Books about Optimizing from Amazon.com

Learn the tricks of the trade so you can build and architect applications that scale quickly--without all the high-priced headaches and service-level agreements associated with enterprise app servers and proprietary programming and database products. Culled from the experience of the Flickr.com lead developer, "Building Scalable Web Sites" offers techniques for creating fast sites that your visitors will find a pleasure to use. Creating popular sites requires much more than fast hardware with lots of memory and hard drive space. It requires thinking about how to grow over time, how to make the same resources accessible to audiences with different expectations, and how to have a team of developers work on a site without creating new problems for visitors and for each other. Presenting information to visitors from all over the world * Integrating email with your web applications * Planning hardware purchases and hosting options to have as much as you need without breaking your wallet * Partitioning and distributing databases to support large datasets and simultaneous transactions * Monitoring your applications to find and clear bottlenecks * Providing services APIs and using services from other providers to increase your site's reach and capabilities Whether you're starting a small web site with hopes of growing big or you already have a large system that needs maintenance, you'll find "Building Scalable Web Sites" to be a library of ideas for making things work..
Price: $20.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Thoroughly rewritten for today's web environment, this bestselling book offers a fresh look at a fundamental topic of web site development: navigation design. Amid all the changes to the Web in the past decade, and all the hype about Web 2.0 and various "rich" interactive technologies, the basic problems of creating a good web navigation system remain. Designing Web Navigation demonstrates that good navigation is not about technology-it's about the ways people find information, and how you guide them.

Ideal for beginning to intermediate web designers, managers, other non-designers, and web development pros looking for another perspective, Designing Web Navigation offers basic design principles, development techniques and practical advice, with real-world examples and essential concepts seamlessly folded in. How does your web site serve your business objectives? How does it meet a user's needs? You'll learn that navigation design touches most other aspects of web site development. This book:

• Provides the foundations of web navigation and offers a framework for navigation design
• Paints a broad picture of web navigation and basic human information behavior
• Demonstrates how navigation reflects brand and affects site credibility
• Helps you understand the problem you're trying to solve before you set out to design
• Thoroughly reviews the mechanisms and different types of navigation
• Explores "information scent" and "information shape"
• Explains "persuasive" architecture and other design concepts
• Covers special contexts, such as navigation design for web applications
• Includes an entire chapter on tagging

While Designing Web Navigation focuses on creating navigation systems for large, information-rich sites serving a business purpose, the principles and techniques in the book also apply to small sites. Well researched and cited, this book serves as an excellent reference on the topic, as well as a superb teaching guide. Each chapter ends with suggested reading and a set of questions that offer exercises for experiencing the concepts in action..
Price: $27.40 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This 2-in-1 training kit includes the official Microsoft study guide, plus practice tests on CD to help you assess your skills. It also delivers in-depth preparation, plus practice for 70-442, an exam for the MCITP Database Developer certification. Ace your exam prepand build real-world job skillswith lessons, labs, practice tests, and more. Then assess yourself using 200+ practice questions on the CD, featuring multiple, customizable testing options designed to meet your specific needs. You also get an evaluation version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 software and an exam discount vouchermaking this kit an exceptional value and a great career investment..
Price: $22.86 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Over the last ten years, the ARM architecture has become one of the most pervasive architectures in the world, with more than 2 billion ARM-based processors embedded in products ranging from cell phones to automotive braking systems. A world-wide community of ARM developers in semiconductor and product design companies includes software developers, system designers and hardware engineers. To date no book has directly addressed their need to develop the system and software for an ARM-based system. This text fills that gap.

This book provides a comprehensive description of the operation of the ARM core from a developers perspective with a clear emphasis on software. It demonstrates not only how to write efficient ARM software in C and assembly but also how to optimize code. Example code throughout the book can be integrated into commercial products or used as templates to enable quick creation of productive software.

The book covers both the ARM and Thumb instruction sets, covers Intel's XScale Processors, outlines distinctions among the versions of the ARM architecture, demonstrates how to implement DSP algorithms, explains exception and interrupt handling, describes the cache technologies that surround the ARM cores as well as the most efficient memory management techniques. A final chapter looks forward to the future of the ARM architecture considering ARMv6, the latest change to the instruction set, which has been designed to improve the DSP and media processing capabilities of the architecture.

* No other book describes the ARM core from a system and software perspective.
* Author team combines extensive ARM software engineering experience with an in-depth knowledge of ARM developer needs.
* Practical, executable code is fully explained in the book and available on the publisher's Website.
* Includes a simple embedded operating system..
Price: $58.76 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This is the third in O'Reilly's series of landmark Perl tutorials, which started with Learning Perl, the bestselling introduction that taught you the basics of Perl syntax, and Intermediate Perl, which taught you how to create re-usable Perl software Mastering Perl pulls everything together to show you how to bend Perl to your will. It convey's Perl's special models and programming idioms.

This book isn't a collection of clever tricks, but a way of thinking about Perl programming so you can integrate the real-life problems of debugging, maintenance, configuration, and other tasks you encounter as a working programmer.

The book explains how to:

• Use advanced regular expressions, including global matches, lookarounds, readable regexes, and regex debugging
• Avoid common programing problems with secure programming techniques
• Profile and benchmark Perl to find out where to focus your improvements
• Wrangle Perl code to make it more presentable and readable
• See how Perl keeps track of package variables and how you can use that for some powerful tricks
• Define subroutines on the fly and turn the tables on normal procedural programming.
• Modify and jury rig modules to fix code without editing the original source
• Let your users configure your programs without touching the code
• Learn how you can detect errors Perl doesn't report, and how to tell users about them
• Let your Perl program talk back to you by using Log4perl
• Store data for later use in another program, a later run of the same program, or to send them over a network
• Write programs as modules to get the benefit of Perl's distribution and testing tools

Appendices include "brian's Guide to Solving Any Perl Problem" to improve your troubleshooting skills, as well as suggested reading to continue your Perl education. Mastering Perl starts you on your path to becoming the person with the answers, and, failing that, the person who knows how to find the answers or discover the problem..
Price: $21.89 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Blogging for Dollars!

Whether you’re an experienced blogger or an absolute beginner, you can make money with your blog. Simply follow the step-by-step advice of two expert bloggers and industry insiders who have launched many successful sites of their own. They’ll walk you through every step of the blogging process, and they’ll even share their most profitable tricks of the trade.

• Generate income using various types of ads
• Tap into the power of other blogs
• Maximize searches for more hits—and more money

“Every blogger and website owner needs to read this book.” —Bill Hartzer, billhartzer.com

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Price: $12.12 [Notify me when price goes down.]

If where an organization allocates its resources determines its strategy, why is it that so few companies actively manage the resource allocation process? "Optimizing Corporate Portfolio Management: Aligning Investment Proposals with Organizational Strategy" goes beyond platitudes about why you should use corporate portfolio management (CPM) by offering a practical methodology to bring this powerful discipline to your organization.

"Optimizing Corporate Portfolio Management" takes an expansive view of where CPM can be utilized by demonstrating that it can be used across any business line, product group or functional area, e.g., IT, R&D, innovation, marketing, salesforce, capital expenditure, etc. CPM is appropriate anywhere discretionary investments are being selected and executed. As a result, other terms used to describe portfolio management such as IT portfolio management, enterprise portfolio management, and project portfolio management are all merely subsets or slices of CPM.

The book is written by Anand Sanwal, an expert on CPM, who has led American Express' CPM discipline (referred to as American Express Investment Optimization). American Express' CPM efforts are widely recognized as the most extensive, substantial and progressive deployment of CPM across any organization. Sanwal avoids academic theories and consultant jargon to ultimately deliver pragmatic and proven recommendations on how to make CPM a reality. The book features a foreword by Gary Crittenden, former CFO and EVP of American Express, and several case studies from leading financial services, technology, and government organizations utilizing CPM. Additionally, the book has received significant praise from thought leaders at Google, HP, American Express, The CFO Executive Board, Gartner, Accenture Marketing Sciences, The Wharton School of Business and many others..
Price: $37.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Who can understand the mind of a preschooler? You can! Know that above all else, a preschooler is a learner. His amazing powers of reasoning and discrimination are awakened through a world of play and imagination. Through home relationships, he learns about love, trust, comfort, and security; through friends he learns to measure himself against a world of peers; and through unconditional love, a child establishes his own unique selfhood. The growth period between ages three and five years is all about learning, and On Becoming Preschoolwise is all about helping parents create the right opportunities and best environment to optimize their child's learning potential.Now influencing over two million homes worldwide, trusted parenting authors Gary Ezzo and Dr. Robert Bucknam once again bring their collective wisdom, experience, and insight to bear on this critical phase of preschool training. From teaching about the importance of play to learning how to prepare a preschooler for the first day of school, from organizing your child's week to understanding childhood fears and calming parental anxiety, sound advice and practical application await the reader. You will find this resource as practical as it is informative, curative as much as it is encouraging..
Price: $3.84 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Oracle system performance inefficiencies often go undetected for months or even years--even under intense scrutiny--because traditional Oracle performance analysis methods and tools are fundamentally flawed. They're unreliable and inefficient.

Oracle DBAs and developers are all too familiar with the outlay of time and resources, blown budgets, missed deadlines, and marginally effective performance fiddling that is commonplace with traditional methods of Oracle performance tuning. In this crucial book, Cary Millsap, former VP of Oracle's System Performance Group, clearly and concisely explains how to use Oracle's response time statistics to diagnose and repair performance problems. Cary also shows how "queueing theory" can be applied to response time statistics to predict the impact of upgrades and other system changes.

"Optimizing Oracle Performance" eliminates the time-consuming, trial-and-error guesswork inherent in most conventional approaches to tuning. You can determine exactly where a system's performance problem is, and with equal importance, where it is not, in just a few minutes--even if the problem is several years old.

"Optimizing Oracle Performance" cuts a path through the complexity of current tuning methods, and streamlines an approach that focuses on optimization techniques that any DBA can use quickly and successfully to make noticeable--even dramatic--improvements.

For example, the one thing database users care most about is response time. Naturally, DBAs focus much of their time and effort towards improving response time. But it is entirely too easy to spend hundreds of hours to improve important system metrics such as hit ratios, average latencies, andwait times, only to find users are unable to perceive the difference. And an expensive hardware upgrade may not help either.

It doesn't have to be that way. Technological advances have added impact, efficiency, measurability, predictive capacity, reliability, speed, and practicality to the science of Oracle performance optimization. "Optimizing Oracle Performance" shows you how to slash the frustration and expense associated with unraveling the true root cause of any type of performance problem, and reliably predict future performance.

The price of this essential book will be paid back in hours saved the first time its methods are used.

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Price: $17.19 [Notify me when price goes down.]