Describes how a Bangladeshi immigrant, shot in the Dallas mini mart where he worked in the days after September 11 in a revenge crime, forgave his assailant and petitioned the state of Texas to spare his attacker the death penalty.

All of Java's Input/Output (I/O) facilities are based on streams, which provide simple ways to read and write data of different types. Java provides many different kinds of streams, each with its own application. The universe of streams is divided into four largecategories: input streams and output streams, for reading and writing binary data; and readers and writers, for reading and writing textual (character) data. You're almost certainly familiar with the basic kinds of streams--but did you know that there's a CipherInputStream for reading encrypted data? And a ZipOutputStream for automaticallycompressing data? Do you know how to use buffered streams effectively to make your I/O operations more efficient? Java I/O, 2nd Edition has been updated for Java 5.0 APIs and tells you all you ever need to know about streams--and probably more. A discussion of I/O wouldn't be complete without treatment of character sets and formatting. Java supports the Unicode standard, which provides definitions for the character sets of most written languages. Consequently, Java is the first programming language that lets you do I/O in virtually any language. Java also provides a sophisticated model for formatting textual and numeric data. Java I/O, 2nd Edition shows you how to control number formatting, use characters aside from the standard (but outdated) ASCII character set, and get a head start on writing truly multilingual software. Java I/O, 2nd Edition includes: Coverage of all I/O classes and related classes In-depth coverage of Java's number formatting facilities and its support for international character sets

Examines how designers approach the creation of a range of designs with a recognisable and continual element.

If you want to attract and retain users in the booming mobile services market, you need a quick-loading app that won’t churn through their data plans. The key is to compress multimedia and other data into smaller files, but finding the right method is tricky. This witty book helps you understand how data compression algorithms work—in theory and practice—so you can choose the best solution among all the available compression tools. With tables, diagrams, games, and as little math as possible, authors Colt McAnlis and Aleks Haecky neatly explain the fundamentals. Learn how compressed files are better, cheaper, and faster to distribute and consume, and how they’ll give you a competitive edge. Learn why compression has become crucial as data production continues to skyrocket Know your data, circumstances, and algorithm options when choosing compression tools Explore variable-length codes, statistical compression, arithmetic numerical coding, dictionary encodings, and context modeling Examine tradeoffs between file size and quality when choosing image compressors Learn ways to compress client- and server-generated data objects Meet the inventors and visionaries who created data compression algorithms

This novel of young men seeking glory in the Republic of Texas is “a surprisingly absorbing rendition of a terrible episode in American history” (The Oregonian). The Diezmo tells the incredible story of the Mier Expedition, one of the most absurd and tragic military adventures in the history of Texas—a country and a state, as Rick Bass writes, that was “born in blood.” In the early days of the Republic of Texas, two young men, wild for glory, impulsively volunteer for an expedition Sam Houston has ordered to patrol the Mexican border. But their dreams of triumph soon fade into prayers for survival, and all that is on their minds is getting home and having a cool drink of water. After being captured in a raid on the Mexican village of Mier, escaping, and being recaptured, the men of the expedition are punished with the terrible diezmo, in which one man in ten is randomly chosen to die. The survivors end up in the most dreaded prison in Mexico. There they become pawns in an international chess game to decide the fate of Texas, and with their hopes of release all but extinguished, they make one desperate, last-ditch effort to escape. “The best literary adventure story I've read since Legends of the Fall. Full of unusual history, exciting events, timely ideas, and stunning wilderness scenery . . . a wonderfully told novel of the human capacity for survival in the face of the very worst that war can do to us.” —Howard Frank Mosher, author of Points North “A vivid, graphic, harrowing tale of wild men and bad blood, a fable universal and timeless in its application.” —Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong “Terrific . . . powerful.” —Los Angeles Times

'Programming .NET Components', second edition, updated to cover .NET 2.0., introduces the Microsoft .NET Framework for building components on Windows platforms. From its many lessons, tips, and guidelines, readers will learn how to use the .NET Framework to program reusable, maintainable, and robust components.

Pro PHP presents experienced developers with a thorough guide to the language's key advanced features, focusing on both recent and emerging features and development trends. Advanced object-oriented features, documentation, debugging, software patterns, and the Standard PHP Library are just a few of the topics covered in extensive detail. Author and noted PHP expert Kevin McArthur also examines emerging practices and trends such as the MVC architecture as applied to PHP, with special emphasis placed upon the increasingly popular Zend Framework. The book also covers JSON, the SOAP extension, and advanced web services topics.

The introduction of the Microsoft® .NET framework not only brings developers a powerful, cohesive toolset for the development of new Windows and Web applications -- it also replaces COM as the technology of choice for building components on Windows platforms. Components are the fundamental building blocks of .NET applications; they can both simplify and add flexibility to complex applications. Applied properly, component-oriented programming enable reuse, allow for long-term maintenance, application extensibility and scalability. Component technology is nothing new, but the .NET Framework offers developers a new way to develop binary components rapidly, without the hurdles that many COM developers have had to deal with prior to .NET. While retaining all of the core concepts that define component-oriented development--language independence, separation of interface from implementation, binary compatibility, versioning, concurrency management, location transparency, security, deployment--.NET is built upon a fresh component-oriented runtime that has an easier time providing these core concepts. Programming .NET Components offers a complete introduction to the new Microsoft .NET component model, focusing on the aspects of .NET that make it ideal for building reusable, maintainable, and robust components. Author Juval Löwy, a noted authority on component-oriented programming, teaches the intricacies of .NET component programming and the related system issues to application developers, along with relevant design guidelines, tips, best practices, and known pitfalls. The book is packed with helpful original utilities aimed at simplifying the programming model and increasing the developer productivity. The book begins with an appreciation for the "why" and fundamentals of component-oriented programming, and then continues with an introduction to .NET essentials. Following practical, expert advice on effective .NET development techniques, the book then devotes a chapter to each of the following features critical to component development: Resource management Versioning Events Asynchronous calls Multithreading Serialization Remoting Component services Security. Programming .NET Components offers everything you'll need to know to program components for real-life .NET applications, using Windows Forms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, or web services. Anyone interested in developing .NET applications, especially enterprise level, will find this book an invaluable resource.

Get a head start with eXist, the open source NoSQL database and application development platform built entirely around XML technologies. With this hands-on guide, you’ll learn eXist from the ground up, from using this feature-rich database to work with millions of documents to building complex web applications that take advantage of eXist’s many extensions. If you’re familiar with XML—as a student, professor, publisher, or developer—you’ll find that eXist is ideal for all kinds of documents. This book shows you how to store, query, and search documents with XQuery and other XML technologies, and how to construct applications on top of the database with tools such as eXide and eXist’s built-in development environment. Manage both data-oriented and text-oriented markup documents securely Build a sample application that analyzes and searches Shakespeare’s plays Go inside the architecture and learn how eXist processes documents Learn how to work with eXist’s internal development environment Choose among various indexes, including a full-text index based on Apache Lucene Dive into eXist’s APIs for integrating or interacting with the database Extend eXist by building your own Triggers, Scheduled Tasks, and XQuery extension modules

This book provides readers with a complete A-Z for using C# with the .NET 2.0 Platform and the .NET 3.0 extensions. It contains new chapters digging deeply into the interactions between the existing framework and the new extensions to give readers the edge when they come to evaluation and implement .NET 3.0 for the first time. To provide even more support, the book includes a bonus CD that provides over five hundred pages of carefully selected additional content to help broaden a reader’s understanding of both .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.0.