The Sync Framework is Microsoft's innovation to address the dilemma of occasionally connected systems. It is a comprehensive synchronization platform that enables collaboration and offline access for applications, services, and devices. In particular, it features technologies and tools that enable device roaming, sharing, and the ability to take networked data offline before synchronizing it back to the networked application at a later time. Pro Sync Framework concludes with a working example that shows how the techniques you've learned can be used to create a versatile application, adaptable to a wide variety of connectivity and synchronization challenges.

Understand how to use the new features of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for data mining by using the tools in Data Mining with Microsoft SQL Server 2008, which will show you how to use the SQL Server Data Mining Toolset with Office 2007 to mine and analyze data. Explore each of the major data mining algorithms, including naive bayes, decision trees, time series, clustering, association rules, and neural networks. Learn more about topics like mining OLAP databases, data mining with SQL Server Integration Services 2008, and using Microsoft data mining to solve business analysis problems.

Teach yourself SQL Server 2008—one step at a time. Get the practical guidance you need to build database solutions that solve real-world business problems. Learn to integrate SQL Server data in your applications, write queries, develop reports, and employ powerful business intelligence systems. Discover how to: Install and work with core components and tools Create tables and index structures Manipulate and retrieve data Secure, manage, back up, and recover databases Apply tuning plus optimization techniques to generate high-performing database applications Optimize availability through clustering, database mirroring, and log shipping Tap business intelligence tools—Reporting, Analysis, and Integration Services CD features: Practice exercises and code samples Fully searchable eBook For customers who purchase an ebook version of this title, instructions for downloading the CD files can be found in the ebook.

This book is intended for IT professionals and students who want to learn how to design, analyze, and understand databases. The material will benefit those who want a better high-level understanding of databases such as proposal managers, architects, project managers, and even customers. The material will also benefit those who will actually design, build, and work with databases such as database designers, database administrators, and programmers. In many projects, these roles overlap so the same person may be responsible for working on the proposal, managing part of the project, and designing and creating the database. This book is aimed at IT professionals and students of all experience levels. It does not assume that you have any previous experience with databases or programs that use them. It doesn't even assume that you have experience with computers. All you really need is a willingness and desire to learn. This book explains database design. It tells how to plan a database's structure so the database will be robust, resistant to errors, and flexible enough to accommodate a reasonable amount of future change. It explains how to discover database requirements, build data models to study data needs, and refine those models to improve the database's effectiveness. The book solidifies these concepts by working through a detailed example that designs a realistic database. Later chapters explain how to actually build databases using two common database products: Access 2007 and MySQL. The book finishes by describing some of the topics you need to understand to keep a database running effectively such as database maintenance and security. This book explains database design. It tells how to determine what should go in a database and how the database should be structured to give the best results. This book does not focus on actually creating the database. The details of database construction are different for different database tools so, to remain as generally as useful as possible, this book doesn't concentrate on any particular database system. You can apply the techniques described here equally to whatever database tool you use whether it's Access, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, or some other database product. Most database products include free editions that you can use for smaller projects. For example, SQL Server Express Edition, Oracle Express Edition, and MySQL Community Server are all free. To remain database neutral, the book does not assume you are using a particular database so you don't need any particular software or hardware. To work through the Exercises, all you really need is a pencil and some paper. You are welcome to type solutions into your computer if you like but you may actually find working with pencil and paper easier than using a graphical design tool to draw pictures, at least until you are comfortable with database design and are ready to pick a computerized design tool. "Goals of Effective Database Design," explains the reasons why people and organizations use databases. It explains a database's purpose and conditions that it must satisfy to be useful. This also describes the basic ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) and CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) features that any good database should have. It explains in high-level general terms what makes a good database and what makes a bad database. "Database Types," explains some of the different types of databases that you might decide to use. These include flat files, spreadsheets, hierarchical databases (XML), object databases, and relational databases. The relational database is one of the most powerful and most commonly used forms of database so it is the focus of this book, but it is important to realize that there are alternatives that may be more appropriate under certain circumstances. This gives some tips on deciding which kind of database might be best for a particular project. "Relational Database Fundamentals," explains basic relational database concepts such as tables, rows, and columns. It explains the common usage of relational database terms in addition to the more technical terms that are sometimes used by database theorists. It describes different kinds of constraints that databases use to guarantee that the data is stored safely and consistently. "Understanding User Needs," explains how to learn about the users' needs and gather user requirements. It tells how to study the users' current operations, existing databases (if any), and desired improvements. It describes common questions that you can ask to learn about users' operations, desires, and needs, and how to build the results into requirements documents and specifications. This explains what use cases are and tells how to use them and the requirements to guide database design and to measure success. "Translating User Needs into Data Models," introduces data modeling. It explains how to translate the user's conceptual model and the requirements into other more precise models that define the database design rigorously. This describes several database modeling techniques including user-interface models, semantic object models, entity-relationship diagrams, and relational models. "Extracting Business Rules," explains how a database can handle business rules. It explains what business rules are, how they differ from database structure requirements, and how you can identify business rules. This explains the benefits of separating business rules from the database structure and tells how achieve that separation. "Normalizing Data," explains one of the biggest tools in database design: normalization. Normalization techniques allow you to restructure a database to increase its flexibility and make it more robust. This explains the various forms of normalization, emphasizing the stages that are most common and important: first, second, and third normal forms (1NF, 2NF, and 3NF). It explains how each of these kinds of normalization helps prevent errors and tells why it is sometimes better to leave a database slightly less normalized to improve performance. "Designing Databases to Support Software Applications," explains how databases fit into the larger context of application design and lifecycle. This explains how later development depends on the underlying database design. It discusses multi-tier architectures that can help decouple the application and database design so there can be at least some changes to either without requiring changes to the other. "Common Design Patterns," explains some common patterns that are useful in many applications. Some of these techniques include implementing various kinds of relationships among objects, storing hierarchical and network data, recording temporal data, and logging and locking. "Common Design Pitfalls," explains some common design mistakes that occur in database development. It describes problems that can arise from insufficient planning, incorrect normalization, and obsession with ID fields and performance. "User Needs and Requirements," walks through the steps required to analyze the users' problem, define requirements, and create use cases. It describes interviews with fictitious customers that are used to identify the application's needs and translate them into database requirements. "Building a Data Model," translates the requirements gathered in the previous into a series of data models that precisely define the database's structure. This builds user-interface models, entity-relationship diagrams, semantic object models, and relational models to refine the database's initial design. The final relational models match the structure of a relational database fairly closely so they are easy to implement. "Extracting Business Rules," identifies the business rules embedded in the relational model. It shows how to extract those rules in order to separate them logically from the database's structure. This makes the database more robust in the face of future changes to the business rules. "Normalization and Refinement," refines the relational model by normalizing it. It walks through several versions of the database that are in different normal forms. It then selects the degree of normalization that provides a reasonable tradeoff between robust design and acceptable performance. "Microsoft Access," explains how to build a database with Microsoft Access 2007. This explains enough to get started and to use Access to build non-trivial databases. You can use other versions of Access to work through this, although the locations of menus, buttons, and other Access features are different in different versions. "MySQL," explains how to build a database with MySQL. This tells where to download a free version of MySQL. It explains how to use the MySQL Command Line Client as well as some useful graphical tools including MySQL Query Browser and MySQL Workbench. "Introduction to SQL," provides an introduction to SQL (Structured Query Language). It explains how to use SQL commands to add, insert, update, and delete data. By using SQL, you can help insulate a program from the idiosyncrasies of the particular database product that it uses to store data. "Building Databases with SQL Scripts," explains how to use SQL scripts to build a database. It explains the advantages of this technique, such as the ability to create scripts to initialize a database before performing tests. It also explains some of the restrictions on this method, such as the fact that the user must create and delete tables in specific orders to satisfy table relationships. "Database Maintenance," describes some of the database maintenance issues that are part of any database application. Though performing and restoring backups, compressing tables, rebuilding indexes, and populating data warehouses are strictly not database design tasks, they are essential to any working application. "Database Security," explains database security issues. It explains the kinds of security that some database products provide. It also explains some additional techniques that can enhance database security such as using database views to appropriately restrict the users' access to data.

SQL Server 2008 represents a sizable jump forward in scalability, performance, and usability for the DBA, developer, and business intelligence (BI) developer. It is no longer unheard of to have 20-terabyte databases running on a SQL Server. SQL Server administration used to just be the job of a database administrator (DBA), but as SQL Server proliferates throughout smaller companies, many developers have begun to act as administrators as well. Additionally, some of the new features in SQL Server are more developer-centric, and poor configuration of these features can result in poor performance. SQL Server now enables you to manage the policies on hundreds of SQL Servers in your environment as if you were managing a single instance. We've provided a comprehensive, tutorial-based book to get you over the learning curve of how to configure and administer SQL Server 2008. Whether you're an administrator or developer using SQL Server, you can't avoid wearing a DBA hat at some point. Developers often have SQL Server on their own workstations and must provide guidance to the administrator about how they'd like the production configured. Oftentimes, they're responsible for creating the database tables and indexes. Administrators or DBAs support the production servers and often inherit the database from the developer. This book is intended for developers, DBAs, and casual users who hope to administer or may already be administering a SQL Server 2008 system and its business intelligence features, such as Integration Services. This book is a professional book, meaning the authors assume that you know the basics about how to query a SQL Server and have some rudimentary concepts of SQL Server already. For example, this book does not show you how to create a database or walk you through the installation of SQL Server using the wizard. Instead, the author of the installation chapter may provide insight into how to use some of the more advanced concepts of the installation. Although this book does not cover how to query a SQL Server database, it does cover how to tune the queries you've already written. The first ten chapters of the book are about administering the various areas of SQL Server, including the developer and business intelligence features. Chapter 1 briefly covers the architecture of SQL Server and the changing role of the DBA. Chapters 2 and 3 dive into best practices on installing and upgrading to SQL Server 2008. Managing your SQL Server database instance is talked about in Chapter 4. This chapter also describes some of the hidden tools you may not even know you have. Once you know how to manage your SQL Server, you can learn in Chapter 5 how to automate many of the redundant monitoring and maintenance tasks. This chapter also discusses best practices on configuring SQL Server Agent. Chapters 6 and 7 cover how to properly administer and automate many tasks inside of the Microsoft business intelligence products, such as Integration Services and Analysis Services. Developers will find that Chapter 8 is very useful, as it covers how to administer the development features, such as SQL CLR. Chapter 9 explains how to secure your SQL Server from many common threats and how to create logins and users. Chapter 10 covers how to create a SQL Server project and do proper change management in promoting your scripts through the various environments. It also covers the Policy-Based Management framework in SQL Server. Chapters 11 through 15 make up the performance tuning part of the book. Chapter 11 discusses how to choose the right hardware configuration for your SQL Server in order to achieve optimal performance. After the hardware and operating system is configured, Chapter 12 shows you how to optimize your SQL Server instance for the best performance. Chapter 13 describes how to monitor your SQL Server instance for problematic issues such as blocking and locking. Chapters 14 and 15 discuss how to optimize the T-SQL that accesses your tables and then how to index your tables appropriately. Chapters 16 through 20 consist of the high-availability chapters of the book. Chapter 16 covers how to use the various forms of replication, while database mirroring is covered in Chapter 17. Classic issues and best practices with backing up and recovering your database are discussed in Chapter 18. Chapter 19 dives deeply into the role of log shipping in your high-availability strategy, and Chapter 20 presents a step-by-step guide to clustering your SQL Server and Windows 2008 server. This edition of the book covers all the same great information we covered in the last book, and we've added loads of new content for SQL Server 2008, which adds numerous new features to improve the DBA's life. In short, the new version of SQL Server focuses on improving your efficiency, the scale of your server, and the performance of your environment, so you can do more in much less time, and with fewer resources and people. This means you can manage many servers at one time using Policy-Based Management, scale your I/O load using compression, and collect valuable information about your environment using data collectors, to name just a few key new features. To follow the examples in this book, you will need to have SQL Server 2008 installed. If you wish to learn how to administer the business intelligence features, you need to have Analysis Services and the Integration Services components installed. You need a machine that can support the minimum hardware requirements to run SQL Server 2008; and you also need the AdventureWorks2008 and AdventureWorksDW2008 databases installed. Instructions for accessing these databases can be found in the ReadMe file on this book's Web site. Some features in this book (especially in the high-availability part) require the Enterprise or Developer Edition of SQL Server. If you do not have this edition, you will still be able to follow through some of the examples in the chapter with Standard Edition.

Extend your programming skills with a comprehensive study of the key features of SQL Server 2008. Delve into the new core capabilities, get practical guidance from expert developers, and put their code samples to work. This is a must-read for Microsoft .NET and SQL Server developers who work with data access—at the database, business logic, or presentation levels. Discover how to: Query complex data with powerful Transact-SQL enhancements Use new, non-relational features: hierarchical tables, native file streaming, and geospatial capabilities Exploit XML inside the database to design XML-aware applications Consume and deliver your data using Microsoft LINQ, Entity Framework, and data binding Implement database-level encryption and server auditing Build and maintain data warehouses Use Microsoft Excel to build front ends for OLAP cubes, and MDX to query them Integrate data mining into applications quickly and effectively. Get code samples on the Web.

“The way the information is presented appeals to teachers, hobbyists, web designers—anyone looking for a way to enhance their content by using customized maps.” —Warren Kelly, Pastor “It could become the de-facto tutorial volume for the subject, as well as the classic reference guide.” —Thomas Duff, Lead Developer “This book is written so well and is so easy to follow it’s a joy to go through.” — Daniel McKinnon, Software Engineer KML began as the file format for Google Earth, but it has evolved into a full-fledged international standard for describing any geographic content—the “HTML of geography.” It’s already supported by applications ranging from Microsoft Virtual Earth and NASA WorldWind to Photoshop and AutoCAD. You can do amazing things with KML, and this book will show you how, using practical examples drawn from today’s best online mapping applications. Drawing on her extensive experience with the creators of KML, Wernecke teaches techniques that can be used by everyone from programmers to real estate agents, scientists, students, architects, virtual explorers, and more. Highlights include Incorporating rich content in Placemark balloons Creating overlays that superimpose your images on standard Earth browsers Generating animations that move through Placemarks, Overlays, and Models Controlling and updating map content across the Web Managing large data sets using regions and custom data types Complete KML language reference: elements, types, syntax, file structure, and conventions

Master the foundations of T-SQL with the right balance of conceptual and practical content. Get hands-on guidance—including exercises and code samples—that show you how to develop code to query and modify data. You’ll gain a solid understanding of the T-SQL language and good programming practices, and learn to write more efficient and powerful queries. Discover how to: Apply T-SQL fundamentals, create tables, and define data integrity Understand logical query processing Query multiple tables using joins and subqueries Simplify code and improve maintainability with table expressions Explore pivoting techniques and how to handle grouping sets Write code that modifies data Isolate inconsistent data and address deadlock and blocking scenarios

If you’re a database administrator, you know Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is revolutionizing database development. Get up to speed on SQL Server 2008, impress your boss, and improve your company’s data management — read Microsoft SQL Server 2008 For Dummies! SQL Server 2008 lets you build powerful databases and create database queries that give your organization the information it needs to excel. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 For Dummies helps you build the skills you need to set up, administer, and troubleshoot SQL Server 2008. You’ll be able to: Develop and maintain a SQL Server system Design databases with integrity and efficiency Turn data into information with SQL Server Reporting Services Organize query results, summarizing data with aggregate functions and formatting output Import large quantities of data with SSIS Keep your server running smoothly Protect data from prying eyes Develop and implement a disaster recovery plan Improve performance with database snapshots Automate SQL Server 2008 administration Microsoft SQL Server 2008 For Dummies is a great first step toward becoming a SQL Server 2008 pro!

If you’re in charge of database administration, developing database software, or looking for database solutions for your company, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies can help you get a handle on this extremely popular relational database management system. Here you’ll find what’s new in the latest version; how to choose and install the right variation for your needs; how to monitor, maintain, and protect your data; and what it takes to keep your database healthy. You’ll discover how to: Build and maintain tables Design a database and communicate with it Retrieve, analyze, and report data Build solid, robust database applications Use the SQL Server Optimizer and Query Designer Navigate SQL Server with Visual Studio Develop useful reports with the Report Builder and Report Designer Create Business Intelligence solutions with Business Intelligence Development Studio Configure your server and perform major administrative tasks To help you quickly find what you need, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies is divided into nine minibooks: Essential Concepts Designing and Using Databases Interacting With Your Data Database Programming Reporting Services Analysis Services Performance Tips and Tricks Database Administration Appendixes Microsoft SQL Server 2008 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies gets you started, helps you solve problems, and will even answer your questions down the road!

Get the practical, pocket-sized guide for IT professionals who need to administer, maintain, and optimize SQL Server 2008. Written by award-winning author William Stanek, this portable reference delivers essential details for using SQL Server 2008 to help protect and manage your company s data whether automating tasks, creating indexes and views, performing backups and recovery, replicating transactions, tuning performance, managing server activity, importing and exporting data, or performing other key tasks. Featuring quick-reference tables, lists, and step-by-step instructions, this handy, one-stop guide provides fast, accurate answers on the spot whether you re at your desk or in the field! Key Book Benefits Provides fast facts and immediate reference for administering SQL Server 2008 Delivers must-know details for taking advantage of the improved scalability, security features, and management tools in SQL Server 2008 Features concise tables, easy-to-scan lists, and step-by-step instructions for fast answers, wherever you need them

SQL for the Real World Don’t just learn “generic” SQL. Learn SQL to get results with the world’s top database platforms–Oracle for the enterprise and Microsoft Access for the desktop. Based on John Patrick’s hands-on SQL course at the University of California, Berkeley Extension, this book shows exactly how to retrieve the data you want, when you need it, in any application–from ad hoc reports to the data warehouse. Thoroughly updated for the newest versions of Oracle, Access, and the SQL standard, this book contains more exercises, techniques, and solutions than ever before. You’ll learn exactly how to write SQL queries that are easy to understand, verify, modify, and extend–even if you’ve never worked with databases before. teaches you how to SQL Fundamentals,Third Edition, Build simple statements to retrieve, store, or modify data Craft complex queries that draw information from multiple tables Sort and summarize your data just the way you want it Create and edit your own tables Protect the integrity of your data Create more efficient, high-performance queries Work with unions, subqueries, self joins, cross joins, inner joins, and outer joins Use the Oracle Data Dictionary About the Web Site The accompanying Web site, https://www.box.com/shared/ylbckg2fn0 , contains all the SQL code and tables from the book, including the full databases for several versions of Access and code for building the corresponding Oracle databases. It also provides solutions to many of the book’s problems and an open area for discussions with the author and other readers.

Take full advantage of everything SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services has to offer and deliver customizable, web–enabled reports across your business at a reasonable cost. Learn best–practices from professionals who use SQL Server Reporting Services daily to deliver solutions to paying clients and gain the competitive edge on using Microsoft's enterprise–level reporting platform. Provides best–practices for using Reporting Services Written by practicing professionals with paying clients Your key to delivering business intelligence across the enterprise

The Definitive Guide to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Create and deliver data-rich reports across the enterprise using this complete server-based reporting solution. Written by a member of the original Reporting Services development team, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services covers the entire report-building and distribution process, including data extraction, integration with desktop and Web applications, and end-user access. The book explains how to maximize all of the powerful features, including the new Tablix data format, as well as enhanced performance, scalability, and visualization capabilities. Install, configure, and customize SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Create SELECT queries to extract data Generate reports from the Report Wizard and from scratch Add charts, images, and gauges Build reusable report templates Use the new Tablix data format to create reports with any structure Export reports to Word, Excel, PDF, HTML, XML, and other formats Enable end-user access to reports via the Report Server and its Report Manager web interface

“ explains the concepts and practice of data modeling with a clarity that makes the technology accessible to anyone building databases and data-driven applications. A Developer’s Guide to Data Modeling for SQL Server “Eric Johnson and Joshua Jones combine a deep understanding of the science of data modeling with the art that comes with years of experience. If you’re new to data modeling, or find the need to brush up on its concepts, this book is for you.” — Peter Varhol, Executive Editor, Redmond Magazine Model SQL Server Databases That Work Better, Do More, and Evolve More Smoothly Effective data modeling is essential to ensuring that your databases will perform well, scale well, and evolve to meet changing requirements. However, if you’re modeling databases to run on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or 2005, theoretical or platform-agnostic data modeling knowledge isn’t enough: models that don’t reflect SQL Server’s unique real-world strengths and weaknesses often lead to disastrous performance. is a practical, SQL Server-specific guide to data modeling for every developer, architect, and administrator. This book offers you invaluable start-to-finish guidance for designing new databases, redesigning existing SQL Server data models, and migrating databases from other platforms. A Developer’s Guide to Data Modeling for SQL Server You’ll begin with a concise, practical overview of the core data modeling techniques. Next, you’ll walk through requirements gathering and discover how to convert requirements into effective SQL Server logical models. Finally, you’ll systematically transform those logical models into physical models that make the most of SQL Server’s extended functionality. All of this book’s many examples are available for download from a companion Web site. This book enables you to Understand your data model’s physical elements, from storage to referential integrity Provide programmability via stored procedures, user-defined functions, triggers, and .NET CLR integration Normalize data models, one step at a time Gather and interpret requirements more effectively Learn an effective methodology for creating logical models Overcome modeling problems related to entities, attribute, data types, storage overhead, performance, and relationships Create physical models—from establishing naming guidelines through implementing business rules and constraints Use SQL Server’s unique indexing capabilities, and overcome their limitations Create abstraction layers that enhance security, extensibility, and flexibility

SQL for Microsoft Access (2nd Edition) provides a guide to getting the most out of Microsoft Access through the use of Structured Query Language. Step-by-step examples demonstrate how to use SQL script to create tables, add records to tables, and retrieve and manage records. Readers will also learn about calculated fields, Access projects, and the integration of SQL script in VBA and ASP code. Explore the relational database structure and the basics of SQL. Understand how table joins, unions, and subqueries are used to retrieve records from multiple tables simultaneously. Learn how to filter records and group data. Discover how to create parameter queries that prompt users for data. Test your knowledge and comprehension with the end-of-chapter quizzes and projects.

“If you want to understand the future before it happens, you’ll love this book. If you want to change the future before it happens to you, this book is required reading.” – Reed Hundt, former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission “There is no simpler or clearer statement of the radical change that digital technologies will bring, nor any book that better prepares one for thinking about the next steps.” – Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School and Author of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace “ Blown to Bits will blow you away. In highly accessible and always fun prose, it explores all the nooks and crannies of the digital universe, exploring not only how this exploding space works but also what it means.” – Debora Spar, President of Barnard College, Author of Ruling the Waves and The Baby Business “This is a wonderful book–probably the best since Hal Varian and Carl Schultz wrote Digital Rules. The authors are engineers, not economists. The result is a long, friendly talk with the genie, out of the lamp, and willing to help you avoid making the traditional mistake with that all-important third wish.” – David Warsh, Author of Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations “ Blown to Bits is one of the clearest expositions I’ve seen of the social and political issues arising from the Internet. Its remarkably clear explanations of how the Net actually works lets the hot air out of some seemingly endless debates. You’ve made explaining this stuff look easy. Congratulations!” – David Weinberger, Coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto and Author of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. “ Blown to Bits is a timely, important, and very readable take on how information is produced and consumed today, and more important, on the approaching sea change in the way that we as a society deal with the consequences.” – Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology, Google, Inc. “This book gives an overview of the kinds of issues confronting society as we become increasingly dependent on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Every informed citizen should read this book and then form their own opinion on these and related issues. And after reading this book you will rethink how (and even whether) you use the Web to form your opinions…” – James S. Miller, Senior Director for Technology Policy and Strategy, Microsoft Corporation “Most writing about the digital world comes from techies writing about technical matter for other techies or from pundits whose turn of phrase greatly exceeds their technical knowledge. In Blown to Bits, experts in computer science address authoritatively the practical issues in which we all have keen interest.” – Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Author of Multiple Intelligences and Changing Minds “Regardless of your experience with computers, Blown to Bits provides a uniquely entertaining and informative perspective from the computing industry’s greatest minds. A fascinating, insightful and entertaining book that helps you understand computers and their impact on the world in a whole new way. This is a rare book that explains the impact of the digital explosion in a way that everyone can understand and, at the same time, challenges experts to think in new ways.” – Anne Margulies, Assistant Secretary for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts “ Blown to Bits is fun and fundamental. What a pleasure to see real teachers offering such excellent framework for students in a digital age to explore and understand their digital environment, code and law, starting with the insight of Claude Shannon. I look forward to you teaching in an open online school.” – Professor Charles Nesson, Harvard Law School, Founder, Berkman Center for Internet and Society “To many of us, computers and the Internet are magic. We make stuff, send stuff, receive stuff, and buy stuff. It’s all pointing, clicking, copying, and pasting. But it’s all mysterious. This book explains in clear and comprehensive terms how all this gear on my desk works and why we should pay close attention to these revolutionary changes in our lives. It’s a brilliant and necessary work for consumers, citizens, and students of all ages.” – Siva Vaidhyanathan, cultural historian and media scholar at the University of Virginia and author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity “The world has turned into the proverbial elephant and we the blind men. The old and the young among us risk being controlled by, rather than in control of, events and technologies. Blown to Bits is a remarkable and essential Rosetta Stone for beginning to figure out how all of the pieces of the new world we have just begun to enter–law, technology, culture, information–are going to fit together. Will life explode with new possibilities, or contract under pressure of new horrors? The precipice is both exhilarating and frightening. Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis, together, have ably managed to describe the elephant. Readers of this compact book describing the beginning stages of a vast human adventure will be one jump ahead, for they will have a framework on which to hang new pieces that will continue to appear with remarkable speed. To say that this is a ‘must read’ sounds trite, but, this time, it’s absolutely true.” – Harvey Silverglate, criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer and writer Every day, billions of photographs, news stories, songs, X-rays, TV shows, phone calls, and emails are being scattered around the world as sequences of zeroes and ones: bits. We can’t escape this explosion of digital information and few of us want to–the benefits are too seductive. The technology has enabled unprecedented innovation, collaboration, entertainment, and democratic participation. But the same engineering marvels are shattering centuries-old assumptions about privacy, identity, free expression, and personal control as more and more details of our lives are captured as digital data. Can you control who sees all that personal information about you? Can email be truly confidential, when nothing seems to be private? Shouldn’t the Internet be censored the way radio and TV are? Is it really a federal crime to download music? When you use Google or Yahoo! to search for something, how do they decide which sites to show you? Do you still have free speech in the digital world? Do you have a voice in shaping government or corporate policies about any of this? Blown to Bits offers provocative answers to these questions and tells intriguing real-life stories. This book is a wake-up call to the human consequences of the digital explosion. Preface xiii Chapter 1: Digital Explosion: Why Is It Happening, and What Is at Stake? 1 Chapter 2: Naked in the Sunlight: Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned 19 Chapter 3: Ghosts in the Machine: Secrets and Surprises of Electronic Documents 73 Chapter 4: Needles in the Haystack: Google and Other Brokers in the Bits Bazaar 109 Chapter 5: Secret Bits: How Codes Became Unbreakable 161 Chapter 6: Balance Toppled: Who Owns the Bits? 195 Chapter 7: You Can’t Say That on the Internet: Guarding the Frontiers of Digital Expression 229 Chapter 8: Bits in the Air: Old Metaphors, New Technologies, and Free Speech 259 Conclusion: After the Explosion 295 Appendix: The Internet as System and Spirit 301 Endnotes 317 Index 347

This book is primarily a practical reference book for professional XSLT developers. It assumes no previous knowledge of the language, and many developers have used it as their first introduction to XSLT; however, it is not structured as a tutorial, and there are other books on XSLT that provide a gentler approach for beginners. The book does assume a basic knowledge of XML, HTML, and the architecture of the Web, and it is written for experienced programmers. There's no assumption that you know any particular language such as Java or Visual Basic, just that you recognize the concepts that all programming languages have in common. The book is suitable both for XSLT 1.0 users upgrading to XSLT 2.0, and for newcomers to XSLT. The book is also equally suitable whether you work in the Java or .NET world. As befits a reference book, a key aim is that the coverage should be comprehensive and authoritative. It is designed to give you all the details, not just an overview of the 20 percent of the language that most people use 80 percent of the time. It's designed so that you will keep coming back to the book whenever you encounter new and challenging programming tasks, not as a book that you skim quickly and then leave on the shelf. If you like detail, you will enjoy this book; if not, you probably won't. But as well as giving the detail, this book aims to explain the concepts, in some depth. It's therefore a book for people who not only want to use the language but who also want to understand it at a deep level. The book aims to tell you everything you need to know about the XSLT 2.0 language. It gives equal weight to the things that are new in XSLT 2.0 and the things that were already present in version 1.0. The book is about the language, not about specific products. However, there are appendices about Saxon (the author's own implementation of XSLT 2.0), about the Altova XSLT 2.0 implementation, and about the Java and Microsoft APIs for controlling XSLT transformations, which will no doubt be upgraded to handle XSLT 2.0 as well as 1.0. A third XSLT 2.0 processor, Gestalt, was released shortly before the book went to press, too late to describe it in any detail. But the experience of XSLT 1.0 is that there has been a very high level of interoperability between different XSLT processors, and if you can use one of them, then you can use them all. In the previous edition we split XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 into separate volumes. The idea was that some readers might be interested in XPath alone. However, many bought the XSLT 2.0 book without its XPath companion and were left confused as a result; so this time, the material is back together. The XPath reference information is in self-contained chapters, so it should still be accessible when you use XPath in contexts other than XSLT. The book does not cover XSL Formatting Objects, a big subject in its own right. Nor does it cover XML Schemas in any detail. If you want to use these important technologies in conjunction with XSLT, there are other books that do them justice. This book contains twenty chapters and eight appendixes (the last of which is a glossary) organized into four parts. The following section outlines what you can find in each part, chapter, and appendix. Part I: Foundations: The first part of the book covers essential concepts. You should read these before you start coding. If you ignore this advice, as most people do, then you read them when you get to that trough of despair when you find it impossible to make the language do anything but the most trivial tasks. XSLT is different from other languages, and to make it work for you, you need to understand how it was designed to be used. Chapter 1: XSLT in Context: This chapter explains how XSLT fits into the big picture: how the language came into being and how it sits alongside other technologies. It also has a few simple coding examples to keep you alert. Chapter 2: The XSLT Processing Model: This is about the architecture of an XSLT processor: the inputs, the outputs, and the data model. Understanding the data model is perhaps the most important thing that distinguishes an XSLT expert from an amateur; it may seem like information that you can't use immediately, but it's knowledge that will stop you making a lot of stupid mistakes. Chapter 3: Stylesheet Structure: XSLT development is about writing stylesheets, and this chapter takes a bird's eye view of what stylesheets look like. It explains the key concepts of rule-based programming using templates, and explains how to undertake programming-in-the-large by structuring your application using modules and pipelines. Chapter 4: Stylesheets and Schemas: A key innovation in XSLT 2.0 is that stylesheets can take advantage of knowledge about the structure of your input and output documents, provided in the form of an XML Schema. This chapter provides a quick overview of XML Schema to describe its impact on XSLT development. Not everyone uses schemas, and you can skip this chapter if you fall into that category. Chapter 5: The Type System: XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0 offer strong typing as an alternative to the weak typing approach of the 1.0 languages. This means that you can declare the types of your variables, functions, and parameters, and use this information to get early warning of programming errors. This chapter explains the data types available and the mechanisms for creating user-defined types. Part II: XSLT and XPath Reference: This section of the book contains reference material, organized in the hope that you can easily find what you need when you need it. It's not designed for sequential reading, though you might well want to leaf through the pages to discover what's there. Chapter 6: XSLT Elements: This monster chapter lists all the XSLT elements you can use in a stylesheet, in alphabetical order, giving detailed rules for the syntax and semantics of each element, advice on usage, and examples. This is probably the part of the book you will use most frequently as you become an expert XSLT user. It's a "no stone unturned" approach, based on the belief that as a professional developer you need to know what happens when the going gets tough, not just when the wind is in your direction. Chapter 7: XPath Fundamentals: This chapter explains the basics of XPath: the low-level constructs such as literals, variables, and function calls. It also explains the context rules, which describe how the evaluation of XPath expressions depends on the XSLT processing context in which they appear. Chapter 8: XPath: Operators on Items: XPath offers the usual range of operators for performing arithmetic, boolean comparison, and the like. However, these don't always behave exactly as you would expect, so it's worth reading this chapter to see what's available and how it differs from the last language that you used. Chapter 9: XPath: Path Expressions: Path expressions are what make XPath special; they enable you to navigate around the structure of an XML document. This chapter explains the syntax of path expressions, the 13 axes that you can use to locate the nodes that you need, and associated operators such as union, intersection, and difference. Chapter 10: XPath: Sequence Expressions: Unlike XPath 1.0, in version 2.0 all values are sequences (singletons are just a special case). Some of the most important operators in XPath 2.0 are those that manipulate sequences, notably the "for" expression, which translates one sequence into another by applying a mapping. Chapter 11: XPath: Type Expressions: The type system was explained in Chapter 5; this chapter explains the operations that you can use to take advantage of types. This includes the "cast" operation which is used to convert values from one type to another.A big part of this chapter is devoted to the detailed rules for how these conversions are done. Chapter 12: XSLT Patterns: This chapter returns from XPath to a subject that's specific to XSLT. Patterns are used to define template rules, the essence of XSLT's rule-based programming approach. The reason for explaining them now is that the syntax and semantics of patterns depends strongly on the corresponding rules for XPath expressions. Chapter 13: The Function Library: XPath 2.0 includes a library of functions that can be called from any XPath expression; XSLT 2.0 extends this with some additional functions that are available only when XPath is used within XSLT. The library has grown immensely since XPath 1.0. This chapter provides a single alphabetical reference for all these functions. Chapter 14: Regular Expressions: Processing of text is an area where XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 are much more powerful than version 1.0, and this is largely through the use of constructs that exploit regular expressions. If you're familiar with regexes from languages such as Perl, this chapter tells you how XPath regular expressions differ. If you're new to the subject, it explains it from first principles. Chapter 15: Serialization: Serialization in XSLT means the ability to generate a textual XML document from the tree structure that's manipulated by a stylesheet. This isn't part of XSLT processing proper, so (following W3C's lead) it's separated it into its own chapter. You can control serialization from the stylesheet using an declaration, but many products also allow you to control it directly via an API. Part III: Exploitation: The final section of the book is advice and guidance on how to take advantage of XSLT to write real applications. It's intended to make you not just a competent XSLT coder, but a competent designer too. The best way of learning is by studying the work of others, so the emphasis here is on practical case studies. Chapter 16: Extensibility: This chapter describes the "hooks" provided in the XSLT specification to allow vendors and users to plug in extra functionality. The way this works will vary from one implementation to another, so we can't cover all possibilities, but one important aspect that the chapter does cover is how to use such extensions and still keep your code portable. Chapter 17: Stylesheet Design Patterns: This chapter explores a number of design and coding patterns for XSLT programming, starting with the simplest "fill-in-the-blanks" stylesheet, and extending to the full use of recursive programming in the functional programming style, which is needed to tackle problems of any computational complexity. This provides an opportunity to explain the thinking behind functional programming and the change in mindset needed to take full advantage of this style of development. Chapter 18: Case Study: XMLSpec: XSLT is often used for rendering documents, so where better to look for a case study than the stylesheets used by the W3C to render the XML and XSLT specifications, and others in the same family, for display on the web? The resulting stylesheets are typical of those you will find in any publishing organization that uses XML to develop a series of documents with a compatible look-and-feel. Chapter 19: Case Study: A Family Tree: Displaying a family tree is another typical XSLT application. This example with semi-structured data—a mixture of fairly complex data and narrative text—that can be presented in many different ways for different audiences. It also shows how to tackle another typical XSLT problem, conversion of the data into XML from a legacy text-based format. As it happens, this uses nearly all the important new XSLT 2.0 features in one short stylesheet. But another aim of this chapter is to show a collection of stylesheets doing different jobs as part of a complete application. Chapter 20: Case Study: Knight's Tour: Finding a route around a chessboard where a knight visits every square without ever retracing its steps might sound a fairly esoteric application for XSLT, but it's a good way of showing how even the most complex of algorithms are within the capabilities of the language. You may not need to tackle this particular problem, but if you want to construct an SVG diagram showing progress against your project plan, then the problems won't be that dissimilar. Part IV: Appendices: Appendix A: XPath 2.0 Syntax Summary: Collects the XPath grammar rules and operator precedences into one place for ease of reference. Appendix B: Error Codes: A list of all the error codes defined in the XSLT and XPath language specifications, with brief explanations to help you understand what's gone wrong. Appendix C: Backward Compatibility: The list of things you need to look out for when converting applications from XSLT 1.0. Appendix D: Microsoft XSLT Processors: Although the two Microsoft XSLT processors don't yet support XSLT 2.0, we thought many readers would find it useful to have a quick summary here of the main objects and methods used in their APIs. Appendix E: JAXP: the Java API for XML Processing: JAXP is an interface rather than a product. Again, it doesn't have explicit support yet for XSLT 2.0, but Java programmers will often be using it in XSLT 2.0 projects, so the book includes an overview of the classes and methods available. Appendix F: Saxon: At the time of writing Saxon (developed by the author of this book) provides the most comprehensive implementation of XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0, so its interfaces and extensions are covered in some detail. Appendix G: Altova: Altova, the developers of XML Spy, have an XSLT 2.0 processor that can be used either as part of the development environment or as a freestanding component. This appendix gives details of its interfaces. Appendix H: Glossary Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

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