This book, like the first, second, and third editions before it, is for the working SQL programmer who wants to pick up some advanced programming tips and techniques. It assumes that the reader is an SQL programmer with a year or more of actual experience. This is not an introductory book, so let’s not have any gripes in the amazon.com...

Data communication networks are widely used today and are an integral part of our daily life. The Internet is a medium for business, personal, and government communication, and it is difficult to envision today’s society without this essential infrastructure. The continued success of the Internet is dependent on our ability to...

Parallel hardware has been ubiquitous for some time now. It’s difficult to find a laptop, desktop, or server that doesn’t use a multicore processor. Beowulf clusters are nearly as common today as high-powered workstations were during the 1990s, and cloud computing could make distributed-memory systems as accessible as...

QoS, short for "quality of service," is one of the most important goals a network designer or administrator will have. Ensuring that the network runs at optimal precision with data remaining accurate, traveling fast, and to the correct user are the main objectives of QoS. The various media that fly across the network including...

Computer graphics systems are capable of generating stunningly realistic images of objects that have never physically existed. In order for computers to create these accurately detailed images, digital models of appearance must include robust data to give viewers a credible visual impression of the depicted materials. In particular, digital...

The classic definition of realism has been veridical realism. Does the picture pass the comparison test? That is, would an...

The practice of compiler construction changes continually, in part because the designs of processors and systems change. For example, when we began to write Engineering a Compiler (eac) in 1998, some of our colleagues questioned the wisdom of including a chapter on instruction scheduling because out-of-order execution threatened to make...

An API presents a...

A course in computer programming provides the typical student's first exposure to the field of computer science. Most students in such a course will have used computers all their lives, for email, games, web browsing, word processing, social networking, and a host of other tasks, but it is not until they write their first programs that...

Between 1997 and 2002, AliaslWavefront's Maya has found wide acceptance in the animation, visual effects, and games communities, in large part because of the tremendous extent that it encourages customization through developing plug-ins and scripting in Maya Embedded Language (MEL). Major studios, including Disney, Dreamworks,...

Search has been vital to artificial intelligence from the very beginning as a core technique in problem solving. The authors present a thorough overview of heuristic search with a balance of discussion between theoretical analysis and efficient implementation and application to real-world problems. Current developments in search such as...

Image synthesis, or rendering, is a field of transformation: it changes geometry and physics into meaningful images. Because the most popular algorithms frequently change, it is increasingly important for researchers and implementors to have a basic understanding of the principles of image synthesis. Focusing on theory, Andrew...