Thursday, April 25, 2013


Welcome to the first ever ACM Learning Center Bulletin, keeping you current on the many online learning tools ACM offers to help extend our members' skills and knowledge. To suggest addition of books, courses; future Tech Packs or Webinar topic; or just offer feedback, leave a note in the Learning Center Suggestion Box.


IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Learning Center Tech Packs
IN THE SPOTLIGHT

May 8: David Patterson and Armando Fox, "Engineering Software as a Service"
On Wednesday, May 8, 2013, at 2 pm ET (1 pm CT/12 noon MT/11 am PT/6 pm GMT) ACM presents "Engineering Software as a Service: An Agile Software Approach," a special virtual webcast with David Patterson (a former president of ACM) and Armando Fox. They've written a textbook on the subject and co-teach a very popular Massive Open Online Course course (MOOC) on the subject at the University of California, Berkeley.

Attendees will learn about the synergy between SaaS and Agile development methods now being deployed by companies like Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and Google, modern frameworks like Ruby on Rails, and tools such as Cucumber, RSpec, and Pivotal Track. David will talk about eliciting SaaS requirements from customers through user stories, following behavior-driven and test-driven design design, projecting SaaS app costs and schedule, and organizing SaaS programming teams using Scrum principles. The talk will be followed by a live question and answer session moderated by Armando Fox.

Click here to register for this free webinar—and feel free to share the link with interested friends and colleagues. (If you'd like to attend but can't make it to the virtual event, you still need to register to receive a recording of the webinar when it becomes available.) You can stream this and all ACM Learning Webinars on your mobile device, including smartphones and tablets. And check out our past events (covering topics like big data, cybersecurity, developing mobile applications in the cloud, recommender systems, and software as a service), all available on demand.

Watch Vint Cerf and Stu Feldman's Talk on the Future of the Web
"Internet�s Future Social Implications: Upheaval or 'Trek�s' Promise?", a special ACM Webcast presented on Tuesday, April 23, 2013 as part of the ACM Learning Webinar series, is now available on demand (registration required). Google's Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf (currently serving as President of ACM) talked about the future of the Internet and its technological, economic, legal, and social implications in a very special virtual event moderated by Google's Vice President of Engineering Stuart Feldman (a former president of ACM).

Vint discussed the current and anticipated technical evolution of the system, the power of mobile technology to leverage the computing power of the Internet and World Wide Web, the introduction of the Internet of Things and the implications these have for safety, authentication, and control. He also looked at the implications of the Web's open character on geopolitics and intellectual property laws. The talk was followed by a live question and answer session moderated by Stuart Feldman. Attendees can expect to come away with an appreciation for the scope, depth, and evolutionary arc of the Internet and the policy and technical challenges it poses in the 21st Century.

Click here to register for this free webinar and be sure to share this with friends and colleagues who may be interested in this topic. And don't forget to fill out the survey by clicking on the red widget found on the right side of the bottom panel in the webinar console.

Major Update to ACM Online Book/Video Collection
We recently added dozens of new titles to the ACM Learning Center collection. This book and video "swap" refreshes our library based on member suggestions, updates to popular editions as well as coverage of trending skills and technologies. All ACM members now have access to hot Books 24x7 titles such as Android Application Development for Java Programmers, Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 in C#, Beginning CouchDB, iOS 6 Recipes, Professional ASP.NET MVC 4, Programming Massively Parallel Processors, Pro jQuery, The Art of R Programming, The Definitive Guide to HTML5, and Pro C# 5.0 and the .NET 4.5 Framework.

Professional members additionally have access to new books and videos from Safari, including the popular Big Nerd Ranch Guide series (iOS Programming, More Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, and Objective-C Programming), Learning Whitehat Hacking and Penetration Testing, MongoDB: The Definitive Guide, Programming in Scala, Programming Collective Intelligence, Python for Data Analysis R in a Nutshell, Strata Conference Santa Clara 2012: Complete Video Compilation, and Xcode 4 Unleashed.

Topics receiving new or increased coverage include agile programming and lean project management, Android and iOS programming, APN .NET MVC 4, business analysis and data mining, cloud computing and virtualization, cyber forensics and information security, game development, Hadoop, HTML5/CSS3, Java and JavaScript, Linux, Microsoft SQL Server 2012, open source databases, R and Scala programming, and Windows 8.

Also added are study guides aligned with certifications in CEH Ethical Hacker, Cisco (CCNA, CWNA), CISSP, CompTIA, ITIL, Microsoft's MCTS, Oracle's OCA, PMP, RHCSA/RHCE Red Hat Linux, and VMware's VCP. There is also updated coverage of established technologies such as Fortran and LaTeX. Check out the Safari and Books 24x7 book swap pages on the ACM Learning Center website for the complete list of new books and videos.

ACM Online Books from Morgan Kaufmann and Syngress
There's more to ACM's e-book library than Books 24x7 and Safari Books Online, such as Web Application Vulnerabilities, from Syngress publishing. Experienced security consultant, system administrator, and member of the FBI's Infragard organization Steve Palmer teaches readers how to defend Web-based applications developed with AJAX, SOAP, XMLPRC, and more; and why Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks can be so devastating.

This and another 150 titles from publishers Morgan Kaufmann (MK) and Syngress are available in PDF (and some in ePub) and downloadable to your desktop, laptop, tablet, and any popular e-book reader on your mobile device. All members (Student and Professional) can access them through the ACM Learning Center (click the eBooks link option under the Books & Video tab in the main navigation bar) as well as the ACM Digital Library (the eBooks link under Browse the Special Collections).

Morgan Kaufmann is a well-known and respected publisher of computer science titles spanning Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networking, Computer Architecture, Computer Graphics and Game Development, Data Management and Business Intelligence, Software Engineering, and User Experience and Human Computer Interaction. Syngress specializes in books on Digital Forensics, Hacking and Penetration Testing, Certification, IT Security and Administration, and more. See the ACM eBook Catalog for all available titles, including books from Morgan Kaufman and Syngress.


Learning Center

Boost Your Skill Set with Courses from Skillsoft
Have you taken advantage of ACM's online courses, complimentary for all members? With a variety of learning assets, including online courses and project simulations, the new Skillsoft course catalog offers broad coverage of the latest industry standards, such as HTML 5, Java SE, and Microsoft .NET 4, and SharePoint 2010. Certification tracks aligned with CAPM and PMP, Cisco's CCNA and CCNT, CISSP, CompTIA (A+, Linux +, and Security+), ITIL, LPI (Linux), Microsoft (MCITP, MCSA, MCTS), and Oracle (databases and Java) help prepare you for vendor examinations. Many feature complimentary online "mentoring" from certified subject area experts. Courses are also downloadable to an offline player for your convenience. Check out the full Skillsoft course catalog and leave your course suggestions in the Learning Center Suggestion Box.

Watch ACM A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration Videos
Last year ACM marked the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing's birth with a special event centered on the ACM A.M. Turing Award winners, 33 of whom attended and participated in the Celebration. The Technical Program included moderated panels and invited talks from selected speakers and focused on Alan Turing's contributions, as well as the history and future of computing. By bringing together so many ACM A.M. Turing Award winners to reflect on Alan Turing's contribution and share their views on the past and future of computing, the ACM A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration engaged researchers, academics, students, and the public in a conversation about the importance and direction of our discipline. The panels and lectures are now part of the ACM Learning Center multimedia library.

Talks by A.M. Turing laureates include "Computable Real Numbers and Why They Are Still Important Today," where Edmund Clake focuses on the most successful verification techniques, temporal logic, and model checking; in particular a model checker that makes better use of the theory of the computable reals and computable analysis more generally, and new formal methods for hybrid systems that combine existing discrete methods in model checking with new algorithms based on computable analysis. And don't miss the outstanding panels, including "Turing the Man": Keith Van Rijsbergen chairs a session with Charles Bachman, Calvin Gotlieb, Wendy Hall, and William Newman as these luminaries recount their personal experiences with Alan himself and Sara, his mother.

ACM Podcasts: Exclusive Interviews with Top Computing Professionals
Tune in as the leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs advancing computing as a science and a profession discuss their background, experience, and career highlights, all while providing invaluable insights and lessons learned for future computing professionals in this ongoing series of exclusive interviews conducted by Stephen Ibaraki, Chair of the ACM Professional Development Committee. Don't miss a fascinating chat with Judea Pearl, recipient of the ACM Turing Award in 2012, a world-renowned researcher in artificial intelligence (AI) and Director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles. Pearl discusses his seminal work on processing information under uncertainty as well as causal reasoning.


Tech Packs

Tech Packs: Expert-Curated Readings on Hot Computing Topics
Have you looked at a Tech Pack yet? These innovative, integrated learning packages covering today's hottest topics in computing are created by subject matter expert committees who curate essential readings, such as foundational journal papers, conference proceedings, keynotes, and more. TechPacks available to members include: Other Tech Packs are in development on topics including Big Data, Bioinformatics, Computing Ethics and Professionalism, Machine Learning, Software as a Service, and Virtualization. Have a suggestion for another Tech Pack topic? Leave it in the Tech Pack Suggestion Box!


 
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