Articles

Our books have a reputation for clear, easy-to-follow writing. We believe it’s the reason the In Easy Steps series has become one of the most successful in the world.

So we’ve asked some of our best-selling authors to share more of their wisdom in this selection of articles.

Fighting Spam

Posted by In Easy Steps Team on Dec 10, 2011 in Article | Comments Off

By Stuart Yarnold Some interesting statistics on spam: Currently, some 80 % of email traffic is estimated to be spam 30 billion spam emails are sent every day 78 % of PC users receive spam on a daily basis 4 % of recipients make a purchase as a result of a received spam email Worldwide, the cost of dealing with spam is estimated to be 50 billion dollars annually If the spammers have you in their sights, what can you do about it? The first and most obvious step is to simply delete your account and open a new one with a different address....

Online Poker – An Overview

Posted by In Easy Steps Team on Dec 9, 2011 in Article | Comments Off

By Stuart Yarnold Quite apart from being an invaluable information resource, the Internet provides many means of recreation, one of the most popular of which is gambling. This comes in various forms: spread betting, casino games such as blackjack and roulette, stocks and shares, etc. The one we are going to look at here is poker. Currently, there are four to five hundred poker sites and the first step is to choose one, download and install the software, and then open an account. Making sure you use a reputable poker room is important as...

Understanding Camera Raw

Posted by In Easy Steps Team on Dec 7, 2011 in Article | Comments Off

By Robert Shufflebotham With the relentless advance of digital camera technology, many pro-level and some mid-range digital cameras now allow you to record images as “raw” files. But, do you need camera raw, and what are the advantages and implications if you decide to use it? Most digital cameras use either CCD (charge-coupled device) or CMOS (complimentary metal oxide semiconductor) sensor technology to capture image data. Raw image files record the precise data captured by the photosensitive sensors of the camera without...

Understanding Regular Expressions By Mike McGrath

Posted by In Easy Steps Team on Dec 7, 2011 in Article | Comments Off

A “Regular Expression” is simply a pattern describing a particular string of characters. Regular Expressions are often referred to as “regex” or “regexp” and are supported by most programming languages, such as C++, and scripting languages such as JavaScript. Regular Expressions are useful for text validation and for search-and-replace operations within text by matching their specified pattern to a section of the text. A Regular Expression pattern may consist entirely of “literal characters”...