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

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

Explore the world of Virtual Reality by building immersive and fun VR projects using Unity 3D About This Book Learn the basic principles of virtual reality applications and get to know how they differ from games and desktop apps Build various types of VR experiences, including diorama, first-person characters, riding on rails, 360 degree projections, and social VR A project-based guide that teaches you to use Unity to develop VR applications, which can be experienced with devices such as the Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard Who This Book Is For If you’re a non-programmer unfamiliar with 3D computer graphics, or experienced in both but new to virtual reality, and are interested in building your own VR games or applications then this book is for you. Any experience in Unity is an advantage. What You Will Learn Create 3D scenes with Unity and Blender while learning about world space and scale Build and run VR applications for consumer headsets including Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard Build interactive environments with physics, gravity, animations, and lighting using the Unity engine Experiment with various user interface (UI) techniques that you can use in your VR applications Implement the first-person and third-person experiences that use only head motion gestures for input Create animated walkthroughs, use 360-degree media, and build multi-user social VR experiences Learn about the technology and psychology of VR including rendering, performance and VR motion sickness Gain introductory and advanced experience in Unity programming with the C# language In Detail What is consumer “virtual reality”Wearing a head-mounted display you view stereoscopic 3D scenes. You can look around by moving your head, and walk around using hand controls or motion sensors. You are engaged in a fully immersive experience. On the other hand, Unity is a powerful game development engine that provides a rich set of features such as visual lighting, materials, physics, audio, special effects, and animation for creating 2D and 3D games. Unity 5 has become the leading platform for building virtual reality games, applications and experiences for this new generation of consumer VR devices. Using a practical and project-based approach, this book will educate you about the specifics of virtual reality development in Unity. You will learn how to use Unity to develop VR applications which can be experienced with devices such as the Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard. We will then learn how to engage with virtual worlds from a third person and first person character point of view. Furthermore, you will explore the technical considerations especially important and possibly unique to VR. The projects in the book will demonstrate how to build a variety of VR experiences. You will be diving into the Unity 3D game engine via the interactive Unity Editor as well as C-Sharp programming. By the end of the book, you will be equipped to develop rich, interactive virtual reality experiences using Unity. So, let's get to it! Style and approach This book takes a practical, project-based approach to teach specifics of virtual reality development in Unity. Using a reader-friendly approach, this book will not only provide detailed step-by-step instructions but also discuss the broader context and applications covered within.

Learn effective C++ network programming with Boost.Asio and become a proficient C++ network programmer About This Book Learn efficient C++ network programming with minimum coding using Boost.Asio Your one-stop destination to everything related to the Boost.Asio library Explore the fundamentals of networking to choose designs with more examples, and learn the basics of Boost.Asio Who This Book Is For This book is for C++ Network programmers with basic knowledge of network programming, but no knowledge of how to use Boost.Asio for network programming. What You Will Learn Prepare the tools to simplify network programming in C++ using Boost.Asio Explore the networking concepts of IP addressing, TCP/IP ports and protocols, and LAN topologies Get acquainted with the usage of the Boost libraries Get to know more about the content of Boost.Asio network programming and Asynchronous programming Establish communication between client and server by creating client-server application Understand the various functions inside Boost.Asio C++ libraries to delve into network programming Discover how to debug and run the code successfully In Detail Boost.Asio is a C++ library used for network programming operations. Organizations use Boost because of its productivity. Use of these high-quality libraries speed up initial development, result in fewer bugs, reduce reinvention-of-the-wheel, and cut long-term maintenance costs. Using Boost libraries gives an organization a head start in adopting new technologies. This book will teach you C++ Network programming using synchronous and asynchronous operations in Boost.Asio with minimum code, along with the fundamentals of Boost, server-client applications, debugging, and more. You will begin by preparing and setting up the required tools to simplify your network programming in C++ with Boost.Asio. Then you will learn about the basic concepts in networking such as IP addressing, TCP/IP protocols, and LAN with its topologies. This will be followed by an overview of the Boost libraries and their usage. Next you will get to know more about Boost.Asio and its concepts related to network programming. We will then go on to create a client-server application, helping you to understand the networking concepts. Moving on, you will discover how to use all the functions inside the Boost.Asio C++ libraries. Lastly, you will understand how to debug the code if there are errors found and will run the code successfully. Style and approach An example-oriented book to show you the basics of networking and help you create a network application simply using Boost.Asio, with more examples for you to get up and running with Boost.Asio quickly.

Discover tips and trick for Dynamics NAV report building About This Book Create and customize reports in Dynamics NAV 2015 using RDLC, Word, Power BI, and Reporting Services Work with different elements in the toolbox such as tablix, which can be used as a List, Table, or Matrix and understand the differences between them and when to use which This book is a pragmatic guide with clear instructions and real-world examples to teach you about the reporting capabilities of Dynamics NAV 2015 Who This Book Is For If you are a consultant, developer, customer, user, or just interested in the reporting capabilities of Dynamics NAV, then this book is for you. Basic knowledge of Dynamics NAV will be helpful. What You Will Learn Understand why reports are designed in a specific way and then apply this knowledge to your advantage Develop document reports using different techniques Apply filtering and sorting, and create groups Use RDLC to visualize information Visualize information, KPIs, and trends using expressions, Gauges, Charts, Data bars, Indicators, and Spark lines Create and optimize your dataset for RDLC and for Word layouts Use Power BI with Dynamics NAV to bring your data to life Build Reporting Services reports on top of Dynamics NAV In Detail Microsoft Dynamics NAV is a multi-lingual, multi-currency business management solution that organizations use to manage their accounts, supply chain, sales, payroll, and HR. It is an ERP tool for organizations that is fast to implement, easy to configure, and simple to use. It is widely used because simplicity is a part of its development, product design, usability, and implementation. This book will help you to master, analyze, and deliver the most challenging reporting requirements in Dynamics NAV 2015. The book starts by explaining report development and it's different phases such as data model, layout, and testing you go through. It introduces you to RDLC and the different controls in the toolbox, such as the Tablix, in its many forms. You will learn to use expressions to make your layout dynamic and to overcome typical problems. Moving on, the book will teach you to visualize data and be able to understand and read a report as it is intended. You will also learn to use Microsoft Word to create a layout for a report. With Power BI and Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Map, you will learn how easy and powerful it is to bring your data to life, so you can spot trends and perform in depth analysis of your business. Reporting Services is also explained as another way that you can apply the knowledge you have about RDLC to build RDL layouts outside of Dynamics NAV. By the end, you will create different types of charts so you can visualize key performance indicators inside the Dynamics NAV application. Style and approach This book is an essential guide in to understanding what is involved in creating reports in Dynamics NAV and its reporting capabilities.

Here's the ultimate of ultimates: nine hundred new recipes from Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough, the authors of the Ultimate cookbook series. With a quarter million books already in print, their series has followed a simple recipe to success: Give cooks hundreds of solid, basic recipes with thousands of ways to vary them, shake them up, and personalize them so that everyone can be an ultimate cook!With The Ultimate Cook Book, Weinstein and Scarbrough tackle everything from breakfast to barbecue, stir-fries to steaks, chilis to curries, and paellas to puddings. Pick your favorite, cook it as a solid basic, or vary it in hundreds of ways to make the dish your own. You've got years' worth of dishes and a world of cooking experiences ahead of you. What could be more fun?Take chicken, that ubiquitous blank canvas. Roast a whole bird to perfection. Bake it under a salt crust for a dramatic presentation. Roast chicken halves atop winter squash. Prepare a Greek-style casserole with leeks, pine nuts, and raisins. Stuff chicken breasts with a Moroccan-inspired mixture of couscous and spices. There are more than thirty ideas for preparing boneless, skinless chicken breasts. And ten things to do with a leftover roast chicken or that rotisserie bird purchased on the way home. Get the idea?This comprehensive, easy-to-use compendium is the ultimate in inspiration, the ultimate in possibilities. Start your Ultimate cookbook collection today—or round it out with The Ultimate Cook Book.

Bookselling burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr doesn't generally get philosophical about his criminal career. He's good at it, it's addictively exciting—and it pays a whole lot better than pushing old tomes. He steals therefore he is, period.He might well ponder, however, the deeper meaning of events at the luxurious Chelsea brownstone of Herb and Wanda Colcannon, which is apparently burgled three times on the night Bernie breaks in: once before his visit and once after. Fortunately he still manages to lift some fair jewelry and an extremely valuable coin. Unfortunately burglar or burglars number three leave Herb unconscious and Wanda dead . . . and the cops think Rhodenbarr dunnit.There's no time to get all existential about it—especially after the coin vanishes and the fence fencing it meets with a most severe end. But Bernie is going to have to do some deep thinking to find a way out of this homicidal conundrum.

One magical sword. Two rivals.Wind-voice the half-dove, formerly enslaved, is now free, and Maldeor, the one-winged archaeopteryx, hungers for supreme power. The adversaries will both embark on their own epic quest to find the sword that will determine the future of birdkind. An exciting prequel to the New York Times bestseller Swordbird.

It was the start of a grand adventure in a land of antiquity, a rare opportunity to visit biblical places shrouded in mystery. But in a Jerusalem hotel room a world away from everything she knows, Dinah van der Lyn hears angry voices through the wall, followed by a crash and a brief cry in English...for help! The brutal shattering of an evening's stillness becomes a prelude to terror. Without warning, Dinah has been unwittingly pulled into something unholy transpiring in a sacred city, and she must find answers hidden in the shadows. And she must trust an enigmatic stranger as she races through ancient, twisting streets teeming with secrets and peril, a man who may be leading her to safety...or to her doom.

Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens ("Mark Twain"), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway—Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in her newest work of prose fiction, poignantly and audaciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers, Oates explores the mysterious regions of the unknowable self that is "genius."Darkly hilarious, brilliant, and brazen, Wild Nights! is Joyce Carol Oates's most original and haunting work of the imagination.

Undreamed-Of Wonders From The Farthest Reaches Of ImaginationIn this second volume of the previous year's finest short fantastic fiction, acclaimed editor and anthologist David G. Hartwell showcases new works by stellar literary artists -- acknowledged masters of the genre and exceptionally talented newcomers alike. Astonishing worlds come alive in these pages -- realms of strange creatures and remarkable sorceries, as well as twisted shadow versions of our inhabited earthly plain. A bold and breathtaking compendium of tales -- including a new Earthsea story from the incomparable Ursula K. Le Guin -- Years's Best Fantasy 2 is the state-of-the-art of a unique and winning genre, offering unforgettable excursions into new realities wondrous, bizarre, enchanting...and terrifying.

The door to fantastic worlds, skewed realities, and breathtaking other realms is opened wide to you once more in this third anthology of the finest short fantasy fiction to emerge over the past year, compiled by acclaimed editor David G. Hartwell. Rarely has a more magnificent collection of tales been contained between book covers -- phenomenal visions of the impossible-made-possible by some of the field's most accomplished literary artists and stellar talents on the rise. Year's Best Fantasy 3 is a heady brew of magic and wonder, strange journeys and epic quests, boldly concocted by the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Swanwick, Tanith Lee, and others. Step into a dimension beyond the limits of ordinary imagination . . . and be amazed!.

Uprooted from a well-ordered life in Virginia when she was nine, Willa Cather came of age in the West during the last years of the American frontier. She developed a love for the beauty of the open grassland and an abiding interest in the Old World customs of her neighbors, the dreamers and builders who inhabit her fiction. This collection includes work from the early part of Cather's career and clearly marks themes and landscapes that she would detail and explore for the remainder of her life. Alongside THE BOHEMIAN GIRL, Harper Perennial will publish the short fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, and Oscar Wilde to be packaged in a beautifully designed, boldly colorful boxset in the aim to attract contemporary fans of short fiction to these revered masters of the form. Also, in each of these selections will appear a story from one of the new collections being published in the "Summer of the Short Story." A story from Lydia Peelle's forthcoming collection, REASONS FOR AND ADVANTAGES OF BREATHING, will be printed at the back of this volume.

Having lost a wife to violence and a son to retribution, onetime Texas sheriff Daniel Shaye has brought what remains of his shattered family -- two grown boys fiercely devoted to their father and justice -- to Vengeance Creek, Arizona. In a lawless town, they become the law, grieving for their slain loved ones while looking to start a new life free of further bloodshed. But destiny has other plans for the Shayes.Eight men ride into town with designs on the bank's money -- and when they ride out, a dozen innocent people are dead and Dan Shaye is down with a gunshot wound. Now it's up to his boys to settle one more score, riding hell for leather toward a final reckoning ... and a mystery.And if Death comes again for the sons of Daniel Shaye, so be it, because any man who won't lay down his life for what is right is no man at all.

The 42 page article was extracted from the book: Youth and the Bright Medusa, by Willa Cather.

A short story from the Classic Shorts collection: The Bohemian Girl by Willa Cather

The short works of Dostoevsky exist in the very large shadow of his astonishing longer novels, but they too are among literature's most revered works and offer keys to understanding the themes in his longer works. Contained in this volume are the short stories "White Nights," "A Disgraceful Affair," and "The Dream of the Ridiculous Man," three of Dostoevsky's most troubling, moving, and poignant works. Alongside A DISGRACEFUL AFFAIR, Harper Perennial will publish the short fiction of Stephen Crane, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, and Oscar Wilde to be packaged in a beautifully designed, boldly colorful boxset in the aim to attract contemporary fans of short fiction to these revered masters of the form. Also, in each of these selections will appear a story from one of the new collections being published in 2009. A story from Barb Johnson's forthcoming collection will be printed at the back of this volume.

A short story from the Classic Shorts collection: Family Happiness by Leo Tolstoy

Becky Miller lives in the best neighborhood, goes to school with the children of movie stars, and has her psychiatrist on speed dial. She may live in the City of Angels, but this sixteen-year-old's life is far from perfect. By day, Becky navigates the halls of one of L.A.'s most elite schools, where the mean girls are a special breed of mean, and at night, she deals with sparring parents, a grandmother who is man-crazy, and a younger brother, Jack, who answers only to J-zizzy. As Becky's life comes crashing down around her, she struggles to put it back together and learn to grow up while trying to stay sane.Isabel Kaplan dishes the dirt on the children of Hollywood's elite—from Spago delivered to campus at lunch and shrinks who dole out psychotropic drugs as though they're candy to parent-free parties at the Four Seasons—the lives of Becky and her creator, Isabel Kaplan, are like no other, and yet strangely, just like everyone's.

Los Angeles is all about the sweet life: hot clubs, cute guys, designer . . . everything. Nineteen-year-old Jane Roberts can't wait to start living it up. She may be in L.A. for an internship, but Jane plans to play as hard as she works, and has enlisted her BFF Scarlett to join in the fun.When Jane and Scarlett are approached by a producer who wants them to be on his new series, a "reality version of Sex and the City," they can hardly believe their luck. Their own showYes, please!Soon Jane is TV's hottest star. Fame brings more than she ever imagined possible for a girl from Santa Barbara—free designer clothes, the choicest tables at the most exclusive clubs, invites to Hollywood premieres—and she's lapping up the VIP treatment with her eclectic entourage of new pals. But those same friends who are always up for a wild night are also out for a piece of Jane's spotlight.In a city filled with people chasing after their dreams, it's not long before Jane wakes up to the reality that everyone wants something from her, and nothing is what it seems to be.L.A. Candy is a deliciously entertaining novel about what it's like to come of age in Hollywood while starring in a reality TV show, written by a girl who has experienced it all firsthand: Lauren Conrad.

My dream from last night haunts me. I am still running, still trying to hide from something I cannot see. I know that it sees me with eyes that can pierce the darkness. I know that it hungers to take my life. Paul has always believed in the power of dreams. He knows that they are often warnings. Warnings that should be taken very seriously.Now his nightmare visions of a predatory winged creature are becoming all too real. And though Paul has always depended on the wisdom of his Abenaki ancestors' stories to guide his footsteps, no monster tale could have prepared him for what he is about to encounter, alone, at the top of one of the most dangerous mountains in the world.