The Silent Software Revolution:
A Layman’s Tour of the Amazing New World of Desktop and Web Applications
... a book by Buzz King.
The Silent Software Revolution grounds the reader in today's desktop and web-based software development technologies, and explains how easy it is to produce sophisticated applications. It then provides intuitive, highly accessible descriptions of the exciting, emerging technologiesthat will even more fundamentally change the user's interaction with computers. It gives simple explanations of how these software tools will be used to build fast, highly interactive, and richly multimedia applications; these include next-generation browsers that will do the searching for us and web-resident medical information systems that will provide integrated and lifelong access to our medical records.
The Silent Software Revolution unvails a future where computers around the globe are used in concert to perform tasks for average users. It also predicts that soon, we will use advanced applications over the Internet; we will thus be freed from complex applications that freeze up and crash our computers, and that must be frequently replaced at very high costs.
A major focus of the book is on the new world of collaborative, interdisciplinary development. The Silent Software Revolution describes the global community of professionals who train and aid each other as they develop the backbone of the new web and the new Internet. This diverse community is populated by educated professionals who have advanced training in the fine arts, engineering, animation, liberal arts, graphics, and science. The book argues that universities must radically expand their curriculums to respond to this need, and stop teaching programming as a technically isolated discipline fit only for the socially isolated.
The book describes how previously-disparate desktop and web software development tools and techniques are merging into unified paradigms that are accessible to individuals whose primary skills are not in programming. Many new tools provide drag- and-drop components that automatically expand into powerful software components. These components can be used to construct virtually any sort of desktop or web-based application.
The book also covers the dramatic impact of open source software, and how individuals with minimal funds can build powerful software applications. In order to remain competitive, vendors of expensive software systems are forced to release free versions of their products, thus expanding what is truly an astonishing, broad collection of totally free software development tools.
Very importantly, the book does not rely on inscrutable code fragments and complex technical drawings. A number of technical terms are introduced, but only those that the public will be hearing in the years to come. These words are defined intuitively, and they include cloud computing, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, XML, namespaces, web services, and the Semantic Web. There are only a handful of images in the book and none of them involve intricate descriptions.
At several places in the book, simple "experiments" are suggested, whereby the more knowledgeable reader can download and try out new software technology. There will be an associated website that will provide less experienced readers with step-by-step, intuitive instructions on how to perform these experiments. It should be noted that it is not at all necessary to perform these experiments in order to fully appreciate the book.