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PalmPilot's popularity is growing and with over a million units sold, the Palm OS dominates the hand-held market. Wired has astutely described Palm's position in a recent article: "On its way to becoming the bestselling hand-held computer of all time, the 3Com PalmPilot has spawned an intense, emotional, and fanatical developer following not seen since the glory days of the Mac." (Wired, 20 Feb. 98).Palm Programming should be eagerly accepted by programmers because the authors worked closely with Palm to ensure that the book is tailored exactly to the needs of the ever-growing group of Palm developers. As nothing but some piecemeal documentation exists currently, this book provides a much needed solution to the Palm developers. In fact, Pal...

Do you think that only professionals with expensive tools and years of experience can work with web graphics? This guide tosses that notion into the trash bin.Painting the Web is the first comprehensive book on web graphics to come along in years, and author Shelley Powers demonstrates how readers of any level can take advantage of the graphics and animation capabilities built into today's powerful browsers. She covers GIFs, JPEGs, and PNGs, raster and vector graphics, CSS, Ajax effects, the canvas objects, SVG, geographical applications, and more -- everything that designers (and non-designers) use to literally paint the Web. More importantly, Shelley's own love of web graphics shines through in every example. Not only can you master the many differ...

What's "real-world programming"?Real-world programming (typically called real-time programming) is programming that interacts in some way with the "real world" of daily life. At one time, real-time systems were confined to very esoteric applications, like rocket guidance systems. Now, they play a role in almost every aspect of life: they control the brakes on your car, video games, automatic bank tellers -- and the disk drive in your computer. It won't be long before mundane devices like toasters and hair dryers have microprocessors built in, to say nothing of multimedia devices that haven't even been invented yet.Real-world applications are characterized by deadlines. If the brake processor in your car doesn't meet a deadline, yo...

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is the next-generation graphics file format for the Web. Designed as an open-source format to replace the proprietary GIF format, PNG is better, smaller, more extensible, and free. Already supported by major software like Macromedia Fireworks, Adobe Photoshop, and Microsoft Office, as well as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, PNG is an elegant and feature-rich image format that has finally achieved broad industry support.PNG: The Definitive Guide addresses the needs of both graphic designers who want to get the most out of the format and programmers who want to add full PNG support to their own applications.In the "Using PNG" section, Roelofs covers Web browsers and servers, image viewers, i...