Author Description

"Preface to the Computing Handbook Set The purpose of the Computing Handbook Set is to provide a single, comprehensive reference for specialists in computer science, information systems, information technology, software engineering, and other fields who wish to broaden or deepen their understanding in a particular subfield of the computing discipline. Our goal is to provide up-to-date information on a wide range of topics in a form that is accessible to students, faculty, and professionals. The discipline of computing has developed rapidly since CRC Press published the second edition of the Computer Science Handbook in 2004 (Tucker, 2004). Indeed, it has developed so much that this third edition requires repartitioning and expanding the topic coverage into a two-volume set. The need for two volumes recognizes not only the dramatic growth of computing as a discipline but also the relatively new delineation of computing as a family of five separate disciplines, as described by their professional societies--The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), The IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS), and The Association for Information Systems (AIS) (Shackleford et al., 2005). These separate disciplines are known today as computer engineering, computer science, information systems, information technology, and software engineering. These names more or less fully encompass the variety of undergraduate and graduate degree programs that have evolved around the world, with the exception of countries where the term informatics is used for a subset of these disciplines. The document "Computing curricula 2005: The overview report" describes computing this way (Shackleford et al., 2005, p. 9):"--