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. . . .

Earth, 2308. Multiple pandemic plagues have ravaged the earth beyond recognition. Working desperately, the Philadelphia National Archives uses a mysterious time machine to bring key members of the past into the future, to save humanity from destroying itself.Pulled from Renaissance Italy, former peasant Benedetta brings a friendship with master artist Leonardo da Vinci . . . and an unprecedented ability to change destiny, aided by her new partner, the Viking Ivar. But it is not easy to reconcile the past and the present, and the time refugees have their own plans for their new world.Weaving together time travel, quantum mechanics, Templars, and outlaws, acclaimed author Rebecca Ore delivers a powerful tale of intrigue and possibility, and the fight to be free.

A timeless American classic rediscovered—an unforgettable saga of a heartland familyOn a farm in western Missouri during the first half of the twentieth century, Matthew and Callie Soames create a life for themselves and raise four headstrong daughters. Jessica will break their hearts. Leonie will fall in love with the wrong man. Mary Jo will escape to New York. And wild child Mathy's fate will be the family's greatest tragedy. Over the decades they will love, deceive, comfort, forgive—and, ultimately, they will come to cherish all the more fiercely the bonds of love that hold the family together.

All you need to know to be a princess—OrJust live like oneCompiled byMia ThermopolisakaPrincessAmeliaMignonetteGrimaldiThermopolisRenaldoof Genovia

After exhausting their resources in the slums of Los Angeles, a junkie and his wife settle in London's "murder mile," the city's most violent and criminally corrupt section. Persevering past failed treatments, persistent temptation, urban ennui, and his wife's ruinous death wish, the nameless narrator fights to reclaim his life.In prose that could peel paint from a car, Tony O'Neill re-creates the painfully comic, often tragic days of a recovering heroin addict.

"That's when I saw him—the cowboy—across the smoky room."I'll never forget that night. It was like a romance novel, an old Broadway musical, and a John Wayne western rolled into one. Out for a quick drink with friends, I wasn't looking to meet anyone, let alone a tall, rugged cowboy who lived on a cattle ranch miles away from my cultured, corporate hometown. But before I knew it, I'd been struck with a lightning bolt . . . and I was completely powerless to stop it.Read along as I recount the rip-roaring details of my unlikely romance with a chaps-wearing cowboy, from the early days of our courtship (complete with cows, horses, prairie fire, and passion) all the way through the first year of our marriage, which would be filled with more challenge and strife—and manure—than I ever could have expected. This isn't just my love story; it's a universal tale of passion, romance, and all-encompassing love that sweeps us off our feet. It's the story of a cowboy.And Wranglers.And chaps.And the girl who fell in love with them.

The epic saga of love and war continues—the heart-stopping sequel to Paullina Simons's beloved international bestseller The Bronze Horseman.Tatiana is eighteen years old, pregnant, and widowed when she escapes war-torn Leningrad to find a new life in America. But the ghosts of her past do not rest easily. She becomes consumed by the belief that her husband, Red Army officer Alexander Belov, is still alive and needs her desperately.Meanwhile, oceans and continents away in the Soviet Union, Alexander barely escapes execution, and is forced to lead a battalion of soldiers considered expendable by the Soviet high command. Yet Alexander is determined to take his men through the ruins of Europe in one last desperate bid to escape Stalin's death machine and somehow find his way to Tatiana once again.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train comes a novel about buried secrets and the redemptive power of forgivenessCassie Simon is a struggling artist living in New York City. When she receives a call from a magistrate telling her she has inherited sixty acres of land in Sweetwater, Tennessee, from her grandfather, whom she never knew, she takes it as a sign: it's time for a change. She moves to the small Southern town where her mother, Ellen, grew up—and where she died tragically when Cassie was three.From the moment she arrives in Sweetwater, Cassie is overwhelmed by the indelible mark her mother's memory left behind. As she delves into the thicket of mystery that surrounds her mother's death, Cassie begins to discover the desperate measures of which the human heart is capable.

Vienna, 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor in town seeking psychotherapy for a troubling ailment of a sexual nature, becomes caught up in a feverish affair with a beautiful, enigmatic woman. When she goes to the police to press charges of rape, however, he is stunned, and his few months of passion come to an abrupt end. Only a carefully plotted escape—with the help of two mysterious British diplomats—saves him from trial.But the frenzied getaway sets off a chain of events that steadily dismantles Lysander's life as he knows it. He returns to a London on the cusp of war, hoping to win back his onetime fiancée and banish from memory his traumatic ordeals abroad, but Vienna haunts him at every turn. The men who helped coordinate his escape recruit him to carry out the brutal murder of a complete stranger. His lover from Vienna shows up nonchalantly at a party, ready to resume their liaison. Unable to live an ordinary existence, he is plunged into the dangerous theater of wartime intelligence—a world of sex, scandal, and spies, where lines of truth and deception blur with every waking day. Lysander must now discover the key to a secret code that is threatening Britain's safety, and use all his skills to keep this murky world of suspicion and betrayal from invading every corner of his life.Moving from Vienna to London's West End, from the battlefields of France to hotel rooms in Geneva, Waiting for Sunrise is a mesmerizing journey into the human psyche, a beautifully observed portrait of wartime Europe, a plot-twisting thriller, and a literary tour de force.

Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize A Kirkus Best Book of the YearPlagued by guilt, paralyzed by shame, Jinx has spent the years since her mother's death alone, estranged from her husband, withdrawn from her son, and entrenched in a childhood home filled with fierce and violent memories. When Lemon, an old family friend, appears unbidden at the door, he seduces Jinx with a heady mix of powerful storytelling and tender care. What follows is a tense and passionate weekend, as the two join forces to unravel the tragedy that binds them. Jinx has long carried the burden of the past; now, she must relive her mother's last days, confront her grief head-on, and speak the truth as only she knows it.Expertly woven and perfectly paced, A Cupboard Full of Coats is both a heartbreaking family drama and a riveting mystery, with a cast of characters who linger in the mind and the heart long after the last page has been turned.

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.

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.

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.

Create succinct and expressive implementations with functional programming in Python About This Book ? Learn how to choose between imperative and functional approaches based on expressiveness, clarity, and performance ? Get familiar with complex concepts such as monads, concurrency, and immutability ? Apply functional Python to common Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) programming problems Who This Book Is For This book is for Python developers who would like to perform Functional programming with Python. Python Programming knowledge is assumed. What You Will Learn ? Use Python's generator functions and generator expressions to work with collections in a non-strict (or lazy) manner ? Utilize Python library modules including itertools, functools, multiprocessing, and concurrent features to ensure efficient functional programs ? Use Python strings with object-oriented suffix notation and prefix notation ? Avoid stateful classes with families of tuples ? Design and implement decorators to create composite functions ? Use functions such as max(), min(), map(), filter(), and sorted() ? Write higher-order functions In Detail If you’re a Python developer who wants to discover how to take the power of functional programming (FP) and bring it into your own programs, then this book is essential for you, even if you know next to nothing about the paradigm. Starting with a general overview of functional concepts, you’ll explore common functional features such as first-class and higher-order functions, pure functions, and more. You’ll see how these are accomplished in Python 3.6 to give you the core foundations you’ll build upon. After that, you’ll discover common functional optimizations for Python to help your apps reach even higher speeds. You’ll learn FP concepts such as lazy evaluation using Python’s generator functions and expressions. Moving forward, you’ll learn to design and implement decorators to create composite functions. You'll also explore data preparation techniques and data exploration in depth, and see how the Python standard library fits the functional programming model. Finally, to top off your journey into the world of functional Python, you’ll at look at the PyMonad project and some larger examples to put everything into perspective. Style and approach This book provides a general overview of functional concepts and then delves deeper into the functional features, showing you how the Python standard library fits the functional programming model. It also demonstrates how to implement common functional programming design patterns and techniques in Python.

This book is aimed at system administrators and technical architects moving from a virtualized environment to cloud environments; who are familiar with cloud computing platforms. Knowledge of virtualization and managing Linux environments is expected. Prior knowledge or experience of OpenStack is not required, although beneficial.

A practical guide for building effective enterprise solutions with Java EE 8 About This Book ? Recipes to get you up-and-running with Java EE 8 application development ? Learn how to apply the major Java EE 8 APIs and specifications ? Implement microservices and Reactive programming with Java EE 8 Who This Book Is For This book is for developers who want to become proficient with Java EE 8 for their enterprise application development. Basic knowledge of Java is assumed What You Will Learn ? Actionable information on the new features of Java EE 8 ? Using the most important APIs with real and working code ? Building server side applications, web services, and web applications ? Deploying and managing your application using the most important Java EE servers ? Building and deploying microservices using Java EE 8 ? Building Reactive application by joining Java EE APIs and core Java features ? Moving your application to the cloud using containers ? Practical ways to improve your projects and career through community involvement In Detail Java EE is a collection of technologies and APIs to support Enterprise Application development. The choice of what to use and when can be dauntingly complex for any developer. This book will help you master this. Packed with easy to follow recipes, this is your guide to becoming productive with Java EE 8. You will begin by seeing the latest features of Java EE 8, including major Java EE 8 APIs and specifications such as JSF 2.3, and CDI 2.0, and what they mean for you. You will use the new features of Java EE 8 to implement web-based services for your client applications. You will then learn to process the Model and Streaming APIs using JSON-P and JSON-B and will learn to use the Java Lambdas support offered in JSON-P. There are more recipes to fine-tune your RESTful development, and you will learn about the Reactive enhancements offered by the JAX-RS 2.1 specification. Later on, you will learn about the role of multithreading in your enterprise applications and how to integrate them for transaction handling. This is followed by implementing microservices with Java EE and the advancements made by Java EE for cloud computing. The final set of recipes shows you how take advantage of the latest security features and authenticate your enterprise application. At the end of the book, the Appendix shows you how knowledge sharing can change your career and your life. Style and approach Task based learning guide to help ease application development with Java EE.

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

Highly available microservice-based web apps for Cloud with Java About This Book ? Take advantage of the simplicity of Spring to build a full-fledged application ? Let your applications run faster while generating smaller cloud service bills ? Integrate your application with various tools such as Docker and ElasticSearch and use specific tools in Azure and AWS Who This Book Is For Java developers who want to build secure, resilient, robust and scalable applications that are targeted for cloud based deployment, will find this book helpful. Some knowledge of Java, Spring, web programming and public cloud providers (AWS, Azure) should be sufficient to get you through the book. What You Will Learn ? See the benefits of the cloud environment when it comes to variability, provisioning, and tooling support ? Understand the architecture patterns and considerations when developing on the cloud ? Find out how to perform cloud-native techniques/patterns for request routing, RESTful service creation, Event Sourcing, and more ? Create Docker containers for microservices and set up continuous integration using Jenkins ? Monitor and troubleshoot an application deployed in the cloud environment ? Explore tools such as Docker and Kubernetes for containerization and the ELK stack for log aggregation and visualization ? Use AWS and Azure specific tools to design, develop, deploy, and manage applications ? Migrate from monolithic architectures to a cloud native deployment In Detail Businesses today are evolving so rapidly that they are resorting to the elasticity of the cloud to provide a platform to build and deploy their highly scalable applications. This means developers now are faced with the challenge of building build applications that are native to the cloud. For this, they need to be aware of the environment, tools, and resources they’re coding against. If you’re a Java developer who wants to build secure, resilient, robust, and scalable applications that are targeted for cloud-based deployment, this is the book for you. It will be your one stop guide to building cloud-native applications in Java Spring that are hosted in On-prem or cloud providers - AWS and Azure The book begins by explaining the driving factors for cloud adoption and shows you how cloud deployment is different from regular application deployment on a standard data centre. You will learn about design patterns specific to applications running in the cloud and find out how you can build a microservice in Java Spring using REST APIs You will then take a deep dive into the lifecycle of building, testing, and deploying applications with maximum automation to reduce the deployment cycle time. Gradually, you will move on to configuring the AWS and Azure platforms and working with their APIs to deploy your application. Finally, you’ll take a look at API design concerns and their best practices. You’ll also learn how to migrate an existing monolithic application into distributed cloud native applications. By the end, you will understand how to build and monitor a scalable, resilient, and robust cloud native application that is always available and fault tolerant. Style and approach Filled with examples, this book will build you an entire cloud-native application through its course and will stop at each point and explain in depth the functioning and design considerations that will make a robust, highly available application

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.

Discover Android programming and web development by understanding the concepts of Kotlin Programming About This Book ? Practical solutions to your common programming problems with Kotlin 1.1 ? Leverage the functional power of Kotlin to ease your Android application development ? Learn to use Java code in conjunction with Kotlin Who This Book Is For This book will appeal to Kotlin developers keen to find solutions for their common programming problems. Java programming knowledge would be an added advantage. What You Will Learn ? Understand the basics and object-oriented concepts of Kotlin Programming ? Explore the full potential of collection frameworks in Kotlin ? Work with SQLite databases in Android, make network calls, and fetch data over a network ? Use Kotlin's Anko library for efficient and quick Android development ? Uncover some of the best features of Kotlin: Lambdas and Delegates ? Set up web service development environments, write servlets, and build RESTful services with Kotlin ? Learn how to write unit tests, integration tests, and instrumentation/acceptance tests. In Detail The Android team has announced first-class support for Kotlin 1.1. This acts as an added boost to the language and more and more developers are now looking at Kotlin for their application development. This recipe-based book will be your guide to learning the Kotlin programming language. The recipes in this book build from simple language concepts to more complex applications of the language. After the fundamentals of the language, you will learn how to apply the object-oriented programming features of Kotlin 1.1. Programming with Lambdas will show you how to use the functional power of Kotlin. This book has recipes that will get you started with Android programming with Kotlin 1.1, providing quick solutions to common problems encountered during Android app development. You will also be taken through recipes that will teach you microservice and concurrent programming with Kotlin. Going forward, you will learn to test and secure your applications with Kotlin. Finally, this book supplies recipes that will help you migrate your Java code to Kotlin and will help ensure that it's interoperable with Java. Style and approach This book explains concepts related to Kotlin Programming using a practical approach and with the help of easy-to-follow recipes.

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.