How do we evaluate ambiguous concepts such as wellbeing, freedom, and social justice? How do we develop policies that offer everyone the best chance to achieve what they want from life? The capability approach, a theoretical framework pioneered by the philosopher and economist Amartya Sen in the 1980s, has become an increasingly influential way to ...
Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North breaks new ground by exploring the concept of lifestyle from a distinctly anthropological perspective. Showcasing the collective work of ten experienced scholars in the field, the book goes beyond concepts of tradition that have often been the focus of previous research, to explain how political, economic ...
Consciousness is widely perceived as one of the most fundamental, interesting and difficult problems of our time. However, we still know next to nothing about the relationship between consciousness and the brain and we can only speculate about the consciousness of animals and machines.
Human and Machine Consciousness presents a new foundation fo...
In these powerful and stylishly written essays, Maria Manuel Lisboa dissects the work of Paula Rego, the Portuguese-born artist considered one of the greatest artists of modern times. Focusing primarily on Rego's work since the 1980s, Lisboa explores the complex relationships between violence and nurturing, power and impotence, politics and th...
This free book brings together a set of original studies that use cutting-edge computational methods to investigate conflict at various geographic scales and degrees of intensity and violence. Methodologically, this book covers a variety of computational approaches from text mining and machine learning to agent-based modelling and social network an...
This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2016, held in Edinburgh, UK, in May 2016.While agile development has already become mainstream in industry, this field is still constantly evolving and continues to spur an enormous interest both in industry and academia. To this end, ...
This Open Access textbook provides students and researchers in the life sciences with essential practical information on how to quantitatively analyze data images. It refrains from focusing on theory, and instead uses practical examples and step-by step protocols to familiarize readers with the most commonly used image processing and analysis platf...
Modeling and simulation are powerful tools for explaining the world, making predictions, designing things that work, and making them work better. Learning to use these tools can be difficult; this book is my attempt to make the experience as enjoyable and productive as possible.
By reading this book - and working on the exercises - you will lear...
This free book explores the fundamentals of computer music and functional programming through the Haskell programming language. Functional programming is typically considered difficult to learn. This introduction in the context of creating music will allow students and professionals with a musical inclination to leverage their experience to help un...
The SQL Server 2016 In-Memory OLTP engine (a.k.a. Hekaton) is designed to exploit terabytes of available memory and high numbers of processing cores. It allows us to work with memory-optimized tables and indexes, and natively compiled stored procedures, in addition to the disk-based tables and indexes, and T-SQL stored procedures, that SQL Server h...
This bestselling book is now the standard guide to building phone systems with Asterisk, the open source IP PBX that has traditional telephony providers running scared! Revised for the 1.4 release of the software, the new edition of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony reveals how you can save money on equipment and support, and finally be in control ...
The corporate market is now embracing free, "open source" software like never before, as evidenced by the recent success of the technologies underlying LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). Each is the result of a publicly collaborative process among numerous developers who volunteer their time and energy to create better software.
The...
Originally developed for mainframes but highly portable across platforms-from servers to desktops to handhelds-Rexx is an easy yet powerful scripting language that's widely used for rapid application development.
Covers Rexx interpreters for specialized functions-object-oriented, mainframe, and handheld.
There are 8 different free Rexx i...
Modern appliances are complex machines with processors, operating systems, and application software. While there are books that will tell you how to run Linux on embedded hardware, and books on how to build a Linux application, Linux Appliance Design is the first book to demonstrate how to merge the two and create a Linux appliance. You'll see...
This hands-on guide to hacking begins with step-by-step tutorials on hardware modifications that teach basic hacking techniques as well as essential reverse engineering skills. The book progresses into a discussion of the Xbox security mechanisms and other advanced hacking topics, with an emphasis on educating the readers on the important subjects ...
In this book, you will learn how digital signals are captured, represented, processed, communicated, and stored in computers. The specific topics we will cover include: physical properties of the source information (such as sound or images), devices for information capture (microphones, cameras), digitization, compression, digital signal representa...
There are many books that teach beginners how to write secret messages using ciphers. There are a couple books that teach beginners how to hack ciphers. As far as I can tell, there are no books to teach beginners how to write programs to hack ciphers. This book fills that gap.
This book is for complete beginners who do not know anything about en...
The mission of the first edition of this book was to introduce the anykernel and rump kernels and motivate their existence. Additionally, we explored the characteristics of the technology through various experiments. The paramount, often criminally overlooked experiment was the one hiding in plain sight: is it possible to construct the system in a ...
The dramatic change in the price and accessibility of data demands a new focus on data analytic literacy. This book is intended for use by people who perform regular data analyses. It aims to give a brief summary of the key ideas, practices, and pitfalls of modern data analysis. One goal is to summarize in a succinct way the most common difficultie...
This project was initiated in 2009 with the aim to spread knowledge about mobile technologies and encourage people to enter our community or deepen their existing knowledge.
More than twenty writers from the mobile community share their know-how in dealing with topics such as accessibility in mobile apps, UX design, mobile analytics, prototyping...
This module is focused on the study of Free Software in relation with the private sector and the economic implications of its use and development models. We analyse the software industry from an economic perspective: how it was affected by the raise of free software and what is its potential for the future. On the other hand, we study how to use Fr...
This book is assembled from lectures given by the author over a period of 10 years at the School of Computing of DePaul University. The lectures cover multiple classes, including Analysis and Design of Algorithms, Scientific Computing, Monte Carlo Simulations, and Parallel Algorithms. These lectures teach the core knowledge required by any scientis...
This free book, or really a "coursebook" for a college freshman-level class, has been updated for Spring 2014 and provides an introduction to programming and problem solving using both Matlab and Mathcad. We provide a balanced selection of introductory exercises and real-world problems (i.e. no "contrived" problems). We include ...
Understanding and creating a mobile app development strategy is an important process for today's development decision-makers opening up new business opportunities or empowering employees to be more productive with new capabilities. Microsoft defines an end-to-end platform for the agile creation of mobile apps that can target any platform (iOS,...
Microsoft Press is pleased to offer the second edition of Kraig Brockschmidt's in-depth ebook on writing Windows Store apps using HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript on the Windows 8.1 platform. The ebook includes 20 chapters and 4 appendices....
If you've designed your SQL code intelligently and implemented a sensible indexing strategy, there's a good chance your queries will "fly", when tested in isolation. In the real world, however, where multiple processes can access the same data at the same time, SQL Server often has to make one process wait, sacrificing concurren...
Think C++ is an introduction to programming using the C++ programming language. I originally wrote it to help students prepare for the Computer Science AP exam (when the exam was in C++)....
The Little Book of Semaphores is a free textbook that introduces the principles of synchronization for concurrent programming.
In most computer science curricula, synchronization is a module in an Operating Systems class. OS textbooks present a standard set of problems with a standard set of solutions, but most students don't get a good und...
The Linux Command Line takes you from your very first terminal keystrokes to writing full programs in Bash, the most popular Linux shell (or command line). Along the way you'll learn the timeless skills handed down by generations of experienced, mouse-shunning gurus: file navigation, environment configuration, command chaining, pattern matchin...
Take pictures and shoot video with your Raspberry Pi. Connecting a High Quality Camera or Camera Module turns your favourite credit-card-sized computer into a powerful digital camera. Learn how to set up and control the camera to capture stills and video footage. Discover the numerous modes and effects available, and use the camera in a variety of ...
Even if you are an absolute beginner, this book will teach you all you need to know to write simple programs in C and start creating GUIs.
The first half of the book is an introduction to C, and covers the basics of writing simple command-line programs. The second half shows how to use the GTK user interface toolkit with C to create feature-rich...
The Raspberry Pi is loved the world over by educators and makers thanks to its tiny size and endless possibilities. Find out why it's loved and how to use it with the latest official Projects Book - we've managed to stuff the fifth edition with another 200 pages of inspiring projects, practical tutorials, and definitive reviews.
- Lear...