To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design


Henry Petroski - 1985
    More than a series of fascinating case studies, To Engineer Is Human is a work that looks at our deepest notions of progress and perfection, tracing the fine connection between the quantifiable realm of science and the chaotic realities of everyday life."Alert, inquisitive, unspecialized, wholly human...refreshingly eclectic." --The Spectator"Henry Petroski is an ardent engineer, and if he writes more good books like this, he might find himself nominated to become the meistersinger of the guild. [This is] a refreshing plunge into the dynamics of the engineering ethos...as straightforward as an I-beam."--Science

The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century


Edward Dolnick - 2008
    The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art.It was an almost perfect crime. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. But, as Edward Dolnick reveals, the reason for the forger's success was not his artistic skill. Van Meegeren was a mediocre artist. His true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling both the Nazis and the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life.ARTnews called Dolnick's previous book, the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist, "the best book ever written on art crime." In The Forger's Spell, the stage is bigger, the stakes are higher, and the villains are blacker.

Math Riddles For Smart Kids: Math Riddles and Brain Teasers that Kids and Families will Love


M. Prefontaine - 2017
    It is a collection of 150 brain teasing math riddles and puzzles. Their purpose is to make children think and stretch the mind. They are designed to test logic, lateral thinking as well as memory and to engage the brain in seeing patterns and connections between different things and circumstances. They are laid out in three chapters which get more difficult as you go through the book, in the author’s opinion at least. The answers are at the back of the book if all else fails. These are more difficult riddles and are designed to be attempted by children from 10 years onwards, as well as participation from the rest of the family. Tags: Riddles and brain teasers, riddles and trick questions, riddles book, riddles book for kids, riddles for kids, riddles for kids aged 9-12, riddles and puzzles, jokes and riddles, jokes book, jokes book for kids, jokes children, jokes for kids, jokes kids, puzzle book

Catch Your Breath: The Secret Life of a Sleepless Anaesthetist


Ed Patrick - 2021
    “They’re just fantastic! Then I remembered, Ed you’re an anesthesiologist…f*cking hell! I can’t believe that…”.  I like to think I’m an inspiration to all budding doctors that anything is achievable.Ed is a sleepless anesthesiologist. His shifts involve snatching five-minute lunch breaks in the staff bathrooms, navigating emergencies and living with the all too terrifying sense of responsibility. And that was before Coronavirus arrived, which quickly turned his job into a nightmare queue of struggling with ill-fitting PPE, balancing staff shortages and intubating Covid-19 patients who can’t breathe on their own.Hilariously funny and moving, Catch Your Breath follows Ed’s journey from bewildered medical student in Aberdeen to unflinching anesthesiologist on the NHS frontline. It offers a unique insight into life on the hospital wards during the pandemic, while also sharing the hope that we will all get through this.

The Imposter's Handbook


Rob Conery - 2016
    New languages, new frameworks, new ways of doing things - a constant struggle just to stay current in the industry. This left no time to learn the foundational concepts and skills that come with a degree in Computer Science.

The Unified Software Development Process


Ivar Jacobson - 1999
    This book demonstrates how the notation and process complement one another, using UML models to illustrate the new process in action. It describes the constructs such as use cases, actors, and more.

Mastering Emacs


Mickey Petersen - 2015
    In the Mastering Emacs ebook you will learn the answers to all the concepts that take weeks, months or even years to truly learn, all in one place.“Emacs is such a hard editor to learn”But why is it so hard to learn? As it turns out, it's almost always the same handful of issues that everyone faces.If you have tried to learn Emacs you will have struggled with the same problems everyone faces, and few tutorials to see you through it.I have dedicated the first half of the book to explaining the essence of Emacs — and in doing so, how to overcome these issues:Memorizing Emacs’s keys: You will learn Emacs one key at a time, starting with the arrow keys. To feel productive in Emacs, it’s important you start on an equal footing — without too many new concepts and keys to memorize. Each chapter will introduce more keys and concepts so you can learn at your own pace. Discovering new modes and features: Emacs is a self-documenting editor, and I will teach you how to use the apropos, info, and describe system to discover new modes and features, or help you find things you forgot! Customizing Emacs: You don’t have to learn Emacs Lisp to alter a lot of Emacs’s functionality. Most changes you want to make are possible using Emacs’s Customize interface and I will show you how to use it efficiently. Understanding the terminology: Emacs is so old it predates almost every other editor and all modern user interfaces. I have an entire chapter dedicated to the unique terminology in Emacs; how it is different from other editors, and what that means to you.

A World of Hurt: Fixing Pain Medicine's Greatest Mistake


Barry Meier - 2013
    

Confident Data Skills: Master the Fundamentals of Working with Data and Supercharge Your Career


Kirill Eremenko - 2018
    From entertainment to politics, from technology to advertising and from science to the business world, understanding and using data is now one of the most transferable and transferable skills out there. Learning how to work with data may seem intimidating or difficult but with Confident Data Skills you will be able to master the fundamentals and supercharge your professional abilities. This essential book covers data mining, preparing data, analysing data, communicating data, financial modelling, visualizing insights and presenting data through film making and dynamic simulations.In-depth international case studies from a wide range of organizations, including Netflix, LinkedIn, Goodreads, Deep Blue, Alpha Go and Mike's Hard Lemonade Co. show successful data techniques in practice and inspire you to turn knowledge into innovation. Confident Data Skills also provides insightful guidance on how you can use data skills to enhance your employability and improve how your industry or company works through your data skills. Expert author and instructor, Kirill Eremenko, is committed to making the complex simple and inspiring you to have the confidence to develop an understanding, adeptness and love of data.

Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach


Julia Silge - 2017
    With this practical book, you'll explore text-mining techniques with tidytext, a package that authors Julia Silge and David Robinson developed using the tidy principles behind R packages like ggraph and dplyr. You'll learn how tidytext and other tidy tools in R can make text analysis easier and more effective.The authors demonstrate how treating text as data frames enables you to manipulate, summarize, and visualize characteristics of text. You'll also learn how to integrate natural language processing (NLP) into effective workflows. Practical code examples and data explorations will help you generate real insights from literature, news, and social media.Learn how to apply the tidy text format to NLPUse sentiment analysis to mine the emotional content of textIdentify a document's most important terms with frequency measurementsExplore relationships and connections between words with the ggraph and widyr packagesConvert back and forth between R's tidy and non-tidy text formatsUse topic modeling to classify document collections into natural groupsExamine case studies that compare Twitter archives, dig into NASA metadata, and analyze thousands of Usenet messages

Intermediate Perl


Randal L. Schwartz - 2003
    One slogan of Perl is that it makes easy things easy and hard things possible. "Intermediate Perl" is about making the leap from the easy things to the hard ones.Originally released in 2003 as "Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules" and revised and updated for Perl 5.8, this book offers a gentle but thorough introduction to intermediate programming in Perl. Written by the authors of the best-selling "Learning Perl," it picks up where that book left off. Topics include: Packages and namespacesReferences and scopingManipulating complex data structuresObject-oriented programmingWriting and using modulesTesting Perl codeContributing to CPANFollowing the successful format of "Learning Perl," we designed each chapter in the book to be small enough to be read in just an hour or two, ending with a series of exercises to help you practice what you've learned. To use the book, you just need to be familiar with the material in "Learning Perl" and have ambition to go further.Perl is a different language to different people. It is a quick scripting tool for some, and a fully-featured object-oriented language for others. It is used for everything from performing quick global replacements on text files, to crunching huge, complex sets of scientific data that take weeks to process. Perl is what you make of it. But regardless of what you use Perl for, this book helps you do it more effectively, efficiently, and elegantly."Intermediate Perl" is about learning to use Perl as a programming language, and not just a scripting language. This is the book that turns the Perl dabbler into the Perl programmer.

Undressed Art: Why We Draw


Peter Steinhart - 2004
    In The Undressed Art, writer-naturalist Peter Steinhart investigates the rituals, struggles, and joys of drawing. Reflecting on what is known about the brain’s role in the drawing process, Steinhart explores the visual learning curve: how children begin to draw, how most of them stop, and what brings adults back to this deeply human art form later in life.  He considers why the face and figure are such commanding subjects and describes the delicate collaboration of the artist and model. Here is a powerful reminder that no revolution in art or technology can undermine our vital need to draw.

Color: A Natural History of the Palette


Victoria Finlay - 2003
    Extracted from an Afghan mine, the blue “ultramarine” paint used by Michelangelo was so expensive he couldn’t afford to buy it himself. Since ancient times, carmine red—still found in lipsticks and Cherry Coke today—has come from the blood of insects.

A Parkinson's Primer: An Indispensable Guide to Parkinson's Disease for Patients and Their Families


John M. Vine - 2017
    Well, I was diagnosed 24 years ago, and I still learned something new on every page.”—Michael Kinsley, Vanity Fair columnist and author of Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide Here is the book that John Vine and his wife, Joanne, wish they could have consulted when John was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease—a nontechnical, personal guide written from the patient’s perspective. Relying on his experiences over the past 12 years, John writes knowledgeably about all aspects of the disease. John also interviewed other Parkinson’s patients and their partners, whose stories and advice he includes throughout the book. “I wish we’d had John Vine’s book when my brother-in-law was diagnosed. The book is highly informative, unflinchingly honest, and reassuringly optimistic. It’s just what the doctor should have ordered.”—Cokie Roberts, best-selling author and political commentator on ABC News and NPR “John Vine details, in a compelling and accessible way, his experience with Parkinson’s disease. His book is an extraordinary guide to living successfully with Parkinson’s, and a must read for all who want to better understand the condition. Although diagnosed with Parkinson’s, my father lived an active and productive life until his death at age 94. As the book makes clear, while each patient’s journey is unique, common approaches are indispensable in treating the symptoms of the disease.”—Eric H. Holder, Jr. served as the 82nd Attorney General of the United States from 2009 to 2015 “John Vine has written the best primer I’ve ever read for newly diagnosed Parkinson’s patients and their families. It helps them cope with the shock of diagnosis, gives them (jargon-free) the scientific basics they need to know, describes the symptoms they may experience (making clear that every case is different) and catalogs the resources available to navigate living with Parkinson’s. John humanizes the book by describing his own experience and that of 22 other patients and their partners. I’d urge every neurologist to have copies of Vine’s primer on hand to help new PD on their journey forward.”—Morton Kondracke, author of Saving Milly: Love, Politics and Parkinson’s Disease and a member of the Founders' Council of the Michael J. Fox Foundation “My husband has PD, and I devoured this book. It’s wise, wonderfully readable, and, above all, helpful. Since John Vine has PD, he speaks with great authority about the challenges, both physical and psychological. If you have Parkinson’s, live with someone who has it, or just know someone battling the disease, A Parkinson’s Primer is for you.”—Lesley Stahl, award-winning television journalist on the CBS News program 60 Minutes “This is a remarkable book describing the personal experiences of many individuals, including the author, living with Parkinson’s disease. It captures the fact that although there are many possible symptoms in this disease, each person experiences different symptoms and copes with them in various ways. The thoughtful and insightful comments and coping strategies should be helpful for persons with PD, and their partners, regardless of the stage of the disease.”—Stephen Grill, MD, PhD, Director of the Parkinson’s & Movement Disorders Center of Maryland John M. Vine is a lawyer at Covington & Burling LLP in Washington, DC, where he is the senior member and former head of the firm’s employee benefits group. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2004.

The MAF Method: A Personalized Approach to Health and Fitness


Philip Maffetone - 2020