The story of software engineering has been the story of increasing the level of abstraction at which we as programmers work, from logic encoded in hardware to toggle switches representing binary digits, through machine code, assembly language, low-level languages, and high-level languages both procedural and functional. More recently,...

In 2010, Pixologic celebrated the 10th anniversary of the debut of ZBrush. ZBrush was introduced to the world as an experimental art application with a unique technology that allowed users to create illustrations in two and a half dimensions. I remember seeing the Pixologic booth at a Macworld in New York in the summer of 2000. The...

Whether...

Throughout the book, Windows and Xbox 360 game development are mentioned within the context of the material presented. But make no mistake — this is a book about Windows Phone 7, fi rst and...

Let’s face it, while GUI applications are nice and they do provide significant levels of hand holding, they’re cumbersome and inefficient. The command line is an essential part of the administrator experience—at least, if the administrator wants to go home at night and spend weekends somewhere other than work. Using...

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A few years ago, I was teaching a workshop on advanced SketchUp techniques to a group of extremely bright middle and high school (or so I thought) students in Hot Springs, Arkansas. As subject matter went, I wasn’t pulling any punches — we were breezing through material I wouldn’t think of introducing to most groups...

There are many students and professionals in science and engineering, other than those specifically interested in fields such as computer science or computer engineering, who need to know how to solve computational problems on computers. There are basically two approaches to meeting the needs of such people. One is to rely on software...