Books!

The increased use of technology is necessary in order for industrial control systems to maintain and monitor industrial, infrastructural, or environmental processes. The need to secure and identify threats to the system is equally critical.Securing Critical Infrastructures and Critical Control Systems: Approaches for Threat Protection provides a full and detailed understanding of the vulnerabilities and security threats that exist within an industrial control system. This collection of research defines and analyzes the technical, procedural, and managerial responses to securing these systems.

C. Laing, A. Badii, and P. Vickers, eds., Securing Critical Infrastructures and Industrial Control Systems: Approaches for Threat Protection. IGI Global, Dec. 2012, ISBN: 9781466626591.

“This book is a comprehensive introductory presentation of the key research areas in the interdisciplinary fields of sonification and auditory display. Chapters are written by leading experts, providing a wide-range coverage of the central issues, and can be read from start to finish, or dipped into as required (like a smorgasbord menu).”

P. Vickers, ‘‘Sonification for Process Monitoring,’’ in The Sonification Handbook (T. Hermann, A. D. Hunt, and J. Neuhoff, eds.), pp. 455-492, Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2011

S. Barrass and P. Vickers, ‘‘Sonification Design and Aesthetics,’’ in The Sonification Handbook (T. Hermann, A. D. Hunt, and J. Neuhoff, eds.), pp. 145-172, Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2011

How to Think Like a Programmer is a bright, accessible, fun read describing the mindset and mental methods of programmers. Anticipating the problems that students have through the character of Brian the Bewildered Wildebeest, the slower pace required for this approach is made interesting and engaging by hand-drawn sketches, frequent (paper-based) activities and the everyday tasks (e.g. coffee making) used as a basis of worked examples.

How to Think Like a Programmer provides a fun and accessible way to learn the mental models needed to approach computational programmable problems.

HowToThinkLikeAProgrammer.com web site and discussion forum

This is the expanded 16-chapter version of How to Think Like a Programmer. Its first eight chapters are the same as the first volume, and the remaining chapters take the reader closer to the machine level covering topics such as data typing, data structures, and more on object oriented programming.

Both books use pseudo-code as the notation for expressing the algorithms.

HowToThinkLikeAProgrammer.com web site and discussion forum

This lovely book, edited by Paul Fishwick, contains contributions from a wide range of researchers who have all addressed the central question of the role of aesthetics in computing. J.L. Alty and I co-authored the chapter on the aesthetics of program sonification.

P. Vickers and J. L. Alty, ‘‘The Well-tempered Compiler: The Aesthetics of Program Auralization,’’ in Aesthetic Computing (P. Fishwick, ed.), ch. 17, pp. 335-354, Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2006, ISBN: 0-262-06250-X.

This book (co-authored with my former colleagues Melvyn King and John Pardoe) is a short primer on computer programming using the C language.

M. King, J. Pardoe, and P. Vickers, A First Course in Computer Programming Using C. London: McGraw-Hill, 1994, ISBN: 0-07-707913-2