If you like Wired Magazine and popular science books, you'll love the "hidden history" of The Battery.

    The savagery of this electrical battle can hardly be imagined today. The showdown between AC and DC began as a rather straightforward conflict between technical standards, a battle of competing methods to deliver essentially the same product, electricity. But the skirmish soon metastasized into something bigger and darker. In the AC/DC battle, the worst aspects of human nature somehow got caught up in the wires; a silent, deadly flow of arrogance, vanity, and cruelty. Following the path of least resistance, the war of currents soon settled around that most primal of human emotions: fear. "AC/DC" serves as an object lesson in bad business strategy and poor decision making. Edison's inability to see his mistake was a key factor in his loss of control over the "operating system" for his future inventions—not to mention the company he founded, General Electric.

    Step-by-step illustrations, helpful diagrams, and exceptional photography make this book an easy-to-follow and easy-on-the-eyes guide to getting your project done.With an emphasis on making DIY projects that can change the world, The Big Book of Maker Skills includes sections and tutorials on:Setting Up a HackerspacePicking the Right ToolsWelding SmartsCircuitry BasicsProgramming & ArduinosWorking with Wood3-D PrintingLaser-cuttingCNC RoutingTesting & PrototypingDrones and Space Exploration ToolsRoboticsBiotechnologySourcing and Crowdsourcing

    With an almost unlimited range of input and output add-ons, sensors, indicators, displays, motors, and more, the Arduino offers you countless ways to create devices that interact with the world around you.In Arduino Workshop, you'll learn how these add-ons work and how to integrate them into your own projects. You'll start off with an overview of the Arduino system but quickly move on to coverage of various electronic components and concepts. Hands-on projects throughout the book reinforce what you've learned and show you how to apply that knowledge. As your understanding grows, the projects increase in complexity and sophistication.Among the book's 65 projects are useful devices like:A digital thermometer that charts temperature changes on an LCD A GPS logger that records data from your travels, which can be displayed on Google Maps A handy tester that lets you check the voltage of any single-cell battery A keypad-controlled lock that requires a secret code to open You'll also learn to build Arduino toys and games like:An electronic version of the classic six-sided die A binary quiz game that challenges your number conversion skills A motorized remote control tank with collision detection to keep it from crashingArduino Workshop will teach you the tricks and design principles of a master craftsman. Whatever your skill level, you'll have fun as you learn to harness the power of the Arduino for your own DIY projects.

    One half massive case study, one half technical manual, Dissecting the Hack has it all - learn all about hacking tools and techniques and how to defend your network against threats. Yes, the security threats are real - read more about the tactics that you see executed throughout the story in the second half of the book where you will learn to recon, scan, explore, exploit and expunge with the tools and techniques shown in the story. Every hack is real and can be used by you once you have the knowledge within this book! Utilizes actual hacking and security tools in its story- helps to familiarize a newbie with the many devices and their codeIntroduces basic hacking techniques in real life context for ease of learningPresented in the words of the hacker/security pro, effortlessly envelops the beginner in the language of the hack

    Each model includes a list of the required parts, minimal text, and colorful photographs from multiple angles so you can re-create it without the need for step-by-step instructions.You'll learn to build cars with real suspension, steerable crawlers, ball-shooters, grasping robotic arms, and other creative marvels. Each model demonstrates simple mechanical principles that you can use as building blocks for your own creations.Best of all, every part you need to build these machines comes in one LEGO set (#31313)!

    In addition to being the most up-to-date communications text available, Simon Haykin has added MATLAB computer experiments.

    Targeted at the novice market, this self-instruction guide to electronics and electricity has been fully updated to include the latest emerging technologies, including wireless communications, computers and the Internet.

    Like many others, I feel like I have learned more in the last couple of years studying Bitcoin than I have during two decades of formal education. The following lessons are a distillation of what I’ve learned. First published as an article series titled “What I’ve Learned From Bitcoin,” what follows can be seen as a third edition of the original series. Like Bitcoin, these lessons aren’t a static thing. I plan to work on them periodically, releasing updated versions and additional material in the future.Bitcoin is an inexhaustible teacher, which is why I do not claim that these lessons are all-encompassing or complete. They are a reflection of my personal journey down the rabbit hole. There are many more lessons to be learned, and every person will learn something different from entering the world of Bitcoin. I hope that you will find these lessons useful and that the process of learning them by reading won’t be as arduous and painful as learning them firsthand.

    This mini-textbook includes wonderfully simple line drawings and clear language to describe all the automotive systems as well as a glossary, index, and a test after each chapter. How Cars Work provides the basic vocabulary and mechanical knowledge to help a reader talk intelligently with mechanics, understand shop manuals, and diagnosis car problems. Tom Newton guides the reader with a one topic per page format that delivers information in bite size chunks—just right for teenage boys.Author and illustrator Tom Newton is a school psychologist. How Cars Work was developed for teens, but is also used by automotive service managers and mechanics to help customers understand repairs. This book can be found in adult literacy programs, high schools, and middle schools. How Cars Work makes it fun and easy to learn how cars work!

    Smith. But, thanks to the determination of a powerful senator, he would soon find himself at the agency’s helm. A Birkenstocks-wearing physics PhD, Jaczko was unlike any chairman the agency had ever seen: he was driven by a passion for technology and a concern for public safety, with no ties to the industry and no agenda other than to ensure that his agency made the world a safer place. And so Jaczko witnessed what outsiders like him were never meant to see—an agency overpowered by the industry it was meant to regulate and a political system determined to keep it that way. After an emergency trip to Japan to help oversee the frantic response to the horrifying nuclear disaster at Fukushima in 2011, and witnessing the American nuclear industry’s refusal to make the changes he considered necessary to prevent an equally catastrophic event from occurring here, Jaczko started saying aloud what no one else had dared. Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator is a wake-up call to the dangers of lobbying, the importance of governmental regulation, and the failures of congressional oversight. But it is also a classic tale of an idealist on a mission whose misadventures in Washington are astounding, absurd, and sometimes even funny—and Jaczko tells the story with humor, self-deprecation, and, yes, occasional bursts of outrage. Above all, Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator is a tale of confronting the truth about one of the most pressing public safety and environmental issues of our time: nuclear power will never be safe.

    You may not like Facebook, but you can't deny its success. And to a large degree, that success stems from the "move fast" ethos. The entire culture of Facebook is built for speed.Move Fast is an exploration of modern software strategies and tactics through the lens of Facebook. Relying on in-depth interviews with more than two dozen Facebook engineers, this book explores the product strategy, cultural principles, and technologies that made Facebook the dominant social networking company. Most importantly, Move Fast investigates how you can apply those strategies to your creative projects.It's not easy to build a software company, but once you know how to move fast, your company will be prepared to build a strategy that benefits from the world's rapid changes, rather than suffering from them.

    Electric Circuits is the most widely used introductory circuits textbook of the past decade. The book has remained popular due to its success in implementing three themes throughout the text: (1) It builds an understanding of concepts based on information the student has previously learned; (2) The text helps stress the relationship between conceptual understanding and problem-solving approaches; (3) The authors provide numerous examples and problems that use realistic values and situations to give students a strong foundation of engineering practice.

    This well-written, technically accurate, and even exciting account captures the urgency of the race to win World War II, the people behind the magnetrons, screens and antennae, and the use of radar in the cold war.

    From the assembly lines of Henry Ford to the open roads of Route 66, from the lore of Jack Kerouac to the sex appeal of the Hot Rod, America’s history is a vehicular history—an idea brought brilliantly to life in this major work by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Ingrassia. Ingrassia offers a wondrous epic in fifteen automobiles, including the Corvette, the Beetle, and the Chevy Corvair, as well as the personalities and tales behind them: Robert McNamara’s unlikely role in Lee Iacocca’s Mustang, John Z. DeLorean’s Pontiac GTO , Henry Ford’s Model T, as well as Honda’s Accord, the BMW 3 Series, and the Jeep, among others. Through these cars and these characters, Ingrassia shows how the car has expressed the particularly American tension between the lure of freedom and the obligations of utility. He also takes us through the rise of American manufacturing, the suburbanization of the country, the birth of the hippie and the yuppie, the emancipation of women, and many more fateful episodes and eras, including the car’s unintended consequences: trial lawyers, energy crises, and urban sprawl. Narrative history of the highest caliber, Engines of Change is an entirely edifying new way to look at the American story.