In Eloquent Ruby, Russ Olsen helps you write Ruby like true Rubyists do-so you can leverage its immense, surprising power. Olsen draws on years of experience internalizing the Ruby culture and teaching Ruby to other programmers. He guides you to the "Ah Ha!" moments when it suddenly becomes clear why Ruby works the way it does, and how you can take advantage of this language's elegance and expressiveness. Eloquent Ruby starts small, answering tactical questions focused on a single statement, method, test, or bug. You'll learn how to write code that actually looks like Ruby (not Java or C#); why Ruby has so many control structures; how to use strings, expressions, and symbols; and what dynamic typing is really good for. Next, the book addresses bigger questions related to building methods and classes. You'll discover why Ruby classes contain so many tiny methods, when to use operator overloading, and when to avoid it. Olsen explains how to write Ruby code that writes its own code-and why you'll want to. He concludes with powerful project-level features and techniques ranging from gems to Domain Specific Languages. A part of the renowned Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series, Eloquent Ruby will help you "put on your Ruby-colored glasses" and get results that make you a true believer.

    A world of speakeasies and dancing girls where a gambler or bootlegger is perfectly normal and respectable in every way. Those familiar with "Guys and Dolls" know what to expect!

    curriculum for an introductory foundations textbook--one that provides an overview and understanding of the broad range of subjects included in C.E.--for college and seminary use.Thirty-one chapters are offered under the following sections: 1) Foundations of C.E.; 2) Developmental Perspectives of C.E.; 3) Educational Implications of C.E.; 4) Organization, Administration, and Leadership; 5) C.E. Applied to the Family; and 6) Specialized Ministries. Contributors include Robert PazmiNo, Jim Wilhoit, Julie Gorman, Klaus Issler, and Ted Ward.FROM THE FOREWORD BY LESTER C. BLANK JR.Introducing Christian Education will become a major resource text for church leaders and Christian education leaders who are professors of Christian education. It will be a valuable resource in my personal library. The desired outcome will be Psalm 78:72: "He cared for them with a true heart and led them with skillful hands."

    By 1993, the computer industry had changed so rapidly the company was on its way to losing $16 billion and IBM was on a watch list for extinction -- victimized by its own lumbering size, an insular corporate culture, and the PC era IBM had itself helped invent.Then Lou Gerstner was brought in to run IBM. Almost everyone watching the rapid demise of this American icon presumed Gerstner had joined IBM to preside over its continued dissolution into a confederation of autonomous business units. This strategy, well underway when he arrived, would have effectively eliminated the corporation that had invented many of the industry's most important technologies.Instead, Gerstner took hold of the company and demanded the managers work together to re-establish IBM's mission as a customer-focused provider of computing solutions. Moving ahead of his critics, Gerstner made the hold decision to keep the company together, slash prices on his core product to keep the company competitive, and almost defiantly announced, "The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision."Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? tells the story of IBM's competitive and cultural transformation. In his own words, Gerstner offers a blow-by-blow account of his arrival at the company and his campaign to rebuild the leadership team and give the workforce a renewed sense of purpose. In the process, Gerstner defined a strategy for the computing giant and remade the ossified culture bred by the company's own success.The first-hand story of an extraordinary turnaround, a unique case study in managing a crisis, and a thoughtful reflection on the computer industry and the principles of leadership, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? sums up Lou Gerstner's historic business achievement. Taking readers deep into the world of IBM's CEO, Gerstner recounts the high-level meetings and explains the pressure-filled, no-turning-back decisions that had to be made. He also offers his hard-won conclusions about the essence of what makes a great company run.In the history of modern business, many companies have gone from being industry leaders to the verge of extinction. Through the heroic efforts of a new management team, some of those companies have even succeeded in resuscitating themselves and living on in the shadow of their former stature. But only one company has been at the pinnacle of an industry, fallen to near collapse, and then, beyond anyone's expectations, returned to set the agenda. That company is IBM.Lou Gerstener, Jr., served as chairman and chief executive officer of IBM from April 1993 to March 2002, when he retired as CEO. He remained chairman of the board through the end of 2002. Before joining IBM, Mr. Gerstner served for four years as chairman and CEO of RJR Nabisco, Inc. This was preceded by an eleven-year career at the American Express Company, where he was president of the parent company and chairman and CEO of its largest subsidiary. Prior to that, Mr. Gerstner was a director of the management consulting firm of McKinsey & Co., Inc. He received a bachelor's degree in engineering from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

    Whether you're building the next killer app, investing in a startup, or simply curious about the technology, this practical book is essential reading.Bitcoin, the first successful decentralized digital currency, is still in its infancy and it's already spawned a multi-billion dollar global economy. This economy is open to anyone with the knowledge and passion to participate. Mastering Bitcoin provides you with the knowledge you need (passion not included).This book includes:A broad introduction to bitcoin--ideal for non-technical users, investors, and business executivesAn explanation of the technical foundations of bitcoin and cryptographic currencies for developers, engineers, and software and systems architectsDetails of the bitcoin decentralized network, peer-to-peer architecture, transaction lifecycle, and security principlesOffshoots of the bitcoin and blockchain inventions, including alternative chains, currencies, and applicationsUser stories, analogies, examples, and code snippets illustrating key technical concepts

    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

    It's not enough to simply know what to believe (theology) or, on the other hand, how to do ministry (methodology)—they need something in between. They need help thinking about ministry in a culture that no longer believes Christianity is a force for good, let alone the source of ultimate revealed truth in the person of Christ. Center Church, a collection of twelve essays by Timothy Keller, outlines a theological vision for ministry that is organized around three core commitments:*Gospel-centered: The gospel of grace in Jesus Christ changes everything, from our hearts to our community to the world. It completely reshapes the content, tone and strategy of all that we do.*City-centered: With a positive approach toward our culture, we learn to affirm that cities are wonderful, strategic and underserved places for gospel ministry.*Movement-centered: Instead of building our own tribe, we seek the prosperity and peace of our community as we are led by the Holy Spirit.

    The principal enhancement in Java 8 was the addition of functional programming constructs to Java's object-oriented roots. Java 7, 8, and 9 also introduced language features, such as the try-with-resources statement, the diamond operator for generic types, default and static methods in interfaces, the @SafeVarargs annotation, and modules. New library features include pervasive use of functional interfaces and streams, the java.time package for manipulating dates and times, and numerous minor enhancements such as convenience factory methods for collections. In this new edition of Effective Java, Bloch updates the work to take advantage of these new language and library features, and provides specific best practices for their use. Java's increased support for multiple paradigms increases the need for best-practices advice, and this book delivers. As in previous editions, each chapter consists of several "items," each presented in the form of a short, standalone essay that provides specific advice, insight into Java platform subtleties, and updated code examples. The comprehensive descriptions and explanations for each item illuminate what to do, what not to do, and why. Coverage includes:Updated techniques and best practices on classic topics, including objects, classes, methods, libraries, and generics How to avoid the traps and pitfalls of commonly misunderstood subtleties of the platform Focus on the language and its most fundamental libraries, such as java.lang and java.util

    Drawing heavily on the author's own real-world experiences, the book stresses design and analysis. Coverage is divided into two parts, the first being a general guide to techniques for the design and analysis of computer algorithms. The second is a reference section, which includes a catalog of the 75 most important algorithmic problems. By browsing this catalog, readers can quickly identify what the problem they have encountered is called, what is known about it, and how they should proceed if they need to solve it. This book is ideal for the working professional who uses algorithms on a daily basis and has need for a handy reference. This work can also readily be used in an upper-division course or as a student reference guide. THE ALGORITHM DESIGN MANUAL comes with a CD-ROM that contains: * a complete hypertext version of the full printed book. * the source code and URLs for all cited implementations. * over 30 hours of audio lectures on the design and analysis of algorithms are provided, all keyed to on-line lecture notes.

    As a modern application developer you need to understand the emerging field of data management, both RDBMS and NoSQL. Seven Databases in Seven Weeks takes you on a tour of some of the hottest open source databases today. In the tradition of Bruce A. Tate's Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, this book goes beyond your basic tutorial to explore the essential concepts at the core each technology. Redis, Neo4J, CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase, Riak and Postgres. With each database, you'll tackle a real-world data problem that highlights the concepts and features that make it shine. You'll explore the five data models employed by these databases-relational, key/value, columnar, document and graph-and which kinds of problems are best suited to each. You'll learn how MongoDB and CouchDB are strikingly different, and discover the Dynamo heritage at the heart of Riak. Make your applications faster with Redis and more connected with Neo4J. Use MapReduce to solve Big Data problems. Build clusters of servers using scalable services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Discover the CAP theorem and its implications for your distributed data. Understand the tradeoffs between consistency and availability, and when you can use them to your advantage. Use multiple databases in concert to create a platform that's more than the sum of its parts, or find one that meets all your needs at once.Seven Databases in Seven Weeks will take you on a deep dive into each of the databases, their strengths and weaknesses, and how to choose the ones that fit your needs.What You Need: To get the most of of this book you'll have to follow along, and that means you'll need a *nix shell (Mac OSX or Linux preferred, Windows users will need Cygwin), and Java 6 (or greater) and Ruby 1.8.7 (or greater). Each chapter will list the downloads required for that database.

    With this hands-on guide, you'll learn how to write effective, idiomatic Python code by leveraging its best and possibly most neglected features. Author Luciano Ramalho takes you through Python's core language features and libraries, and shows you how to make your code shorter, faster, and more readable at the same time.Many experienced programmers try to bend Python to fit patterns they learned from other languages, and never discover Python features outside of their experience. With this book, those Python programmers will thoroughly learn how to become proficient in Python 3.This book covers:Python data model: understand how special methods are the key to the consistent behavior of objectsData structures: take full advantage of built-in types, and understand the text vs bytes duality in the Unicode ageFunctions as objects: view Python functions as first-class objects, and understand how this affects popular design patternsObject-oriented idioms: build classes by learning about references, mutability, interfaces, operator overloading, and multiple inheritanceControl flow: leverage context managers, generators, coroutines, and concurrency with the concurrent.futures and asyncio packagesMetaprogramming: understand how properties, attribute descriptors, class decorators, and metaclasses work"

    It could forever change how you experience and interact with your physical surroundings, open your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed.B & W photographs and illustrations throughout.

    And through CODE, we see how this ingenuity and our very human compulsion to communicate have driven the technological innovations of the past two centuries. Using everyday objects and familiar language systems such as Braille and Morse code, author Charles Petzold weaves an illuminating narrative for anyone who’s ever wondered about the secret inner life of computers and other smart machines. It’s a cleverly illustrated and eminently comprehensible story—and along the way, you’ll discover you’ve gained a real context for understanding today’s world of PCs, digital media, and the Internet. No matter what your level of technical savvy, CODE will charm you—and perhaps even awaken the technophile within.

    True worship, however, is our response to God's gracious revelation; in order to be acceptable to God, worship must be experienced on God's terms. Respected Old Testament scholar Daniel Block examines worship in the Bible, offering a comprehensive biblical foundation and illuminating Old Testament worship practices and principles. He develops a theology of worship that is consistent with the teachings of Scripture and is applicable for the church today. He also introduces readers to a wide range of issues related to worship. The book, illustrated with diagrams, charts, and pictures, will benefit professors and students in worship and Bible courses, pastors, and church leaders.

    Struggling to keep up with the large numbers of names, dates, and places presented to them, it is easy for students to lose sight of the big picture, the broad sweep of movement and change that instructors most wish to communicate. Justo Gonzalez has written this book to help students gain just such a quick and basic grasp of the main periods and issues in the history of Christianity. Drawing upon his own extensive experience and that of others, he contends that having been introduced to the essentials of church history in a brief and accessible form, students are far better able to understand and appreciate what they encounter in more detailed lectures and reading. Gonzalez provides a comprehensive opening chapter that summarizes major issues and concerns of each of the principal eras of church history. Subsequent chapters focus on the ancient church, the Christian empire, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, and the twentieth century and the end of modernity.