A historical novel of prejudice and plague, The Scourges of Heaven sweeps gracefully, joyfully, painfully across centuries and generations. Through Cynthia Anne Ferguson, orphaned aboard a vessel carrying immigrants, hopes, dreams, and cholera from the Old World to the New, David Dick paints a world where the causes of disease are little understood, where faith is not always a comfort, where human questioning often goes unanswered, and where unexpected death is frequently attribut...

Web Services, Service-Oriented Architectures, and Cloud Computing is a jargon-free, highly illustrated explanation of how to leverage the rapidly multiplying services available on the Internet. The future of business will depend on software agents, mobile devices, public and private clouds, big data, and other highly connected technology. IT professionals will need to evaluate and combine online services into service-oriented architectures (SOA), often depending on Web services and cloud c...

In 2011 my son was born and I instantly found myself on a whole new planet. Walk with me while I traverse this strange land with Hal as our guide...Lessons From Hal is the daily diary written over the course of his son's first year by a nervous, slightly paranoid, newb father as he attempts to adapt from a geeky existence to a parental (yet still geeky) existence.*5% of all profits made on my end will be donated to the World Wildlife Fund

Winner of the 2011 Jolt Excellence Award!Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process.This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enablerapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Throughautomation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration betweendevelopers, testers, and operations, d...

Of course you love being a parent. But sometimes, it just sucks.I know. I’m Amber Dusick and I started my blog Parenting: Illustrated with Crappy Pictures because I needed a place to vent about the funny (and frustrating) day-to-day things that happened to me as a parent. Turns out, poo is hilarious! At least when you’re not the one wiping it up. This book won’t make your frustrating moments any less crappy. But these stories about my Crappy Baby, Crappy Boy and my husband, Crappy ...

The overwhelming majority of a software systemâ??s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems?In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Googleâ??s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some...

This is a book for dedicated academics who consider spending years masochistically overworked and underappreciated as a laudable goal. They lead the lives of the impoverished, grade the exams of whiny undergrads, and spend lonely nights in the library or laboratory pursuing a transcendent truth that only six or seven people will ever care about. These suffering, unshaven sad sacks are grad students, and their salvation has arrived in this witty look at the low points of grad school.

A solid introduction to the practices, plans, and skills required for developing a smart system architectureInformation architecture combines IT skills with business skills in order to align the IT structure of an organization with the mission, goals, and objectives of its business. This friendly introduction to IT architecture walks you through the myriad issues and complex decisions that many organizations face when setting up IT systems to work in sync with busi...

Find the right big data solution for your business or organizationBig data management is one of the major challenges facing business, industry, and not-for-profit organizations. Data sets such as customer transactions for a mega-retailer, weather patterns monitored by meteorologists, or social network activity can quickly outpace the capacity of traditional data management tools. If you need to develop or manage big data solutions, you'll appreciate how these four ...

Housebroken charts the evolution of one man from unregenerate cad to stay-at-home dad. And along the way David Eddie provides lots of useful tips for other men who have ended up treading the domestic path: basic but puzzling things like how to cook, how to stay faithful to your wife and how to bend your gender without losing your machismo. Above all, Housebroken is a story of the great adventures it is possible to have within a three-block radius of your house, from one o...

Humor for the heart when the world is insane!Give the gift of laughter this winter season!There's a perfectly comical explanation for that bad behavior! Abe Surde is a progressive humorist and master mixologist who tackles—with a smile and a wink—100 challenging personality types seen in everyday life. Arm yourself with hilarious tips for handling bullies, drama queens, haters, micromanagers, narcissists, troublemakers, and more. WHY PEOPLE SUCK is great medicine for anyone ...

Hacking the Cube is a straightforward and sometimes comical look into the everyday world of information technology. It answers questions that many IT professionals and newcomers ask about the tools and skills needed to survive one of the most complex career fields in the world. Most computer books deal with configuring software and do little to help you learn what you need to know. to work.