Books about Engineers from Amazon.com

Inspired by Werner von Braun and his Cape Canaveral team, 14-year-old Homer Hickam decided in 1957 to build his own rockets They were his ticket out of Coalwood, West Virginia, a mining town that everyone knew was dying--everyone except Sonny's father, the mine superintendent and a company man so dedicated that his family rarely saw him. Hickam's smart, iconoclastic mother wanted her son to become something more than a miner and, along with a female science teacher, encouraged the efforts of his grandiosely named Big Creek Missile Agency. He grew up to be a NASA engineer and his memoir of the bumpy ride toward a gold medal at the National Science Fair in 1960--an unprecedented honor for a miner's kid--is rich in humor as well as warm sentiment. Hickam vividly evokes a world of close communal ties in which a storekeeper who sold him saltpeter warned, "Listen, rocket boy. This stuff can blow you to kingdom come." Hickam is candid about the deep disagreements and tensions in his parents' marriage, even as he movingly depicts their quiet loyalty to each other. The portrait of his ultimately successful campaign to win his aloof father's respect is equally affecting. --Wendy Smith.
Price: $7.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Want your web site to display more quickly? This book presents 14 specific rules that will cut 25% to 50% off response time when users request a page. Author Steve Souders, in his job as Chief Performance Yahoo!, collected these best practices while optimizing some of the most-visited pages on the Web. Even sites that had already been highly optimized, such as Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Front Page, were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines.

The rules in High Performance Web Sites explain how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you've already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. Other sources of information pay a lot of attention to tuning web servers, databases, and hardware, but the bulk of display time is taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser. High Performance Web Sites covers every aspect of that process.

Each performance rule is supported by specific examples, and code snippets are available on the book's companion web site. The rules include how to:

• Make Fewer HTTP Requests


• Use a Content Delivery Network


• Add an Expires Header


• Gzip Components


• Put Stylesheets at the Top


• Put Scripts at the Bottom


• Avoid CSS Expressions


• Make JavaScript and CSS External


• Reduce DNS Lookups


• Minify JavaScript


• Avoid Redirects


• Remove Duplicates Scripts


• Configure ETags


• Make Ajax Cacheable

If you're building pages for high traffic destinations and want to optimize the experience of users visiting your site, this book is indispensable.

"If everyone would implement just 20% of Steve's guidelines, the Web would be a dramatically better place. Between this book and Steve's YSlow extension, there's really no excuse for having a sluggish web site anymore."
-Joe Hewitt, Developer of Firebug debugger and Mozilla's DOM Inspector
"Steve Souders has done a fantastic job of distilling a massive, semi-arcane art down to a set of concise, actionable, pragmatic engineering steps that will change the world of web performance."
-Eric Lawrence, Developer of the Fiddler Web Debugger, Microsoft Corporation
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Price: $12.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

From the acclaimed author of the debut novel The Seas -- which won a National Book Award for writers under 35 -- comes this utterly transporting new novel, a wondrous imagining of an unlikely friendship between the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and a young chambermaid in the Hotel New Yorker, where Tesla lives out his last days.

From the moment she first catches sight of Tesla on New Year's Day 1943, Louisa, obsessed with radio dramas and the secret lives of the hotel guests, is determined to befriend this strange man. Winning his attention through their shared love of pigeons, Louisa eventually uncovers the extraordinary story of Tesla's life as a Serbian immigrant and a visionary genius. Meanwhile, Louisa finds herself facing her father's increasingly imminent departure in a time machine, and swept off her feet by a mysterious mechanic (perhaps from the future) named Arthur, who has unexpectedly appeared in her life.

While luminously resurrecting one of the greatest scientists of all time, Nikola Tesla -- inventor of AC electricity and wireless communication -- The Invention of Everything Else immerses us in a magical early-twentieth-century New York City thrumming with energy, wonder, and possibility..
Price: $11.44 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney explores the brilliant and prescient mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest scientists and inventors. Called a madman by his enemies, a genius by others, and an enigma by nearly everyone, Nikola Tesla was, without a doubt, a trailblazing inventor who created astonishing, sometimes world-transforming devices that were virtually without theoretical precedent. Tesla not only discovered the rotating magnetic field -- the basis of most alternating-current machinery -- but also introduced us to the fundamentals of robotics, computers, and missile science. Almost supernaturally gifted, unfailingly flamboyant and neurotic, Tesla was troubled by an array of compulsions and phobias and was fond of extravagant, visionary experimentations. He was also a popular man-about-town, admired by men as diverse as Mark Twain and George Westinghouse, and adored by scores of society beauties.

From Tesla's childhood in Yugoslavia to his death in New York in the 1940s, Cheney paints a compelling human portrait and chronicles a lifetime of discoveries that radically altered -- and continue to alter -- the world in which we live. Tesla: Man Out of Time is an in-depth look at the seminal accomplishments of a scientific wizard and a thoughtful examination of the obsessions and eccentricities of the man behind the science.

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Price: $8.15 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The dramatic growth in practical applications for machine learning over the last ten years has been accompanied by many important developments in the underlying algorithms and techniques. For example, Bayesian methods have grown from a specialist niche to become mainstream, while graphical models have emerged as a general framework for describing and applying probabilistic techniques. The practical applicability of Bayesian methods has been greatly enhanced by the development of a range of approximate inference algorithms such as variational Bayes and expectation propagation, while new models based on kernels have had a significant impact on both algorithms and applications.

This completely new textbook reflects these recent developments while providing a comprehensive introduction to the fields of pattern recognition and machine learning. It is aimed at advanced undergraduates or first-year PhD students, as well as researchers and practitioners. No previous knowledge of pattern recognition or machine learning concepts is assumed. Familiarity with multivariate calculus and basic linear algebra is required, and some experience in the use of probabilities would be helpful though not essential as the book includes a self-contained introduction to basic probability theory.

The book is suitable for courses on machine learning, statistics, computer science, signal processing, computer vision, data mining, and bioinformatics. Extensive support is provided for course instructors, including more than 400 exercises, graded according to difficulty. Example solutions for a subset of the exercises are available from the book web site, while solutions for the remainder can be obtained by instructors from the publisher. The book is supported by a great deal of additional material, and the reader is encouraged to visit the book web site for the latest information.

Coming soon:

*For students, worked solutions to a subset of exercises available on a public web site (for exercises marked "www" in the text)

*For instructors, worked solutions to remaining exercises from the Springer web site

*Lecture slides to accompany each chapter

*Data sets available for download

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Price: $57.24 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Best Fully Integrated Study System Available

With hundreds of practice questions and hands-on exercises, RHCE Red Hat Certified Engineer Linux Study Guide, Fifth Edition covers what you need to know--and shows you how to prepare--for this challenging exam.

• 100% complete coverage of all objectives for exam RH302
• Exam Readiness Checklist at the front of the book--you're ready for the exam when all objectives on the list are checked off
• Inside the Exam sections in every chapter highlight key exam topics covered
• Real-world exercises modeled after hands-on exam scenarios
• Two complete lab-based exams simulate the format, tone, topics, and difficulty of the real exam
• Bonus content (available for download) includes installation screen review, basic instructions for using VMware and Xen as testbeds, and paper and pencil versions of the lab exams

Covers all RH302 exam topics, including:

• Hardware installation and configuration
• The boot process
• Linux filesystem administration
• Package management and Kickstart
• User and group administration
• System administration tools
• Kernel services and configuration
• Apache and Squid
• Network file sharing services (NFS, FTP, and Samba)
• Domain Name System (DNS)
• E-mail (servers and clients)
• Extended Internet Services Daemon (xinetd), the Secure package, and DHCP
• The X Window System
• Firewalls, SELinux, and troubleshooting

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Price: $30.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The mastermind behind Apple sheds his low profile and steps forward to tell his story for the first time.

Before cell phones that fit in the palm of your hand and slim laptops that fit snugly into briefcases, computers were like strange, alien vending machines. They had cryptic switches, punch cards and pages of encoded output. But in 1975, a young engineering wizard named Steve Wozniak had an idea: What if you combined computer circuitry with a regular typewriter keyboard and a video screen? The result was the first true personal computer, the Apple I, a widely affordable machine that anyone could understand and figure out how to use.

Wozniak's life—before and after Apple—is a "home-brew" mix of brilliant discovery and adventure, as an engineer, a concert promoter, a fifth-grade teacher, a philanthropist, and an irrepressible prankster. From the invention of the first personal computer to the rise of Apple as an industry giant, iWoz presents a no-holds-barred, rollicking, firsthand account of the humanist inventor who ignited the computer revolution. 16 pages of illustrations..
Price: $2.16 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Secrets of the top mixing engineers are revealed in this second edition of the bestselling Mixing Engineer’s Handbook. In this edition, you will learn about the history and evolution of mixing, various mixing styles, the six elements of a mix, the rules for arrangement and how they impact your mix, where to build your mix from, and mixing tips and tricks for every genre of music. You will also learn the secrets of EQ and the “magic frequencies,” along with tips and tricks for adding effects, EQ’ing reverbs, effects layering, calculating the delay time, and much more. A lot has changed in the recording industry since the last edition was published seven years ago, so the new edition provides completely updated information on tips for a loud mix, hypercompression, mixing for Internet distribution, warning signs of an amateur mix, MP3 encoding, streaming audio, audio codecs, de-essing, gating, surround sound mixing, and more. There is also a completely new chapter on how to get the most from mixing inside your computer, as well as a new section on the bass/drum relationship and how to make this difficult part of the mix easy. The book wraps up with insightful interviews with the top engineers in the fi eld, including George Massenburg, Allen Sides, Bruce Swedien, Elliot Scheiner, Andy Johns, Nathanial Kunkel, and several others. Join the tens of thousands of engineers who have used this book to master the art of mixing..
Price: $20.11 [Notify me when price goes down.]