General Books - Page 4

The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)

Obie Fernandez

Amazon Price: $31.49 List Price: $49.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Addison-Wesley Professional Amazon Marketplace: 50 new & used starting at $25.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Computer Science -> General
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Computer Science -> General AAS
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Programming -> Languages & Tools -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The expert guide to building Ruby on Rails applications

Ruby on Rails strips complexity from the development process, enabling professional developers to focus on what matters most: delivering business value. Now, for the first time, there’s a comprehensive, authoritative guide to building production-quality software with Rails. Pioneering Rails developer Obie Fernandez and a team of experts illuminate the entire Rails API, along with the Ruby idioms, design approaches, libraries, and plug-ins that make Rails so valuable. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience, they address the real challenges development teams face, showing how to use Rails’ tools and best practices to maximize productivity and build polished applications users will enjoy.

Using detailed code examples, Obie systematically covers Rails’ key capabilities and subsystems. He presents advanced programming techniques, introduces open source libraries that facilitate easy Rails adoption, and offers important insights into testing and production deployment. Dive deep into the Rails codebase together, discovering why Rails behaves as it does– and how to make it behave the way you want it to.

This book will help you

Increase your productivity as a web developer

Realize the overall joy of programming with Ruby on Rails

Learn what’s new in Rails 2.0

Drive design and protect long-term maintainability with TestUnit and RSpec

Understand and manage complex program flow in Rails controllers

Leverage Rails’ support for designing REST-compliant APIs

Master sophisticated Rails routing concepts and techniques

Examine and troubleshoot Rails routing

Make the most of ActiveRecord object-relational mapping

Utilize Ajax within your Rails applications

Incorporate logins and authentication into your application

Extend Rails with the best third-party plug-ins and write your own

Integrate email services into your applications with ActionMailer

Choose the right Rails production configurations

Streamline deployment with Capistrano

Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics (Interactive Technologies) (Interactive Technologies)

Thomas Tullis, William Albert

Amazon Price: $44.95 List Price: $49.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Morgan Kaufmann Amazon Marketplace: 34 new & used starting at $37.49

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Computer Science -> General
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Computer Science -> General AAS
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Operating Systems -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Effectively measuring the usability of any product requires choosing the right metric, applying it, and effectively using the information it reveals. Measuring the User Experience provides the first single source of practical information to enable usability professionals and product developers to do just that. Authors Tullis and Albert organize dozens of metrics into six categories: performance, issues-based, self-reported, web navigation, derived, and behavioral/physiological. They explore each metric, considering best methods for collecting, analyzing, and presenting the data. They provide step-by-step guidance for measuring the usability of any type of product using any type of technology.

. Presents criteria for selecting the most appropriate metric for every case
. Takes a product and technology neutral approach
. Presents in-depth case studies to show how organizations have successfully used the metrics and the information they revealed

Java Generics and Collections

Maurice Naftalin, Philip Wadler

Amazon Price: $23.09 List Price: $34.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Amazon Marketplace: 37 new & used starting at $17.71

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Computer Science -> General
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Computer Science -> General AAS
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Programming -> Java -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This comprehensive guide shows you how to master the most important changes to Java since it was first released. Generics and the greatly expanded collection libraries have tremendously increased the power of Java 5 and Java 6. But they have also confused many developers who haven't known how to take advantage of these new features.

"Java Generics and Collections" covers everything from the most basic uses of generics to the strangest corner cases. It teaches you everything you need to know about the collections libraries, so you'll always know which collection is appropriate for any given task, and how to use it.

Topics covered include: Fundamentals of generics: type parameters and generic methods Other new features: boxing and unboxing, foreach loops, varargs Subtyping and wildcards Evolution not revolution: generic libraries with legacy clients and generic clients with legacy libraries Generics and reflection Design patterns for generics Sets, Queues, Lists, Maps, and their implementations Concurrent programming and thread safety with collections Performance implications of different collections

Generics and the new collection libraries they inspired take Java to a new level. If you want to take your software development practice to a new level, this book is essential reading.

Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, where his research focuses on the design of programming languages. He is a co-designer of GJ, work that became the basis for generics in Sun's Java 5.0.

Maurice Naftalin is Technical Director at Morningside Light Ltd., a software consultancy in the United Kingdom. He has most recently served as anarchitect and mentor at NSB Retail Systems plc, and as the leader of the client development team of a major UK government social service system.

""A brilliant exposition of generics. By far the best book on the topic, it provides a crystal clear tutorial that starts with the basics and ends leaving the reader with a deep understanding of both the use and design of generics.""
Gilad Bracha, Java Generics Lead, Sun Microsystems

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

Cass R. Sunstein

Amazon Price: $10.85 List Price: $15.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Oxford University Press, USA Amazon Marketplace: 37 new & used starting at $9.53

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Industries & Professions -> MIS
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> General
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

As the dire history of planned economies highlights, small well-informed groups of people will often make far worse decisions than large numbers of people, acting independently, would make. In Infotopia, Cass Sunstein looks at the "wisdom of the many"--particularly as seen on today's Internet--illuminating many new ways of collecting and evaluating information and making effective decisions.
Sunstein shows how the on-line efforts of many people coming together help companies, schools, governments, and individuals to amass ever-growing bodies of accurate knowledge. He describes for instance how Wikipedia, through an endless flurry of self-correcting exchanges, collects information on everything from politics and business to science fiction. Open-source software--which licenses programmers to use, change, and improve the software--taps the power of large numbers of people to spur technological development. And prediction markets--such as the famous Iowa Electronic Market, where people bet real money on the outcome of local and national elections--collect information in a way that allows companies, ranging from computer makers to Hollywood studios, to make better decisions about the future. Sunstein reveals why these revolutionary new methods are so astoundingly accurate and he also shows how people can take advantage of "the wisdom of the many" without succumbing to the dangers of herd mentality.
"Sunstein, one of the biggest of America's internet big thinkers, has written an intriguing new book in which he argues that Hayek's insights about the genius of markets are equally true of the internet."
--Patti Waldmeir, Financial Times
"This extraordinary work synthesizes the latest in how we know, with the latest in what the web has become, to map more compellingly than any other book the promise and risk of the information society."
--Lawrence Lessig, author of Free Culture and The Future of Ideas
"Vivid, readable, and informativea show-me-the-money guide to what soars and what stumbles from the stable of Internet dreams."
--Jedediah Purdy, American Prospect

Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions

Jason Burby, Shane Atchison

Amazon Price: $19.79 List Price: $29.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Sybex Amazon Marketplace: 42 new & used starting at $9.41

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Industries & Professions -> MIS
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Management & Leadership -> Decision-Making & Problem Solving
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Management & Leadership -> Systems & Planning

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Theories and theories alone! 1 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

If you are looking for "Actionable Web Analytics" or how to "Use Data to Make Smart Business Decisions", then look somewhere else. The title of this book and the 5 star reviews given by some people here has misled me. I have red 75% of this book and finally decided to stop waisting my time. The book goes around web analytics and never gets into the point or give any specific practical recommendation.

It was a total waist of time and If there is a way I can return it back I will do so immediately.

Editorial Review:

Knowing everything you can about each click to your Web site can help you make strategic decisions regarding your business. This book is about the why, not just the how, of web analytics and the rules for developing a "culture of analysis" inside your organization. Why you should collect various types of data. Why you need a strategy. Why it must remain flexible. Why your data must generate meaningful action. The authors answer these critical questions—and many more—using their decade of experience in Web analytics.

File System Forensic Analysis

Brian Carrier

Amazon Price: $37.79 List Price: $59.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Addison-Wesley Professional Amazon Marketplace: 54 new & used starting at $25.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Industries & Professions -> E-commerce -> General
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Industries & Professions -> E-commerce -> General AAS
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Business & Culture -> Privacy

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The bible for File System Forensics 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Great Book. Great job Brian. A must have in your bookshelf if you are serious about computer forensics.
It only lacks two things to be perfect: a reiserfs and a HFS+ sections.

Only an error. GPT partition schema isn't used only in big servers. New Intel Macintoshes use it by default for their boot drive.

Fantastic 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I've been in IT for over 25 years, and in that time I've read a lot of technical books. "File System Forensic Analysis" is not only the best book I have read on computer forensics, it's probably the best technical work in ANY field I've ever read. It's thoroughly researched, clearly written, and contains virtually no fluff. The numerous rave reviews it has received are well-deserved.

My only quibble is the short, but seemingly gratuitous section on hexadecimal and decimal arithmetic. If you're ready for this book, you'll already know this stuff. But, that's only a few pages in a book that's otherwise packed with real substance.

Editorial Review:

This is an advanced cookbook and reference guide for digital forensic practitioners. File System Forensic Analysis focuses on the file system and disk. The file system of a computer is where most files are stored and where most evidence is found; it also the most technically challenging part of forensic analysis. This book offers an overview and detailed knowledge of the file system and disc layout. The overview will allow an investigator to more easily find evidence, recover deleted data, and validate his tools. The cookbook section will show how to use the many open source tools for analysis, many of which Brian Carrier has developed himself.

Bioinformatics For Dummies (For Dummies (Math & Science))

Jean-Michel, Ph. D. Claverie, Cedric, Ph.D. Notredame

Amazon Price: $19.79 List Price: $29.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: For Dummies Amazon Marketplace: 55 new & used starting at $10.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Home Computing -> Internet -> Web Browsers
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Business & Culture -> Culture
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Computer Science -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Were you always curious about biology but were afraid to sit through long hours of dense reading? Did you like the subject when you were in high school but had other plans after you graduated? Now you can explore the human genome and analyze DNA without ever leaving your desktop!

Bioinformatics For Dummies is packed with valuable information that introduces you to this exciting new discipline. This easy-to-follow guide leads you step by step through every bioinformatics task that can be done over the Internet. Forget long equations, computer-geek gibberish, and installing bulky programs that slow down your computer. You’ll be amazed at all the things you can accomplish just by logging on and following these trusty directions. You get the tools you need to:

• Analyze all types of sequences
• Use all types of databases
• Work with DNA and protein sequences
• Conduct similarity searches
• Build a multiple sequence alignment
• Edit and publish alignments
• Visualize protein 3-D structures
• Construct phylogenetic trees

This up-to-date second edition includes newly created and popular databases and Internet programs as well as multiple new genomes. It provides tips for using servers and places to seek resources to find out about what’s going on in the bioinformatics world. Bioinformatics For Dummies will show you how to get the most out of your PC and the right Web tools so you’ll be searching databases and analyzing sequences like a pro!

Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design (Adaptive Path)

Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer, David Verba

Amazon Price: $16.49 List Price: $24.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Amazon Marketplace: 45 new & used starting at $8.89

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> General
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> General AAS
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Home Computing -> Internet -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The world in which we live and work is subject to change without notice, and succeeding amidst that uncertainty requires continuous improvement. The key to creating successful products and services in a rapidly changing world is not resistance to unexpected change, but the flexibility to adapt to it. With that in mind, Subject to Change presents ideas that will help you improve your work designing products and services that provide great experiences for your customers.

Praise
"Short, but powerful. Easy to read, yet profound. I’ve been searching for just this book: the one perfect book that summarizes the essence of modern product design. This is it. The lessons are as powerful as they are simple: The product is NOT the goal. Successful products are systems. Focus on the experience. This requires empathy, agile product management, real understanding of the target audience. This book practices what it preaches. I will use it in my courses for MBA students. You should use it for, well, for everyone. Short, simple, persuasive, and powerful."
Don Norman
Author of Emotional Design and Design of Future Things
Co-Founder Nielsen Norman group

"Customers don’t care about how innovative you are. They just want to be happy and satisfied. Learn from Adaptive Path a passion for finding and solving the problems that will matter to customers no matter what the future brings."
Scott Berkun
Author, The Myths of Innovation

"Wake up. The future of business isn’t about flying cars and robot butlers. Creating the future is really about changing the way your company connects with its customers. Use this book as your guide."
Jeffrey Veen
Design Manager, Google

"Subject to Change presents complex, challenging ideas in simple, compelling language, with illuminating examples and no shortage of memorable phrases. At once authoritative and nimble, the book itself is an example of the kind of experience the authors admire. No matter who you are, it will change the way you think about design."
Michael Bierut
Partner, Pentagram
Author, 79 Short Essays on Design

"The principles set out in Subject to Change are essential for the design of any product, but especially relevant for the fast-moving world of web software. It used to be the case that a software product was designed once, and refreshed every couple of years. Software is no longer a product. It is a process, a dynamic service that evolves as it responds to constant interaction with its users. The essence of Web 2.0 design is to create a dynamic framework that harnesses the collective intelligence of customers in such a way that the software becomes almost alive. This terrific book teaches the mindset required for this new kind of design."
Tim O’Reilly
Founder and Publisher, O’Reilly Media

Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation

Don Tapscott

Amazon Price: $18.00 List Price: $20.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: McGraw-Hill Amazon Marketplace: 58 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> General AAS
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Home Computing -> Internet -> General AAS
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Business & Culture -> Culture

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 43 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Future Schlock 1 out of 5 stars.
6 of 8 people found this review helpful.

As a long-time net user AND baby boomer, I found much of what Tapscott says completely wrong, be it his unscientific conclusions regarding the so-called "N-Gen" (his own invention, which I find so distasteful and misleading that I'll not use it from now on), his predictions for the future, or his dim view of the technological abilities and intelligence of the boomers.

For example:

1. He assumes that boomers will always remain behind the young when it comes to using the net. There is endless talk of the growing percentage of youthful net users, while ignoring (and thereby discounting) any corresponding growth in boomers using it. He mentions more than once that because youth "assimilated" the net whereas boomers had to learn to use it, youth has an advantage in that respect. (I suppose that some kid raised in a car and thereby "assimilating" how to drive would have a great advantage over all of us dummies who had to learn by taking driver's ed, too.) Now, I don't know how technologically adept or otherwise he might be, and some allowance must be made for the time the book was written (1998), but nowadays I've got news for him: It ain't that hard!!!

2. He stereotypes boomers as being one-dimensional and ignorant; only youth is imaginative, unselfish, open-minded and resourceful. He predicts either a terrible clash between the generations or (in the unlikely event that the boomers wake up in time to cede control to youth) something of a utopia run by the young. It's funny, but a lot of people from that generation that I've encountered hardly fit that profile (and yes, I'm talking about people online)...and I never thought I was all that closed-minded (though I'm sure his advocates would disagree after reading this). Besides, isn't youth traditionally more imaginative, etc., etc.? What proof does he have that this generation won't turn out as all the others have? It's called "growing up." (And I don't mean that it's a 100% good thing!) And he contends that in that generational clash the young will have the advantage, having mastered the greatest tool for mass communication ever: the internet. Evidently the boomers will still be sending telegrams and will thereby be left behind.

3. He mentions that the young have some nebulous advantage in that they espouse so many different points of view, while boomers (there's that stereotyping again) see everything in black and white (I'm not kidding, that's exactly what he says at one point). Not surprisingly, he offers absolutely no proof for either of those assertions. As someone who's spent most of his life finding shades of gray in everything, I think he's confusing the word "different" with "differing," blissfully ignorant of the possibility that all of those contending viewpoints might result in nothing but cacophony.

4. His insights on the young seem to mostly stem from those kids he's spoken with on less than a handful of websites. Evidently he thinks that these websites provide a completely scientific sampling of that generation. Believe me, there ain't no such animal! I'm happy for those sites in that they were frequented by a very nice segment of the younger generation (though even here, some things--like the continuous protestations of teenage males that they would never, ever even think about visiting a porn site--seem somewhat disingenuous, to say the least), but I've been to many sites and participated with many from that generation who, I assure you, were hardly the little angels he's making everyone out to be (and I'm certainly not saying they're all bad, either...but these are rather sweeping generalizations, proof that HE thinks in black and white, anyway).

5. His usual, completely unscientific, means of arriving at a proof of one of his theories is to first introduce it, then to provide some truly scientific though barely related evidence (a chart that shows internet growth or something), and finally to submit a few quotes from his kids to bolster his standpoint. None of this, of course, proves anything, and I'm quite certain that anyone with a professional background in statistical analysis could easily rip his logic to shreds.

6. He sees the net as the road to the truth, and the new generation as particularly discerning of it. Yet everyday I find another hoax in my email, many of them passed on to me by gullible youngsters.

All of which amounts to his own utopian view of youth, a somewhat curmudgeonly distaste for the opinions and abilities of the boomers, and a blatant force-fitting of his transparent opinions (and, in the end, that's all they are) upon the actual, both slimly provided and barely relevant, facts.

It doesn't surprise me at all that younger people have given the book so many positive opinions on here; they're being told what they want to hear. What does surprise me is how few people have seen how poorly constructed his arguments are (regardless of how true or false his conclusions may be). What does that say about the ability of this new generation to discern the truth with a critical eye?

If the proof is in the pudding, keep in mind the year this was published: 1998. That was almost a decade ago (as I write this), long enough for a good part of that generation to come of age, long enough to begin to see some of his sweeping changes, long enough for many of his predictions to have come true. Where are they? People are talking about the book on here as if it were just published and he's showing us the world as it will be 10 years from now. He IS!...only that "10 years from now" is NOW!

Editorial Review:

Don Tapscott, author of The Digital Economy, turns his attention to the way young people--surrounded by high-tech toys and tools from birth--will likely affect the future. In Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, Tapscott parlays some 300 interviews into predictions on how today's 2- to 22-year-olds might reshape society. His observations about this enormously influential population, which will total 88 million in North America alone by the year 2000, range from the kind of employees they may eventually be to how they could be reached by marketers.

CompTIA A+ Certification Workbook For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

Faithe Wempen

Amazon Price: $19.79 List Price: $29.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: For Dummies Amazon Marketplace: 49 new & used starting at $7.20

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Certification Central -> Exams -> A+
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Certification Central -> A+
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Certification Central -> General

Editorial Review:

Becoming a certified computer technician can take your career to new heights. Unfortunately, sitting down to take the A+ Certification exam can do the same for your blood pressure—but don’t get your cables in a knot!

A+ Certification Workbook for Dummies gives you everything you need to sharpen your skills and boost your confidence as you prepare for the A+ Certification exam. Reflecting the tone and content of the actual test, this friendly workbook includes hundreds of hands-on exercises, scores of quizzes covering the terms and specifications you’ll need to memorize, and tons of troubleshooting “story problems” that require critical thinking and application of theory.

With A+ Certification Workbook for Dummies, you’ll get practical guidance and helpful tips on answering questions and solving problems in all areas covered on the real exam, including:

• Protecting yourself and your PC
• Motherboards and CPUs
• Memory, BIOS, and CMOS
• Disk storage
• Power supplies and portable PCs
• Ports, cables, and connectors
• Monitors and adapters
• Printers
• Multimedia and input devices

Plus, you’ll get hands-on experience with:

• Installing and upgrading Windows
• Files, folders, and command prompts
• Running and configuring applications
• System resources and device drivers
• Optimizing and maintaining Windows
• Understanding the system files and boot sequences
• Troubleshooting hardware, bootstrap, startup, and application problems

Bonus CD-ROM includes example files and a test engine with additional review questions!

A+ Certification Workbook for Dummies gives you everything you need to pass the A+ Certification Exam and prove you have what it takes to work in the competitive computer support industry.