The inside story of the ‘reluctant medium’, finally available in a mass-market A-format edition Betty Shine was originally an opera singer, but studied all forms of alternative healing, becoming a vitamin and mineral therapist. Guided by spirit voices from the age of two, she became a world-famous medium. This is the story of how she became the best known medium and healer in the UK. Through her books, tapes and absent healing service, she is in touch with thousands of people worldwide. The hardback publication of her book produced a tremendous response from both the media and the general public and this A-format edition will bring her story to an even wider audience.

Nine-year-old Meena can’t wait to grow up and break free from her parents. But, as the daughter of the only Punjabi family in the mining village of Tollington, her struggle for independence is different from most. Meena wants fishfingers and chips, not chapati and dhal; she wants an English Christmas, not the usual interminable Punjabi festivities – but more than anything, she wants to roam the backyards of working-class Tollington with feisty Anita Rutter and her gang. Blonde, cool, aloof, outrageous and sassy, Anita is everything Meena thinks she wants to be. Meena wheedles her way into Anita’s life, but the arrival of a baby brother, teenage hormones, impending entrance exams for the posh grammar school and a motorcycling rebel without a future threaten to turn Anita’s salad days sour. Anita and Me paints a comic, poignant, compassionate and colourful portrait of village life in the era of flares, power cuts, glam rock, decimalisation and Ted Heath. It is a unique vision of a British childhood in the Seventies, a childhood caught between two cultures, each on the brink of change.

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the sequel to one of her most celebrated novels, ‘The Fifth Child’. ‘The Fifth Child’, Doris Lessing’s 1988 novel, made a powerful impact on publication. Its account of idyllic marital and parental bliss shattered by the arrival of the feral fifth child of the Lovatts made for unnerving and compulsive reading. That child, Ben, is the central character of this sequel, which picks up the fable at the end of his childhood and takes our primal, misunderstood, maladjusted teenager out into the world. He meets mostly with mockery, fear and incomprehension, but with just enough kindness and openness to keep him afloat as his adventures take him from London to the south of France and on to South America in his restless quest for community, companionship and peace. Lessing employs a plain, unadorned prose fit for fables; again, we have a childlike perspective at the heart of the book; again, the world in all its malevolence and misapprehension swirls around at the edge, while, occasionally, a strong character steps forward to try to set a good example.

You can indulge without guilt! Enjoy delicious desserts, perfect pastries, cookies and cakes, breads and bakes as part of a healthy lifestyle. Who says you can’t have it all? The third title from Sally Bee. Busy mum, home cook and heart-attack survivor Sally Bee knows better than anyone how to incorporate healthy eating into a busy lifestyle with her gorgeous, flavoursome and balanced recipes. In her new book, Have Your Cake and Eat it Too, Sally turns her attention to the sweet things in life to show that you don’t have to give up your favourite treats to maintain a healthy lifestyle or slimmer waistline. In fact, Sally claims that depriving yourself of these little pleasures makes it harder to stick to a nutritious and balanced diet long term. Sally shows how to make your favourite treats a little less naughty with healthier versions of much loved puddings, bakes, cakes and desserts. You can rest assured that they won’t be as sinful as they taste; a sensible attitude and a bit of creative cooking is all that’s needed to spoil yourself the healthier way. Sally also shares her helpful tips, advice and experience to show you how to enjoy little luxuries sensibly. She also reveals some of her culinary secrets and how to make compensations for 'naughty' ingredients by adding more of the good stuff. At the age of 36 Sally Bee suffered three major heart attacks in a single week. Sally defied all odds and, 5 years on, is glowing with health. She is the ultimate endorsement for living a sustainable healthy life, and is living proof that her recipes work. Recipes Include… Hot Choccy Soufflé Raspberry Muffins Low-fat Zesty Lemon Buttercream Pineapple, Raspberry and Amaretti Parfaits Chocolate Vanilla Mousse Peach and Strawberry Sorbet Soda Bread Spicy Apple Muffins Almond and Hazelnut Gateau Gooey Chocolate Orange Cookies Caramelised Apples Almond Macaroons Oatmeal Fruit Bread Chocolate Pistachio Biscuits Passionate Pear Crumble

In a twisting, fast-moving adventure, ex-Navy Seal Nolan Kilkenny finds himself on a dangerous mission where he must recover a priceless artifact of human existence. The key to all life has suddenly become worth killing for… Deep in the frozen wasteland of Antarctica, a remote NASA research lab rests atop a two-mile thick glacier, covering a vast underground water resevoir. But the true discovery isn’t the lake buried in ice - it’s what has been found within its boundaries. Something amazing. Something alive. And it may hold the answers to existence itself. When the lab is attacked and its scientists murdered, Nolan Kilkenny realises that there is more than science at stake - there’s power, money, and what may be another step in evolution. Racing around the globe, Kilkenny must stop the machinations of a diabolical adversary and recover a priceless artifact of human existence - or die trying…

Three crazy, funny stories, featuring the two clumsiest talking mice you’ll ever meet… ‘The mouse started to trundle away, glancing at Howard over its shoulder, nervously. “You may well glance at me nervously," said Howard, picking up an empty water glass and placing it over the mouse. "You'll stay in there so I can eat my breakfast in peace. I shall deal with you afterwards…”’ But you can't really deal with the Clumsies, afterwards or at any time. Once you've got them, you're stuck with them. From the moment when Howard Armitage first finds two talking mice under his desk – the inimitable and hilarious Purvis and Mickey Thompson – his life, and his belongings, are turned forever upside down. Obsessed with biscuits and forever playing incomprehensible games of their own devising, the Clumsies are not your average mice – and though they're desperate to help Howard get out of trouble with his evil boss, they're only really good for one thing… …making a mess.

More hilarious stories about the two clumsiest talking mice you’ll ever meet… It’s Clumsies on Sea as Howard and the Clumsies head to the seaside for what Howard calls a “conference” and the Clumsies call a “holiday”! Will Howard manage to impress his evil boss Mr Bullerton? Will he get to the hotel on time? And will the trip pass without mess or incident of any kind? Of course not. Nothing goes to plan when the Clumsies are about! Sandcastles, talking donkeys, runaway supermarket trollies: this clumsy adventure has it all!

Amanda Valentino is the most mysterious, the most magnetic girl you’ll never meet. But if you join THE AMANDA PROJECT you just might find out what happened to her… Who is Amanda? And why did she vanish? When Amanda Valentino started at Endeavor High on Halloween, she changed everything. A fabulous mix of the weird and the wonderful, Amanda was the most extraordinary student ever. Amanda herself was drawn to only three other students: Callie, Hal and Nia – the popular girl, the loner and the intellectual misfit. Without Amanda they would never had been friends, but now Amanda has disappeared and it’s up to them to find out what happened. Reluctantly, and with only the most cryptic of clues and the fragments of her life that Amanda let slip, this unlikely trio must find out where she’s gone, and why… The mystery begins in THE AMANDA PROJECT, Invisible i and continues online at www.theamandaproject.com

A hugely entertaining and glamorous debut, perfect for fans of the X-Factor, from an exciting voice in young women’s fiction Meet Jenna Jonsson and Sadie Laine: two gorgeous, glamorous twenty-somethings fighting to make it to the top of their chosen professions. Beautiful and talented, Jenna is an international pop star, determined to take her career to the next level. And when a chance meeting leads to an opportunity for Jenna to work with world-famous rock band Phoenix, Jenna is quick to agree – although her decision is somewhat influenced by Nick Taylor, the drummer with Phoenix and the most gorgeous man Jenna has ever met… Meanwhile, Sadie is a struggling dancer and a childhood rival of Jenna's. Ambitious and passionate, she is determined to fulfil her dreams. And a move to Las Vegas yields an unmissable career opportunity and a chance at true love. Jenna and Sadie's lives are about to collide but will sparks fly? Or will they be able to put the past behind them?

A hugely entertaining and glamorous book, from an exciting new voice in young women’s fiction Stunning and sexy, Dionne Summers is a girl who speaks her mind. Brought up on the mean streets of Detroit, she is determined that nothing will stop her from becoming the world’s next supermodel. Beautiful and innocent, Alyson Wakefield is desperate to escape her upbringing. She decides it is time to take hold of her life and follow her dreams. Heading to the chic streets of Paris, the girls move in with a maverick young designer, Ce Ce Bouvier. Born to a life of luxury and glamour, Ce Ce is determined to stand on her own two feet and take the fashion world by storm. The girls vow to make it to the top, but their friendship is about to be tested to the limits when deception, betrayal and tragedy are played out in the glare of the paparazzi flashbulbs. Can the three girls overcome the ghosts of the past – or will the catwalk consume them?

A classic Agatha Christie short story, available individually for the first time as an ebook. Asked to investigate an incident that needs to be dealt with discretion, Poirot reluctantly agrees to spend Christmas in the countryside with the Laceys. Dreading the cold and traditional English fare Poirot attempts to locate a missing ruby in order to save a kingdom…

A teenage murder witness is drowned in a tub of apples… At a Hallowe’en party, Joyce – a hostile thirteen-year-old – boasts that she once witnessed a murder. When no-one believes her, she storms off home. But within hours her body is found, still in the house, drowned in an apple-bobbing tub. That night, Hercule Poirot is called in to find the ‘evil presence’. But first he must establish whether he is looking for a murderer or a double-murderer…

A collection of short stories featuring the ‘heart specialist’, Parker Pyne. Mrs Packington felt alone, helpless and utterly forlorn. But her life changed when she stumbled upon an advertisement in The Times which read: ‘ARE YOU HAPPY? IF NOT, CONSULT MR PARKER PYNE’. Equally adept at putting together the pieces of a marriage or the fragments of a murder mystery, Mr Parker Pyne was possibly the world’s most unconventional private eye – and certainly its most charming.

Set in 1919, young couple Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley form a partnership, hiring themselves out as ”young adventurers”. Their first case, however, is more of an adventure than they expect – working to find documents that, if they were known to the general public, would fuel a communist revolution in Britain. The action and drama was kept high throughout the course of the plot, and the twist at the end was marvelously well-done. I didn’t expect it at all– in fact, I thought I had worked out the solution about halfway through, but I was completely wrong. I love it when mystery books do that; it makes reading them into a fun game.

Advanced analytics on your Big Data with latest Apache Spark 2.x About This Book ? An advanced guide with a combination of instructions and practical examples to extend the most up-to date Spark functionalities. ? Extend your data processing capabilities to process huge chunk of data in minimum time using advanced concepts in Spark. ? Master the art of real-time processing with the help of Apache Spark 2.x Who This Book Is For If you are a developer with some experience with Spark and want to strengthen your knowledge of how to get around in the world of Spark, then this book is ideal for you. Basic knowledge of Linux, Hadoop and Spark is assumed. Reasonable knowledge of Scala is expected. What You Will Learn ? Examine Advanced Machine Learning and DeepLearning with MLlib, SparkML, SystemML, H2O and DeepLearning4J ? Study highly optimised unified batch and real-time data processing using SparkSQL and Structured Streaming ? Evaluate large-scale Graph Processing and Analysis using GraphX and GraphFrames ? Apply Apache Spark in Elastic deployments using Jupyter and Zeppelin Notebooks, Docker, Kubernetes and the IBM Cloud ? Understand internal details of cost based optimizers used in Catalyst, SystemML and GraphFrames ? Learn how specific parameter settings affect overall performance of an Apache Spark cluster ? Leverage Scala, R and python for your data science projects In Detail Apache Spark is an in-memory cluster-based parallel processing system that provides a wide range of functionalities such as graph processing, machine learning, stream processing, and SQL. This book aims to take your knowledge of Spark to the next level by teaching you how to expand Spark’s functionality and implement your data flows and machine/deep learning programs on top of the platform. The book commences with an overview of the Spark ecosystem. It will introduce you to Project Tungsten and Catalyst, two of the major advancements of Apache Spark 2.x. You will understand how memory management and binary processing, cache-aware computation, and code generation are used to speed things up dramatically. The book extends to show how to incorporate H20, SystemML, and Deeplearning4j for machine learning, and Jupyter Notebooks and Kubernetes/Docker for cloud-based Spark. During the course of the book, you will learn about the latest enhancements to Apache Spark 2.x, such as interactive querying of live data and unifying DataFrames and Datasets. You will also learn about the updates on the APIs and how DataFrames and Datasets affect SQL, machine learning, graph processing, and streaming. You will learn to use Spark as a big data operating system, understand how to implement advanced analytics on the new APIs, and explore how easy it is to use Spark in day-to-day tasks. Style and approach This book is an extensive guide to Apache Spark modules and tools and shows how Spark's functionality can be extended for real-time processing and storage with worked examples.

Learn the art of leveraging PowerShell to automate Office 365 repetitive tasks About This Book ? Master the fundamentals of PowerShell to automate Office 365 tasks. ? Easily administer scenarios such as user management, reporting, cloud services, and many more. ? A fast-paced guide that leverages PowerShell commands to increase your productivity. Who This Book Is For The book is aimed at sys admins who are administering office 365 tasks and looking forward to automate the manual tasks. They have no knowledge about PowerShell however basic understanding of PowerShell would be advantageous. What You Will Learn ? Understand the benefits of *ing and automation and get started using Powershell with Office 365 ? Explore various PowerShell packages and permissions required to manage Office 365 through PowerShell ? Create, manage, and remove Office 365 accounts and licenses using PowerShell and the Azure AD ? Learn about using powershell on other platforms and how to use Office 365 APIs through remoting ? Work with Exchange Online and SharePoint Online using PowerShell ? Automate your tasks and build easy-to-read reports using PowerShell In Detail While most common administrative tasks are available via the Office 365 admin center, many IT professionals are unaware of the real power that is available to them below the surface. This book aims to educate readers on how learning PowerShell for Office 365 can simplify repetitive and complex administrative tasks, and enable greater control than is available on the surface. The book starts by teaching readers how to access Office 365 through PowerShell and then explains the PowerShell fundamentals required for automating Office 365 tasks. You will then walk through common administrative cmdlets to manage accounts, licensing, and other scenarios such as automating the importing of multiple users,assigning licenses in Office 365, distribution groups, passwords, and so on. Using practical examples, you will learn to enhance your current functionality by working with Exchange Online, and SharePoint Online using PowerShell. Finally, the book will help you effectively manage complex and repetitive tasks (such as license and account management) and build productive reports. By the end of the book, you will have automated major repetitive tasks in Office 365 using PowerShell. Style and approach This step by step guide focuses on teaching the fundamentals of working with PowerShell for Office 365. It covers practical usage examples such as managing user accounts, licensing, and administering common Office 365 services. You will be able to leverage the processes laid out in the book so that you can move forward and explore other less common administrative tasks or functions.

Mastering Drupal can lead to a mighty website - discover what Drupal 8 can really do with hidden techniques, best practices, and more! About This Book ? The most up-to-date advanced practical guide on Drupal 8 with an in-depth look at all the advanced new features such as authoring, HTML markup, built-in web services, and more ? If you are looking to dive deep into Drupal 8 and create industry-standard web apps, then this is the ideal book for you ? All the code and examples are explained in great detail to help you in the development process Who This Book Is For This book is ideally suited to web developers, designers, and web administrators who want to dive deep into Drupal. Previous experience with Drupal is a must to unleash the full potential of this book. What You Will Learn ? Discover how to better manage content using custom blocks and views ? Display content in multiple ways, taking advantage of display modes ? Create custom modules with YAML and Symfony 2 ? Easily translate content using the new multilingual capabilities ? Use RESTful services and JavaScript frameworks to build headless websites ? Manage Drupal configuration from one server to another easily In Detail Drupal is an open source content management system trusted by governments and organizations around the globe to run their websites. It brings with it extensive content authoring tools, reliable performance, and a proven track record of security. The community of more than 1,000,000 developers, designers, editors, and others have developed and maintained a wealth of modules, themes, and other add-ons to help you build a dynamic web experience. Drupal 8 is the latest release of the Drupal built on the Symfony2 framework. This is the largest change to the Drupal project in its history. The entire API of Drupal has been rebuilt using Symfony and everything from the administrative UI to themes to custom module development has been affected. This book will cover everything you need to plan and build a complete website using Drupal 8. It will provide a clear and concise walkthrough of the more than 200 new features and improvements introduced in Drupal core. In this book, you will learn advanced site building techniques, create and modify themes using Twig, create custom modules using the new Drupal API, explore the new REST and Multilingual functionality, import, and export Configuration, and learn how to migrate from earlier versions of Drupal. Style and approach This book takes a practical approach with equal emphasis on examples and illustrative screenshots.

A guide to mastering Visual Studio 2017 About This Book ? Focus on coding with the new, improved, and powerful tools of VS 2017 ? Master improved debugging and unit testing support capabilities ? Accelerate cloud development with the built-in Azure tools Who This Book Is For .NET Developers who would like to master the new features of VS 2017, and would like to delve into newer areas such as cloud computing, would benefit from this book. Basic knowledge of previous versions of Visual Studio is assumed. What You Will Learn ? Learn what's new in the Visual Studio 2017 IDE, C# 7.0, and how it will help developers to improve their productivity ? Learn the workloads and components of the new installation wizard and how to use the online and offline installer ? Build stunning Windows apps using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) tools ? Get familiar with .NET Core and learn how to build apps targeting this new framework ? Explore everything about NuGet packages ? Debug and test your applications using Visual Studio 2017 ? Accelerate cloud development with Microsoft Azure ? Integrate Visual Studio with most popular source control repositories, such as TFS and GitHub In Detail Visual Studio 2017 is the all-new IDE released by Microsoft for developers, targeting Microsoft and other platforms to build stunning Windows and web apps. Learning how to effectively use this technology can enhance your productivity while simplifying your most common tasks, allowing you more time to focus on your project. With this book, you will learn not only what VS2017 offers, but also what it takes to put it to work for your projects. Visual Studio 2017 is packed with improvements that increase productivity, and this book will get you started with the new features introduced in Visual Studio 2017 IDE and C# 7.0. Next, you will learn to use XAML tools to build classic WPF apps, and UWP tools to build apps targeting Windows 10. Later, you will learn about .NET Core and then explore NuGet, the package manager for the Microsoft development platform. Then, you will familiarize yourself with the debugging and live unit testing techniques that comes with the IDE. Finally, you'll adapt Microsoft's implementation of cloud computing with Azure, and the Visual Studio integration with Source Control repositories. Style and approach This comprehensive guide covers the advanced features of Visual Studio 2017, and communicates them through a practical approach to explore the underlying concepts of how, when, and why to use it.

Leverage the power of Python to collect, process, and mine deep insights from social media data About This Book ? Acquire data from various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, GitHub, and more ? Analyze and extract actionable insights from your social data using various Python tools ? A highly practical guide to conducting efficient social media analytics at scale Who This Book Is For If you are a programmer or a data analyst familiar with the Python programming language and want to perform analyses of your social data to acquire valuable business insights, this book is for you. The book does not assume any prior knowledge of any data analysis tool or process. What You Will Learn ? Understand the basics of social media mining ? Use PyMongo to clean, store, and access data in MongoDB ? Understand user reactions and emotion detection on Facebook ? Perform Twitter sentiment analysis and entity recognition using Python ? Analyze video and campaign performance on YouTube ? Mine popular trends on GitHub and predict the next big technology ? Extract conversational topics on public internet forums ? Analyze user interests on Pinterest ? Perform large-scale social media analytics on the cloud In Detail Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Pinterest, and YouTube have become part of everyday life in a big way. However, these complex and noisy data streams pose a potent challenge to everyone when it comes to harnessing them properly and benefiting from them. This book will introduce you to the concept of social media analytics, and how you can leverage its capabilities to empower your business. Right from acquiring data from various social networking sources such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and social forums, you will see how to clean data and make it ready for analytical operations using various Python APIs. This book explains how to structure the clean data obtained and store in MongoDB using PyMongo. You will also perform web scraping and visualize data using Scrappy and Beautifulsoup. Finally, you will be introduced to different techniques to perform analytics at scale for your social data on the cloud, using Python and Spark. By the end of this book, you will be able to utilize the power of Python to gain valuable insights from social media data and use them to enhance your business processes. Style and approach This book follows a step-by-step approach to teach readers the concepts of social media analytics using the Python programming language. To explain various data analysis processes, real-world datasets are used wherever required.

Build, Manage and Improve your infrastructure effortlessly. About This Book ? An up-to-date and comprehensive resource on Terraform that lets you quickly and efficiently launch your infrastructure ? Learn how to implement your infrastructure as code and make secure, effective changes to your infrastructure ? Learn to build multi-cloud fault-tolerant systems and simplify the management and orchestration of even the largest scale and most complex cloud infrastructures Who This Book Is For This book is for developers and operators who already have some exposure to working with infrastructure but want to improve their workflow and introduce infrastructure as a code practice. Knowledge of essential Amazon Web Services components (EC2, VPC, IAM) would help contextualize the examples provided. Basic understanding of Jenkins and Shell *s will be helpful for the chapters on the production usage of Terraform. What You Will Learn ? Understand what Infrastructure as Code (IaC) means and why it matters ? Install, configure, and deploy Terraform ? Take full control of your infrastructure in the form of code ? Manage complete infrastructure, starting with a single server and scaling beyond any limits ? Discover a great set of production-ready practices to manage infrastructure ? Set up CI/CD pipelines to test and deliver Terraform stacks ? Construct templates to simplify more complex provisioning tasks In Detail Terraform is a tool used to efficiently build, configure, and improve the production infrastructure. It can manage the existing infrastructure as well as create custom in-house solutions. This book shows you when and how to implement infrastructure as a code practices with Terraform. It covers everything necessary to set up the complete management of infrastructure with Terraform, starting with the basics of using providers and resources. It is a comprehensive guide that begins with very small infrastructure templates and takes you all the way to managing complex systems, all using concrete examples that evolve over the course of the book. The book ends with the complete workflow of managing a production infrastructure as code—this is achieved with the help of version control and continuous integration. The readers will also learn how to combine multiple providers in a single template and manage different code bases with many complex modules. It focuses on how to set up continuous integration for the infrastructure code. The readers will be able to use Terraform to build, change, and combine infrastructure safely and efficiently. Style and approach This book will help and guide you to implement Terraform in your infrastructure. The readers will start by working on very small infrastructure templates and then slowly move on to manage complex systems, all by using concrete examples that will evolve during the course of the book.

This book covers the fundamentals of machine learning with Python in a concise and dynamic manner. It covers data mining and large-scale machine learning using Apache Spark. About This Book ? Take your first steps in the world of data science by understanding the tools and techniques of data analysis ? Train efficient Machine Learning models in Python using the supervised and unsupervised learning methods ? Learn how to use Apache Spark for processing Big Data efficiently Who This Book Is For If you are a budding data scientist or a data analyst who wants to analyze and gain actionable insights from data using Python, this book is for you. Programmers with some experience in Python who want to enter the lucrative world of Data Science will also find this book to be very useful, but you don't need to be an expert Python coder or mathematician to get the most from this book. What You Will Learn ? Learn how to clean your data and ready it for analysis ? Implement the popular clustering and regression methods in Python ? Train efficient machine learning models using decision trees and random forests ? Visualize the results of your analysis using Python’s Matplotlib library ? Use Apache Spark’s MLlib package to perform machine learning on large datasets In Detail Join Frank Kane, who worked on Amazon and IMDb’s machine learning algorithms, as he guides you on your first steps into the world of data science. Hands-On Data Science and Python Machine Learning gives you the tools that you need to understand and explore the core topics in the field, and the confidence and practice to build and analyze your own machine learning models. With the help of interesting and easy-to-follow practical examples, Frank Kane explains potentially complex topics such as Bayesian methods and K-means clustering in a way that anybody can understand them. Based on Frank’s successful data science course, Hands-On Data Science and Python Machine Learning empowers you to conduct data analysis and perform efficient machine learning using Python. Let Frank help you unearth the value in your data using the various data mining and data analysis techniques available in Python, and to develop efficient predictive models to predict future results. You will also learn how to perform large-scale machine learning on Big Data using Apache Spark. The book covers preparing your data for analysis, training machine learning models, and visualizing the final data analysis. Style and approach This comprehensive book is a perfect blend of theory and hands-on code examples in Python which can be used for your reference at any time.