The World Book Encyclopedia


Book Description

An encyclopedia designed especially to meet the needs of elementary, junior high, and senior high school students.







The Tale of Despereaux


Book Description

A brave mouse, a covetous rat, a wishful serving girl, and a princess named Pea come together in Kate DiCamillo's Newbery Medal–winning tale. Welcome to the story of Despereaux Tilling, a mouse who is in love with music, stories, and a princess named Pea. It is also the story of a rat called Roscuro, who lives in the darkness and covets a world filled with light. And it is the story of Miggery Sow, a slow-witted serving girl who harbors a simple, impossible wish. These three characters are about to embark on a journey that will lead them down into a horrible dungeon, up into a glittering castle, and, ultimately, into each other's lives. What happens then? As Kate DiCamillo would say: Reader, it is your destiny to find out. With black-and-white illustrations and a refreshed cover by Timothy Basil Ering.




The Big Book of Small Python Projects


Book Description

Best-selling author Al Sweigart shows you how to easily build over 80 fun programs with minimal code and maximum creativity. If you’ve mastered basic Python syntax and you’re ready to start writing programs, you’ll find The Big Book of Small Python Projects both enlightening and fun. This collection of 81 Python projects will have you making digital art, games, animations, counting pro- grams, and more right away. Once you see how the code works, you’ll practice re-creating the programs and experiment by adding your own custom touches. These simple, text-based programs are 256 lines of code or less. And whether it’s a vintage screensaver, a snail-racing game, a clickbait headline generator, or animated strands of DNA, each project is designed to be self-contained so you can easily share it online. You’ll create: • Hangman, Blackjack, and other games to play against your friends or the computer • Simulations of a forest fire, a million dice rolls, and a Japanese abacus • Animations like a virtual fish tank, a rotating cube, and a bouncing DVD logo screensaver • A first-person 3D maze game • Encryption programs that use ciphers like ROT13 and Vigenère to conceal text If you’re tired of standard step-by-step tutorials, you’ll love the learn-by-doing approach of The Big Book of Small Python Projects. It’s proof that good things come in small programs!




Reading Group Choices


Book Description




True North


Book Description

One of American literature’s most significant authors delivers “a coming-of-age story, a familial saga of estrangement . . . A slow-burning revenge tragedy” (The New York Times Book Review). An epic tale that pits a son against the legacy of his family’s desecration of the earth, and his own father’s more personal violations, Jim Harrison’s True North is a beautiful and moving novel that speaks to the territory in our hearts that calls us back to our roots. The scion of a family of wealthy timber barons, David Burkett has grown up with a father who is a malevolent force and a mother made vague and numb by alcohol and pills. He and his sister Cynthia, a firecracker who scandalizes the family at fourteen by taking up with the son of their Finnish-Native American gardener, are mostly left to make their own way. As David comes to adulthood—often guided and enlightened by the unforgettable, intractable, courageous women he loves—he realizes he must come to terms with his forefathers’ rapacious destruction of the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, as well as the working people who made their wealth possible. Jim Harrison has given us a family tragedy of betrayal, amends, and justice for the worst sins. True North is a bravura performance from one of our finest writers, accomplished with deep humanity, humor, and redemptive soul. “A provocative tale that explores the roots of wealth and privilege in America . . . Harrison’s writing is superb, as always, rippling with thematic leaps and poetic insights.” —The Oregonian




Wander Woman


Book Description

Presents fresh research and powerful stories to give voice to a new generation of women driven by challenge and change Offers compelling advice on how to make wandering a life strategy, not just a series of unplanned events Includes probing questions and thought-provoking exercises to help readers find peace in life's chaos and confusion 2011 Axiom Award Gold Medal winner in the category of Women in Business There’s a new generation of high-achieving women today—confident, ambitious, accomplished, driven. And yet, as master coach Marcia Reynolds discovered, many of them are also anxious, discontented, and frustrated. They’re constantly questioning their purpose, juggling multiple roles, and reevaluating their goals. As a result they’re restless—they move from job to job, from challenge to challenge, almost on impulse. They’re wander women. Existing personal growth books, so focused on empowerment and encouragement, can’t help these women. They don’t need to find their voice—they know how to roar. They don’t expect balance in their lives—but they long to find peace in the chaos. They aren’t necessarily focused on gaining a seat in the boardroom—they want projects that mean something or businesses they run on their own. Reynolds helps wander women understand the roots of their restlessness and make their wandering a conscious strategy, not a reaction. Drawing on extensive research and interviews she illuminates the needs that drive their decisions and the core assumptions that lock them into rigid perfectionist patterns. She offers a wealth of exercises and practices that will enable wander women to reset their mental programming, discover new ways of finding direction, and thoughtfully choose and plan their futures, whether they climb the corporate ladder, find satisfaction below the glass ceiling, or set out on their own. For every woman plagued by frustration and self-doubt—“Will what I’ve done ever feel good enough?”—Wander Woman sets the stage to uncover the answers to life’s tough questions about meaning and purpose, significance and value, and the legacy you can leave from a life lived well.




Introduction to Applied Linear Algebra


Book Description

A groundbreaking introduction to vectors, matrices, and least squares for engineering applications, offering a wealth of practical examples.




Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms


Book Description

Information theory and inference, taught together in this exciting textbook, lie at the heart of many important areas of modern technology - communication, signal processing, data mining, machine learning, pattern recognition, computational neuroscience, bioinformatics and cryptography. The book introduces theory in tandem with applications. Information theory is taught alongside practical communication systems such as arithmetic coding for data compression and sparse-graph codes for error-correction. Inference techniques, including message-passing algorithms, Monte Carlo methods and variational approximations, are developed alongside applications to clustering, convolutional codes, independent component analysis, and neural networks. Uniquely, the book covers state-of-the-art error-correcting codes, including low-density-parity-check codes, turbo codes, and digital fountain codes - the twenty-first-century standards for satellite communications, disk drives, and data broadcast. Richly illustrated, filled with worked examples and over 400 exercises, some with detailed solutions, the book is ideal for self-learning, and for undergraduate or graduate courses. It also provides an unparalleled entry point for professionals in areas as diverse as computational biology, financial engineering and machine learning.




Cheat Play Live


Book Description

Beaches are places where the universe speaks loudest, where earth, air, fire and water meet in their purest form. They broadcast a message we can only hear if we let ourselves walk quietly in the light and listen. On a beach in California in 2008, Lisa finds a shell on a rock, its two halves open to the sky. On the outside it is sea-worn and unremarkable, but on the inside it gleams like a jewel. It is as though it is lying there, waiting to be found and cherished - like her. She uses the picture she takes of that shell to set up an online profile that will end her marriage. It leads her to more beaches around the world - to Kenya, Thailand, Turkey, Egypt and India - in search of freedom from the fear of a life alone, from society's expectations of a fortysomething woman, and the freedom to choose how she wants to live. For fans of Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Lisa Edwards' story is about the search for a life beyond the one prescribed for women: marriage, babies and a high-flying career. Childfree-by-choice, she is determined to fly solo, going on holidays on her own, as well as to restaurants, bars and even clubs. But grieving for her parents, she begins to depend on the anaesthetic that alcohol gives her and it steers her life in unexpected ways. During the course of her journey she dates married men, younger men, men her own age and Muslim men, but none of them are prepared to give her her freedom. In India, she discovers yoga and a tribe of women who show her a new path, breaking the lock on the secret she's been keeping inside her since she was a little girl.