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Sep 29 2022

IT Manager’s Handbook: by Bill Holtsnider, Brian D. Jaffe

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IT Manager’s Handbook: The Business Edition is a MUST-HAVE guide for the advancing technology professional who is looking to move up into a supervisory role, and is ideal for newly-promoted IT managers who need to quickly understand their positions. It uses IT–related examples to discuss business topics and recognizes the ever-changing and growing demands of IT in today’s world as well as how these demands impact those who work in the field. Specific attention is paid to the latest issues, including the challenges of dealing with a mobile and virtual workforce, managing Gen-X/Years, and running an IT organization in a troubled economy. Rich with external references and written in-easy-to-read sections, IT Manager’s Handbook: The Business Edition is the definitive manual to managing an IT department in today’s corporate environment. Focuses on Web 2.0 ideas and how they impact and play into today's organizations, so you can keep up on social networking, YouTube, web conferencing, instant messaging, Twitter, RSS Feeds, and other collaboration tools Provides strategies on how to get employees to focus in the 24/7 data word Discusses key IT topics in 'layman's terms' for business personnel who need to understand IT topics ...

Sep 29 2022

Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction by John Sutherland

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John Sutherland's contribution to Oxford's VSI series is an informative condensation of major themes in the sociology of literature. It is not a comprehensive analysis of all bestselling genres (e.g., self-help books, popular history, etc.), nor is it exhaustive of all geographic areas (confining itself to the Anglo-American book markets). Nonetheless, Sutherland stays true to the VSI format (brevity and readability) and provides his readers with a pithy survey of major bestsellers and their social, literary, and cultural contexts.While it is true that there are other studies that deal with the bestseller phenomenon more extensively (of which Sutherland cites a handful in his bibliography), this VSI book has the advantage of inviting lay readers to reflect on the origins and development of bestseller marketing over the course of the twentieth century. Drawing from his wide knowledge of bestselling titles in the U.S. and Britain, Sutherland offers numerous examples of books that happened to capture their historical moment perfectly, only to fade away once that moment had passed. Sutherland is careful to point out the importance of genre (especially with crime fiction and westerns), political ideology (see his discussion of Tom Clancy and John Grisham), and media tie-ins (with 1976's *The Omen* as the landmark screenplay-novelization tie-in) in establishing a book's bestseller status in a given time and place. The examples are brief, but by the end of Sutherland's survey one has a good impression of the various strategies authors, publishers, and advertisers have used to secure books' lucrative, albeit fleeting, place on the bestseller lists.Again, there are other books out there that delve deeper into the bestseller phenomenon. Two titles Sutherland doesn't cite but that remain illuminating are Thomas Whiteside's *The Blockbuster Complex*, based on a series of articles he wrote for the *New Yorker* in the 1970s, and Andre Schiffrin's more recent *The Business of Books*. Still, Sutherland's VSI is a pleasant, accessible read, and one that brings lay readers into conversation with an enduring object of study in the sociology of literature....

Sep 29 2022

Beauty: A Very Short Introduction by Roger Scruton

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Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference. In this Very Short Introduction the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object - either in art, in nature, or the human form - beautiful, and examining how we can compare differing judgements of beauty when it is evident all around us that our tastes vary so widely. Is there a right judgement to be made about beauty? Is it right to say there is more beauty in a classical temple than a concrete office block, more in a Rembrandt than in last year's Turner Prize winner? Forthright and thought-provoking, and as accessible as it is intellectually rigorous, this introduction to the philosophy of beauty draws conclusions that some may find controversial, but, as Scruton shows, help us to find greater sense of meaning in the beautiful objects that fill our lives. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable....

Sep 29 2022

Numerical Methods for Linear Control Systems: Design and Analysis by Biswa Nath Datta

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Numerical Methods for Linear Control Systems Design and Analysis is an interdisciplinary textbook aimed at systematic descriptions and implementations of numerically-viable algorithms based on well-established, efficient and stable modern numerical linear techniques for mathematical problems arising in the design and analysis of linear control systems both for the first- and second-order models....

Sep 29 2022

Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by Annas, Julia

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If you buy this hoping for a quick and easy intro to the names, lives and thoughts of early Greek philosophers, you're going to feel let down. The author seems to think that she's got more important things in mind than organizing and running the essential facts by you. She wants you to wonder about the usual tedious gender/power/class "issues," how perceptions of the Greeks have changed over time, what it all does or doesn't mean to us, and much else I could have lived without. And then she subjects you to pages of "Now, class, what do you think?"-style discussions. Questions for author: how is a reader supposed to have deep or searching thoughts about a field before knowing anything about that field? And: isn't this book meant to be an introduction? By the way, the teacher's own deep and searching thoughts didn't impress. All in all, like a day spent at a bad progressive school. There are probably lots of not-bad intros to the field out there. Maybe other reviewers can suggest a few. I've found intro-to-philosophy books by Bryan Magee and Paul Strathern helpful and well-written. There's always the encyclopedia, as well as a couple of free online dictionaries of philosophy.By the way, beware this whole series of Oxford "Short introductions" unless you have eyes as sharp as an eagle's. Someone gave the designer entirely too much leeway. The books look attractive but are almost unreadable -- the print is dinky (as in footnote-size)and entirely sans serifs. I could manage only five pages at a time before my middle-aged eyes gave out....

Sep 29 2022

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Gamma, Erich

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This book characterizes the kind of thinking that moves you from the low-level 'small' view of a software developer to the high level long-term view of a software architect.While entry-level and junior developers may spent hours arguing fruitlessly over whether OOP is dead or alive, or whether functional programming is better or worse, most senior engineers and software architects are able to use many different paradigms. They understand that these patterns are deeper than the paradigm they are implemented in.They understand that the concepts and ideas underlying these design patterns cannot and will not ever die because they express evergreen solutions to dealing with evolving software systems.Javascript made the prototype pattern its object model. Generators (and coroutines) that make async/await possible are often implemented as combinations of Factories and Iterators. The Observer pattern underlies almost every single reactive UI framework and most microservice architectures. Decorators have become mainstays in most languages, inversion of control (IoC) is crucial for dependency injection patterns (Angular, etc.), and on and on...

Sep 29 2022

Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction by Ward, Colin

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Writing with a clear leftist slant, Ward provides an informative survey of some of the leading anarchist theoreticians and briefly describes some interesting attempts to apply theory to select institutions, such as schools and urban gardens on a small scale. What the book lacks however, and what was most disappointing to me, was the short shrift Ward gave to individualist or right leaning anarchism as opposed to communalist variants. He barely discusses Stirner, who Marx took quite seriously as a threat to his promotion of communism and also downplays the contributions and efforts by Tucker and Spooned. He seemingly assumes leftist critiques of Capitalism, including claims of exploitation and environmental harm and scarcity are true --as if they were self-evident or revealed truths, sans the need to provide evidence for his claims. There is a rich literature refuting claims of inevitable scarcity, resource decline, and preferences for individual/autonomous/contractual versus communal forms of association and living. Treating libertarian/anarchists as if they are nothing more than apologists for capitalism the way it operates under existing government regimes, complete with cronyism, corruption and protectionism is not fair to individualist anarchist thinking....

Sep 29 2022

Engineering A Compiler by Cooper, Keith D

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I can imagine a very good one-term course in compiler construction built around this text. After a brief introduction, it gets immediately into the classic topics of lexical scanning, parsing, and syntax analysis. These three chapters help any beginner understand the multiple levels of processing, from the character level, up through reorganizing grammars for practical parsing and table-driven techniques, to the lower levels of semantic analysis. This includes a very brief discussion of type systems and type inference - less than 20 pages, on a topic that whole books devote themselves to. These 200 pages typify what you'll see in the rest of the book: a lot of attention paid to lexical analysis, a problem largely eliminated by automated tools (lex and yacc being the best known), and thin mention of the harder problems that differ significantly across languages and applications of languages. Chapter 5 addresses the critical issue of intermediate representation, the data structures that represent the program during analysis, optimization, and code generation. Chapter 6 is titled "The Procedure Abstraction." It deals with much more than its name suggests, including procedure activation records (generalizations of stack frames), parameter passing, stack management, symbol visibility and scoping, and scraps of symbol table organization - important stuff, but hard to understand as "procedure abstraction." The next chapter deals with "Code Shape," a grab-bag including value representations, arrays and strings, control constructs, and procedures (again). It also presents a very few pages, at the end, on object oriented language - hardly enough to scratch the surface, let alone build competence. And, for lack of a better place to stick them, I would have expected support for parallelism and exceptions to appear here, but this book seems to omit the topics altogether.Code analysis and optimization appear in chapters 8-10. That includes a competent introduction to static single assignment notation, a staple of current compiler technology mentioned earlier, in the section on intermediate representation. This covers a range of basics, but omits all significant mention of arrays, the workhorses of performance computing. Chapters 11-13 introduce the basics of instruction selection, scheduling, and register allocation. Although it mentions some hardware effects, like out-of-order execution in superscalar architecture, discussion stays close to the instruction sets of popular processors. As a result, it omits mention of SIMD, VLIW, DSP, and more exotic architectures, the ones most in need of good code generation. Compiler-specific support libraries, e.g. the kind that make up for lack of hardware divide instructions, should have appeared somewhere around here, but are oddly absent.The authors present an adequate introduction for the beginner, someone who's still not sure what a hash table is (see appendix B). It introduces many basic topics, but doesn't go into a lot of depth in any of them. The student who finishes this book will understand most major issues of classical compiler construction. I just can't see a serious, working competence coming out of this text, though. I give it four stars as an academic introduction, but a lot less for anyone with immediate problems to solve....

Sep 29 2022

American History: A Very Short Introduction by Boyer, Pauls S

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American History: A Very Short Introduction provides its reader with as comprehensive a look at American political, social and cultural history as is possible in under 200 small pages (the standard format for the "Very Short Introduction" series, whose books are not only short but small as well) and in a well written manner. Virtually every event, person of significance and movement in American history receives at least a mention, which must have been a difficult task to accomplish given the strictures. What it does not do, however, is provide consistently up to date scholarship or a proper sense of proportion of America's triumphs to failures. It also contains a few errors and some of Boyer's interpretations of events will provoke disagreement with those who do not share his political leanings.Boyer essentially begins with the English settlement of North America, dispensing with the pre-Columbian native peoples, Leif Ericson and non-English Europeans in only a few pages. The colonial period is one of the book's strengths as Boyer explains the development of the English settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth and the social development of the New World as different from that of the Old. The events leading to the Revolution are also nicely cataloged, and Boyer takes us from the post-Revolutionary war period through the Gilded Age in a fairly conventional manner.Some of Boyer's interpretations of events rely on dated scholarship, however. A simplistic search for foreign markets accounts entirely for the Spanish-American War. His account of the New Deal places the stock market crash in the role of catalyst of the Great Depression failing to mention the role of monetary policy, which is at the core of today's economic understanding. He also dredges up the traditional misconception that Americans' fondness for coffee dates from the Boston Tea Party and incorrectly cites the date of England's Glorious Revolution. Boyer also cites a famous utterance by Andrew Jackson in defiance of the Supreme Court that is considered apocryphal.Although explicitly Boyer strives for objectivity he does not always achieve it. His account is generally well balanced through Reconstruction, but his leftward leanings emerge shortly thereafter and his interpretation of events from the Gilded Age to the present too often becomes predictable and selective. Progressives are, unsurprisingly for a University of Wisconsin professor, lauded and nearly every legislative enactment of the New Deal and Great Society is given space. Like many historians, though, Boyer mistakes these enactments as achievements in their own right, and rarely analyzes whether they, in fact, accomplished their goals. For instance, he credits President Clinton with welfare reform but never asks why a Democratic president would see the need to reform it in the first place. His characterization of today's Tea Party as an offshoot of the religious right ignores the firestorm that occurred a result of policies that were perceived to "bailout" the impecunious (whether on Wall Street, in the housing market or the auto industry) at the expense of those who had behaved in a fiscally responsible manner in the Tea Party members' views.Boyer concludes by cataloging America's many challenges and faults as he finds them today. Nonetheless, he concludes that "when the balance is drawn, America's record of achievement in advancing human well-being may ultimately outweigh the rest and prove a more lasting measure of national greatness than transient imperial power, military might, or a mere abundance of ephemeral material goods." The reader will likely need to consult another book to understand, however, why that is....