What do you need to know to create a game for the iPhone? Even if you’ve already built some iPhone applications, developing games using iPhone’s gestural interface and limited screen layout requires new skills. Loaded with descriptive examples and clear explanations, iPhone Game Development provides everything from game development basics and iPhone programming fundamentals to guidelines for dealing with special graphics and audio needs, creating in-game physics, and much more.

What do you need to know to create a game for the iPhone? Even if you’ve already built some iPhone applications, developing games using iPhone’s gestural interface and limited screen layout requires new skills. With iPhone Game Development, you get everything from game development basics and iPhone programming fundamentals to guidelines for dealing with special graphics and audio needs, creating in-game physics, and much more.

Loaded with descriptive examples and clear explanations, this book helps you learn the technical design issues particular to the iPhone and iPod Touch, and suggests ways to maximize performance in different types of games. You also get plug-in classes to compensate for the areas where the iPhone’s game programming support is weak.

• Learn how to develop iPhone games that provide engaging user experiences
• Become familiar with Objective-C and the Xcode suite of tools
• Learn what it takes to adapt the iPhone interface to games
• Create a robust, scalable framework for a game app
• Understand the requirements for implementing 2D and 3D graphics
• Learn how to add music and audio effects, as well as menus and controls
• Get instructions for publishing your game to the App Store

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Backed by a tireless development community, PHP has been a model of language evolution over its 10+ year history. Borne from a contract developer’s pet project, these days you’ll find PHP powering many of the world’s largest web sites, including Yahoo!, Digg, EA Games, and Lycos.

PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice, Second Edition shows you how to meld the power of PHP with the sound enterprise development techniques embraced by professional programmers. Going well beyond the basics of object–oriented development, you’ll learn about advanced topics such as working with static methods and properties, abstract classes, interfaces, design patterns, exception handling, and more. You’ll also be exposed to key tools such as PEAR, CVS, Phing, and phpDocumentor.

What you’ll learn

• Write solid, maintainable code by embracing object–oriented techniques and design patterns.
• Create detailed, versatile documentation using the powerful phpDocumentor automated documentation system.
• Gain new flexibility during the development process by managing your code within a CVS repository and using the Phing build system.
• Capitalize upon the quality code of others by using the PEAR package management solution.

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Every day organizations large and small fall victim to attacks on their data. Encryption provides a shield to help defend against intruders. Because of increasing pressure from government regulators, consumers, and the business community at large, the job descriptions of SQL DBAs and developers are expanding to include encryption. Expert SQL Server 2008 Encryption will show you how to efficiently implement SQL Server 2008 encryption functionality and features to secure your organizational data.

• Introduces encryption, guiding readers through its implementation in SQL Server
• Demonstrates advanced techniques such as the use of hardware security modules
• Covers all that a SQL Server database administrator needs to know about encryption

What you’ll learn

• Take advantage of hardware security modules via extensible key management
• Implement targeted encryption of individual columns
• Secure an entire database at once with Transparent Data Encryption
• Encrypt disk volumes using BitLocker encryption
• Effectively design and manage encryption as part of your total security solution
• Digitally sign documents stored in your database

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Adobe Photoshop CS4 Studio Techniques has been completely updated to cover the new features in CS4. In a friendly, easy-going style that’s long on information and short on techno-babble, Photoshop Hall-of-Famer Ben Willmore and photographer Dan Ablan guide you through the concepts and features that will truly make a difference in how you use Photoshop every day. They’ll take you from blindly following step-by-step instructions to an in-depth understanding of how Photoshop works, cutting through the fat to focus on what they consider to be Photoshop’s essential features. This full-color book delivers the content in three easily digestible sections: Working Foundations, Production Essentials, and Creative Explorations. Streamlined for this new edition, the book will distill Photoshop’s vast capabilities down to what you need to know for a full understanding of the program, while simultaneously focusing more directly on best practices for the photographer. Beginning with a quick “refresher course” on the working foundations of Photoshop, you’ll move on to real-world production techniques. Finally, you’ll get to fully explore Photoshop’s creative potential by blending and enhancing images, creating collages, retouching photographs, colorizing, and working with filters and layer masks. By the time you finish this book, your creativity and efficiency levels will soar and you’ll feel like you finally “get” Photoshop.

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“The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs reveals the operating system behind any great presentation and provides you with a quick-start guide to design your own passionate interfaces with your audiences.” —Cliff Atkinson, author of Beyond Bullet Points and The Activist Audience

Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s wildly popular presentations have set a new global gold standard—and now this step-by-step guide shows you exactly how to use his crowd-pleasing techniques in your own presentations. The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs is as close as you’ll ever get to having the master presenter himself speak directly in your ear. Communications expert Carmine Gallo has studied and analyzed the very best of Jobs’s performances, offering point-by-point examples, tried-and-true techniques, and proven presentation secrets that work every time. With this revolutionary approach, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to sell your ideas, share your enthusiasm, and wow your audience the Steve Jobs way.

“No other leader captures an audience like Steve Jobs does and, like no other book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs captures the formula Steve uses to enthrall audiences.”
–Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group

“Now you can learn from the best there is–both Jobs and Gallo. No matter whether you are a novice presenter or a professional speaker like me, you will read and reread this book with the same enthusiasm that people bring to their iPods.”
–David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave

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If you’re a web developer with previous JavaScript and DOM scripting experience, Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs, and Libraries is perfect for you to take your knowledge up to the next level.

This book is about JavaScript and using the document object model—the conduit to the HTML document. This book is not about learning how to program JavaScript from scratch. It starts with the assumption that you have done some JavaScript development before and understand the JavaScript syntax. This book builds on top of that knowledge to give you a deeper understanding of DOM Scripting and how to apply that to your projects. It uses this new understanding to describe what JavaScript libraries are and show you how they can be applied to your project. The book will also explain Ajax and how best to plan and apply it to your projects. It explains how to build simple animation objects for adding movement to elements on the page. There are straightforward examples that demonstrate the techniques used throughout the book.

JavaScript has seen a resurgence in popularity over the past few years, and with it has come an exploration of the power of the language as well as what it can do within the browser. This book will explain techniques new and old—such as closures, encapsulation, and inheritance—that many are using and how you can best apply them to your own projects.

By reading this book, you should have a greater understanding of how JavaScript works and be able to use advanced concepts such as closures and event delegation to build more flexible applications for the Web. You’ll walk away with a greater appreciation for JavaScript libraries and how they can simplify and speed up your development. You’ll also be able to implement Ajax effectively into your site, create special effects, use JavaScript libraries, and know how best to apply these libraries to your projects.

What you’ll learn

• Where CSS, HTML, and the DOM fit into modern scripting, and how to use them together effectively
• OOP techniques for more efficient JavaScript coding
• How to use JavaScript libraries such as Prototype in your work
• How to build effective form validation into your applications using Ajax
• How to create mashups using APIs
• How to build dynamic user interfaces

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Interested in becoming a master of the PHP language and MySQL database but don’t know where to begin? This bestselling book ranks among the most thorough and practical guides in print, covering all of the key concepts and features, and showing you how to effectively integrate PHP and MySQL to build powerful websites.

The book begins with a vast overview of PHP’s capabilities, starting with a survey of the installation and configuration process on both the Windows and Linux platforms. Next, several chapters are devoted to basic PHP concepts, including variables, datatypes, arrays, functions, string manipulation, and processing user input. Other key PHP topics are also covered, including PEAR, session handling, LDAP integration, the Smarty templating engine, Web services, and PDO.

Next up is a presentation of MySQL’s key features. You’re first guided through MySQL’s installation and configuration process, and are presented with an introduction to its storage engines, datatypes, administration utilities, security features, and data import/export facilities. New MySQL 5-specific chapters have been added in this edition, covering triggers, stored procedures, and views. Along the way, you’ll gain insight into PHP’s assortment of MySQL functions (using both the mysql and mysqli extensions), and learn how to create and execute queries, perform searches, and carry out key database tasks from within your Web application.

What You Will Learn from This Book

• Install and configure Apache, PHP and MySQL on both Windows and Linux
• Accept and process information submitted via HTML forms
• Authenticate users and track user preferences and data using PHP’s session-handling capabilities
• Process Web-based file uploads using the HTTP_Upload PEAR package
• Create your own RSS aggregator using Magpie, and process XML files in amazingly efficient fashion using SimpleXML
• Use both command-line and graphical MySQL clients to effectively manage your data
• Secure the MySQL server, creating roles and restricting access even at very granular levels
• Effectively integrate PHP and MySQL to create dynamic, data-driven web applications

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The agile model of software development has taken the world by storm. Now, in Agile Software Development, Second Edition, one of agile’s leading pioneers updates his Jolt Productivity award-winning book to reflect all that’s been learned about agile development since its original introduction.

Alistair Cockburn begins by updating his powerful model of software development as a “cooperative game of invention and communication.” Among the new ideas he introduces: harnessing competition without damaging collaboration; learning lessons from lean manufacturing; and balancing strategies for communication. Cockburn also explains how the cooperative game is played in business and on engineering projects, not just software development

Next, he systematically illuminates the agile model, shows how it has evolved, and answers the questions developers and project managers ask most often, including

·      Where does agile development fit in our organization?

·      How do we blend agile ideas with other ideas?

·      How do we extend agile ideas more broadly?

Cockburn takes on crucial misconceptions that cause agile projects to fail. For example, you’ll learn why encoding project management strategies into fixed processes can lead to ineffective strategy decisions and costly mistakes. You’ll also find a thoughtful discussion of the controversial relationship between agile methods and user experience design.

Cockburn turns to the practical challenges of constructing agile methodologies for your own teams. You’ll learn how to tune and continuously reinvent your methodologies, and how to manage incomplete communication. This edition contains important new contributions on these and other topics:

·      Agile and CMMI

·      Introducing agile from the top down

·      Revisiting “custom contracts”

·      Creating change with “stickers”

In addition, Cockburn updates his discussion of the Crystal methodologies, which utilize his “cooperative game” as their central metaphor.

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From identifying your triggers to improving your relationships — manage your emotional wellbeing

Struggling to cope with anxiety and/or depression? Have no fear — this hands-on guide focuses on helping you pinpoint the root of your problems and find relief from your symptoms in a detailed, step-by-step manner. With concise, eye-opening exercises, you’ll understand how to assess your current situation, remove the roadblocks to change, face your fears, and improve your view of yourself and the world around you. You’ll see how to take direct action to alter negative or distorted thinking, lift your moods, and adopt positive habits that will lead you toward a more joyful, meaningful, and connected life!

Discover
* How to improve the way you feel about yourself
* Skills to face and overcome what makes you anxious or depressed
* How to determine whether medication is an option for you
* Practical ways to prepare for and deal with setbacks

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Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional is the most comprehensive book on the Python ever written. Advanced topics, such as extending Python and packaging/distributing Python applications, are also covered.

Ten different projects illustrate the concepts introduced in the book. You will learn how to create a P2P file-sharing application and a web-based bulletin board, and how to remotely edit web-based documents and create games.

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