Time poor, that is.Four out of five adults report feeling they are time-poor: They have too much to do and not enough time to do it. And the consequences are severe. The time-poor experience less joy each day. They laugh less. They are less healthy, less productive, and more likely to divorce. In one study of 2.5 million Americans, time stress produced a stronger negative effect on happiness than unemployment.How can we escape the time traps that make us feel this way and keep us from living our best lives?Time Smart is your playbook for taking back the time you lose to mindless tasks and unfulfilling chores. Author and Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans will give you proven strategies for improving your "time affluence." Sometimes you can find time lost to thoughtless activity--like mindlessly checking your phone. Sometimes you can find time by buying your way out of time-consuming, unrewarding tasks--for instance, by paying for a ride to work.The techniques Whillans provides will free up seconds, minutes, and hours that, over the long term, become weeks of freed up time you can reinvest in positive, healthy activities.Time Smart doesn't stop at telling you what to do. It also shows you how to do it, helping you achieve the mind-set shift that will make these activities part of your everyday regimen.At every step, Time Smart provides assessments, checklists, and activities you can use right away. Before you've finished reading chapter 1, you'll be accounting for your time and thinking about ways to change.Whillans knows what works. A leading voice in time and happiness research, she's worked with groups as diverse as large consulting firms, couples, the US military, and women with limited means managing vegetable stands in Kenya. The strategies she presents are proven through research and brought to life by the stories of people making the shift--or trying to make the shift--in order to create happier, more fulfilling lives.

    Did you design your system to survivef a sudden rush of visitors from Digg or Slashdot? Or an influx of real world customers from 100 different countries? Are you ready for a world filled with flakey networks, tangled databases, and impatient users?If you're a developer and don't want to be on call for 3AM for the rest of your life, this book will help.In Release It!, Michael T. Nygard shows you how to design and architect your application for the harsh realities it will face. You'll learn how to design your application for maximum uptime, performance, and return on investment.Mike explains that many problems with systems today start with the design.

    Clojure's clean, careful design lets you write programs that get right to the essence of a problem, without a lot of clutter and ceremony. Clojure is Lisp reloaded. Clojure has the power inherent in Lisp, but is not constrained by the history of Lisp. Clojure is a functional language. Data structures are immutable, and functions tend to be side-effect free. This makes it easier to write correct programs, and to compose large programs from smaller ones. Clojure is concurrent. Rather than error-prone locking, Clojure provides software transactional memory. Clojure embraces Java. Calling from Clojure to Java is direct, and goes through no translation layer. Clojure is fast. Wherever you need it, you can get the exact same performance that you could get from hand-written Java code. Many other languages offer some of these features, but the combination of them all makes Clojure sparkle. Programming Clojure shows you why these features are so important, and how you can use Clojure to build powerful programs quickly.

    Now, veteran software engineer and author Vaughn Vernon offers an easier and more rewarding method to succeeding with Actor model. Reactive Messaging Patterns with the Actor Model shows how the reactive enterprise approach, Actor model, Scala, and Akka can help you overcome previous limits of performance and scalability, and skillfully address even the most challenging non-functional requirements. Reflecting his own cutting-edge work, Vernon shows architects and developers how to translate the longtime promises of Actor model into practical reality. First, he introduces the tenets of reactive software, and shows how the message-driven Actor model addresses all of them-making it possible to build systems that are more responsive, resilient, and elastic. Next, he presents a practical Scala bootstrap tutorial, a thorough introduction to Akka and Akka Cluster, and a full chapter on maximizing performance and scalability with Scala and Akka. Building on this foundation, you'll learn to apply enterprise application and integration patterns to establish message channels and endpoints; efficiently construct, route, and transform messages; and build robust systems that are simpler and far more successful. Coverage Includes How reactive architecture replaces complexity with simplicity throughout the core, middle, and edges The characteristics of actors and actor systems, and how Akka makes them more powerful Building systems that perform at scale on one or many computing nodes Establishing channel mechanisms, and choosing appropriate channels for each application and integration challenge Constructing messages to clearly convey a sender's intent in communicating with a receiver Implementing a Process Manager for your Domain-Driven Designs Decoupling a message's source and destination, and integrating appropriate business logic into its router Understanding the transformations a message may experience in applications and integrations Implementing persistent actors using Event Sourcing and reactive views using CQRS Find unique online training on Domain-Driven Design, Scala, Akka, and other software craftsmanship topics using the for{comprehension} website at forcomprehension.com.

    It gives you hundreds of solutions to real-world problems, with clear explanations and thousands of lines of code you can use in your own projects.From data structures and algorithms, to integration with cutting-edge technologies, the Ruby Cookbook has something for every programmer. Beginners and advanced Rubyists alike will learn how to program with:Strings and numbersArrays and hashesClasses, modules, and namespacesReflection and metaprogrammingXML and HTML processingRuby on Rails (including Ajax integration)DatabasesGraphicsInternet services like email, SSH, and BitTorrentWeb servicesMultitaskingGraphical and terminal interfacesIf you need to write a web application, this book shows you how to get started with Rails. If you're a system administrator who needs to rename thousands of files, you'll see how to use Ruby for this and other everyday tasks. You'll learn how to read and write Excel spreadsheets, classify text with Bayesian filters, and create PDF files. We've even included a few silly tricks that were too cool to leave out, like how to blink the lights on your keyboard.The Ruby Cookbook is the most useful book yet written about Ruby. When you need to solve a problem, don't reinvent the wheel: look it up in the Cookbook.

    The focus is on SQL-it covers all major SQL databases without getting lost in the details of any one specific product. Starting with the basics of indexing and the WHERE clause, SQL Performance Explained guides developers through all parts of an SQL statement and explains the pitfalls of object-relational mapping (ORM) tools like Hibernate. Topics covered include: Using multi-column indexes; Correctly applying SQL functions; Efficient use of LIKE queries; Optimizing join operations; Clustering data to improve performance; Pipelined execution of ORDER BY and GROUP BY; Getting the best performance for pagination queries; Understanding the scalability of databases. Its systematic structure makes SQL Performance Explained both a textbook and a reference manual that should be on every developer's bookshelf.