Books about Computational from Amazon.com

This book provides the first clear, comprehensive, and accessible account of complex adaptive social systems, by two of the field's leading authorities. Such systems--whether political parties, stock markets, or ant colonies--present some of the most intriguing theoretical and practical challenges confronting the social sciences. Engagingly written, and balancing technical detail with intuitive explanations, Complex Adaptive Systems focuses on the key tools and ideas that have emerged in the field since the mid-1990s, as well as the techniques needed to investigate such systems. It provides a detailed introduction to concepts such as emergence, self-organized criticality, automata, networks, diversity, adaptation, and feedback. It also demonstrates how complex adaptive systems can be explored using methods ranging from mathematics to computational models of adaptive agents.

John Miller and Scott Page show how to combine ideas from economics, political science, biology, physics, and computer science to illuminate topics in organization, adaptation, decentralization, and robustness. They also demonstrate how the usual extremes used in modeling can be fruitfully transcended.

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Price: $21.29 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Programming Legend Charles Petzold unlocks the secrets of the extraordinary and prescient 1936 paper by Alan M. Turing

Mathematician Alan Turing invented an imaginary computer known as the Turing Machine; in an age before computers, he explored the concept of what it meant to be computable, creating the field of computability theory in the process, a foundation of present-day computer programming.

The book expands Turing’s original 36-page paper with additional background chapters and extensive annotations; the author elaborates on and clarifies many of Turing’s statements, making the original difficult-to-read document accessible to present day programmers, computer science majors, math geeks, and others.

Interwoven into the narrative are the highlights of Turing’s own life: his years at Cambridge and Princeton, his secret work in cryptanalysis during World War II, his involvement in seminal computer projects, his speculations about artificial intelligence, his arrest and prosecution for the crime of "gross indecency," and his early death by apparent suicide at the age of 41..
Price: $13.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This highly anticipated revision builds upon the strengths of the previous edition. Sipser's candid, crystal-clear style allows students at every level to understand and enjoy this field. His innovative "proof idea" sections explain profound concepts in plain English. The new edition incorporates many improvements students and professors have suggested over the years, and offers updated, classroom-tested problem sets at the end of each chapter..
Price: $38.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this important theoretical treatise, Jean Lave, anthropologist, and Etienne Wenger, computer scientist, push forward the notion of situated learning--that learning is fundamentally a social process and not solely in the learner's head. The authors maintain that learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process they call legitimate peripheral participation. Learners participate in communities of practitioners, moving toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community. Legitimate peripheral participation provides a way to speak about crucial relations between newcomers and oldtimers and about their activities, identities, artifacts, knowledge and practice. The communities discussed in the book are midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, and recovering alcoholics, however, the process by which participants in those communities learn can be generalized to other social groups..
Price: $20.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

• Create code art, visualizations, and interactive applications with this powerful yet simple computer language and programming environment
• Learn how to code 2D and 3D animation, pixel-level imaging, motion effects, and physics simulations
• Take a creative and fun approach to learning creative computer programming

If you're interested in creating cutting-edge code-based art and animations, you've come to the right place! Processing (available at www.processing.org) is a revolutionary open source programming language and environment designed to bridge the gap between programming and art, allowing non-programmers to learn programming fundamentals as easily as possible, and empowering anyone to produce beautiful creations using math patterns. With the software freely available, Processing provides an accessible alternative to using Flash for creative coding and computational artboth on and off the Web. This book is written especially for artists, designers, and other creative professionals and students exploring code art, graphics programming, and computational aesthetics. The book provides a solid and comprehensive foundation in programming, including object-oriented principles, and introduces you to the easy-to-grasp Processing language, so no previous coding experience is necessary. The book then goes through using Processing to code lines, curves, shapes, and motion, continuing to the point where you'll have mastered Processing and can really start to unleash your creativity with realistic physics, interactivity, and 3D! In the final chapter, you'll even learn how to extend your Processing skills by working directly with the powerful Java programming languagethe language Processing itself is built with.

You'll learn:

• The fundamentals of creative computer programming—from procedural programming, to object-oriented programming, to pure Java programming
• How to virtually draw, paint, and sculpt using computer code and clearly explained mathematical concepts
• 2D and 3D programming techniques, motion design, and cool graphics effects
• How to code your own pixel-level imaging effects, such as image contrast, color saturation, custom gradients and more
• Advanced animation techniques, including realistic physics and artificial life simulation

Summary of Contents

• PART ONE: THEORY OF PROCESSING AND COMPUTATIONAL ART
  • Chapter 1: Code Art
  • Chapter 2: Creative Coding
  • Chapter 3: Code Grammar 101
  • Chapter 4: Computer Graphics, the Fun, Easy Way
  • Chapter 5: The Processing Environment
• PART TWO: PUTTING THEORY INTO PRACTICE
  • Chapter 6: Lines
  • Chapter 7: Curves
  • Chapter 8: Object-Oriented Programming
  • Chapter 9: Shapes
  • Chapter 10: Color and Imaging
  • Chapter 11: Motion
  • Chapter 12: Interactivity
  • Chapter 13: 3D
  • Chapter 14: 3D Rendering in Java Mode
• PART THREE: REFERENCE
  • Appendix A: Processing Language API
  • Appendix B: Math Reference
  • Appendix C: Integrating Processing within Java

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Price: $39.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

An explosion of Web-based language techniques, merging of distinct fields, availability of phone-based dialogue systems, and much more make this an exciting time in speech and language processing. The first of its kind to thoroughly cover language technology – at all levels and with all modern technologies – this book takes an empirical approach to the subject, based on applying statistical and other machine-learning algorithms to large corporations. Builds each chapter around one or more worked examples demonstrating the main idea of the chapter, usingthe examples to illustrate the relative strengths and weaknesses of various approaches. Adds coverage of statistical sequence labeling, information extraction, question answering and summarization, advanced topics in speech recognition, speech synthesis. Revises coverage of language modeling, formal grammars, statistical parsing, machine translation, and dialog processing. A useful reference for professionals in any of the areas of speech and language processing.

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Price: $92.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $12.41 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Were you always curious about biology but were afraid to sit through long hours of dense reading? Did you like the subject when you were in high school but had other plans after you graduated? Now you can explore the human genome and analyze DNA without ever leaving your desktop!

Bioinformatics For Dummies is packed with valuable information that introduces you to this exciting new discipline. This easy-to-follow guide leads you step by step through every bioinformatics task that can be done over the Internet. Forget long equations, computer-geek gibberish, and installing bulky programs that slow down your computer. You’ll be amazed at all the things you can accomplish just by logging on and following these trusty directions. You get the tools you need to:

• Analyze all types of sequences
• Use all types of databases
• Work with DNA and protein sequences
• Conduct similarity searches
• Build a multiple sequence alignment
• Edit and publish alignments
• Visualize protein 3-D structures
• Construct phylogenetic trees

This up-to-date second edition includes newly created and popular databases and Internet programs as well as multiple new genomes. It provides tips for using servers and places to seek resources to find out about what’s going on in the bioinformatics world. Bioinformatics For Dummies will show you how to get the most out of your PC and the right Web tools so you’ll be searching databases and analyzing sequences like a pro!.
Price: $9.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Theoretical neuroscience provides a quantitative basis for describing what nervous systems do, determining how they function, and uncovering the general principles by which they operate. This text introduces the basic mathematical and computational methods of theoretical neuroscience and presents applications in a variety of areas including vision, sensory-motor integration, development, learning, and memory.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I discusses the relationship between sensory stimuli and neural responses, focusing on the representation of information by the spiking activity of neurons. Part II discusses the modeling of neurons and neural circuits on the basis of cellular and synaptic biophysics. Part III analyzes the role of plasticity in development and learning. An appendix covers the mathematical methods used, and exercises are available on the book's Web site..
Price: $32.62 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Learning is becoming an urgent topic. Nations worry about the learning of their citizens, companies about the learning of their workers, schools about the learning of their students. But it is not always easy to think about how to foster learning in innovative ways. This book presents a framework for doing that, with a social theory of learning that is ground-breaking yet accessible, with profound implications not only for research, but also for all those who have to foster learning as part of their responsibilites at work, at home, at school..
Price: $30.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]