The magic of Christmas comes alive with this classic letter to Santa. Based in Stow, Ohio, Twin Sisters Productions has been dedicated to producing quality educational and inspirational music resources for over 25 years. Fraternal twins Karen Mitzo Hilderbrand and Kim Mitzo Thompson founded the company when they realized Kim’s success teaching third grade math through her catchy multiplication song could help children beyond her classroom. From there, Twin Sisters expanded its product line to include e-books, digital music, CDs, read-along and sing-along books, floor puzzles and educational workbooks, all with the purpose of learning through music. These internationally sold products have received nearly 170 awards, including nine Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified Gold albums and one Platinum albu, over the years for excellence, creativity and amusement. With thousands of songs and 35 million albums sold, Twin Sisters positions itself as the leader in children’s educational music.

Master performance optimization for Unity3D applications with tips and techniques that cover every aspect of the Unity3D EngineAbout This BookOptimize CPU cycles, memory usage, and GPU throughput for any Unity3D applicationMaster optimization techniques across all Unity Engine features including Scripting, Asset Management, Physics, Graphics Features, and ShadersA practical guide to exploring Unity Engine's many performance-enhancing methodsWho This Book Is ForThis book is intended for intermediate and advanced Unity developers who have experience with most of Unity’s feature-set, and who want to maximize the performance of their game. Familiarity with the C# language will be needed.What You Will LearnUse the Unity Profiler to find bottlenecks anywhere in our application, and discover how to resolve themImplement best-practices for C# *ing to avoid common pitfallsDevelop a solid understanding of the rendering pipeline, and maximize its performance through reducing draw calls and avoiding fill rate bottlenecksEnhance shaders in a way that is accessible to most developers, optimizing them through subtle yet effective performance tweaksKeep our scenes as dynamic as possible by making the most of the Physics engineOrganize, filter, and compress our art assets to maximize performance while maintaining high qualityPull back the veil on the Mono Framework and the C# Language to implement low-level enhancements that maximize memory usage and avoid garbage collectionGet to know the best practices for project organization to save time through an improved workflowIn DetailCompetition within the gaming industry has become significantly fiercer in recent years with the adoption of game development frameworks such as Unity3D. Through its massive feature-set and ease-of-use, Unity helps put some of the best processing and rendering technology in the hands of hobbyists and professionals alike. This has led to an enormous explosion of talent, which has made it critical to ensure our games stand out from the crowd through a high level of quality. A good user experience is essential to create a solid product that our users will enjoy for many years to come.Nothing turns gamers away from a game faster than a poor user-experience. Input latency, slow rendering, broken physics, stutters, freezes, and crashes are among a gamer’s worst nightmares and it’s up to us as game developers to ensure this never happens. High performance does not need to be limited to games with the biggest teams and budgets.Initially, you will explore the major features of the Unity3D Engine from top to bottom, investigating a multitude of ways we can improve application performance starting with the detection and analysis of bottlenecks. You’ll then gain an understanding of possible solutions and how to implement them. You will then learn everything you need to know about where performance bottlenecks can be found, why they happen, and how to work around them.This book gathers a massive wealth of knowledge together in one place, saving many hours of research and can be used as a quick reference to solve specific issues that arise during product development.Style and approachThis book is organized based on the major features of Unity engine and should be treated as a reference guide. It is written as a series of investigations into both common and unusual performance pitfalls, each including a study on why the bottleneck is causing us problems, and a list of enhancements or features that can be used to work around them. Differences in effectiveness, behaviors, or feature-sets between Unity 4.x and Unity 5.x will be highlighted.

Unlock more than 50 amazing tips and tricks to enhance your QlikView skillsAbout This BookLearn QlikView development best practices from the expertsDiscover valuable tips, tricks, and undocumented featuresA fast-paced guide with techniques and best practices to optimize high-performance, robust, and scalable applicationsWho This Book Is ForQlikView Unlocked is intended for anyone with at least some experience in designing, developing, or supporting QlikView applications. Whether you are new to QlikView or are a seasoned developer, there is something for everyone in this book.What You Will LearnBuild the QlikView environment correctly so that it is flexible and robustDeliver a successful QlikView projectUnderstand and implement QlikView best practicesDiscover the best way to prototype, develop, and deploy applicationsOvercome data modeling challengesExplore the in’s and out’s of Section AccessSolve post-deployment issues in Server and PublisherIn DetailQlikView is considered as one of the most used tool for Business Intelligence (BI). An efficient BI tool should provide five important capabilities for effective data analysis—collection (gathering important information), reporting, analysis (the ability to interact with data), visualization (the presentation of data), and discovery (exploring data). QlikView offers all these necessary skills required to deal with big data in real-world scenarios.QlikView Unlocked will provide you with new insights to get the very best from QlikView. This book will help you to develop skills to work with data efficiently. We will cover all the secrets of unleashing the full power of QlikView, which will enable you to make better use of the tool and create better results for future projects.In the course of this book, we will walk you through techniques and best practices that will enable you to be more productive. You will gain quick insights into the tool with the help of short steps called ”keys,” which will help you discover new features of QlikView. Moving on you will learn new techniques for data visualization, *ing, data modeling, and more. This book will then cover best practices to help you establish an efficient system with improved performance. We will also teach you some tricks that will help you speed up development processes, monitor data with dashboards, and so on.By the end of this book, you will have gained beneficial tips, tricks, and techniques to enhance the overall experience of working with QlikView.Style and approachWritten in a fairly informal style, this is a book that can be read cover-to-cover or simply used as a ”how-to” reference. Using real-world examples with clear explanations, code samples, and screenshots, you will be able understand each topic fully. You will be able to apply the knowledge gained to your QlikView projects.

Leverage Swift and enhance your code to take your applications to the next levelAbout This BookBuild solid, high performance applications in SwiftIncrease your efficiency by getting to grips with concurrency and parallel programmingUse Swift to design performance-oriented solutionsWho This Book Is ForThis book is aimed at experienced Swift developers wanting to optimize their programs on Apple platforms to optimize application performance.What You Will LearnBuild solid, stable, and reliable applications using SwiftUse REPL and Pl to manage and configure relational databasesExplore Swift's features including its static type system, value objects, and functional programming Design reusable code for high performance in SwiftUse to Xcode LLBD and REPL to debug commandsAvoid sharing resources by using concurrency and parallel programmingUnderstand the lazy loading pattern, lazy sequences, and lazy evolution.In DetailSwift is one of the most popular and powerful programming languages for building iOS and Mac OS applications, and continues to evolve with new features and capabilities. Swift is considered a replacement to Objective-C and has performance advantages over Objective-C and Python. Swift adopts safe programming patterns and adds modern features to make programming easier, more flexible, and more fun.Develop Swift and discover best practices that allow you to build solid applications and optimize their performance.First, a few of performance characteristics of Swift will be explained. You will implement new tools available in Swift, including Playgrounds and REPL. These will improve your code efficiency, enable you to analyse Swift code, and enhance performance. Next, the importance of building solid applications using multithreading concurrency and multi-core device architecture is covered, before moving on to best practices and techniques that you should utilize when building high performance applications, such as concurrency and lazy-loading. Finally, you will explore the underlying structure of Swift further, and learn how to disassemble and compile Swift code.Style and approachThis is a comprehensive guide to enhancing Swift programming techniques and methodology to enable faster application development.

For much of the twentieth century, Americans had a love/hate relationship with France. While many admired its beauty, culture, refinement, and famed joie de vivre, others thought of it as a dilapidated country populated by foul-smelling, mean-spirited anti-Americans driven by a keen desire to part tourists from their money. We'll Always Have Paris explores how both images came to flourish in the United States, often in the minds of the same people.Harvey Levenstein takes us back to the 1930s, when, despite the Great Depression, France continued to be the stomping ground of the social elite of the eastern seaboard. After World War II, wealthy and famous Americans returned to the country in droves, helping to revive its old image as a wellspring of sophisticated and sybaritic pleasures. At the same time, though, thanks in large part to Communist and Gaullist campaigns against U.S. power, a growing sensitivity to French anti-Americanism began to color tourists' experiences there, strengthening the negative images of the French that were already embedded in American culture. But as the century drew on, the traditional positive images were revived, as many Americans again developed an appreciation for France's cuisine, art, and urban and rustic charms.Levenstein, in his colorful, anecdotal style, digs into personal correspondence, journalism, and popular culture to shape a story of one nation's relationship to another, giving vivid play to Americans' changing response to such things as France's reputation for sexual freedom, haute cuisine, high fashion, and racial tolerance. He puts this tumultuous coupling of France and the United States in historical perspective, arguing that while some in Congress say we may no longer have french fries, others, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, know they will always have Paris, and France, to enjoy and remember.

Once maligned as a swampy outpost, the fledgling city of Chicago brazenly adopted the motto Urbs in Horto or City in a Garden, in 1837. Chicago Gardens shows how this upstart town earned its sobriquet over the next century, from the first vegetable plots at Fort Dearborn to innovative garden designs at the 1933 World's Fair. Cathy Jean Maloney has spent decades researching the city's horticultural heritage, and here she reveals the unusual history of Chicago's first gardens. Challenged by the region's clay soil, harsh winters, and fierce winds, Chicago's pioneering horticulturalists, Maloney demonstrates, found imaginative uses for hardy prairie plants. This same creative spirit thrived in the city's local fruit and vegetable markets, encouraging the growth of what would become the nation's produce hub. The vast plains that surrounded Chicago, meanwhile, inspired early landscape architects, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jens Jensen, and O.C. Simonds, to new heights of grandeur. Maloney does not forget the backyard gardeners: immigrants who cultivated treasured seeds and pioneers who planted native wildflowers. Maloney's vibrant depictions of Chicagoans like "Bouquet Mary," a flower peddler who built a greenhouse empire, add charming anecdotal evidence to her argument-that Chicago's garden history rivals that of New York or London and ensures its status as a world-class capital of horticultural innovation. With exquisite archival photographs, prints, and postcards, as well as field guide de*ions of living legacy gardens for today's visitors, Chicago Gardens will delight green-thumbs from all parts of the world.

Chiara Matraini (1515-1604?) was a member of the great flowering of poetic imitators and innovators in the Italian literary heritage begun by Petrarch, cultivated later by the lyric poet Pietro Bembo, and supplanted by the epic poet Torquato Tasso. Though without formal training, Matraini excelled in a number of literary genres popular at the time-poetry, religious meditation, discourse, and dialogue. In her midlife, she published a collection of erotic love poetry, but later in life her work shifted toward a search for spiritual salvation. Near the end of her life, she published a new poetry retrospective.Mostly available in only a handful of rare book collections, her writings are now adeptly translated here for an English-speaking audience and situated historically in an introduction by noted Matraini expert Giovanna Rabitti. Selected Poetry and Prose allows the poet to finally take her place as one of the seminal authors of the Renaissance, next to her contemporaries Vittoria Colonna and Laura Battiferra, also published in the Other Voice series.

Alberto Giacometti's 1934 Cube stands apart for many as atypical of the Swiss artist, the only abstract sculptural work in a wide oeuvre that otherwise had as its objective the exploration of reality. With The Cube and the Face, renowned French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman has conducted a careful analysis of Cube, consulting the artist's sketches, etchings, texts, and other sculptural works in the years just before and after Cube was created. Cube, he finds, is indeed exceptional-a work without clear stylistic kinship to the works that came before or after it. At the same time, Didi-Huberman shows, Cube marks the transition between the artist's surrealist and realist phases and contains many elements of Giacometti's aesthetic consciousness, including his interest in dimensionality, the relation of the body to geometry, and the portrait-or what Didi-Huberman terms "abstract anthropomorphism." Drawing on Freud, Bataille, Leiris, and others Giacometti counted as influence, Didi-Huberman presents fans and collectors of Giacometti's art with a new approach to transitional work.

Explore Mr. Conway’s farm and see what all of the farm animals are up to. Based in Stow, Ohio, Twin Sisters Productions has been dedicated to producing quality educational and inspirational music resources for over 25 years. Fraternal twins Karen Mitzo Hilderbrand and Kim Mitzo Thompson founded the company when they realized Kim’s success teaching third grade math through her catchy multiplication song could help children beyond her classroom. From there, Twin Sisters expanded its product line to include e-books, digital music, CDs, read-along and sing-along books, floor puzzles and educational workbooks, all with the purpose of learning through music. These internationally sold products have received nearly 170 awards, including nine Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified Gold albums and one Platinum albu, over the years for excellence, creativity and amusement. With thousands of songs and 35 million albums sold, Twin Sisters positions itself as the leader in children’s educational music.

Children will love this fun, delightfully illustrated book about being silly. Based in Stow, Ohio, Twin Sisters Productions has been dedicated to producing quality educational and inspirational music resources for over 25 years. Fraternal twins Karen Mitzo Hilderbrand and Kim Mitzo Thompson founded the company when they realized Kim’s success teaching third grade math through her catchy multiplication song could help children beyond her classroom. From there, Twin Sisters expanded its product line to include e-books, digital music, CDs, read-along and sing-along books, floor puzzles and educational workbooks, all with the purpose of learning through music. These internationally sold products have received nearly 170 awards, including nine Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified Gold albums and one Platinum albu, over the years for excellence, creativity and amusement. With thousands of songs and 35 million albums sold, Twin Sisters positions itself as the leader in children’s educational music.

Learn what all of the different rescue vehicles sound like in this educational book. Based in Stow, Ohio, Twin Sisters Productions has been dedicated to producing quality educational and inspirational music resources for over 25 years. Fraternal twins Karen Mitzo Hilderbrand and Kim Mitzo Thompson founded the company when they realized Kim’s success teaching third grade math through her catchy multiplication song could help children beyond her classroom. From there, Twin Sisters expanded its product line to include e-books, digital music, CDs, read-along and sing-along books, floor puzzles and educational workbooks, all with the purpose of learning through music. These internationally sold products have received nearly 170 awards, including nine Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified Gold albums and one Platinum albu, over the years for excellence, creativity and amusement. With thousands of songs and 35 million albums sold, Twin Sisters positions itself as the leader in children’s educational music.

Golden slumbers kiss your eyes; Smiles awake you when you rise.

Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed

One little duck was swimming in a pond.

Follow five costumed children on a trick-or-treating adventure. Based in Stow, Ohio, Twin Sisters Productions has been dedicated to producing quality educational and inspirational music resources for over 25 years. Fraternal twins Karen Mitzo Hilderbrand and Kim Mitzo Thompson founded the company when they realized Kim’s success teaching third grade math through her catchy multiplication song could help children beyond her classroom. From there, Twin Sisters expanded its product line to include e-books, digital music, CDs, read-along and sing-along books, floor puzzles and educational workbooks, all with the purpose of learning through music. These internationally sold products have received nearly 170 awards, including nine Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified Gold albums and one Platinum albu, over the years for excellence, creativity and amusement. With thousands of songs and 35 million albums sold, Twin Sisters positions itself as the leader in children’s educational music.

Children will laugh as they learn to count from 1 to 10 in this delightfully illustrated book. Based in Stow, Ohio, Twin Sisters Productions has been dedicated to producing quality educational and inspirational music resources for over 25 years. Fraternal twins Karen Mitzo Hilderbrand and Kim Mitzo Thompson founded the company when they realized Kim’s success teaching third grade math through her catchy multiplication song could help children beyond her classroom. From there, Twin Sisters expanded its product line to include e-books, digital music, CDs, read-along and sing-along books, floor puzzles and educational workbooks, all with the purpose of learning through music. These internationally sold products have received nearly 170 awards, including nine Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified Gold albums and one Platinum albu, over the years for excellence, creativity and amusement. With thousands of songs and 35 million albums sold, Twin Sisters positions itself as the leader in children’s educational music.

Counting 1 to 10

In my first book of poetry and prose, The Learning Process, Iexplored many themes. For my second book, A Life in Orbit, Idetermined to try something novel and new: a biography in verse. Itwas a daunting project because I had to revisit my past andtranslate my thoughts and memories into a discipline of words,lines and verses. I was handicapped to an extent by the restraintsimposed by the narrative style. I had to write truthfully, andwithout embellishment in four-line stanzas, within the time spanand framework of eleven periods of my life. These periods variedboth dramatically and traumatically, but I averaged around fortyverses for each period. This book dates from 1932 to 2012. Thecharacters include my parents, siblings, relatives, friends,teachers at school and university, teaching associates, travellingcompanions, poets, personal friends, as well as personalities andpolitical figures of the times. I have suffered, but I have alsotriumphed. Here is my story in prose. Ken W. Simpson was brought upin South Camberwell, a Melbourne suburb in the Australian state ofVictoria. He taught art and crafts in technical schools for fifteenyears before retiring. "I began writing short stories until Idiscovered my love for poetry." His first book The Learning Processwas published by Strategic two years ago. He lives with his familyin Lysterfield, suburban Melbourne. Publisher's website:http://sbpra.com/KenWSimpson

Eleven years on from the Great War, Lord Connor finds himselfonce more thrown into the depth of battle. This time his journeytakes him and his friends Will, Jasmine and Kustos into thenon-returnable world of Judgment. Here they face once more theirnemesis Volnar who somehow managed to escape his eternalpunishment. Advised by , a native of Judgment, the quartetsplit up in search of Hunter and Armon who they believe can helpthem defeat the Dark Lord once and for all. Each expedition isfilled with danger and both Connor and Will call upon new skillsand friendships to aid them through the ordeal to face the finalshowdown About the Author: Marty Connor and Rosie J May live inPortsmouth, England. Marty is an IT administrator and Rosie is aSenior Technology Project Manager. Marty was motivated to write theAwake series to honor the lives of his grandparents. This is thethird book in the saga. The next two installments continue with theadventure, and finally bring the story to its conclusion.Publisher's Website: http://sbpra.com/MartyConnor Author's Website:www.awake-are-we.com

Create your own "I love you more" examples with your child. Based in Stow, Ohio, Twin Sisters Productions has been dedicated to producing quality educational and inspirational music resources for over 25 years. Fraternal twins, Karen Mitzo Hilderbrand and Kim Mitzo Thompson, founded the company when they realized Kim’s success teaching third-grade math through her catchy multiplication song could help children beyond her classroom. From there, Twin Sisters expanded its product line to include e-books, digital music, CDs, read- and sing-along books, floor puzzles and educational workbooks-- all with the purpose of learning through music. These internationally-sold products have received nearly 170 awards, including nine Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified Gold albums and one Platinum album, over the years for excellence, creativity and amusement. With thousands of songs and 35 million albums sold, Twin Sisters positions itself as the leader in children’s educational music.

By boat, bus, truck, or train - how do you get around town. Based in Stow, Ohio, Twin Sisters Productions has been dedicated to producing quality educational and inspirational music resources for over 25 years. Fraternal twins Karen Mitzo Hilderbrand and Kim Mitzo Thompson founded the company when they realized Kim’s success teaching third grade math through her catchy multiplication song could help children beyond her classroom. From there, Twin Sisters expanded its product line to include e-books, digital music, CDs, read-along and sing-along books, floor puzzles and educational workbooks, all with the purpose of learning through music. These internationally sold products have received nearly 170 awards, including nine Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified Gold albums and one Platinum albu, over the years for excellence, creativity and amusement. With thousands of songs and 35 million albums sold, Twin Sisters positions itself as the leader in children’s educational music.