In 1997, almost by accident, John Richardson found himself sharing a hotel with more than a thousand dwarfs. Over the course of a single week, he begins relationships with some of the people at a convention that evolve into an affecting two-year-and-beyond odyssey into the little world.He introduces us to characters like a saintly but obsessed doctor and a mother who sacrifices her family to save her dwarf daughter. He follows two dwarf lovers from their first meeting through their struggle to overcome fear and shame and find the confidence to love each other. He becomes personally involved in a tangled and often confrontational friendship with a female dwarf.Through these stories and musings, ranging from classic theories of beauty to the history of the disability movement, to postmodern theories of difference, Richardson presents a world that is a skewed reflection of our own -- and offers us a glimpse into the essential human condition.

Garden & Gun magazine's aptly named Good Dog column—which features true stories of canines and the humans who love them—is one of the publication's most popular features. Now editor in chief David DiBenedetto and the editors of Garden & Gun have gathered their favorite essays as well as original pieces to create this must-read collection of dog ownership, companionship, and kinship. By turns humorous, inspirational, and poignant, Good Dog offers beautifully crafted essays from such notable writers as P. J. O'Rourke, Jon Meacham, Julia Reed, and Roy BlountJr. From the troublemakers who can't be fenced in to the lifelong companions who never leave our sides, this one-of-a-kind anthology showcases man's best friend through all of his most endearing (and maddening) attributes.

Are you a narcissistWhat is narcissismis one of the fastest-rising searches on Google, and articles on the topic routinely go viral. Yet the word narcissism seems to mean something different each time it's uttered. In fact, the more it's slung about, the more elusive its true meaning becomes. The only certainty, it would seem, is that it's bad to be a narcissist really bad. That's terrible news for millennials, who've been branded the most narcissistic generation ever. In Rethinking Narcissism, Dr. Craig Malkin a Harvard Medical School Instructor and clinical psychologist with more than two decades of clinical experience offers a radically new model for understanding this often misused term. Narcissism, argues Dr. Malkin, is essentially a spectrum of self-importance and everyone falls somewhere on the scale between utter selflessness and total arrogance. When we casually invoke the term narcissist most of us are referring to the outer edge of the spectrum, which can shade into dangerous psychopathy. But there are also those who live at the lower end of the spectrum dubbed echoists by Dr. Malkin. These, too, are people we know; people so fearful of attention or acknowledgment that they often seem to have no voice at all. Drawing on his own research as well as on the latest findings in psychology, Dr. Malkin uses vivid stories of people from all walks of life to teach concrete strategies for spotting and coping with excessive narcissism. At the same time, he explains why embracing some degree of narcissism the drive to feel special is essential to maintaining a healthy sense of self-worth. Using his new tool , the Narcissism Test, he not only guides readers through the process of measuring their narcissism, but also offers step-by-step advice to prevent unhealthy narcissism and to nurture healthy narcissism in ourselves as well as in our partners, our colleagues, and our children.As practical as it is wise, Rethinking Narcissism doesn't just help people avoid the temptations and dangers of extreme narcissism and narcissists in both the real world and cyberspace; it helps everyone, including people who don't feel special enough, to find their voices and live a more passionate, fulfilling life.

They defied death by being such good girls keeping secrets, staying out of sight, and suffering in frightened silence.Sophie pictured on the cover survived the Holocaust without even knowing she was Jewish, while her terrified, widowed mother worked for the Nazis in Poland under the guise of a Christian bookkeeper.Flora, orphaned by Final Solution, was shuttled through southern France, from convents to the homes of one Christian family after another, unsure of who she really was.Carla and her family took shelter in the apartment of a Dutch barber, while, one floor below, the man who protected them would cut German soldiers' hair.Sophie Turner-Zaretsky, Flora Hogman, and Carla Lessing (and her husband, Ed) survived not only the Holocaust among the mere 10 percent of European Jewish children who did but their own survival. Each of them ended up in New York, where they slowly emerged from the traumas of their childhoods, devoted their careers to helping others, and played important roles in the groundbreaking 1991 event that, for the first time, brought together the hidden child survivors scattered around the world.A chance meeting with Sophie sent author R. D. Rosen, a privileged Jewish American child of the suburbs, on a journey to grasp the scope of Nazi extermination of Europe's Jews and to honor hidden children, the very last generation of survivors to have witnessed the Holocaust firsthand.

Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman and went underground. With the help of a Christian friend, she emerged in Munich as Grete Denner. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her. Despite Edith's protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity a secret.In wrenching detail, Edith recalls a life of constant, almost paralyzing fear. She tells of German officials who casually questioned the lineage of her parents; of how, when giving birth to her daughter, she refused all painkillers, afraid that in an altered state of mind she might reveal something of her past; and of how, after her husband was captured by the Soviet army, she was bombed out of her house and had to hide while drunken Russian soldiers raped women on the street.Yet despite the risk it posed to her life, Edith created a remarkable record of survival. She saved every document and set of papers issued to her, as well as photographs she managed to take inside labor camps. Now part of the permanent collection at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., these hundreds of documents, several of which are included in this volume, form the fabric of a gripping new chapter in the history of the Holocaust -- complex, troubling, and ultimately triumphant.

Finding Life in RuinsJump into a battered Indiana Jones style Jeep with the intrepid Marilyn Johnson and head down bone-rattling roads in search of those who dig up the past. Johnson, the author of two acclaimed books about quirky subcultures The Dead Beat (about obituary writers) and This Book Is Overdue! (about librarians) brings her irrepressible wit and curiosity to bear on yet another strange world, that of archaeologists. Who chooses to work in ruinsWhat's the allure of sifting through layers of dirt under a hot sunWhy do archaeologists care so passionately about what's dead and buried and why should we?Johnson tracks archaeologists around the globe from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, from Newport, Rhode Island to Machu Picchu. She digs alongside experts on an eighteenth-century sugar plantation and in a first-century temple to Apollo. She hunts for bodies with forensics archaeologists in the vast and creepy Pine Barrens of New Jersey, drinks beer with an archaeologist of ancient beverages, and makes stone tools like a caveman. By turns amusing and profound, Lives in Ruins and its wild cast of characters find new ways to consider what is worth salvaging from our past.Archaeologists are driven by the love of history and the race to secure its evidence ahead of floods and bombs, looters and thieves, and before the bulldozers move in. Why spend your life in ruinsTo uncover our hidden stories before they disappear.

In 2008, Aspen Matis left behind her quaint Massachusetts town for a school two thousand miles away. Eager to escape her childhood as the sheltered baby girl of her family, Aspen wanted to reinvent herself at college. She hoped that far from home she'd meet friends who hadn't known her high school meekness; she would explore thrilling newfound freedom, blossom, and become a confident adult. But on her second night on campus, all those hopes were obliterated when Aspen was raped by a fellow student.The academic year commenced; Aspen felt alone now, devastated. She stumbled through her first college semester. Her otherwise loving and supportive parents discouraged her from speaking of the attack; her university's "conflict mediation" process for handling sexual assaults was callous then ineffectual. Aspen was confused, ashamed, and uncertain about how to deal with a problem that has disturbingly become common at institutions of higher learning throughout the country. Her desperation growing, she made a bold decision: she fled. She dropped out and sought healing in the freedom of the wild, on the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail leading from Mexico to Canada.In this important and inspiring memoir, Aspen chronicles an ambitious five-month trek that was as dangerous as it was transformative. Forced to survive on her own for the first time, squarely facing her trauma and childhood, she came to realize that the rape was not the only shameful burden she carried with her as she walked. She found herself on a new expedition: to confront and overcome the confines that had bound her since long before her second night at college.A nineteen-year-old girl alone and adrift, Aspen conquered desolate mountain passes and met rattlesnakes, bears, and fellow desert pilgrims. Among the snowcaps and the forests of America's West, she found the confidence that had eluded her all her life. After a thousand miles of solitude, she met a man who helped her learn to love, trust, and heal. Then from the endless woods she blazed a new path to the future she wanted and reclaimed it.What emerges is an unflinching portrait of a girl in the aftermath of rape. Told with elegance and suspense, Girl in the Woods is a beautifully rendered story of emotional and physical boundaries eroding to reveal the truths that lie beyond the edges of the map.

It was a cold late autumn day when I brought my children to live in rural West Virginia. The farmhouse was one hundred years old, there was already snow on the ground, and the heat was sparse as was the insulation. The floors weren't even, either. My then-twelve-year-old son walked in the door and said, 'You've brought us to this slanted little house to die.'Thus begins former romance writer Suzanne McMinn's wild ride into self-sustainable living halfway up a hill on one of the most remote dirt roads in West Virginia, with a cast including her children, an enigmatic partner, the rural neighborhood of quirky characters, and a whole slew of ridiculous and uncooperative farm animals. An unlikely adventurer, the suburban-born-and-bred author tackles one daunting challenge after another on her new forty-acre farm, from hatching chickens and milking a cow to herding sheep and making her own cheese. Whether she's trying to convince a goat to accept its baby or just get her ornery neighbor to move over and let her pass on the road, every page of her adventure is fraught with laughter, passion, drama, and the risk of losing it all before she figures out why she's doing it in the first place. And when she does lose it all, she discovers a triumph she never expected along with the truth for which she'd been searching all along.

From the bestselling, Man Booker–short-listed author of The Sisters Brothers comes a brilliant and boisterous novel that reimagines the folk taleA love story, an adventure story, a fable without a moral, and an ink-black comedy of manners, Undermajordomo Minor is Patrick deWitt's long-awaited follow-up to the internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed novel The Sisters Brothers.Lucien (Lucy) Minor is the resident odd duck in the bucolic hamlet of Bury. Friendless and loveless, young and aimless, Lucy is a compulsive liar, a sickly weakling in a town famous for producing brutish giants. Then Lucy accepts employment assisting the Majordomo of the remote, foreboding Castle Von Aux.While tending to his new post as Undermajordomo, Lucy soon discovers the place harbors many dark secrets, not least of which being the whereabouts of the castle's master, Baron Von Aux. He also encounters the colorful people of the local village—thieves, madmen, aristocrats, and Klara, a delicate beauty for whose love he must compete with the exceptionally handsome soldier Adolphus. Thus begins a tale of polite theft, bitter heartbreak, domestic mystery, and cold-blooded murder in which every aspect of humanity is laid bare for our hero to observe.Undermajordomo Minor is an adventure, a mystery, and a searing portrayal of rural Alpine bad behavior, but above all it is a love story—and Lucy must be careful, for love is a violent thing.

One of the most talked about books of the year . . . Bit by bit, the ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. And while the elderly Russian woman cannot hold on to fresh memories—the details of her grown children's lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild—her distant past is preserved: vivid images that rise unbidden of her youth in war-torn Leningrad. In the fall of 1941, the German army approached the outskirts of Leningrad, signaling the beginning of what would become a long and torturous siege. During the ensuing months, the city's inhabitants would brave starvation and the bitter cold, all while fending off the constant German onslaught. Marina, then a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum, along with other staff members, was instructed to take down the museum's priceless masterpieces for safekeeping, yet leave the frames hanging empty on the walls—a symbol of the artworks' eventual return. To hold on to sanity when the Luftwaffe's bombs began to fall, she burned to memory, brushstroke by brushstroke, these exquisite artworks: the nude figures of women, the angels, the serene Madonnas that had so shortly before gazed down upon her. She used them to furnish a "memory palace," a personal Hermitage in her mind to which she retreated to escape terror, hunger, and encroaching death. A refuge that would stay buried deep within her, until she needed it once more. . . .

Khaliah Ali, daughter of Muhammad Ali, shares her success at overcoming obesity through banding surgery—a minimally invasive, reversible, and extremely effective choice for drastically overweight peopleWhen Muhammad Ali's daughter Khaliah hit 325 pounds, she didn't need to be told again that she was morbidly obese. A lifetime of dieting, of starving, had not helped. Miserable, depressed, and unable to walk up a flight of stairs without losing her breath, she did not know which way to turn—until a friend pointed her toward a new type of surgery called gastric banding. It is just as effective as gastric bypass but with a fraction of potential complications. With the band placed around her stomach and completely taking away her hunger, Khaliah slimmed down to half her former size. Khaliah wraps her story of weight loss in this memoir of what it was like to grow up the daughter of one of the world's most famous men, and teams up with her surgeons at the New York University Medical Center to detail the lifetime of misery suffered by an obese girl; the ins and outs of the banding operation; and the joy, serenity, and health resulting from a solution that until now had eluded her.

Meet Tom Ripple, a man with an uncommon outlook on his common life. Through the vividness of his voice and his growing sense of the sorrow and absurdity of the world, Tom Ripple becomes an unusually appealing antihero, aware of his ordinariness and the limits of his intelligence, with a ribald sense of humor, and a clumsiness in his attempts at emotional connection with others. He is a bewildered everyman navigating his way through modern times. By turns poignant, funny, heartbreaking, and profound, It's All Right Now is a towering achievement and a singular work of the imagination.

Leverage the power of Python and its de facto GUI framework to build highly interactive interfaces About This Book ? The fundamentals of Python and GUI programming with Tkinter. ? Create multiple cross-platform projects by integrating a host of third-party libraries and tools. ? Build beautiful and highly-interactive user interfaces that target multiple devices. Who This Book Is For This book is for beginners to GUI programming who haven’t used Tkinter yet and are eager to start building great-looking and user-friendly GUIs. Prior knowledge of Python programming is expected. What You Will Learn ? Create a scrollable frame via theCanvas widget ? Use the pack geometry manager andFrame widget to control layout ? Learn to choose a data structurefor a game ? Group Tkinter widgets, such asbuttons, canvases, and labels ? Create a highly customizablePython editor ? Design and lay out a chat window In Detail Tkinter is a modular, cross-platform application development toolkit for Python. When developing GUI-rich applications, the most important choices are which programming language(s) and which GUI framework to use. Python and Tkinter prove to be a great combination. This book will get you familiar with Tkinter by having you create fun and interactive projects. These projects have varying degrees of complexity. We'll start with a simple project, where you'll learn the fundamentals of GUI programming and the basics of working with a Tkinter application. After getting the basics right, we'll move on to creating a project of slightly increased complexity, such as a highly customizable Python editor. In the next project, we'll crank up the complexity level to create an instant messaging app. Toward the end, we'll discuss various ways of packaging our applications so that they can be shared and installed on other machines without the user having to learn how to install and run Python programs. Style and approach Step by Step guide with real world examples

Develop skills to build powerful plug-ins with Eclipse IDE through examples About This Book Create useful plug-ins to make Eclipse work for you Learn how to migrate Eclipse 3.x plug-ins to Eclipse 4.x From automation to testing, find out how to get your IDE performing at an impressive standard Who This Book Is For This book is for Java developers familiar with Eclipse who need more from the IDE. This book will sharpen your confidence and make you a more productive developer with a tool that supports rather than limits you. What You Will Learn Create plug-ins for Eclipse 4.x Test plug-ins automatically with JUnit Display tree and table information in views Upgrade Eclipse 3.x plug-ins to Eclipse 4.x Find out how to build user interfaces from SWT and JFace Run tasks in the background and update the user interface asynchronously Automate builds of plug-ins and features Automate user interface tests with SWTBot In Detail Eclipse is used by everyone from indie devs to NASA engineers. Its popularity is underpinned by its impressive plug-in ecosystem, which allows it to be extended to meet the needs of whoever is using it. This book shows you how to take full advantage of the Eclipse IDE by building your own useful plug-ins from start to finish. Taking you through the complete process of plug-in development, from packaging to automated testing and deployment, this book is a direct route to quicker, cleaner Java development. It may be for beginners, but we're confident that you'll develop new skills quickly. Pretty soon you'll feel like an expert, in complete control of your IDE. Don't let Eclipse define you - extend it with the plug-ins you need today for smarter, happier, and more effective development. Style and approach Packed with plenty of examples so you're never stuck, or never left simply reading instructions, this book encourages you to get started immediately. This book is for developers who want to develop, not just learn.

The book uses stepbystep instructions along with full code listings for each exercise. After each exercise, the author pauses to reflect, explain, and offer insights before building on the project. The author approaches the content with the belief that we are all teachers and that you are reading this book not only because you want to learn, but because you want to share your knowledge with others. Motivated students can pick up this book and teach themselves how to program because the book takes a simple, strategic, and structured approach to learning Scratch. Parents can grasp the fundamentals so that they can guide their children through introductory Scratch programming exercises. It’s perfect for homeschool families. Teachers of all disciplines from computer science to English can quickly get up to speed with Scratch and adapt the projects for use in the classroom.

Over 120 practical and easy-to-understand recipes that explain how to use Sass and Compass to write efficient, maintainable, and reusable CSS code for your web development projects About This Book Leverage Sass to make your CSS code maintainable, reusable and prevent code duplications Shorten debug time with Sass when creating complex CSS code for different browsers and devices Write easy and bullet-proof CSS with Compass using this step-by-step and detailed guide Who This Book Is For This book is mainly intended for web developers and designers who are comfortable with CSS and HTML. If you are someone with some experience with CSS, you will find the learning curve of learning Sass syntax to be less steep. Basic knowledge of web development is helpful but you don't have to be a programmer to understand Sass. What You Will Learn Spend less time debugging code Compile Sass code into readable and maintainable CSS Integrate Sass in your own projects Reuse your code to prevent code duplications Write reusable and portable CSS code Make use of pre-built and established code written by other developers Reduce development and maintenance time of your projects Set up a development environment with Gulp In Detail Sass and Compass Designer's Cookbook helps you to get most out of CSS3 and harness its benefits to create engaging and receptive applications. This book will help you develop faster and reduce the maintenance time for your web development projects by using Sass and Compass. You will learn how to use with CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap and Foundation and understand how to use other libraries of pre-built mixins. You will also learn setting up a development environment with Gulp. This book guides you through all the concepts and gives you practical examples for full understanding. Style and approach This book is the perfect mix of essential theory combined with real-life examples and problems, with clear explanations of the more sophisticated Sass concepts. Learn Sass and Compass with practical and well-explained example code. This book follows a problem and solution approach that is convenient to understand and follow.

Jump into the world of Game AI development About This Book ? Move beyond using libraries to create smart game AI, and create your own AI projects from scratch ? Implement the latest algorithms for AI development and in-game interaction ? Customize your existing game AI and make it better and more efficient to improve your overall game performance Who This Book Is For This book is for game developers with a basic knowledge of game development techniques and some basic programming techniques in C# or C++. What You Will Learn ? Get to know the basics of how to create different AI for different type of games ? Know what to do when something interferes with the AI choices and how the AI should behave if that happens ? Plan the interaction between the AI character and the environment using Smart Zones or Triggering Events ? Use animations correctly, blending one animation into another and rather than stopping one animation and starting another ? Calculate the best options for the AI to move using Pruning Strategies, Wall Distances, Map Preprocess Implementation, and Forced Neighbours ? Create Theta algorithms to the AI to find short and realistic looking paths ? Add many characters into the same scene and make them behave like a realistic crowd In Detail The book starts with the basics examples of AI for different game genres and directly jumps into defining the probabilities and possibilities of the AI character to determine character movement. Next, you’ll learn how AI characters should behave within the environment created. Moving on, you’ll explore how to work with animations. You’ll also plan and create pruning strategies, and create Theta algorithms to find short and realistic looking game paths. Next, you’ll learn how the AI should behave when there is a lot of characters in the same scene. You'll explore which methods and algorithms, such as possibility maps, Forward Chaining Plan, Rete Algorithm, Pruning Strategies, Wall Distances, and Map Preprocess Implementation should be used on different occasions. You’ll discover how to overcome some limitations, and how to deliver a better experience to the player. By the end of the book, you think differently about AI. Style and approach The book has a step-by-step tutorial style approach. The algorithms are explained by implementing them in #.

Over 80 recipes to help you improve vSphere 6.5's performance and solve problems before they arise About This Book ? The practical recipes provide cost-effective and high performance for any application running in a virtual machine ? Contains best practices and troubleshooting techniques to resolve vSphere 6.5 performance issues ? Get a comprehensive coverage of performance issues and solutions including vCenter Server design and virtual machine and application tuning Who This Book Is For If you are a system administrator and are planning to deploy vSphere 6.5 in your organization and want to maximize its performance, then this book is for you. Prior knowledge of the vSphere 6.5 concepts is essential. What You Will Learn ? Understand the VMM Scheduler, cache aware CPU Scheduler, NUMA aware CPU Scheduler, and more during the CPU Performance Design phase ? Get to know the virtual memory reclamation technique, host ballooning monitoring, and swapping activity ? Choose the right platform while designing your vCenter Server, redundant vCenter design, and vCenter SSO and its deployment ? Learn how to use various performance simulation tools ? Design VCSA Server Certificates to minimize security threats ? Use health check tools for storage and boost vSphere 6.5's performance with VAAI and VASA In Detail vSphere is a mission-critical piece of software for many businesses. It is a complex tool, and incorrect design and deployment can create performance related issues that can negatively affect the business. This book is focused on solving these problems as well as providing best practices and performance-enhancing techniques. This edition is fully updated to include all the new features in version 6.5 as well as the latest tools and techniques to keep vSphere performing at its best. This book starts with interesting recipes, such as the interaction of vSphere 6.5 components with physical layers such as CPU, memory, and networking. Then we focus on DRS, resource control design, and vSphere cluster design. Next, you'll learn about storage performance design and how it works with VMware vSphere 6.5. Moving on, you will learn about the two types of vCenter installation and the benefits of each. Lastly, the book covers performance tools that help you get the most out of your vSphere installation. By the end of this book, you will be able to identify, diagnose, and troubleshoot operational faults and critical performance issues in vSphere 6.5. Style and approach This cookbook is written in a practical, helpful style with numerous recipes focusing on answering and providing solutions to common and not-so-common performance issues and problems.

Make sense of your data and predict the unpredictable About This Book ? A unique book that centers around develop six key practical skills needed to develop and implement predictive analytics ? Apply the principles and techniques of predictive analytics to effectively interpret big data ? Solve real-world analytical problems with the help of practical case studies and real-world scenarios taken from the world of healthcare, marketing, and other business domains Who This Book Is For This book is for those with a mathematical/statistics background who wish to understand the concepts, techniques, and implementation of predictive analytics to resolve complex analytical issues. Basic familiarity with a programming language of R is expected. What You Will Learn ? Master the core predictive analytics algorithm which are used today in business ? Learn to implement the six steps for a successful analytics project ? Classify the right algorithm for your requirements ? Use and apply predictive analytics to research problems in healthcare ? Implement predictive analytics to retain and acquire your customers ? Use text mining to understand unstructured data ? Develop models on your own PC or in Spark/Hadoop environments ? Implement predictive analytics products for customers In Detail This is the go-to book for anyone interested in the steps needed to develop predictive analytics solutions with examples from the world of marketing, healthcare, and retail. We'll get started with a brief history of predictive analytics and learn about different roles and functions people play within a predictive analytics project. Then, we will learn about various ways of installing R along with their pros and cons, combined with a step-by-step installation of RStudio, and a de*ion of the best practices for organizing your projects. On completing the installation, we will begin to acquire the skills necessary to input, clean, and prepare your data for modeling. We will learn the six specific steps needed to implement and successfully deploy a predictive model starting from asking the right questions through model development and ending with deploying your predictive model into production. We will learn why collaboration is important and how agile iterative modeling cycles can increase your chances of developing and deploying the best successful model. We will continue your journey in the cloud by extending your skill set by learning about Databricks and SparkR, which allow you to develop predictive models on vast gigabytes of data. Style and Approach This book takes a practical hands-on approach wherein the algorithms will be explained with the help of real-world use cases. It is written in a well-researched academic style which is a great mix of theoretical and practical information. Code examples are supplied for both theoretical concepts as well as for the case studies. Key references and summaries will be provided at the end of each chapter so that you can explore those topics on their own.

Store, search, and analyze your data with ease using Elasticsearch 5.x About This Book ? Get to grips with the basics of Elasticsearch concepts and its APIs, and use them to create efficient applications ? Create large-scale Elasticsearch clusters and perform analytics using aggregation ? This comprehensive guide will get you up and running with Elasticsearch 5.x in no time Who This Book Is For If you want to build efficient search and analytics applications using Elasticsearch, this book is for you. It will also benefit developers who have worked with Lucene or Solr before and now want to work with Elasticsearch. No previous knowledge of Elasticsearch is expected. What You Will Learn ? See how to set up and configure Elasticsearch and Kibana ? Know how to ingest structured and unstructured data using Elasticsearch ? Understand how a search engine works and the concepts of relevance and scoring ? Find out how to query Elasticsearch with a high degree of performance and scalability ? Improve the user experience by using autocomplete, geolocation queries, and much more ? See how to slice and dice your data using Elasticsearch aggregations. ? Grasp how to use Kibana to explore and visualize your data ? Know how to host on Elastic Cloud and how to use the latest X-Pack features such as Graph and Alerting In Detail Elasticsearch is a modern, fast, distributed, scalable, fault tolerant, and open source search and analytics engine. You can use Elasticsearch for small or large applications with billions of documents. It is built to scale horizontally and can handle both structured and unstructured data. Packed with easy-to- follow examples, this book will ensure you will have a firm understanding of the basics of Elasticsearch and know how to utilize its capabilities efficiently. You will install and set up Elasticsearch and Kibana, and handle documents using the Distributed Document Store. You will see how to query, search, and index your data, and perform aggregation-based analytics with ease. You will see how to use Kibana to explore and visualize your data. Further on, you will learn to handle document relationships, work with geospatial data, and much more, with this easy-to-follow guide. Finally, you will see how you can set up and scale your Elasticsearch clusters in production environments. Style and approach This comprehensive guide will get you started with Elasticsearch 5.x, so you build a solid understanding of the basics. Every topic is explained in depth and is supplemented with practical examples to enhance your understanding.

Learn, develop, and design applications using the new features in Microsoft Dynamics CRM About This Book ? Implement business logic using processes, plugins, and client-side *s with MS Dynamics 365 ? Develop custom CRM solutions to improve your business applications ? A comprehensive guide that covers the new features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and increasingly advanced topics. Who This Book Is For This book targets skilled developers who are looking to build business-solution software and are new to application development in Microsoft Dynamics 365, especially for CRM. What You Will Learn ? Discover new designers tools included in Dynamics 365 CRM ? Develop apps using the platform-agnostic Web API ? Leverage Azure Extensions to design cloud-aware applications ? Learn how to implement CRUD operation ? Create integrated real-world apps using Microsoft PowerApps and Flow by combining services such as Twitter, Facebook, and SharePoint ? Configure and use Artificial Intelligence Azure Cognitive Services for Recommendation and Text Analytic services In Detail Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM is the most trusted name in enterprise-level customer relationship management. Thelatest version of Dynamics CRM comes with the important addition of exciting features guaranteed to make your life easier. It comes straight off the shelf with a whole new frontier of updated business rules, process enhancements, SDK methods, and other enhancements. This book will introduce you to the components of the new designer tools, such as SiteMap, App Module, and Visual Designer for Business Processes. Going deeper, this book teaches you how to develop custom SaaS applications leveraging the features of PowerApps available in Dynamics 365.Further, you will learn how to automate business processes using Microsoft Flow, and then we explore Web API, the most important platform update in Dynamics 365 CRM. Here, you'll also learn how to implement Web API in custom applications. You will learn how to write an Azure-aware plugin to design and integrate cloud-aware solutions. The book concludes with configuring services using newly released features such as Editable grids, Data Export Service, LinkedIn Integration, Relationship Insights, and Live Assist. Style and approach The book takes a pragmatic approach, exploring Dynamics 365 and its CRM features with the help of real-world scenarios.