One might think that the climax of the 10-volume Sandman series would come in the last book, or even the second to last. But indeed the heart and soul of Neil Gaiman's magnum opus lies here in Brief Lives. It could be because one of the most central mysteries—that of the Sandman's missing brother—is revealed here (in fact, the plot of this volume is the search for this member of the Endless). It could be because everything that comes after this volume, however surprising or unexpected, is inevitable. But it's more because this is a story about mortality and loss, the difficulty of change, the purpose of remembering, the purpose of forgetting, and the importance of humanity. If you have wanted to find out what all the good buzz on this great comic book series is about and haven't read any Gaiman before, don't be turned off by this volume's pivotal position in the larger story of the Sandman series. This book might actually operate better as a stand-alone story, in that its depth and compassion are more condensed, pure, and brief. —Jim Pascoe

This classic work shows a care and understanding of C++ that only Bjarne Stroustrup, the designer of the language, can achieve. It also conveys the punctilious and sometimes suffocating detail that only Stroustrup would desire to communicate. The novice programmer will have difficulty distinguishing between the essential and the dispensable material. However, experienced C++ programmers will appreciate the reference manual portion of the book, which contains an exact definition of C++ that even numerous examples cannot express. Stroustrup's book has several chapters on classes and the reference manual component of the book contains the complete grammar of classes. This is a book that every experienced C++ programmer needs to own.

Tackles the challenge of writing compelling Tablet PC software on two fronts. Details decades of usability research into pen-based computing to present an authoritative discussion of the optimal design of pen-based user interfaces. Provides an in-depth exposition of the Tablet PC Ink SDK, complete with tips and tricks. Softcover.

Tackles the challenge of writing compelling Tablet PC software on two fronts. Details decades of usability research into pen-based computing to present an authoritative discussion of the optimal design of pen-based user interfaces. Provides an in-depth exposition of the Tablet PC Ink SDK, complete with tips and tricks. Softcover.

Tackles the challenge of writing compelling Tablet PC software on two fronts. Details decades of usability research into pen-based computing to present an authoritative discussion of the optimal design of pen-based user interfaces. Provides an in-depth exposition of the Tablet PC Ink SDK, complete with tips and tricks. Softcover.

Tackles the challenge of writing compelling Tablet PC software on two fronts. Details decades of usability research into pen-based computing to present an authoritative discussion of the optimal design of pen-based user interfaces. Provides an in-depth exposition of the Tablet PC Ink SDK, complete with tips and tricks. Softcover.

This book considers how agencies are currently figured at the human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Contrary to the apparent enlivening of objects promised by the sciences of the artificial, the author proposes that the rhetorics and practices of those sciences work to obscure the performative nature of both persons and things. The question then shifts from debates over the status of human-like machines, to that of how humans and machines are enacted as similar or different in practice, and with what theoretical, practical and political consequences. Drawing on recent scholarship across the social sciences, humanities and computing, the author argues for research aimed at tracing the differences within specific sociomaterial arrangements without resorting to essentialist divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are constituted.

Abelson and Sussman's classic Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programsteaches readers how to program by employing the tools of abstraction and modularity. The authors' central philosophy is that programming is the task of breaking large problems into small ones. The book spends a great deal of time considering both this decomposition and the process of knitting the smaller pieces back together.

The authors employ this philosophy in their writing technique. The text asks the broad question "What is programming?" Having come to the conclusion that programming consists of procedures and data, the authors set off to explore the related questions of "What is data?" and "What is a procedure?"

The authors build up the simple notion of a procedure to dizzying complexity. The discussion culminates in the description of the code behind the programming language Scheme. The authors finish with examples of how to implement some of the book's concepts on a register machine. Through this journey, the reader not only learns how to program, but also how to think about programming.

The pliant protagonist of Italo Svevo's 1923 classic Confessions of Zenois, among other things, a bumbling businessman, a guilt-ridden adulterer, and a hardcore nicotine addict. What Zeno Cosini most definitely is notis wordless. For the novel is in fact a dense and comically excruciating exercise in self-revelation, undertaken by the narrator as part of his psychoanalytic treatment. Zeno never finds a cure for his affliction, which seems to be a strain of continental angst. Yet his reflections remain as audacious as they are exhaustive—and, much of the time, masterfully absorbing.

As we soon discover, Zeno is a master is the convoluted rationalization. He concocts numerous reasons why his "last cigarette" needn't truly become his last; he strives endlessly to convince himself that he loves his wife; he tirelessly justifies an awkward affair, all the while vacillating between a paralysis of action and a lazy submission. "My resolutions are less drastic and, as I grow older, I become more indulgent to my weaknesses," Zeno proclaims early on. (Later he backpedals even further, confessing that his "resolutions existed for their own sake and had no practical results whatever.") As a last-ditch tactic, he transmutes his disappointments into inevitabilities—an act of creative bookkeeping that becomes steadily creepier as the narrative unfolds.

There are times, to be sure, when Zeno seems to grasp that life isn't merely feints and games, that subterfuge and dark motivation aren't the whole of human transaction. Yet he always retreats back into his extravagant, consoling fantasies. Perhaps that's why Svevo's book still has the power to discomfit: Zeno's ingenious whitewashing of an indifferent world feels alarmingly like the fictions we tell ourselves on a daily basis. —Ben Guterson