Complete Digital Photography has become a classic book for helping traditional photographers move to digital! It's also the book of choice for many new digital photographers who want to learn how to take great digital photos. Now in its 4th edition, this bestseller has been fine-tuned and updated to provide the most current information available. Covering everything from the inner workings of the camera to the subtle intricacies of image editing software, the book is divided into four sections. The first section provides the basic technical foundation needed throughout the rest of the book. It details the basics of how digital cameras work and provides a quick photography primer. The second part explores everything needed to make an informed decision about which camera, computer, and software to choose. Section three has been thoroughly updated and expanded to cover the nitty gritty of shooting, including metering, choosing the right exposure, using histograms, flash photography, and much more. And the final section, teaches the latest digital editing and correction techniques, including new coverage of workflow and raw conversion.

About the Author

Ben Long (San Francisco, CA) is a writer, producer, videographer, and the author of the best-selling title Complete Digital Photography, Third Edition as well as the first two editions of The Digital Filmmaking Handbook.

Teach yourself how to design and create SQL Server 2008 databases one step at a time. Work at your own pace through the book s practical, skill-building lessons and the hands-on practice files on CD. You ll begin by learning to install and configure SQL Server 2008, design a model database, and work with tables and indexes. Next, you ll learn techniques to manipulate, maintain, and retrieve data. Finally, you ll learn more-advanced techniques, such as using views, functions, and triggers. As you complete each lesson, you can hone your skills using the practice exercises on the companion CD. Plus, you can review and download code samples illustrating the author s own, professional techniques direct from the companion Web site.

Microsoft SQL Server has been Microsoft's flagship database for over 15 years. Before the next version of SQL Server launches, SQL Server 2008 will be celebrating SQL Server's 20th birthday. In that time, SQL Server has grown from handling small departmental tasks to serving up the largest databases on the planet. The release of SQL Server 2000 saw a dramatic evolution of Microsoft SQL Server. No longer a simple "database," Microsoft SQL Server is now a complete data architecture solution capable of handling the data storage and manipulation needs of any organization.

This book walks you through your first steps in T-SQL (also known as Transact-SQL), which is Microsoft SQL Server s dialect of the standard ANSI-SQL language. You ll learn the theory behind T-SQL querying and programming, how to develop T-SQL code to query and modify data, and get an overview of programmable objects. Although this book is intended for beginners, it is not merely a step-by-step book. It goes beyond the syntactical elements of T-SQL and explains the logic behind the language and its elements. Many aspects of SQL are unique to the language, and are very different from other programming languages. This book helps you adopt the right state of mind and gain a true understanding of the language elements. You learn how to think in terms of sets and follow good SQL programming practices. The book is not version-specific; it does, however, cover language elements that were introduced in recent versions of SQL Server, including SQL Server 2008. To complement the learning experience, the book provides exercises that enable you to practice what you ve learned. The book starts with a theoretical background to T-SQL querying and programming (Chapter 1) laying the foundations for the rest of the book, and also coverage of creating tables and defining data integrity. The book moves on to various aspects of querying and modifying data (Chapters 2 through 8), then to a discussion of concurrency and transactions (Chapter 9), and finally provides an overview of programmable objects (Chapter 10). This book features a companion Web site that makes available to you all the code used in the book, the errata, additional resources, and more.

Delve into the fundamental architectural principles and techniques for developing service-oriented AJAX applications for the enterprise. This guide offers a code-heavy, example-based approach to learning how to write a modern services API and an AJAX front end that can easily be extended, reused, and integrated by third parties. Focusing on Microsoft technologies and enterprise servers, including Microsoft SharePoint(r) Server 2007, ASP.NET AJAX, and Microsoft .NET Frameworks 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5, this book walks you through a client-centric UI architecture programmed against an XML service-oriented backend. Topics include the Microsoft AJAX Library, Web services and an XML API, client-side XSLT, JavaScript AJAX communication, and integration with Microsoft servers. The book does not attempt to be an exhaustive reference, but focuses instead on fundamental architectural principles and guidance.

While their basic principles and ideas are well understood and cogent from a conceptual perspective, the realization of interorganizational workflows and applications based on service-oriented architectures (SOAs) remains a complex task, and, especially when it comes to security, the implementation is still bound to low-level technical knowledge and hence inherently error-prone.

Hafner and Breu set a different focus. Based on the paradigm of model-driven security, they show how to systematically design and realize security-critical applications for SOAs. In their presentation, they first detail how systems and security engineering go hand in hand and are integrated from the very start in the requirements elicitation and the design phase. In a second step, they apply the principles of model-driven security to SOAs. Model-driven security is an engineering paradigm that aims at the automatic generation of security-critical executable software for target architectures. Based on the general principles of model-driven software development, the automation of security engineering through proven and reliable mechanisms guarantees correctness and facilitates an agile and flexible approach to the implementation and high-level management of security-critical systems.

Their book addresses IT professionals interested in the design and realization of modern security-critical applications. It presents a synthesis of various best practices, standards and technologies from model-driven software development, security engineering, and SOAs. As a reader, you will learn how to design and realize SOA security using the framework of an extensible domain architecture for model-driven security.

About the Author

Ruth Breu has been head of the research group Quality Engineering at the University of Innsbruck since 2002. Prior to that, she was a researcher at the Technische Universität München and Universität Passau, and spent several years in industry working as a software engineering consultant. Quality Engineering focuses on foundations of model-based software development, in particular in the areas of security engineering, IT governance, model quality assessment and workflow management systems. The research group cooperates with industry partners such as Siemens, Swiss Re and Telekom Austria.

Michael Hafner gained his industry experience in the automotive and the telecommunications sectors as a technical consultant on systems integration with Deloitte Consulting before joining the Quality Engineering group as a researcher. In this group he has been responsible for the design and the realization of the SECTET framework, a model-driven security infrastructure for SOA applications.

Silverlight is a framework for building rich, browser-hosted applications that run on a variety of operating systems. Silverlight works its magic through a browser plug-in. When you surf to a web page that includes some Silverlight content, this browser plug-in runs, executes the code, and renders that content in a specifically designated region of the page. The important part is that the Silverlight plug-in provides a far richer environment than the traditional blend of HTML and JavaScript that powers ordinary web pages. Used carefully and artfully, you can create Silverlight pages that have interactive graphics, use vector animations, and play video and sound files.

If this all sounds eerily familiar, it’s because the same trick has been tried before. Several other technologies use a plug-in to stretch the bounds of the browser, including Java, ActiveX, Shockwave, and (most successfully) Adobe Flash. Although all these alternatives are still in use, none of them has become the single, dominant platform for rich web development. Many of them suffer from a number of problems, including installation headaches, poor development tools, and insufficient compatibility with the full range of browsers and operating systems. The only technology that’s been able to avoid these pitfalls is Flash, which boasts excellent cross-platform support and widespread adoption. However, Flash has only recently evolved from a spunky multimedia player into a set of dynamic programming tools. It still offers far less than a modern programming environment like .NET.

That’s where Silverlight fits into the picture. Silverlight aims to combine the raw power and cross-platform support of Flash with a first-class programming platform that incorporates the fundamental concepts of .NET. At the moment, Flash has the edge over Silverlight because of its widespread adoption and its maturity. However, Silverlight boasts a few architectural features that Flash can’t match—most importantly, the fact that it’s based on a scaled-down version of .NET’s common language runtime (CLR) and allows developers to write client-side code using pure VB.

Learning CSS technology and continually improving one’s design and developer skills is essential for every Web designer. Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (CSS and XHTML), Third Edition educates beginning-to-intermediate Web designers on crucial design issues through general discussion, case studies, and helpful tips and techniques. Using easy-to-understand language and concepts, the book bridges the knowledge gap from XHTML table-based design to full CSS-based design, helping you master the most current technologies and techniques needed. With over 13 years of experience as a Web designer for Fortune 500 companies, non-profi ts, and small businesses alike, author Clint Eccher has learned numerous tips and techniques of the trade and discloses them here, saving you time and potential aggravation by alerting you to potential pitfalls. Best of all, he shares over 200 of the completely customizable design templates that he has developed over the years on this book’s companion CD-ROM! The designs included on the CD illustrate the book’s content and offer you a variety of options—XHTML table-based coded Web sites, e-newsletters, signatures, Photoshop-only designs, and CSS-coded designs. These designs not only offer the reader a variety of designs that can be quickly customized and used, but are great for inspiration as well. This is a complete Web design training course and free library of templates all in one!

About the Author

Clint Eccher is an award-winning Web designer with more than 13 years of experience designing and developing professional Web sites. He is the owner of A5design, a Web design company that not only subcontracts to various marketing, advertising, and IT organizations, but also is commissioned by Fortune 500 companies, local and national nonprofi t organizations, and small businesses for Web design and/or development. In addition to authoring Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (CSS and XHTML), Third Edition, which has been published in fi ve different languages, he is also the author of Advanced Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (CSS and XHTML). Eccher lives and works in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Learning CSS technology and continually improving one’s design and developer skills is essential for every Web designer. Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (CSS and XHTML), Third Edition educates beginning-to-intermediate Web designers on crucial design issues through general discussion, case studies, and helpful tips and techniques. Using easy-to-understand language and concepts, the book bridges the knowledge gap from XHTML table-based design to full CSS-based design, helping you master the most current technologies and techniques needed. With over 13 years of experience as a Web designer for Fortune 500 companies, non-profi ts, and small businesses alike, author Clint Eccher has learned numerous tips and techniques of the trade and discloses them here, saving you time and potential aggravation by alerting you to potential pitfalls. Best of all, he shares over 200 of the completely customizable design templates that he has developed over the years on this book’s companion CD-ROM! The designs included on the CD illustrate the book’s content and offer you a variety of options—XHTML table-based coded Web sites, e-newsletters, signatures, Photoshop-only designs, and CSS-coded designs. These designs not only offer the reader a variety of designs that can be quickly customized and used, but are great for inspiration as well. This is a complete Web design training course and free library of templates all in one!

About the Author

Clint Eccher is an award-winning Web designer with more than 13 years of experience designing and developing professional Web sites. He is the owner of A5design, a Web design company that not only subcontracts to various marketing, advertising, and IT organizations, but also is commissioned by Fortune 500 companies, local and national nonprofi t organizations, and small businesses for Web design and/or development. In addition to authoring Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (CSS and XHTML), Third Edition, which has been published in fi ve different languages, he is also the author of Advanced Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (CSS and XHTML). Eccher lives and works in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Application Express, or APEX, is one of the most innovative products to come out of Oracle in years. APEX is an application development framework for developing database–backed applications. It’s easy enough to get started in that power users can quit storing data in random spreadsheets and instead centralize their data in the powerful Oracle database, all without developer help. Developers arent left out, however. Those who choose to can go deep and leverage the full power and flexibility of Oracles database engine.

Getting started with APEX is easy. Learning how to take full advantage of APEX is the problem. It was the problem, that is, until this book came along. In Pro Oracle Application Express, authors John Scott and Scott Spendolini open the “hood” of APEX and expose the full power behind its easy–to–use GUI interface. They show you what you need to know to produce powerful, professionally polished applications, things such as user-authentication models, approaches to layout and navigation, how to integrate Ajax, how to deal with localization issues such as time zones and translations, how to customize the look and feel of an APEX web site, and much, much more.

The authors are well–qualified to write on APEX. John Scott runs ShellPrompt, a hosting service that handles many large-scale APEX applications, some of which he is paid to develop. John is a hard–core APEX developer. His coauthor, Scott Spendolini, is one of the original creators of APEX. Both John and Scott now base their fulltime careers on developing APEX applications. Pro Oracle APEX is your opportunity to learn APEX from the very best.

About the Author

John Edward Scott has been using Oracle since version 7 (around 1993) and has used pretty much every release since then. He has had the good fortune to work on a wide range of projects for a varied group of clients. He was lucky enough to start working with Oracle Application Express when it was first publicly released, and has worked with it nearly every day since (and loves it).

Scott Spendolini is President and Founder of Sumner Technologies, LLC (http://sumnertech.com), a small consulting firm which specializes in Oracle Application Express training and consulting services. Spendolini has assisted a number of clients from various verticals with their Application Express development and training needs. He has presented at a number of conferences, including Oracle OpenWorld, ODTUG, and IOUG and is a regular contributor to the APEX Forums on OTN.

Previously to founding Sumner Technologies, LLC, he worked for Oracle Corporation for almost 10 years, the last three of which he was a Senior Product Manager for Oracle Application Express. Prior to working with Oracle APEX, Spendolini assisted customers with the Oracle eBusiness Suite and its related technologies. Spendolini holds a dual bachelors degree from Syracuse University in Management Information Systems and Telecommunications Management.

This book is a tresure … will be welcomed by all who are active in the areaof elimination methods. -- Bruno Buchberger Professor of Computer Mathematics Johannes Kepler University, Austria

With a software library included, this book provides an elementary introduction to polynomial elimination in practice. The library Epsilon, implemented in Maple and Java, contains more than 70 well-documented functions for symbolic elimination and decomposition with polynomial systems and geometric reasoning. The book presents the functionality, implementation, and performance of Epsilon and demonstrates the usefulness of the elimination tool by a number of selected applications, together with many examples and illustrations. The reader will find Epsilon an efficient tool, applicable to a wide range of problems in science, engineering, and industry, and this book an accessible exposition and a valuable reference for elimination theory, methods, and practice.

About the Author

Dongming Wang has been a senior researcher at CNRS since 1992. He worked previously at the Johannes Kepler University in Austria for four years, after receiving his PhD in 1987 from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is recognized for his work and expertise on polynomial elimination and decomposition, automated geometric reasoning, and applications of symbolic computation to differential equations and neural networks.

Author of two previous books and co-editor/translator of 13 books and special volumes, Dr Wang has published about 70 papers in professional journals and conference proceedings. He has also been involved in the initiation and organization of a number of academic activities in the areas of symbolic computation and automated reasoning.

"At last a user-friendly reference that documents hundreds of the most useful ABAP routines currently in use. This book is essential for ABAP consultants, project engineers, and programmers who want to save both time and money and avoid having to reinvent the wheel." Robert G. Drake, Course Leader, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

"An invaluable reference guide enabling developers to quickly unleash the power of SAP's vast repository of reusable tools, immediately resulting in improved development times and reduced maintenance. A must for any development team."
Macartan Conway, Senior SAP Consultant, CRM Technology (IRELAND) Ltd, Ireland

R/3 is a business system that has gained global prominence. However, the SAP R/3 has 237,000 function modules. Quite often the programmer is unaware that a module exists which can be of help in their programs. This convenient resource is a collection of the most common ABAP modules, demonstrated within simple programs. Also included is a CD-ROM containing these programs for easily searchable examples. The modules in this book and CD-ROM are organised for quick reference. This concise reference contains: A full explanation of the layout of reference entries A brief introduction to SAP Coverage of conversion and date and time modules File and directory modules List, long texts, and number modules Useful integration modules for MSOffice and pop-up dialog box management This book organises over 300 modules in this book, many of which are undocumented in text and arranges them for quick and easy reference, and explains when and where to use the most common SAP R/3 ABAP function modules.