Design

ASQ 2007 CROSBY MEDAL WINNER!

An Integrated Technology for Delivering Better Software—Cheaper and Faster!

This book presents an integrated technology, Design for Trustworthy Software (DFTS), to address software quality issues upstream such that the goal of software quality becomes that of preventing bugs in implementation rather than finding and eliminating them during and after implementation. The thrust of the technology is that major quality deployments take place before a single line of code is written!

This customer-oriented integrated technology can help deliver breakthrough results in cost, quality, and delivery schedule thus meeting and exceeding customer expectations. The authors describe the principles behind the technology as well as their applications to actual software design problems. They present illustrative case studies covering various aspects of DFTS technology including CoSQ, AHP, TRIZ, FMEA, QFD, and Taguchi Methods and provide ample questions and exercises to test the readers understanding of the material in addition to detailed examples of the applications of the technology.

The book can be used to impart organization-wide learning including training for DFTS Black Belts and Master Black Belts. It helps you gain rapid mastery, so you can deploy DFTS Technology quickly and successfully.

Learn how to

•    Plan, build, maintain, and improve your trustworthy software development system

•    Adapt best practices of quality, leadership, learning, and management for the unique software development milieu

•    Listen to the customer’s voice, then guide user expectations to realizable, reliable software products

•    Refocus on customer-centered issues such as reliability, dependability, availability, and upgradeability

•    Encourage greater design creativity and innovation

•    Validate, verify, test, evaluate, integrate, and maintain software for trustworthiness

•    Analyze the financial impact of software quality

•    Prepare your leadership and infrastructure for DFTS

Design for Trustworthy Software will help you improve quality whether you develop in-house, outsource, consult, or provide support. It offers breakthrough solutions for the entire spectrum of software and quality professionals—from developers to project leaders, chief software architects to customers.

The American Society for Quality (ASQ) is the world's leading authority on quality which provides a community that advances learning, quality improvement, and knowledge exchange to improve business results, and to create better workplaces and communities worldwide. The Crosby Medal is presented to the individual who has authored a distinguished book contributing significantly to the extension of the philosophy and application of the principles, methods, or techniques of quality management.

Bijay K. Jayaswal, CEO of Agilenty Consulting Group, has held senior executive positions and consulted on quality and strategy for 25 years. His expertise includes value engineering, process improvement, and product development. He has directed MBA and Advanced Management programs, and helped to introduce enterprise-wide reengineering and Six Sigma initiatives.

Dr. Peter C. Patton, Chairman of Agilenty Consulting Group, is Professor of Quantitative Methods and Computer Science at the University of St. Thomas. He served as CIO of the University of Pennsylvania and CTO at Lawson Software, and has been involved with software development since 1955.

Customize the appearance of your Magento 1.4 e-commerce store with Magento's powerful theming engine

• Install and configure Magento 1.4 and learn the fundamental principles behind Magento themes
• Customize the appearance of your Magento 1.4 e-commerce store with Magento's powerful theming engine by changing Magento templates, skin files and layout files
• Change the basics of your Magento theme from the logo of your store to the color scheme of your theme
• Integrate popular social media aspects such as Twitter and Facebook into your Magento store

In Detail

Magento is a popular open source e-commerce project. Whilst it comes with a number of default themes to change the look and feel of your store, many people, both new to Magento and old hands, struggle with even the more basic aspects of customizing Magento themes. When you read this book you'll learn how to change the basics of your Magento theme, create a new custom theme and much more.

The book is a step-by-step guide to theming Magento, aimed at readers with little technical expertise. The first chapters introduce Magento 1.4 and Magento themes, covering Magento theme hierarchy and the key components of a Magento theme: templates, skins, layout, and locales. Later chapters delve into changing the basics of your Magento store, including methods for changing the logo of your store, adding a custom favicon (favorites icon) and integrating Twitter and Facebook into your store. More advanced topics include customizing Magento templates and XML layout files to alter a theme to your own needs and creating a custom print stylesheet.

In short, the book provides guides to common aspects of theming and customizing Magento 1.4 and equally useful step-by-step walkthroughs of integrating more unusual items in to your Magento store.

A practical guide to customizing and creating Magento 1.4 themes

What you will learn from this book

• Install and configure Magento 1.4
• Customize the appearance of your Magento 1.4 e-commerce store with Magento's powerful theming engine
• Learn the fundamental principles behind Magento themes
• Change Magento templates, skin files, and layout files to achieve your theming goals
• Change the basics of your Magento theme, from the logo of your store to the color scheme of your theme
• Customize product view pages in your store to maximize customer interest
• Create a new Magento theme using the Base theme as a beginning
• Using the @font-face declaration in Magento themes
• Integrate popular social media aspects such as Twitter and Facebook in to your Magento store
• Customize templates for e-mail sent to your store's customers
• Avoid common pitfalls with Magento
• Style your store for printing more effectively

Approach

The book is written in an informal tone with clear, step-by-step guides through the major tasks in the book.

Who this book is written for

This book is aimed at web designers and web developers who are not familiar with Magento at all, and at Magento designers and developers who are more familiar with Magento 1.3 than Magento 1.4. The book assumes knowledge of HTML and CSS and an awareness, but not in-depth knowledge of, PHP syntax.

We've all sneaked the odd five minutes here or there playing the latest Flash game that someone sent round the office, but creating those games is trickier than it looks. The aim of Foundation Game Design with Flash is to take you, even if you've minimal multimedia or programming experience, through a series of step-by-step examples and detailed case studies to the point where you'll have the skills to independently design any conceivable 2D game using Flash and ActionScript. The book is a non-technical one-stop-shop for all the most important skills and techniques a beginner game designer needs to build games with Flash from scratch. Whether you're creating quick blasts of viral amusement, or more in-depth action or adventure titles, this book is for you.

• Focused and friendly introduction to designing games with Flash and ActionScript
• 5 detailed case studies of Flash games
• Essential techniques for building games, with each chapter gently building on the skills of preceding chapters

What you'll learn

• Learn how to build interactive movies and objects with Flash
• Get a thorough grounding in ActionScript 3.0 and good programming practices, with minimal prior programming experience required
• Discover how to build Interactive Storybooks, Space-Shooter, Adventure and Drag and Drop games.
• Master collision detection, Enemy AI systems, player control, managing game data, basic physics and trigonometry.
• Make use of Design Patterns and Object Oriented Programming techniques to build robust games.
• Understand the strategies for making games fun to play and easy to build.

Who is this book for?

This book is for a non-technical creative person who wants to learn the art of videogame design, but has no idea where to start or where to look for help. It is a lucid, friendly and step-by-step guide though all the technical and creative issues involved in game design with Flash and ActionScript. The book treats the art of programming as a creative artistic tool, and will help anyone who may be afraid of programming to love the subject as much as the author does. The techniques in the book are comprehensive enough to form the basis of career as a game designer, and form a solid foundation for continued study of programming and ActionScript. This book is the missing link that will guide and inspire any curious and creative person turn a good game idea into a reality.

We've all sneaked the odd five minutes here or there playing the latest Flash game that someone sent round the office, but creating those games is trickier than it looks. The aim of Foundation Game Design with Flash is to take you, even if you've minimal multimedia or programming experience, through a series of step-by-step examples and detailed case studies to the point where you'll have the skills to independently design any conceivable 2D game using Flash and ActionScript. The book is a non-technical one-stop-shop for all the most important skills and techniques a beginner game designer needs to build games with Flash from scratch. Whether you're creating quick blasts of viral amusement, or more in-depth action or adventure titles, this book is for you.

• Focused and friendly introduction to designing games with Flash and ActionScript
• 5 detailed case studies of Flash games
• Essential techniques for building games, with each chapter gently building on the skills of preceding chapters

What you'll learn

• Learn how to build interactive movies and objects with Flash
• Get a thorough grounding in ActionScript 3.0 and good programming practices, with minimal prior programming experience required
• Discover how to build Interactive Storybooks, Space-Shooter, Adventure and Drag and Drop games.
• Master collision detection, Enemy AI systems, player control, managing game data, basic physics and trigonometry.
• Make use of Design Patterns and Object Oriented Programming techniques to build robust games.
• Understand the strategies for making games fun to play and easy to build.

Who is this book for?

This book is for a non-technical creative person who wants to learn the art of videogame design, but has no idea where to start or where to look for help. It is a lucid, friendly and step-by-step guide though all the technical and creative issues involved in game design with Flash and ActionScript. The book treats the art of programming as a creative artistic tool, and will help anyone who may be afraid of programming to love the subject as much as the author does. The techniques in the book are comprehensive enough to form the basis of career as a game designer, and form a solid foundation for continued study of programming and ActionScript. This book is the missing link that will guide and inspire any curious and creative person turn a good game idea into a reality.

Customize the appearance of your Magento 1.4 e-commerce store with Magento's powerful theming engine

• Install and configure Magento 1.4 and learn the fundamental principles behind Magento themes
• Customize the appearance of your Magento 1.4 e-commerce store with Magento's powerful theming engine by changing Magento templates, skin files and layout files
• Change the basics of your Magento theme from the logo of your store to the color scheme of your theme
• Integrate popular social media aspects such as Twitter and Facebook into your Magento store

In Detail

Magento is a popular open source e-commerce project. Whilst it comes with a number of default themes to change the look and feel of your store, many people, both new to Magento and old hands, struggle with even the more basic aspects of customizing Magento themes. When you read this book you'll learn how to change the basics of your Magento theme, create a new custom theme and much more.

The book is a step-by-step guide to theming Magento, aimed at readers with little technical expertise. The first chapters introduce Magento 1.4 and Magento themes, covering Magento theme hierarchy and the key components of a Magento theme: templates, skins, layout, and locales. Later chapters delve into changing the basics of your Magento store, including methods for changing the logo of your store, adding a custom favicon (favorites icon) and integrating Twitter and Facebook into your store. More advanced topics include customizing Magento templates and XML layout files to alter a theme to your own needs and creating a custom print stylesheet.

In short, the book provides guides to common aspects of theming and customizing Magento 1.4 and equally useful step-by-step walkthroughs of integrating more unusual items in to your Magento store.

A practical guide to customizing and creating Magento 1.4 themes

What you will learn from this book

• Install and configure Magento 1.4
• Customize the appearance of your Magento 1.4 e-commerce store with Magento's powerful theming engine
• Learn the fundamental principles behind Magento themes
• Change Magento templates, skin files, and layout files to achieve your theming goals
• Change the basics of your Magento theme, from the logo of your store to the color scheme of your theme
• Customize product view pages in your store to maximize customer interest
• Create a new Magento theme using the Base theme as a beginning
• Using the @font-face declaration in Magento themes
• Integrate popular social media aspects such as Twitter and Facebook in to your Magento store
• Customize templates for e-mail sent to your store's customers
• Avoid common pitfalls with Magento
• Style your store for printing more effectively

Approach

The book is written in an informal tone with clear, step-by-step guides through the major tasks in the book.

Who this book is written for

This book is aimed at web designers and web developers who are not familiar with Magento at all, and at Magento designers and developers who are more familiar with Magento 1.3 than Magento 1.4. The book assumes knowledge of HTML and CSS and an awareness, but not in-depth knowledge of, PHP syntax.

ASQ 2007 CROSBY MEDAL WINNER!

An Integrated Technology for Delivering Better Software—Cheaper and Faster!

This book presents an integrated technology, Design for Trustworthy Software (DFTS), to address software quality issues upstream such that the goal of software quality becomes that of preventing bugs in implementation rather than finding and eliminating them during and after implementation. The thrust of the technology is that major quality deployments take place before a single line of code is written!

This customer-oriented integrated technology can help deliver breakthrough results in cost, quality, and delivery schedule thus meeting and exceeding customer expectations. The authors describe the principles behind the technology as well as their applications to actual software design problems. They present illustrative case studies covering various aspects of DFTS technology including CoSQ, AHP, TRIZ, FMEA, QFD, and Taguchi Methods and provide ample questions and exercises to test the readers understanding of the material in addition to detailed examples of the applications of the technology.

The book can be used to impart organization-wide learning including training for DFTS Black Belts and Master Black Belts. It helps you gain rapid mastery, so you can deploy DFTS Technology quickly and successfully.

Learn how to

•    Plan, build, maintain, and improve your trustworthy software development system

•    Adapt best practices of quality, leadership, learning, and management for the unique software development milieu

•    Listen to the customer’s voice, then guide user expectations to realizable, reliable software products

•    Refocus on customer-centered issues such as reliability, dependability, availability, and upgradeability

•    Encourage greater design creativity and innovation

•    Validate, verify, test, evaluate, integrate, and maintain software for trustworthiness

•    Analyze the financial impact of software quality

•    Prepare your leadership and infrastructure for DFTS

Design for Trustworthy Software will help you improve quality whether you develop in-house, outsource, consult, or provide support. It offers breakthrough solutions for the entire spectrum of software and quality professionals—from developers to project leaders, chief software architects to customers.

The American Society for Quality (ASQ) is the world's leading authority on quality which provides a community that advances learning, quality improvement, and knowledge exchange to improve business results, and to create better workplaces and communities worldwide. The Crosby Medal is presented to the individual who has authored a distinguished book contributing significantly to the extension of the philosophy and application of the principles, methods, or techniques of quality management.

Bijay K. Jayaswal, CEO of Agilenty Consulting Group, has held senior executive positions and consulted on quality and strategy for 25 years. His expertise includes value engineering, process improvement, and product development. He has directed MBA and Advanced Management programs, and helped to introduce enterprise-wide reengineering and Six Sigma initiatives.

Dr. Peter C. Patton, Chairman of Agilenty Consulting Group, is Professor of Quantitative Methods and Computer Science at the University of St. Thomas. He served as CIO of the University of Pennsylvania and CTO at Lawson Software, and has been involved with software development since 1955.

There are three main technologies married together to create usable, standards-compliant web designs: XHTML for data structure, Cascading Style Sheets for styling your data, and JavaScript for adding dynamic effects and manipulating structure on the fly using the Document Object Model. This book is about the latter of the three.

DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model gives you everything you need to start using JavaScript and the Document Object Model to enhance your web pages with client-side dynamic effects. We start off by giving you a basic crash course in JavaScript and the DOM, then move on to provide you with several real world examples built up from scratch including dynamic image galleries and dynamic menus, and show you how to manipulate web page styles using the CSS DOM, and create markup on the fly.

New material for this edition includes a run through of the most popular JavaScript libraries and their use.

What you’ll learn

• Apply dynamic behavior to your pages without inserting JavaScript in your markup.
• Write scripts that degrade gracefully when JavaScript isn’t available.
• Use web standards to ensure cross-browser compatibility.
• Harness the power of the DOM to create user-controlled animation.
• Also includes an introduction to Ajax.

Who this book is for

This book is for web developers wanting to expand their knowledge of the DOM to add interactivity and functionality to their web pages.

Anyone can master the fundamentals of game design - no technological expertise is necessary. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses shows that the same basic principles of psychology that work for board games, card games and athletic games also are the keys to making top-quality videogames. Good game design happens when you view your game from many different perspectives, or lenses. While touring through the unusual territory that is game design, this book gives the reader one hundred of these lenses - one hundred sets of insightful questions to ask yourself that will help make your game better. These lenses are gathered from fields as diverse as psychology, architecture, music, visual design, film, software engineering, theme park design, mathematics, writing, puzzle design, and anthropology. Anyone who reads this book will be inspired to become a better game designer - and will understand how to do it.

* Jesse Schell is a highly recognizable name within the game industry - he is the former chair of the International Game Developer's Association, and has designed many successful games, including Disney's award-winning Toontown Online.

* The book's design methodology was developed at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center, co-founded by Dr. Randy Pausch of "Last Lecture" fame.

* 100 'lenses' are scattered throughout the book. These are boxed sets of questions, each a different way of seeing a game that will inspire the creative process.

* 500 pages of detailed, practical instruction on creating world-class games that will be played again and again.

* Winner of Game Developer's 2008 Front Line Award in the book category

This unique book takes good ASP.NET application construction one step further by emphasizing loosely coupled and highly cohesive ASP.NET web application architectural design. Each chapter
addresses a layer in an enterprise ASP.NET application and shows how proven patterns, principles, and best practices can be leveraged to solve problems and improve the design of your code. In addition, a professional-level, end-to-end case study is used to show how to use best practice design patterns and principles in a real website.

Professional ASP.NET Design Patterns:

• Demonstrates how to use the Gang of Four design patterns to improve your ASP.NET code
• Shows how Fowler's Enterprise patterns and the S.O.L.I.D. design principles fit into an enterprise-level ASP.NET site
• Provides details on how to layer an ASP.NET application and separate your concerns and responsibilities
• Details AJAX patterns using JQuery and Json, and messaging patterns with WCF
• Shares best practice tools for ASP.NET such as AutoMapper, NHibernate, StructureMap, Entity Framework, and Castle MonoRail
• Uncovers tips for separating a site's UX and presentation layer using MVC, MVP and the Front Controller patterns
• Features code examples that are applicable to all versions of ASP.NET

This book features C# code examples in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web forms.

Contents:

Part 1: Introducing Patterns & Design Principles

1. The Pattern for successful applications
2. Dissecting the Patterns Pattern

Part 2: The Anatomy of an ASP.NET Application: Learning and Applying Patterns

3. Layering Your Application
4. Business Logic Layer: Organisation
5. Business Logic Layer: Patterns
6. Service Layer
7. Data Access Layer
8. Presentation Layer
9. User Experience Layer

Part 3: Case Study: The Online E-Commerce Store (ASP.NET MVC 2 in C#)

10. Requirements & Infrastructure
11. Product Catalogue Browsing
12. Shopping Basket
13. Membership
14. Ordering and Payment

With the introduction of increasingly complex Web services over the last decade, there has been an explosion of interest in service-oriented architecture (SOA), a structural style whose goal is to achieve a coupling of interacting services - functionalities such as filling out an online application for an account, viewing an online bank statement, or placing an online booking or airline ticket order. These services operate through specific interfaces that control and define their operation. However, due to the evolving nature of enterprises, new services and applications must often be incorporated into these same interfaces. Such incorporation can be costly and complex if the original interface is inflexible or incompatible with the technology utilized by the new applications.

In his new book, data architecture guru James Bean teaches you exactly how to design web service interfaces that are capable of being extended to accommodate ever changing business needs and promote incorporation simplicity. The book first provides an overview of critical SOA principles, thereby offering a basic conceptual summary. The book then provides explicit, tactical, and real-world techniques for ensuring compliance with these principles. Using a focused, tutorial-based approach the book provides working syntactical examples - described by Web services standards such as XML, XML Schemas, WSDL and SOAP - that can be used to directly implement interface design procedures, thus allowing you immediately generate value from your efforts. In summary, SOA and Web Services Interface Design provides the basic theory, but also design techniques and very specific implementable encoded interface examples that can be immediately employed in your work, making it an invaluable practical guide to any practitioner in today's exploding Web-based service market.

• Provides chapters on topics of introductory WSDL syntax and XML Schema syntax, taking take the reader through fundamental concepts and into deeper techniques and allowing them to quickly climb the learning curve.




• Provides working syntactical examples - described by Web services standards such as XML, XML Schemas, WSDL and SOAP - that can be used to directly implement interface design procedures.




• Real-world examples generated using the Altova XML Spy tooling reinforce applicability, allowing you to immediately generate value from their efforts.




• A companion website with all artwork and code examples accompanies the book.