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…
Having abandoned the true way, I fell into a deep sleep and awoke in a deep dark wood. I set out to escape the wood, but my path was blocked by a lion. As I fled to lower ground, a figure appeared before me. “Have mercy on me, whatever you are,” I cried, “whether shade or living human.” “Not a man, though once I was. My parents were from Lombardy. I was born sub Julio and lived in R…
In the mid-2000s, some of the staff at the University of Cambridge noticed that there were fewer students applying to study computer science each year, and that they didn't have very much experience. Something had to be done about this situation. The answer was the Raspberry Pi: a small, inexpensive computer which makes programming as accessible and as fun as possible. The idea is that students…
Signals can be divided into three categories: continuous-time (analog) signals, discrete-time signals, and digital signals. The signals that we encounter daily are mostly analog signals. These signals are defined continuously in time, have an infinite range of amplitude values, and can be processed using analog electronics containing both active and passive circuit elements. Discrete-time sig…
Having opened this cookbook, you are probably eager to inject some of the ungainly strings of parentheses and question marks you find in its chapters right into your code. If you are ready to plug and play, be our guest: the practical regular expressions are listed and described in Chapters 4 through 9. But the initial chapters of this book may save you a lot of time in the long run. For instan…
Regular expressions are a language used for parsing and manipulating text. They are often used to perform complex search-and-replace operations, and to validate that text data is well-formed. Today, regular expressions are included in most program- ming languages, as well as in many scripting languages, editors, applications, databases, and command-line tools. This book aims to give quick acce…
In July 2004 David Heinemeier Hansson released Ruby on Rails, a Web framework for the Ruby pro- gramming language. It quickly gained momentum and became notorious for being a highly productive Model-View-Controller (MVC) Web framework that was particularly well suited to Agile development. Favoring sensible conventions over verbose confi guration fi les, Rails (as it is often called for shor…
This book would not have been possible without the tireless efforts of dozens—possibly even dozens of dozens!—of people. First, my wife, Laura, who not only tolerated my all-night writing sessions and endless requests for feedback on story ideas, but also at various times pinch hit as literary agent, proofreader, sanity checker, and stop-reading-the-Internet- and-get-back-to-work!-er. This …
This book was written with the beginner in mind. Each of the 24 hours in this book is short and succinct, usually teaching one basic subject and building on previous hours. The subjects covered in this book are geared primarily toward rendering on the small Windows Phone 7 screen. A lot of attention is given to sprite animation, since this seems to be the main focus of games for this platform. …
Before we start learning Scala, let's first understand what functional programming (FP) is. You may have used a spreadsheet while working. In a spreadsheet, there is a bunch of equations and we enter values in the given cells for these equations. We get the answers through these equations. When you enter the same values again, you get the same answer and there are no fallouts. At the core of FP…
Scala was born from the mind of Martin Odersky, a man who had helped introduce generarics into the Java programming language.
Python is a powerful programming language when considering portability, flexibility, syntax, style, and extendability. The language was written by Guido van Rossum with clean syntax built in. To define a function or initiate a loop, indentation is used insteadofbrackets.Theresultisprofound:aPythonprogrammercanlookatanygiven uncommented Python code and quickly understand its inner workings and…
People learn spoken languages for different reasons. Y o u learned your first language to live. It gave you the tools to get through your everyday life. If you learned a second language, the reasons could be very differ- ent. Sometimes, you might have to learn a second language to further your career or adapt to a changing environment. But sometimes you decide to conquer a new language not bec…
the Shell iS the Standard interface to every Unix and Linux system; users and administrators alike have experience with the shell, and combining commands into shell scripts is a natural pro- gression. However, that is only the tip of the iceberg. The shell is actually a full programming language, with variables and functions, and also more advanced structures such as arrays (including associati…
Sometimes all one wants is a good example. That’s our motivation for accepting the baton from Joe Sack and revising his excellent work to cover the very latest edition of Microsoft’s database engine—SQL Server 2012. T-SQL is fundamental to working with SQL Server. Almost everything you do, from querying a table to creating indexes to backing up and recovering, ultimately comes down to T-S…
Programming languages do one very simple thing: they allow you to write programs that tell the computer what to do. You can tell a computer to read a value from the keyboard, add two numbers, save a result in a file on the hard disk, or draw a smiley face on the screen. No matter what programming language you use, the underlying commands that the computer can execute are exactly the same. Wheth…
As its main theme, the book presents qualitative research from a practical perspective. Such a view reveals insights into how qualitative research is done, at the ground level. The approach should be especially useful if in fact you are actually wanting to conduct a qualitative study—whether it is to be self-standing, part of a larger study, or an academic or training assignment for an underg…
Swift is an exciting new language from Apple, first announced at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2014. The language started life as the brainchild of Chris Lattner, director of Apple’s Developer Tools Department, and is the next step in the evolution of Apple’s software development ecosystem. Swift brings with it many modern language features, including type safety,…
This book is about Tcl, the scripting language developed by John Ousterhout. Tcl stands for tool command language and was originally designed as a simple scripting language interpreter that could be embedded inside applications written in the C language. With the addition of the Tk graphical toolkit and a host of other language extensions supporting such features as graphics, relational databas…
One of the simplest and natural types of information representation is by means of written texts. Data to be processed often does not decompose into independent records. This type of data is characterized by the fact that it can be written down as a long sequence of characters. Such linear sequence is called a text. The texts are central in "word processing" systems, which provide facilities fo…
This volume, Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, is a Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report is a collaborative effort of Working Group I (WGI) and Working Group II (WGII). The IPCC leadership team for this report also has responsibility for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), scheduled for c…
This volume, Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, is a Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report is a collaborative effort of Working Group I (WGI) and Working Group II (WGII). The IPCC leadership team for this report also has responsibility for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), scheduled for c…
Since its early ARPANET inception during the Cold War, the Internet has grown by a staggering nine orders of magnitude. Today, the Internet and the World Wide Web pervade our lives, having fundamentally altered the way we seek, exchange, distribute, and process information. The Internet has become a powerful social force, transforming communication, entertainment, commerce, politics, medicine, …
Let’s get familiar with dRuby. dRuby stands for “distributed Ruby.” It’s one of the standard libraries that comes with the Ruby core code, and you can use it to write distributed programming apps without the hassle of installing and configuring additional components. In this chapter (because it’s an unwritten rule), we’ll start with “Hello, World” and then create a small reminde…