Views are virtual tables. That means they should be updatable, just as "real" or base tables are. In fact, view updatability isn’t just desirable, it’s crucial, for practical reasons as well as theoretical ones. But view updating has always been a controversial topic. Ever since the relational...

Some web sites "work" and some don't. Good web site consultants know that you can't just jump in and start writing HTML, the same way you can't build a house by just pouring a foundation and putting up some walls. You need to know who will be using the site, and what they'll be using it for. You need some...

Get valuable tips and techniques for automating your cloud deployments with Azure PowerShell cmdlets, and learn how to provision Azure services on the fly. In this hands-on guide, Microsoft cloud technology expert Michael Washam shows you how to automate various management tasks and deploy solutions that are both complex and at...

Avoid common mistakes when building distributed, asynchronous, high-performance software with the Akka toolkit and runtime. With this concise guide, author Jamie Allen provides a collection of best practices based on several years of using the actor model. The book also includes examples of actor application types and two primary...

Time series data is of growing importance, especially with the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things. This concise guide shows you effective ways to collect, persist, and access large-scale time series data for analysis. You’ll explore the theory behind time series databases and learn practical methods for implementing...

After a dozen years of incremental changes, C# has become one of the most versatile programming languages available. With this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn just how powerful the combination of C# 5.0 and .NET 4.5 can be. Author Ian Griffiths guides you through C# 5.0 fundamentals and teaches you techniques for building web...

Want to build native Mac OS X applications with a sleek, developer-friendly alternative to Objective-C? MacRuby is an ideal choice. This in-depth guide shows you how Apple’s implementation of Ruby gives you access to all the features available to Objective-C programmers. You’ll get clear, detailed explanations of MacRuby,...

Linux is increasingly popular among computer enthusiasts of all types, and one of the applications where it is flourishing is multimedia. Take a low-cost hardware platform and add the Linux operating system, which really exploits its speed, and you have a great host for developing multimedia applications. These often can be ported to...

Since Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef first appeared in mid-2011, infrastructure testing has begun to flourish in the web ops world. In this revised and expanded edition, author Stephen Nelson-Smith brings you up to date on this rapidly evolving discipline, including the philosophy driving it and a growing array of tools....

Turn your R code into packages that others can easily download and use. This practical book shows you how to bundle reusable R functions, sample data, and documentation together by applying author Hadley Wickham’s package development philosophy. In the process, you’ll work with devtools, roxygen, and testthat, a set of R...