Computers

Solving complex geospatial problems and delivering solutions has never been easier.

Ready to take your Python knowledge to the next level? Esri Advanced Guide to Python in ArcGIS guides working GIS professionals through integrating Python with ArcGIS capabilities with increasing complexity through each consecutive chapter. Every chapter includes a project that teaches technical skills and problem-solving applicable to practical, job-focused assignments, including understanding client needs, performing market analytics, and managing ArcGIS Online organizations.  

Esri Advanced Guide to Python in ArcGIS uses step-by-step tutorials with an informal, conversational style of writing so you can easily follow and immediately apply the skills explained. Topics include: 

• Designing effective GIS Python solutions 
• ArcPy and ArcGIS API for Python basics 
• Using imagery and GeoAI for advanced analysis 
• Object-oriented programming 
• Delivering work in various formats: Python scripts, Jupyter Notebook, ArcGIS Pro tools, geoprocessing services, and web applications 
• Data engineering and manipulation techniques 
• Managing ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Online, and other portal administration 

Perfect for intermediate to advanced programmers looking to enhance their GIS capabilities, Esri Advanced Guide to Python in ArcGIS will quickly help you become skilled at using Python for geospatial solutions and become more proficient and capable in your work.

Unlock the power of Python in ArcGIS® Pro with this definitive, easy-to-follow guide designed for users with limited programming or scripting experience.

Get started learning to write Python scripts to automate tasks in ArcGIS Pro with Python Scripting for ArcGIS Pro. This book begins with the fundamentals of Python programming and then dives into how to write useful Python scripts that work with spatial data in ArcGIS Pro. You’ll learn how to use geoprocessing tools; describe, create, and update data; and execute specialized tasks. With step-by-step instructions, practical examples, and insightful guidance, you’ll be able to write scripts that will automate and improve your ArcGIS Pro workflows.

This third edition has been revised for ArcGIS Pro 3.2 and Python 3.9.18 and includes updated images; a fully updated chapter 2; and expanded chapters 4, 8, 9, and 10.

The key topics you will learn include:

• Python fundamentals
• Setting up a Python editor
• Automating geoprocessing tasks using ArcPy™
• Exploring and manipulating spatial and tabular data
• Working with geometries using cursors
• Working with rasters and map algebra
• Map scripting
• Debugging and error handling

Helpful points to remember, key terms, and review questions are included at the end of each chapter to reinforce your understanding of Python. Corresponding data and tutorials are available online.

Whether you’re new to Python or already have some experience, Python Scripting for ArcGIS Pro is the go-to resource for learning the versatility of Python coding to solve problems and enhance productivity and efficiency in ArcGIS Pro.

Tackle complex spatial data tasks effortlessly with this easy-to-follow guide to writing specialized Python scripts and developing tools for spatial data in ArcGIS® Pro.

Advanced Python Scripting for ArcGIS Pro follows up on the topics explained in Python Scripting for ArcGIS Pro (Esri Press, 2024) and is now updated for ArcGIS Pro 3.2.

Intended for users who have a good foundation in Python, this book explores how to develop scripts into tools and notebooks to share with others, use third-party packages, and learn other more specialized tasks. By the end of this book, you’ll be confident in writing more advanced scripts, developing them into tools and notebooks, and sharing them with others.

The key topics you will learn include:

• Creating custom functions and classes
• Writing specialized scripts using ArcPy™
• Creating Python script tools and Python toolboxes
• Sharing scripts and tools
• Managing Python packages and environments
• Migrating scripts from Python 2 to 3
• NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib
• Creating and using notebooks
• ArcGIS API for Python and Jupyter Notebook

Helpful points to remember, key terms, and review questions are included at the end of each chapter to reinforce your understanding of Python. Companion data and tutorials are available online.

Packed with advanced techniques and practical examples, Advanced Python Scripting for ArcGIS Pro is perfect for more experienced ArcGIS Pro users who are looking to upgrade their Python skills and enhance their workflows.

A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms

Run a Google search for “Black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why Black women are so sassy” or “why Black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of Black womanhood in modern society.

In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.

An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.

A Next Big Idea Club "Must Read" for December 2023

As all aspects of our social and informational lives increasingly migrate online, the line between what is "real" and what is digitally fabricated grows ever thinner—and that fake content has undeniable real-world consequences. A History of Fake Things on the Internet takes the long view of how advances in technology brought us to the point where faked texts, images, and video content are nearly indistinguishable from what is authentic or true.

Computer scientist Walter J. Scheirer takes a deep dive into the origins of fake news, conspiracy theories, reports of the paranormal, and other deviations from reality that have become part of mainstream culture, from image manipulation in the nineteenth-century darkroom to the literary stylings of large language models like ChatGPT. Scheirer investigates the origins of Internet fakes, from early hoaxes that traversed the globe via Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs), USENET, and a new messaging technology called email, to today's hyperrealistic, AI-generated Deepfakes. An expert in machine learning and recognition, Scheirer breaks down the technical advances that made new developments in digital deception possible, and shares behind-the-screens details of early Internet-era pranks that have become touchstones of hacker lore. His story introduces us to the visionaries and mischief-makers who first deployed digital fakery and continue to influence how digital manipulation works—and doesn't—today: computer hackers, digital artists, media forensics specialists, and AI researchers. Ultimately, Scheirer argues that problems associated with fake content are not intrinsic properties of the content itself, but rather stem from human behavior, demonstrating our capacity for both creativity and destruction.

First place winner in Educational Products at the 2021 International Cartographic Conference

Maps are ubiquitous, yet maps are not made equally, nor are they read equally.

Every map is a product of its maker and its reader, and maps are rarely right or wrong but simply different versions of the truth. The meaning you see in a map can reinforce or challenge your understanding of the theme it represents, and you are much more likely to believe a map if it presents a version of the truth that you believe in already.

But how do you decide what map you want to make? How do you understand the way in which different maps can be used in different ways to tell a story? How do you design a map to be read in a particular way? Thematic Mapping: 101 Inspiring Ways to Visualise Empirical Data answers these questions, and more.

Using 101 maps, graphs, charts, and plots of the 2016 United States presidential election data, Thematic Mapping explores the rich diversity of thematic mapping and the visual representation of data. It details well-known techniques and demonstrates how to design effective maps and graphics. Each map illustrates a different approach to the same data, and all lead to different maps and different ways of seeing different shades of truth.

Thematic Mapping examines the innovative and fascinating alternative ways of making maps of data which you can use in your own work. Which will speak to your truth?

Data Science, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI are currently some of the most talked-about concepts in industry, government, and society, and yet also the most misunderstood. This book will clarify these concepts and provide you with practical knowledge to apply them:

- Understand crucial data science concepts, from statistics and mathematics to legal and ethical considerations.

- Learn how to build data platforms and deploy safe and robust data projects to production.

- Gain the vocabulary to communicate technical requirements and roadmaps to diverse business stakeholders.

- Dive into practical case studies that illustrate how knowledge generated from data is changing various industries over the long term.

The team of authors consists of data experts from business and academia, including data scientists, engineers, business leaders and legal experts. Their broad, deep guide to all aspects of working with data and AI includes:

- Machine Learning Fundamentals: Foundations of mathematics and statistics, plus common frameworks for applying ML in practice: from statistical ML to neural networks, Transformers and AutoML

- Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision: How to extract valuable insights from text, images and video data, and put it to use in real world applications

- Foundation Models and Generative AI: Understand the strengths, challenges, and practical considerations for working with generative models for text, image, video, and other types of data

- Modeling and Simulation: Model the behavior of complex systems and do a What-If analysis covering different scenarios

- Data Science, ML and AI in production: How can you use cloud and database technologies and MLOps to turn experimentation into a working data product?

- Talking about Data: Communication and presentation skills for effective data teams and innovative business leaders

- Building Safe, Responsible AI: Best practices in ML Security; safeguarding generative AI models from attack; and how to adhere to GDPR, CCPA, and the new AI act

All authors are members of the Vienna Data Science Group (VDSG), an NGO that aims to establish a platform for exchanging knowledge on the application of data science, AI and Machine Learning and raising awareness of the opportunities and potential risks of these technologies.

Originally designed as an educational supplement for the renowned Stanford courses Computer Science 106A and 106B, Bit by Bit is a comic-style resource that uses fractal grids, custom-drawn characters, and fun graphics as a visually immersive introduction to the key concepts of beginner coding, learning pedagogy, education, and visual thinking.

Bit by Bit takes readers on a journey that encompasses the full scope of both courses; beginning with the chief elements and fundamentals of programming such as functions, variables, and integers; carrying readers through the basics of Python and C++ into the conceptual world of efficiency and recursion; and walking them through collections of linked data structures. Throughout each section, course and Stanford alum Ecy Femi King is there to guide, cajole, and assist, simultaneously providing useful tips to encourage maximum knowledge absorption and engaging commentary for readers at every level. In short, this book is more than just a cohesive "study buddy" for introductory Stanford courses. Rather, it delivers a far-reaching guide of both pedagogical interest and practical use to students, educators, and researchers worldwide.

Create visual and geospatial stories that blend map science and map design.

To make aesthetically pleasing, informative maps, mapmakers and graphic designers have historically used time-consuming tasks and workflows as part of the job. But what if you could get to the aesthetic design of your mapping projects much sooner with access to accurate, detailed map layers and powerful mapping tools that could enhance your story? Enter ArcGIS® Maps for Adobe® Creative Cloud®, the mapping extension that connects Adobe® Illustrator® to the power of ArcGIS, Esri’s geospatial software.

Mapping by Design: A Guide to ArcGIS Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud is the guidebook for making effective maps using Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud. Learn how to create compelling visual stories with maps following comprehensive tutorials designed to navigate readers through common mapmaking workflows.

Key topics include:

• Learning the user interface components of Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud
• Creating maps following common workflows
• Performing custom geo-analyses
• Using automated custom symbology and map elements
• Integrating Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud into your ArcGIS Pro cartographic workflows

By connecting Illustrator to ArcGIS Online, this extension gives designers the power to create maps by providing easy access to authoritative digital maps and map layers. In Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud, this seamless connection means that you can add these digital map layers, perform many map enhancements and geo-analytical functions, and then download your maps as well-organized, ready-to-design files in Illustrator. Further, Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud allows ArcGIS Pro users to open their maps and layouts in Illustrator and continue adding and analyzing map data and layers.

Whether you are a creative seeking to make beautiful maps with a familiar graphic design application or a GIS Professional who wants to learn the ArcGIS Pro–to–Illustrator integration workflow, Mapping by Design serves as a practical guide for all mapmakers.

A major challenge confronting contemporary theory is to overcome its fixation on written narratives and the culture of print. In this presentation of a general theory of systems, Germany's most prominent and controversial social thinker sets out a contribution to sociology that reworks our understanding of meaning and communication.

Luhmann concedes that there is no longer a binding representation of society within society, but refuses to describe this situation as a loss of legitimation or a crisis of representation. Instead, he proposes that we search for new ways of coping with the enforced selectivity that marks any self-description under the conditions of functionally differentiated modern society. For Luhmann, the end of metanarratives does not mean the end of theory, but a challenge to theory, an invitation to open itself to theoretical developments in a number of disciplines that, for quite some time, have been successfully working with cybernetic models that no longer require the fiction of the external observer.

Social Systems provides the foundation for a theory of modern society that would be congruent with this new understanding of the world. One of the most important contributions to social theory of recent decades, it has implications for many disciplines beyond sociology.

Over a decade ago, Tim Houlne wrote The New World of Work, suggesting that many businesses would shift from the cube to the cloud. Work wouldn’t just be conducted in the office, and employees could work remotely. While this declaration was met with much resistance, two years of the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything, and many more companies embraced the concept of remote work.

Today, Houlne believes we’re at another pivotal moment in history where work is about to change again. As Houlne shares in The Intelligent Workforce, we live in a world where everything is digital, and the lines between humans and machines continue to blur at an unfathomable rate. The new world of work has fundamentally shifted how businesses operate—providing employees with a real-time, constant stream of emails, messages, and digital communications.

Unfortunately, many executives are far behind the times. They think owning a smartphone or moving away from physical files to digital means they are current with technological trends. But entrepreneurs who plan to be in business for the long term must understand that the level of human and artificial intelligence interactions will increase at an even more rapid rate than digital transitions of the past. For managers, it is critical they adapt to this digital transformation and jobs reset. Work is changing, careers are shifting, and those long sought-after titles and levels of seniority once thought invaluable seemingly devalue by the day.

While many fear the future and see machines as a replacement for humanity, Houlne is more optimistic and sees an opportunity for humans and machines to co-create the future. As he details in The Intelligent Workforce, machines are precise while humans have intuition. Combined, these make a powerful combination. There will always be jobs that humans do better than machines and jobs that machines do better than humans.

Houlne believes that businesses that continue to invest in AI will accelerate and widen the gap between those that do not. He argues that for most organizations to survive in the coming decade, they must recognize the emerging patterns of the digital workforce, understand the impact these changes will have on their teams and customers, and then take proactive steps to work with rather than against these changes.

A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms

Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.

In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.

An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.

For decades, AutoCAD® students, instructors, and professionals have relied on the Exercise Workbook series to develop and hone their use of this versatile program. Whether you are new to the software, seeking to develop and improve your 2D drawing capabilities, or just want to make the most of the latest version of this program, the bestselling Beginning AutoCAD® 2026 Exercise Workbook is the ultimate reference. And for the first time, this superb resource is in full color, making it the ideal tool for visual learners.

With step-by-step instructions, inside tips, and tons of exercises, AutoCAD experts Shrock and Heather help users make real progress in both learning the basics and mastering the steps involved in creating professional-quality drawings. To quick-start working with drawing commands, users can download preset drawing templates from the provided link, or by visiting Industrial Press’s website product pages.

Improving on previous releases, AutoCAD 2026 facilitates efficient creation, precise revision, and sharing of layouts for a myriad of projects. For example, the new Activity Insights palette provides an overview of edits, enabling the creator or collaborators to see what has changed in a drawing. Plus, this edition includes an essential AutoCAD Quick Key Guide for quick access to the most frequently used AutoCAD features.

New and Improved Features in the Beginning AutoCAD 2026 Workbook

• Now in full color!—Users will find key topics, instructions,and steps—plus helpful notes, CADTips, and full-color screenshots displaying AutoCAD 2026 tools, commands, and menus—all clearly color-coded.
• Activity Insights—A new palette provides users with access to a What’s Changed summary of what has been done in each creation and edit session. Activity Insights can be filtered by time, users, and activities.
• AutoCAD Quick Key Guide—An invaluable bonus in this edition is a guide to function keys for AutoCAD help and text screens, dialog boxes, modes, and features, along with time-saving, one-key shortcuts for commands and drawing management, and other useful keyboard combinations.
• Global AutoCAD2026 Updates—New illustrations, detailed explanations, and step-by-step instructions throughout this Exercise Workbook reflect the latest AutoCAD tools, dialog boxes, and key elements.

The goal of this book is to provide a mathematical perspective on some key elements of the so-called deep neural networks (DNNs). Much of the interest in deep learning has focused on the implementation of DNN-based algorithms. Our hope is that this compact textbook will offer a complementary point of view that emphasizes the underlying mathematical ideas. We believe that a more foundational perspective will help to answer important questions that have only received empirical answers so far.

The material is based on a one-semester course Introduction to Mathematics of Deep Learning" for senior undergraduate mathematics majors and first year graduate students in mathematics. Our goal is to introduce basic concepts from deep learning in a rigorous mathematical fashion, e.g introduce mathematical definitions of deep neural networks (DNNs), loss functions, the backpropagation algorithm, etc. We attempt to identify for each concept the simplest setting that minimizes technicalities but still contains the key mathematics.

Unlock the power of Python in ArcGIS® Pro with this definitive, easy-to-follow guide designed for users with limited programming or scripting experience.

Get started learning to write Python scripts to automate tasks in ArcGIS Pro with Python Scripting for ArcGIS Pro. This book begins with the fundamentals of Python programming and then dives into how to write useful Python scripts that work with spatial data in ArcGIS Pro. You’ll learn how to use geoprocessing tools; describe, create, and update data; and execute specialized tasks. With step-by-step instructions, practical examples, and insightful guidance, you’ll be able to write scripts that will automate and improve your ArcGIS Pro workflows.

This third edition has been revised for ArcGIS Pro 3.2 and Python 3.9.18 and includes updated images; a fully updated chapter 2; and expanded chapters 4, 8, 9, and 10.

The key topics you will learn include:

• Python fundamentals
• Setting up a Python editor
• Automating geoprocessing tasks using ArcPy™
• Exploring and manipulating spatial and tabular data
• Working with geometries using cursors
• Working with rasters and map algebra
• Map scripting
• Debugging and error handling

Helpful points to remember, key terms, and review questions are included at the end of each chapter to reinforce your understanding of Python. Corresponding data and tutorials are available online.

Whether you’re new to Python or already have some experience, Python Scripting for ArcGIS Pro is the go-to resource for learning the versatility of Python coding to solve problems and enhance productivity and efficiency in ArcGIS Pro.

Solving complex geospatial problems and delivering solutions has never been easier.

Ready to take your Python knowledge to the next level? Esri Advanced Guide to Python in ArcGIS guides working GIS professionals through integrating Python with ArcGIS capabilities with increasing complexity through each consecutive chapter. Every chapter includes a project that teaches technical skills and problem-solving applicable to practical, job-focused assignments, including understanding client needs, performing market analytics, and managing ArcGIS Online organizations.  

Esri Advanced Guide to Python in ArcGIS uses step-by-step tutorials with an informal, conversational style of writing so you can easily follow and immediately apply the skills explained. Topics include: 

• Designing effective GIS Python solutions 
• ArcPy and ArcGIS API for Python basics 
• Using imagery and GeoAI for advanced analysis 
• Object-oriented programming 
• Delivering work in various formats: Python scripts, Jupyter Notebook, ArcGIS Pro tools, geoprocessing services, and web applications 
• Data engineering and manipulation techniques 
• Managing ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Online, and other portal administration 

Perfect for intermediate to advanced programmers looking to enhance their GIS capabilities, Esri Advanced Guide to Python in ArcGIS will quickly help you become skilled at using Python for geospatial solutions and become more proficient and capable in your work.

Refreshed screenshots and step-by-step exercises, frequently asked questions, and updated industry-specific projects highlight this edition covering the new AutoCAD 2022 software. This Exercise Workbook covers important AutoCAD commands and step-by-step procedures, including a thorough review of the latest features available (see the feature box, below), including Floating Drawing Tabs and Shared Views. All of this is reinforced by inch and metric exercises, designed to give you the practice needed to efficiently master key skills and complete more advanced projects. Plus, for the first time ever, an AutoCAD Quick Key Guide is included, providing a handy reminder for one-key shortcuts and multiple keyboard combinations.

Whether you are an instructor, a student of engineering, design, architecture, or computer graphics, or a hobbyist looking to hone your craft, you will find the Advanced AutoCAD Exercise Workbook an invaluable asset in your AutoCAD library.  


New and/or Improved Features in AutoCAD 2022:

• Installer–The new Installer reduces the number of steps required for the initial install, improving performance.
• Floating Drawing Tabs–Drag a drawing file tab from the main application window to make it a separate drawing file window and have several drawings open at once. This is particularly useful if you have two or more monitors.
• Shared Views–Store your designs in the Cloud for other users to view, measure, and exchange feedback.
• Share Current Drawing–Share a link to your drawing file and others can view or edit that drawing in AutoCAD’s online application.
• Trace–Turn this on so that collaborators can work together on drawing changes without altering the existing drawing.
• Redesigned Start Tab–Take advantage of easier access to recent work and saved drawing files from connected drives, as well as learning resources and announcements from Autodesk.

Tackle complex spatial data tasks effortlessly with this easy-to-follow guide to writing specialized Python scripts and developing tools for spatial data in ArcGIS® Pro.

Advanced Python Scripting for ArcGIS Pro follows up on the topics explained in Python Scripting for ArcGIS Pro (Esri Press, 2024) and is now updated for ArcGIS Pro 3.2.

Intended for users who have a good foundation in Python, this book explores how to develop scripts into tools and notebooks to share with others, use third-party packages, and learn other more specialized tasks. By the end of this book, you’ll be confident in writing more advanced scripts, developing them into tools and notebooks, and sharing them with others.

The key topics you will learn include:

• Creating custom functions and classes
• Writing specialized scripts using ArcPy™
• Creating Python script tools and Python toolboxes
• Sharing scripts and tools
• Managing Python packages and environments
• Migrating scripts from Python 2 to 3
• NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib
• Creating and using notebooks
• ArcGIS API for Python and Jupyter Notebook

Helpful points to remember, key terms, and review questions are included at the end of each chapter to reinforce your understanding of Python. Companion data and tutorials are available online.

Packed with advanced techniques and practical examples, Advanced Python Scripting for ArcGIS Pro is perfect for more experienced ArcGIS Pro users who are looking to upgrade their Python skills and enhance their workflows.

A year of HBR's essential thinking on tech—all in one place.

Agentic AI, smart health care, advanced sensors, bioengineering—new technologies like these are reshaping organizations at the hybrid office, on factory floors, and in the C-suite. What should you and your company be doing now to take advantage of the new opportunities these technologies are creating—and avoid falling victim to disruption?

The Year in Tech, 2026: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you understand what the latest and most important tech innovations mean for your organization and how you can use them to compete and win in today's turbulent business environment.

Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind?

Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues—blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more—each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow.

You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas—and prepare you and your company for the future.

A clear-eyed guide to the metaverse and how this powerful technology—along with advances in spatial computing, VR, and AR—will impact our economy, our lives, and our world.

The metaverse. That term elicits a wide range of ideas and opinions. For many, it represents the next evolutionary phase of the internet—a fully immersive, digital universe where people can interact, work, and play in virtual environments. For others, it's yet another overhyped technology. So what is it, exactly? And what will its impact be?

While speculation and predictions about the metaverse are varied, one thing is clear: it is impacting the world of business as well as people's lives, and it will continue to do so in the future. The global metaverse market is predicted to be worth about $1 trillion by 2030, with over two billion users participating in some form of immersive experience.

There's a reason why companies are investing heavily in spatial computing and why platforms like Roblox are thriving. The metaverse, along with the technologies that underpin it, is still evolving, but it will eventually offer more ways for people to experience the world and each other.

In Welcome to the Metaverse, David Shrier, a world-leading futurist and the author of Welcome to AI, offers an entertaining look at the potential uses and impacts of this virtual space on business and life.

Best-selling author Cass R. Sunstein outlines the promise and limits of artificial intelligence

Imperfect Oracle is about the promise and limits of artificial intelligence. The promise is that in important ways AI is better than we are at making judgments. Its limits are evidenced by the fact that AI cannot always make accurate predictions—not today, not tomorrow, and not the day after, either.

Natural intelligence is a marvel, but human beings blunder because we are biased. We are biased in the sense that our judgments tend to go systematically wrong in predictable ways, like a scale that always shows people as heavier than they are, or like an archer who always misses the target to the right. Biases can lead us to buy products that do us no good or to make foolish investments. They can lead us to run unreasonable risks, and to refuse to run reasonable risks. They can shorten our lives. They can make us miserable.

Biases present one kind of problem; noise is another. People are noisy not in the sense that we are loud, though we might be, but in the sense that our judgments show unwanted variability. On Monday, we might make a very different judgment from the judgment we make on Friday. When we are sad, we might make a different judgment from the one we would make when we are happy. Bias and noise can produce exceedingly serious mistakes.

AI promises to avoid both bias and noise. For institutions that want to avoid mistakes it is now a great boon. AI will also help investors who want to make money and consumers who don’t want to buy products that they will end up hating. Still, the world is full of surprises, and AI cannot spoil those surprises because some of the most important forms of knowledge involve an appreciation of what we cannot know and why we cannot know it. Life would be a lot less fun if we could predict everything.

A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms

Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.

In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.

An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.

Bootstrapping analyzes the genesis of personal computing from both technological and social perspectives, through a close study of the pathbreaking work of one researcher, Douglas Engelbart. In his lab at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s, Engelbart, along with a small team of researchers, developed some of the cornerstones of personal computing as we know it, including the mouse, the windowed user interface, and hypertext. Today, all these technologies are well known, even taken for granted, but the assumptions and motivations behind their invention are not. Bootstrapping establishes Douglas Engelbart's contribution through a detailed history of both the material and the symbolic constitution of his system's human-computer interface in the context of the computer research community in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

Engelbart felt that the complexity of many of the world's problems was becoming overwhelming, and the time for solving these problems was becoming shorter and shorter. What was needed, he determined, was a system that would augment human intelligence, co-transforming or co-evolving both humans and the machines they use. He sought a systematic way to think and organize this coevolution in an effort to discover a path on which a radical technological improvement could lead to a radical improvement in how to make people work effectively. What was involved in Engelbart's project was not just the invention of a computerized system that would enable humans, acting together, to manage complexity, but the invention of a new kind of human, "the user." What he ultimately envisioned was a "bootstrapping" process by which those who actually invented the hardware and software of this new system would simultaneously reinvent the human in a new form.

The book also offers a careful narrative of the collapse of Engelbart's laboratory at Stanford Research Institute, and the further translation of Engelbart's vision. It shows that Engelbart's ultimate goal of coevolution came to be translated in terms of technological progress and human adaptation to supposedly user-friendly technologies. At a time of the massive diffusion of the World Wide Web, Bootstrapping recalls the early experiments and original ideals that led to today's "information revolution."

Bootstrapping analyzes the genesis of personal computing from both technological and social perspectives, through a close study of the pathbreaking work of one researcher, Douglas Engelbart. In his lab at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s, Engelbart, along with a small team of researchers, developed some of the cornerstones of personal computing as we know it, including the mouse, the windowed user interface, and hypertext. Today, all these technologies are well known, even taken for granted, but the assumptions and motivations behind their invention are not. Bootstrapping establishes Douglas Engelbart's contribution through a detailed history of both the material and the symbolic constitution of his system's human-computer interface in the context of the computer research community in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

Engelbart felt that the complexity of many of the world's problems was becoming overwhelming, and the time for solving these problems was becoming shorter and shorter. What was needed, he determined, was a system that would augment human intelligence, co-transforming or co-evolving both humans and the machines they use. He sought a systematic way to think and organize this coevolution in an effort to discover a path on which a radical technological improvement could lead to a radical improvement in how to make people work effectively. What was involved in Engelbart's project was not just the invention of a computerized system that would enable humans, acting together, to manage complexity, but the invention of a new kind of human, "the user." What he ultimately envisioned was a "bootstrapping" process by which those who actually invented the hardware and software of this new system would simultaneously reinvent the human in a new form.

The book also offers a careful narrative of the collapse of Engelbart's laboratory at Stanford Research Institute, and the further translation of Engelbart's vision. It shows that Engelbart's ultimate goal of coevolution came to be translated in terms of technological progress and human adaptation to supposedly user-friendly technologies. At a time of the massive diffusion of the World Wide Web, Bootstrapping recalls the early experiments and original ideals that led to today's "information revolution."

This volume, the third of a series, consists of applications of Mathematica® to a potpourri of more advanced topics. These include differential geometry of curves and surfaces, differential equations and special functions and complex analysis. Some of the newest features of Mathematica® are demonstrated and explained and some problems with the current implementation pointed out and possible future improvements suggested.

• Contains a large number of worked out examples.
• Explains some of the most recent mathematical features of Mathematica®.
• Considers topics discussed rarely or not at all in the context of Mathematica®.
• Can be used to supplement several different courses.
• Based on actual university courses.

Random Number Generators, Principles and Practices has been written for programmers, hardware engineers, and sophisticated hobbyists interested in understanding random numbers generators and gaining the tools necessary to work with random number generators with confidence and knowledge.

Using an approach that employs clear diagrams and running code examples rather than excessive mathematics, random number related topics such as entropy estimation, entropy extraction, entropy sources, PRNGs, randomness testing, distribution generation, and many others are exposed and demystified.

If you have ever

• Wondered how to test if data is really random
• Needed to measure the randomness of data in real time as it is generated
• Wondered how to get randomness into your programs
• Wondered whether or not a random number generator is trustworthy
• Wanted to be able to choose between random number generator solutions
• Needed to turn uniform random data into a different distribution
• Needed to ensure the random numbers from your computer will work for your cryptographic application
• Wanted to combine more than one random number generator to increase reliability or security
• Wanted to get random numbers in a floating point format
• Needed to verify that a random number generator meets the requirements of a published standard like SP800-90 or AIS 31
• Needed to choose between an LCG, PCG or XorShift algorithm

Then this might be the book for you.

Scientific Computing for Scientists and Engineers is designed to teach undergraduate students relevant numerical methods and required fundamentals in scientific computing.

Most problems in science and engineering require the solution of mathematical problems, most of which can only be done on a computer. Accurately approximating those problems requires solving differential equations and linear systems with millions of unknowns, and smart algorithms can be used on computers to reduce calculation times from years to minutes or even seconds. This book explains: How can we approximate these important mathematical processes? How accurate are our approximations? How efficient are our approximations?

Scientific Computing for Scientists and Engineers covers:

• An introduction to a wide range of numerical methods for linear systems, eigenvalue problems, differential equations, numerical integration, and nonlinear problems;
• Scientific computing fundamentals like floating point representation of numbers and convergence;
• Analysis of accuracy and efficiency;
• Simple programming examples in MATLAB to illustrate the algorithms and to solve real life problems;
• Exercises to reinforce all topics.

Unlike the bulk majority of publications on philosophy of science and research ethics, which are authored by professional philosophers and intended for philosophers, this book has been written by a research practitioner and intended for research practitioners. It is distinctive by its integrative approach to methodological and ethical issues related to research practice, with special emphasis of mathematical modelling and measurement, as well as by attempted application of engineering design methodology to moral decision making. It is also distinctive by more than 200 real-world examples drawn from various domains of science and technology. It is neither a philosophical treaty nor a quick-reference guide. It is intended to encourage young researchers, especially Ph.D. students, to deeper philosophical reflection over research practice. They are not expected to have any philosophical background, but encouraged to consult indicated sources of primary information and academic textbooks containing syntheses of information from primary sources. This book can be a teaching aid for students attending classes aimed at identification of methodological and ethical issues related to technoscientific research, followed by introduction to the methodology of analysing dilemmas arising in this context.

Data Science, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence are currently some of the most talked-about concepts in industry, government, and society, and yet also the most misunderstood. This book will clarify these concepts and provide you with practical knowledge to apply them. Featuring: 

- A comprehensive overview of the various fields of application of data science

- Case studies from practice to make the described concepts tangible

- Practical examples to help you carry out simple data analysis projects

The book approaches the topic of data science from several sides. Crucially, it will show you how to build data platforms and apply data science tools and methods. Along the way, it will help you understand - and explain to various stakeholders - how to generate value from these techniques, such as applying data science to help organizations make faster decisions, reduce costs, and open up new markets. Furthermore, it will bring fundamental concepts related to data science to life, including statistics, mathematics, and legal considerations. Finally, the book outlines practical case studies that illustrate how knowledge generated from data is changing various industries over the long term. 

Contains these current issues:

- Mathematics basics: Mathematics for Machine Learning to help you understand and utilize various ML algorithms.

- Machine Learning: From statistical to neural and from Transformers and GPT-3 to AutoML, we introduce common frameworks for applying ML in practice

- Natural Language Processing: Tools and techniques for gaining insights from text data and developing language technologies

- Computer vision: How can we gain insights from images and videos with data science?

- Modeling and Simulation: Model the behavior of complex systems, such as the spread of COVID-19, and do a What-If analysis covering different scenarios.

- ML and AI in production: How to turn experimentation into a working data science product?

- Presenting your results: Essential presentation techniques for data scientists

The definitive, easy-to-follow guide to writing Python code with spatial data in ArcGIS Pro, whether you’re new to programming or not.

Python Scripting for ArcGIS Pro starts with the fundamentals of Python programming and then dives into how to write useful Python scripts that work with spatial data in ArcGIS Pro. Learn how to execute geoprocessing tools, describe, create and update data, as well as execute a number of specialized tasks. See how to write simple, custom scripts that will automate your ArcGIS Pro workflows.

Some of the key topics you will learn include:

• Python fundamentals
• Setting up a Python editor
• Automating geoprocessing tasks using ArcPy
• Exploring and manipulating spatial and tabular data
• Working with geometries using cursors
• Working with rasters and map algebra
• Map scripting
• Debugging and error handling

Helpful “points to remember,” key terms, and review questions are included at the end of each chapter to reinforce your understanding of Python. Corresponding data and exercises are available online. 

Whether you want to learn Python or already have some experience, Python Scripting for ArcGIS Pro is the comprehensive, hands-on book for learning the versatility of Python coding as an approach to solving problems and increasing your productivity in ArcGIS Pro. Follow the step-by-step instruction and common workflow guidance for automating tasks and scripting with Python.

Don't forget to also check out Esri Press's other Python title: 

Advanced Python Scripting for ArcGIS Pro (9781589486188)

First place winner in Educational Products at the 2021 International Cartographic Conference

Maps are ubiquitous, yet maps are not made equally, nor are they read equally.

Every map is a product of its maker and its reader, and maps are rarely right or wrong but simply different versions of the truth. The meaning you see in a map can reinforce or challenge your understanding of the theme it represents, and you are much more likely to believe a map if it presents a version of the truth that you believe in already.

But how do you decide what map you want to make? How do you understand the way in which different maps can be used in different ways to tell a story? How do you design a map to be read in a particular way? Thematic Mapping: 101 Inspiring Ways to Visualise Empirical Data answers these questions, and more.

Using 101 maps, graphs, charts, and plots of the 2016 United States presidential election data, Thematic Mapping explores the rich diversity of thematic mapping and the visual representation of data. It details well-known techniques and demonstrates how to design effective maps and graphics. Each map illustrates a different approach to the same data, and all lead to different maps and different ways of seeing different shades of truth.

Thematic Mapping examines the innovative and fascinating alternative ways of making maps of data which you can use in your own work. Which will speak to your truth?

The myth of good AI offers a bold new approach to understanding artificial intelligence and its implications for human security. Dismantling the ‘good AI’ narrative pedalled by tech giants, the book exposes the full extent of AI’s nefarious impact on society.
Drawing on a wide range of literature, the book provides a gripping synthesis of debates in philosophy, medicine, media, psychology, international affairs, economics and politics. It charts the full spectrum of AI-related themes and explores what implications AI has for our future, while equipping the reader with strategies for survival.

The integration of Radio Detection and Ranging (RADAR) remote sensing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides a platform for understanding various Earth's surface processes and their predictive analysis. This book offers state-of-the-art techniques and applications to address real-time challenges through AI-based RADAR remote sensing. Furthermore, it explores the potential applications of AI in emerging areas of remote sensing and image processing.

GO Programming in easy steps, 2nd edition is updated to cover the latest version of golang, and first illustrates the golang programming basics with variables, operators, flow control, and functions, before moving on to demonstrate Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) with golang. This book then shows how golang can handle user input, plus read and write files on your own system.

The examples in GO Programming in easy steps, 2nd edition also demonstrate concurrent programming with goroutines for speed. Finally, the book illustrates how to create and interact with a golang web server on your own system.

GO Programming in easy steps, 2nd edition has an easy-to-follow style that will appeal to:

This book makes no assumption that you have previous knowledge of any programming language, so is suitable for a beginner or a programming guru.

Python in easy steps, 3rd edition teaches you to program in the powerful Python programming language – the world’s favorite coding language. It gives complete examples that illustrate each aspect with colorized source code.

Python in easy steps, 3rd edition begins by explaining how to install the free Python interpreter so that you can quickly begin to create your own executable programs by copying the book's examples. It demonstrates all the Python language basics before moving on to provide examples of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). A new chapter for this edition then demonstrates how to process web form data with the Flask web framework for Python. The book concludes by demonstrating how you can use your acquired knowledge to create and deploy graphical windowed applications.

Python in easy steps, 3rd edition has an easy-to-follow style, and makes no assumption you have previous knowledge of any programming language, so it's ideal for:

Artificial intelligence (AI) is heralded as a revolutionary force in the global economy. But the transformation it brings is not simply about new technology as a driver of change. It is about who owns it, what they want to do with it, who can pay for it, and how other economic actors around the world – from legacy manufacturing firms in the Global North to farmers in the Global South – must adjust.


This book explores AI systems as products of unequal and conflictual power relations. It exposes grand AI narratives as rhetorical ammunition in political fights over tech futures and socio-economic distribution. Tech giants leverage infrastructure and data to cement their global dominance. Meanwhile, geopolitical competition between China and the United States increasingly dominates the AI economy, entrenching globe-spanning dependencies. The AI Matrix is an essential guide to the real-world economic dynamics that AI unleashes.

THE AI ACT HANDBOOK //

- Detailed overview of the AI Act

- Impact of the AI Act on various areas (including fi nance, employment law, advertising and administration)

- Related areas of law (data protection, IP and IT law)

- Practical overview of AI governance, risk and compliance in companies

- Information on standards, norms and certifications

By experts for practitioners – with this handbook, you can prepare yourself for the requirements of the European AI Act in a practical and compliant manner. Get comprehensive information on the effects on the various application fields of artificial intelligence in the private and public sectors. After a brief introduction to the history and technology of AI, you will receive a detailed subsumption of the content of the AI Act based on the various risk categories. Subsequently, areas of law closely related to the use of AI, in particular data protection, IP and IT law, will be dealt with in detail. By providing case studies, the book shares insights about the impact of the AI Act on various areas such as autonomous driving, work, critical infrastructure, medicine, insurance, etc. The correlation with the areas of law relevant to these areas will also be considered. A practical overview of the topic of AI governance, risk and compliance (GRC) in companies, tips on the application of guidelines and governance frameworks, implementation ideas for trustworthy AI as well as standards, norms and certifications complement the book.

The TEAM OF AUTHORS consists of lawyers specializing in IT and data protection law and the use of AI. It includes, among others, one of Austria's representative in the AI Act negotiations at EU Council level and the founder of the Austrian association Women in AI.

FROM THE CONTENTS //

- What Is AI and How Do Data Science and Data Analytics Differ?

- Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence

- AI Act: Rights and Obligations

- Data Protection

- Intellectual Property

- AI and IT Contract Law

- Private Sector

- Public Sector

- Ethics

- Governance in the Company

The digital world is transitioning from text to media: photos, audio files, video clips, animations, games, and more. Enterprises of all kinds struggle with how to manage those media assets. Digital professionals who want to master the life cycles behind creating, storing, and reusing media need the inside scoop on how digital and media asset management technology really works.

Why do crucial customer insights often fail to drive product decisions? The answer: wasted research. Jake Burghardt identifies the insidious root causes of research waste, giving actionable ideas to increase the impact of siloed research. You’ll learn to enhance collaboration, maximize learning, and drive research-informed product launches. Anyone—from UX researchers and insight generators to data scientists and CX analysts—will benefit from these crucial customer insights.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for anyone who’s seen too many important customer insights that failed to drive next steps in their business. It’s for leaders and practitioners who want to experiment with new ways to increase their organization’s research use in product development and delivery. Specifically, it’s perfect for researchers from any discipline from UX to CX to sales to data science. It’s also a must-read for leaders of product, design, marketing, and engineering —anyone who wants to improve decision-making based on available customer research. And that includes operations people.

Takeaways

 
• Uncover tools and methods to reduce research waste.
 
• Learn how to find and use hidden research that might have lasting impact on your organization.
 
• Discover knowledge-consolidating tools and requirements for repositories.
 
• Increase the impact of any type of customer research on your organization.
 
• Note the special “IDEA” sections that show possible actions to choose based on what makes sense for your current resources and organizational context
 
• See “You Might Be Asking” sidebars, which give answers to common questions.
 
• Search for “Imagine a Way Forward” sidebars that highlight special scenarios—telling a story of action ideas as step-by-step narratives.
 
• Look for insightful interviews from experts in the field.
 
• Read the chapter summaries of key proposals to get more value from research, including a distillation of what success might look like.

Welcome to the future, where you can talk with the digital things around you: voice assistants, chatbots, and more. 

But these interactions can be unhelpful and frustrating—sometimes even offensive or biased. Conversations with Things teaches you how to design conversations that are useful, ethical, and human–centered—because everyone deserves to be understood, especially you.

Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs.

After years of building the same interface elements, some designers and developers get wise and try to create reusable, common solutions to help everyone stop reinventing the wheel every time. Most fail. In Design That Scales, design systems expert Dan Mall draws on his extensive experience helping some of the world's most recognizable brands create design practices that are truly sustainable and successful.

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• A design system is crucial for any organization managing two or more digital products. Learn how to create, manage, and sustain a successful design system.
• See how the ecosystem of a design system works in order to understand the context for success.
• Figure out where the people involved in a design system fit and how they can best collaborate.
• Learn the metrics for success within a design system and how to measure them.
• Determine the best techniques for marketing your design system to stakeholders.
• Learn what guidance and relationships are crucial for a design system to succeed.
• See the end-of-chapter questions that highlight how to guide your design system to a profitable outcome.

Effective interface animation deftly combines form and function to improve feedback, aid in orientation, direct attention, show causality, and express your brand’s personality. Designing Interface Animation shows you how to create web animation that balances purpose and style while blending seamlessly into the user’s experience. This book is a crash course in motion design theory and practice for web designers, UX professionals, and front-end developers alike.

Just as pilots and doctors improve by studying crash reports and postmortems, experience designers can improve by learning how customer experience failures cause products to fail in the marketplace. Rather than proselytizing a particular approach to design, Why We Fail holistically explores what teams actually built, why the products failed, and how we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.

Interviewing is easy, right? Anyone can do it… but few do it well enough to unlock the benefits and insights that interviewing users and customers can yield.

In this new and updated edition of the acclaimed classic Interviewing Users, Steve Portigal quickly and effectively dispels the myth that interviewing is trivial. He shows how research studies and logistics can be used to determine concrete goals for a business and takes the reader on a detailed journey into the specifics of interviewing techniques, best practices, fieldwork, documentation, and how to make sense of uncovered data. Then Steve takes the process even further―showing the methods and details behind asking questions―from the words themselves to the interviewer’s actions and how they influence an interview. There is even a chapter on making sure that information gleaned from the research study is used by the business in such a way to make it impactful and worthwhile. Oh, and for good measure he throws in information about Research Operations.

But, hey, that’s just the nuts and bolts of the book. The truly fun part is Steve’s voice and how he portrays this information through amusing anecdotes about his career, fascinating examples from other practitioners, and tips and tricks that only the most experienced UX researchers, like Steve, could come up with. As a nod to the pandemic, he offers ideas for the best way to interview someone remotely, and he also discusses personal bias―how to identify and deal with it so that it doesn’t affect interviews.

Everyone will get something from this book. But beyond the requisite information, it’s simply a good read. And if you want another good read with stories galore, pick up Steve’s other book Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries.

"Quite simply the best book on when, why, and how you should conduct user interview studies."
—Elizabeth F. Churchill, PhD, Senior Director, Google

Who Should Read This Book?

• Anyone and everyone who is interested in finding out what makes their business tick, i.e., who their users are.
• Anyone and everyone who wants to learn how to interview and listen to people.
• Anyone and everyone, including CEOs, user researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product managers, strategists, interviewers, and you.

Takeaways

• User research is key for companies to include in their design and development process.
• The best way to do user research is through interviewing users and determining their needs.
• Interviewing can identify what could be designed or what is actually a problem.
• Teams who meet their users face-to-face will build better products.
• Field research takes a lot of preparation to be successful―and a solid plan in advance.
• There are critical techniques and frameworks for mapping human behavior.
• A good interviewer always puts their participants at ease.
• If you ask the right questions, you’ll get the right answers.
• A smart interviewer checks their worldview at the door.
• To establish a rapport with your interviewee, listen and don’t be judgmental.
• Research data is a combination of analysis and synthesis.
• The importance of research analysis must be continually highlighted and emphasized to the powers that be.

We all tell stories. It's one of the most natural ways to share information, as old as the human race. This book is not about a new technique, but how to use something we already know in a new way. Stories help us gather and communicate user research, put a human face on analytic data, communicate design ideas, encourage collaboration and innovation, and create a sense of shared history and purpose. This book looks across the full spectrum of user experience design to discover when and how to use stories to improve our products. Whether you are a researcher, designer, analyst or manager, you will find ideas and techniques you can put to use in your practice.

Good content isn’t magical—it's thoughtful, creative, and well researched words put together with finesse. In Strategic Content Design, you'll learn how to create effective content, using hard–won research methods, best practices, and proven tips for conducting quantitative and qualitative content–focused research and testing.

"This is me, shouting from the rooftops: Strategic Content Design belongs in the hands of absolutely anyone who cares about content in UX—by which I mean EVERYONE."
—Kristina Halvorson, CEO and Founder, Brain Traffic

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• Realistically assess the current state of your content.
• Learn how to write content research questions.
• Create a content research study and evaluate your content&apos:s effectiveness.
• Identify which specific words or content elements to test. Analyze your research results.
• Identify which specific words or content elements to test.
• Determine which research methods and tools are ideal for your team's content research needs.
• Elevate the role of content design in your company, proving that content is key to creating an outstanding customer experience—and improving your bottom line.
• Create a content research roadmap.
• Learn from professional content people in case studies that highlight practical examples.

"This isn't yet another seemingly-endless-series-of-checklists books to help you tick off all the elements that cumulatively add up to accessibility. Instead, it's a book about how to improve the way you do user experience design, so it inevitably produces things that are accessible." — Steve Krug, Author of Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

If you are in charge of the user experience, development, or strategy for a web site, A Web for Everyone will help you make your site accessible without sacrificing design or innovation. Rooted in universal design principles, this book provides solutions: practical advice and examples of how to create sites that everyone can use.

Your customer has five senses and a small universe of devices. Why aren't you designing for all of them? Go beyond screens, keyboards, and touchscreens by letting your customer's humanity drive the experience—not a specific device or input type. Learn the techniques you'll need to build fluid, adaptive experiences for multiple inputs, multiple outputs, and multiple devices.

Mobile user experience is a new frontier. Untethered from a keyboard and mouse, this rich design space is lush with opportunity to invent new and more human ways for people to interact with information. Invention requires casting off many anchors and conventions inherited from the last 50 years of computer science and traditional design and jumping head first into a new and unfamiliar design space.

Card sorting helps us understand how people think about content and categories. Armed with this knowledge, we can group information so that people can better find and understand it. In this book, Donna describes how to plan and run a card sort, then analyse the results and apply the outcomes to your project.

Care about content? Better copy isn't enough. As devices and channels multiply—and as users expect to relate, share, and shift information quickly—we need content that can go more places, more easily. Content Everywhere will help you stop creating fixed, single-purpose content and start making it more future-ready, flexible, reusable, manageable, and meaningful wherever it needs to go.

Many designers enjoy the interfaces seen in science fiction films and television shows. Freed from the rigorous constraints of designing for real users, sci-fi production designers develop blue-sky interfaces that are inspiring, humorous, and even instructive. By carefully studying these “outsider” user interfaces, designers can derive lessons that make their real-world designs more cutting edge and successful.

Game design is a sibling discipline to software and Web design, but they're siblings that grew up in different houses. They have much more in common than their perceived distinction typically suggests, and user experience practitioners can realize enormous benefit by exploiting the solutions that games have found to the real problems of design. This book will show you how.

Most organizations fail to tap into the game–changing power of research. Research That Scales is the ultimate playbook for transforming your research practice, whatever its size or shape, into an impactful and efficient insight–generating engine. Use it to plan, manage, and scale a research practice that can truly propel businesses forward.

Who Should Read This Book?

If you’re a research leader, a researcher, or a ResearchOps specialist, this book is a must–read. But if you work in product management, design, content, marketing, academia, or for an agency, and do research as part of your work, this book is for you, too. Anyone involved in devising strategies and systems that support scaled–up human–centered research will find Research That Scales invaluable.

Takeaways

• Learn what it means to scale research and how to build purpose into your research practice.
• Gain a pragmatic view of research strategy and why it's crucial to scaling research.
• Design a research operating system that can grow the impact of research.
• Uncover the eight elements of research operations and the ResearchOps Venn diagram.
• Use the ResearchOps Planning Matrix to deliver operations that make good ideas real.
• Build systems that make finding the right research participants a breeze.
• Learn how to make the most of research by developing a research knowledge management (RKM) strategy.
• Build a foundation of trust with your company and stakeholders by shifting perceptions about research.
• Make ethics and data privacy more than a checklist of dos and don'ts and lofty principles.
• Learn how to become a "money magnet" for research.
• Attract and retain the best research talent to fuel your growth.

Whether you're new to UX or a seasoned practitioner, The User Experience Team of One gives you everything you need to succeed, emphasizing down–to–earth approaches that deliver big impact over time–consuming, needlessly complex techniques. This updated classic remains a comprehensive and essential guide for UX and product designers everywhere—you'll accomplish a lot more with a lot less.

Who Should Read This Book?

The techniques and advice in this book are applicable to anyone who is just starting out in user experience, as well as seasoned practitioners who have been in the field for years. In addition, anyone who read the first edition will appreciate this updated edition that features loads of new material that has changed over the past 10 years. There are tips, tools, and techniques throughout the book to improve your performance. The various methods detail exactly how to handle a variety of situations—from the timing involved, the materials, when to use that information, and how to try it out. Look for real–life sidebars from the authors, as well as experts in the field. This book applies to a team of one or a team of many.

Takeaways

• The first section covers the philosophy of the UX team of one—why you do it, how you build support, how to identify common challenges, and how to keep growing.
• The second section of the book, "Practice," gives you tools and techniques for managing this balancing act with detailed methods.
• The 25 up–to–date methods in Part II prompt a question about a specific topic, answer the question, give the average time it will take to deal with the issue, tell you when to use this material, and give you instructions for "Trying It Out".
• You can learn about working conditions that a team of one often experiences.
• The book addresses difficult situations that UX practitioners often encounter (for example, the need for speed in corporate environments.
• Be sure to review the UX Value Loop[TM] that Joe created to define UX.
• Check out sidebars that highlight some of Joe and Leah's personal real–life experiences.
• The end of each chapter tells you what to do if you can "only do one thing"
• Finally, notes and tips give you handy techniques and tools to use in your own practice.

There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product—but you can increase your odds. 

One of the best ways is to understand users' reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.

Eye tracking is a widely used research method, but there are many questions and misconceptions about how to effectively apply it. Eye Tracking the User Experience—the first how-to book about eye tracking for UX practitioners—offers step-by-step advice on how to plan, prepare, and conduct eye tracking studies; how to analyze and interpret eye movement data; and how to successfully communicate eye tracking findings.

User experience designers and researchers are wrestling with product management—as a peer discipline, a job title, a future career—or simply wondering exactly what it entails. In Product Management for UX People, Christian

Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout (commerce), registration (community), data input (participation and sharing), and any task requiring information entry. In Web Form Design, Luke Wroblewski draws on original research, his considerable experience at Yahoo! and eBay, and the perspectives of many of the field's leading designers to show you everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging Web forms.

“Katie Swindler does a brilliant job of breaking down our stress response, with vivid stories that demonstrate how the systems we create can help or hinder at critical times.”— Carolyn Chandler, coauthor, A Project Guide to UX Design and Adventures in Experience Design

Emergencies—landing a malfunctioning plane, resuscitating a heart attack victim, or avoiding a head-on car crash—all require split-second decisions that can mean life or death. Fortunately, designers of life-saving products have leveraged research and brain science to help users reduce panic and harness their best instincts.

Life and Death Design brings these techniques to everyday designers who want to help their users think clearly and act safely. 

Just as pilots and doctors improve by studying crash reports and postmortems, experience designers can improve by learning how customer experience failures cause products to fail in the marketplace. Rather than proselytizing a particular approach to design, Why We Fail holistically explores what teams actually built, why the products failed, and how we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.

As design continues to impact our products, services, and solutions at scale, it is more important than ever to understand the systems and context that surround design decisions. Closing the Loop will introduce you to a powerful systems thinking mindset and provide you with the tools and frameworks to define the systems that surround your work.

"Cababa's book comes at a crucial moment for design, and points the way toward a more inclusive, meaningful future for our work."
—David Dylan Thomas, author, Design for Cognitive Bias

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• Combine user–centered design with systems thinking to understand interconnections and interventions to create goals that benefit society.
• Expand their thinking about what constitutes problem–solving in order to reframe problem spaces.
• Map the status quo in order to better envision the future.
• Kick off primary research by conducting interviews with subject matter experts.
• Use stakeholder maps as a form of analysis and synthesis output.
• Create a causal loop map to articulate systems forces in the form of cause and effect.
• Develop a theory of change to plan initiatives that will lead to the desired outcomes and impact.
• Use the futures wheel as a tool to imagine the impact of decisions.

Surveys That Work explains a seven–step process for designing, running, and reporting on a survey that gets accurate results. In a no–nonsense style with plenty of examples about real–world compromises, the book focuses on reducing the errors that make up Total Survey Error—a key concept in survey methodology. If you are conducting a survey, this book is a must–have.

There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product—but you can increase your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users' reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.

Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout (commerce), registration (community), data input (participation and sharing), and any task requiring information entry. In Web Form Design, Luke Wroblewski draws on original research, his considerable experience at Yahoo! and eBay, and the perspectives of many of the field's leading designers to show you everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging Web forms.

Your customer has five senses and a small universe of devices. Why aren't you designing for all of them? Go beyond screens, keyboards, and touchscreens by letting your customer's humanity drive the experience—not a specific device or input type. Learn the techniques you'll need to build fluid, adaptive experiences for multiple inputs, multiple outputs, and multiple devices.

Whether you're new to UX or a seasoned practitioner, The User Experience Team of One gives you everything you need to succeed, emphasizing down–to–earth approaches that deliver big impact over time–consuming, needlessly complex techniques. This updated classic remains a comprehensive and essential guide for UX and product designers everywhere—you'll accomplish a lot more with a lot less.

Who Should Read This Book?

The techniques and advice in this book are applicable to anyone who is just starting out in user experience, as well as seasoned practitioners who have been in the field for years. In addition, anyone who read the first edition will appreciate this updated edition that features loads of new material that has changed over the past 10 years. There are tips, tools, and techniques throughout the book to improve your performance. The various methods detail exactly how to handle a variety of situations—from the timing involved, the materials, when to use that information, and how to try it out. Look for real–life sidebars from the authors, as well as experts in the field. This book applies to a team of one or a team of many.

Takeaways

• The first section covers the philosophy of the UX team of one—why you do it, how you build support, how to identify common challenges, and how to keep growing.
• The second section of the book, "Practice," gives you tools and techniques for managing this balancing act with detailed methods.
• The 25 up–to–date methods in Part II prompt a question about a specific topic, answer the question, give the average time it will take to deal with the issue, tell you when to use this material, and give you instructions for "Trying It Out".
• You can learn about working conditions that a team of one often experiences.
• The book addresses difficult situations that UX practitioners often encounter (for example, the need for speed in corporate environments.
• Be sure to review the UX Value Loop[TM] that Joe created to define UX.
• Check out sidebars that highlight some of Joe and Leah's personal real–life experiences.
• The end of each chapter tells you what to do if you can "only do one thing"
• Finally, notes and tips give you handy techniques and tools to use in your own practice.

Surveys That Work explains a seven–step process for designing, running, and reporting on a survey that gets accurate results. In a no–nonsense style with plenty of examples about real–world compromises, the book focuses on reducing the errors that make up Total Survey Error—a key concept in survey methodology. If you are conducting a survey, this book is a must–have.

Interviewing is easy, right? Anyone can do it… but few do it well enough to unlock the benefits and insights that interviewing users and customers can yield.

In this new and updated edition of the acclaimed classic Interviewing Users, Steve Portigal quickly and effectively dispels the myth that interviewing is trivial. He shows how research studies and logistics can be used to determine concrete goals for a business and takes the reader on a detailed journey into the specifics of interviewing techniques, best practices, fieldwork, documentation, and how to make sense of uncovered data. Then Steve takes the process even further―showing the methods and details behind asking questions―from the words themselves to the interviewer’s actions and how they influence an interview. There is even a chapter on making sure that information gleaned from the research study is used by the business in such a way to make it impactful and worthwhile. Oh, and for good measure he throws in information about Research Operations.

But, hey, that’s just the nuts and bolts of the book. The truly fun part is Steve’s voice and how he portrays this information through amusing anecdotes about his career, fascinating examples from other practitioners, and tips and tricks that only the most experienced UX researchers, like Steve, could come up with. As a nod to the pandemic, he offers ideas for the best way to interview someone remotely, and he also discusses personal bias―how to identify and deal with it so that it doesn’t affect interviews.

Everyone will get something from this book. But beyond the requisite information, it’s simply a good read. And if you want another good read with stories galore, pick up Steve’s other book Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries.

"Quite simply the best book on when, why, and how you should conduct user interview studies."
—Elizabeth F. Churchill, PhD, Senior Director, Google

Who Should Read This Book?

• Anyone and everyone who is interested in finding out what makes their business tick, i.e., who their users are.
• Anyone and everyone who wants to learn how to interview and listen to people.
• Anyone and everyone, including CEOs, user researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product managers, strategists, interviewers, and you.

Takeaways

• User research is key for companies to include in their design and development process.
• The best way to do user research is through interviewing users and determining their needs.
• Interviewing can identify what could be designed or what is actually a problem.
• Teams who meet their users face-to-face will build better products.
• Field research takes a lot of preparation to be successful―and a solid plan in advance.
• There are critical techniques and frameworks for mapping human behavior.
• A good interviewer always puts their participants at ease.
• If you ask the right questions, you’ll get the right answers.
• A smart interviewer checks their worldview at the door.
• To establish a rapport with your interviewee, listen and don’t be judgmental.
• Research data is a combination of analysis and synthesis.
• The importance of research analysis must be continually highlighted and emphasized to the powers that be.

Card sorting helps us understand how people think about content and categories. Armed with this knowledge, we can group information so that people can better find and understand it. In this book, Donna describes how to plan and run a card sort, then analyse the results and apply the outcomes to your project.

"This is the book to read if you're thinking of a career transition from UX to product." —Ellen Chisa, Founder in Residence, Boldstart Ventures

User experience designers and researchers are wrestling with product management—as a peer discipline, a job title, a future career—or simply wondering exactly what it entails. In Product Management for UX People, Christian Crumlish demystifies product management for UX practitioners who want to understand, partner with, and even become product managers.

Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs.

Game design is a sibling discipline to software and Web design, but they're siblings that grew up in different houses. They have much more in common than their perceived distinction typically suggests, and user experience practitioners can realize enormous benefit by exploiting the solutions that games have found to the real problems of design. This book will show you how.

As design continues to impact our products, services, and solutions at scale, it is more important than ever to understand the systems and context that surround design decisions. Closing the Loop will introduce you to a powerful systems thinking mindset and provide you with the tools and frameworks to define the systems that surround your work.

"Cababa's book comes at a crucial moment for design, and points the way toward a more inclusive, meaningful future for our work."
—David Dylan Thomas, author, Design for Cognitive Bias

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• Combine user–centered design with systems thinking to understand interconnections and interventions to create goals that benefit society.
• Expand their thinking about what constitutes problem–solving in order to reframe problem spaces.
• Map the status quo in order to better envision the future.
• Kick off primary research by conducting interviews with subject matter experts.
• Use stakeholder maps as a form of analysis and synthesis output.
• Create a causal loop map to articulate systems forces in the form of cause and effect.
• Develop a theory of change to plan initiatives that will lead to the desired outcomes and impact.
• Use the futures wheel as a tool to imagine the impact of decisions.

Why do crucial customer insights often fail to drive product decisions? The answer: wasted research. Jake Burghardt identifies the insidious root causes of research waste, giving actionable ideas to increase the impact of siloed research. You’ll learn to enhance collaboration, maximize learning, and drive research-informed product launches. Anyone—from UX researchers and insight generators to data scientists and CX analysts—will benefit from these crucial customer insights.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for anyone who’s seen too many important customer insights that failed to drive next steps in their business. It’s for leaders and practitioners who want to experiment with new ways to increase their organization’s research use in product development and delivery. Specifically, it’s perfect for researchers from any discipline from UX to CX to sales to data science. It’s also a must-read for leaders of product, design, marketing, and engineering —anyone who wants to improve decision-making based on available customer research. And that includes operations people.

Takeaways

 
• Uncover tools and methods to reduce research waste.
 
• Learn how to find and use hidden research that might have lasting impact on your organization.
 
• Discover knowledge-consolidating tools and requirements for repositories.
 
• Increase the impact of any type of customer research on your organization.
 
• Note the special “IDEA” sections that show possible actions to choose based on what makes sense for your current resources and organizational context
 
• See “You Might Be Asking” sidebars, which give answers to common questions.
 
• Search for “Imagine a Way Forward” sidebars that highlight special scenarios—telling a story of action ideas as step-by-step narratives.
 
• Look for insightful interviews from experts in the field.
 
• Read the chapter summaries of key proposals to get more value from research, including a distillation of what success might look like.

After years of building the same interface elements, some designers and developers get wise and try to create reusable, common solutions to help everyone stop reinventing the wheel every time. Most fail. In Design That Scales, design systems expert Dan Mall draws on his extensive experience helping some of the world's most recognizable brands create design practices that are truly sustainable and successful.

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• A design system is crucial for any organization managing two or more digital products. Learn how to create, manage, and sustain a successful design system.
• See how the ecosystem of a design system works in order to understand the context for success.
• Figure out where the people involved in a design system fit and how they can best collaborate.
• Learn the metrics for success within a design system and how to measure them.
• Determine the best techniques for marketing your design system to stakeholders.
• Learn what guidance and relationships are crucial for a design system to succeed.
• See the end-of-chapter questions that highlight how to guide your design system to a profitable outcome.

If you are in charge of the user experience, development, or strategy for a web site, A Web for Everyone will help you make your site accessible without sacrificing design or innovation. Rooted in universal design principles, this book provides solutions: practical advice and examples of how to create sites that everyone can use.

Many designers enjoy the interfaces seen in science fiction films and television shows. Freed from the rigorous constraints of designing for real users, sci-fi production designers develop blue-sky interfaces that are inspiring, humorous, and even instructive. By carefully studying these “outsider” user interfaces, designers can derive lessons that make their real-world designs more cutting edge and successful.

Eye tracking is a widely used research method, but there are many questions and misconceptions about how to effectively apply it. Eye Tracking the User Experience—the first how-to book about eye tracking for UX practitioners—offers step-by-step advice on how to plan, prepare, and conduct eye tracking studies; how to analyze and interpret eye movement data; and how to successfully communicate eye tracking findings.

We all tell stories. It's one of the most natural ways to share information, as old as the human race. This book is not about a new technique, but how to use something we already know in a new way. Stories help us gather and communicate user research, put a human face on analytic data, communicate design ideas, encourage collaboration and innovation, and create a sense of shared history and purpose. This book looks across the full spectrum of user experience design to discover when and how to use stories to improve our products. Whether you are a researcher, designer, analyst or manager, you will find ideas and techniques you can put to use in your practice.

Good content isn’t magical—it's thoughtful, creative, and well researched words put together with finesse. In Strategic Content Design, you'll learn how to create effective content, using hard–won research methods, best practices, and proven tips for conducting quantitative and qualitative content–focused research and testing.

"This is me, shouting from the rooftops: Strategic Content Design belongs in the hands of absolutely anyone who cares about content in UX—by which I mean EVERYONE."
—Kristina Halvorson, CEO and Founder, Brain Traffic

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• Realistically assess the current state of your content.
• Learn how to write content research questions.
• Create a content research study and evaluate your content&apos:s effectiveness.
• Identify which specific words or content elements to test. Analyze your research results.
• Identify which specific words or content elements to test.
• Determine which research methods and tools are ideal for your team's content research needs.
• Elevate the role of content design in your company, proving that content is key to creating an outstanding customer experience—and improving your bottom line.
• Create a content research roadmap.
• Learn from professional content people in case studies that highlight practical examples.