When Andy and I wrote the first edition, we had to explain the background and appeal of Ruby. Among other things, we wrote, “When we discovered Ruby, we realized that we’d found what we’d been looking for. More than any other language with which we have worked, Ruby stays out of your way. You can concentrate on solving the problem at hand, instead of struggling with compiler and language…
This book is the second edition of the PickAxe, as Programming Ruby is known to Rubyists. It is a tutorial and reference for the Ruby programming language. If you have the first edition, you’ll find that this version is a significant rewrite. When Andy and I wrote the first edition, we had to explain the background and appeal of Ruby. Among other things, we wrote “When we discovered Ru…
As we can see from the rise of social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, My- Space, the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), and hundreds of others around the world, there’s a major shift taking place in how humans interact with the Web and how the Web in turn interacts with them. The static web is an artifact of the past, having been replaced by the idea that sites or applications shoul…
This is a book about programming sound. Just as in any other programming book, in this book we’ll cover the technical skills and tools that will enable you to tell a computer how to do something—namely, make sound. But just as with any other programming language, good design is important. I don’t mean visual design; I mean careful thought and practice concerning “how things work.” So …
This book is an advanced reference for the mobile web today, and it is the most complete reference available at this time. This may seem an ambitious claim, but it is the truth. This book draws upon a mix of experience and very detailed research and testing not available in other books, websites, or research papers about the mobile web. Programming the Mobile Web will teach you how to create ef…
WCF is a software development kit for developing and deploying services on Windows. I will describe what a service is in the next section. But WCF is much more—it is literally a better .NET. WCF provides a runtime environment for your services, enabling you to expose Common Language Runtime (CLR) types as services and to consume other services as CLR types. Although in theory you could build …
This book—the 6th edition of Programming Windows—is a guide to programming applications that run under Microsoft Windows 8. At the time of this writing (May 1, 2012), Windows 8 is not yet complete and neither is this book. What you are reading right now is a preview ebook version of the book. This preview version is based on the Consumer Preview of Windows 8, which was released on February …
I am always impressed when science fiction and reality meet. With Kinect for Windows, this is definitely the case, and it is exciting to be able to control the computer with only our hands, without touching any devices, just like in the movie “Minority Report.” I fell in love with Kinect for Windows the first time I tried it. Being able to control my computer with gestures and easily create…
Welcome to the exciting, empowering world of home automation! If you have ever wanted your home to do more than just protect you against the outside elements and want to interface it to the digital domain, this book will show you how. By demonstrating several easy-to-build projects, you will be able to take the skills you learned from this book and expand upon and apply them toward custom home …
Programming Fundamentals - A Modular Structured Approach using C++ is written by Kenneth Leroy Busbee, a faculty member at Houston Community College in Houston, Texas. The materials used in this textbook/collection were developed by the author and others as independent modules for publication within the Connexions environment. Programming fundamentals are often divided into three college course…
I love programming. I enjoy the challenge to not only make a working program, but to do so with style. Programming is like poetry. It conveys a message, not only to the computer, but to those who modify and use your program. With a program, you build your own world with your own rules. You create your world according to your conception of both the problem and the solution. Masterful programmers…
We are surrounded by strings. Strings of bits make integers and floating-point numbers. Strings of digits make telephone numbers, and strings of characters make words. Long strings of characters make web pages, and longer strings yet make books. Extremely long strings represented by the letters A, C, G and T are in geneticists' databases and deep inside the cells of many readers of this book.
Programming is making the computer do whatever we want it to do. And program (or software) is the name given to a series of computer code to complete a specific task. Sometimes the procedure of writing a program is also named as solving a problem because all programs are written to do a specific task, in other words to solve a problem you faced in real world. Because of the hardware design, com…
My first experience with Amazon Web Services was on March 14, 2006. I had seen a press release announcing a new web-based storage service called Simple Storage Service (S3), and I remember thinking how strange it seemed that Amazon would be offering such a service. Nevertheless, I signed up for an account and started reading the documentation. I was blown away by S3. The simple, affordable pric…
Python is an easy-to-learn programming language that has some really useful features for a beginning programmer. The code is quite easy to read when compared to other programming languages, and it has an interactive shell into which you can enter your programs and see them run. In addition to its simple language structure and an interactive shell with which to experiment, Python has some featur…
In this book, we will explore the beautiful world of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) using the Python programming language. Along the way, we will talk to networks, queues, the OpenGL graphical library, and many more technologies. This is a programming cookbook. Every chapter is self-contained and explains a certain programming solution. We will start very simply, yet throughout this book we…
The study of computer science should cover not only the principles on which computational processing is based, but should also reflect the current state of knowledge of these fields. Today, the technology requires that professionals from all branches of computer science know both the software and hardware whose interaction at all levels is the key to understanding the basics of computational pr…
Python is a versatile programming language that can be used for a wide range of technical tasks—computation, statistics, data analysis, game development, and more. Though Python is easy to learn, its range of features means there are many aspects of it that even experienced Python developers don't know about. Even if you're confident with the basics, its logic and syntax, by digging deeper yo…
The open source geographic information system, QGIS, at version 2.6 now rivals even the most expensive commercial GIS software in both functionality and usability. It is also a showcase of the best geospatial open source technology available. It is not just a project in itself, but the marriage of dozens of open source projects in a single, clean interface. Geospatial technology is not just the…