Unbreakable destiny. Ultimate sacrifice. One man will do anything to save what matters most. Kevin Connelly embarks on a quest to honor the memory of his grandfather, a war hero in a neighborhood without heroes, and rescue his twin siblings from mysterious aliens. His older brother, now the head of their orphaned family has other plans, requiring him to flee a contract with a powerful crime lord. Military enlistment might be the answer to his prayers or the beginning of his destruction. Ace and Amanda-Margaret Connelly learn firsthand the secret of the Siren doom when they are captured by a race of giants opposing their Siren masters. Nothing is what it seems. The human race will soon learn rebels are treacherous allies. Gunnery Sergeant Robert Priest, PhD, is dedicated to the 343rd Marauders despite the horror of Brookhaven and the damage done to his closest friends. Duty doesn't get easier when the Connelly family complicates his mission of vengeance and redemption. Bayonet Dawn is military science fiction packed with camaraderie, action, and a family saga to be remembered. The book strives to realize the best elements of classics in the genre: Starship Troopers, Battlestar Galactica, and Dune.

    Following a grand betrayal, Khaled's father and uncles, the respected right-hand men to the King of Afghanistan, become targets of the new regime. Khaled's father is exiled, his uncles are executed, and their families are locked away in a forgotten corner of Kabul. So begins a decades-long struggle in captivity where Khaled faces the hardship of prison life while enduring tragedies as more of his loved ones are executed and succumb to diseases. Despite the tribulations he experiences, Khaled never gives up hope, choosing to make the most of his time by studying five different languages, advanced literature, and philosophy. Eventually, Khaled and his family are released from prison, but are they truly free? Forbidden from leaving the country, one thing continues to haunt Khaled: a longing to reunite with his father. SHACKLED is a raw, heart-opening story about resilience. It follows the Charkhi family from the 1932 coup to the 1979 Soviet invasion. Amidst national and personal upheaval, Khaled finds his freedom by choosing to lead a life of optimism, kindness, joy, and love. Adam Siddiq is the grandson of Khaled Siddiq. Adam wrote SHACKLED alongside his grandfather, Khaled—a shared journey they hope will inspire others to become more involved in the sacred bond between the youth and their elders.

    Brodie Seminar Book Series) shows how you can change your mindset and improve your personal motivation. Learning how to remain motivated in your life is essential. Without motivation, you will surely find yourself lacking quality results in life. • Do you have everything you wish to achieve in your life? • Do you have any important goals to accomplish in your life? • Are you really accomplishing your goals and dreams? • Have you ever stopped to actually evaluate the quality of your life? Most people struggle to produce the exact results they want in their life, typically due to a lack of motivation or inspiration to take the necessary actions. If you want to become successful in your life, the secrets are revealed in Motivation 101. These untold secrets will encourage and prepare you to take action. It is these actions that will translate to increasing the results you want. Motivation 101 will help open your eyes, mind, and body and will help teach you how to stay motivated and to take action to accomplish your goals. This is why Motivation 101 is a must-have in every library or home. Here are a few things that you will get out of Motivation 101 • How to start your day on the right note • How to utilize the Power of Music throughout the day • How to realize who your greatest opponent really is • How to create your own environment • How to Just Do It when it comes to accomplishing your goals • How to become a Master of Your Own Universe The perfect way to get motivation is from deep within you. Doing something that will motivate you will surely get the results. This book is intended to help eliminate procrastination and teach you how to be passionate about everything you set out to do, encourage you to do what you really love and help create value for not only for yourself but for others. This is the fundamental success principle that you must aspire to accomplish and Motivation 101 will help your journey. Motivation 101 can help you move toward enjoying your peak level of living. Life is more than mere existence. We only truly exist when we live our lives with purpose. Motivation 101 shows you how you can easily start your own journey towards a healthier mindset – a mindset that you can be proud of and achieve mental freedom. But more than this, Motivation 101 explores what it means to live a truly happy and fulfilled life – to really live the life of your dreams and pursue what you love. It encourages you to examine your own motivations and desires in order to determine your path in life. To get access to the bonus materials and resources (all for FREE), be sure to visit: www.BrodieEDU.com

    As a professional C++ developer and former Harvard teaching fellow, I know what you need to know to be a great C++ programmer, and I know how to teach it, one step at a time. I know where people struggle, and why, and how to make it clear. I cover every step of the programming process, including:Getting the tools you need to program and how to use them*Basic language feature like variables, loops and functions*How to go from an idea to code*A clear, understandable explanation of pointers*Strings, file IO, arrays, references*Classes and advanced class design*C++-specific programming patterns*Object oriented programming*Data structures and the standard template library (STL)Key concepts are reinforced with quizzes and over 75 practice problems.

    This book is aimed at the working Rails developer who is looking to grow and evolve Rails projects while keeping them flexible, maintainable, and robust. The focus is on pragmatic solutions which tread a “middle way” between the expedience of the Rails “golden path”, and rigid OO purity.

    Criminals succeed by exercising enormous creativity, and those defending against them must do the same.Beautiful Security explores this challenging subject with insightful essays and analysis on topics that include:The underground economy for personal information: how it works, the relationships among criminals, and some of the new ways they pounce on their prey How social networking, cloud computing, and other popular trends help or hurt our online security How metrics, requirements gathering, design, and law can take security to a higher level The real, little-publicized history of PGP This book includes contributions from:Peiter "Mudge" Zatko Jim Stickley Elizabeth Nichols Chenxi Wang Ed Bellis Ben Edelman Phil Zimmermann and Jon Callas Kathy Wang Mark Curphey John McManus James Routh Randy V. Sabett Anton Chuvakin Grant Geyer and Brian Dunphy Peter Wayner Michael Wood and Fernando Francisco All royalties will be donated to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

    In this book, you'll learn how to become an entrepreneur, driving your career in the direction of your choosing. You'll learn how to build your software development career step by step, following the same path that you would follow if you were building, marketing, and selling a product. After all, your skills themselves are a product. The choices you make about which technologies to focus on and which business domains to master have at least as much impact on your success as your technical knowledge itself--don't let those choices be accidental. We'll walk through all aspects of the decision-making process, so you can ensure that you're investing your time and energy in the right areas. You'll develop a structured plan for keeping your mind engaged and your skills fresh. You'll learn how to assess your skills in terms of where they fit on the value chain, driving you away from commodity skills and toward those that are in high demand. Through a mix of high-level, thought-provoking essays and tactical "Act on It" sections, you will come away with concrete plans you can put into action immediately. You'll also get a chance to read the perspectives of several highly successful members of our industry from a variety of career paths. As with any product or service, if nobody knows what you're selling, nobody will buy. We'll walk through the often-neglected world of marketing, and you'll create a plan to market yourself both inside your company and to the industry in general. Above all, you'll see how you can set the direction of your career, leading to a more fulfilling and remarkable professional life.

    The others are immersed in a digital world he cannot access. He's left to explore miles of wilderness bounded by the Nolichucky River and encircling Appalachian mountain ridges of Bumpas Cove, Tennessee. Beyond the last broken and tilted pieces of a crumbling asphalt road, he discovers the abandoned village where Iron Mountain's mine workers lived. He walks inside empty houses and mine-works searching for toys and relics of the families that lived there decades before. In this place, being alone feels natural. He returns daily, looking for forgotten things. Crawling through a streambed under a tunnel of long blackberry briars, he finds something that isn't covered with rust. It shines white in the scattered shadows. Freed of muck and mire, the glass-metal sleeve is as light as plastic. He slides his arm inside, but before his fingers can reach down into the two long flat fingers, a sharp hook locks into his arm. Leo is forced to find other scattered pieces, assembling a full flightsuit. Once restored, it prepares for a thousand light-year return trip with Leo trapped inside, as it waits for its alien pilot to be restored into Leo's mind. But the suit has drawn others, like Leo, set apart and isolated. Their fate and Leo's intertwine as they face an alien entity that has no regard for their lives.

    But if you haven't seen the performance improvements you expected, or still don't feel confident enough to use Spark in production, this practical book is for you. Authors Holden Karau and Rachel Warren demonstrate performance optimizations to help your Spark queries run faster and handle larger data sizes, while using fewer resources.Ideal for software engineers, data engineers, developers, and system administrators working with large-scale data applications, this book describes techniques that can reduce data infrastructure costs and developer hours. Not only will you gain a more comprehensive understanding of Spark, you'll also learn how to make it sing.With this book, you'll explore:How Spark SQL's new interfaces improve performance over SQL's RDD data structureThe choice between data joins in Core Spark and Spark SQLTechniques for getting the most out of standard RDD transformationsHow to work around performance issues in Spark's key/value pair paradigmWriting high-performance Spark code without Scala or the JVMHow to test for functionality and performance when applying suggested improvementsUsing Spark MLlib and Spark ML machine learning librariesSpark's Streaming components and external community packages

    If the idea of a computer science book without computers upsets you, please close your eyes until you’ve finished reading the rest of this page.The truth is that computer science is not really about the computer. It is just a tool to help you see ideas more clearly. You can see the moon and stars without a telescope, smell the flowers without a fluoroscope, have fun without a funoscope, and be silly sans oscilloscope.You can also play with computer science without... you-know-what. Ideas are the real stuff of computer science. This book is about those ideas, and how to find them.

    With step-by-step instructions, complete scripts, and expert tips to guide readers, this work gets right down to business - after grounding readers with separate discussions of first the scripting language (PHP) and then the database program (MySQL), it goes on to cover security, sessions and cookies, and using additional Web tools.

    This title also teaches you how to use the HTML5 and CSS3 features alongside the earlier standards.

    Offering a gentle learning curve, PHP is an accessible yet powerful language for creating dynamic web pages. As its popularity has grown, PHP's basic feature set has become increasingly more sophisticated. Now PHP 5 boasts advanced features--such as new object-oriented capabilities and support for XML and Web Services--that will please even the most experienced web professionals while still remaining user-friendly enough for those with a lower tolerance for technical jargon.If you've wanted to try your hand at PHP but haven't known where to start, then Learning PHP 5 is the book you need. If you've wanted to try your hand at PHP but haven't known where to start, then Learning PHP 5 is the book you need. With attention to both PHP 4 and the new PHP version 5, it provides everything from a explanation of how PHP works with your web server and web browser to the ins and outs of working with databases and HTML forms. Written by the co-author of the popular PHP Cookbook, this book is for intelligent (but not necessarily highly-technical) readers. Learning PHP 5 guides you through every aspect of the language you'll need to master for professional web programming results. This book provides a hands-on learning experience complete with exercises to make sure the lessons stick.Learning PHP 5 covers the following topics, and more:How PHP works with your web browser and web server PHP language basics, including data, variables, logic and looping Working with arrays and functions Making web forms Working with databases like MySQL Remembering users with sessions Parsing and generating XML DebuggingWritten by David Sklar, coauthor of the PHP Cookbook and an instructor in PHP, this book offers the ideal classroom learning experience whether you're in a classroom or on your own. From learning how to install PHP to designing database-backed web applications, Learning PHP 5 will guide you through every aspect of the language you'll need to master to achieve professional web programming results.

    It takes an incredible lot of time, and often for no measurable results in sales. Some of you may have spent hours, days, weeks, even months, writing blogs, getting active on Facebook and Twitter in order to promote your book. Then you look at your sales figures for the last weeks or months, and your heart sinks. Why isn’t this working? So, have you ever wondered how other books seem to come out of nowhere and become Best Sellers? Ever suspected that there are some tricks you don’t know about that others are using to promote their book? Well, you would be right. In this book I’m going to show you the secrets many of the more successful authors use to help promote and sell their books on Amazon. These are rock solid proven methods that are sure to make your book more visible on the only online store that counts – Amazon. This Secret Guide To Becoming A Best Seller reveals many of the lesser known tactics to promoting your Book on Amazon, including: The Best Way To Promote Your Book The Wrong Way To Promote Your Book What They Won't Tell You About Promoting Your Book How To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Marketing Campaigns Finding The Best Revenue Opportunities Finding Engaged Readers Who Will Read Your Book How The Best Seller System Works What It Takes To Get You There Hot New Releases - How To Get Your Book There Investigating The Secrets Of Amazon's Search Box The Best Ways To Advertise Your Book To New Readers Book Reviews And Why They Are So Important And More … This book is literally a secret guide to your biggest challenge on Amazon: getting discovered.

    This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours-- sometimes even minutes-no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base. Jez Humble and David Farley begin by presenting the foundations of a rapid, reliable, low-risk delivery process. Next, they introduce the "deployment pipeline," an automated process for managing all changes, from check-in to release. Finally, they discuss the "ecosystem" needed to support continuous delivery, from infrastructure, data and configuration management to governance. The authors introduce state-of-the-art techniques, including automated infrastructure management and data migration, and the use of virtualization. For each, they review key issues, identify best practices, and demonstrate how to mitigate risks. Coverage includes - Automating all facets of building, integrating, testing, and deploying software - Implementing deployment pipelines at team and organizational levels - Improving collaboration between developers, testers, and operations - Developing features incrementally on large and distributed teams - Implementing an effective configuration management strategy - Automating acceptance testing, from analysis to implementation - Testing capacity and other non-functional requirements - Implementing continuous deployment and zero-downtime releases - Managing infrastructure, data, components and dependencies - Navigating risk management, compliance, and auditing Whether you're a developer, systems administrator, tester, or manager, this book will help your organization move from idea to release faster than ever--so you can deliver value to your business rapidly and reliably.