Home to Chicago's Polish Village, impressive examples of architecture, and the legendary Olson Waterfall, Avondale is often called "the neighborhood that built Chicago." Images of America: Avondale and Chicago's Polish Village sheds light on the little known history of the community, including its fascinating industrial past. From its beginnings as a sleepy subdivision started by a Michigan senator, it became a cultural mecca for Chicago's Polish community, playing a crucial role in Poland...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERLow-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun show up at his office. But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling) extraterrestrials. The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on American pop songs ever since “Year Zero” (1977 to us), resulting in the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang and bankrupting the...

The definitive novel of today’s Silicon Valley, After On flash-captures our cultural and technological moment with up-to-the-instant savvy. Matters of privacy and government intrusion, post-Tinder romance, nihilistic terrorism, artificial consciousness, synthetic biology, and much more are tackled with authority and brash playfulness by New York Times bestselling author Rob Reid.Meet Phluttr—a diabolically addictive new social network and a villai...

CockroachDB is the distributed SQL database that handles the demands of today's data-driven applications. The second edition of this popular hands-on guide shows software developers, architects, and DevOps/SRE teams how to use CockroachDB for applications that scale elastically and provide seamless delivery for end users while remaining indestructible.Data professionals will learn how to migrate existing applications to CockroachDB's performant, cloud-native data architecture. You'...

Get a practical introduction to CockroachDB. This book starts with installation and foundational concepts and takes you through to creating clusters that are ready for production environments. You will learn how to create, optimize, and operate CockroarchDB clusters in single and multi-region environments. You will encounter anti-patterns to avoid, as well as testing techniques for integration and load testing.The book explains why CockroachDB exists, goes over its major benefits, ...

She Almost Died...In the ordinary life of Julia, a hidden danger looms, threatening to unravel everything she holds dear. Unbeknownst to her, an insidious blood disorder, affecting her brain, poised to strike without warning.Prepare for a heart-stopping journey as "Alive For A Reason" ... unfolds, a mesmerizing story that will grip you from the first page. When fate intervenes, a courageous coworker's timely discovery becomes a lifeline, unleashing a race against time to sa...

Reaching Reluctant Young Readers features 150 middle-grade books. Each profiled title has the potential to hook the reluctant reader and lure them to read the entire book. To specifically encourage elementary and middle-school-age reluctant children to read, there is first a pitch to get the reader’s attention. That is followed by a short reading passage to “set the hook” and encourage the young person to read the rest of the book on their own. Further, the book contains several hundred ad...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAn alien advance party was suddenly nosing around my planet.Worse, they were lawyering up. . . .In the hilarious tradition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Rob Reid takes you on a headlong journey through the outer reaches of the universe—and the inner workings of our absurdly dysfunctional music industry.Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an...

The definitive novel of today’s Silicon Valley, After On flash-captures our cultural and technological moment with up-to-the-instant savvy. Matters of privacy and government intrusion, post-Tinder romance, nihilistic terrorism, artificial consciousness, synthetic biology, and much more are tackled with authority and brash playfulness by New York Times bestselling author Rob Reid.Meet Phluttr—a diabolically addictive new social network and a villai...

Discover the best in science fiction and fantasy with the 2017 Del Rey ebook sampler!2017 is shaping up to a big year. Kevin Hearne, who remixed our myths in The Iron Druid Chronicles, kicks off a fantasy series with an entirely new lore. A sentient social network aspires to world domination in a diabolical satire of Silicon Valley. A persecuted princess returns to her magical homeland in an enchanting debut novel. And in an wild new vision of reincarnation, one ma...

In a moving story of sacrifice and triumph, human scientists establish a relationship with intelligent lifeforms—the cheela—living on Dragon's Egg, a neutron star where one Earth hour is equivalent to hundreds of their years. The cheela culturally evolve from savagery to the discovery of science, and for a brief time, men are their diligent teachers.

Have you ever wondered what it's like to live through a bioweapon attack or to have every aspect of your life governed by invisible ants? In Cory Doctorow's collection of novellas, he wields his formidable experience in technology and computing to give us mind-bending sci-fi tales that explore the possibilities of information technology—and its various uses—run amok."Anda's Game" is a spin on the bizarre new phenomenon of "cyber sweatshops," in which people are paid very low wages ...