My goal in writing this book is to share with you some of what I know about Excel, and in the process, make you more efficient on the job. The book contains everything that you need to know to learn the basics of Excel and then move on to more advanced topics at your own pace. You’ll find many useful examples and lots of tips and tricks that I’ve accumulated over the years.

In this book, I’ve tried to maintain a good balance between the basics that every Excel user needs to know and the more complex topics that will appeal to power users. I’ve used Excel for nearly 20 years, and I realize that almost everyone still has something to learn (including myself). My goal is to make that learning an enjoyable process.

This book was written for Excel 2007 for Windows. No exceptions. If you’re using an older version of Excel, I suggest that you put down this book immediately and find a book that’s appropriate for your version of Excel. The changes in Excel 2007 are so extensive that you’ll probably be hopelessly confused if you use an earlier version.

This book can teach you how to debug more effectively. It is a complete and pragmatic overview of debugging, written by a talented researcher who has developed many clever ways to isolate bugs. It explains best practices for finding and fixing errors in programs, ranging from systematically tracking error reports, reproducing failures, observing symptoms, isolating the cause, and correcting defects. Along with basic techniques and commonly used tools, the book also explores the author’s innovative techniques for isolating minimal input to reproduce an error and for tracking cause and effect through a program.

Studying this book will make you a better programmer. You will be able to find and fix errors in your code (and your colleague’s code) faster and more effectively, a valuable skill that will enable you to finish projects earlier and produce programs with fewer defects. Also, if you read between the lines you will learn how to write code that is more easily tested and debugged, which further increases your ability to find and correct defects. And thinking hard about what can go wrong with your program can help you avoid mistakes in the first place, so you have less to debug.

The author of this book demonstrates that you can write well-designed, resilient code incrementally and safely, while minimizing your investment in speculative up-front design.

See eXtreme Programming (XP) in action at the hands of an XP mater—and learn Microsoft .NET and C# programming in the process! In this fast-paced, hands-on exposition, Ron Jeffries—one of the leading voices and practitioner in the XP community—demonstrates that you can write well-designed, resilient code incrementally and safely, while minimizing your investment in speculative up-front design. As Jeffries builds his sample application, you get firsthand insights into what successful XP development looks like, complete with real-world challenges such as the eleventh-hour change order. For further practice and study, you can download all the author’s code—including missteps—so you can see XP and agile concepts in action and assess how they fit into your own work.

This book focuses on the subsystems and devices on the data plane. There is a brief introduction to IP network management to familiarize readers with how the network is managed, as many routers are interconnected together.

The book starts with an introduction to today’s and tomorrow’s networks, the router architectures and their building blocks, examples of commercial high-end routers, and the challenging issues of designing high-performance high-speed routers.

A distinction of this book is that we provide as many figures as possible to explain the concepts. Readers are encouraged to first scan through the figures and try to understand them before reading the text. If fully understood, readers can skip to the text to save time. However, the text is written in such a way as to talk the readers through the figures.

What kind of secrets are included in 501 Web Site Secrets? Well, there’s parts of a site you didn’t know existed. Or ways to use the site that you weren’t aware of. Or special commands that help you get even more out of the site than you could before. Cool stuff like that—and more.

That’s the nature of a secret—something that most users don’t know about, but would get a kick out of if they did. These are the kinds of things that will make you say to yourself, “That’s cool—I didn’t know you could do that!” And then you’ll want to go directly to the site to try the secret out for yourself. (Go ahead; it’s allowed.)

Of course, not all 501 secrets in this book will be new to you. If you’re Internetsavvy at all, you’ll probably know some of what I reveal in these pages. That’s okay; it only means that you’re on your toes. I’m sure, however, that you’ll find more than a few secrets you didn’t know, and that they’ll make this book a worthwhile read for you.