First, businesses discovered quality as a key competitive edge; next came service. Now, Donald A. Norman, former Director of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of California, reveals how smart design is the new competitive frontier. The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how—and why—some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

Shell scripting skills never go out of style. It's the shell that unlocks the real potential of Unix. Shell scripting is essential for Unix users and system administrators-a way to quickly harness and customize the full power of any Unix system. With shell scripts, you can combine the fundamental Unix text and file processing commands to crunch data and automate repetitive tasks. But beneath this simple promise lies a treacherous ocean of variations in Unix commands and standards. Classic Shell Scripting is written to help you reliably navigate these tricky waters. Writing shell scripts requires more than just a knowledge of the shell language, it also requires familiarity with the individual Unix programs: why each one is there, how to use them by themselves, and in combination with the other programs. The authors are intimately familiar with the tips and tricks that can be used to create excellent scripts, as well as the traps that can make your best effort a bad shell script. With Classic Shell Scripting you'll avoid hours of wasted effort. You'll learn not only write useful shell scripts, but how to do it properly and portably. The ability to program and customize the shell quickly, reliably, and portably to get the best out of any individual system is an important skill for anyone operating and maintaining Unix or Linux systems. Classic Shell Scripting gives you everything you need to master these essential skills.

The foundation of all object-oriented software design, including agile methods such as extreme programming, is object thinking. But many developers have not mastered its underlying concepts and principles#151;relying on methodology and process instead of fully exploiting the power of object thinking in software design. In this essential, high-level reference, well-known object technologist David West provides a deep historical and contextual discussion of object thinking, including the behavioral approaches to object discovery and design. Readers will master the fundamental principles and learn how to apply object thinking to improve software development at every phase of the process.

Solve these twenty-five popular programming puzzles, and sharpen your programming skills as you craft solutions.

You'll find interesting and challenging programming puzzles including: 800 NumbersCrosswordsCryptogramsKnight's TourPaper, Rock, ScissorsTic-Tac-ToeTexas Hold-Em...and more.
Learning to program can be quite a challenge. Classes and books can get you so far, but at some point you have to sit down and start playing with some code. Only by reading and writing real code, with real problems, can you learn.

The Ruby Quiz was built to fill exactly this need for Ruby programmers. Challenges, solutions, and discussions combine to make Ruby Quiz a powerful way to learn Ruby tricks. See how algorithms translate to Ruby code, get exposure to Ruby's libraries, and learn how other programmers use Ruby to solve problems quickly and efficiently.

Regular expressions are an extremely powerful tool for manipulating text and data. They have spread like wildfire in recent years, now offered as standard features in Perl, Java, VB.NET and C# (and any language using the .NET Framework), PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, MySQL, awk, Emacs, and many other popular tools and languages. If you don't use regular expressions yet, you will discover in this book a whole new world of mastery over your data. If you already use them, you'll appreciate this book's unprecedented detail and breadth of coverage. If you think you know all you need to know about regular expressions, this book is a stunning eye-opener. In spite their wide availability, flexibility, and unparalleled power, regular expressions are frequently underutilized. Regular expressions allow you to code complex and subtle text processing that you never imagined could be automated. Regular expressions can save you time and aggravation. They can be used to craft elegant solutions to a wide range of problems. A command of regular expressions is an invaluable skill. Yet what is power in the hands of an expert can be fraught with peril for the unwary.

Mastering Regular Expressions will help you navigate the minefield to becoming an expert. Once you've mastered regular expressions, they'll become an invaluable part of your toolkit. You will wonder how you ever got by without them. Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition has been thoroughly updated to include all the new features of Perl 5.8, as well as several other languages, including Java, VB.NET, C#, Python, JavaScript, Tcl, and Ruby. Written in the lucid, entertaining tone that made a complex, dry topic crystal-clear to thousands of programmers, and sprinkled with solutions to complex real-world problems, Mastering Regular Expressions offers a wealth information that you can put to immediate use. Topics include: A comparison of features among different versions of many languages and toolsHow the regular expression engine worksOptimization (major savings available here!)Matching just what you want, but not what you don't wantSections and chapters on individual languages

When was the Jurassic Period? How do bionic parts work? Is there a face on Mars? While most dictionaries and science books only tell you the answers, The Ultimate Visual Dictionary of Science shows you! Each picture is an accompanied by concise, clear explanations that make the most complex subjects easy to understand., Over 200,000 words. More than 1,400 color photographs and 200 illustrations. A companion volume to the hugely successful Ultimate Visual Dictionary.

Almost everyone can "see" in the conventional sense, but developing photographic vision takes practice. Learning to See Creatively helps photographers visualize their work, and the world, in a whole new light.

Now totally rewritten, revised, and expanded, this best-selling guide takes a radical approach to creativity. It explains how it is not some gift only for the "chosen few" but actually a skill that can be learned and applied. Using inventive photos from his own stunning portfolio, author and veteran photographer Bryan Peterson deconstructs creativity for photographers. He details the basic techniques that went into not only taking a particular photo, but also provides insights on how to improve upon it—helping readers avoid the visual pitfalls and technical dead ends that can lead to dull, uninventive photographs.

This revised edition features the latest information on digital photography and digital imaging software, as well as an all-new section on color as a design element. Learning to See Creatively is the definitive reference for any photographers looking for a fresh perspective on their work.

* New edition of a best-selling title
* Updated to include digital
* All new artwork, and a totally revised and expanded text
* All-new section on color as a design element
* Written by one of Amphoto's bestselling authors

Sometimes the simplest answer is the best. Many Enterprise Java developers, accustomed to dealing with Java's spiraling complexity, have fallen into the habit of choosing overly complicated solutions to problems when simpler options are available. Building server applications with "heavyweight" Java-based architectures, such as WebLogic, JBoss, and WebSphere, can be costly and cumbersome. When you've reached the point where you spend more time writing code to support your chosen framework than to solve your actual problems, it's time to think in terms of simplicity. In Better, Faster, Lighter Java, authors Bruce Tate and Justin Gehtland argue that the old heavyweight architectures are unwieldy, complicated, and contribute to slow and buggy application code. As an alternative means for building better applications, the authors present two "lightweight" open source architectures: Hibernate—a persistence framework that does its job with a minimal API and gets out of the way, and Spring—a container that's not invasive, heavy or complicated. Hibernate and Spring are designed to be fairly simple to learn and use, and place reasonable demands on system resources. Better, Faster, Lighter Javashows you how they can help you create enterprise applications that are easier to maintain, write, and debug, and are ultimately much faster. Written for intermediate to advanced Java developers, Better, Faster, Lighter Java, offers fresh ideas—often unorthodox—to help you rethink the way you work, and techniques and principles you'll use to build simpler applications. You'll learn to spend more time on what's important. When you're finished with this book, you'll find that your Java is better, faster, and lighter than ever before.

Ricardo Semler thinks that companies ought to put employee freedom and satisfaction ahead of corporate goals.

Imagine a company where employees set their own hours; where there are no offices, no job titles, no business plans; where employees get to endorse or veto any new venture; where kids are encouraged to run the halls; and where the CEO lets other people make nearly all the decisions. This company—Semco—actually exists, and despite a seeming recipe for chaos, its revenues have grown from $35 million to $160 million in the last six years. It has virtually no staff turnover, and there are no signs that its growth will stop any time soon.

How did Semco become wildly successful despite breaking many of the commonly accepted laws of business? In The Seven-Day Weekend, Ricardo Semler shows that for those willing to take a chance, there is a better way to run a workplace. He explains how the technology that was supposed to make life easier—laptops, cell phones, e-mail, pagers—has in fact stolen free time and destroyed the traditional nine-to-five workday. But this can be a good thing—if you have the freedom to get your job done on your own terms and to blend your work life and personal life with enthusiasm and creative energy. Smart bosses will eventually realize that you might be most productive if you work on Sunday afternoon, play golf on Monday morning, go to a movie on Tuesday afternoon, and watch your child play soccer on Thursday.

This is a radical book that will challenge the business world to make the seven-day weekend a reality.

From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year’s Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

An overview of the new server-side Java platform - Java 2 Enterprise Edition - as it relates to building n-tier web applications. It covers the building blocks (Servlets, JSP, EJB, JDBC, RMI, JNDI, CORBA) then goes into special design considerations for server side programming, (including resource pooling and component based design) before finally discussing future possibilities opened up by Jini and JavaSpaces technology.

In a world where, increasingly, corporate IT development is Web application development - ASP, PHP, CGI and ISAPI are all viable options.Now, so is the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition, and that's good news because server-side Java is portable across Windows, Linux, UNIX and MacOS and compatible with a wide range of Web Servers (IIS, Apache, Netscape Enterprise Server) and Application Servers from Sun, IBM and others.

What does all this mean for you? Java provides technologies to allow for server side processing, dynamic page content generation and dynamic presentation. With these comprehensive, platform independent Java class libraries you can join together the disparate pieces of your business - data, applications and platforms - to form a coherent whole.

Java 2 Enterprise Edition - announced by Sun in June 1999 - makes Java an entire platform, not just another language and this is the first book that seriously covers it.