PC Books

Fully revised to include coverage of the new features of PaintShop Photo Pro, Photo Restoration and Retouching Using Corel ? PaintShop Photo ? Pro, Second Edition teaches you how to use PaintShop Photo Pro’s plethora of top-notch photo editing tools to retouch, enhance, and restore your photographs. You’ll benefit from the practical techniques and insider tips shown in this book, regardless of your skill level. After a brief introduction to PaintShop Photo Pro and other helpful topics such as scanning and organizing, you’ll dive into detailed photo studies that showcase new and old photos alike. By examining actual photos from the author’s collection, you’ll learn how to retouch or restore digital, scanned, color, and black-and-white photos. Each study teaches you how to tackle specific problems, shows you the pros and cons of different techniques, and concludes with a fully restored or retouched photo. You’ll learn how to do things like repair cuts and scratches, remove dust, blemishes, take out red-eye, enhance color, brightness, and contrast, remove distractions, correct perspective and lens distortion, and more. You’ll even discover how to retouch people, enhance good photos, and explore ways to tackle “impossible” photos.

Price: $39.99

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Cloud Computing Explained provides an overview of Cloud Computing in an enterprise environment. There is a tremendous amount of enthusiasm around cloud-based solutions and services as well as the cost-savings and flexibility that they can provide. It is imperative that all senior technologists have a solid understanding of the ramifications of cloud computing since its impact is likely to permeate the entire IT landscape. However, it is not trivial to introduce a fundamentally different service-delivery paradigm into an existing enterprise architecture. 

Price: $39.95

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Increase efficiency while saving money with “on-demand” computing

The biggest game-changing force in business since the creation of the Internet, cloud computing simplifies and lowers the cost of operations while providing flexibility and power you never dreamed possible. Make your strategic move now, with Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution!

“Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution is an important work that captures the concepts and technological advances fueling the rapid adoption of cloud computing today. It illuminates how specific core technologies have led to the emergence of those patterns as the foundation for the next generation of IT-managed infrastructure.”
—Rich Wolski, Chief Technology Officer and cofounder of Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., and Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara

“Explains in marvelously plain English how clouds will change our world. . . . If the potential of cloud computing doesn’t excite you now, it will after you read this book. Buy a copy and put it on your CEO’s desk. Babcock explains it all.”
—Paul Gillin, bestselling author of The New Influencers

“A valuable primer and handbook. It will help you master the technology and follow the story as innovators craft the future of cloud computing.”
—Ted schadler, VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc., and coauthor of Empowered

“This readable, thought-provoking book will be especially useful to business professionals and practitioners.”
Choice magazine

About the Book

Everyday business as we know it is poised for a monumental shift, courtesy of cloud computing—the biggest game-changer since the creation of the Internet itself. There’s no doubt about it: If you want to compete in the future, you must begin educating yourself about cloud computing now.

From InformationWeek editor Charles Babcock, a leading authority on the business benefits and pitfalls of cloud computing, Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution provides the tools every manager needs to create a new business strategy that harnesses all the power cloud computing has to offer.

Cloud computing is the equivalent of renting time on a computing infrastructure over the Internet, rather than building your own from the ground up. Access to the cloud is growing quickly, and the benefits are undeniable. Those who begin incorporating cloud computing into their business strategy will enjoy:

• Dramatic Cost Savings: The cloud makes available innovative technologies that would otherwise be too expensive.
• Ubiquitous Access: Employees can access the server power they need anytime, anywhere, and send it the program they want to run.
• Unprecedented Agility: Business processes and business infrastructures can be altered quicker than ever.
• Steady Traffic Flow: Even during peak loads, systems in the cloud can overcome bottlenecks and expand to meet the user’s needs.

Working on the cloud, your analysts, business intelligence experts, and researchers can access large-scale, high-speed, highly reliable systems while paying only for short-term use.

You didn’t set up your own electrical grid to power your computers. Why pay big money to use them when you don’t have to? The cloud is on the horizon, and it’s looming larger by the day. Learn how to take full advantage of it with Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution.

Price: $27.95

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The world of smart shoes, appliances, and phones is already here, but the practice of user experience (UX) design for ubiquitous computing is still relatively new. Design companies like IDEO and frogdesign are regularly asked to design products that unify software interaction, device design and service design — which are all the key components of ubiquitous computing UX — and practicing designers need a way to tackle practical challenges of design. Theory is not enough for them — luckily the industry is now mature enough to have tried and tested best practices and case studies from the field.

Smart Things presents a problem-solving approach to addressing designers’ needs and concentrates on process, rather than technological detail, to keep from being quickly outdated. It pays close attention to the capabilities and limitations of the medium in question and discusses the tradeoffs and challenges of design in a commercial environment. Divided into two sections,  frameworks and techniques, the book discusses broad design methods and case studies that reflect key aspects of these approaches. The book then presents a set of techniques highly valuable to a practicing designer. It is intentionally not a comprehensive tutorial of user-centered design’as that is covered in many other books’but it is a handful of techniques useful when designing ubiquitous computing user experiences.

In short, Smart Things gives its readers both the “why” of this kind of design and the “how,” in well-defined chunks.

* Tackles design of products in the post-Web world where computers no longer have to be monolithic, expensive general-purpose devices
* Features broad frameworks and processes, practical advice to help approach specifics, and techniques for the unique design challenges
* Presents case studies that describe, in detail, how others have solved problems, managed trade-offs, and met successes

Price: $39.95

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