Small and slight with fair hair the colour of Spring sunshine and china-blue eyes, young Tilda is dismayed that by command of Queen Victoria, because of her Royal connections, she is to marry the Prince of a distant country called Obernia. Not only has she never met the Prince, she does not want to marry him, as she wishes to marry for love one day and certainly not for political convenience. In Munich on her way to meet her Prince, Tilda insists on attending a rowdy Beer hall and becomes embroiled in a violent student riot. But luckily she is rescued by Rudolph, an impossibly handsome dashing stranger, who she had spied on when walking in the woods near King Ludwig’s beautiful Palace, the Linderhof. In their flight from the riots, he is shot by the Police and they take refuge in the home of Frau Sturdel, a local midwife, who helps Tilda to nurse the young man back to health. Soon Tilda has fallen head over heels in love with Rudolph – and he with her. But surely their love is doomed unless, somehow, she can extricate herself from her impending Royal mariage de convenance.

If you have ever wondered 'What is a Zen garden?' then this 50 page new publication for 2013 will tell you. Zen gardens are beautiful Japanese gardens steeped in history, religious meaning and a visual simplicity. There are many styles and many ingredients, Stones, Rocks, Moss, Sand, Gravel, Plants and Shrubs,Lanterns and Ornaments. Japanese Zen gardens is a book that introduces the reader to the subject and presents the options available for anyone wishing to build their own garden space at home - however large or small. Zen gardens are becoming more and more popular around the world and building one is not as difficult as you may think. With a little knowledge and following our step by step instructions with pictures you will discover how straight forward it is to build a Zen garden in your yard or garden. Japanese Zen gardens are serene havens of tranquil beauty and the perfect antidote to a stressful world. The author Russ Chard has written and published Japanese garden books, articles and videos for the past 10 years.

In his pacey, darkly humorous first novel, Duncan Abbott doesn't pull any punches. With a searing eye for satire and a great deal of comic ingenuity he proposes some startling new political ideas at a time when paucity of thought and poverty of ideals seem to be the norm. Join our hero George King, a talented, popular and ethical MP, and his cadre of madcap idealists as they saunter amusingly through the sordid side of parliament changing the nation as they go! Watch them improve the lives of millions, sweep away swathes of avarice and laugh in the face of adversity, while tearing down a sex, drugs and prostitution-based blackmail campaign that could bring down British politics as we know it.

Before there is peace, blood will spill blood, and the lake will run red... The gripping adventure that began with a small housecat in Into the Wild continues with Book Four of the thrilling Warriors spin off series The New Prophecy. These cats' devoted fans have catapulted them onto national bestseller lists, and the support for the series grows stronger with every book. Now the warrior Clans have finally reached their new home, but their troubles are far from over. Don't miss the next adventure of Brambleclaw, Firestar, and ThunderClan in Starlight, featuring new maps of the Clans' unfamiliar territory at the front.

As shadows of the past continue to haunt the forest, Brambleclaw is haunted by a dark figure on a dangerous quest for revenge, and must struggle to remain true to his Clan. A sinister path is unfolding and the time is coming for certain warriors to make the choices that will determine their destiny . . . and the destiny of all the Clans.

Palmer LaRue is running out of birthdays. For as long as he can remember, he's dreaded the day he turns ten -- the day he'll take his place beside all the other ten-year-old boys in town, the day he'll be a wringer. But Palmer doesn't want to be a wringer. It's one of the first things he learned about himself and it's one of the biggest things he has to hide. In Palmer's town being a wringer is an honor, a tradition passed down from father to son. Palmer can't stop himself from being a wringer just like he can't stop himself from growing one year older, just like he can't stand up to a whole town -- rightNewbery Medal winner Jerry Spinelli's most powerful novel yet is a gripping tale of how one boy learns how not to be afraid.

Young Tristran Thorn will do anything to win the cold heart of beautiful Victoria even fetch her the star they watch fall from the night sky. But to do so, he must enter the unexplored lands on the other side of the ancient wall that gives their tiny village its name. Beyond that old stone wall, Tristran learns, lies Faerie where nothing, not even a fallen star, is what he imagined. From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman comes a remarkable quest into the dark and miraculous in pursuit of love and the utterly impossible.

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind reveals the missing link between wanting success and achieving it! Have you ever wondered why some people seem to get rich easily, while others are destined for a life of financial struggleIs the difference found in their education, intelligence, skills, timing, work habits, contacts, luck, or their choice of jobs, businesses, or investmentsThe shocking answer is: None of the above! In his groundbreaking Secrets of the Millionaire Mind , T. Harv Eker states: Give me five minutes, and I can predict your financial future for the rest of your life! Eker does this by identifying your money and success blueprint. We all have a personal money blueprint ingrained in our subconscious minds, and it is this blueprint, more than anything, that will determine our financial lives. You can know everything about marketing, sales, negotiations, stocks, real estate, and the world of finance, but if your money blueprint is not set for a high level of success, you will never have a lot of money and if somehow you do, you will most likely lose it! The good news is that now you can actually reset your money blueprint to create natural and automatic success. Secrets of the Millionaire Mind is two books in one. Part I explains how your money blueprint works. Through Eker rare combination of street smarts, humor, and heart, you will learn how your childhood influences have shaped your financial destiny. You will also learn how to identify your own money blueprint and revise it to not only create success but, more important, to keep and continually grow it. In Part II you will be introduced to seventeen Wealth Files, which describe exactly how rich people think and act differently than most poor and middle-class people. Each Wealth File includes action steps for you to practice in the real world in order to dramatically increase your income and accumulate wealth. If you are not doing as well financially as you would like, you will have to change your money blueprint. Unfortunately your current money blueprint will tend to stay with you for the rest of your life, unless you identify and revise it, and that exactly what you will do with the help of this extraordinary book. According to T. Harv Eker, it simple. If you think like rich people think and do what rich people do, chances are you'll get rich too!

Chicago Stars quarterback Dean Robillard is the luckiest man in the world: a bona-fide sports superstar and the pride of the NFL with a profitable side career as a buff billboard model for End Zone underwear. But life in the glory lane has started to pale, and Dean has set off on a cross-country trip to figure out what's gone wrong. When he hits a lonely stretch of Colorado highway, he spies something that will shake up his gilded life in ways he can't imagine. A young woman . . . dressed in a beaver suit. Blue Bailey is on a mission to murder her ex. Or at least inflict serious damage. As for the beaver suit she's wearing . . . Is it her fault that life keeps throwing her curveballsWitness the expensive black sports car pulling up next to her on the highway and the Greek god stepping out of it. Blue's career as a portrait painter is the perfect job for someone who refuses to stay in one place for very long. She needs a ride, and America's most famous football player has an imposing set of wheels. Now, all she has to do is keep him entertained, off guard, and fully clothed before he figures out exactly how desperate she is. But Dean isn't the brainless jock she imagines, and Blue despite her petite stature is just about the toughest woman Dean has ever met. They're soon heading for his summer home where their already complicated lives and inconvenient attraction to each other will become entangled with a charismatic but aging rock star; a beautiful fifty-two-year-old woman trying to make peace with her rock and roll past; an eleven-year-old who desperately needs a family; and a bitter old woman who hates them all. As the summer progresses, the wandering portrait artist and the charming football star play a high-stakes game, fighting themselves and each other for a chance to have it all. Natural Born Charmer is for everyone who's ever thought about leaving their old life in the dust and never looking back. Susan Elizabeth Phillips takes us home again . . . and shows us where love truly lives.

Barbarians at the Gate has been called one of the most influential business books of all time -- the definitive account of the largest takeover in Wall Street history. Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's gripping account of the frenzy that overtook Wall Street in October and November of 1988 is the story of deal makers and publicity flaks, of strategy meetings and society dinners, of boardrooms and bedrooms -- giving us not only a detailed look at how financial operations at the highest levels are conducted but also a richly textured social history of wealth at the twilight of the Reagan era. Barbarians at the Gate -- a business narrative classic -- is must reading for everyone interested in the way today's world really works.

Small-time stoolie, Jake " The Spinner" Jablon, made a lot of new enemies when he switched careers, from informer to blackmailer. And the more "clients", he figured, the more money -- and more people eager to see him dead. So no one is surprised when the pigeon is found floating in the East River with his skull bashed in.And what's worse, no one cares -- except Matthew Scudder. The ex-cop-turned-private-eye is no conscientious avenging angel. But he's willing to risk his own life and limb to confront Spinner's most murderously aggressive marks. A job's a job after all -- and Scudder's been paid to find a killer -- by the victim...in advance.

Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, is the classic manual on the art of living and one of the wonders of the world. In eighty-one brief chapters, the Tao Te Ching llods at the basic predicatment of being alive and gives advice that imparts balance and perspective, a serene and generous spirit. This book is about wisdom in action. It teaches how wo work for the good with the efforless skill that comes from being in accord with the Tao (the basic principle of the universe) and applies equally to good government and sexual love, to childrearing, business, and ecology. The Tao Te Ching is the most widely traslated book in world literature, after the Bible. Yet the gemlike lucidity of the original has eluded most previous translations, and they have obscured some of its central ideas. Now the Tao Te ching has been rendered into English by the eminent scholar and traslator Stephen Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell's Dropping Ashes on the Buddha is a modern Zen classic, and his translations of Rilke and of the Book of Job have already been called definitive for our time.

The Professor and the Madman , masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history. The compilation of the OED , begun in 1857, was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.

Build real-world computer vision applications and develop cool demos using OpenCV for Python About This Book Learn how to apply complex visual effects to images using geometric transformations and image filters Extract features from an image and use them to develop advanced applications Build algorithms to help you understand the image content and perform visual searches Who This Book Is For This book is intended for Python developers who are new to OpenCV and want to develop computer vision applications with OpenCV-Python. This book is also useful for generic software developers who want to deploy computer vision applications on the cloud. It would be helpful to have some familiarity with basic mathematical concepts such as vectors, matrices, and so on. What You Will Learn Apply geometric transformations to images, perform image filtering, and convert an image into a cartoon-like image Detect and track various body parts such as the face, nose, eyes, ears, and mouth Stitch multiple images of a scene together to create a panoramic image Make an object disappear from an image Identify different shapes, segment an image, and track an object in a live video Recognize an object in an image and build a visual search engine Reconstruct a 3D map from images Build an augmented reality application In Detail Computer vision is found everywhere in modern technology. OpenCV for Python enables us to run computer vision algorithms in real time. With the advent of powerful machines, we are getting more processing power to work with. Using this technology, we can seamlessly integrate our computer vision applications into the cloud. Web developers can develop complex applications without having to reinvent the wheel. This book will walk you through all the building blocks needed to build amazing computer vision applications with ease. We start off with applying geometric transformations to images. We then discuss affine and projective transformations and see how we can use them to apply cool geometric effects to photos. We will then cover techniques used for object recognition, 3D reconstruction, stereo imaging, and other computer vision applications. This book will also provide clear examples written in Python to build OpenCV applications. The book starts off with simple beginner’s level tasks such as basic processing and handling images, image mapping, and detecting images. It also covers popular OpenCV libraries with the help of examples. The book is a practical tutorial that covers various examples at different levels, teaching you about the different functions of OpenCV and their actual implementation. Style and approach This is a conversational-style book filled with hands-on examples that are really easy to understand. Each topic is explained very clearly and is followed by a programmatic implementation so that the concept is solidified. Each topic contributes to something bigger in the following chapters, which helps you understand how to piece things together to build something big and complex.

A respected senator from Georgia, Will Lee has aspirations of more.But a cruel stroke of fate thrusts him onto the national stage well before he expects, and long before he's ready, for a national campaign. The road to the White House, however, will be more treacherous -- and deadly -- than Will and his intelligent, strikingly beautiful wife, Kate, an associate director in the Central Intelligence Agency, can imagine.A courageous and principled man, Will soon learns he has more than one opponent who wants him out of the race. Thrust into the spotlight as never before, he's become the target of clandestine enemies from the past who will use all their money and influence to stop him -- dead. Now Will isn't just running for president -- he's running for his life.

Eleven Minutes is the story of Maria, a young girl from a Brazilian village, whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heartbroken. At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that "love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer. . . ." A chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune. Maria's despairing view of love is put to the test when she meets a handsome young painter. In this odyssey of self-discovery, Maria has to choose between pursuing a path of darkness -- sexual pleasure for its own sake -- or risking everything to find her own "inner light" and the possibility of sacred sex, sex in the context of love. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

A stranger arrives at the remote village of Viscos, carrying with him a backpack containing a notebook and eleven gold bars. He comes searching for the answer to a question that torments him: Are human beings, in essence, good or evilIn welcoming the mysterious foreigner, the whole village becomes an accomplice to his sophisticated plot, which will forever mark their lives. A novel of temptation by the internationally bestselling author Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym is a thought-provoking parable of a community devoured by greed, cowardice, and fear as it struggles with the choice between good and evil.

Tess loves math because it's the one subject she can trust there's always just one right answer, and it never changes. But then she starts algebra and is introduced to those pesky and mysterious variables, which seem to be everywhere in eighth grade. When even your friends and parents can be variables, how in the world do you find out the right answers to the really important questions, like what to do about a boy you like or whom to tell when someone's done something really badWill Tess's life ever stop changing long enough for her to figure it all out?

This nonfiction book has been faithfully adapted for young readers from the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Marley & Me by John Grogan! Marley, a lovable Labrador retriever, is always getting himself into trouble. Some may say he is the world's worst dog. But those who know and love Marley understand that nothing can stop his loyalty, exuberance, and passion not even the Grogans' screen door! How this big, rambunctious dog becomes the heart of the Grogan family is the story of Marley .

Get to grips with key data visualization and predictive analytic skills using R About This Book Acquire predictive analytic skills using various tools of R Make predictions about future events by discovering valuable information from data using R Comprehensible guidelines that focus on predictive model design with real-world data Who This Book Is For If you are a statistician, chief information officer, data scientist, ML engineer, ML practitioner, quantitative analyst, and student of machine learning, this is the book for you. You should have basic knowledge of the use of R. Readers without previous experience of programming in R will also be able to use the tools in the book. What You Will Learn Customize R by installing and loading new packages Explore the structure of data using clustering algorithms Turn unstructured text into ordered data, and acquire knowledge from the data Classify your observations using Na?ve Bayes, k-NN, and decision trees Reduce the dimensionality of your data using principal component analysis Discover association rules using Apriori Understand how statistical distributions can help retrieve information from data using correlations, linear regression, and multilevel regression Use PMML to deploy the models generated in R In Detail R is statistical software that is used for data analysis. There are two main types of learning from data: unsupervised learning, where the structure of data is extracted automatically; and supervised learning, where a labeled part of the data is used to learn the relationship or scores in a target attribute. As important information is often hidden in a lot of data, R helps to extract that information with its many standard and cutting-edge statistical functions. This book is packed with easy-to-follow guidelines that explain the workings of the many key data mining tools of R, which are used to discover knowledge from your data. You will learn how to perform key predictive analytics tasks using R, such as train and test predictive models for classification and regression tasks, score new data sets and so on. All chapters will guide you in acquiring the skills in a practical way. Most chapters also include a theoretical introduction that will sharpen your understanding of the subject matter and invite you to go further. The book familiarizes you with the most common data mining tools of R, such as k-means, hierarchical regression, linear regression, association rules, principal component analysis, multilevel modeling, k-NN, Na?ve Bayes, decision trees, and text mining. It also provides a de*ion of visualization techniques using the basic visualization tools of R as well as lattice for visualizing patterns in data organized in groups. This book is invaluable for anyone fascinated by the data mining opportunities offered by GNU R and its packages. Style and approach This is a practical book, which analyzes compelling data about life, health, and death with the help of tutorials. It offers you a useful way of interpreting the data that’s specific to this book, but that can also be applied to any other data.

Get hands-on experience with vRealize Orchestrator and automate your VMware environment About This Book Gain an in-depth understanding of vRO in the VMware infrastructure Create your own advanced vRO *s using JavaScript A step-by-step tutorial to manage and create workflows with vRO Who This Book Is For This book is for VMware vSphere administrators who have minimal experience with automation tools and want to learn how to effectively automate their environment with VMware vRealize Orchestrator. A basic understanding of the VMware vSphere terms and concepts would be helpful. What You Will Learn Familiarize yourself with the Orchestrator architecture and Explore how plugins can expand Orchestrator's capabilitiesExplore how plug-ins can expand Orchestrator’s capabilities Deploy and configure the vRealize Orchestrator appliance Schedule and run workflows using the vSphere Web Client Create your own workflows with minimal work Use workflow presentations to improve your automation projects Integrate JavaScript to enhance your workflows Debug your workflows for errors and fix them Learn how to create, import, and export packages, to enable easy exchange solutions with others In Detail The automation of virtual environments has become the focus of many endeavors. VMware vRealize Orchestrator is a tool that enables you to automate not only your VMware environments, but also the surrounding hardware and software infrastructure. Orchestrator is also a central tool in the VMware cloud initiative and is extensively used by products such as vRealize Automation. In this book, you will learn how Orchestrator is able to help you automate your complete VMware infrastructure as well as its surrounding hardware and software. After deploying and configuring the vRealize Orchestrator appliance, you will learn how to run the existing workflows that are a part of the Orchestrator library. You will also see how the vSphere Web Client integration of Orchestrator reduces the time you spend on your daily admin tasks. The main aspect here is to learn how to create new workflows from existing ones. You will also look at how you can create completely new workflows. This includes learning about JavaScript and using presentation features to improve the layout and user friendliness of your workflows. Toward the end, you will learn to check for errors in your workflows and debug them. By the time you're done with the book, you'll be proficient in managing your workflows. Style and approach This book follows a sequential approach with ample screenshots in the examples that convey a deeper understanding of all Orchestrator-related tasks.