Python is arguably the most-used programming language in the world, with applications from primary school education to workaday web development, to the most advanced scientific research institutes. While there are many ways to perform a task in Python, some are wrong, inelegant, or inefficient. Better Python Code is a guide to "Pythonic" programming, a collection of best practices, ways of working, and nuances that are easy to miss, especially when ingrained habits are borrowed from other programming languages.

50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon picks one text-based game from each year between 1971 and 2020 and studies how it works, what it's about, why it's special, and its lasting legacy. From personal stories to million-word epics, from games printed by teletypes to games downloaded on smart watches, this is the fascinating story of interactive fiction’s first half-century.

From analog to digital, mainframes to mobile phones – with photos, ads, and concept drawings of inventions that ushered in the digital era, this visual survey of the Information Age reveals how the computer and the internet irreversibly transformed our world.

Awk was developed in 1977 at Bell Labs, and it's still a remarkably useful tool for solving a wide variety of problems quickly and efficiently. In this update of the classic Awk book, the creators of the language show you what Awk can do and teach you how to use it effectively.

This book guides the reader on the journey of constructing their own compiler for the racket programming language. Along the way the reader learns the essential concepts, algorithms, and data structures that underlie modern compilers

An updated, revised, and comprehensive overview of the concepts related to cloud computing, including recent applications, innovations, and its future evolution.

Whether you are a university professor, researcher at a think tank, graduate student, or analyst at a private firm, chances are that at some point you have presented your work in front of an audience. Most of us approach this task by converting a written document into slides, but the result is often a text-heavy presentation saddled with bullet points, stock images, and graphs too complex for an audience to decipher-much less understand. Presenting is fundamentally different from writing, and with only a little more time, a little more effort, and a little more planning, you can communicate your work with force and clarity. Designed for presenters of scholarly or data-intensive content, Better Presentations details essential strategies for developing clear, sophisticated, and visually captivating presentations. Following three core principles-visualize, unify, and focus-Better Presentations describes how to visualize data effectively, find and use images appropriately, choose sensible fonts and colors, edit text for powerful delivery, and restructure a written argument for maximum engagement and persuasion. With a range of clear examples for what to do (and what not to do), the practical package offered in Better Presentations shares the best techniques to display work and the best tactics for winning over audiences. It pushes presenters past the frustration and intimidation of the process to more effective, memorable, and persuasive presentations.

Balkan Cyberia reveals the extension of economic and political networks of influence far past the reputed fall of communism, along with the pivotal role small countries played in geopolitical games at the time. Through the prism of the Bulgarian computer industry, the true nature of the socialist international economy, and indeed the links between capitalism and communism, emerge.

This book includes essays reporting original research on educational programs in AI relational robots and Scratch programming, on children's views on digital privacy and artificial intelligence, and on discourses around educational technologies. Shorter opinion pieces add the perspectives of an instructional designer, a social worker, and parents. The contributing social, behavioral, and computer scientists represent perspectives and contexts that span education, commercial tech platforms, and home settings. They analyze problems and offer solutions that elevate the voices and agency of parents and children. Their essays also build on recent research examining how social media, digital games, and learning technologies reflect and reinforce unequal childhoods.

The emergence of artificial intelligence has triggered enthusiasm and promise of boundless opportunities as much as uncertainty about its limits. The contributions to this volume explore the limits of AI, describe the necessary conditions for its functionality, reveal its attendant technical and social problems, and present some existing and potential solutions. At the same time, the contributors highlight the societal and attending economic hopes and fears, utopias and dystopias that are associated with the current and future development of artificial intelligence.