An orphan raised in Valparaiso, Chile, by a Victorian spinster and her rigid brother, vivacious young Eliza Sommers follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. Entering a rough-and-tumble world of new arrivals driven mad by gold fever, Eliza moves in a society of single men and prostitutes with the help of her good friend and savior, the Chinese doctor Tao Chien. California opens the door to a new life of freedom and independence to the young Chilean, and her search for her elusive lover gradually turns into another kind of journey. By the time she finally hears news of him, Eliza must decide who her true love really is.

Written in the classic noir tradition of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep , Straits of Fortune is a fast-paced and sometimes deadly adventure set in America's sexiest city. Ex-cop Jack Vaughn, the best thing to happen to crime fiction since Chandler's Philip Marlowe hung up his holster, moved from the gritty streets of New York to Miami to work as a personal trainer. The sun, sand, and tanned bodies of Miami are a welcome distraction from the haunting memory of another cop's death in New York. But when he becomes involved with millionaire businessman Colonel Patterson, he realizes his newfound peace is short-lived.The Colonel offers Jack a hundred grand to do a seemingly simple favor. But getting involved with the Colonel also means getting involved with his daughter, the exotic wild child Vivian, who once broke Jack's heart. Jack had sworn to forget her, but this memorable cast of characters lures him back into their double-dealing circle.The deeper he gets, the more Jack finds himself entangled in an ever-expanding web of lies, lust, and violence. A dark, hard-boiled look at the dangerous underbelly of glamorous Miami, Straits of Fortune is an unforgettable debut novel.

Some marriages are made in heaven . . . Some are not.What happens when "the happiest day of your life" turns into a nightmareForget the drunken best man or the bridesmaid dresses from the '80s . . . none of these wedding day disasters can compare to a cursed bride determined to make it down the aisle, or a vampire who is about to disrupt your wedding.Join New York Times bestselling authors Maggie Shayne and Jeaniene Frost, USA Today bestseller Kathryn Smith, as well as Terri Garey in four unforgettable tales of unholy matrimony . . . where the grooms are dark, dangerous, and mostly dead, and to love and cherish till death takes on a whole new meaning.

The Simple Science of a Healthy Life From fitness to diets to emotional health and longevity, what do people who feel and look healthy do differently than those who are overtired, depressed, or out of shapeEvery day we face an avalanche of studies and statistics that tell us what we should or shouldn't eat, how long we need to exercise, or how to protect ourselves from secondhand smoke and the harmful rays from the sun. Not only are these studies often contradictory, but the actual scientific information is usually inaccessible. Moving beyond the myths and misinformation, the advice in these pages is not based on one person's opinions or one expert's study. For the first time the research available on the health of average Americans has been distilled into one hundred essential ways that we can become healthier and happier. Each of the core findings is accompanied by a real life example showing these results in action. ?Eat more often. Oxford University researchers found that people who ate five or six times a day had a 5 percent lower total cholesterol than average and were 45 percent more likely to be able to sustain their target weight than people who ate once or twice a day. ?Who says caffeine is bad for youThe majority of scientific evidence shows that, for a healthy adult, moderate quantities of caffeine (about three cups of coffee per day) pose no significant health risks. ?Home sweet home. People who described their home lives as satisfying were 24 percent more likely to live beyond normal life expectancy, according to a UCLA study.

In this wicked, laugh-out-loud debut novel, five miserable souls struggle to make their mark on Hollywood, the city of the soulless. Rachel Burt, starry-eyed and clueless, has left behind tiny Sugarland, Texas, and her position as Starbucks employee of the month, to pursue her dreams of becoming a screenwriter. The madness begins when she eagerly accepts a position as assistant to Victoria Rush, an aging television diva with "a little pill-popping problem that two tours of duty at Betty Ford couldn't remedy." Rachel learns the ropes from Michaela Marsh, a never-say-die, plastic-surgery perfect "midget Tai-Bo Barbie." Michaela has spent years (and years and years: she is -- gasp -- over thirty!) trying to break into Hollywood, which has given her a healthy respect for the casting couch; but even sleeping with her slimy agent hasn't landed her a meaty role, and the last pilot she almost got, some ten years ago, went to that little nobody, Lisa Kudrow. Jeb, who operates on pure rage, has been fired from more assistant jobs than he cares to count, and he currently teeters on the edge of insanity under Randall Blume, one of the sleaziest agents in Hollywood. Kecia Christy, a no-nonsense Pisces pining for love and addicted to Krispy Kremes, works for Travis Trask, the hottest teen heartthrob since "that other white boy, Leo." More interested in smoking prizewinning pot with his bonehead buddies than in his next movie, Travis is always looking for the next good party -- until his ex-con brother shows up at the front door. Griffin's intelligence and ambition fail to shield him from endless humiliation at the hands of Johnny Treadway, a crass A-list manager with pec and cheek implants and a perpetual tan, courtesy of the Tropical Rays tanning bed he keeps in his office. Johnny takes all the credit while Griffin does all the real work, and Griffin has begun to suspect that selling his soul might not be worth that overdue promotion after all. Once a week, Rachel, Michaela, Jeb, Griffin, and Kecia meet at a dark, unhip watering hole to commiserate. Soon enough, however, the system spits them out, and they must learn to survive through sheer determination, hard-won industry savvy, and luck. At turns hilarious, poignant, and sinfully gossipy, The Assistants will keep you glued to your seat until the final page is turned.

The statistics are staggering. Thirteen million Americanshave been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes; another 5.2 million don't know that they have it. During the past thirty years the diabetes rate has tripled, and each year about 200,000 people die from complications of the disease. The Centers for Disease Control project that one out of every three children born in the year 2000 will develop the disease. But Type 2 diabetes is largely preventable. Find out how you can avoid becoming a statistic. As a respected physician and pioneer in the field of complementary medicine, Dr. Robert C. Atkins recognized early on that diabetes and obesity are twin epidemics, and that the way to reverse both is to permanently change the way people eat. Yet much of the mainstream medical establishment continues to advocate the treatment of diabetes with insulin and other drugs, while recommending a diet high in carbohydrates including sugar which raises your blood sugar. What you'll learn from reading Atkins Diabetes Revolution is that rather than correcting your metabolism, such a diet can actually increase your risk of developing diabetes -- and heart disease. The Atkins Blood Sugar Control Program (ABSCP) helps you identify the metabolic signposts that indicate trouble long before the onset of Type 2 diabetes so you can stop it in its tracks. If you already have the disease, the ABSCP offers you and your physician a strategy for weight management and blood-sugar control, while minimizing your exposure to drugs. Atkins Diabetes Revolution presents a comprehensive lifestyle program, including diet, exercise, and nutrient supplementation. The book also contains meal plans, recipes, a fitness routine, and case studies. This groundbreaking book, a fitting tribute to Dr. Atkins, tackles one of the greatest health challenges you and your family may ever face.

What should I eat, and where can I find itWhich products are the most Atkins-friendlyAre there hidden dangers in seemingly "acceptable" foodsNow Food Shopping the Atkins Way is Easier Than Ever! Whether you're one of the millions already losing weight and feeling great thanks to the remarkable Atkins Nutritional Approachor you are just discovering the healthy benefits of a low-carb lifestyle, shopping for food need no longer be a daunting process. The Atkins Shopping Guide contains everything you must know to stock your pantry with the right foods, while avoiding products devoid of nutrients and full of sugar and white flour. With foods clearly arranged by category, this indispensable handbook takes you aisle-by-aisle through the supermarket, putting helpful information at your fingertips. It also provides useful pointers for shopping at "superstores" and natural foods retailers, all in a handy format portable enough to carry in your pocket or purse. So throw away that misguided food pyramid chart and stop counting fat grams and calories. With The Atkins Shopping Guide, confusion about the right way to eat will be a thing of the past, as you follow the proven Atkins path to healthy living!

Practical advice and information from the world's foremost experts on autism -- and a mother's own hard-won lessons from helping her son recover from the disorder When Karen Siff Exkorn's son, Jake, was diagnosed with autism, she struggled to pull together comprehensive information about the disorder. Fortunately, she was able to educate herself quickly, and her extensive at-home treatment of her son led to his amazing full recovery. But the journey wasn't easy, and now, in The Autism Sourcebook, Siff Exkorn offers parents the wisdom she wishes she'd had at the beginning. Recent studies show that there is a worldwide epidemic of autism. More than 1.5 million people are affected in the United States alone, with one in every 166 children diagnosed. Early detection and early intervention are two of the key factors in improving prognosis -- but too often, writes Siff Exkorn, parents get bogged down in denial or confusion about the still mysterious disorder, and are unable to take the necessary steps. Providing accessible medical information gleaned from the world's foremost experts, Siff Exkorn offers an inside look at families with children who have autism, and ties in her own firsthand experience as a parent. The author shares valuable knowledge about the following: ?What the diagnosis really means ?Understanding and accessing treatment options ?Knowing your child's rights in the school system ?Coping with common marital and familial stress ?Making the stigma of autism a thing of the past With extensive appendices, including the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers, Diagnostic Criteria for the Five Pervasive Developmental Disorders, and carefully selected lists of Internet resources, recommended readings, and top autism organizations worldwide, The Autism Sourcebook is the single most comprehensive, practical resource available to parents and loved ones of children with autism.

More Than 600 New Options! Imagine eating your favorite foods every 3 hours to finally get the results you've been searching for. NO calorie-counting, NO carb deprivation, and NO skipping sweets. Based on the revolutionary principles of Time-Based Nutrition?, this pocket guidebook will give you the slimming secrets you need to enjoy fast food, restaurant meals, gas station gourmet, and much more! Visit www.3hourdiet.net for your free personalized weight-loss profile.

An offensive, in-your-face, brutally honest and completely hilarious look at male inner life and sexual fantasy. In the course of this hilariously honest book, our narrator suffers through a relationship with his vapid wannabe-actress girlfriend until he finds the perfect girl. But when he moves into the new relationship, he slowly learns that all women are pretty much the same, that man's true desires will never be fulfilled, and the decision between living life alone or biting the marriage bullet must be made.Includes an excerpt from the forthcoming sequel The Average American Marriage.

Leverage frontend development skills to build impressive iOS and Android applications with React Native About This Book Apply flexbox to get layout and build rich animations that bring your React Native application to life Integrate third-party libraries and develop customized components that run natively on iOS and Android platforms Combine React Native with Redux, Redux middleware, and a remote API to build scalable data-driven applications Who This Book Is For This book is for anyone who wants to build cross-platform native mobile applications using only JavaScript and the React Native framework. In particular, this book is especially useful for front-end developers who want to use their current skillset to build mobile applications. An existing working knowledge of JavaScript will help you get the most out of this book. What You Will Learn Implement native React Native components and APIs Explore React’s JSX syntax Manage data using Redux and Redux middleware Build applications with React Native on both iOS and Android platforms Perform animations in your applications using the animation APIs Understand routing and Navigator comparison Create your own Native module In Detail React Native has completely revolutionized mobile development by empowering JavaScript developers to build world-class mobile apps that run natively on mobile platforms. This book will show you how to apply JavaScript and other front-end skills to build cross-platform React Native applications for iOS and Android using a single codebase. This book will provide you with all the React Native building blocks necessary to become an expert. We’ll give you a brief explanation of the numerous native components and APIs that come bundled with React Native including Images, Views, ListViews, WebViews, and much more. You will learn to utilize form inputs in React Native. You’ll get an overview of Facebook’s Flux data architecture and then apply Redux to manage data with a remote API. You will also learn to animate different parts of your application, as well as routing using React Native’s navigation APIs. By the end of the book, you will be able to build cutting-edge applications using the React Native framework. Style and approach This comprehensive guide will take your React Native skills to the next level. It shows you how to develop a clear workflow to build scalable applications, and how to implement the architectural concepts covered to build applications that shine in the real world.

Build modular applications that are easy to scale using the most powerful components and design patterns that React can offer you right now About This Book Dive into the core patterns and components of React.js in order to master your application's design Improve their debugging skills using the DevTools This book is packed with easy-to-follow examples that can be used to create reusable code and extensible designs Who This Book Is For If you want to increase your understanding of React and apply it to real-life application development, then this book is for you. What You Will Learn Write clean and maintainable code Create reusable components applying consolidated techniques Use React effectively in the browser and node Choose the right styling approach according to the needs of the applications Use server-side rendering to make applications load faster Build high-performing applications by optimizing components In Detail Taking a complete journey through the most valuable design patterns in React, this book demonstrates how to apply design patterns and best practices in real-life situations, whether that's for new or already existing projects. It will help you to make your applications more flexible, perform better, and easier to maintain – giving your workflow a huge boost when it comes to speed without reducing quality. We'll begin by understanding the internals of React before gradually moving on to writing clean and maintainable code. We'll build components that are reusable across the application, structure applications, and create forms that actually work. Then we'll style React components and optimize them to make applications faster and more responsive. Finally, we'll write tests effectively and you'll learn how to contribute to React and its ecosystem. By the end of the book, you'll be saved from a lot of trial and error and developmental headaches, and you will be on the road to becoming a React expert. Style and approach The design patterns in the book are explained using real-world, step-by-step examples. For each design pattern, there are hints about when to use it and when to look for something more suitable. This book can also be used as a practical guide, showing you how to leverage design patterns.

Learn to really THINK about CSS, and how to create CSS that endures continual iteration, multiple authors, and yet always produces predictable results About This Book Address the problems of CSS at scale, avoiding the shortfalls of scaling CSS. The shortfalls of conventional approaches to scaling CSS. Develop consistent and enforceable selector naming conventions with ECSS. Learn how to organize project structure to more easily isolate and decouple visual components. Who This Book Is For This is a book for working CSS authors involved in large projects. This is a book that tackles create enduring CSS for large-scale projects. What You Will Learn The problems of CSS at scale—specificity, the cascade and styles intrinsically tied to element structure. The shortfalls of conventional approaches to scaling CSS. The ECSS methodology and the problems it solves. How to develop consistent and enforceable selector naming conventions with ECSS. How to organise project structure to more easily isolate and decouple visual components. How to handle state changes in the DOM with ARIA or override selectors. How to apply ECSS to web applications and visual modules. Considerations of CSS tooling and processing: Sass/PostCSS and linting. Addressing the notion of CSS selector speed with hard data and browser representative insight In Detail Learn with me, Ben Frain, about how to really THINK about CSS and how to use CSS for any size project! I'll show you how to write CSS that endures continual iteration, multiple authors, and yet always produces predictable results. Enduring CSS, often referred to as ECSS, offers you a robust and proven approach to authoring and maintaining style sheets at scale. Enduring CSS is not a book about writing CSS, as in the stuff inside the curly braces. This is a book showing you how to think about CSS, and be a smarter developer with that thinking! It's about the organisation and architecture of CSS—the parts outside the braces. I will help you think about the aspects of CSS development that become the most difficult part of writing CSS in larger projects. You’ll learn about the problems of authoring CSS at scale—including specificity, the cascade and styles intrinsically tied to document structure. I'll introduce you to the ECSS methodology, and show you how to develop consistent and enforceable selector naming conventions. We'll cover how to apply ECSS to your web applications and visual model, and how you can organize your project structure wisely, and handle visual state changes with ARIA, providing greater accessibility considerations. In addition, we'll take a deep look into CSS tooling and process considerations. Finally we will address performance considerations by examining topics such as CSS selector speed with hard data and browser-representative insight. Style and approach Learn with me, Ben Frain, about how to really think about CSS. This is a book to deal with writing CSS for large-scale, rapidly changing web projects and applications. This isn't a book about writing CSS, as in the stuff inside the curly braces - this is a book about the organisation and architecture of CSS; the parts outside the braces!

Create beautiful data visualizations and interactive dashboards with Tableau About This Book Delve into the features and functionalities of Tableau from the ground up with this step-by-step guide that has over 50 "follow-me" recipes Build rich visualizations to effectively highlight the underlying trends and patterns in your data Build beautiful interactive dashboards and storyboards to stitch your visualizations together and tell a story Who This Book Is For This book is for anyone who wishes to use Tableau. It will be of use to both beginners who want to learn Tableau from scratch and to more seasoned users who simply want a quick reference guide. This book is a ready reckoner guide for you. The book will be such that both new & existing Tableau users who don’t know, or can’t recall how to perform different Tableau tasks can use the book and be benefited from it. What You Will Learn Get to grips with the Tableau workspace and terminologies and understand what data sources you can connect Learn to create basic charts like bar chart, stacked bar, pie chart, line chart, area chart, tree map & word cloud Go even further with more advanced visualizations such as scatter plot, box & whiskers plot, dual axis, bullet chart, Histograms, Maps, etc Use pre-defined calculation and change its scope and direction to affect outcome Learn to define Parameters and call them into parametric calculations that provide outcomes based on user inputs Build Dashboards and use Actions to link multiple sheets on the dashboard Connect to multiple data sources using Data Blending, Multiple Table Join within the same data source as well as across data sources, Custom SQL and learn to work with data Extracts Compute statistical trends, build forecasting models and use Reference lines for benchmarking In Detail Data is everywhere and everything is data! Visualization of data allows us to bring out the underlying trends and patterns inherent in the data and gain insights that enable faster and smarter decision making. Tableau is one of the fastest growing and industry leading Business Intelligence platforms that empowers business users to easily visualize their data and discover insights at the speed of thought. Tableau is a self-service BI platform designed to make data visualization and analysis as intuitive as possible. Creating visualizations with simple drag-and-drop, you can be up and running on Tableau in no time. Starting from the fundamentals such as getting familiarized with Tableau Desktop, connecting to common data sources and building standard charts; you will walk through the nitty gritty of Tableau such as creating dynamic analytics with parameters, blended data sources, and advanced calculations. You will also learn to group members into higher levels, sort the data in a specific order & filter out the unnecessary information. You will then create calculations in Tableau & understand the flexibility & power they have and go on to building story-boards and share your insights with others. Whether you are just getting started or whether you need a quick reference on a "how-to" question, This book is the perfect companion for you Style and approach This cookbook takes a step-by-step approach and the text systematically evolves to cover more involved functionalities. Every recipe includes illustrative screenshots which provide a detailed visual resource for each step.

Find out everything you need to know to build powerful robots with the most up-to-date ROS About This Book This comprehensive, yet easy-to-follow guide will help you find your way through the ROS framework Successfully design and simulate your 3D robot model and use powerful robotics algorithms and tools to program and set up your robots with an unparalleled experience by using the exciting new features from Robot Kinetic Use the latest version of gazebo simulator, OpenCV 3.0, and C++11 standard for your own algorithms Who This Book Is For This book is suitable for an ROS beginner as well as an experienced ROS roboticist or ROS user or developer who is curious to learn ROS Kinetic and its features to make an autonomous Robot. The book is also suitable for those who want to integrate sensors and embedded systems with other software and tools using ROS as a framework. What You Will Learn Understand the concepts of ROS, the command-line tools, visualization GUIs, and how to debug ROS Connect robot sensors and actuators to ROS Obtain and analyze data from cameras and 3D sensors Use Gazebo for robot/sensor and environment simulation Design a robot and see how to make it map the environment, navigate autonomously, and manipulate objects in the environment using MoveIt! Add vision capabilities to the robot using OpenCV 3.0 Add 3D perception capabilities to the robot using the latest version of PCL In Detail Building and programming a robot can be cumbersome and time-consuming, but not when you have the right collection of tools, libraries, and more importantly expert collaboration. ROS enables collaborative software development and offers an unmatched simulated environment that simplifies the entire robot building process. This book is packed with hands-on examples that will help you program your robot and give you complete solutions using open source ROS libraries and tools. It also shows you how to use virtual machines and Docker containers to simplify the installation of Ubuntu and the ROS framework, so you can start working in an isolated and control environment without changing your regular computer setup. It starts with the installation and basic concepts, then continues with more complex modules available in ROS such as sensors and actuators integration (drivers), navigation and mapping (so you can create an autonomous mobile robot), manipulation, Computer Vision, perception in 3D with PCL, and more. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to leverage all the ROS Kinetic features to build a fully fledged robot for all your needs. Style and approach This book is packed with hands-on examples that will help you program your robot and give you complete solutions using ROS open source libraries and tools. All the robotics concepts and modules are explained and multiple examples are provided so that you can understand them easily.

Deploy, configure, and run clusters of Docker containers with Swarm About This Book Get to grips with Docker Swarm, one of the key components of the Docker ecosystem. Optimize Swarm and SwarmKit features for scaling massive applications through containers. Learn about Docker’s scheduling tricks, high availability, security, and platform scalability. Who This Book Is For If you are a Linux admin or a Docker user who wants to natively manage Docker clusters, then this is the book for you. What You Will Learn Create and manage Swarm Mode clusters of any size Get a backstage view of the biggest Swarms ever built : Swarm2k and Swarm3k, with their 2,300 and 4,700 nodes Discovery mechanisms and Raft Deploy your containerized app on Swarm Administer Swarm clusters on AWS, Azure, and DigitalOcean Integrate Flocker volumes with Swarm Create and manage Swarms on OpenStack Magnum In Detail Docker Swarm serves as one of the crucial components of the Docker ecosystem and offers a native solution for you to orchestrate containers. It’s turning out to be one of the preferred choices for Docker clustering thanks to its recent improvements. This book covers Swarm, Swarm Mode, and SwarmKit. It gives you a guided tour on how Swarm works and how to work with Swarm. It describes how to set up local test installations and then moves to huge distributed infrastructures. You will be shown how Swarm works internally, what’s new in Swarmkit, how to automate big Swarm deployments, and how to configure and operate a Swarm cluster on the public and private cloud. This book will teach you how to meet the challenge of deploying massive production-ready applications and a huge number of containers on Swarm. You'll also cover advanced topics that include volumes, scheduling, a Libnetwork deep dive, security, and platform scalability. Style and approach A comprehensive guide that covers all aspects of Docker Swarm from setup to customization.

Discover over 125 solution-based recipes to help you build applications for smartphones, tablets, and desktops About This Book Learn to build applications for Windows 10, the latest Windows version Develop your applications to be compatible with smartphones, tablets, and desktops This guide is packed with recipes covering major solutions to day-to-day problems faced by Windows programmers Who This Book Is For The book is dedicated to programmers with various experience of developing applications for Windows-based smartphones, tablets, and desktops—even beginners can find suitable content. What You Will Learn Start developing universal applications for Windows 10 Design user interface in the XAML language Use the MVVM design pattern with data binding Store data in files and in a database Use multimedia content and animations Capture data from built-in sensors Handle various Internet-based scenarios Test the application and submit it to the Windows Store In Detail Need to ensure you can always create the best Windows apps regardless of platformWhat you need are solutions to the biggest issues you can face, so you can always ensure you’re making the right choices and creating the best apps you can. The book starts with recipes that will help you set up the integrated development environment before you go ahead and design the user interface. You will learn how to use the MVVM design pattern together with data binding, as well as how to work with data in different file formats. Moving on, you will explore techniques to add animations and graphics to your application, and enable your solution to work with multimedia content. You will also see how to use sensors, such as an accelerometer and a compass, as well as obtain the current GPS location. You will make your application ready to work with Internet-based scenarios, such as composing e-mails or downloading files, before finally testing the project and submitting it to the Windows Store. By the end of the book, you will have a market-ready application compatible across different Windows devices, including smartphones, tablets, and desktops. Style and approach This quick-start book takes a cookbook format with recipes covering more than 125 solutions to help you create and build applications for Windows 10. The examples presented in the book use the free integrated development environment. A supporting set of codes that present solutions to problems described in particular chapters is available as well.

Combine the incredible powers of Spark, Mesos, Akka, Cassandra, and Kafka to build data processing platforms that can take on even the hardest of your data troubles! About This Book This highly practical guide shows you how to use the best of the big data technologies to solve your response-critical problems Learn the art of making cheap-yet-effective big data architecture without using complex Greek-letter architectures Use this easy-to-follow guide to build fast data processing systems for your organization Who This Book Is For If you are a developer, data architect, or a data scientist looking for information on how to integrate the Big Data stack architecture and how to choose the correct technology in every layer, this book is what you are looking for. What You Will Learn Design and implement a fast data Pipeline architecture Think and solve programming challenges in a functional way with Scala Learn to use Akka, the actors model implementation for the JVM Make on memory processing and data analysis with Spark to solve modern business demands Build a powerful and effective cluster infrastructure with Mesos and Docker Manage and consume unstructured and No-SQL data sources with Cassandra Consume and produce messages in a massive way with Kafka In Detail SMACK is an open source full stack for big data architecture. It is a combination of Spark, Mesos, Akka, Cassandra, and Kafka. This stack is the newest technique developers have begun to use to tackle critical real-time analytics for big data. This highly practical guide will teach you how to integrate these technologies to create a highly efficient data analysis system for fast data processing. We’ll start off with an introduction to SMACK and show you when to use it. First you’ll get to grips with functional thinking and problem solving using Scala. Next you’ll come to understand the Akka architecture. Then you’ll get to know how to improve the data structure architecture and optimize resources using Apache Spark. Moving forward, you’ll learn how to perform linear scalability in databases with Apache Cassandra. You’ll grasp the high throughput distributed messaging systems using Apache Kafka. We’ll show you how to build a cheap but effective cluster infrastructure with Apache Mesos. Finally, you will deep dive into the different aspect of SMACK using a few case studies. By the end of the book, you will be able to integrate all the components of the SMACK stack and use them together to achieve highly effective and fast data processing. Style and approach With the help of various industry examples, you will learn about the full stack of big data architecture, taking the important aspects in every technology. You will learn how to integrate the technologies to build effective systems rather than getting incomplete information on single technologies. You will learn how various open source technologies can be used to build cheap and fast data processing systems with the help of various industry examples

Master text-taming techniques and build effective text-processing applications with R About This Book Develop all the relevant skills for building text-mining apps with R with this easy-to-follow guide Gain in-depth understanding of the text mining process with lucid implementation in the R language Example-rich guide that lets you gain high-quality information from text data Who This Book Is For If you are an R programmer, analyst, or data scientist who wants to gain experience in performing text data mining and analytics with R, then this book is for you. Exposure to working with statistical methods and language processing would be helpful. What You Will Learn Get acquainted with some of the highly efficient R packages such as OpenNLP and RWeka to perform various steps in the text mining process Access and manipulate data from different sources such as JSON and HTTP Process text using regular expressions Get to know the different approaches of tagging texts, such as POS tagging, to get started with text analysis Explore different dimensionality reduction techniques, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and understand its implementation in R Discover the underlying themes or topics that are present in an unstructured collection of documents, using common topic models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) Build a baseline sentence completing application Perform entity extraction and named entity recognition using R In Detail Text Mining (or text data mining or text analytics) is the process of extracting useful and high-quality information from text by devising patterns and trends. R provides an extensive ecosystem to mine text through its many frameworks and packages. Starting with basic information about the statistics concepts used in text mining, this book will teach you how to access, cleanse, and process text using the R language and will equip you with the tools and the associated knowledge about different tagging, chunking, and entailment approaches and their usage in natural language processing. Moving on, this book will teach you different dimensionality reduction techniques and their implementation in R. Next, we will cover pattern recognition in text data utilizing classification mechanisms, perform entity recognition, and develop an ontology learning framework. By the end of the book, you will develop a practical application from the concepts learned, and will understand how text mining can be leveraged to analyze the massively available data on social media. Style and approach This book takes a hands-on, example-driven approach to the text mining process with lucid implementation in R.

GL, or Glycaemic Loading, is the dieting sensation taking the nation by storm. Nigel Denby, the UK's No.1 authority on GL and author of ‘The 7-Day GL Diet’ brings you an exciting new cookbook with over 100 simple and delicious recipes. Every taste is catered for – fish lovers, meat connoisseurs, vegetarian, sweet. Love your food AND lose weight! GL is the diet for people who want permanent results fast without going hungry. It's simpler than GI – and more effective, too. This is because it doesn't just look at the GI (Glycaemic Index) of a food: it also takes into account the amount of it we eat. This means that many high GI banned foods are back on the menu – yes, even chocolate! In this exciting new cookbook Nigel Denby, author of ‘The 7-Day GL Diet’, shows you how easy it is to cook healthy and delicious meals in minutes. It's packed with over 100 tasty recipes and full of handy tips to keep you on track. Love your food with the GL Diet Cookbook – and watch the pounds melt away.

Discover a novelist that Neil Gaiman describes as ‘an astonishingly smart writer’. When a chance meeting with a stranger leads to an offer of a room in exchange for telling her stories, Molly jumps at the chance. Slowly she builds a new, eccentric family around herself: Tim, her secretive boyfriend, who just might be a spy; Miranda, the lovelorn hairstylist; Liz, the lusty librarian; Mr. Roberts, landlord and listener; and his French wife, Mrs. Roberts. Much to Molly's surprise, she finds the stories she tells now are her key to creating a completely different life. Suddenly, her future is full of endless possibilities. The trouble is, Molly's not the only one telling tales. And the truth is always stranger than fiction. Sarah Salway's witty, finely-tuned and poignant story of many stories is a uniquely entrancing chronicle.