Sun Wu (bettter known as Sun Tzu) was an ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher who is traditionally believed, and who is most likely, to have authored the Art of War, an influential ancient Chinese book on military strategy. Sun Tzu has had a significant impact on Chinese and Asian history and culture, both as an author of the Art of War and through legend. During the 19th and 20th centuries, Sun Tzu's Art of War grew in popularity and saw practical use in Western society, and his work has continued to influence both Asian and Western culture and politics. Historians have questioned whether or not Sun Tzu was an authentic historical figure. Traditional accounts place him in the Spring and Autumn Period of China (722–481 BC) as a military general serving under King Helü of Wu, who lived c. 544—496 BC. Modern scholars accepting his historicity place the completion of The Art of War in the Warring States Period (476–221 BC), based on the descriptions of warfare in the text, and on the similarity of text's prose to other works completed in the early Warring States period."

The alien spaceship is in his sights. His finger is on the Fire button. Johnny Maxwell is about to set the new high score on the computer game Only You Can Save Mankind.Suddenly:We wish to talk.HuhWe surrender.The aliens aren't supposed to surrender -- they're supposed to die! Now what is Johnny going to do with a fleet of alien prisoners who know their rights under the international rules of war and are demanding safe-conductIt's hard enough trying to save Mankind from the Galactic Hordes. It's even harder trying to save the Galactic Hordes from Mankind.But it's just a game, isn't itIsn't it?Master storyteller Terry Pratchett leaves readers breathless -- with laughter, and with suspense -- in a reality-bending tale of virtual heroism.

Steve Jobs revolutionized the way we work, listen to music, watch movies, and communicate. By pushing boundaries and always thinking one step ahead, Jobs became an icon, equally as famous for his advanced ideas and design aesthetic as his sleek black turtlenecks. What inspired himHow did he do his jobWhat made him the man he was?Here is Steve Jobs—the innovator, the rebel, the genius—in an incisive biography of a man who changed the world. Also includes quotes from and about Jobs, chronologies detailing Jobs’s achievements, and source notes.

If you are interested in quantitative finance, financial modeling, and trading, or simply want to learn how Python and pandas can be applied to finance, then this book is ideal for you. Some knowledge of Python and pandas is assumed. Interest in financial concepts is helpful, but no prior knowledge is expected.

Commands to kill, to commit ethnic cleansing, to institutionalize segregation, to hate and fear other races and religions all are in the Bible, and all occur with a far greater frequency than in the Qur’an. But fanaticism is no more hard-wired in Christianity than it is in Islam. In Laying Down the Sword, one of America’s best scholars of religion” (The Economist) explores how religions grow past their bloody origins, and delivers a fearless examination of the most violent verses of the Bible and an urgent call to read them anew in pursuit of a richer, more genuine faith.Christians cannot engage with neighbors and critics of other traditions nor enjoy the deepest, most mature embodiment of their own faith until they confront the texts of terror in their heritage. Philip Jenkins identifies the holy amnesia” that, while allowing *ural religions to grow and adapt, has demanded a nearly wholesale suppression of the Bible’s most aggressive passages, leaving them dangerously dormant for extremists to revive in times of conflict. Jenkins lays bare the whole Bible, without compromise or apology, and equips us with tools for reading even the most unsettling texts, from the slaughter of the Canaanites to the alarming rhetoric of the book of Revelation.Laying Down the Sword presents a vital framework for understanding both the Bible and the Qur’an, gives Westerners a credible basis for interaction and dialogue with Islam, and delivers a powerful model for how a faith can grow from terror to mercy.

Over 140 practical recipes to help you make sense of your data with ease and build production-ready data apps About This Book Analyze Big Data sets, create attractive visualizations, and manipulate and process various data types Packed with rich recipes to help you learn and explore amazing algorithms for statistics and machine learning Authored by Ivan Idris, expert in python programming and proud author of eight highly reviewed books Who This Book Is For This book teaches Python data analysis at an intermediate level with the goal of transforming you from journeyman to master. Basic Python and data analysis skills and affinity are assumed. What You Will Learn Set up reproducible data analysis Clean and transform data Apply advanced statistical analysis Create attractive data visualizations Web scrape and work with databases, Hadoop, and Spark Analyze images and time series data Mine text and analyze social networks Use machine learning and evaluate the results Take advantage of parallelism and concurrency In Detail Data analysis is a rapidly evolving field and Python is a multi-paradigm programming language suitable for object-oriented application development and functional design patterns. As Python offers a range of tools and libraries for all purposes, it has slowly evolved as the primary language for data science, including topics on: data analysis, visualization, and machine learning. Python Data Analysis Cookbook focuses on reproducibility and creating production-ready systems. You will start with recipes that set the foundation for data analysis with libraries such as matplotlib, NumPy, and pandas. You will learn to create visualizations by choosing color maps and palettes then dive into statistical data analysis using distribution algorithms and correlations. You’ll then help you find your way around different data and numerical problems, get to grips with Spark and HDFS, and then set up migration *s for web mining. In this book, you will dive deeper into recipes on spectral analysis, smoothing, and bootstrapping methods. Moving on, you will learn to rank stocks and check market efficiency, then work with metrics and clusters. You will achieve parallelism to improve system performance by using multiple threads and speeding up your code. By the end of the book, you will be capable of handling various data analysis techniques in Python and devising solutions for problem scenarios. Style and Approach The book is written in “cookbook” style striving for high realism in data analysis. Through the recipe-based format, you can read each recipe separately as required and immediately apply the knowledge gained.

This is an essential book for everyone who wants to write clearly about any subject and use writing as a means of learning.

Mutant Message Down Under is the fictional account of an American woman's spiritual odyssey through outback Australia. An underground bestseller in its original self-published edition, Marlo Morgan's powerful tale of challenge and endurance has a message for us all. Summoned by a remote tribe of nomadic Aborigines to accompany them on walkabout, the woman makes a four-month-long journey and learns how they thrive in natural harmony with the plants and animals that exist in the rugged lands of Australia's bush. From the first day of her adventure, Morgan is challenged by the physical requirements of the journey she faces daily tests of her endurance, challenges that ultimately contribute to her personal transformation. By traveling with this extraordinary community, Morgan becomes a witness to their essential way of being in a world based on the ancient wisdom and philosophy of a culture that is more than 50,000 years old.

This book is intended for Python programmers interested in learning how to do natural language processing. Maybe you’ve learned the limits of regular expressions the hard way, or you’ve realized that human language cannot be deterministically parsed like a computer language. Perhaps you have more text than you know what to do with, and need automated ways to analyze and structure that text. This Cookbook will show you how to train and use statistical language models to process text in ways that are practically impossible with standard programming tools. A basic knowledge of Python and the basic text processing concepts is expected. Some experience with regular expressions will also be helpful.

This book follows a standard tutorial approach with approximately 750 code samples spread through the 19 chapters. This amounts to over 5,900 lines of code that illustrate each concept. This book is aimed at programmers who have already learned the basics of objectoriented Python and need to write more sophisticated, flexible code that integrates seamlessly with the rest of Python. This book assumes a computer science background, with experience of common Python design patterns.

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…

The moving true story of a little girl with Asperger syndrome, controlled and abused by the one person she called her friend. Taylor had always struggled to make friends – she felt ‘different’. Taylor never knew her father and her mother wasn’t around much. She just didn’t understand people, and was alone and scared most of the time. That was until, aged just 11, an older married man called Tom befriended her. She loved having someone who would talk to her, listen to her, a protector. But when he moved away a few months later she was easy prey to the gang of drug dealers and petty criminals who groomed and abused her, using her as a form of currency to appease their debtors and amuse their friends. Increasingly isolated and desperate, it began to look as though the pattern of Taylor's life had been set – until she started to fight back, determined to build a safe future for herself, however long it took.

Learn the most powerful and primary programming language for writing smart contracts and find out how to write, deploy, and test smart contracts in Ethereum. About This Book ? Get you up and running with Solidity Programming language ? Build Ethereum Smart Contracts with Solidity as your scripting language ? Learn to test and deploy the smart contract to your private Blockchain Who This Book Is For This book is for anyone who would like to get started with Solidity Programming for developing an Ethereum smart contract. No prior knowledge of EVM is required. What You Will Learn ? Learn the basics and foundational concepts of Solidity and Ethereum ? Explore the Solidity language and its uniqueness in depth ? Create new accounts and submit transactions to blockchain ? Get to know the complete language in detail to write smart contracts ? Learn about major tools to develop and deploy smart contracts ? Write defensive code using exception handling and error checking ? Understand Truffle basics and the debugging process In Detail Solidity is a contract-oriented language whose syntax is highly influenced by JavaScript, and is designed to compile code for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Solidity Programming Essentials will be your guide to understanding Solidity programming to build smart contracts for Ethereum and blockchain from ground-up. We begin with a brief run-through of blockchain, Ethereum, and their most important concepts or components. You will learn how to install all the necessary tools to write, test, and debug Solidity contracts on Ethereum. Then, you will explore the layout of a Solidity source file and work with the different data types. The next set of recipes will help you work with operators, control structures, and data structures while building your smart contracts. We take you through function calls, return types, function modifers, and recipes in object-oriented programming with Solidity. Learn all you can on event logging and exception handling, as well as testing and debugging smart contracts. By the end of this book, you will be able to write, deploy, and test smart contracts in Ethereum. This book will bring forth the essence of writing contracts using Solidity and also help you develop Solidity skills in no time. Style and approach Solidity is a high-level programming language best understood using examples. After covering basic concepts of Ethereum and Solidity, programming constructs will be explained with help of examples. As chapters progress, deployment, usage and testing of contacts will form major aspect of the book. Troubleshooting and unit testing is an important exercise and skill to master this language will also be covered in this book.

Design and implement scalable and maintainable RESTful solutions with Node.js 10 About This Book ? Create rich and scalable RESTful API solutions from scratch ? Explore the new features of Node.js 10, Express 4.0, and MongoDB ? Integrate MongoDB in your Node.js application to store and secure your data Who This Book Is For If you are a web developer keen to enrich your development skills to create server-side RESTful applications based on the Node.js platform, this book is for you. Some knowledge of REST would be an added advantage, but is definitely not a necessity. What You Will Learn ? Install, develop, and test your own Node.js user modules ? Understand the differences between HTTP and RESTful applications ? Use self-descriptive URLs and set accurate HTTP status codes ? Eliminate third-party dependencies in your tests with mocking ? Implement automation tests for a REST-enabled endpoint with Mocha ? Secure your services with NoSQL database integration within Node.js applications ? Integrate a simple frontend using JavaScript libraries available on a CDN server In Detail When building RESTful services, it is really important to choose the right framework. Node.js, with its asynchronous, event-driven architecture, is exactly the right choice for building RESTful APIs. This third edition of RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10 will teach you to create scalable and rich RESTful applications based on the Node.js platform. You will be introduced to the latest NPM package handler and understand how to use it to customize your RESTful development process. You will begin by understanding the key principle that makes an HTTP application a RESTful-enabled application. After writing a simple HTTP request handler, you will create and test Node.js modules using automated tests and mock objects; explore using the NoSQL database, MongoDB, to store data; and get to grips with using self-descriptive URLs. You’ll learn to set accurate HTTP status codes along with understanding how to keep your applications backward-compatible. Also, while implementing a full-fledged RESTful service, you will use Swagger to document the API and implement automation tests for a REST-enabled endpoint with Mocha. Lastly, you will explore some authentication techniques to secure your application. Style and approach Step-by-step practical guide to building RESTful applications

Learn how to build physical computing systems using BeagleBone Black and Python About This Book Get to grips with the fundamentals of BeagleBone Leverage Python *s to program BeagleBone for your requirements Build four exciting projects, from home automation to a tele-controlled robot Who This Book Is For This book is intended for hobbyists and consumers who wish to create impressive projects using BeagleBone. You must be familiar with Python programming. What You Will Learn Program on BeagleBone Black using Python Interface sensors and actuators to BeagleBone Black Build your own real-time physical computing systems Connect physical computing systems to cloud servers Build your own home automation and home security system Build your own tele-controlled robot with real-time video streaming In Detail BeagleBone is a low cost, community-supported development platform to develop a variety of electronic projects. This book will introduce you to BeagleBone and get you building fun, cool, and innovative projects with it. Start with the specifications of BeagleBone Black and its operating systems, then get to grips with the GPIOs available in BeagleBone Black. Work through four types of exciting projects: building real-time physical computing systems, home automation, image processing for a security system, and building your own tele-controlled robot and learn the fundamentals of a variety of projects in a single book. By the end of this book, you will be able to write code for BeagleBone in order to operate hardware and impart decision-making capabilities with the help of efficient coding in Python. Style and approach This book is a step by step guide that will walk you through the fundamentals of building different projects using BeagleBone Black.

Temptation is so close! To protect her son, Mark, Ciara Malloy has moved to this rural area in Washington. The new beginning is off to a rocky start, however, when Mark gets too familiar with Gabe Tennert's horses. It's obvious their next-door neighbor prefers his solitude. Even so, he shows incredible patience with Mark. And when Gabe turns that intense gaze Ciara's way…how can she resist such a good, sexy man? But crossing the line between friends and something more is riskier than Ciara expects. As Gabe pushes for a commitment, she fears revealing the secret truths that could turn him away forever.

A century before A GAME OF THRONES, two unlikely heroes wandered Westeros… A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS compiles the first three official prequel novellas to George R.R. Martin’s ongoing masterwork, A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE. Before Tyrion Lannister and Podrick Payne there was Dunk and Egg. A young, na?ve but courageous hedge knight, Ser Duncan the Tall towers above his rivals – in stature if not experience. Tagging along with him is his diminutive squire, a boy called Egg – whose true identity must be hidden from all he and Dunk encounter: for in reality he is Aegon Targaryen, and one day he will be king. Improbable heroes though they be, great destinies lie ahead for Dunk and Egg; as do powerful foes, royal intrigue, and outrageous exploits. A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS brings together for the first time the first three official prequel novellas to George R.R. Martin’s ongoing masterwork, A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, set in an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne, and the memory of the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory. Featuring more than 160 illustrations by Gary Gianni, one of the finest fantasy artists of our time, this beautiful volume will transport readers to the world of the Seven Kingdoms in an age of bygone chivalry.

Agatha Christie’s audacious mystery thriller, reissued with a striking cover designed to appeal to the latest generation of Agatha Christie fans and book lovers.

A man returns from the dead, and the body of a mysterious stranger is found in his room…

When a man plunges down a cliff, two adventurous young friends decide to find his killer… While playing an erratic round of golf, Bobby Jones slices his ball over the edge of a cliff. His ball is lost, but on the rocks below he finds the crumpled body of a dying man. With his final breath the man opens his eyes and says, ‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’ Haunted by these words, Bobby and his vivacious companion, Frankie, set out to solve a mystery that will bring them into mortal danger…

From the Sunday Times bestselling author comes an epic tale of love, passion and heartbreak. In the summer of 1940, eyes are focussed on the skies above the South of England: the Battle for Britain has just begun. But Evie Lucas has eyes for no-one but a dashing young pilot called Tony. Evie has a glittering career as an artist ahead of her but seems only to be fascinated in sketching portraits of him… Seventy years later, recently widowed art historian Lucy is putting the pieces of her life back together, and to do that she needs to uncover the mystery surrounding a painting in her home. As Lucy ties up the loose ends of one lifetime, she stirs up a hornet’s nest of history in another. Suddenly, Lucy finds herself in danger from people past and present who have no intention of letting an untold truth ever surface. Some stories are buried in the darkness forever. Some are just waiting to be told…