Business Intelligence (BI) software allows you to view different components of a business using a single visual platform, which makes comprehending mountains of data easier. BI is everywhere. Applications that include reports, analytics, statistics, and historical and predictive modeling are all examples of BI. Currently, we are in the second generation of BI software—called BI 2.0—which is focused on writing BI software that is predictive, adaptive, simple, and interactive.

As computers and software have evolved, more data can be presented to end users with increasingly visually rich techniques. Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies such as Microsoft Silverlight can be used to transform traditional user-interfaces filled with boring data into fully interactive analytical applications that quickly deliver insight from large data sets. Furthermore, RIA applications now include 3D spatial-design capabilities that move beyond a simple list or grid and allow for interesting layouts of aggregated data. BI 2.0 implemented via an RIA technology can truly bring out the power of BI and deliver it to an average user on the Web.

Next-Generation Business Intelligence Software with Silverlight 4 provides developers, designers, and architects with a solid foundation in BI design and architecture concepts for Microsoft Silverlight. This book covers key BI design concepts and how they can be applied without an existing BI infrastructure. Author Bart Czernicki provides you with examples of how to build small BI applications that are interactive, highly visual, statistical, predictive—and most importantly—intuitive to the end-user.

BI isn’t just for the executive branch of a Fortune 500 company—it is for the masses. Let Next-Generation Business Intelligence Software with Silverlight 4 show you how to unlock the rich intelligence you already have.

• Design rich BI solutions for the masses
• Discover tips for using engaging BI designs for application presentation
• Consume BI data as a service
• Understand and create SaaS models in BI
• Craft BI solutions using the most advanced Silverlight 4.0 technology through C# 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010

There are four core audiences for this book:

# Business intelligence professionals/developers: Cube designers, report writers, SharePoint administrators, and others in this group are looking for a resource to gain additional wisdom on cutting-edge BI concepts. These readers will gain ideas that go beyond the capabilities of the traditional BI tools they are used to.
# Senior developers or architects: Developers who are familiar with writing traditional software applications and want to broaden their understanding of concepts in order to include BI fall into this category. Some may have never written any BI applications in their careers but are interested in what BI has to offer. These readers will understand the core BI concepts and how to apply them using application techniques.
# CTOs/BI directors: These are senior managers who make strategic decisions with BI. The technical examples will probably be overly technical for these readers. However, the numerous visual aids within this book will help these strategic managers make better decisions after seeing next-generation BI concepts implemented.

Information infrastructures are integrated solutions based on the fusion of information and communication technologies. They are characterized by the large amount of data that must be managed accordingly. An information infrastructure requires an efficient and effective information retrieval system to provide access to the items stored in the infrastructure. Terminological Ontologies: Design, Management and Practical Applications presents the main problems that affect the discovery systems of information infrastructures to manage terminological models, and introduces a combination of research tools and applications in Semantic Web technologies. This book specifically analyzes the need to create, relate, and integrate the models required for an infrastructure by elaborating on the problem of accessing these models in an efficient manner via interoperable services and components.

About this book:

• Includes the common framework for integration of terminological models into information infrastructures, covering the different management steps (acquisition, storage, and access).

• Provides a revision of the main requirements of terminological models in different information retrieval systems and proposes integration solutions to facilitate and simplify its management.

• “This book is essential for those who will have to create ontologies from existing terminological databases,” comments Dr. Jacques Teller, University Of Liege, Belgium.

Terminological Ontologies: Design, Management and Practical Applications is geared toward information management systems and semantic web professionals working as project managers, application developers, government workers and more. Advanced undergraduate and graduate level students, professors and researchers focusing on computer science will also find this book valuable as a secondary text or reference book.

Programming knowledge is often necessary for finding a solution to a biological problem. Based on the author’s experience working for an agricultural biotechnology company, Python for Bioinformatics helps scientists solve their biological problems by helping them understand the basics of programming. Requiring no prior knowledge of programming-related concepts, the book focuses on the easy-to-use, yet powerful, Python computer language.

The book begins with a very basic introduction that teaches the principles of programming. It then introduces the Biopython package, which can be useful in solving life science problems. The next section covers sophisticated tools for bioinformatics, including relational database management systems and XML. The last part illustrates applications with source code, such as sequence manipulation, filtering vector contamination, calculating DNA melting temperature, parsing a genbank file, inferring splicing sites, and more. The appendices provide a wealth of supplementary information, including instructions for installing Python and Biopython and a Python language and style guide.

By incorporating examples in biology as well as code fragments throughout, the author places a special emphasis on practice, encouraging readers to experiment with the code. He shows how to use Python and the Biopython package for building web applications, genomic annotation, data manipulation, and countless other applications.

In the SOA world, managing distributed services and service infrastructures is critical. Oracle Enterprise Manager - an all-encompassing management product - facilitates increased management capabilities for databases, application servers, and packaged applications. BPEL PM and OSB are two compelling, market leading products that are driving Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementation across enterprises.

There is a lack of clarity around real-world operational use cases that would help operational administrators in their day-to-day tasks. Further, the documentation available online does not provide much information on administering BPEL PM and OSB with Enterprise Manager Grid Control efficiently.

This book will help you set up the framework for managing operational tasks from a central location using Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control in a step-by-step functional approach. You will learn to automate various operational tasks that are essential for the smooth running of Oracle SOA products in production, thus increasing the efficiency of your SOA projects.

This book shows how top-drawer management capabilities from Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control can be used to effectively manage your Oracle SOA environment. You start by discovering one or more BPEL and OSB components centrally. The book then explains how to monitor BPEL processes and OSB services, and how to get alerts on service availability and performance problems. It covers the management of BPEL and OSB infrastructure components and how to manage their configurations in a central repository. It follows a hands-on approach, showing you how to use an automated approach for deploying BPEL processes and OSB projects.

By the end of this book, you will have learned several techniques to set up a framework that will help you manage your SOA environment from a central location.

A step-by-step guide to using Enterprise Manager Grid Control to automate common operational tasks essential for the smooth running of Oracle SOA products such as BPEL Process Manager and Oracle Service Bus

What you will learn from this book

• Explore BPEL Process Manager and OSB targets
• Monitor BPEL processes, partner links, OSB proxy, and business services using a combination of server metrics and synthetic tests
• Monitor the BPEL instances causing errors by creating SOAP tests
• Manage the BPEL and OSB infrastructure by monitoring configuration changes
• Manage service-level expectations around SOA services
• Create a dashboard to monitor critical SOA services, key metrics, and SLAs
• Deploy BPEL and OSB artifacts in an automated fashion to ensure that the deployments are conducted in an error free manner
• Manage the configuration settings of the BPEL and OSB infrastructure, including setting baselines and comparisons
• Clone an existing SOA Suite from one instance to another to automate the creation of a new SOA Suite environment

Approach

This book is a step-by-step tutorial on how to automate the management of BPEL Process manager, SOA Suite, and Oracle Service Bus. Each chapter has a problem-solution approach, starting with a real-world problem and then providing the solution to the problem using illustrative examples.

Who this book is written for

This book is written for BPEL and OSB administrators who deal with Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Oracle SOA Suite, or Oracle Service Bus in a production environment and who need to automate operational tasks. If you are an SOA architect or associated with SOA governance, this book will serve as an eye opener for the many available features to provide production assurance in complex SOA environments.

A general awareness of Service-Oriented Architecture is expected, as well as an awareness of Oracle SOA products such as BPEL Process Manager and Oracle Service Bus. No specific management or operational expertise is required.

Silverlight makes it much easier to build web applications with highly usable, interactive, and exciting user interfaces. However, with so many new options open to designers and developers, making the best use of the tools available is not always so easy. It's ease of use and rapid development process has left one area completely uncovered - how to design, build, and implement professional and usable interfaces, and create an enjoyable user experience and interaction.

Written by a Microsoft MVP and Silverlight Prototyping Specialist, this book is the first and only book on developing Silverlight User Interfaces. Clear, step-by-step instructions show how to build all the user interface elements that users look forward to in a cutting edge app. This book offers essential recipes, with each recipe depicting the commonly used user interface patterns built with Silverlight, and in some cases, with WPF to showcase the possibilities.

The author's experience in designing and developing user interfaces enables him to share insights on creating professional interfaces in a clear and friendly way. The book starts off with recipes dealing with fixed and fluid layouts, building custom command link controls, working with navigation, and collapsible panels, and then moves on to the more advanced topics such as calendars, alternating row colors, and task panes. The author covers a number of different UI patterns, controls, and approaches accompanied by XAML and C# code where needed (and explained), along with usage context and practical, proven, and professional techniques for specific controls and patterns.

From maps to task panes, and web cam support to pixel shaders, this Cookbook provides you with a rich selection of Silverlight UI recipes. It covers all that you need to know in order to design and implement a user interface, together with professional user experience and interface guidelines to make your solutions and applications pleasurable for your users.The author has found himself in the role of both, a designer and a developer, at different points in his professional career, and his motive was to create a book that will serve as a useful resource for designers and developers trying to find their way with Silverlight and Expression Blend.By the end of the book, you will be able to create a rich, professional, and standards-compliant user interface.

Design and implement professional user interfaces with Silverlight.

What you will learn from this book

• Implement liquid versus fixed layouts to choose the best design for your application
• Build custom controls like navigation pane, split button, and command link button to suit your application's needs
• Good design practices for patterns like wizards, tabs, status bar area and window locations
• Menu usage practices-classical and contextual ones together with guidelines
• Design and implement navigation patterns, expanders, tiled sections, task panes, and collapsible panels for saving space and minimizing visual distractions
• Design and implement calendar controls to allow user-specific time and date input
• Represent large data sets using alternating row colours as a design technique
• Create a responsive UI and remove the visual noise from the interfaces for a rich user experience
• Enable full screen Silverlight experiences for interactive applications such as games, maps, and media players.
• Add and utilize the maps and geo-based UI controls for a truly immersive map experience for your users
• Use the pixel shading techniques to achieve amazing visual effects on images and controls

Approach

Written in a Cookbook style, this book offers learning and techniques through recipes. It contains step-by-step instructions for designers and developers who want to learn about how to design and implement numerous user interface patterns with Silverlight. It will take you a step further by providing you with professional and proven user interface and user experience guidelines wherever possible. The book is designed in such a way that you can explore it chapter-by-chapter, or read it in any order.

Who this book is written for

If you are a developer or designer who knows the basics of Silverlight, has a smattering of C# and XAML, and wants to build applications with elegant and attractive interfaces, then this book is for you.

JavaFX Script enables you to easily create rich Internet applications by embedding multimedia components. Although you can create stylish Internet applications by modifying these default components, even advanced users find it challenging to create impressive feature-rich Internet applications with JavaFX. Also, there are limited JavaFX components to work with and by default these components don't look visually appealing.

This book explores limitless possibilities to style your application by coding JavaFX components to display your content in a more appealing fashion. The recipes in this book will help you to create customized JavaFX components with which you can make modern, feature-rich applications.

First, you will be introduced to the JavaFX SDK and other development tools available to help you be productive during development. You will create an application in JavaFX by arranging complex graphical components (and non-graphical libraries) with simplified declarative constructs. You will then explore the fun side of JavaFX by using transformation techniques to manipulate the location and dimensions of objects. The next chapter is about the GUI components that are available in the framework, which provide a high level of interactivity. You will learn how to use the media component to play media content. Then we will access data and manipulate data locally or remotely. You will explore many deployment options and integration tips and tricks to take advantage of runtime contexts. Finally, you will interact with pure Java code to read and write files in JavaFX and to establish interactions with computing platforms.

Get quick solutions to create modern rich Internet applications using the various JavaFX features ranging from JavaScript fundamentals to more complicated topics including visual controls, custom components, multimedia, animation, effects, web and data services, deployment practices, and much more

What you will learn from this book

• Dive into the JavaFX scripting language fundamentals by creating and declaring classes, functions, trigger variables, and more
• Create complex graphical components with simplified declarative constructs and arrange these building blocks to create applications in JavaFX
• Effortlessly make your objects visually appealing by applying cool effects
• Quickly build an application that provides a high level of interactivity by using JavaFX GUI controls
• Seamlessly play audio and video in several formats using built-in media components
• Access data and manipulate data locally or remotely using tools that are available in JavaFX
• Achieve data visualization using the newly added feature - JavaFX chart components
• Make your applications available for easy access and use by implementing deployment options such as Java WebStart and applets available in JavaFX
• Take advantage of runtime contexts to interact with the executing environment with integration tips and tricks

Approach

This book is a comprehensive collection of recipes that elaborate on known use cases. You will find an organized step-by-step procedure to accomplish each task followed by detailed explanations to better understand how and why each step was undertaken, and many links to online references and other related sections in the book that supplement the subject in question. The book is written so that you can work through the recipes in order or go straight to the recipes that interest you; where a recipe depends on other recipes they are clearly referenced.

Who this book is written for

If you are a Java developer, Rich Internet Application content developer, or graphic designer who wants to build RIAs featuring animations, videos, and other feature-rich content, this book is for you. Knowledge of Java, JavaScript, and JavaFX components is not essential, but will help you exploit this book to your advantage.

JavaScript is an important part of web development in today's Web 2.0 world. While there are many JavaScript frameworks in the market, learning to write, test, and debug JavaScript without the help of any framework will make you a better JavaScript developer. However, testing and debugging can be time consuming, tedious, and painful. This book will ease your woes by providing various testing strategies, advice, and tool guides that will make testing smooth and easy.

This book shows you the most essential features of JavaScript, which you will be using in your daily development, testing, and debugging tasks. You will learn to use the most basic functions of JavaScript to perform ad hoc testing quickly and efficiently.

This book is organized in an easy to follow, step-by-step tutorial style to maximize your learning. You will first learn about the different types of errors you will most often encounter as a JavaScript developer. You will also learn the most essential features of JavaScript through our easy to follow examples.As you go along, you will learn how to write better JavaScript code through validation. Learning how to write validated code alone will help you improve tremendously as a JavaScript developer and most importantly, to write JavaScript code that runs better, faster, and with less bugs.

As our JavaScript program gets larger, we need better ways of testing our JavaScript code. You will learn how to go about various testing concepts and how to use them in your test plan. After which, you will learn how to implement the test plan for your code. To accommodate more complex JavaScript code, you will learn more about the built-in features of JavaScript to identify and catch different types of JavaScript error. Such information helps to spot the root of the problem so that you can act on it.

Finally, you will learn how to make use of the built-in browser tools and other external tools to automate your testing process.

Learn how to test and debug JavaScript through example-driven tutorials.

What you will learn from this book

• Relationship between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Different types of JavaScript error
• How to perform ad hoc testing
• How to validate your JavaScript code
• Different testing concepts
• Create a test plan and implement it
• How to test more complex code by using JavaScript's exception handling
• Learn how to test the user interface controlled by JavaScript
• How to debug your code using tools such as Google Chrome, Javascript Debugger, and Firefox's Venkman Extension.
• How to further automate your testing process using Sahi, Qunit, and JsLitmus
• Other testing tools that will make your testing process easier and less painful

Approach

This book is organized such that only the most essential information is provided to you in each chapter so as to maximize your learning. Examples and tutorials are given in an easy to follow, step-by-step manner so that you can see how the testing process is being carried out and how the code is being written. The source code also contains detailed explanation so that you know what the code is doing. Multiple screenshots are used in places that matter so that you have a visual sense of what is happening.

Who this book is written for

Beginner JavaScript developers looking for essential ways to write, test, and debug JavaScript for different purposes and situations.

Written by best-selling PC repair author and educator Jean Andrews, the fifth edition of A+ Guide to Hardware: Managing, Maintaining, and Troubleshooting maps fully to CompTIA's 2009 A+ Exam objectives. This full-color guide is the most complete, step-by-step book available for learning the fundamentals of supporting and troubleshooting computer hardware. At the same time, it prepares readers to successfully pass the A+ 220-701 and 220-702 exams. The new edition is formatted to support any teaching or learning style and course format, featuring an essentials-to-practical organization within each chapter and inclusion of tabs distinguishing exam content. Further content and live demonstrations with Jean Andrews are available on the accompanying CD, making this new edition a total solution for hardware maintenance and repair.

This book offers an introduction to Flash Catalyst for designers with intermediate to advanced skills. It discusses where Catalyst sits within the production process and how it communicates with other programs. It covers all of the features of the Flash Catalyst workspace, teaching you how to create designs from scratch, how to build application designs and add functionality, and how to master the Catalyst/Flex workflow.

• Introduces Flash Catalyst
• Focuses on production process
• Covers the interrelation between Flash Catalyst and Photoshop/Illustrator/Flex/Flash

Starting from scratch, you’ll learn the basic concepts and interface functionality of Flash Catalyst, and get practical experience by working on carefully crafted real-life projects throughout the book. You’ll learn every stage of the process, from the first design sketches to the Flex Developer hand over, and how you can make design changes to assets while the developers work on the code. You’ll also learn how to make your designs functional by adding simple buttons and scroll bars, and how to make sure that developers can precisely interpret your vision.

• Converting Photoshop/Illustrator artwork to interactive designs
• Sketching designs with interactivity
• Sketching designs with transitions
• Working with the FXG format
• Designing with fluid layouts in Catalyst

This book is for designers experienced with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks who want to include Flash Catalyst in their workflows. It’s also for the general audience looking to design rich Internet applications using Catalyst.

TORQUE FOR TEENS, SECOND EDITION teaches beginners the techniques they need to design their very own video games using Garage Games' powerful 3D computer game engine, Torque. Written in simple language, each chapter begins with a basic overview of the topic being covered, followed by step-by-step instructions to help readers conquer each new skill presented, and ending with a summary to reinforce what they've learned. Throughout the course of the book readers will put their new skills into action with a hands-on project that ends with the creation of a first-person shooter game. Each chapter builds upon the previous until their very own video game is complete. This second edition covers the latest-and-greatest version of the software, including updates and new interfaces.

Most users on the Internet have a few favorite Internet web applications that they use often and cannot do without. These popular applications often provide essential services that we need even while we don't fully understand its features or how they work. Ruby empowers you to develop your own clones of such applications without much ordeal. Learning how these sites work and describing how they can be implemented enables you to move to the next step of customizing them and enabling your own version of these services.

This book shows the reader how to clone some of the Internet's most popular applications in Ruby by first identifying their main features, and then showing example Ruby code to replicate this functionality.

While we understand that it connects us to our friends and people we want to meet up with, what is the common feature of a social network that makes it a social network? And how do these features work? This book is the answer to all these questions. It will provide a step-by-step explanation on how the application is designed and coded, and then how it is deployed to the Heroku cloud platform. This book's main purpose is to break up popular Internet services such as TinyURL, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook to understand what makes it tick. Then using Ruby, the book describes how a minimal set of features for these sites can be modeled, built, and deployed on the Internet.

Break up and rewrite popular social networking and other Internet applications using Ruby

What you will learn from this book

• Discover in depth the major features of TinyURL, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook and what makes them work
• Discover how each of these popular Internet services can be modeled with DataMapper
• Create clones of these Internet services using Rack and Sinatra
• Use third-party authentication providers with OpenID
• Deploy the cloned Internet services to the cloud using Heroku
• Use Amazon S3 to store data for your clones

Approach

This is a hands-on book with plenty of well - explained code. Each chapter has a standalone project in which a complete web application with specific features of a social networking site is emphasized. The final chapter of the book is a project that has a complete and fully developed social networking site. Each chapter begins with a brief description of the features of the Internet service and the market it is within. After extracting the main features of the service, the chapter goes into explaining how a clone of the service can be designed, followed by a short description of the technologies and platforms being used. The bulk of the chapter goes into describing how the clone is built, with step-by-step explanations and code examples. Finally, the chapter shows how the finished clone can be deployed on the Internet.

Who this book is written for

This book is written for web application programmers with an intermediate knowledge of Ruby. You should also know how web applications work and you have used at least some of the cloned Internet services before. If you are a trying to find out exactly how can you make your very own customized applications such as TinyURL, Twitter, Flickr, or Facebook, this book is for you. Programmers who want to include features of these Internet services into their own web applications will also find this book interesting.

Alfresco 3 is the leading open source enterprise content management system that offers powerful features for interacting with the content in its repository from outside the system. These include the support for the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) implementation, reusable web scripts, and a Web Services API.

This is the first book to show you how to use Web Services in Alfresco. Packed with examples, you'll learn how to build applications using Alfresco remote APIs based on SOAP and REST. You'll see how to use different APIs and bindings such as WebServices, WebScripts, and CMIS.

Alfresco 3 Web Services starts off by showing you the services exposed by the Alfresco Web Services API, and how the API fits into the Alfresco software architecture.You learn to develop your application firstly by setting up and testing your Java development environment using the Alfresco SDK in Eclipse IDE and secondly by associating the Alfresco source code and Javadocs in Eclipse.

With the help of real world practical examples, you learn how to do things like create, sort, and call Web Scripts, and invoke remote calls to Alfresco repository. To get the most from the Web Services API, you need to know about the basics of the Content Manipulation Language (CML), and the book takes you through this.

Examples such as the bookshop application show you how to sign in, change user sessions, get, remove and change public and private associated contents, manage a cart for your e-commerce application, and so on.Next, by implementing a Microsoft .NET application using the Alfresco Web Services API, you see how to perform operations against the repository from your .NET application. The book provides you with REST and SOAP concepts, their comparison, basics of the FreeMarker language, Atom Publishing Protocol, JavaScript controllers, and the Apache Chemistry project.

By the end of this book, you will be able to put together your knowledge about CMIS and the Apache Chemistry toolkit to develop a complete working application that uses Alfresco, via CMIS, as a back-end storage. Last but not the least, this book also covers the WebServices security profiles - the best practices for Web Services to promote better interoperability.

A step-by-step guide to implementing the SOAP API, Web Scripts, and CMIS.

What you will learn from this book

• Gain a comprehensive overview of the specifications of Web services
• Learn how to manipulate contents in Alfresco using different operations and APIs
• Build applications on top of Alfresco using Alfresco Web Services API
• Extend the Alfresco RESTful API using WebScripts
• Make your own different output renditions using FreeMarker
• Explore the CMIS specification with all the details about the Alfresco implementation
• Learn how to contact Alfresco with your client using one of the bindings of CMIS
• Make your CMIS integration more standard using the Apache Chemistry project

Approach

The book is a detailed guide to building integrations on top of Alfresco filled with tons of examples and sample code. It is intended to be a complete overview to help developers choose a specific API with related method invocations.

Who this book is written for

If you are a web developer who wants to build business applications on top of Alfresco, then this is the book for you. Basic understanding of XML, Web development concepts (HTTP, MVC) and Web Services is required.

A friendly guide to the Olympus E-PL1, the latest trend in digital cameras

Hybrids offer the flexibility of interchangeable lenses and a large sensor in a smaller body. The Olympus E-PL1 lightens your load without sacrificing shooting power and this fun and friendly guide helps you better understand your camera's controls, features, and potential. Veteran author Julie Adair King presents you with examples on how to use your camera's main functions in order to create effective and memorable digital photos.

• Explains how to work with lenses and shoot in auto mode
• Covers the on-board controls and situational shooting
• Addresses manipulating focus and color controls
• Discusses printing, posting online, and other ways to share images

Get started shooting with Olympus E-PL1 For Dummies!

Autodesk’s official guide to architectural visualization using 3ds Max Design

Exclusively endorsed by Autodesk, this comprehensive tutorial and reference thoroughly covers 3ds Max Design, the 3D modeling, animation, and rendering software used for architectural visualizations. It also includes essential material for students preparing for the new Certified Associate and Certified Professional exams. Examples come from projects that architects, designers, and planners actually encounter each day, while the workflows and instructions have been tested in real-world applications.

• The official guide endorsed by Autodesk, with comprehensive information on using 3ds Max Design 2011 as well as achieving certification
• Features step-by-step instructions and real-world projects that readers will actually encounter
• Covers using the 3ds Max interface, working with Revit and AutoCAD files, using the data and scene management tools, modeling, simulating lighting effects, analyzing sustainable design features, setting up animated walkthroughs, and much more
• Explains how to render real-world surfaces with architectural material and how to choose the renderer that creates the desired effect

Mastering Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 covers every facet of this powerful program.

The full-color guide to the exciting new iPad, written specifically with the needs of seniors in mind!

The iPad is the perfect device for the senior market, combining the Web, e-mail, photos, video, and book reading into an intuitive, portable device. Written by veteran Dummies author Nancy Muir, this fun and friendly guide shows you how to use the many features and capabilities of the iPad to make life easier! You'll learn how to use the multitouch screen to zoom in and out on Web pages and choose a font and size that makes reading comfortable so that you can get directions, plan vacations, enjoy photos, keep in touch with family, obtain financial and legal information, and much more.

• Assumes no prior information or experience and begins with the basics of getting acquainted with your iPad and its features
• Introduces the intuitive touch methodology for interacting, zooming, and scrolling
• Walks you through organizing your calendar, finding and browsing sites, sending e-mails, sharing photos, buying and playing music, and more
• Focuses on subjects that are particularly helpful to seniors, such as getting directions, protecting personal information, setting passwords, maintaining and troubleshooting the iPad, and more

You'll quickly discover that the iPad and iPad for Seniors For Dummies are the perfect combinations to get connected and stay connected!

The Complete Guide to Software Testing Bill Hetzel Gain a new perspective to software testing as a life cycle activity, not merely as something that happens at the end of coding. This edition is completely revised and contains new chapters on testing methodologies including ANSI standard-based testing—a survey of testing practices. Dr. Hetzel first develops the concepts and principles of testing. Then he presents detailed discussions of testing techniques, methodologies and management perspectives. Each chapter contains examples, checklists and case studies based on Dr. Hetzel’s consulting and management experience. These will help you understand the material and adapt it to your environment. Intended primarily for software developers, testers and managers, auditors and quality assurance specialists will find the book an invaluable aid for the development of testing standards and the evaluation of testing effectiveness. Table of Contents: Introduction. Principles of Testing. Methodology. Testing through Reviews. Testing Requirements. Testing Design. Testing Programs—Testing in the Small. Testing Systems—Testing in the Large. Testing Software Changes. Testing Software Packages. The Role of Management. Organizing the Testing Function. Controlling the Testing Function. Putting the Pieces Together. Testing Practices Survey. Sample Testing Policies. Quality Measurement Diagnostic Checklist. Testing References (Bibliography).

Internet Lockdown: Internet Security Administrator's Handbook covers hot security technology including firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, honeypots, network security on all operating systems. It explains confusing core concepts like certificates, cryptography, firewalls and encryption in a fashion anyone can understand. This book takes the theory behind security and provides real-world implementation examples and techniques.

This book focuses on practical approaches to achieving security in the real world. The real world I live in has too few resources, too few staff, too skimpy a budget, and too little time. (I don't think I've ever seen an overstaffed IT department.) Despite the challenges, security can be achieved.

Definitions of security and ideas about how to achieve it abound in the industry — but they aren’t much use unless everyone is on the same page. Therefore Internet Lockdown: Internet Security Administrator’s Handbook (ISAH) starts out by covering the basics of security. From there — since you can’t be expected to defend properly against something you don’t understand — a tour of the hacker’s techniques, tools, and methods gives you an outline of what you’re up against. Then ISAH works through the different layers at which you can implement security measures. The last several chapters pull all these layers together by discussing the whole process of implementing security, from design to testing. A sample company profile helps clarify what goes where and why.

A recent Cisco traffic forecast indicates that annual global IP traffic will reach two-thirds of a zettabyte by 2013. With their ability to solve problems in massive information distribution and processing, while keeping scaling costs low, overlay systems represent a rapidly growing area of R&D with important implications for the evolution of Internet architecture.

Inspired by the author’s articles on content based routing, Overlay Networks: Toward Information Networking provides a complete introduction to overlay networks. Examining what they are and what kind of structures they require, the text covers the key structures, protocols, and algorithms used in overlay networks. It reviews the current state of the art in applications, decentralized overlays, security, information routing, and information forwarding. The book provides readers with an overview of networking technologies, the TCP/IP protocol suite, and networking basics. It also examines:

• The foundations of structured overlays
• Unstructured P2P overlay networks
• Graph-based algorithms for information dissemination and probabilistic algorithms
• Content-centric routing and a number of protocols and algorithms
• Security challenges of P2P and overlay technologies—providing solutions for these mitigating risks

Written by a scientist who is a university professor and a senior member of the Nokia research staff, this forward-looking reference covers advanced issues concerning performance and scalability. It highlights recent developments and discusses specific algorithms, including BitTorrent, Coolstream, BitOs, Chord, Content Addressable Network, Content Delivery Networks, Overlay multicast, and Peer-to-Peer SIP.

Complete with a number of frequently-used probabilistic techniques and projections for future trends, this authoritative resource provides the tools and understanding needed to create deployable solutions for processing and distributing the vast amounts of data that modern networks demand.

Modern computing is no longer about devices but is all about providing services, a natural progression that both consumers and enterprises are eager to embrace. As it can deliver those services, efficiently and with quality, at compelling price levels, cloud computing is with us to stay. Ubiquitously and quite definitively, cloud computing is answering the demand for sophisticated, flexible services

Cloud Computing: Technologies and Strategies of the Ubiquitous Data Center looks at cloud computing from an IT manager’s perspective. It answers basic as well as strategic questions from both a business and a technical perspective so that you can confidently  engage both IT and financial assets in making your organization techno- savvy, efficient, and competitive.

Any answers about the future of computing are definitely in the clouds

The first section of the book offers up a history of the computing roots that have evolved into cloud computing. It looks at how IT has been traditionally serving needs and how cloud computing improves and expands on these services, so you can strategize about how a cloud might provide solutions to specific IT questions or answer business needs.

Next, the book shows how to begin the process of determining which organizational needs would best be served and improved by cloud computing. Presenting specific cases as examples, the book walks you through issues that your organization might likely encounter. Written clearly and succinctly, it --

• Introduces you to the concepts behind different types of clouds, including those used for storage, those that improve processor and application delivery, and those that mix any and all of these services
• Covers typical concerns you will hear with regard to such issues as security, application integration, and structural limitations
• Looks at the future of clouds, from developments right on the horizon to those still in the planning stage

By the book’s conclusion, you will have a solid basis on which to initiate strategic discussions about deploying clouds in your organization. You will understand how cloud computing  can affordably solve real problems. You will know which strategies to use and you will learn of the pitfalls to avoid when taking your data center to the clouds.

Throughout this book are the answers you need to the many questions from the most basic to the more advanced surrounding cloud computing and its place in your enterprise.

What exactly is cloud computing?
How are clouds different than virtualization?
Should my organization use a cloud (or multiple clouds)?
Can clouds and virtualization play significant roles in my organization at the same time?

Covering the basics of virtualization and clusters and the more advanced strategic considerations of security and return on investment, this book will be your guide to IT’s present and future in the cloud, a resource that you will continually turn to. 

Coming soon! For more information, Professional Cloud Computing, at www.professionalcloudcomputing.com, will help you find information to delve more deeply into the discussion in any of a number of directions.

About the Authors:

Brian J. S. Chee is one of the first 10 Certified Netware Instructors outside of Novell, Inc., Brian has seen networking evolve from the ground up from the viewpoints of a manufacturer, a distributor, a reseller, a computer scientist at the U.S. General Service Administration Office of Information Security (GSA-OIS), and now at the University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology (SOEST) as a researcher. As a Senior Contributing Editor to InfoWorld magazine and a long-time member of the Interop NOC team, Brian has a unique insight into networking trends and the emergence of new technology.

Curtis Franklin, Jr. has been writing about technologies and products in computing and networking since the early 1980s. A Senior Writer at NetWitness, he also contributes to a number of technology-industry publications including InfoWorld, Dark Reading, and ITWorld.com on subjects ranging from mobile enterprise computing to enterprise security and wireless networking. He is also online community manager for the Interop conference. Curtis is the author of hundreds of magazine articles, the co-author of three books, and has been a frequent speaker at computer and networking industry conferences across North America and Europe. When he’s not writing, Curt is a painter, photographer, cook, and multi-instrumentalist musician, and is active in amateur radio (KG4GWA), scuba diving, and the Florida Master Naturalist program.

XNA 3.0 GAME DEVELOPMENT FOR TEENS is a complete guide to entry level programming and computer game development using XNA 3.0 and the Visual C# 2008 Express programming language for beginners. This book shows readers how to create and execute computer games on their PC, and then how to port their PC games over to their Xbox 360 or Zune player. This book is for anyone looking to begin creating their own computer games with XNA 3.0 and Visual C# 2008 Express.

This book represents the hard work of a great many individuals to whom I owe many thanks. Special thanks go to Emi Smith. As acquisitions editor, Emi helped make this book a reality and ensured that things went smoothly. I also need to thank Jenny Davidson, who served as this book’s project editor. Jenny’s guidance and editorial skills were essential to the success of this book. Thanks also need to go out to the book’s technical editor, Keith Davenport, who provided many invaluable insights and a great deal of technical advice. Last but not least, I would like to thank everyone else at Course Technology PTR for all their contributions and hard work.

About author

Jerry Lee Ford, Jr. is an author, educator, and an IT professional with over 20 years of experience in information technology, including roles as an automation analyst, technical manager, technical support analyst, automation engineer, and security analyst. He is the author of 33 books and co-author of two additional books. His published works include Getting Started with Game Maker, DarkBASIC Programming for the Absolute Beginner, Scratch Programming for Teens, Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Programming for the Absolute Beginner, and Phrogram Programming for the Absolute Beginner. Jerry has a master’s degree in business administration from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, and he has over five years of experience as an adjunct instructor teaching networking courses in information technology.

Plone is widely used for creating feature-rich and secure enterprise intranets. Each company has different goals, architecture, hierarchy, and size and requires a very different intranet to manage its business. No matter what size, or what purpose, Plone offers solutions to the most common intranet needs, and more.

If you've never built an intranet before, you don't even have programming skills, or you don't have any experience with CMSs, this practical guide targeted at people with no previous experience with Plone is the most suitable book for you. Starting from scratch, it will show you how to design and build a feature-rich, secure corporate intranet easily, by optimizing the features of Plone. It will guide you from the initial setup through Plone basics, security, and workflow-related topics, ending with the most common deployment techniques. It will help you learn how to use content types effectively for your intranet. You will learn how to manage the life cycle of your documents and content in general using workflows. It will teach you how to manage security and access to your content granularly. You will learn to manage local users, and get to know about the mechanisms that Plone makes available to the users to manage their data.

This step-by-step book will also show you how to choose the right add-on products for your site, and how to enhance your intranet by using them efficiently. At the end, you will learn how to deploy your intranet and make your site live for your users.

Build your own Plone-based intranet easily and successfully by focusing on effective usage of content type, security, content life cycle, and suitable Plone add-ons

What you will learn from this book

• Get to grips with installing Plone and all its dependencies
• Easily set up your Plone site and optimize it to work as an intranet
• Manage users and groups, and use local and global roles to manage content access
• Create and modify Plone workflows and learn how to use them
• Explore the most common security use cases in an intranet and learn how to deal with them in Plone
• Make effective use of content type and some of the out-of-the-box Plone features to work for your intranet
• Enhance your intranet with useful add-on products, like corporate blogs, message boards, document preview helpers, and so on
• Give a fresh, standing-out look to your intranet with attractive themes
• Deploy your intranet and make your site live

Approach

This is a step-by-step guide, from installing your first Plone instance to deploying your intranet. Each chapter will show you an essential aspect that your intranet should have. However, each chapter is isolated enough to serve as a reference manual for later use. The book is packed with examples and useful screenshots for easy learning.

Who this book is written for

This book is for anyone who needs to build an intranet with no limits on capabilities or features. Even if you don't have previous CMS experience or programming skills, this book is for you. Targeted at beginners with no previous experience with Plone, this book will teach you step by step and at the end you should have a full-featured, reliable, and secure intranet.

Offering a wide range of programming examples implemented in MATLAB^®, Computational Intelligence Paradigms: Theory and Applications Using MATLAB^® presents theoretical concepts and a general framework for computational intelligence (CI) approaches, including artificial neural networks, fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, genetic algorithms and programming, and swarm intelligence. It covers numerous intelligent computing methodologies and algorithms used in CI research.

The book first focuses on neural networks, including common artificial neural networks; neural networks based on data classification, data association, and data conceptualization; and real-world applications of neural networks. It then discusses fuzzy sets, fuzzy rules, applications of fuzzy systems, and different types of fused neuro-fuzzy systems, before providing MATLAB illustrations of ANFIS, classification and regression trees, fuzzy c-means clustering algorithms, fuzzy ART map, and Takagi–Sugeno inference systems. The authors also describe the history, advantages, and disadvantages of evolutionary computation and include solved MATLAB programs to illustrate the implementation of evolutionary computation in various problems. After exploring the operators and parameters of genetic algorithms, they cover the steps and MATLAB routines of genetic programming. The final chapter introduces swarm intelligence and its applications, particle swarm optimization, and ant colony optimization.

Full of worked examples and end-of-chapter questions, this comprehensive book explains how to use MATLAB to implement CI techniques for the solution of biological problems. It will help readers with their work on evolution dynamics, self-organization, natural and artificial morphogenesis, emergent collective behaviors, swarm intelligence, evolutionary strategies, genetic programming, and the evolution of social behaviors.

If you're ready to use Closure to build rich web applications with JavaScript, this hands-on guide has precisely what you need to learn this suite of tools in depth. Closure makes it easy for experienced JavaScript developers to write and maintain large and complex codebases -- as Google has demonstrated by using Closure with Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps.

Author and Closure contributor Michael Bolin has included numerous code examples and best practices, as well as valuable information not available publicly until now. You'll learn all about Closure's Library, Compiler, Templates, testing framework, and Inspector -- including how to minify JavaScript code with the Compiler, and why the combination of the Compiler and the Library is what sets Closure apart from other JavaScript toolkits.

• Learn how the Compiler significantly reduces the amount of JavaScript users have to download when visiting your site
• Discover several ways to use the Compiler as part of your build process
• Learn about type expressions, primitives, and common utilities
• Understand how Closure emulates classes and class-based inheritance
• Use Closure Templates on the server and the client from either JavaScript or Java
• Test and debug your JavaScript code, even when it's compiled

FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) can be found in applications such as smart phones, mp3 players, medical imaging devices, and for aerospace and defense technology. FPGAs consist of logic blocks and programmable interconnects. This allows an engineer to start with a blank slate and program the FPGA for a specific task, for instance, digital signal processing, or a specific device, for example, a software-defined radio. Due to the short time to market and ability to reprogram to fix bugs without having to respin FPGAs are in increasingly high demand.

This book is for the engineer that has not yet had any experience with this electrifying and growing field. The complex issue of FPGA design is broken down into four distinct phases - Design / Synthesis / Simulation / Place & Route. Numerous step-by-step examples along with source code accompany the discussion. A brief primer of one of the popular FPGA and hardware languages, VHDL, is incorporated for a simple yet comprehensive learning tool. While a general technology background is assumed, no direct hardware development understanding is needed. Also, included are details on tool-set up, verifaction techniques, and test benches. Reference material consists of a quick reference guide, reserved words, and common VHDL/FPGA terms.

• Learn how to design and develop FPGAs -- no prior experience necessary!


• Breaks down the complex design and development of FPGAs into easy-to-learn building blocks


• Contains examples, helpful tips, and step-by-step tutorials for synthesis, implementation, simulation, and programming phases

Space support in databases poses new challenges in every part of a database management system & the capability of spatial support in the physical layer is considered very important. This has led to the design of spatial access methods to enable the effective & efficient management of spatial objects.

R-trees have a simplicity of structure & together with their resemblance to the B-tree, allow developers to incorporate them easily into existing database management systems for the support of spatial query processing.

This book provides an extensive survey of the R-tree evolution, studying the applicability of the structure & its variations to efficient query processing, accurate proposed cost models, & implementation issues like concurrency control and parallelism. Written for database researchers, designers & programmers as well as graduate students, this comprehensive monograph will be a welcome addition to the field.

Managing Information Security offers focused coverage of how to protect mission critical systems, how to deploy security management systems, IT security, ID Management, intrusion detection and prevention systems, computer forensics, network forensics, firewalls, penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, and more. It offers in-depth coverage of the current technology and practice as it relates to information security management solutions. Individual chapters are authored by leading experts in the field and address the immediate and long term challenges in the authors' respective areas of expertise.

Improving security of IT, network, and telecom assets has become absolutely essential. The growth of distributed computing, combined with the widespread use of off-the-shelf software products and Internet connectivity, has created security nightmares for many organizations. During the last decade, a great deal of attention has been focused on the cyber aspects of information systems security. In an effort to address an array of cyber security problems, many organizations have hired or trained new IT security personnel and dramatically increased spending on computer security products. It appears that the struggle to improve cyber security will continue well into the future.

However, the obsessive concern over information cyber security has far too often overshadowed the need for understanding the basics of information systems. The purpose of this book is to show organizations how to effectively and efficiently organize and maintain their defenses on all fronts, not just protect against the cyber threat. This includes risk analysis, mitigation design, deployment of defenses, and the maintenance of security efforts. The book starts with basic concepts and takes readers through the steps to help them to effectively secure computer networks and information systems.

• Chapters contributed by leaders in the field covering foundational and practical aspects of information security management, allowing the reader to develop a new level of technical expertise found nowhere else.
• Comprehensive coverage by leading experts allows the reader to put current technologies to work.
• Presents methods of analysis and problem solving techniques, enhancing the reader's grasp of the material and ability to implement practical solutions.

Featured in the four-color, visual Picture Yourself series, PICTURE YOURSELF LEARNING MICROSOFT OFFICE 2010 is a valuable resource for all readers, beginner to intermediate. Clear, step-by-step instructions walk you through the basics of each application from beginning to end. Helpful tips provide additional information and advice to enhance your Office 2009 experience and help meet your needs. PICTURE YOURSELF LEARNING MICROSOFT OFFICE 2010 is packed with information useful to those who have purchased their first computer and are learning Office 2010 for the first time. Those who have experience with older versions of Office will find this book an excellent way to help them get up to speed on their computing experience, by way of the over 1,000 screenshots to guide your way. You have the option of reading the book from cover to cover, or simply reading the individual programs you are interested in.

Troubleshooting and Maintaining Cisco IP Networks (TSHOOT) Foundation Learning Guide is a Cisco® authorized learning tool for CCNP preparation. As part of the Cisco Press foundation learning series, this book covers how to maintain and monitor complex enterprise networks.

The chapters focus on planning tasks, evaluations of designs, performance measurements, configuring and verifying, and correct troubleshooting procedures and documentation tasks. From this book you will learn the foundational topics for critical analysis, planning, verification and documentation, while configuring tasks would have been mastered in the CCNP ROUTE and CCNP SWITCH material. The author walks you through several real-world troubleshooting examples to help you refine your study in the art of troubleshooting.

Each chapter opens with the list of topics covered to clearly identify the focus of that chapter. At the end of each chapter, a summary of key concepts for quick study and review questions provide you with an opportunity to assess and reinforce your understanding of the material. Throughout the book, real-world troubleshooting examples serve to illuminate theoretical concepts.

Troubleshooting and Maintaining Cisco IP Networks (TSHOOT) Foundation Learning Guide is ideal for certification candidates who are seeking a tool to learn all the topics covered in the CCNP TSHOOT 642-832 exam.

• Serves as the official book for the Cisco Networking Academy CCNP TSHOOT course
• Provides a thorough presentation on maintenance and troubleshooting techniques for routers and switches in a complex enterprise network
• Covers troubleshooting wireless, unified communications, and video issues in converged networks
• Explains how to maintain and troubleshoot network security implementations
• Uses extensive troubleshooting examples and diagrams to solidify the topic explanations
• Presents self-assessment review questions, chapter objectives, and summaries to facilitate effective studying

This volume is in the Certification Self-Study Series offered by Cisco Press®. Books in this series provide officially developed training solutions to help networking professionals understand technology implementations and prepare for the Cisco Career Certifications examinations.

The NetBeans Platform has many features provided out of the box for Swing desktop application developers. It can take you hours just to create menu bars, toolbars, a window system, and other typical desktop application infrastructural needs rather than you focusing on your domain knowledge. Imagine how much time you could save with a hands-on guide for using the NetBeans Platform, which relieves you from creating desktop functions for each of your applications.

This book guides you through the development of a complete Swing application built on the NetBeans Platform. Each chapter introduces a number of new concepts relating to a theme, such as the window system, and then shows you how to implement the concepts in the application you are creating. At the end of the book you have a task manager, which you can adapt to your own purposes. Or you can, of course, create your own applications, now that you have built up a solid basis of NetBeans Platform knowledge.

The NetBeans Platform is a framework for developing large distributed desktop applications. It aims to drastically simplify desktop application development by providing a number of techniques, patterns, and full-blown Swing components out of the box. Most desktop applications have very similar technical requirements, such as: a consistent user interface, extensibility, data display, configuration settings, a help system, distribution mechanisms, on-line update possibilities, and the ability to be deployed to multiple operating systems.

Fulfilling these technical requirements over and over again for each new application is expensive, superfluous, and boring. The NetBeans Platform gives developers a transparent, open source, extensible, and free framework that address all of these technical requirements. This book will guide you through all these topics and show you how you can apply the lessons learned in the context of a real application.

The central driver of the book is the creation of a complete sample application, chapter by chapter, throughout the length of this book. You will learn how to apply the key concepts in your own work environment, so that you will be able to build flexible, reliable, robust and scalable Swing applications yourself. At the end of the book, you will be comfortable creating similar applications yourself and you will know what to do when you get stuck.

This book helps you to create robust Swing applications by providing an in-depth coverage of all the features of the powerful NetBeans Platform 6.8

What you will learn from this book

• Reuse the NetBeans window system for your Swing applications, rather than creating your own
• Explore the NetBeans module system and utilize it effectively in large applications
• Use the standard parts of the NetBeans Platform rather than creating your own menu bars, toolbars, and other typical features
• Handle the display of large sets of data via the NetBeans Nodes API, together with the NetBeans Platform's advanced Swing components
• Get to know all of the main NetBeans APIs and utilize them for developing applications that suit your needs
• Visualize your data quickly and powerfully via the NetBeans Visual Library API
• Prototype your application and get very complex data structures displayed in interesting ways in no time
• Create applications that can be easily deployed to Windows, Linux, and Mac
• Build your understanding of the nuances of the NetBeans Platform as you create an application from scratch

Approach

This is a step-by-step example-driven tutorial designed to be worked through chapter-wise. You'll be learning with the help of example code and screenshots that will ensure easier understanding. At the end, you will have developed a complete application on top of the NetBeans Platform.

Who this book is written for

This book is written for developers who are comfortable with Java and Swing and who would like to use a framework as the basis of their Swing application. Zero knowledge of the NetBeans Platform is assumed. The reader is typically a developer (or a group of developers) wanting to create large, distributed, flexible Swing applications. The development team is typically large and distributed and members need to work independently on distinct parts of the application. The end user of the application typically needs to have the ability to install additional features at runtime, after the application has already been installed, without reinstalling the application.

PIC Microcontrollers are a favorite in industry and with hobbyists. These microcontrollers are versatile, simple, and low cost making them perfect for many different applications. The 8-bit PIC is widely used in consumer electronic goods, office automation, and personal projects. Author, Dogan Ibrahim, author of several PIC books has now written a book using the PIC18 family of microcontrollers to create projects with SD cards.

This book is ideal for those practicing engineers, advanced students, and PIC enthusiasts that want to incorporate SD Cards into their devices. SD cards are cheap, fast, and small, used in many MP3 players, digital and video cameras, and perfect for microcontroller applications.

Complete with Microchip's C18 student compiler and using the C language this book brings the reader up to speed on the PIC 18 and SD cards, knowledge which can then be harnessed for hands-on work with the eighteen projects included within. Two great technologies are brought together in this one practical, real-world, hands-on cookbook perfect for a wide range of PIC fans.

*Eighteen fully worked SD projects in the C programming language
*Details memory cards usage with the PIC18 family
*Companion Web site with project code listings to run on Microchip's C18 student compiler

Get ready to kick some software project butt. By learning the ways of the agile samurai you will discover:

* how to create plans and schedules your customer and your team can believe in

• what characteristics make a good agile team and how to form your own

• how to gather requirements in a fraction of the time using agile user stories

• what to do when you discover your schedule is wrong, and how to look like a pro correcting it

• how to execute fiercely by leveraging the power of agile software engineering practices
  
  By the end of this book you will know everything you need to set up, execute, and successfully deliver agile projects, and have fun along the way. If you're a project lead, this book gives you the tools to set up and lead your agile project from start to finish. If you are an analyst, programmer, tester, usability designer, or project manager, this book gives you the insight and foundation necessary to become a valuable agile team member.
  
  The Agile Samurai slices away the fluff and theory that make other books less-than-agile. It's packed with best practices, war stories, plenty of humor and hands-on tutorial exercises that will get you doing the right things, the right way.
  
  This book will make a difference.

Consumer electronics (CE) devices, providing multimedia entertainment and enabling communication, have become ubiquitous in daily life. However, consumer interaction with such equipment currently requires the use of devices such as remote controls and keyboards, which are often inconvenient, ambiguous and non-interactive. An important challenge for the modern CE industry is the design of user interfaces for CE products that enable interactions which are natural, intuitive and fun. As many CE products are supplied with microphones and cameras, the exploitation of both audio and visual information for interactive multimedia is a growing field of research. Collecting together contributions from an international selection of experts, including leading researchers in industry, this unique text presents the latest advances in applications of multimedia interaction and user interfaces for consumer electronics. Covering issues of both multimedia content analysis and human-machine interaction, the book examines a wide range of techniques from computer vision, machine learning, audio and speech processing, communications, artificial intelligence and media technology. Topics and features: introduces novel computationally efficient algorithms to extract semantically meaningful audio-visual events; investigates modality allocation in intelligent multimodal presentation systems, taking into account the cognitive impacts of modality on human information processing; provides an overview on gesture control technologies for CE; presents systems for natural human-computer interaction, virtual content insertion, and human action retrieval; examines techniques for 3D face pose estimation, physical activity recognition, and video summary quality evaluation; discusses the features that characterize the new generation of CE and examines how web services can be integrated with CE products for improved user experience. This book is an essential resource for researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry working in areas of multimedia analysis, human-computer interaction and interactive user interfaces. Graduate students studying computer vision, pattern recognition and multimedia will also find this a useful reference.

Art and Technology of Entertainment Computing and Communication takes a blue sky research perspective on the field of interactive media for entertainment computing. Adrian David Cheok argues that entertainment as an end-product is useful for interactive play, however it is also a powerful tool for learning and communication and it is also a key driver for the development of information technology. This book explores the future of entertainment technologies used for communication and describes quantum step research. It will inform and inspire readers to create their own radical inventions and innovations that are not incremental, but which break through ideas and non-obvious solutions. One of the main explorations is the examination of how new forms of computer interaction can lead to radical new forms of technology and art for entertainment computing. Art and Technology of Entertainment Computing and Communication is an informative and inspirational text for students and the next generation of researchers. It’s main aim is to provide information that will hopefully help change the world and society for the better, through new modes of entertainment and communication. Academics, researchers, engineers, game designers, and interaction designers, will find the content both interesting and valuable. Entertainment is the "engine" to inspire people and drive innovation in interactive digital media design. The pioneer of the field, Prof. Adrian David Cheok, takes you on an exciting tour of the future shaped by the Entertainment Technologies. Hiroshi ISHII, Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Laboratory.

Oracle's Siebel CRM is market-leading Customer Relationship Management software. Unmatched in functionality and scalability, Siebel enhances a company's sales performance, improves customer satisfaction, and provides a robust Customer Relationship Management system for an organization.

This practical book offers a comprehensive understanding of Siebel CRM. It is your safe vessel for navigating the deep waters of Siebel installation and system management.

This book is a complete exercise in installing and managing Oracle's Siebel CRM for your organization. You will understand the Siebel architecture and install it piece by piece. In easy-to-follow chapters, the book will guide you through the installation of Siebel server, client and third-party reporting software on Microsoft Windows and Linux, covering everything from the planning the process and software download to the installation and configuration tasks.

After reading this book, you will feel fully prepared for setting up multiple servers and multi-lingual configurations. This book fosters your general understanding of the intricate features and functionality of Oracle Siebel CRM. In addition, you will learn how to support development environments and how to migrate configuration changes between environments using Application Deployment Manager.

Another benefit of this book is that it teaches administrators how to establish system monitoring strategies to identify and avoid performance bottlenecks. When you have finished the book, you will feel prepared to install and manage Oracle's Siebel CRM in a real-world environment. In addition, you will know some tricks that even seasoned experts will envy.

A pragmatic guide for effectively and efficiently implementing and managing Oracle's Siebel CRM

What you will learn from this book

• Understand Siebel Web Architecture
• Plan and prepare Siebel CRM infrastructure
• Install and configure Siebel CRM software on Microsoft Windows and Linux
• Install and configure Siebel Charts and Oracle BI Publisher for Siebel
• Implement load balancing and support multi-language environments
• Manage the Siebel servers from the Siebel Web Client and the command line
• Implement LDAP authentication and Web Single-Sign-On
• Understand Siebel Access Control and Personalization
• Manage organizations, positions, and user accounts
• Install the Siebel Management Server infrastructure and use ADM to migrate configuration changes
• Monitor Siebel CRM environments for usage and performance
• Use Siebel Remote to support developers and mobile users

Approach

This book provides a practical, hands-on experience. Chapter by chapter, a Siebel CRM self-study environment is created which can be used to follow the examples described in the book to explore the Siebel functionality.

The book ensures that you understand what you are doing and why you are doing it. It contains clear step-by-step instructions, explanatory tables, screenshots, and precise diagrams.

Who this book is written for

This book is for administrators who want to develop and strengthen their Siebel CRM skills in the areas of installation and system management. Whether you are a novice or a more experienced user, this book will teach you something new in many ways and by the end of the book, you will be ready to install and manage Siebel CRM in a real-world environment.

OpenCart is a popular open source shopping cart solution and provides elegantly written tools to establish a fully functional online store from scratch in a very short time with intuitive screens. It can be a difficult task for beginners to go beyond the basics and apply all the features, which they will require for their businesses.

This practical book gives you hands-on experience on using and managing OpenCart, helping you start feature-rich, professional online stores easily. It also teaches you how to organize your online store effectively in terms of products, payments, shipping, orders, and customer relations.

OpenCart 1.4 Beginner's Guide will teach you how to build a store that can take control of all the online shopping needs. You will be able to run multiple shops in a single installation. You will learn how to set up products and correctly organize in categories. You will correctly integrate a payment gateway and shipping method after reading the comparisons and applying the examples. You will learn how to define taxes and apply them according to the geolocation of a customer. This book also teaches you how to manage orders and customers. You can impress your customers and increase the availability of the website to more people with the help of this practical guide. Additionally, the book also teaches you how to use design templates and apply SEO (search engine optimization) to make the store more visible for search engine queries.

Explore OpenCart-build robust shopping websites with high-level functionality.

What you will learn from this book

• Install OpenCart correctly, explore different online store organization models, and choose the one that suits your needs
• Create categories, products, product options, and assign their advanced parameters
• Manage taxes with geo zones and link them to products
• Configure store settings, including welcome message, currencies, languages, modules, themes, SEO links, and so on
• Different payment models, including Bank Transfer, PayPal, Cash on Delivery, Money order, Authorize.net, and so on
• Enable one or more shipping methods, including free, flat rate, weight-based, per item, UPS, and USPS
• Apply product discounts, create coupon codes, set special prices for sales in bulk
• Manage orders and change statuses, print invoices, and so on
• Grouping and managing customers, sending e-mail newsletters and managing OpenCart administration panel with multiple users with different permission levels
• Localize your online store by adding new languages and currencies, and correctly upgrade current OpenCart system

Approach

This is a tutorial-style book that follows a practical approach to demonstrate the potential of OpenCart. The book is suitable for those who have basic computer skills. Written with a fast-paced but friendly and engaging approach, this Packt Beginner's Guide is designed to be placed alongside the computer as your guide and mentor. Step-by-step tutorials are complemented with explanations of the reasoning behind what you are doing. You will quickly pick up the necessary skills, tips and tricks for building a successful OpenCart online store with practical examples that helps you to learn by experiment and play.

Who this book is written for

This book is aimed at individuals who want to develop professional online stores without any hands-on programming experience, and clients/non-developers who will be managing their inventory and processing orders through the backend.

Near Field Communication (NFC) technology has become increasingly important for ubiquitous computing. Florian Resatsch investigates the optimal strategies for developing and evaluating ubiquitous computing applications based on NFC. He draws on a variety of current theories on ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, and technology acceptance to propose an iterative process model (UCAN) for the integrated development and evaluation of NFC applications. Finally, the author offers a range of design guidelines for NFC applications in four categories: NFC technology, tag infrastructure, devices, and human factors.

Precise descriptions and instructions enable users, students and consultants to easily understand Microsoft Dynamics AX. Microsoft offers Dynamics AX as its premium ERP solution to support mid-size and larger organizations with a complete business management solution, which is easy to use. Going through a simple but comprehensive case study - the sample company 'Anso Tenchnologies Inc.' - this book provides the required knowledge to handle all basic business processes in Dynamics AX. Exercises allow to train the processes and functionality described, which makes this book also a good choice for self-study.

One of the most challenging issues facing our current information society is the accelerating accumulation of data trails in transactional and communication systems, which may be used not only to profile the behaviour of individuals for commercial, marketing and law enforcement purposes, but also to locate and follow things and actions. Data mining, convergence, interoperability, ever- increasing computer capacities and the extreme miniaturisation of the hardware are all elements which contribute to a major contemporary challenge: the profiled world. This interdisciplinary volume offers twenty contributions that delve deeper into some of the complex but urgent questions that this profiled world addresses to data protection and privacy. The chapters of this volume were all presented at the second Conference on Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP2009) held in Brussels in January 2009 (www.cpdpconferences.org). The yearly CPDP conferences aim to become Europe’s most important meeting where academics, practitioners, policy-makers and activists come together to exchange ideas and discuss emerging issues in information technology, privacy and data protection and law. This volume reflects the richness of the conference, containing chapters by leading lawyers, policymakers, computer, technology assessment and social scientists. The chapters cover generic themes such as the evolution of a new generation of data protection laws and the constitutionalisation of data protection and more specific issues like security breaches, unsolicited adjustments, social networks, surveillance and electronic voting. This book not only offers a very close and timely look on the state of data protection and privacy in our profiled world, but it also explores and invents ways to make sure this world remains a world we want to live in.

This unique volume presents a new approach - the general theory of information - to scientific understanding of information phenomena. Based on a thorough analysis of information processes in nature, technology, and society, as well as on the main directions in information theory, this theory synthesizes existing directions into a unified system. The book explains how this theory opens new kinds of possibilities for information technology, information sciences, computer science, knowledge engineering, psychology, linguistics, social sciences, and education.The book also gives a broad introduction to the main mathematically-based directions in information theory. The general theory of information provides a unified context for existing directions in information studies, making it possible to elaborate on a comprehensive definition of information; explain relations between information, data, and knowledge; and, demonstrate how different mathematical models of information and information processes are related. In this book, explanation of information essence and functioning is given, as well as answers to the following questions: how information is related to knowledge and data; how information is modeled by mathematical structures; and, how these models are used to better understand computers and the Internet, cognition and education, communication and computation.

Build working devices, from simple to complex You'll start with the basics and then move on to more complicated projects. Go from switching circuits to integrated circuits, and from simple alarms to programmable microcontrollers. Step-by-step instructions and more than 500 full-color photographs and illustrations will help you use -- and understand -- electronics concepts and techniques.

• Discover by breaking things: experiment with components and learn from failure
• Set up a tricked-out project space: make a work area at home, equipped with the tools and parts you'll need
• Learn about key electronic components and their functions within a circuit
• Create an intrusion alarm, holiday lights, wearable electronic jewelry, audio processors, a reflex tester, and a combination lock
• Build an autonomous robot cart that can sense its environment and avoid obstacles
• Get clear, easy-to-understand explanations of what you're doing and why

This pragmatic book offers the real world knowledge you need to develop lean and maintainable Java EE 5 / 6 applications. Real World Java EE Patterns - Rethinking Best Practices guides you to efficient patterns and best practices in a structured way, with code from real world projects. This book includes coverage of: An introduction into the core principles and APIs of Java EE 6 (EJB, JPA, JMS, JCA, JTA, DI, Convention Over Configuration, REST), Principles of transactions, Isolation Levels, remoting in Java EE 6 context, Discussion of superfluous patterns and outdated best practices like DAOs, Business Delegates, DTOs, extensive layering, indirections, Patterns for integration of asynchronous, legacy, or incompatible resources, Infrastructural patterns for eager-starting of services, thread tracking, pre-condition checks, Java EE 6 lookups or integration of third-party Dependency Injection frameworks like Guice, Fully functional JCA implementation with source code, EJB 2 - EJB 3 migration strategies

“Clear, thoughtful, and thought-provoking, Germs, Genes & Civilization makes the case that infectious diseases have played a major role in shaping society. Clark argues that religion, morals, and even democracy have all been influenced by the smallest and most dangerous organisms on our planet. While you may not accept every argument, you will be stimulated, entertained, and enlightened.”

Samuel L. Stanley, Jr., M.D., President, Stony Brook University, and former Director of the Midwest Regional Center for Excellence in Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases Research

“Clark presents an insightful explanation of the invisible history all around us. He conveys the essential facts in a riveting and engaging manner that everyone, including the nonscientist, will find exceptionally interesting and revealing.”

Michael C. Thomsett, author of The Inquisition

“Germs, Genes & Civilization is a fascinating and well-balanced account of how a wide variety of different kinds of microbes have influenced human evolution, culture, society, and even religious thought. Written for a lay audience, the relationships between genes and disease resistance and susceptibility are clearly discussed, and the book concludes with a sober assessment of what may be in store for us in the future.”

Irwin W. Sherman, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Riverside, and author of Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World and The Power of Plagues

The Stunning Hidden Interconnections Between Microbes and Humanity

 AD 452: Attila the Hun stands ready to sack Rome. No one can stop him--but he walks away. A miracle? No...dysentery. Microbes saved the Roman Empire. Nearly a millennium later, the microbes of the Black Death ended the Middle Ages, making possible the Renaissance, western democracy, and the scientific revolution. Soon after, microbes ravaged the Americas, paving the way for their European conquest.

Again and again, microbes have shaped our health, our genetics, our history, our culture, our politics, even our religion and ethics. This book reveals much that scientists and cultural historians have learned about the pervasive interconnections between infectious microbes and humans. It also considers what our ongoing fundamental relationship with infectious microbes might mean for the future of the human species.

The “good side” of history’s worst epidemics

The surprising debt we owe to killer diseases

Where diseases came from...

...and where they may be going

Children of pestilence: disease and civilization

From Egypt to Mexico, from Rome to China

STDs, sexual behavior, and culture

How microbes can shape cultural cycles of puritanism and promiscuity

Get the Best Mortgage Deal in Today’s Real Estate Markets--and Avoid a Whole New Generation of Scams! 

• Exposes new secrets, lies, and scams the mortgage industry doesn’t want you to know about
• Reveals how to save thousands right now by finding the best rate and negotiating the best deal
• Guides you step-by-step through improving your credit and preparing to buy, even if you’ve faced foreclosure

Everything you thought you knew about financing a house has changed. Your future depends on knowing today’s mortgage and credit realities: Relying on older information could cost you a fortune or keep you from buying a house altogether. In Homebuyers Beware, Carolyn Warren reveals the new realities of home financing and shows exactly how to take advantage of them, whether you’re buying your first home, refinancing, struggling with imperfect credit, or planning to invest in real estate.

Homebuyers Beware reveals new secrets homebuyers simply can’t afford to miss and exposes new scams that target today’s eager consumers--including new loans that look great on paper but are every bit as dangerous as yesterday’s subprimes. Unlike other mortgage guides, this book fully reflects today’s radically new mortgage requirements, in addition to the latest federal housing legislation and how to improve your credit rating. From its up-to-the-minute guidance on real estate negotiation to its powerful tips on getting lower interest rates and avoiding bogus junk fees, this may be the most valuable book you ever read!

• Who’s ripping you off now
  High-tech “smoke and mirrors” that can trick you into overpaying
• Quick, easy, powerful ways to fix your credit
  Innovative ways to raise your credit score or recover from a foreclosure or short sale
• Uncovering the costly secrets of the Yield Spread Premium
  Get past your banker’s lies, learn the truth, and save a fortune
• The latest laws and credit rules and what they mean to you
  So-called anti-predatory laws and codes of conduct actually hurt homebuyers. Learn what you can do to protect yourself from big corporation greed.
• New plans for recovering from bad credit, foreclosures, or short sales
  Step-by-step techniques that erase bad credit and raise your credit score faster than you ever thought possible. Learn how to recover from a foreclosure

It's the trap that ensnares virtually every business. We focus on process: "how" we're doing the job. And we forget about the bigger issue: "what" we're doing and "why" we're doing it. That's why we're leaving so much value on the table. In Rethink, business architect Ric Merrifield exposes this problem with vivid examples and introduces breakthrough techniques for overcoming it. Merrifield shows how to rise above the clutter of your "hows" to expose what does and doesn't need attention in your organization. You'll learn to identify the activities most critical to success, as well as those that are borderline, redundant, or even counterproductive. Merrifield helps you get past the parochial, subjective viewpoints of ground-level participants...find more cost-effective ways to achieve core goals...capture better information for prioritizing investments...identify hidden sources of value...use technology-driven plug-and-play management to increase efficiency and agility...and reconfigure your company to ride nonstop waves of change. Along the way, Merrifield presents powerful case studies ranging from ING DIRECT to Amazon.com to Procter & Gamble. These diverse companies have learned how to cut costs, strengthen innovation, and profit from change all at the same time. Using the lessons in this book, you can, too. / Rise above low-level processes and narrow perspectives / Step back, identify what really matters to the organization, and act accordingly / Understand the hidden connections that can make or break your business / Make profitable changes without setting off destructive chain reactions / Expose activities where people, process, and technology matter...and, equally important, where they don't

Every business leader eventually comes up against the dilemma that yesterday’s competitive advantages and key operating practices erode in their value to deliver tomorrow’s growth and productivity improvement. Some successfully address the challenge – jettisoning slow-growth or unproductive activities; channeling resources into higher growth areas; and redirecting their organizations to become more competitive in the longer term. Far more often, unfortunately, efforts to revitalize once-successful companies founder because leaders fail to ask the right questions (in time); get trapped into the tyranny of outdated practices or structures; or are simply unable to retool in time to remain viable. Today’s global financial crisis promises to raise the stakes – rendering companies that can’t figure out how to reorient their operations uncompetitive far more quickly than in the past.

With this as background, it is truly refreshing to read about Ric Merrifield’s work in Rethink: A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation. Ric insightfully hones in on a major reason that large, established companies have so much trouble getting out of their own way – they get trapped by the ‘hows’ of the way they do business and give far too little thought to the ‘what’s’ of what they are really trying to accomplish. I’m reminded of something I heard Brad Anderson (the CEO of Best Buy) observe at the recent World Economic Forum Annual Conference in Davos: “Companies,” he said, “have a huge disadvantage in that they have habits. They will often choose those habits over survival!”. Merrifield’s book provides a nice point of departure for getting past the habits and the established processes to address the question of what a firm does that actually creates value. In eleven insightful chapters, Merrifield encourages business leaders to develop deep insight about the ‘what’ factors that they can use to drive productivity gains as well as innovation. Examples from companies as diverse as Procter & Gamble, ING Direct, Newman’s Own food products and JetBlue provide instructive texture to his basic framework for identifying how your company creates value and how you might capture the same – or even more – value with a different business architecture. The results can sometimes be surprising – in one fascinating example, Merrifield details how one company found out that it was paying for the same Zip-code lookup data twelve times!

Merrifield’s approach can also help companies avoid the dangers of cost-cutting that actually destroys the fabric of the company’s success (think Home Depot) while providing the framework in which a firm can innovate, even in these difficult times (think Amazon.com or Procter & Gamble). This is a thought-provoking and insightful tome, which I can highly recommend for your next business trip – tuck it in your carry-on and be prepared to get a really different take on what makes your company tick.

Rita Gunther McGrath is best known for her breakthrough work on how companies can reduce risk and pursue growth, characterized by such best-selling works as her 1995 co-authored Harvard Business Review article, “Discovery Driven Planning”. She has co-authored three books, all published by Harvard Business Publishing, The Entrepreneurial Mindset (2000); MarketBusters (2005) and the newly released Discovery Driven Growth (2009).

How the World Really Works–and How to Make It Start Working Again!

·   Discover the immutable laws of nature that govern all your financial decisions–and put them to work for you

·   Ten ways to maximize wealth and happiness for everyone

·   How not to fix a broken economy: stupid policy tricks and why they just make things worse

We all live inside the Econosphere: a living, breathing, global organism that choreographs billions of performers with breathtaking precision and can make life better for everyone. But the Econosphere works best if we understand what nurtures it–and what poisons it. In The Econosphere, leading economist Craig Thomas reveals the amazing economic organism we’re all part of, explains how it really works, and shows how to make it start working again–for everyone. Thomas illuminates the laws that govern every economic decision you make–and shows how to use that information to make better decisions, achieve greater success, and maximize your happiness.

Your Hands-On Guide for Creating Continuous, Profitable Growth!

Use the proven, six-step Marketing Process to:

• Create a marketing plan with execution built in to the process.

• Accurately predict the ROI of marketing and sales to improve results.

• Integrate marketing best practices with new social media breakthroughs.

• Improve customer experience and customer lifetime value.

• Refine your brand and positioning to create a competitive advantage.

• Update strategy in real time to respond to changing market conditions.

• Create a culture that thrives on accountability, execution, and winning.

A Better Way to Plan and Execute!

Master Monique Reece’s Proven Marketing Process:

Purpose: Define your vision and specific strategic goals.

Research: Deepen your understanding of customers, markets, and competitors.

Analyze: Uncover powerful new growth opportunities.

Implement: Develop a tactical plan using new media tactics to drive leads, increase sales, and build
your brand.

Strategize: Create strategies and build effective sales plans resulting in increased revenue and profitability.

Execute and Evaluate: Integrate marketing, sales, and operations. Measure and update your plan in real-time and create a culture of execution.

Use Puts to Mitigate Risk, Reverse and Offset Losses, and Protect Profits–Even in Plummeting Markets!

“In these financial times, this is an especially timely book. Michael C. Thomsett provides practical, direct instruction to investors on how to employ put options to enhance and protect their portfolios. A powerful guide for professionals and novices alike.”

–Virginia B. Gerhart, CFP, President, Gerhart Associates

“Michael C. Thomsett’s Put Option Strategies is a must read for all stock investors who want to protect profits and manage risk in volatile stock markets. This easy to read book explains the basic strategies and moves on to more sophisticated uses of put option strategies to hedge risk in bear markets. The use of leverage is clearly explained to provide the tools for conservative investors to increase their profitable trading. This book is an excellent resource for all stock investors and should be read by all investors who want to lock in profits and limit losses in volatile stock markets.”

–Esme Faerber, author of All About Stocks; All About Investing; All About Bonds, Bond Mutual Funds, and Bond ETFs

“Michael C. Thomsett is an authority on options. In his latest work, he has skillfully clarified how to employ powerful techniques to protect portfolios and profit from uncertain times. This book is a must read.”

–Scott Kyle, CEO, Coastwise Capital Group, and author of The Power Curve: Smart Investing Using Dividends, Options, and the Magic of Compounding

Better Green Business brings together practical insights and start-to-finish strategies for moving any enterprise to a higher level of environmental stewardship. Drawing on his extensive experience from working across industries and functional boundaries, Dr. Eric G. Olson shows how to systematically drive “win-win-win” gains: growing top-line revenue, helping customers increase efficiency, and improving the environment at the same time.

Olson introduces powerful business process transformation methodologies and technologies for increasing operational efficiency and reducing waste, including IBM’s impactful Green Sigma approach. He also identifies new opportunities to drive value by “instrumenting the planet” and introduces the technologies that make this possible. Finally, he assesses long-term trends that will make “green business” increasingly crucial in the coming years.

• Defining “green strategy” and crafting transformation plans that work
  Complementing traditional strategy, improving operations, and making green strategy actionable
• Using Green Sigma to reduce environmental impact and drive business value
  Includes a detailed case study on reducing enterprise carbon emissions and costs 
• Instrumenting the planet for a more intelligent, sustainable world
  New technology innovations and solutions for environmental stewardship 
• Anticipating the future of green business–and all business
  Critical resource and environmental trends that will reshape business management

Master the Low-Risk ETF-Based Investing Strategy That Gives You the Chance to Make Money in Any Market Climate

“Tom Lydon has been a leader in the ETF business for many years. His new book walks through the basics of ETFs investing and shows why professionals–and increasingly, individuals–are turning to ETFs.”

–Bob Pisani, CNBC Reporter

“Our complex and global financial system has created a powerful need for guideposts for investors and traders alike. Tom Lydon provides an excellent tool to help navigate the current economic environment in a clear, concise, easy-to-understand way.”

–John L. Jacobs, EVP and CMO, The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc.

“There are hundreds of writers, speakers, and advisers clamoring to get a seat aboard the ETF bandwagon. However, if you’re looking for genuine insight from a real pioneer, then read Tom Lydon. Not only is Tom’s The ETF Trend Following Playbook a principled how-to guide for individual investors, it is requisite reading for money managers.”

–Gary Gordon, Editor of ETFExpert.com

“Tom Lydon has put together a concise handbook for the active ETF trader outlining the key drivers of successful trend investing. The ETF Trend Following Playbook provides sound advice for traders as well as a comprehensive and up-to-date tour of all the ETF world has to offer.”

–Scott Burns, Director of ETF Analysis at Morningstar

“Sir John’s ability to comprehend complex concepts and distill these into money-making ideas for his investors was legendary. With this book, Scott Phillips extends Sir John Templeton’s crystal clear vision to some of tomorrow’s most interesting and powerful money-making opportunities. All readers should be prepared to learn–and profit!”

–Jeffrey Everett, Founding Partner, Everkey Global Partners

“The brilliant global investing strategy of Sir John Templeton finds new life in Scott Phillips’ Buying at the Point of Maximum Pessimism. With the U.S. in trouble, savvy international investing is a must, and this book shows you the best places to put your money for serious profits ahead.”

–Christopher Ruddy, CEO, Newsmax Media, Inc.

“In Buying at the Point of Maximum Pessimism, Scott Phillips delivers a road map to investment success traveled by the very few but guaranteed to lead you to enormous profits. The book offers a delightful, common sense approach to investing that unfortunately is not so common.”

–Robert P. Miles, author, The Warren Buffett CEO

"If you want to mitigate your risks while leveraging your long-term sources for growth, read every page of this book and invest accordingly. In ten or twenty years you will look back and be thankful you did.”  

–Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, Ph.D., Research Professor, Yale University and CEO, The Roosevelt Group

Value Investing for the 2010s! Earn Consistent Long-Term Profits in a Radically New Market Environment

Legendary value investor Sir John Templeton knew the secret of earning consistent profits: In times of maximum pessimism, recognize what your long-term opportunities are–and be ready to pounce. This book shows you where today’s long-term opportunities are, so you can earn outsized profits when the “herd” is running away in terror.

Lauren Templeton Capital Management’s Scott Phillips identifies six powerful value investing themes for the 2010s: areas of long-term growth that become even more compelling in volatile or bear markets. This is value investing for the 2010s: a set of emerging opportunities you can profit from, while other investors are selling in fear!

“The author’s option trading guidelines include important issues often overlooked by investors. Attention conservative investors! Michael C. Thomsett’s Options Trading for the Conservative Investor has hit a bull’s-eye...for you!”

–Marty Kearney, The Options Institute, Chicago Board Options Exchange

“Michael C. Thomsett has done a terrific job of showing how a conservative investor can use certain option strategies to his advantage. He spells out how that investor can utilize options to provide income, to protect stock holdings, or even as a substitute for stock itself. Every open-minded conservative investor should read this book.”

– Lawrence G. McMillan, publisher, The Options Strategist newsletter; president, McMillan Analysis Corporation; author, Options as a Strategic Investment

“This book is a must for the diligent investor. Perfectly timed for these uncertain markets, Michael C. Thomsett provides a lucid guide for how to approach options trading conservatively, yet also focuses on the fundamental need for good returns and provides real examples throughout.”

–Guy Cohen, author of The Bible of Options Strategies and creator of OptionEasy (www.optioneasy.com)

• New downside protection strategies, detailed examples, and step-by-step techniques for conservative investors
• Easy enough for virtually any experienced investor to use–even those without options experience
• By renowned options expert Michael C. Thomsett, author of the global best-seller Getting Started in Options

To protect yourself in today’s volatile and uncertain market environment, you need to hedge losses, create extra sources of income, and reduce risk. In this book, internationally renowned options expert Michael C. Thomsett shows how to do all that effectively. One step at a time, Thomsett helps you exploit 12 carefully chosen options strategies that can dramatically increase your overall returns as you manage risks within your personal limits.