Systems Analysis & Design

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Web Analytics: An Hour a Day

by Avinash Kaushik from Sybex

Written by an in-the-trenches practitioner, this step-by-step guide shows you how to implement a successful Web analytics strategy. Web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik, in his thought-provoking style, debunks leading myths and leads you on a path to gaining actionable insights from your analytics efforts. Discover how to move beyond clickstream analysis, why qualitative data should be your focus, and more insights and techniques that will help you develop a customer-centric mindset without sacrificing your company’s bottom line.

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

Head First Design Patterns (Head First)

by Elisabeth Freeman from O'Reilly Media, Inc.

You're not alone.

At any given moment, somewhere in the world someone struggles with the same software design problems you have. You know you don't want to reinvent the wheel (or worse, a flat tire), so you look to Design Patterns--the lessons learned by those who've faced the same problems. With Design Patterns, you get to take advantage of the best practices and experience of others, so that you can spend your time on...something else. Something more challenging. Something more complex. Something more fun.

You want to learn about the patterns that matter--why to use them, when to use them, how to use them (and when NOT to use them). But you don't just want to see how patterns look in a book, you want to know how they look "in the wild". In their native environment. In other words, in real world applications. You also want to learn how patterns are used in the Java API, and how to exploit Java's built-in pattern support in your own code.

You want to learn the real OO design principles and why everything your boss told you about inheritance might be wrong (and what to do instead). You want to learn how those principles will help the next time you're up a creek without a design pattern.

Most importantly, you want to learn the "secret language" of Design Patterns so that you can hold your own with your co-worker (and impress cocktail party guests) when he casually mentions his stunningly clever use of Command, Facade, Proxy, and Factory in between sips of a martini. You'll easily counter with your deep understanding of why Singleton isn't as simple as it sounds, how the Factory is so often misunderstood, or on the real relationship between Decorator, Facade and Adapter.

With Head First Design Patterns, you'll avoid the embarrassment of thinking Decorator is something from the "Trading Spaces" show. Best of all, in a way that won't put you to sleep! We think your time is too important (and too short) to spend it struggling with academic texts.

If you've read a Head First book, you know what to expect--a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works. Using the latest research in neurobiology, cognitive science, and learning theory, Head First Design Patterns will load patterns into your brain in a way that sticks. In a way that lets you put them to work immediately. In a way that makes you better at solving software design problems, and better at speaking the language of patterns with others on your team.

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)

by Frederick P. Brooks from Addison-Wesley Professional

The classic book on the human elements of software engineering. Software tools and development environments may have changed in the 21 years since the first edition of this book, but the peculiarly nonlinear economies of scale in collaborative work and the nature of individuals and groups has not changed an epsilon. If you write code or depend upon those who do, get this book as soon as possible -- from Amazon.com Books, your library, or anyone else. You (and/or your colleagues) will be forever grateful. Very Highest Recommendation.

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies)

by Bill Buxton from Morgan Kaufmann

Bill Buxton and I share a common belief that design leadership together with technical leadership drives innovation. Sketching, prototyping, and design are essential parts of the process we use to create new products. Bill Buxton brings design leadership and creativity to Microsoft. Through his thought-provoking personal examples he is inspiring others to better understand the role of design in their own companies--Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft

Informed design is essential. While it might seem that Bill Buxton is exaggerating or kidding with this bold assertion, neither is the case. In an impeccably argued and sumptuously illustrated book, design star Buxton convinces us that design simply must be integrated into the heart of business--Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Design is explained, with the means and manner for successes and failures illuminated by engaging stories, true examples and personal anecdotes. In Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton clarifies the processes and skills of design from sketching to experience modeling, in a lively and informative style that is rich with stories and full of his own heart and enthusiasm. At the start we are lost in mountain snows and northern seas, but by the end we are equipped with a deep understanding of the tools of creative design.--Bill Moggridge, Cofounder of IDEO and author of Designing Interactions

Like any secret society, the design community has its strange rituals and initiation procedures. Bill opens up the mysteries of the magical process of design, taking us through a land in which story-telling, orange squeezers, the Wizard of Oz, I-pods, avalanche avoidance, bicycle suspension sketching, and faking it are all points on the design pilgrims journey. There are lots of ideas and techniques in this book to feed good design and transform the way we think about creating useful stuff". Peter Gabriel

I love this book. There are very few resources available that see across and through all of the disciplines involved in developing great experiences. This is complex stuff and Buxton's work is both informed and insightful. He shares the work in an intimate manner that engages the reader and you will find yourself nodding with agreement, and smiling at the poignant relevance of his examples.--Alistair Hamilton, Symbol Technologies, NY

Books that have proposed bringing design into HCI are aplenty, though books that propose bringing software in to Design less common. Nevertheless, Bill manages to skilfully steer a course between the excesses of the two approaches and offers something truly in-between. It could be a real boon to the innovation business by bringing the best of both worlds: design and HCI. --Richard Harper, Microsoft Research, Cambridge

There is almost a fervor in the way that new products, with their rich and dynamic interfaces, are being released to the publictypically promising to make lives easier, solve the most difficult of problems, and maybe even make the world a better place. The reality is that few survive, much less deliver on their promise. The folly? An absence of design, and an over-reliance on technology alone as the solution.

We need design. But design as described here depends on different skillsetseach essential, but on their own, none sufficient. In this rich ecology, designers are faced with new challengeschallenges that build on, rather than replace, existing skills and practice.

Sketching User Experiences approaches design and design thinking as something distinct that needs to be better understoodby both designers and the people with whom they need to work in order to achieve success with new products and systems. So while the focus is on design, the approach is holistic. Hence, the book speaks to designers, usability specialists, the HCI community, product managers, and business executives. There is an emphasis on balancing the back-end concern with usability and engineering excellence (getting the design right) with an up-front investment in sketching and ideation (getting the right design). Overall, the objective is to build the notion of informed design: molding emerging technology into a form that serves our society and reflects its values.

Grounded in both practice and scientific research, Bill Buxtons engaging work aims to spark the imagination while encouraging the use of new techniques, breathing new life into user experience design.

Covers sketching and early prototyping design methods suitable for dynamic product capabilities: cell phones that communicate with each other and other embedded systems, smart appliances, and things you only imagine in your dreams;
Thorough coverage of the design sketching method which helps easily build experience prototypeswithout the effort of engineering prototypes which are difficult to abandon;
Reaches out to a range of designers, including user interface designers, industrial designers, software engineers, usability engineers, product managers, and others;
Full of case studies, examples, exercises, and projects, and access to video clips (www.mkp.com/sketching) that demonstrate the principles and methods.

About the Author

Trained as a musician, Bill Buxton began using computers over thirty years ago in his art. This early experience, both in the studio an on stage, helped develop a deep appreciation of both the positive and negative aspects of technology and its impact. This increasingly drew him into both design and research, with a very strong emphasis on interaction and the human aspects of technology. He first came to prominence for his work at the University of Toronto on digital musical instruments and the novel interfaces that they employed. This work in the late 70s gained the attention of Xerox PARC, where Buxton participated in pioneering work in collaborative work, interaction techniques and ubiquitous computing. He then went on to become Chief Scientist of SGI and Alias|Wavefront, where he had the opportunity to work with some of the top film makers and industrial designers in the world. He is now a principal researcher at Microsoft Corp., where he splits his time between research and helping make design a fundamental pillar of the corporate culture.

* Covers sketching and early prototyping design methods suitable for dynamic product capabilities: cell phones that communicate with each other and other embedded systems, "smart" appliances, and things you only imagine in your dreams;

* Thorough coverage of the design sketching method which helps easily build experience prototypeswithout the effort of engineering prototypes which are difficult to abandon;

* Reaches out to a range of designers, including user interface designers, industrial designers, software engineers, usability engineers, product managers, and others;

* Full of case studies, examples, exercises, and projects, and access to video clips that demonstrate the principles and methods.

The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling (Second Edition)

by Ralph Kimball from Wiley

Single most authoritative guide from the inventor of the technique.

• Presents unique modeling techniques for e-commerce, and shows strategies for optimizing performance.
• Companion Web site provides updates on dimensional modeling techniques, links related to sites, and source code where appropriate.

"The latest edition of the single most authoritative guide on dimensional modeling for data warehousing! Dimensional modeling has become the most widely accepted approach for data warehouse design. Here is a complete library of dimensional modeling techniques--the most comprehensive collection ever written. Greatly expanded to cover both basic and advanced techniques for optimizing data warehouse design, this second edition to Ralph Kimball's classic guide is more than sixty percent updated."

The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit

by Ralph Kimball from Wiley

• Presenting the much-anticipated Second Edition, which boasts nearly 40 percent new and revised coverage, reflecting the latest best practices
• This unparalleled tutorial approach covers everything from planning the data warehouse project to implementing the design and managing the data warehouse environment
• The Kimball Group has streamlined the lifecycle methodology to be more efficient and user-friendly based on their thousands of hours of experience in both consulting and training
• They have also revised various lifecycle topics, including dimensional modeling, data warehouse architecture, ETL, and Business Intelligence
• New sections at the end of every process and techniques chapter feature coverage of managing the effort and reducing risk, assuring quality, estimating considerations, Web site resources, and more

SOA Principles of Service Design (The Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl)

by Thomas Erl from Prentice Hall PTR

“This book could be described as an encyclopedia of service design–Erl leaves nothing to chance. Indispensable.”

–Steve Birkel, Chief IT Technical Architect, Intel Corp.

“An absolute pleasure to read…the best SOA book I’ve read.

A book I would recommend to all of my colleagues; it provides much insight to the topics often overlooked by most books in this genre…the visuals were fantastic.”

–Brandon Bohling, SOA Architecture and Strategy, Intel Corporation

“This book is a milestone in SOA literature. For the first time we are provided with a practical guide on defining service characteristics and service design principles for SOA from a vendor-agnostic viewpoint. It’s a great reference for SOA discovery, adoptions, and implementation projects.”

–Canyang Kevin Liu, Principal Enterprise Architect, SAP Americas, Inc.

“I liked this book. It contains extremely important material for those who need to design services.”

–Farzin Yashar, IBM SOA Advanced Technologies

“This book does a great job laying out benefits, key ideas and design principles behind successfully adopting service-oriented computing. At the same time, the book openly addresses challenges, risks and trade-offs that are in the way of adopting SOA in the real-world today. It moves away from ivory-tower views of service orientation, but still lays out a strong vision for SOA and outlines the changes necessary to realize the full potential.”

–Christoph Schittko, Senior Architect, Microsoft

“I recommend this book to any SOA practitioner who wishes to empower themselves in making service design real…gives readers the 360º view into service design [and] gives SOA practitioners the depth and understanding needed into the principles of SOA to assist in the design of a mature and successful SOA program.”

–Stephen G. Bennett, Americas SOA Practice Lead, BEA Systems

“SOA projects are most successful when they are based on a solid technical foundation. Well accepted and established design principles are part of this foundation. This book takes a very structured approach at defining the core design principles for SOA, thus allowing the reader to immediately applying them to a project. Each principle is formally introduced and explained, and examples are given for how to apply it to a real design problem. A ‘must read’ for any architect, designer or developer of service oriented solutions”.

–Andre Tost, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Software Group

“There are few references for SOA that give you the nuts and bolts and this one is at the top of the list. Well written and valuable as a reference book to any SOA practitioner.”

–Dr. Mohamad Afshar, Director of Product Management, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Corporation

“A thorough examination of the considerations of service design. Both seasoned SOA practitioners and those endeavoring to realize services can benefit from reading this book.”

–Bill Draven, Enterprise Architect, Intel Corporation

“There are very few who understand SOA like Thomas Erl does! The principle centric description of service orientation from Thomas canonizes the underpinnings of this important paradigm shift in creating agile and reusable software capabilities. The principles, so eloquently explained, leave little room for any ambiguity attached to the greater purpose of SOA. Most organizations today are creating services in a bottoms-up approach, realizing composition and reuse organically. The time is ripe for a book like this that prepares architects for a principle centric approach to SOA.”

–Hanu Kommalapati, Architect, Microsoft Corporation

“Outstanding SOA literature uniquely focused on the fundamental services design with thorough and in-depth study on all practical aspects from design principles to methodologies. This book provides a systematic approach for SOA adoption essential for both IT management and professionals.”

–Robin Chen, PhD, Google, Inc.

“Thomas Erl’s books are always densely filled with information that’s well structured. This book is especially insightful for Enterprise Architects because it provide s great context and practical examples. Part 1 of the book alone is worth getting the book for.”

–Markus Zirn, Senior Director, Product Management, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Corporation

“A very clear discussion of the subject matter. Provides a good structure that facilitates understanding and readily highlights key points.”

–Kareem Yusuf, Director of SOA Strategy and Planning, IBM Software Group

“I am very impressed. Comprehensive. Educative. This book helped me to step back and look at the SOA principles from broader perspective. I’d say this is a must-read book for SOA stakeholders.”

–Radovan Janecek, Director R&D, SOA Center, Hewlett-Packard

“Very valuable guidance for understanding and applying SOA service design principles with concrete examples. A must read for the practitioner of SOA service design.”

–Umit Yalcinalp, PhD, Standards Architect, SAP

“This book really does an excellent job of explaining the principles underpinning the value of SOA…Erl goes to great length to explain and give examples of each of the 8 principles that will significantly increase the readers ability to drive an SOA service design that benefits both business and IT.”

–Robert Laird, IT Architect, IBM EAI/SOA Advanced Technologies Group

“This book strikes a healthy balance between theory and practice. It is a perfect complement to the SOA series by the author.”

–Prakash Narayan, Sun Microsystems

“If you are going to be designing, developing, or implementing SOA, this is a must have book.”

–Jason “AJ” Comfort Sr., Booz Allen Hamilton

“An excellent book for anyone who wants to understand service-orientation and the principles involved in designing services…a clear, concise and articulate exploration of the eight design principles involved in analyzing, designing, implementing, and maintaining services…”

–Anish Karmarkar, Oracle Corporation

“Very well written, succinct, and easy to understand.”

–Raj Balasubramanian, IBM Software Group

“Acomprehensive exploration of the issues of service design which has the potential to become the definitive work in this area.”

–James Pasley, Chief Technology Officer, Cape Clear Software

“An excellent addition to any SOA library; it covers a wide range of issues in enough detail to be a valuable asset to anyone considering designing or using SOA based technologies.”

–Mark Little, Director of Standards, Red Hat

“This book communicates complex concepts in a clear and concise manner. Examples and illustrations are used very effectively.”

–Darryl Hogan, Senior Architect, Microsoft

“A work of genius…Offers the most comprehensive and thorough explanation on the principles of service design and what it means to be ‘service oriented.’

“Erl’s treatment of the complex world of service oriented architecture is pragmatic, inclusive of real world situations and offers readers ways to communicate these ideas through illustrations and well formulated processes.”

–David Michalowicz, MITRE Corporation

“This is the book for the large organization trying to rationalize its IT assets and establish an agile platform for the future. By highlighting risk and...

Pro InfoPath 2007 (Expert's Voice)

by Philo Janus from Apress

InfoPath enables users to design forms and publish them for use by other users. It combines the ease of use of Access forms with the enterprise scalability of a network-based platform. Microsofts goal with InfoPath is to get form design and maintenance out of the IT shop and onto the desktop, while maintaining the power of connecting to web services or a SQL Server. Since InfoPath is wholly XML-based, it is easy to introduce it into a heterogeneous enterprise environment &emdash; via web services InfoPath can act as the interface for any back end system. InfoPath 2007, coupled with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, adds the ability to deploy InfoPath forms in a web browser with no client side application. SharePoint and Office 2007 have leveraged InfoPath in many other ways &emdash; making InfoPath forms part of the workflow engine embedded in SharePoint, and using InfoPath forms to capture and maintain arbitrary metadata in Office documents.

Pro InfoPath 2007 was written so that developers can read it as an introduction to InfoPath 2007, as well as use it as a reference for common tasks. Targeted at developers, power users should also find a lot of value in this book to learn how to design and use forms in InfoPath.

This book will show form designers how to:

• Use InfoPath to fill in electronic forms
• Design and publish forms
• Connect to data sources to read and publish data
• Design and leverage the power of InfoPath views
• Work with SharePoint form libraries to get the most out of InfoPath form data
• Import existing Word and Excel forms into InfoPath
• Create workflows with SharePoint Designer
• Work with digital signatures

In addition, developers will learn how to:

• Create an InfoPath form template based on a data connection or web service
• Publish InfoPath form templates as content types
• Create custom task panes for InfoPath forms
• Understand SharePoint information management policies
• Write .Net code behind InfoPath forms and browser forms
• Create an add-in to extend the capabilities of InfoPath
• Create a custom workflow for SharePoint, embedding InfoPath forms for gathering information
• Build a .Net web service that InfoPath can connect to
• Use Altovas XMLSpy to work with InfoPath form templates

Prioritizing Web Usability (VOICES)

by Jakob Nielsen from New Riders Press

In 2000, Jakob Nielsen, the world’s leading expert on Web usability, published a book that changed how people think about the Web—Designing Web Usability (New Riders). Many applauded. A few jeered. But everyone listened. The best-selling usability guru is back and has revisited his classic guide, joined forces with Web usability consultant Hoa Loranger, and created an updated companion book that covers the essential changes to the Web and usability today. Prioritizing Web Usability is the guide for anyone who wants to take their Web site(s) to next level and make usability a priority! Through the authors’ wisdom, experience, and hundreds of real-world user tests and contemporary Web site critiques, you’ll learn about site design, user experience and usability testing, navigation and search capabilities, old guidelines and prioritizing usability issues, page design and layout, content design, and more!

Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software

by Eric Evans from Addison-Wesley Professional