Whether you are an entry-level or seasoned designer or programmer, learn all about data structures in this easy-to-understand, self-teaching guide that can be directly applied to any programming language.

This handbook shows how to write faster and more robust stored procedures and functions, learn effective, real-world solutions to problems faced by database developers, designers, and administrators, and master topics such as optimizing and debugging.

The Mongol warriors are one of the great success stories of world military history. Under the leadership of Genghis Khan and his successors the Mongols conquered much of the known world, fighting in territory ranging from the frozen steppes, the wilderness of Palestine, the jungles of Java and the great rivers of China. Through all this they showed a remarkable ability to adopt, adapt and improve a vast range of military techniques and technology, from siege weapons to naval warfare. This book tells the story of this remarkable military organisation, including details of weaponry, tactics, training and beliefs.

This book began as a series of essays on the way knowledge is constructed by different groups of people: masons, Polynesian navigators, malariologists, turbulence engineers and cartographers. Now the book is finished it seems to be a reflection on modernity and the problems we have in understanding it. This slightly odd effect of an unplanned outcome may be the common authorial sensation of the book having a voice of its own. But I suspect it illustrates the illusory nature of one of the core tenets of modernity—that the technoscientific knowledge, upon which the concept of modernity is based, epitomises planning, rationality and order. This book is in large part a reexamination of the supposed planned and rational character of technoscientific knowledge. Rather than being governed by logic and method, modernity’s drive for order conceals its messy, contingent, unplanned and arational character. If we wish to rethink the way we produce knowledge and the forms of knowledge we value, we need to recognise, even celebrate, its unplanned and messy nature. The book assumes that there is not just one universal form of knowledge (Western science), but a variety of knowledges. Moreover, a cross-cultural, comparative form of analysis is required to understand our own knowledge traditions. For this reason I consider examples from a variety of periods and cultures in order to explore the ways in which we are constituted as knowng subjects through the very processes of knowing that we construct. At the same time I think it is incumbent on me to examine the nature of the sociological stance that provides for such an analysis. In that reflexive sense my position could be characterised as postmodern, but I aim to break with the limitations of both the postmodern and the modern and argue for the transmodern—a way station at which some kind of synthesis of the two can be achieved, without the excesses of either.

Few languages are riddled with as many spelling inconsistencies and irregularities as English. Why is there such dissonance between the sounds of English and the spelling used to represent them? The answer lies in the history of the language itself. The History of English Spelling reveals the rich and complex history of Modern English spelling, tracing its origins and development from Old English up to the present day. The book provides a highly detailed, letter-by-letter analysis of the Old English basis of Modern English spelling, followed by in-depth coverage of the contributions from French, Latin, Greek, and the many other languages that have contributed to current orthography. Upward and Davidson also explore events in the socio-political history of England as an explanatory setting for developments in spelling, along with the works of a number of lexicographers (especially Johnson and Webster), and various proposals for spelling reform. The History of English Spelling reveals the richness of the complex and often frustrating alphabetic spelling system used in the English language.