Books by Alex Davies

This book gives a new account of society and social change in the upper and middle Thames Valley from the Late Bronze Age to Middle Iron Age, 1150-100 BC. A model is developed from social anthropological case studies setting out expectations on how societies are structured based on certain material manifestations. Patterns are found within the wide range of types of evidence that are integrated and synthesised. This includes settlements, house forms, metalwork, pottery, human and animal remains, monuments, landscape boundaries and special deposits.The main interpretation offered is that Late Bronze Age societies were fluid and unstructured by either social status differences or lineage identities, whereas Early Iron Age communities were more concerned with ancestral genealogy and inter-generational inheritance. By the Middle Iron Age, communal aspects of ritual practice and material practice were largely replaced by local and household concerns in which smaller groups displayed increasing autonomy from each other.

If youre writing one of several applications that call for asynchronous programming, this concise hands-on guide shows you how the async feature in C# 5.0 can make the process much simpler. Along with a clear introduction to asynchronous programming, you get an in-depth look at how the async feature works and why you might want to use it in your application.Written for experienced C# programmersyet approachable for beginnersthis book is packed with code examples that you can extend for your own projects.Write your own asynchronous code, and learn how async saves you from this messy choreDiscover new performance possibilities in ASP.NET web server codeExplore how async and WinRT work together in Windows 8 applicationsLearn the importance of the await keyword in async methodsUnderstand which .NET thread is running your codeand at what points in the programUse the Task-based Asynchronous Pattern (TAP) to write asynchronous APIs in .NETTake advantage of parallel computing in modern machinesMeasure async code performance by comparing it with alternatives