Master detective Hercule Poirot, the hero of many an Agatha Christie novel, boasted repeatedly about the power of “the little gray cells” in his head to solve the toughest mysteries. For philosophers, writers and other thinkers, however, those little gray cells have been the greatest mystery of all. How do a couple of pounds of spongy, electrically active tissue give rise to a psychological essence? How do weemerge from the neural thicket?Empirical scientists may be relative new-comers to this investigation (unlike the philosophers, they’ve been on the case for only a few hundred years), but they have taken long strides forward in that short time.

In this special issue of Scientific American, some of the leading researchers in neuroscience and in psychology discuss how much is now known about the nature of consciousness, memory, emotions, creativity, dreams and other mental phenomena. Their answers suggest that some of these mysteries may be largely solved within our lifetimes—even if new ones are posed in the process.

But treat these articles as you would any good detective story: don’t turn right to the end for the answers. Half the fun is in tracing the deductions.

MySQL Stored Procedure Programming covers a lot of ground. The book starts with a thorough introduction to stored procedures programming and functions, covering the fundamentals of data types, operators, and using SQL in stored procedures. You’ll learn how to build and maintain stored programs — covering transactions, stored functions, and triggers — and how to call and use MySQL-based stored procedures in a variety of languages, including PHP, Perl, Python, .NET, and Java. This book, destined to be the bible of stored procedure development, is a resource that no real MySQL programmer can afford to do without.The implementation of stored procedures in MySQL 5.0 a huge milestone - one that is expected to lead to widespread enterprise adoption of the already extremely popular MySQL database. If you are serious about building the web-based database applications of the future, you need to get up to speed quickly on how stored procedures work — and how to build them the right way. This book, destined to be the bible of stored procedure development, is a resource that no real MySQL programmer can afford to do without.

In the decade since MySQL burst on the scene, it has become the dominant open source database, with capabilities and performance rivaling those of commercial RDBMS offerings like Oracle and SQL Server. Along with Linux and PHP, MySQL is at the heart of millions of applications. And now, with support for stored procedures, functions, and triggers in MySQL 5.0, MySQL offers the programming power needed for true enterprise use.

MySQL’s new procedural language has a straightforward syntax, making it easy to write simple programs. But it’s not so easy to write secure, easily maintained, high-performance, and bug-free programs. Few in the MySQL world have substantial experience yet with stored procedures, but Guy Harrison and Steven Feuerstein have decades of combined expertise.

This book is an explanation of design patterns as applied to the .NET 2.0 Framework. Some of the patterns are from Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, and others are from other sources. The focus of this book is not to explicitly define the patterns, but to illustrate the patterns in the context of using them with a programming language like C#, because the original design patterns were illustrated using C++, and there are major differences between that language and .NET and C#.Why Patterns?
You might be wondering, “Why this book, and why patterns?” Oddly enough, the idea occurred to me while training some students on how to use design patterns. The students were doing their exercises, and I saw one student in particular write code in which the base type was a class and not an interface. I asked him why he was writing code like that, and his response was, “Because that is what I have been doing all this time.” The student’s method was wrong, but his response revealed an interesting perspective: why use an interface when a base class is good enough? Right then, it hit me like a ton of bricks: object-oriented programming, or OOP, can be easier understood when one is first taught patterns.

When learning traditional OOP techniques, you are taught about shapes, squares, and other abstract topics. You learn about how a class is responsible for its own data, and how classes implement responsibilities. The problem with this form of learning is that it explains object-oriented programming, but it does not explain how to solve a problem with concrete solutions. For example, how do you instantiate a type, pass its references to another class, and persist that information to a medium? The problem with traditional object-oriented programming is that it gives vague guidance in implementing a solution.

Windows XP is the most popular operating system on the planet–and the most annoying. From incomprehensible error messages to inexplicable crashes, from wonky wireless setups to just finding a file, Windows can make your computing life a nightmare. But thanks to Fixing Windows XP Annoyances, you can banish the bugs, speed up operations, and just make Windows work right.

Windows XP frequently falls under the “You can’t live with it; you can’t live without it” category, and with good reason. Windows is an operating system, the underlying software that provides drivers, interface components, and communication services to the applications and games you use on your PC. Ideally, operating system software should be both omnipresent and invisible; like the air we breathe, it allows us to function but should never get in our way. Alas, it doesn’t always work out that way.

Windows crashes. It interrupts our work with incomprehensible error messages. It bogs down under the weight of the software we pile on top of it. And it seems to make simple taskssuch as finding files, choosing default applications, and setting up a networkneedlessly complicated and hopelessly cumbersome. For these reasons and hundreds more, Windows is annoying.

The good news is that there are solutions to most Windows annoyances. Whether the solution lies in an obscure setting, an add-on program, or just a different way of doing something, most of what bugs us about Windows can be fixed. And that’s what this book is about.

When an application is part of the Microsoft Office suite, it’s sure to be a leader in its field. In the realm of desktop database management, Access is top dog with millions of users. But this is one dog that can bite. Although Access is a powerful, relational tool with the fetching talents of a Labrador, it’s not an easy beast to train.

Still, millions of users count on Access for everything from managing parts databases to running Web catalogs to working as a front end to mondo SQL databases. But Access is chockablock with annoyances—report hassles, query conundrums, VBA bugs, arcane error messages, and more.

O’Reilly’s Annoyances series offer real-world help, right now, and Fixing Access Annoyances continues tradition. You’ll not only squash bugs and workaround Access’ limits, but you’ll learn how to use Access to the max, whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned pro. Coverage includes install/configuration annoyances, building better tables and queries, creating forms that work right, generating reliable and sophisticated reports, pulling in data from a variety of sources, crafting macros and VBA code to customize Access, and much more.

You could grab those other books for help, but do they solve problems from page one? Meet a book of a different stripe. The authors come armed with knowledge of the program’s quirks, design hurdles and interface snags. They provide you with battle plans in Fixing Access Annoyances to save you time and bouts of hair pulling.

Stop information from spiraling out of control when working with Access and trying to make this #$@@#$ thing work! Don’t let its quirks, bugs, and troublemaking features beat you. Who you gonna call for help? Instead of waiting on the line for tech support or searching for the answer on the Internet with its too many resources to find exactly what you need, take control of databases with Fixing Access Annoyances, your partner on database adventures.

TABLE OF CONTENT:
Chapter 0 - Access Basics
Chapter 1 - General Annoyances
Chapter 2 - Performance, Versions, Security, and Deployment
Chapter 3 - Data, Tables, and Database Design
Chapter 4 - Queries
Chapter 5 - Forms
Chapter 6 - Reports, Mailing Labels, and Charts
Chapter 7 - Expressions, Macros, Code Modules, and Custom Controls