Learn Human-Computer Interaction. Solve human problems and focus on rapid prototyping and validating solutions through user testing

Christopher Reid Becker

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a field of study that researches, designs, and develops software solutions that solve human problems. This book will help you understand various aspects of the software development phase, from planning and data gathering through to the design and development of software solutions. The book guides you through implementing methodologies that will help you build robust software.You will perform data gathering, evaluate user data, and execute data analysis and interpretation techniques. You’ll also understand why human-centered methodologies are successful in software development, and learn how to build effective software solutions through practical research processes. The book will even show you how to translate your human understanding into software solutions through validation methods and rapid prototyping leading to usability testing. Later, you will understand how to use effective storytelling to convey the key aspects of your software to users. Throughout the book, you will learn the key concepts with the help of historical figures, best practices, and references to common challenges faced in the software industry.By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with HCI strategies and methodologies to design effective user interfaces.

The Ultimate Guide to Informed Wearable Technology. A hands-on approach for creating wearables from prototype to purpose using Arduino systems

Christine Farion

Wearable circuits add interaction and purpose to clothing and other wearable devices that are currently widely used in medical, social, safety, entertainment, and sports fields. To develop useful and impressive prototypes and wearables, you’ll need to be skilled in designing electronic circuits and working with wearable technologies.This book takes you on an interesting journey through wearable technology, starting from electronic circuits, materials, and e-textile toolkits to using Arduino, which includes a variety of sensors, outputs, actuators, and microcontrollers such as Gemma M0 and ESP32. As you progress, you’ll be carefully guided through creating an advanced IoT project. You’ll learn by doing and create wearables with the help of practical examples and exercises. Later chapters will show you how to develop a hyper-body wearable and solder and sew circuits. Finally, you’ll discover how to build a culture-driven wearable to track data and provide feedback using a Design Innovation approach.After reading this book, you’ll be able to design interactive prototypes and sew, solder, and program your own Arduino-based wearable devices with a purpose.

Joomla! 1.6 First Look. A concise guide to everything that's new in Joomla! 1.6

Eric Tiggeler

Release of the much awaited Joomla! 1.6 is just round the corner. There is a lot of hype and curiosity about the new features Joomla! 1.6 will provide and how it will affect existing users.Joomla! 1.6 First Look is a concise guide to the new features of Joomla! 1.6, targeted at existing Joomla! users and developers. If you want to see what's new in Joomla 1.6 and how it's going to affect you, this is the book for you. This book will give readers an insight into the new features of Joomla! 1.6, showing them what has changed, how the changes will affect them, and how to upgrade to Joomla! 1.6 from existing Joomla! versions. It begins with general changes in interface and basic articles, and then takes you through the changes in menus, control levels, templates, extensions, and SEO features. It explains the new features and how to use them, drawing attention to significant differences from how things used to behave. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with the consequences these changes will bring to you as a Joomla! user or developer.

Magento 2 Developer's Guide. Harness the power of Magento 2 to extend and customize your online store

Branko Ajzele, Bartosz Górski

Magento is one of the most exciting, flexible, and customizable e-commerce systems. It offers you an extensive suite of powerful tools for creating and managing an online store. After years of development, Magento 2 introduces itself with a strong emphasis on modularity, Web API's, automated testing and overall new technology stack platform.The long-awaited Magento 2 release introduces a whole new e-commerce platform to develop online stores. The all new Magento 2 architecture, Web APIs, and a host of other features are equally challenging to master as much as they are exciting to use.Tshis book will ease the learning curve by offering step-by-step guidance on how to extend the core functionality of your Magento 2 store.This book is your one-stop guide to build and customize a quality e-commerce website from the latest version of one of the largest, fastest growing, and most popular e-commerce platforms—Magento 2.We start off with an introduction to the fundamental concepts of Magento to give you a foundation to work from. We then move on to configure the development and basic production environment for Magento. After this, you’ll get to grips with the major concepts and conventions that are new to the Magento 2 platform. We then delve deeper to get to the core of automated deployments, persisting data, writing data fixture scripts and applying various backend and frontend modifications. As we near the end of the book, you will learn to make API calls and write automated tests. Finally, you will be guided through building a full-blown helpdesk module from scratch.By the end of this book, you will have learned a wide range of techniques to extend and customize your Magento 2 store to fit the requirements of your business.

Reporting in TFS. Create and customize reports in Team Foundation Server using Excel and SQL Server Reporting Services

Dipti Chhatrapati, Dipti Chhatrapati, Bjoern Rapp

Unity 3D Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide. A seat-of-your-pants manual for building fun, groovy little games quickly

Ryan Henson Creighton

Beginner game developers are wonderfully optimistic, passionate, and ambitious. But that ambition is often dangerous! Too often, budding indie developers and hobbyists bite off more than they can chew. Some of the most popular games in recent memory – Doodle Jump, Paper Toss, and Canabalt, to name a few – have been fun, simple games that have delighted players and delivered big profits to their creators. This is the perfect climate for new game developers to succeed by creating simple games with Unity 3D, starting today.This book starts you off on the right foot, emphasizing small, simple game ideas and playable projects that you can actually finish. The complexity of the games increases gradually as we progress through the chapters. The chosen examples help you learn a wide variety of game development techniques. With this understanding of Unity 3D and bite-sized bits of programming, you can make your own mark on the game industry by finishing fun, simple games.This book shows you how to build crucial game elements that you can reuse and re-skin in many different games, using the phenomenal (and free!) Unity 3D game engine. It initiates you into indie game culture by teaching you how to make your own small, simple games using Unity3D and some gentle, easy-to-understand code. It will help you turn a rudimentary keep-up game into a madcap race through hospital hallways to rush a still-beating heart to the transplant ward, program a complete 2D game using Unity's User Interface controls, put a dramatic love story spin on a simple catch game, and turn that around into a classic space shooter with spectacular explosions and pew sounds! By the time you're finished, you'll have learned to develop a number of important pieces to create your own games that focus in on that small, singular piece of joy that makes games fun.

Hyper-V Best Practices. Equip yourselves with the real-world configurations and best practices of Hyper-V to take full advantage of its virtualization capabilities

Benedict Berger

Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration. Techniques, practical tips, hints, and tricks for Silverlight interactions with SharePoint

Gaston C. Hillar

Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating engaging, interactive user experiences for the Web, desktop, and mobile applications. Integrating Silverlight RIAs in SharePoint 2010 offers amazing opportunities to combine the power and flexibility offered by SharePoint. It is easy to create great user experiences when you have a step-by-step guide to implement Silverlight 4 applications on SharePoint 2010 sites.This book is not a primer on Silverlight 4 or SharePoint 2010. This book focuses on the integration of Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 and provides step-by-step guidelines for implementing Silverlight RIAs in SharePoint. It is filled with real-world examples that depict the various techniques for interacting with data and services provided by this powerful business collaboration platform, for the enterprise and the Internet. As you sit reading this, you might have already started thinking about the benefits of implementing multiple Silverlight applications in a SharePoint environment. This book will help bring those thoughts to fruition.This book begins with the fundamental concepts of integrating Silverlight 4 with SharePoint 2010, such as the preparation of the development environment to create applications using Silverlight 4 and the addition of one or more Silverlight RIAs to a SharePoint site. Then, it moves on to the SharePoint Silverlight Client Object Model world, using step-by-step examples to combine a Silverlight application and a SharePoint module. It also covers methods to deploy and debug the Silverlight application while it runs as Silverlight Web Part in a SharePoint page. The book teaches you to take advantage of the new features offered by Visual Studio 2010 to browse SharePoint lists.Once the reader has control over the SharePoint Silverlight Client Object Model and its asynchronous operations in Silverlight applications, it is time to access external databases through the new Business Connectivity Services (BCS) and interact with workflows. Then, the book explains to perform CRUD operations by consuming the new SharePoint 2010 WCF Data Services in Silverlight. In the end, you'll learn to utilize Silverlight 4's rich media features to add effects and interactive animations to images and videos, thus offering the final touches to the Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 integration learning experience.By the end of this book, you'll learn to take advantage of the unique features offered by Silverlight in order to create impressive UX that interact with SharePoint 2010.