From personalizing Vim to productivity optimizations: Recipes to make life easier for experienced Vim users
Create, install, and use Vim scripts
Personalize your work-area
Optimize your Vim editor to be faster and more responsive

In Detail
Each chapter of this book deals with a different aspect, and provides recipes for easy-to-use hacks to customize and simplify your Vim experience. After an introduction covering the derivation of Vim and its relatives from the vi editor, the author explains basic changes that you can make to the appearance of the Vim editor. Further chapters cover improved navigation through files and buffers in Vim; speeding up your work with templates, auto-completion, folding, sessions, and registers; and formatting text and code, including using external formatting scripts. The final comprehensive chapter covers everything about using Vim scripts and scripting to extend functionality.

Vim stands for Vi IMproved and is the editor of choice for programmers looking for a highly configurable, stable, open-source, multi-platform text editor. It is included with almost every Linux distribution as the standard text editor, and can be used to work with source code from any language. A big advantage of using Vim is that it can be extensively customized; you can control the basic interface, define personalized key mappings, implement macros, and call external or user-defined scripts. Vim has its own scripting language that allows for plug-in like extensions to enable IDE behavior, syntax scripts and highlighting, color schemes, themes, and utility scripts that can add a wide range of features and functionality. Vim 7.0, for which this book is written, includes spell-checking, code completion, document tabs, current line and column highlighting, undo branches, and more.

Summary:
New from bestselling video game guru, Andre LaMothe, Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus provides an incredibly rich tour of today's video game programming techniques for the Microsoft DirectX gaming platform. Filled with entertaining and challenging code examples in C, this book sets a high standard as a tutorial for getting started with game programming and will certainly earn a place on the bookshelf of any working (or aspiring) game developer.
The incredibly rich detail within this book on virtually all facets of game development on the DirectX platform is what sets it apart from other titles. The author, a truly legendary game programmer, conveys his expert knowledge with a sense of authority and flair in a massive format (nearly 1,000 pages). After a tour of basic Windows C programming, this book centers on Microsoft DirectX for game development. Though most of the printed book centers on DirectDraw (for 2D APIs), these APIs are used to render 3D worlds. (A wide variety of articles on Direct3D are included on the accompanying CD-ROM.) The author also shows how to get the most out of other Microsoft APIs for high-performance gaming, including sound (DirectSound and DirectMusic) and input (with DirectInput).
Rarely does the ordinary programmer get a glimpse into the high-powered world of video game development. That's what's offered here with plenty of techniques and tips for creating leading-edge game effects (such as simulating the laws of physics in your games, like gravity, or creating smarter characters with artificial intelligence). Whether you are an aspiring game developer or an interested game enthusiast with a programming background who wants a peek under the hood, Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus shows you how it's done in an exciting, technically rich, and authoritatively told tutorial on how to use DirectX for creating realistic video games. –Richard Dragan

Whether you're building GUI prototypes or full-fledged cross-platform GUI applications with native look-and-feel, PyQt 4 is your fastest, easiest, most powerful solution. Qt expert Mark Summerfield has written the definitive best-practice guide to PyQt 4 development.
With Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt you'll learn how to build efficient GUI applications that run on all major operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and many versions of Unix, using the same source code for all of them. Summerfield systematically introduces every core GUI development technique: from dialogs and windows to data handling; from events to printing; and more. Through the book's realistic examples you'll discover a completely new PyQt 4-based programming approach, as well as coverage of many new topics, from PyQt 4's rich text engine to advanced model/view and graphics/view programming. Every key concept is illuminated with realistic, downloadable examples—all tested on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux with Python 2.5, Qt 4.2, and PyQt 4.2, and on Windows and Linux with Qt 4.3 and PyQt 4.3.

In todays information age, scientists and engineers must quickly and efficiently analyze extremely large sets of data. One of the best tools to accomplish this is Interactive Data Language (IDL®), a programming and visualization environment that facilitates numerical modeling, data analysis, and image processing. IDLs high-level language and powerful graphics capabilities allow users to write more flexible programs much faster than is possible with other programming languages.
An Introduction to Programming with IDL enables students new to programming, as well as those with experience in other programming languages, to rapidly harness IDLs capabilities: fast, interactive performance; array syntax; dynamic data typing; and built-in graphics. Each concept is illustrated with sample code, including many complete short programs.
·Margin notes throughout the text quickly point readers to the relevant sections of IDL manuals
·End-of-chapter summaries and exercises help reinforce learning
·Students who purchase the book are eligible for a substantial discount on a student version of the IDL software
($45.20)

A step-by-step guide to building PHP web sites and applications using the Smarty templating engine
Bring the benefits of Smarty to your PHP programming
Give your designers the power to modify content and layout without PHP programming
Produce code that is easier to debug, maintain, and modify
Useful for both Smarty developers and users

In Detail
Smarty is a templating engine for PHP. Designers who are used to working with HTML files can work with Smarty templates, which are HTML files with simple tags while programmers work with the underlying PHP code. The Smarty engine brings the code and templates together. The result of all this is that designers can concentrate on designing, programmers can concentrate on programming, and they don't need to get in each others way so much. Even if you are developing a site on your own, Smarty is a powerful way to make your code clearer to you and others, as well as easier to debug and modify later.

What you will learn from this book?
This book is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of using Smarty. It will help you to:
Install and configure Smarty on your Web server
Understand how Smarty affects your web site architecture, and build site foundations that make the most of what Smarty offers
Designers will learn to work with templates that contain variables and logic, to modify layouts or content of Smarty web sites
See how Smarty caching can improve the performance of your sites
Develop custom Smarty functions and plug-ins to incorporate into your templates