For nine days in early May, Ryan Watkins along with two brothers, Jeremy and Chris Jones, backpack the world-famous Appalachian Trail through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. From his very first steps into the Smokies, Ryan quickly learns the seventy-mile stretch of trail is far more difficult than he ever imagined.The trio battles through torrential rains, lightning, snow, fatigue, multiple encounters with bears and a standoff with a timber rattlesnake as they march more t...

Harness the power of procedural content generation to design unique games with UnityKey Features\[\*\] Learn the basics of PCG development\[\*\] Develop a 2D game from start to finish\[\*\] Explore all the different ways PCG can be applied in gamesBook DescriptionProcedural Content Generation is a process by which game content is developed using computer algorithms, rather than through the manual efforts of game developers. T...

The Southeastern United States features some of the most serene and scenic hiking and backpacking opportunities anywhere in the country.In this collection, author and outdoorsman Ryan Watkins explores many of the area's hidden and not-so-hidden gems throughout Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and North Carolina.From the sprawling Chattahoochee National Forest to the eerie Dawson Forest Wildlife Management Area and beyond, Ryan recounts the historical and geographical aspe...

**#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century**At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, sh...

If you have ever been wondering what android programming is all about then this is the book that you need to get. It contains all the basics of this type of programming, how to build an app and much, much more.The author goes to great lengths to break all the information down to be as basic as possible so that the reader that is not as confident in their abilities as others are will be able to follow the instructions and get a foot into the world of android programming.This...

After Paul Stutzman lost his wife to breast cancer, he sensed a tug on his heart--the call to a challenge, the call to pursue a dream. Paul left his stable career, traveled to Georgia, and took his first steps on the Appalachian Trail. What he learned during the next four and a half months changed his life--and will change readers' lives as well.In Hiking Through, readers will join Paul on his remarkable 2,176-mile hike through fourteen states in search of peace and a rene...

Danger, belly laughs, inspiration, white sand beaches, old growth forests, mud, tree roots, river crossings, straining muscles, incredible views and two friends who probably had no business even attempting the West Coast Trail. This is the true life adventure, as reported by a middle aged traveler, who finds that a life changing event becomes both life-altering and life-affirming during the seven day wilderness hike on Vancouver Island's rugged west coast.Robert J Bannon takes the r...

Written in cookbook style, this book offers many recipes to create objects, import and export data, create 3D solid objects. Each recipe contains step-by-step instructions followed by analysis of what was done in each task and other useful information. If you've been toying around with FreeCAD and want to have more control over your work flow then this book is for you. The reader needs to have basic knowledge of modeling.

Want to develop games for Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7? This hands-on book will get you started with Microsoft's XNA 4.0 development framework right away -- even if you have no experience developing games. Although XNA includes several key concepts that can be difficult for beginning web developers to grasp, Learning XNA 4.0 shortens the learning curve by walking you through the framework in a clear and understandable step-by-step format.Each chapter offers a self-containe...

Brothers often promise to do something together when they 'grow up." Do they always follow through? When war and a Purple Heart Medal alter those promises, should the surviving brother continue? My promise to my brother haunted me for over forty years. Finally, life stopped getting in the way and I set out on the Appalachian Trail to fulfill that youthful promise.Three Hundred Zeroes describes the Appalachian Trail (A.T.) as it meanders for almost 2,200 miles (3,500 km) through some...

Processing opened up the world of programming to artists, designers, educators, and beginners. This short book gently introduces the core concepts of computer programming and working with Processing. Written by the co-founders of the Processing project, Reas and Fry, Getting Started with Processing shows you how easy it is to make software and systems with interactive graphics. If you're an artist looking to develop interactive graphics programs or a programmer on your way to becoming an a...

When your life plan explodes, you ask yourself the big questions: What do I really need in life? How can I make my life a work of art? Should I buy a house? Have kids? What is a life? Following in Kerouac and Steinbeck's tire tracks, a 32-year-old, post-breakup Brendan Leonard hits the road in search of healing and a new, post-economic-downturn American Dream. Sleeping in the back of a beat-up station wagon, he seeks answers—and hopefully, the occasional shower—in the postcard-worthy place...