A Second-Chance Family When Buck Armstrong rescues Gina Patterson and her baby from a dark country road outside of town, he intends to keep his distance. Gina and little Bobby remind the handsome veteran too much of all he’s lost. The vulnerable single mom seems equally wary of getting involved. But things change once Gina and her son settle into his sister’s boarding house. Being with Gina and Bobby makes Buck question his plans to leave town for a fresh start. Suddenly, he has dreams of forging a new family, even though it will mean risking his heart. But can he escape his past for a chance at a happy future? Rescue River: Making forever families

Dan Hancox is a native Londoner who writes about music, politics, gentrification, social exclusion, protest and the margins of urban life, chiefly for the Guardian, but also the New York Times, Vice, The Fader, Dazed & Confused and XXL. He is the author of The Village Against the World (Verso).

BUILDING A FAMILY En route to the Double T Orphanage to work on its expansion, carpenter Chip Evans and Caroline Hunt discover two orphaned children—and become their caregivers. But Chip’s determined not to let himself get too attached to the children who just lost their widowed father…or to the lovely woman helping him care for them. Especially since Callie and the little ones just don’t fit into his detailed plans for the future. Callie can’t help but fall in love with the orphans, and despite her better judgment, she’s falling for Chip, too. Her dreams of being a wife and mother were not quite like this. But Callie believes a plan bigger than Chip’s brought them all together…and now she just has to help him see it, too.

Saved by the Lawman by Margaret Daley As an unknown assailant attempts to kidnap family court judge Kate Forster’s infant son, police officer Chase Walker thwarts the attack—and vows to keep the pair safe. But who will protect the ex-marine’s heart when the widowed mother and her little boy make him long for a permanent spot in their family? Saved by the SEAL by Susan Sleeman The tragedy that killed Bree Hatfield’s best friends—and left her with custody of their young daughter—has been ruled an accident. But Bree knows it was murder. Scared and alone, she turns to her ex-boyfriend, Navy SEAL Clint Reed, who’ll risk everything to protect baby Ella and the woman he never stopped loving.

AMISH COUNTRY DANGER Returning to her Amish hometown to open a bed and breakfast, Heather Miller thinks she’s finally safe from her violent ex-husband—until he escapes from prison. Now with her ex determined to hurt her, she must rely on US Marshal Zachary Walker for safety. For Zach, this mission isn’t only his duty, it’s personal. The escaped convict killed his sister, and Heather was instrumental in putting the man behind bars. But with Zach’s natural protective instincts toward Heather turning into something deeper, he must keep his emotional distance. He can’t be distracted, because the danger that lies in wait is as evil as it is unexpected…and a lapse in judgement could prove deadly.

Under the Spy’s Protection When Gemma Lyfeld inadvertently interrupts a dangerous smuggling operation in her English village, she’s rescued by a mysterious Scottish spy. Now with criminals after her and her hopes for an expected marriage proposal recently dashed, she will make her society debut in London. But not without the man tasked with protecting her… Covert government agent Tavin Knox must keep Gemma safe from the criminals who think she can identify them—a mission he never wanted. But as he escorts her and her rascally nephews around London, the lovely English lass proves braver than he ever imagined. Suddenly, the spy who works alone has one season to become the family man he never dreamed he’d be.

She thought she could handle any disaster… Responding to a tsunami on the tiny island of Guam should be a routine assignment for Dr. Anna Atao. From epidemics to earthquakes, she’s treated patients in the most dangerous and remote places on earth. Except Anna hasn’t been back to Guam since a tragedy there tore her life apart—and she left behind the man she loved. Seeing Nico brings back all the pain and joy of their time together, but Anna knows he’ll never leave the island. And once her deployment ends, she plans to catch the first helicopter back to the mainland. Anna may be an expert in survival, but without Nico, can she ever truly heal?

She thought she’d never see him again… In the past twelve years, Carly Joslin has made a new life for herself. She moved back home to Reston, Oklahoma, and started a successful organic farming business. So she's not about to let her ex-husband, Luke Sanderson, take all that away. Luke’s oil extraction operation—right next door to Carly—is a real threat to her livelihood…and her peace of mind. Carly had buried the bittersweet memories of their young love, whirlwind marriage and terrible loss. But not deep enough. And now Luke is back in town, unearthing the past and shaking the very foundations of the life she’s built.

He's the one with a family plan Relocating his sprawling family to this small Texas town wasn't the career move Austin cop Luke Hollister planned. Especially when the case he's working involves one of Holly Heights's own. Just ask his new neighbor Jennifer Neil, the high school math teacher who's fiercely protective of her community and personal space. Luke's here to serve, too. He's got a foster mom, siblings and little niece to keep safe. Yet the more he and Jen are thrown together, the more Luke wants to settle here for good-with the fiery redhead. But can he convince Jen to turn the dream house for one she’s building into a real home?

The man they’re all talking about… Gossip has spread far and wide about the broken-hearted recluse of River’s Bend – and who will be the lucky girl to heal him! But Nate Rolfe knows his isolated homestead offers no life for a woman. Plus, he has more pressing matters on his mind than unwanted female attention, such as tracking the elusive band of cattle rustlers plaguing Fir Mountain, and the plight of his family’s determined new housekeeper, Hannah Brooks, who is like no woman he’s ever met before. …and the woman who could win his love! Hannah will do anything to protect her illegitimate daughter, but with no family, no job and soon no home, the future looks bleak for a woman of her reputation. So now she has no choice but to turn to the family her outlaw lover warned her against contacting before he died. Only, Nate is nothing but kind to her and little Jemma. As she is drawn into Nate’s life – and tempted into his arms – Hannah must decide if she can trust him with both the truth of Jemma’s birth, and her own bruised and wary heart…

‘All the ingredients for a perfect, summery read…it really captured my heart’ Cressida McLaughlin ‘Sprinkled with oodles of charm…I simply adored this book’ Christie Barlow Fall in love with a brand new cosy romance series from bestselling author Zara Stoneley When Lucy Jacobs is made redundant from her inner-city teaching job she fears her career is over. Teaching is all Lucy knows and she's determined to get back in the classroom as fast as she can. Except the only job on offer is at an idyllic village school in the middle of nowhere – Lucy's idea of hell. Where are the disadvantaged kids who need saving, where is the challenge? But as Lucy finds herself welcomed into the warm-hearted community of Langtry Meadows, she begins to realise new challenges await – like frogs in the classroom, a rather difficult donkey, and a very brooding local vet… Local boy Charlie Davenport has his own issues about living in the close-knit village of Langtry Meadows. His private life is already fuel for the well-meaning gossips and the very last thing he needs is to get close to the new school teacher…no matter how lovely she is. But as summer days drift away Langtry Meadows weaves its magic, Charlie and Lucy both get the chance to turn over a new leaf and start anew…maybe with each other? A fun, romantic story to make you smile and long for your own country escape. Praise for Summer with the Country Village Vet: ‘Beautifully written tale straight from the author’s heart’ The Writing Garnet ‘Like a summer breeze, gently warming your heart…be prepared for love, laughter and escapism’ My Chestnut Reading Tree ‘A zingy, romantic and fabulously heartwarming book … My ultimate summer read’ Petra Pippa Q

Discover best practices and troubleshooting solutions when working on ROS About This Book ? Develop complex robotic applications using ROS to interface robot manipulators and mobile robots ? Gain insight into autonomous navigation in mobile robots and motion planning in robot manipulators ? Discover best practices and troubleshooting solutions Who This Book Is For If you are a robotics enthusiast or researcher who want to learn more about building robot applications using ROS, this book is for you. In order to learn from this book, you should have a basic knowledge of ROS, GNU/Linux, and C++ programming concepts. The book is also excellent for programmers who want to explore the advanced features of ROS. What You Will Learn ? Create a robot model with a seven-DOF robotic arm and a differential wheeled mobile robot ? Work with Gazebo and V-REP robotic simulator ? Implement autonomous navigation in differential drive robots using SLAM and AMCL packages ? Explore the ROS Pluginlib, ROS nodelets, and Gazebo plugins ? Interface I/O boards such as Arduino, robot sensors, and high-end actuators ? Simulate and motion plan an ABB and universal arm using ROS Industrial ? Explore the latest version of the ROS framework ? Work with the motion planning of a seven-DOF arm using MoveIt! In Detail In this day and age, robotics has been gaining a lot of traction in various industries where consistency and perfection matter. Automation is achieved via robotic applications and various platforms that support robotics. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a modular software platform to develop generic robotic applications. This book focuses on the most stable release of ROS (Kinetic Kame), discusses advanced concepts, and effectively teaches you programming using ROS. We begin with aninformative overview of the ROS framework, which will give you a clear idea of how ROS works. During the course of this book, you’ll learn to build models of complex robots, and simulate and interface the robot using the ROS MoveIt! motion planning library and ROS navigation stacks. Learn to leverage several ROS packages to embrace your robot models. After covering robot manipulation and navigation, you’ll get to grips with the interfacing I/O boards, sensors, and actuators of ROS. Vision sensors are a key component of robots, and an entire chapter is dedicated to the vision sensor and image elaboration, its interface in ROS and programming. You’ll also understand the hardware interface and simulation of complex robots to ROS and ROS Industrial. At the end of this book, you’ll discover the best practices to follow when programming using ROS. Style and approach This is a simplified guide to help you learn and master advanced topics in ROS using hands-on examples.

A highly detailed guide to performing powerful attack vectors in many hands-on scenarios and defending significant security flaws in your company's infrastructure About This Book ? Advanced exploitation techniques to breach modern operating systems and complex network devices ? Learn about Docker breakouts, Active Directory delegation, and CRON jobs ? Practical use cases to deliver an intelligent endpoint-protected system Who This Book Is For If you are a system administrator, SOC analyst, penetration tester, or a network engineer and want to take your penetration testing skills and security knowledge to the next level, then this book is for you. Some prior experience with penetration testing tools and knowledge of Linux and Windows command-line syntax is beneficial. What You Will Learn ? Exposure to advanced infrastructure penetration testing techniques and methodologies ? Gain hands-on experience of penetration testing in Linux system vulnerabilities and memory exploitation ? Understand what it takes to break into enterprise networks ? Learn to secure the configuration management environment and continuous delivery pipeline ? Gain an understanding of how to exploit networks and IoT devices ? Discover real-world, post-exploitation techniques and countermeasures In Detail It has always been difficult to gain hands-on experience and a comprehensive understanding of advanced penetration testing techniques and vulnerability assessment and management. This book will be your one-stop solution to compromising complex network devices and modern operating systems. This book provides you with advanced penetration testing techniques that will help you exploit databases, web and application servers, switches or routers, Docker, VLAN, VoIP, and VPN. With this book, you will explore exploitation abilities such as offensive PowerShell tools and techniques, CI servers, database exploitation, Active Directory delegation, kernel exploits, cron jobs, VLAN hopping, and Docker breakouts. Moving on, this book will not only walk you through managing vulnerabilities, but will also teach you how to ensure endpoint protection. Toward the end of this book, you will also discover post-exploitation tips, tools, and methodologies to help your organization build an intelligent security system. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the skills and methodologies needed to breach infrastructures and provide complete endpoint protection for your system. Style and approach Your one-stop guide to mastering the skills and methodologies of breaching infrastructures and providing complete endpoint protection to your system.

A pragmatic companion guide to your Agile journey About This Book ? Make your team Agile by implementing industry-standard Agile techniques ? Assess scope, scale up efficiently ? Create the correct roles and identify the right candidates for your team ? Finish your projects faster and stay ahead of the curve Who This Book Is For If you’re a software developer or a project manager with little to no experience of Agile, but you want to efficiently implement it, this is the book for you. What You Will Learn ? Create a solid foundation that gives your team an Agile jumpstart ? Understand how to select and evolve practices to increase your team’s agility ? Use experiments to accelerate your team’s understanding ? Fine-tune your approach by incorporating aspects of Lean and Lean Startup ? Know how to foster an environment of continuous improvement and learning that will become self-sustaining In Detail This book will help you overcome the common challenges you’ll face when transforming your working practices from waterfall to Agile. Each chapter builds on the last, starting with easy-to-grasp ways to get going with Agile. Next you’ll see how to choose the right Agile framework for your organization. Moving on, you’ll implement systematic product delivery and measure and report progress with visualization. Then you’ll learn how to create high performing teams, develop people in Agile, manage in Agile, and perform distributed Agile and collaborative governance. At the end of the book, you’ll discover how Agile will help your company progressively deliver software to customers, increase customer satisfaction, and improve the level of efficiency in software development teams. Style and approach Think of this book like a manual, rather than a theoretical textbook. It’s packed full of visual ways to understand Agile, helpful tips to get you set up quickly, tried and tested solutions when challenges arise, and heaps of support to get the day-to-day tasks in Agile done. You’ll want to keep a copy on your desk, right next to your coffee cup.

Leverage the WiFi chip to build exciting Quadcopters About This Book ? Learn to create a fully functional Drone with Arduino and ESP8266 and their modified versions of hardware. ? Enhance your drone's functionalities by implementing smart features. ? A project-based guide that will get you developing next-level drones to help you monitor a particular area with mobile-like devices. Who This Book Is For If you are a programmer or a DIY enthusiast and keen to create a fully functional drone with Arduino and ESP8266, then this book is for you. Basic skills in electronics and programming would be beneficial. This book is not for the beginners as it includes lots of ideas not detailed how you can do that. If you are a beginner, then you might get lost here. The prerequisites of the book include a good knowledge of Arduino, electronics, programming in C or C++ and lots of interest in creating things out of nothing. What You Will Learn ? Includes a number of projects that utilize different ESP8266 and Arduino capabilities, while interfacing with external hardware ? Covers electrical engineering and programming concepts, interfacing with the World through analog and digital sensors, communicating with a computer and other devices, and internet connectivity ? Control and fly your quadcopter, taking into account weather conditions ? Build a drone that can follow the user wherever he/she goes ? Build a mission-control drone and learn how to use it effectively ? Maintain your vehicle as much as possible and repair it whenever required In Detail With the use of drones, DIY projects have taken off. Programmers are rapidly moving from traditional application programming to developing exciting multi-utility projects. This book will teach you to build industry-level drones with Arduino and ESP8266 and their modified versions of hardware. With this book, you will explore techniques for leveraging the tiny WiFi chip to enhance your drone and control it over a mobile phone. This book will start with teaching you how to solve problems while building your own WiFi controlled Arduino based drone. You will also learn how to build a Quadcopter and a mission critical drone. Moving on you will learn how to build a prototype drone that will be given a mission to complete which it will do it itself. You will also learn to build various exciting projects such as gliding and racing drones. By the end of this book you will learn how to maintain and troubleshoot your drone. By the end of this book, you will have learned to build drones using ESP8266 and Arduino and leverage their functionalities to the fullest. Style and approach This is an easy-to-follow guide with illustrations and technical de*ions to help you assemble your vehicle.

Discover new opportunities to empower your private cloud by making the most of the OpenStack universe About This Book ? This practical guide teaches you how to extend the core functionalities of OpenStack ? Discover OpenStack's flexibility by writing custom applications and network plugins ? Deploy a containerized environment in OpenStack through a hands-on and example-driven approach Who This Book Is For This book is for system administrators, cloud architects, and developers who have experience working with OpenStack and are ready to step up and extend its functionalities. A good knowledge of basic OpenStack components is required. In addition, familiarity with Linux boxes and a good understanding of network and virtualization jargon is required. What You Will Learn ? Explore new incubated projects in the OpenStack ecosystem and see how they work ? Architect your OpenStack private cloud with extended features of the latest versions ? Consolidate OpenStack authentication in your large infrastructure to avoid complexity ? Find out how to expand your computing power in OpenStack on a large scale ? Reduce your OpenStack storage cost management by taking advantage of external tools ? Provide easy, on-demand, cloud-ready applications to developers using OpenStack in no time ? Enter the big data world and find out how to launch elastic jobs easily in OpenStack ? Boost your extended OpenStack private cloud performance through real-world scenarios In Detail OpenStack is a very popular cloud computing platform that has enabled several organizations during the last few years to successfully implement their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms. This book will guide you through new features of the latest OpenStack releases and how to bring them into production straightaway in an agile way. It starts by showing you how to expand your current OpenStack setup and how to approach your next OpenStack Data Center generation deployment. You will discover how to extend your storage and network capacity and also take advantage of containerization technology such as Docker and Kubernetes in OpenStack. Additionally, you'll explore the power of big data as a Service terminology implemented in OpenStack by integrating the Sahara project. This book will teach you how to build Hadoop clusters and launch jobs in a very simple way. Then you'll automate and deploy applications on top of OpenStack. You will discover how to write your own plugin in the Murano project. The final part of the book will go through best practices for security such as identity, access management, and authentication exposed by Keystone in OpenStack. By the end of this book, you will be ready to extend and customize your private cloud based on your requirements. Style and approach This guide is filled with practical scenarios on how to extend and enhance OpenStack's functionality. We will be covering various installation and configuration platforms along with a focus on plugins and extending OpenStack's core functionalities.

A practical guide filled with case studies and easy solutions to solve the most common user experience issues About This Book ? Understand and fix the pain points of a bad UX design to ensure greater customer satisfaction. ? Correct UX issues at various stages of a UX Design with the help of different methodologies for fixing bad UXs ? See best practices and established principles in UX with case studies illustrating these practices and principles Who This Book Is For This book is for anyone confronted with a poorly designed UX. It is ideal for UX professionals who want to solve problems with existing UX designs, and UX designers who want to enhance their designs or analyze and rectify where they went wrong. What You Will Learn ? Learn about ROI and metrics in UX ? Understand the importance of getting stakeholders involved ? Learn through real cases how to fix bad UX ? Identify and fix UX issues using different methodologies ? Learn how to turn insights and finding into practical UX solutions ? Learn to validate, test and measure the UX solutions implemented ? Learn about UX refactoring In Detail Have your web applications been experiencing more hits and less conversions? Are bad designs consuming your time and money? This book is the answer to these problems. With intuitive case studies, you’ll learn to simplify, fix, and enhance some common, real-world application designs. You’ll look at the common issues of simplicity, navigation, appearance, maintenance, and many more. The challenge that most UX designers face is to ensure that the UX is user-friendly. In this book, we address this with individual case studies starting with some common UX applications and then move on to complex applications. Each case study will help you understand the issues faced by a bad UX and teach you to break it down and fix these problems. As we progress, you’ll learn about the information architecture, usability testing, iteration, UX refactoring, and many other related features with the help of various case studies. You’ll also learn some interesting UX design tools with the projects covered in the book. By the end of the book, you’ll be armed with the knowledge to fix bad UX designs and to ensure great customer satisfaction for your applications. Style and approach This book takes a practical approach, with case studies, best practices, and practical solutions to bad design

Grasp the fundamental concepts of deep learning using Tensorflow in a hands-on manner About This Book ? Get a first-hand experience of the deep learning concepts and techniques with this easy-to-follow guide ? Train different types of neural networks using Tensorflow for real-world problems in language processing, computer vision, transfer learning, and more ? Designed for those who believe in the concept of 'learn by doing', this book is a perfect blend of theory and code examples Who This Book Is For This book targets data scientists and machine learning developers who wish to get started with deep learning. If you know what deep learning is but are not quite sure of how to use it, this book will help you as well. An understanding of statistics and data science concepts is required. Some familiarity with Python programming will also be beneficial. What You Will Learn ? Understand the fundamentals of deep learning and how it is different from machine learning ? Get familiarized with Tensorflow, one of the most popular libraries for advanced machine learning ? Increase the predictive power of your model using feature engineering ? Understand the basics of deep learning by solving a digit classification problem of MNIST ? Demonstrate face generation based on the CelebA database, a promising application of generative models ? Apply deep learning to other domains like language modeling, sentiment analysis, and machine translation In Detail Deep learning is a popular subset of machine learning, and it allows you to build complex models that are faster and give more accurate predictions. This book is your companion to take your first steps into the world of deep learning, with hands-on examples to boost your understanding of the topic. This book starts with a quick overview of the essential concepts of data science and machine learning which are required to get started with deep learning. It introduces you to Tensorflow, the most widely used machine learning library for training deep learning models. You will then work on your first deep learning problem by training a deep feed-forward neural network for digit classification, and move on to tackle other real-world problems in computer vision, language processing, sentiment analysis, and more. Advanced deep learning models such as generative adversarial networks and their applications are also covered in this book. By the end of this book, you will have a solid understanding of all the essential concepts in deep learning. With the help of the examples and code provided in this book, you will be equipped to train your own deep learning models with more confidence. Style and approach A step-by-step guide filled with multiple examples to help you get started with data science and deep learning.

Learn continuous deployment and automation with code-signing, continuous testing, building, deploying, and releasing of your app. About This Book ? A practical guide on automating your mobile development pipeline with Fastlane, Jenkins, and Slack. ? Build, test, run and deploy your mobile application release with this end to end guide. ? Implement Continuous Integration, delivery, and deployment practices to optimize your application development workflow for faster and efficient release builds. Who This Book Is For This book is intended for mobile developers who are keen on incorporating Continuous integration and deployment practices in their workflow. What You Will Learn ? Harness the fastlane tools for the Continuous Deployment strategy ? Integrate Continuous Deployment with existing Continuous Integration. ? Automate upload of screenshots across all device screen-sizes ? Manage push notifications, provisioning profiles, and code-signing certificates ? Orchestrate automated build and deployments of new versions of your app ? Regulate your TestFlight users and on-board new testers In Detail Competitive mobile apps depend strongly on the development team’s ability to deliver successful releases, consistently and often. Although continuous integration took a more mainstream priority among the development industry, companies are starting to realize the importance of continuity beyond integration and testing. This book starts off with a brief introduction to fastlane—a robust command-line tool that enables iOS and Android developers to automate their releasing workflow. The book then explores and guides you through all of its features and utilities; it provides the reader a comprehensive understanding of the tool and how to implement them. Themes include setting up and managing your certificates and provisioning and push notification profiles; automating the creation of apps and managing the app metadata on iTunes Connect and the Apple Developer Portal; and building, distributing and publishing your apps to the App Store. You will also learn how to automate the generation of localized screenshots and mesh your continuous delivery workflow into a continuous integration workflow for a more robust setup. By the end of the book, you will gain substantial knowledge on delivering bug free, developer-independent, and stable application release cycle. Style and approach A step by step guide taking the readers through all the tools of fastlane.

A tutorial leading the aspiring Go developer to full mastery of Golang's distributed features. About This Book ? This book provides enough concurrency theory to give you a contextual understanding of Go concurrency ? It gives weight to synchronous and asynchronous data streams in Golang web applications ? It makes Goroutines and Channels completely familiar and natural to Go developers Who This Book Is For This book is for developers who are familiar with the Golang syntax and have a good idea of how basic Go development works. It would be advantageous if you have been through a web application product cycle, although it’s not necessary. What You Will Learn ? Gain proficiency with concurrency and parallelism in Go ? Learn how to test your application using Go's standard library ? Learn industry best practices with technologies such as REST, OpenAPI, Docker, and so on ? Design and build a distributed search engine ? Learn strategies on how to design a system for web scale In Detail Distributed Computing with Go gives developers with a good idea how basic Go development works the tools to fulfill the true potential of Golang development in a world of concurrent web and cloud applications. Nikhil starts out by setting up a professional Go development environment. Then you’ll learn the basic concepts and practices of Golang concurrent and parallel development. You’ll find out in the new few chapters how to balance resources and data with REST and standard web approaches while keeping concurrency in mind. Most Go applications these days will run in a data center or on the cloud, which is a condition upon which the next chapter depends. There, you’ll expand your skills considerably by writing a distributed document indexing system during the next two chapters. This system has to balance a large corpus of documents with considerable analytical demands. Another use case is the way in which a web application written in Go can be consciously redesigned to take distributed features into account. The chapter is rather interesting for Go developers who have to migrate existing Go applications to computationally and memory-intensive environments. The final chapter relates to the rather onerous task of testing parallel and distributed applications, something that is not usually taught in standard computer science curricula. Style and approach Distributed Computing with Go takes you through a series of carefully graded tutorials, building ever more sophisticated applications.

SHIELDING HIS FAMILY Defending an accused kidnapper could get attorney Josie Bishop killed—but facing the father of her child for the first time in seven years could destroy her heart. Yet when her ex-fiancé, former SEAL Edward “Blade” Harding, shows up at her door ready to offer his protection, she can’t deny him. Nor can she deny him the chance to know their son. When shots are fired at Josie’s home and a brick is thrown through her window on which a scrawled note says “Drop the case or pay the price,” Blade is more determined than ever to protect his newfound family at all costs. But can he overcome his past mistakes in order to make sure they survive their present…and possibly have a future together? Navy SEAL Defenders: Bound by honor and dedicated to protection.