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: $22.22 [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: $27.77 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Announcing an all-new Self-Paced Training Kit designed to help maximize your performance on 70-442, one of the required exams for the Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) Database Developer certification. This 2-in-1 kit includes the official Microsoft study guide, plus practice tests on CD to help you assess your skills. It comes packed with the tools and features exam candidates want most--including in-depth, self-paced training based on final exam content; rigorous, objective-by-objective review; exam tips from expert, exam-certified authors; and customizable testing options. It also provides real-world scenarios, case study examples, and troubleshooting labs for skills and expertise that you can apply to the job.

Work at your own pace through the lessons and lab exercises. Focusing on designing and implementing database solutions in a professional job role, this official study guide covers topics such as designing data access technologies, writing and modifying queries, validating input data and handling errors, developing a transaction strategy, and optimizing performance.

Then assess yourself using 200+ practice questions on the CD, featuring multiple, customizable testing options designed to meet your specific needs. Choose timed or untimed testing mode, generate random tests, or focus on discrete objectives or chapters. You get detailed explanations for right and wrong answers--including pointers back to the book for further study. You also get an evaluation version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 software and an exam discount voucher--making this kit an exceptional value and a great career investment..
Price: $2.94 [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: $4.74 [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 developer's 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: $62.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

EXAM PREP GUIDE Ace your preparation for the skills measured by MCTS Exam 70-444 and on the job. Work at your own pace through a series of lessons and reviews that fully cover each exam objective Then, reinforce what you ve learned by applying your knowledge to real-world case scenarios and practice exercises. This official Microsoft study guide is designed to help you make the most of your study time. Maximize your performance on the exam by learning to: Monitor and troubleshoot queries, databases, and servers Help defend against injection attacks, denial of service attacks, worms, and viruses Manage security strategies and perform audits Detect and resolve data conflicts Diagnose faults and recover from database failures and disasters Optimize database availability with failover clustering, database mirroring, log shipping, and replication Customize a maintenance strategy and automate routine tasks Build, debug, and deploy SQL Server Integration Services packages PRACTICE TESTS Assess your skills with practice tests on CD. You can work through hundreds of questions using multiple testing modes to meet your specific learning needs.You get detailed explanations for right and wrong answers including a customized learning path that describes how and where to focus your studies. Your training kit includes: 15% exam discount from Microsoft. Offer expires 12/31/11. Details inside. Official self-paced study guide. Practice tests with multiple, customizable testing options and a learning plan based on your results. 400+ practice and review questions. Case scenarios, practice exercises, and best practices. 180-day evaluation version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition. Fully searchable eBook of this guide..
Price: $5.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This is a reference for strength and conditioning coaches, health and fitness professionals, and personal trainers, as well as athletes and weightlifters. Delve into nonlinear, or undulating periodization, to examine how a systematic and periodic reduction of resistance training intensity can improve performance beyond what is expected with traditional methods. This book defines and explains how nonlinear periodization works and then demonstrates how to create nonlinear periodization training programmes. Readers will learn that by creating different workouts for each day, they can emphasise exclusive training styles in every workout to maximise adaptation as well as provide adequate recovery from the rigors of training stress. Fitness professionals and coaches will discover this unique training style reduces the boredom of using similar workout protocols for two to four weeks at a time and therefore lends itself to creating a more satisfied client base. Written in practical and user-friendly terms, the authors provide the knowledge needed to understand periodization and training principles. No other book on the market will teach how to design, implement and assess a nonlinear workout programme..
Price: $12.47 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Providing a clear explanation of the value and benefits of maintenance, this unique guide is written in a language and style that practicing engineers and managers can understand and apply easily. Effective Maintenance Management examines the role of maintenance in minimizing the risk of safety or environmental incidents, adverse publicity, and loss of profitability. In addition to discussing risk reduction tools, it explains their applicability to specific situations, thereby enabling you to select the tool that best fits your requirements. Intended to bridge the gap between designers/maintainers and reliability engineers, this guide is sure to help businesses utilize their assets more effectively, safely, and profitably.

Distinctive Features You’ll Find
- Addresses the philosophical question of why we need to do maintenance and what is the value added by doing it.
- Shows readers how to determine what tasks are required and when they need to be done to achieve optimum performance.
- Provides a risk reduction model which links maintenance to these risks.
- Enables readers to make the link between maintenance on one hand and safety, profitability, and asset life on the other.
- Examines risks faced during the life cycle of a process plant.
- Discusses how to manage risks faced during a high cost, high downtime maintenance activity, namely plant shutdowns.
- Provides an in-depth look at qualitative and quantitative risks.
- Includes a table of fixed format codes that can be used directly or adapted for use in most maintenance management systems.
- Keeps mathematics to a minimum.
- Includes chapter previews and summaries, a list of acronyms, and a glossary of terms..
Price: $38.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

From Saudi Arabia to Singapore, Sweden to South Africa, global companies as diverse as Shell, Deutsche Bank, GE, and Sony share one powerful secret: they have created thousands of new products and services, improved service quality, and made fundamental changes to their organizations' cultures by unleashing the power of action learning.

For over a decade, world-renowned consultant, educator, and award-winning author Michael Marquardt has been helping organizations and world govenments revolutionize the way they solve problems, build effective teams, develop leaders, and transform themselves into learning organizations. Now he calls on his pioneering experiences and the fundamentals first introduced in his best-seller ACTION LEARNING IN ACTION to deliver the next-generation tools and techniques to make action learning successful each and every time, in any organization.

With more than 20 best-practices exmaples, checklists, and other hands-on guidance, OPTIMIZING THE POWER OF ACTION LEARNING puts the "action" in action learning by focusing on the six essential components that make action learning work: the problem, group diversity, a reflective inquiry process, action strategies, a commitment to learning, and the all-important participation of a well-trained action learning coach. Marquardt explores the more recent innovations in the field, lays out the advanced skills needed for success today, and offers step-by-step procedures and specific strategies for introducing and sustaining action learning in any organization..
Price: $28.94 [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: $39.30 [Notify me when price goes down.]