elsevier science technology united states san francisco (59 risultati)

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. Blondie24 tells the story of a computer that taught itself to play checkers far better than its creators ever could by using a program that emulated the basic principles of Darwinian evolution--random variation and natural selection-- to discover on its own how to excel at the game. Unlike Deep Blue, the celebrated chess machine that beat Garry Kasparov, the former world champion chess player, this evolutionary program didn't have access to strategies employed by human grand masters, or to databases of moves for the endgame moves, or to other human expertise about the game of chekers. With only the most rudimentary information programmed into its "brain," Blondie24 (the program's Internet username) created its own means of evaluating the complex, changing patterns of pieces that make up a checkers game by evolving artificial neural networks---mathematical models that loosely describe how a brain works. It's fitting that Blondie24 should appear in 2001, the year when we remember Arthur C. Clarke's prediction that one day we would succeed in creating a thinking machine. In this compelling narrative, David Fogel, author and co-creator of Blondie24, describes in convincing detail how evolutionary computation may help to bring us closer to Clarke's vision of HAL. Along the way, he gives readers an inside look into the fascinating history of AI and poses provocative questions about its future. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. Learning Maya, the world's leading 3D animation and effects package, is a challenge, especially for those who want to master Maya's versatile programming features in addition to its built-in tools. Finally, here is a practical, step-by-step guide that shows how to use Maya to its fullest potential, beginning with the basics. Readers of Complete Maya Programming will first gain a thorough understanding of Maya's inner workings, and then learn how to customize and extend Maya with scripts and plugins that take control and productivity to new levels. Users new to programming can apply Maya's easy scripting language MEL (Maya Embedded Language), while more advanced users can work with the C++ API (Application Progamming Interface). Both a fundamental tutorial for Maya beginners and a solid reference for experienced developers, Complete Maya Programming is every user's guide to Maya mastery. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. Search is not just a box and ten blue links. Search is a journey: an exploration where what we encounter along the way changes what we seek. But in order to guide people along this journey, designers must understand both the art and science of search.In Designing the Search Experience, authors Tony Russell-Rose and Tyler Tate weave together the theories of information seeking with the practice of user interface design. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. Joe Celko challenges you with his trickiest puzzles and then helps you conquer them with a variety of solutions and explanations. The puzzles are a compilation from Joe's columns in DBMS and Database Programming & Design magazines. They include new, never-before-published puzzles plus new solutions and extra background for previously published puzzles. In his usual entertaining and informative style, Joe demonstrates the thought processes that are involved in attacking a problem from an SQL perspective. Through the practical, enjoyable puzzles, he introduces immediately useful new techniques and applications for SQL programming, and shows the database programmer how to write and use non-procedural programs. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. Web site design and development continues to become more sophisticated. An important part of this maturity originates with well-laid-out and well-written content. Ginny Redish is a world-renowned expert on information design and how to produce clear writing in plain language for the web. All of the invaluable information that she shared in the first edition is included with numerous new examples. New information on content strategy for web sites, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media make this once again the only book you need to own to optimize your writing for the web. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. "Redish has done her homework and created a thorough overview of the issues in writing for the Web. Ironically, I must recommend that you read her every word so that you can find out why your customers won't read very many words on your website -- and what to do about it."-- Jakob Nielsen, Principal, Nielsen Norman GroupThere are at least twelve billion web pages out there. Twelve billion voices talking, but saying mostly nothing. If just 1% of those pages followed Ginnys practical, clear advice, the world would be a better place. Fortunately, you can follow her advice for 100% of your own sites pages, so pick up a copy of Letting Go of the Words and start communicating effectively today.--Lou Rosenfeld, co-author, Information Architecture for the World Wide WebOn the web, whether on the job or at home, we usually want to grab information and use it quickly. We go to the web to get answers to questions or to complete tasks to gather information, reading only what we need. We are all too busy to read much on the web.This book helps you write successfully for web users. It offers strategy, process, and tactics for creating or revising content for the web. It helps you plan, organize, write, design, and test web content that will make web users come back again and again to your site. Learn how to create usable and useful content for the web from the master Ginny Redish. Ginny has taught and mentored hundreds of writers, information designers, and content owners in the principles and secrets of creating web information that is easy to scan, easy to read, and easy to use. This practical, informative book will help anyone creating web content do it better.Features* Clearly-explained guidelines with full color illustrations and examples from actual web sites throughout the book. * Written in easy-to-read style with many "befores" and "afters."* Specific guidelines for web-based press releases, legal notices, and other documents.* Tips on making web content accessible for people with special needs.Janice (Ginny) Redish has been helping clients and colleagues communicate clearly for more than 20 years. For the past ten years, her focus has been helping people create usable and useful web sites. She is co-author of two classic books on usability: A Practical Guide to Usability Testing (with Joseph Dumas), and User and Task Analysis for Interface Design (with JoAnn Hackos), and is the recipient of many awards. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. An effective introduction to SQL, and a comprehensive reference for years to come. As the editor of the 1992 standard, Jim Melton is an authority on the language and its new features. Using a highly readable, conversational style, he and Alan Simon clearly present the power of SQL. They describe practical methods of using SQL to solve problems, advanced SQL query expressions, dynamic SQL, transaction models, and database design. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. User Experience Management: Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams deals with specific issues associated with managing diverse user experience (UX) skills, often in corporations with a largely engineering culture. Part memoir and part handbook, it explains what it means to lead a UX team and examines the management issues of hiring, inheriting, terminating, layoffs, interviewing and candidacy, and downsizing. The book offers guidance on building and creating a UX team, as well as equipping and focusing the team. It also considers ways of nurturing the team, from coaching and performance reviews to conflict management and creating work-life balance. Furthermore, it discusses the essential skills needed in leading an effective team and developing a communication plan. This book will be valuable to new managers and leaders, more experienced managers, and anyone who is leading or managing UX groups or who is interested in assuming a leadership role in the future. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. The Designer's Guide to VHDL is both a comprehensive manual for the language and an authoritative reference on its use in hardware design at all levels, from system level down to gate level. Using the IEEE standard for VHDL, the author presents the entire description language and builds a modeling methodology based on successful software engineering techniques. Requiring only a minimal background in programming, this is an excellent tutorial for anyone in computer architecture, digital systems engineering, or CAD. The book is organized so that it can either be read cover to cover for a comprehensive tutorial or be kept deskside as a reference to the language. Each chapter introduces a number of related concepts or language facilities and illustrates each one with examples. Scattered throughout the book are four case studies, which bring together preceding material in the form of extended worked examples. In addition, each chapter is followed by a set of rated exercises. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. Do you spend a lot of time during the design process wondering what users really need? Do you hate those endless meetings where you argue how the interface should work? Have you ever developed something that later had to be completely redesigned? Paper Prototyping can help. Written by a usability engineer with a long and successful paper prototyping history, this book is a practical, how-to guide that will prepare you to create and test paper prototypes of all kinds of user interfaces. You'll see how to simulate various kinds of interface elements and interactions. You'll learn about the practical aspects of paper prototyping, such as deciding when the technique is appropriate, scheduling the activities, and handling the skepticism of others in your organization. Numerous case studies and images throughout the book show you real world examples of paper prototyping at work. Learn how to use this powerful technique to develop products that are more useful, intuitive, efficient, and pleasing: * Save time and money - solve key problems before implementation begins * Get user feedback early - use it to focus the development process * Communicate better - involve development team members from a variety of disciplines * Be more creative - experiment with many ideas before committing to one. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. Spatial Databases is the first unified, in-depth treatment of special techniques for dealing with spatial data, particularly in the field of geographic information systems (GIS). This book surveys various techniques, such as spatial data models, algorithms, and indexing methods, developed to address specific features of spatial data that are not adequately handled by mainstream DBMS technology. The book also reviews commercial solutions to geographic data handling: ArcInfo, ArcView, and Smallworld GISs; and two extensions to the relational model, PostgreSQL and Oracle Spatial. The authors examine these underlying GIS technologies, assess their strengths and weaknesses, and consider specific uses for which each product is best suited. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. The Persona Lifecycle is a field guide exclusively focused on interaction design's most popular new technique. The Persona Lifecycle addresses the "how" of creating effective personas and using those personas to design products that people love. It doesnt just describe the value of personas; it offers detailed techniques and tools related to planning, creating, communicating, and using personas to create great product designs. Moreover, it provides rich examples, samples, and illustrations to imitate and model. Perhaps most importantly, it positions personas not as a panacea, but as a method used to complement other user-centered design (UCD) techniques including scenario-based design, cognitive walkthroughs and user testing. The authors developed the Persona Lifecycle model to communicate the value and practical application of personas to product design and development professionals. This book explores the complete lifecycle of personas, to guide the designer at each stage of product development. It includes a running case study with rich examples and samples that demonstrate how personas can be used in building a product end-to-end. It also presents recommended best practices in techniques, tools, and innovative methods and contains hundreds of relevant stories, commentary, opinions, and case studies from user experience professionals across a variety of domains and industries. This book will be a valuable resource for UCD professionals, including usability practitioners, interaction designers, technical writers, and program managers; programmers/developers who act as the interaction designers for software; and those professionals who work with developers and designers. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. Sketching User Experiences approaches design and design thinking as something distinct that needs to be better understoodby both designers and the people with whom they need to work in order to achieve success with new products and systems. So while the focus is on design, the approach is holistic. Hence, the book speaks to designers, usability specialists, the HCI community, product managers, and business executives. There is an emphasis on balancing the back-end concern with usability and engineering excellence (getting the design right) with an up-front investment in sketching and ideation (getting the right design). Overall, the objective is to build the notion of informed design: molding emerging technology into a form that serves our society and reflects its values. Grounded in both practice and scientific research, Bill Buxtons engaging work aims to spark the imagination while encouraging the use of new techniques, breathing new life into user experience design. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. TCP/IP Sockets in C: Practical Guide for Programmers, Second Edition is a quick and affordable way to gain the knowledge and skills needed to develop sophisticated and powerful web-based applications. The book's focused, tutorial-based approach enables the reader to master the tasks and techniques essential to virtually all client-server projects using sockets in C. This edition has been expanded to include new advancements such as support for IPv6 as well as detailed defensive programming strategies. If you program using Java, be sure to check out this books companion, TCP/IP Sockets in Java: Practical Guide for Programmers, 2nd Edition. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. Data Mining, Second Edition, describes data mining techniques and shows how they work. The book is a major revision of the first edition that appeared in 1999. While the basic core remains the same, it has been updated to reflect the changes that have taken place over five years, and now has nearly double the references. The highlights of this new edition include thirty new technique sections; an enhanced Weka machine learning workbench, which now features an interactive interface; comprehensive information on neural networks; a new section on Bayesian networks; and much more. This text is designed for information systems practitioners, programmers, consultants, developers, information technology managers, specification writers as well as professors and students of graduate-level data mining and machine learning courses. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. Trying to learn Maya programming from the documentation can be daunting whether or not you are a programmer. The first edition of MEL Scripting for Maya Animators earned the reputation as the best introductory book on MEL, Mayas scripting language. Now fully revised and updated, the second edition also includes new features, such as a discussion of global procedures, new chapters on fixing programming bottlenecks, advanced user interface techniques, and optimizing character rigs. New chapters on utility nodes and Maya's Web Panel feature provide new ideas on how to use MEL in applications. This new edition has kept the popular style of the first edition that offered very clear explanations of programming concepts to those without programming experience. A generous collection of code examples and Maya scene files is included on the companion Web site. This is a book for animators, artists, game developers, visual effects developers, and technical directors who want to learn the fundamentals of Maya, how to automate tasks, personalize user interfaces, build custom tools, and solve problems with MEL. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Fair. This landmark revision of the first book to focus on computer architecture as a modern science covers a new generation of architectures and design techniques with a view to the future. It includes increased coverage of pipelining and storage, a comprehensive presentation of caches, and a new chapter on shared memory multiprocessing and network technology. Anyone involved in building computers will profit from the unmatched experience and quantitative approach that Hennessy and Patterson apply to their presentation. A readable copy of the book which may include some defects such as highlighting and notes. Cover and pages may be creased and show discolouration.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. This work combines a strictly scientific approach to human perception with a consistently practical concern for the rules governing the effective visual presentation of information. Readers can apply these principles to optimise visual information for consumption by others. They can also improve their own analyses by adopting display strategies that make data patterns and their significance easier to discern. Because of focuses on the psychological and physiological principles underlying perception, this book transcends the approaches to visual display that have evolved separately in invidual disciplines. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. Get the most from your database applications through clever SQL programming Joe Celko shares his most useful tips and tricks for advanced SQL programming to help the working programmer gain performance and work around system deficiencies. Addressing real problems that people building real applications face, Joe provides new and creative solutions. A noted consultant, lecturer, and columnist for DBMS and Database Programming & Design magazines, Joe uses entertaining anecdotes and "war stories" to provide real-world insight into SQL programming and warn about potential problems. Become an expert programmer This is the first advanced SQL book available that provides a comprehensive presentation of the techniques necessary to help you progress from a casual user of SQL to an expert programmer. Joe uses an informal, conversational writing style to explain why a particular trick works, so the working programmer can apply it directly to his or her own programming needs. Relying primarily on the SQL-89 features that are now supported by commercial RDBMSs, he also includes an extensive discussion of SQL-92, with information on how it's being implemented in current and future database products. The tips and techniques presented here are not product specific, so they allow programmers to maximize any system's performance. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. VHDL is a language for describing digital electronic systems. A vital, efficient step in the system design process, VHDL allows for the design and simulation of a hardware system prior to it actually being manufactured. This new book provides a tutorialintroduction to the fundamental modeling features of VHDL and shows how the features are used for the design of digital systems. Offering the same clear, accessible style as The Designer's Guide to VHDL, The Student's Guide is designed as a main text for introductory VHDL courses, and as a supplementary text for courses that require VHDL-based project work, such as computer architecture, digital design, and digital logic courses. This new condensed text also serves as a quick, self-teaching guide for practicing engineers who need to learn only the basics of VHDL. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. This book introduces a customer-centered approach to business by showing how data gathered from people while they work can drive the definition of a product or process while supporting the needs of teams and their organizations. This is a practical, hands-on guide for anyone trying to design systems that reflect the way customers want to do their work. The authors developed Contextual Design, the method discussed here, through their work with teams struggling to design products and internal systems. In this book, you'll find the underlying principles of the method and how to apply them to different problems, constraints, and organizational situations. Contextual Design enables you to + gather detailed data about how people work and use systems + develop a coherent picture of a whole customer population + generate systems designs from a knowledge of customer work + diagram a set of existing systems, showing their relationships, inconsistencies, redundancies, and omissions. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. Sketching Working Experience: The Workbook provides information about the step-by-step process of the different sketching techniques. It offers methods called design thinking, as a way to think as a user, and sketching, a way to think as a designer. User-experience designers are designers who sketch based on their actions, interactions, and experiences. The book discusses the differences between the normal ways to sketch and sketching used by user-experience designers. It also describes some motivation on why a person should sketch and introduces the sketchbook. The book reviews the different sketching methods and the modules that contain a particular sketching method. It also explains how the sketching methods are used. Readers who are interested in learning, understanding, practicing, and teaching experience design, information design, interface design, and information architecture will find this book relevant. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. From the author's preface: This book is a catalog of the mistakes that I've made while building more than 100 Web sites in the last five years. I wrote it in the hopes that others won't have to repeat those mistakes. For the manager in charge of a Web publication or service, this book gives you the big picture. It is designed to help you to affirmatively make the high-level decisions that determine whether a site will be manageable or unmanageable, profitable or unprofitable, popular or unpopular, reliable or unreliable. I don't expect you to be down in the trenches typing Oracle SQL queries. But you'll learn enough from this book to decide whether in fact you need a database, whom to hire as the high database priest, and whom to allow anywhere near the database. For the literate computer scientist, I hope to expose the beautiful possibilities in Web service design. I want to inspire you to believe that this is the most interesting and exciting area in which we can work. For the working Web designer or programmer, I want to arm you with a new vocabulary and mental framework for building sites. There can be more to life than making a client's bad ideas flesh with PhotoShop and Perl/CGI. For the users of the world, I document a comprehensive open-source approach to building online communities and show a collaborative Web-based way that we can dig ourselves out of our desktop application morass. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Fine. Joe Celko challenges you with his trickiest puzzles and then helps you conquer them with a variety of solutions and explanations. The puzzles are a compilation from Joe's columns in DBMS and Database Programming & Design magazines. They include new, never-before-published puzzles plus new solutions and extra background for previously published puzzles. In his usual entertaining and informative style, Joe demonstrates the thought processes that are involved in attacking a problem from an SQL perspective. Through the practical, enjoyable puzzles, he introduces immediately useful new techniques and applications for SQL programming, and shows the database programmer how to write and use non-procedural programs.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. The free, open-source Processing programming language environment was created at MIT for people who want to develop images, animation, and sound. Based on the ubiquitous Java, it provides an alternative to daunting languages and expensive proprietary software. This book gives graphic designers, artists and illustrators of all stripes a jump start to working with processing by providing detailed information on the basic principles of programming with the language, followed by careful, step-by-step explanations of select advanced techniques.The author teaches computer graphics at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and his book has been developed with a supportive learning experience at its core. From algorithms and data mining to rendering and debugging, it teaches object-oriented programming from the ground up within the fascinating context of interactive visual media.Previously announced as "Pixels, Patterns, and Processing". The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. This is your must-have resource to the theoretical and practical concepts of mobile UX. Youll learn about the concepts and how to apply them in real-world scenarios. Throughout the book, the author provides you with 10 of the most commonly used archetypes in the UX arena to help illustrate what mobile UX is and how you can master it as quickly as possible. First, youll start off learning how to communicate mobile UX flows visually. From there, youll learn about applying and using 10 unique user experience patterns or archetypes for mobile. Finally, youll understand how to prototype and use these patterns to create websites and apps.Whether youre a UX professional looking to master mobility or a designer looking to incorporate the best UX practices into your website, after reading this book, youll be better equipped to maneuver this emerging specialty. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Good. Written by industry thought leaders, Java Web Services Architecture is a no-nonsense guide to web services technologies including SOAP, WSDL, UDDI and the JAX APIs. This book is useful for systems architects and provides many of the practical considerations for implementing web services including authorization, encryption, transactions and the future of Web Services. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. The networking capabilities of the Java platform have been extended considerably since the first edition of the book. This new edition covers version 1.5-1.7, the most current iterations, as well as making the following improvements: The API (application programming interface) reference sections in each chapter, which describe the relevant parts of each class, have been replaced with (i) a summary section that lists the classes and methods used in the code, and (ii) a "gotchas" section that mentions nonobvious or poorly-documented aspects of the objects. In addition, the book covers several new classes and capabilities introduced in the last few revisions of the Java platform. New abstractions to be covered include NetworkInterface, InterfaceAddress, Inet4/6Address, SocketAddress/InetSocketAddress, Executor, and others; extended access to low-level network information; support for IPv6; more complete access to socket options; and scalable I/O. The example code is also modified to take advantage of new language features such as annotations, enumerations, as well as generics and implicit iterators where appropriate. Most Internet applications use sockets to implement network communication protocols. This book's focused, tutorial-based approach helps the reader master the tasks and techniques essential to virtually all client-server projects using sockets in Java. Chapter 1 provides a general overview of networking concepts to allow readers to synchronize the concepts with terminology. Chapter 2 introduces the mechanics of simple clients and servers. Chapter 3 covers basic message construction and parsing. Chapter 4 then deals with techniques used to build more robust clients and servers. Chapter 5 (NEW) introduces the scalable interface facilities which were introduced in Java 1.5, including the buffer and channel abstractions. Chapter 6 discusses the relationship between the programming constructs and the underlying protocol implementations in more detail. Programming concepts are introduced through simple program examples accompanied by line-by-line code commentary that describes the purpose of every part of the program. No other resource presents so concisely or so effectively the material necessary to get up and running with Java sockets programming. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. Authors Jim Jeffers and James Reinders spent two years helping educate customers about the prototype and pre-production hardware before Intel introduced the first Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor. They have distilled their own experiences coupled with insights from many expert customers, Intel Field Engineers, Application Engineers and Technical Consulting Engineers, to create this authoritative first book on the essentials of programming for this new architecture and these new products. This book is useful even before you ever touch a system with an Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor. To ensure that your applications run at maximum efficiency, the authors emphasize key techniques for programming any modern parallel computing system whether based on Intel Xeon processors, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, or other high performance microprocessors. Applying these techniques will generally increase your program performance on any system, and better prepare you for Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and the Intel MIC architecture. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condizione: Very Good. The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence presents an A-to-Z approach for getting the most business intelligence (BI) from a company's data assets or data warehouse. BI is not just a technology or methodology, it is a powerful new management approach that when done right can deliver knowledge, efficiency, better decisions, and profit to almost any organization that uses it. When BI first came on the scene, it promised a lot but often failed to deliver. The missing element was the business-centric focus explained in this book. It shows how you can achieve the promise of BI by connecting it to your organizations strategic goals, culture, and strengths while correcting your BI weaknesses. It provides a practical, process-oriented guide to achieve the full promise of BI; shows how world-class companies used BI to become leaders in their industries; helps senior business and IT executives understand the strategic impact of BI and how they can ensure a strong payoff from their BI investments; and identifies the most common mistakes organizations make in implementing BI. The book also includes a helpful glossary of BI terms; a BI readiness assessment for your organization; and Web links and extensive references for more information. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.