David Nightingale

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow

Carmine Gallo

Carmine Gallo

Hilary Mantel In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political power

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.

Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?

In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.

Chris Baty

Carl Honore

Matt Latimer

Pamela Slim

Andy Hamilton, Dave Hamilton

Iain Banks

Hugh MacLeod

Mark Forster Time is what our lives are made of. Failure to use it properly is disastrous. Yet most books on time management don't work because they take little account of human psychology or the unexpected. This book, written for everyone who has to juggle different demands in a busy schedule, includes lots of help and advice in finding a system that works effectively and leads to more enjoyment of work and leisure. 'I left Mark Forster's time management workshop a changed woman. Yesterday I used his system for a whole day. It was stress-free and fun. I felt energised and satisfied at the end of it.' Sarah Litvinoff

Michael Port, Mina Samuels Think Bigger. About Who You Are. And What You Offer the World.

Stand for something before someone stands on you. Revolt against the play-it-safe, don't disturb the peace, cynical and silenced society that, more often than not, buries big thoughts.

Michael Port, bestselling author and creator of ThinkBigRevolution.com, knows it's not always easy to think big. But big thinking must happen now; today, tomorrow, and forevermore.

At this very moment, you are the change you want to see in the world—should you choose to accept personal responsibility. Devour every word of The Think Big Manifesto. It is the handbook to your personal revolution.

You are more than you know. And you can do more with less than you think...

Unhook from the guru track

Learn how to be comfortable with discomfort

Join people doing powerful things

Be one of the big thinkers that others rave about

This book, and life, is not a conceptual, theoretical experiment in how to do big things. No, this is just what you need if you're on, or want to be on, the path to doing big things and are willing to invest in your future.

Join or incite a worldwide revolution that inspires others to follow. All it takes is one big thought and the revolution is unleashed. One thought, one person at a time, quickly followed by another—soon big thinking becomes the norm. Your big thoughts enable you to achieve greatness, be remarkable, and create a better world.

Are you a member of the Think Big Revolution? If so, this is your Manifesto.

Jerry Weissman In Presenting to Win: Persuading Your Audience Every Time, the world's #1 presentation consultant shows how to connect with even the toughest, most high-level audiences—and move them to action. Jerry Weissman shows presenters of all kinds how to dump those PowerPoint templates once and for all—and learn to tell compelling stories that focus on what's in it for their listeners. Drawing on dozens of practical examples and real case studies, Weissman shows presenters how to identify their real goals and messages before they even open PowerPoint; how to stay focused on what their listeners really care about; and how to capture their audiences in the first crucial 90 seconds. From bullets and graphics to the effective, sparing use of special effects, Weissman covers all the practical mechanics of effective presentation—and walks readers through every step of building a Power Presentation, from brainstorming through delivery. Unlike the techniques in other presentation books, this book's easy, step-by-step approach has been proven with billions of dollars on the line, in hundreds of IPO road shows before the world's most jaded investors.Foreword to the Paperback Edition xxiii Preface: What's Past Is Prologue xxvii Introduction: The Wizard of Aaaahs xxix Chapter One: You and Your Audience 3 Chapter Two: The Power of the WIIFY 15 Chapter Three: Getting Creative: The Expansive Art of Brainstorming 27 Chapter Four: Finding Your Flow 51 Chapter Five: Capturing Your AudienceImmediately 83 Chapter Six: Communicating Visually 109 Chapter Seven: Making the Text Talk 123 Chapter Eight: Making the Numbers Sing 143 Chapter Nine: Using Graphics to Help Your Story Flow 157 Chapter Ten: Bringing Your Story to Life 189 Chapter Eleven: Customizing Your Presentation 215 Chapter Twelve: Pitching in the Majors 231 Chapter Thirteen: Animating Your Graphics 237 Chapter Fourteen: The Virtual Presentation 257 Appendix A: Tools of the Trade 273 Appendix B: Presentation Checklists 277 Acknowledgments 283 Index 287

Stephen Kochan Programming in Objective-C 2.0 provides the new programmer a complete, step-by-step introduction to the Objective-C language. The book does not assume previous experience with either C or object-oriented programming languages, and it includes many detailed, practical examples of how to put Objective-C to use in your everyday programming needs.

Objective-C has become the standard programming language for application development on the Mac OS X and iPhone platforms. A powerful yet simple object-oriented programming language that’s based on the C programming language, Objective-C is widely available not only on OS X but across many operating systems that support the gcc compiler, including Linux, Unix, and Windows systems.

The second edition of this book has been updated and expanded to cover Objective-C 2.0. It shows not only how to take advantage of the Foundation framework’s rich built-in library of classes but also how to use the iPhone SDK to develop programs designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

Part I: The Objective-C 2.0 Language

2 Programming in Objective-C

3 Classes, Objects, and Methods

4 Data Types and Expressions

5 Program Looping

6 Making Decisions

7 More on Classes

8 Inheritance

9 Polymorphism, Dynamic Typing, and Dynamic Binding

10 More on Variables and Data Types

11 Categories and Protocols

12 The Preprocessor

13 Underlying C Language Features

Part II: The Foundation Framework

14 Introduction to the Foundation Framework

15 Numbers, Strings, and Collections

16 Working with Files

17 Memory Management

18 Copying Objects

19 Archiving

Part III: Cocoa and the iPhone SDK

20 Introduction to Cocoa

21 Writing iPhone Applications

Part IV: Appendixes

A Glossary

B Objective-C 2.0 Language Summary

C Address Book Source Code
D Resources

Scott Kelby Scott Kelby, the best-selling Photoshop author in the world today, once again takes this book to a whole new level as he uncovers the latest, most important, and most exciting new Adobe Photoshop CS4 techniques for digital photographers. This major update to his award-winning, record-breaking book does something for digital photographers that's never been done before it cuts through the bull and shows you exactly "how to do it." It's not a bunch of theory; it doesn't challenge you to come up with your own settings or figure it out on your own. Instead, Scott shows you step-bystep the exact techniques used by today's cutting-edge digital photographers, and best of all, he shows you flat-out exactly which settings to use, when to use them, and why. That's why the previous editions of this book are widely used as the official study guide in photography courses at colleges and universities around the world.

Dave Mark, Jeff LaMarche Are you a programmer looking for a new challenge? Does the thought of building your very own iPhone app make your heart race and your pulse quicken? If so, then Beginning iPhone Development is just the book for you.

Assuming only a minimal working knowledge of Objective-C, and written in a friendly, easy-to-follow style, Beginning iPhone Development offers a complete soup-to-nuts course in iPhone and iPod touch programming.

The book starts with the basics, walking you through the process of downloading and installing Apple's free iPhone SDK, then stepping you though the creation of your first simple iPhone application. You'll move on from there, mastering all the iPhone interface elements that you've come to know and love, such as buttons, switches, pickers, toolbars, sliders, etc.

You'll master a variety of design patterns, from the simplest single view to complex hierarchical drill-downs. You'll master the art of table-building and learn how to save your data using the iPhone file system. You'll also learn how to save and retrieve your data using SQLite, iPhone's built-in database management system.

You'll learn how to draw using Quartz 2D and OpenGL ES. You'll add MultiTouch Gestural Support (pinches and swipes) to your applications, and work with the Camera, Photo Library, and Accelerometer. You'll master application preferences, learn how to localize your apps into other languages, and so much more.

Apple's iPhone SDK, this book, and your imagination are all you'll need to start building your very own best-selling iPhone applications.

Martin Evening Martin Evening's Adobe Photoshop for Photographers titles have become classic reference sources for photographers at all skill levels. Whether you are an accomplished user or just starting out, the Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers book contains a wealth of practical advice, hints and tips to help you achieve professional-looking results.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers begins with an overview of the Photoshop interface and the fundamentals of how to use Photoshop, followed by how to configure and optimize your computer's performance to run the program and then it dives straight into the essentials of Camera Raw image editing. The Sharpening chapter shows how to use the Camera Raw controls to obtain optimum capture sharpening and noise reduction and the Essentials chapter outlines how to work with all the basic image adjustment tools that are in the program, some of which have been there since the very beginning.

Practical workshops show you how to master the essential techniques, such as color correction, retouching techniques, toning a black and white image, creating composite images and so on. Each technique is described in step-by-step detail, showing exactly which command to use, whether you are working with a Mac or PC computer.

The accompanying DVD contains a Photoshop for Photographers Help Guide. This is supplied in a web browser format that you can either run from the DVD or copy to your computer hard disk for off-line viewing. The Help Guide contains a complete guide to all the tools and panels in Photoshop as well as other items in the program. It is like having an off-line manual with which to learn more about what each Photoshop tool and palette does. The guide also provides 120 minutes of movie tutorials on Photoshop CS4. If you are just beginning to work with digital images or are looking for new ideas, the best techniques and ways to improve the quality of your work, this is the book for you!

* Learn Photoshop the Martin Evening way! Get up to speed fast with the essential information you need to create superb images in Photoshop CS4.
* Accompnying DVD includes the images you need to follow along as you read, with QuickTime movie tutorials for hands-on learning
* Over 750 professional, color images make this book stand above the rest

Jerry Weissman Learn the successful presentation techniques used in over 500 IPO road shows and featured in The Wall Street Journal and Fast Company.

Jerry Weissman is the presentations coach to Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and many of America's top executives, including founding Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle, Intuit founder Scott Cook, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings, and many others. The San Jose Mercury News says that Weissman's IPO presentation coaching "is worth 10% on a company stock." Now America's top coach reveals the same powerful strategies he teaches to CEOs in expensive private sessions. Learn why your body language and voice are more important than your words, how to present with poise and confidence naturally, and how to connect with any audience emotionally. Filled with illustrative case studies of Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, John F. Kennedy, and many others, The Power Presenter will bring out the best in anyone who has to stand and deliver.

"Readers of 'The Power Presenter' will have access to video clips referenced in the book".

Michael Lopp Managing Humans is a selection of the best essays from Michael Lopps web site, Rands In Repose. Drawing on Lopp's management experiences at Apple, Netscape, Symantec, and Borland, this book is full of stories based on companies in the Silicon Valley where people have been known to yell at each other. It is a place full of dysfunctional bright people who are in an incredible hurry to find the next big thing so they can strike it rich and then do it all over again. Among these people are managers, a strange breed of people who through a mystical organizational ritual have been given power over your future and your bank account. Whether you're an aspiring manager, a current manager, or just wondering what the heck a manager does all day, there is a story in this book that will speak to you. You will learn: What to do when people start yelling at each otherHow to perform a diving save when the best engineer insists on resigningHow to say "No" to the person who signs your paycheck

Among fans of Michael Lopp is the incomparable Joel Spolsky, cofounder and CEO of Fog Creek Software:

"What you're holding in your hands in by far the most brilliant book about managing software teams you're ever going to find".

This book is designed for managers and would-be managers staring at the role of a manager wondering why they would ever leave the safe world of bits and bites for the messy world of managing humans. The book covers handling conflict, managing wildly differing personality types, infusing innovation into insane product schedules, and figuring out how to build a lasting and useful engineering culture.

Fil Hunter, Steven Biver, Paul Fuqua An amazing (and some would say magical) resource on photographic lighting that has been talked about in the community and recommended for years. This highly respected guide has been thoroughly updated and revised for content and design - it is now produced in full color! It introduces a logical theory of photographic lighting so if you are starting out in photography you will learn how to predict results before setting up lights. This is not primarily a how-to book with only set examples for you to copy. Rather, Light: Science and Magic provides you with a comprehensive theory of the nature and principles of light to allow you to use lighting to express your own creativity.

Numerous photographs and illustrations provide clear examples of the theories, while sidebars highlight special lighting questions. Expanded chapters on available light in portraiture, as well as new information on digital equipment and terminology make this a must have update!

*New four color art package with contemporary lighting examples
*Based on the behaviour of light
*Theory book for serious photographers

Michael Freeman

Twyla Tharp All it takes to make creativity a part of your life is the willingness to make it a habit. It is the product of preparation and effort, and is within reach of everyone. Whether you are a painter, musician, businessperson, or simply an individual yearning to put your creativity to use, The Creative Habit provides you with thirty-two practical exercises based on the lessons Twyla Tharp has learned in her remarkable thirty-five-year career.

In "Where's Your Pencil?" Tharp reminds you to observe the world — and get it down on paper. In "Coins and Chaos," she gives you an easy way to restore order and peace. In "Do a Verb," she turns your mind and body into coworkers. In "Build a Bridge to the Next Day," she shows you how to clean the clutter from your mind overnight.

Tharp leads you through the painful first steps of scratching for ideas, finding the spine of your work, and getting out of ruts and into productive grooves. The wide-open realm of possibilities can be energizing, and Twyla Tharp explains how to take a deep breath and begin...

David Elliot Cohen For more than a century, photography has revealed truths, exposed lies, advanced the public discourse, and inspired people to demand change. Socially conscious pioneers with cameras transformed the world—and that legacy lives on in this eye-opening, thought-provoking, and (we hope) action-inducing book. Like Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth before it, we believe that What Matters will fundamentally alter the way we see and understand the human race and our planet.
What Matters asks: What are the essential issues of our time? What are the pictures that will spark public outrage and spur reform? The answer appears in 18 powerful, page-turning stories by the foremost photojournalists of our age, edited by The New York Times best-selling author/editor David Elliot Cohen (A Day in the Life and America 24/7 series), and featuring trenchant commentary from well-recognized experts and thinkers in appropriate fields. Photographer Gary Braasch and climate-change guru Bill McKibben provide “A Global Warming Travelogue” that takes us from ice caves in Antarctica to smoke-spewing coal plants in Beijing. Brent Stirton and Peter A. Glick examine a “Thirsty World,” chronicling the daily search for clean water in non-developed countries. James Nachtwey and bestselling poverty expert Jeffrey D. Sachs look at the causes of, and cures for, global poverty in “The Bottom Billion.” Stephanie Sinclair and Judith Bruce present the preteen brides of Afghanistan, Nepal, and Ethiopia.
Sometimes the juxtaposition of photographs can be startling: “Shop ‘til We Drop,” Lauren Greenfield’s images of upscale consumer culture, starkly contrast with Shehzad Noorani’s “Children of the Black Dust”—child laborers in Bangladesh, their faces blackened with carbon dust from recycled batteries.
The combination of compelling photographs and insightful writing make this a highly relevant, widely discussed book bound to appeal to anyone concerned about the crucial issues shaping our world. What Matters is, in effect, a 336-page illustrated letter to the next American president about the issues that count. It will inspire readers to do their part—however small—to make a difference: to help, the volume includes extensive “What You Can Do” sections with a menu of web links and effective actions readers can take now. This year give What Matters.

Don Tapscott SELECTED AS A 2008 BEST BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST

The Net Generation Has Arrived.
Are you ready for it?

Chances are you know a person between the ages of 11 and 30. You've seen them doing five things at once: texting friends, downloading music, uploading videos, watching a movie on a two-inch screen, and doing who-knows-what on Facebook or MySpace. They're the first generation to have literally grown up digital—and they're part of a global cultural phenomenon that's here to stay.

The bottom line is this: If you understand the Net Generation, you will understand the future.

If you're a Baby Boomer or Gen-Xer: This is your field guide.

A fascinating inside look at the Net Generation, Grown Up Digital is inspired by a $4 million private research study. New York Times bestselling author Don Tapscott has surveyed more than 11,000 young people. Instead of a bunch of spoiled “screenagers” with short attention spans and zero social skills, he discovered a remarkably bright community which has developed revolutionary new ways of thinking, interacting, working, and socializing.

Grown Up Digital reveals: How the brain of the Net Generation processes informationSeven ways to attract and engage young talent in the workforceSeven guidelines for educators to tap the Net Gen potentialParenting 2.0: There's no place like the new homeCitizen Net: How young people and the Internet are transforming democracy

Today's young people are using technology in ways you could never imagine. Instead of passively watching television, the “Net Geners” are actively participating in the distribution of entertainment and information. For the first time in history, youth are the authorities on something really important. And they're changing every aspect of our society-from the workplace to the marketplace, from the classroom to the living room, from the voting booth to the Oval Office.

The Digital Age is here. The Net Generation has arrived. Meet the future.

Alexis Gerard, Bob Goldstein, Guy Kawasaki How and why to make visual communication a powerful competitive tool

From digital cameras and camera phones to videoconferencing, visual communication technology is changing not only personal lives but global business relationships and communities of interest. Visual communication is an essential tool for every corporation-in any industry-that wants to stay competitive.

Going Visual demonstrates how businesses can harness the power of digital images and video to communicate comprehensively and unambiguously. Through real-world success stories the authors outline a clear, simple, five-step plan for developing a Visual Communication Strategy that will sharpen every organization's competitive edge and improve its bottom line.

David Nahmani This brand-new Apple-certified guide, reconceived for Logic's new interface, uses all-new projects and media files to show you how to record, produce, and polish your musical creations with Apple's professional audio software. Veteran audio producer David Nahmani uses step-by-step, project-based instruction and straightforward explanations to teach everything from basic music creation to advanced production techniques.Using the book's DVD files and either Logic Pro 8 or Logic Express 8, you'll begin making music in the first lesson. From there, you'll learn to record audio and MIDI, edit sequences, master mixing techniques, and use Logic's software synthesizers, sampler, and digital signal processors to put the perfect aural polish on your audio creations. A special troubleshooting section helps you set up and optimize your studio and Logic system effectively. Whether you're looking to use your computer as a digital recording studio, create musical compositions and cutting-edge surround-sound mixes, or transfer that song in your head into living music, this comprehensive book/DVD combo will show you how.

Stephen King Find out what books and films influenced the young writer, his first idea for a story and the true life tale that inspired Carrie. For the first time, here's an intimate autobiographical portrait of his home life, his family and his traumatic recent accident. Citing examples of his work and those of his contemporaries, King gives an excellent masterclass on writing - how to use the tools of the trade from building characters to pace and plotting as well as practical advice on presentation. And King tells readers how he got to be a No. 1 bestseller for a quarter of a century with fascinating descriptions of his own process, the origins and development of, e.g. Carrie and Misery.

Christian Bök

Seth Godin

Neal Stephenson

William Gibson

Scott Mccloud A comic book about comic books. McCloud, in an incredibly accessible style, explains the details of how comics work: how they're composed, read and understood. More than just a book about comics, this gets to the heart of how we deal with visual languages in general. "The potential of comics is limitless and exciting!" writes McCloud. This should be required reading for every school teacher. Pulitzer Prize-winner Art Spiegelman says, "The most intelligent comics I've seen in a long time."

Ellen Lupton The organization of letters on a blank sheet — or screen — is the most basic challenge facing anyone who practices design. What type of font to use? How big? How should those letters, words, and paragraphs be aligned, spaced, ordered, shaped, and otherwise manipulated? In this groundbreaking new primer, leading design educator and historian Ellen Lupton provides clear and concise guidance for anyone learning or brushing up on their typographic skills.
Thinking with Type is divided into three sections: letter, text, and grid. Each section begins with an easy-to-grasp essay that reviews historical, technological, and theoretical concepts, and is then followed by a set of practical exercises that bring the material covered to life. Sections conclude with examples of work by leading practitioners that demonstrate creative possibilities (along with some classic no-no's to avoid).

Neil Gaiman

Gregory Berns No organization can survive without iconoclasts — innovators who single-handedly upturn conventional wisdom and manage to achieve what so many others deem impossible.

Though indispensable, true iconoclasts are few and far between. In Iconoclast, neuroscientist Gregory Berns explains why. He explores the constraints the human brain places on innovative thinking, including fear of failure, the urge to conform, and the tendency to interpret sensory information in familiar ways.

Through vivid accounts of successful innovators ranging from glass artist Dale Chihuly to physicist Richard Feynman to country/rock trio the Dixie Chicks, Berns reveals the inner workings of the iconoclast's mind with remarkable clarity. Each engaging chapter goes on to describe practical actions we can each take to understand and unleash our own potential to think differently — such as seeking out new environments, novel experiences, and first-time acquaintances.

Packed with engaging stories, science-based insights, potent practices, and examples from a startling array of disciplines, this engaging book will help you understand how iconoclasts think and equip you to begin thinking more like an iconoclast yourself.

Tom Rath DO YOU HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO WHAT YOU DO BEST EVERY DAY?

Chances are, you don't. All too often, our natural talents go untapped. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to fixing our shortcomings than to developing our strengths.

To help people uncover their talents, Gallup introduced the first version of its online assessment, StrengthsFinder, in the 2001 management book Now, Discover Your Strengths. The book spent more than five years on the bestseller lists and ignited a global conversation, while StrengthsFinder helped millions to discover their top five talents.

In its latest national bestseller, StrengthsFinder 2.0, Gallup unveils the new and improved version of its popular assessment, language of 34 themes, and much more (see below for details). While you can read this book in one sitting, you'll use it as a reference for decades.

Loaded with hundreds of strategies for applying your strengths, this new book and accompanying website will change the way you look at yourself — and the world around you — forever.

AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY IN THE NEW & UPGRADED EDITION OF STRENGTHSFINDER 2.0
(using the unique access code included with each book)

* A new and upgraded edition of the StrengthsFinder assessment

* A personalized Strengths Discovery and Action-Planning Guide for applying your strengths in the next week, month, and year

* A more customized version of your top five theme report

* 50 Ideas for Action (10 strategies for building on each of your top five themes)

* The more user-friendly StrengthsFinder 2.0 companion website, with a strengths community area, library of downloadable discussion guides and activities, a strengths screensaver, and a program for creating display cards of your top five themes

Steve Martin

Ken Robinson "This really is a remarkable book. It does for human resources what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did for the environment. It makes you wonder why we insist on sustaining an education system that is narrow, partial, entirely inappropriate for the 21st century and deeply destructive of human potential when human beings have so much latent creative ability to offer. A brilliant analysis." Wally Olins, Founder, Wolff-Olins "Competitive advantage does not come from the Internet. It comes from leveraging creativity . All corporate leaders should read this book." Professor Richard Scase, author, Britain in 2010 "I thoroughly recommend this excellent book. Developing our latent creative ability is vital for personal and professional success. Ken Robinson gives us the signposts we need to achieve this." Sir John Harvey Jones "If you would like to start to unlock the inherent creativity that exists in every human being (including you), then start (you have to) by reading this book!" Simon Woodroffe, Founder, Yo Sushi, and former Entrepreneur of the Year "Ken Robinson's is an original and creative mind. I can think of no better spokesperson on creativity. His views are as much directed to learning institutions as they are to industry. Out of Our Minds is a genuine challenge to complacency." Ruth Spellman, Chief Executive of Investors in People, UK "Sometimes a writer has an uncanny knack of sharply focusing something which up until then you had not seen in all its simplicity and brilliance. This book does that but at the next moment it makes connections never before imagined…Even the most obstinately prosaic and safe thinkers will be tempted out of their box by Ken Robinson's ideas, theories and speculations. What's more, he writes as he speaks, in a way that, magnetically and compulsively, is simply irresistible" Professor Tim Brighouse, Director of Education, Birmingham

Laura Whitworth, Henry Kinsey-House, Phil Sandahl For professional coaches who want to increase their proficiency as well as those interested in integrating coaching skills into their consulting practice.

Beryl McAlhone

Nancy Duarte No matter where you are on the organizational ladder, the odds are high that you've delivered a high-stakes presentation to your peers, your boss, your customers, or the general public. Presentation software is one of the few tools that requires professionals to think visually on an almost daily basis. But unlike verbal skills, effective visual expression is not easy, natural, or actively taught in schools or business training programs. slide:ology fills that void.

Written by Nancy Duarte, President and CEO of Duarte Design, the firm that created the presentation for Al Gore's Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, this book is full of practical approaches to visual story development that can be applied by anyone. The book combines conceptual thinking and inspirational design, with insightful case studies from the world's leading brands. With slide:ology you'll learn to:

Connect with specific audiencesTurn ideas into informative graphicsUse sketching and diagramming techniques effectivelyCreate graphics that enable audiences to process information easilyDevelop truly influential presentationsUtilize presentation technology to your advantage

Millions of presentations and billions of slides have been produced — and most of them miss the mark. slide:ology will challenge your traditional approach to creating slides by teaching you how to be a visual thinker. And it will help your career by creating momentum for your cause.

Neal Stephenson

Alan Clark The first volume of Alan Clark's diaries, covering two Parliaments during which he served under Margaret Thatcher - until her ousting in a coup which Clark observed closely from the inside - and then under John Major, constitute the most outspoken and revealing account of British political life ever written. Cabinet colleagues, royalty, ambassadors, civil servants and foreign dignitaries are all subjected to Clark's vivid and often wittily acerbic pen, as he candidly records the daily struggle for ascendancy within the corridors of power.

Anne Rice Returning to the hypnotic world she so brilliantly created in Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice demonstrates once again her power to enthrall.  With the same richness of drama, atmosphere and incident, she tells the fantastic story of the vampire Lestat, whom we first perceived as the seductive devil-vampire of Interview with the Vampire and whom we now follow through the ages as he searches for the origin and meaning of his own dark immortality.  And who, more and more, engages our sympathy until he stands revealed as a questing romantic, a vampire-hero with his own strange and passionate courage and morality.

As the novel opens, Lestat, having risen from the earth after a fifty-five years' sleep,  and infatuated with the modern world, presents himself in all his vampire brilliance as a rock star, a superstar, a seducer of millions.  And, in this blaze of adulation, daring to break the vampire oath of silence, he determines to tell his story, to rouse the generations of the living dead from their slumbers and to penetrate the riddle of his own existence.

As he speaks we are plunged back into eighteenth-century France, into the castle where we meet the young Lestat: child of impoverished aristocrats, heroic hunter of wolves, at odds with his tyrannical father, running away to join a traveling troupe of actors.  We see him in the licentious Paris of the day, first apprentice at a boulevard theater, then its most celebrated actor, idolized, adored by many and—night after night—watched by one . . . until, in a sleep filled with dreams of the wolves he killed as a boy, he is shocked awake by a dark figure and suddenly, horribly, eternally joined to the unholy brotherhood.

We follow Lestat as he searches for others like him—in churches and brothels, in gambling houses, huts and palaces—sometimes joined by the vampire-angel Gabrielle, who is bound to him both by blood and by passion; sometimes traveling with his adored Nicolas, the violinist whose music and beauty are equally transcendent.  We follow Lestat as he travels from the snowcapped mountains of the Auvergne and the primeval forest of ancient Gaul to Sicily, Istanbul, Venice and Cairo, searching for his origins, sometimes finding clues to the birth of the vampire race, knowing always that the central truth eludes him.

But all the while, throughout his travels, through many lands and many times, Lestat has made enemies among his brethren—vampires who are in terror of his questions, who fear he will disturb the uneasy balance in which they exist with the mortal world, and who suspect in him a desire to rule.  And when, in the caves below a craggy Greek island, in a sanctuary whose walls are covered with gold-flecked murals, the very first of the living dead awake, the truth at the heart of his quest is at last revealed.  Ancient forces held immobile through the ages are irreversibly set in motion, and as the novel rushes to its stunning climax, Lestat's vampire foes converge in pursuit of him on the demonic freeways of the twentieth century.

Anne Rice "A welcome chance to catch up with old friends...Fascinating...When we emerge from its folds, there's good news on the last page: 'The chronicle of the vampires will continue.' Yum."
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
A feat of mesmerizing storytelling, a chilling entertainment, THE QUEEN OF THE DAMNED unleashes Akasha, the Queen herself, who has risen from a six-thousand year sleep to let loose the powers of the night. Akasha has a marvelously devious plan to "save" mankind and destroy Lestat—in this extraordinarily sensual novel of the complex, erotic, electrifying world of the undead.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Daniel H. Pink "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. Step by step he builds a career, illustrating as he does the six core lessons of finding, keeping, and flourishing in satisfying work: There is no plan ,Forget about your weaknesses, Persistence trumps talent, It's not about you ,Make excellent mistakes, Leave an imprintSmart, engaging, and insightful, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko offers practical advice for anyone looking to start a rewarding career."

Brenda Ueland But we must try to find our True Conscience, our True Self, the very Center, for this is the only first-rate choice-making center. Here lies all originality, talent, honor, truthfulness, courage and cheerfulness. Here lies the ability to choose the good and the grand, the true and the beautiful.

In her ninety-three remarkable years, Brenda Ueland published six million words. She said she had two rules she followed absolutely: to tell the truth, and not to do anything she didn’t want to do. Her integrity shines throughout If You Want to Write, her bestselling classic on the process of writing that has already inspired
thousands to find their own creative center. Carl Sandburg called this book “the best book ever written about how to write.” Yet Ueland reminds us that “whenever I say ‘writing’ in this book, I also mean anything that you love and want to do or make.”

Rosamund Stone Zander, Benjamin Zander In their playing you hear not only precision, color and balance, but thunder, lightning and the language of the heart. This is what the Boston Globe said about a performance by conductor Benjamin Zander with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, but it could apply equally to the Zanders' inspirational book, the product of a synthesis of the diverse worlds of the symphony orchestra and cutting-edge psychology.
The Art of Possibility offers a set of breakthrough practices for creativity in all human enterprises. Infused with the energy of their dynamic partnership, the book joins together Ben's extraordinary talent as a mover and shaker, teacher, and communicator, with Rosamund Stone Zander's genius for creating innovative paradigms for personal and professional fulfillment. In lively counterpoint, the authors provide us with a deep sense of the powerful role that the notion of possibility can play in every aspect of our lives.
The Zanders' deceptively simple practices are based on two premises: that life is composed as a story ("it's all invented") and that, with new definitions, much more is possible than people ordinarily think. The book shifts our perspective with uplifting stories, parables, and anecdotes from the authors' personal experiences as well as from famous and everyday heroes. From "Giving an A," to the mysterious "Rule Number 6," to "Leading from Any Chair"-the account of Ben's stunning realization that the conductor/leader's power is directly linked to how much greatness he is willing to grant to others-each practice offers an opportunity for personal and organizational transformation.
The Art of Possibility provides a life-altering approach to fulfilling dreams large and small. The Zanders invite us all to become passionate communicators, leaders, and performers whose lives radiate possibility into the world.

Rosamund Stone Zander is a family therapist and a landscape painter. Benjamin Zander is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and a professor at the New England Conservatory of Music.

Based on the principles developed through the authors' unique partnership, Mr. Zander gives presentations to managers and executives around the world and Ms. Zander conducts workshops for organizations on practicing the art of possibility.

Donald Miller

Dave Robinson, Chris Garratt Ethics is the burning issue of current moral philosophical thought.

Keith Tondeur

Susan Jeffers Techniques to help you become more powerful in the face of your fears.

John Grisham Five CDs, 6 hrs.
performance by Anthony Heald

Late one October night Justice Abe Rosenberg, at ninety-one the Supreme Court's Liberal legend, is shot to death in his Georgetown home. Two hours later Glenn Jensen, the Court's youngest and most conservative justice, is strangled. The country is stunned; the FBI has no clues.

But Darby Shaw, a brilliant law student at Tulane, thinks she has the answer. Days of digging through the law library's computers have led her to draft a brief speculating on an obscure connection between the two justices—and a most unlikely suspect. Her suspect has powerful friends: one evening, outside a New Orleans restaurant, Darby narrowly escapes an assassin's car bomb. Someone has read her brief—someone who wants her dead.

Alone and frightened, Darby disappears into the anonymous shadows of the French Quarter, where she contacts the investigative reporter Gary Grantham and convinces him that Washington's position on the killings amounts to the biggest cover-up since Watergate. Together they go underground on the run, trying to stay alive long enough to expose the real truth contained in the Pelican Brief.

Enid Blyton

Patrick Ellis

LOUISE COOPER

Lisa Jewell

Martin Millar

Michael Freeman

Michael Langford Third Edition

Here, fully revised and updated to focus on the shift to fully automated cameras, is the best basic handbook of 35mm photography. Compact, complete, color-keyed for easy reference, it is packed with essential information and data — plus dozens of hints for solving photographic problems and improving the pictures you take.

Peter Burian, Bob Caputo Burian and Caputo share the secrets to making great photographs in this engaging and informative guide.

* Making photographs of people, landscapes, and wildlife
* How-to tips from ten of National Geographic's top photographers
* Charts for selecting the right film, filter, and exposure
* Cameras, lenses, and maintenance
* Using existing light and flash
* Tips on effective composition
* Computers and photography
* Travel tips and gear
* Photography Web sites

Richard I'Anson Note From Publisher: This is the old edition of Lonely Planet's Guide to Travel Photography.

Lonely Planet's new edition of Travel Photography may be found by typing the ISBN number 1741041848 into the search box.

The fantastic new 2nd edition has been thoroughly updated and revised to include a special new section on digital photography. It also includes new information on black and white photography techniques.

We invite you to check it out.

KODAK, Debbie Cohen Ready, aim, shoot! With this convenient, professional photoguide by your side, you'll always be prepared to take your best pictures, no matter what situation confronts you. Just open up the easy-to-read, lay-flat spiral notebook to find complete information on color and black-and-white films, film care and storage, exposure, filters, flash, and lenses. It will take just an instant to turn to the section you want, thanks to brightly colored and labeled tabs for each chapter. Best of all, it's put together by the most trusted name in the business: Kodak. Want the full picture on what's inside? * Complete charts for all Kodak films—one for prints and one for slides and transparencies—with a description of the intended uses, and ISO speed and filter for daylight, tungsten, and photolamp. * Facts on caring for film, avoiding static electricity marks, using exposure meters, and calculating lighting ratios. * Dials to help you figure out speeds and lens openings for existing-light subjects; which filters to use; flash exposures; focal length; optical equations; and depth of field for normal, wide-angle, and telephoto lenses. * How to care for lenses and which supplementary lenses to try. The 6th updated edition is the one volume you'll need! 56 pages (all in color), 6 x 8 1/2.

J. Jeffrey An examination of the history and development of photography, from its earliest days in the mid C19 to the present. Using examples from the world's greatest photographers, this book guides the reader through critical issues, such as the criteria by which we carry out judgements and analyses.

Umberto Estrobes

David Blatner, Glenn Fleishman, Stephen F. Roth This expanded and updated second edition covers new file types and software applications, and addresses the special concerns of Web publishers.It offers sage advice on producing top-notch scans and halftones from three of the best-known experts in Web and desktop publishing. You'll gain insight into the key scanning technologies and learn valuable techniques that will save you time, money, and hassle.

John Hedgecoe "A guide to beginning b&w photographic techniques. Discusses principles of basic composition and framing, and...still lifes, portraits, and landscapes. Includes instructions on setting up a home darkroom, processing film, and printing pictures, and advanced techniques...."—RRBN. 160 pages (all in color), 6 5/8 x 10 1/4.

Joe DeMaio, Roberta Worth, Dennis Curtin The Darkroom Handbook, Second Edition, is a completely revised and updated version of a classic guide to the best design, construction, and equipment to use when setting up a darkroom.

This book features ideas and money-saving tips on how to put a darkroom almost anywhere in your home or apartment. It takes you inside darkrooms of photographers around the world including those of famous photographers such as, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Berenice Abbott, and W. Eugene Smith. In addition, it contains detailed do-it-yourself plans for the most essential darkroom components, cutouts and design grids to plan that "dream" darkroom, and special sections on the color darkroom and the digital darkroom.

The most comprehensive book on the darkroom.
A step-by-step guide to help anyone plan and build a photo lab.
Illustrated with an abundance of photos and sketches.

David Chamberlain

Bruce Fraser Call it a control thing, but until recently–or, more specifically, until the availability of digital raw camera formats–you simply weren’t ready to make the move to digital photography. Raw formats, however, changed all of that by allowing you to retrieve images before any in-camera processing has been performed. Photoshop’s Adobe Camera Raw plug-in makes that process even easier by providing a standardized way of accessing and working with these uncompressed digital negatives in your favorite image-manipulation software. In the first volume devoted exclusively to the topic, best-selling author Bruce Fraser shows you how to take advantage of Adobe Camera Raw to set white balance, optimize contrast and saturation, handle noise, correct tint, and recover lost detail in images before converting them to another format. After learning about the raw formats themselves, you’ll discover hands-on techniques for exposing and shooting for digital raw, using Bridge, Adobe’s new standalone file browser, to preview images and automate tasks, and building a workflow around the digital raw process.

Scott Kelby This update is so important, because if there was ever a version of Photoshop that was aimed at digital photographers, Photoshop CS is it, and "The Photoshop CS Book for Digital Photographers" by Scott Kelby (Editor of Photoshop User magazine) once again breaks new ground by doing something for digital photographers that's never been done before—it cuts through the bull and shows you exactly "how to do it." It's not a bunch of theory; it doesn't challenge you to come up with your own settings or figure it out on your own. Instead, it shows you step by step the exact techniques used by today's cutting-edge digital photographers and retouchers, and it does something that virtually no other Photoshop book has ever done — it tells you, flat-out, which settings to use, when to use them, and why.

If you're looking for one of those "tell-me-everything-about-the-Unsharp-Mask-filter" books, this isn't it. You can grab any other Photoshop book on the shelf, because they all do that. Instead, this book gives you the inside tips and tricks of the trade that today's leading pros use to correct, edit, sharpen, retouch, and present their photos to some of the most demanding clients on the planet. You'll be absolutely amazed at how easy and effective they are—once you know the secrets.

LEARN HOW THE PROS DO IT Each year Scott trains thousands of professional photographers how to use Photoshop, and almost without exception they have the same questions and the same problems — that's exactly what Scott covers in this book. You'll learn: The secrets of how the pros retouch portraitsHow to color correct any photo without breaking a sweat (you'll be amazed at how they do it!)How to unlock the power of Photoshop CS' new features for digital photo prosAmazing digital body-sculpting techniquesHow the pros use CS' File Browser (it's much more powerful than you think)Tricks that can send your productivity through the roofThe sharpening techniques the pros really use (there's an entire chapter just on this!)How to deal with common digital camera image problemsRemoving noise, avoiding halos, and protecting your imagesHow to use Match Color, The Color Replacement Tool, and other amazing CS tools.Masking techniques for photographersThe most-requested photographic special effectsand much more!Photoshop CS is THE tool for digital photographers, and this book show you exactly how to put it's power to work for you today.

Charles Campbell

Michael Busselle

Martin Evening The latest edition to join Martin Evening's bestselling 'Adobe Photoshop for Photographers' titles gives you completely updated and revised coverage providing a professional photographer's insight into Photoshop CS.

The main update is the latest coverage of all that's new in digital capture; also the numerous new tutorials and updated, top quality color images throughout make this edition a must have purchase. This edition also benefits from a new internal design that, along with a re-ordering of the contents, makes navigation even easier. Still packed with practical advice and even more hints and tips, this book will take your Photoshop up to a professional standard, guided by the 'Daddy' of Photoshop himself, Martin Evening.

* Over 450 professional, color illustrations make this book stand above the rest
* New interior design and reorganised contents make this book even easier to use
* Master the power of Photoshop CS under the instruction of an internationally recognised Photoshop expert

E.M. Delafield The Provincial Lady has a nice house, a nice husband (usually asleep behind The Times) and nice children. In fact, maintaining Niceness is the Provincial Lady’s goal in life — her raison d'être. She never raises her voice, rarely ventures outside Devon (why would she?), only occasionally allows herself to become vexed by the ongoing servant problem, and would be truly appalled by the confessional mode that has gripped the late 20th century. The Provincial Lady, after all, is part of what made Britain great.

Winston Churchill

Desmond Morris

BORIS PASTERNAK

Peter De La Billiere

Mervyn Peake

Patricia Clayton

Frederick Forsyth Frederick Forsyth,  master of the international thriller, retums with  an electrifying story of a man of immense power and  a conspiracy to crush the President of the United  States. Only one man—Forsyth—Forsyth's most  unforgettable hero yet—can prevent the plan from succeeding.  His name is Quinn. He is the  Negotiator.President Cormack is  bent on a signing a sweeping U.S.-Soviet  disarmament treaty, and the master conspirator is  determined to stop him. The kidnapping of a young man on a  country road in Oxfordshire is but the first  brutal step in the explosive plot engineer the  president's destruction. Enter  Quinn.  Quinn plays the  kidnappers like a master musician. . . until, in a shocking  tumabout, he discovers that ransom was not their  objection after all—and that he has been lured  into a cunningly woven web. Now he must draw upon  his deepest strengths—to save not only the victim  but the entire free  world.

Nick Hornby

Robert Pirsig This lyrical, evocative, thought-provoking journal of a man's quest for truth — and for himself — has touched and changed an entire generation. At its heart, the story is all too simple: a man and his son take a lengthy motorcycle trip through America. But this is not a simple trip at all, for around every corner, through mountain and desert, wind and rain, and searing heat and biting cold, their pilgrimage leads them to new vistas of self-discovery and renewal.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an elemental work that had helped to shape and define the past twenty-five years of American culture. This special audio edition presents this adventure in an exciting new way — for the millions who have already taken this journey and want to travel these roads again, and for the many more who will discover for the first time the wonders and challenges of a journey that will change the way they think and feel about their lives.

Anthony Trollope Anthony Trollope was a masterful satirist with an unerring eye for the most intrinsic details of human behavior and an imaginative grasp of the preoccupations of nineteenth-century English novels. In The Last Chronicle of Barset, Mr. Crawley, curate of Hogglestock, falls deeply into debt, bringing suffering to himself and his family. To make matters worse, he is accused of theft, can't remember where he got the counterfeit check he is alleged to have stolen, and must stand trial. Trollope's powerful portrait of this complex man-gloomy, brooding, and proud, moving relentlessly from one humiliation to another-achieves tragic dimensions.

Bob Rosner

Alistair Blair

Burke Hedges

Timothy J. Sharp Based on his own research, Timothy Sharp addresses lifestyle issues as well as physical and psychological problems that interfere with sleep. These include diet, medication, alcohol, and caffeine, as well as depression, anxiety, and personal problems. He offers a commonsense approach that includes specific relaxation techniques and tips on establishing a good sleep routine.

Julian May

Cliff Atkinson Improve your presentationsand increase your impactwith 50 powerful, practical, and easy-to-apply techniques for Microsoft PowerPoint. With Beyond Bullet Points, youll take your presentation skills to the next levellearning innovative ways to design and deliver your message. Organized into five sectionsDistill Your Ideas, Structure Your Story, Visualize Your Message, Create a Conversation, and Maintain Engagementthe book uses clear, concise language and just the right visuals to help you understand concepts and start getting better results. Not just a how-to for PowerPoint, this book will help take your presentation skills to the next level! Features 50 innovative, easy-to-apply techniques to help you clarify, visualize, and present your ideas using PowerPoint. Author is a leading presentation-skills consultant. Targeted for intermediate to advanced level users of PowerPoint who are looking to stand out from the crowd and make sure people remember what they say.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Dan Wilson

John Simpson For over 30 years, John Simpson has travelled the world to report on the most significant events of our time. From being punched in the stomach by Harold Wilson on one of his first days as a reporter, to escaping summary execution in Beirut, flying into Teheran with the returning Ayatollah Khomeini, and narrowly avoiding entrapment by a beautiful Czech secret agent, Simpson has had an astonishingly eventful career. In 1989 he witnessed the Tiananmen Square massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of Communism throughout Eastern Europe and, only weeks later, in South Africa, the release of Nelson Mandela. With Simpsons uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time, this autobiography is a ring-side seat at every major event in recent global history.

Stella Rimington Stella Rimington first joined Britain’s Security Service (MI5) part-time in 1965, while she was in India accompanying her husband on a posting to New Delhi. She became a full-time employee on her return to the U.K. During her career with MI5, she worked in all the main fields of the Service: counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism becoming, successively, Director of all three branches. She was appointed Director-General in 1992 — the first woman to hold the post and the first Director-General whose name was publicly announced. During her tenure, she pursued a policy of greater openness for MI5, giving several public lectures and publishing a booklet about the service.

Kathleen DesMaisons Are You Sugar Sensitive?

Have you ever wondered why you just can't seem to say no to fattening foods, alcohol or troubling behaviors like overspending and overworking? The answer is not that you're lazy, self-indulgent or undisciplined. The problem lies in your body chemistry.

In her groundbreaking book, Potatoes Not Prozac, Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D., addictive nutrition expert, reveals that emotional troubles such as mood swings or depression often can't be fought by medication. Her radical new way of finding and maintaining mental and physical health offers instead a prescription for altering our eating habits. Millions of people are sugar-sensitive — which means they have a special body chemistry that reacts in extreme ways to sugar and refined carbohydrates like white bread and pasta. DesMaisons reveals that these "comfort" foods actually provide just the opposite effect, triggering feelings of exhaustion, hopelessness and low self-esteem. What's worse, these foods don't stop our cravings for them — they only make us want to go back for more.

Helping us to free ourselves from sugar dependency, DesMaisons explains how certain food dependent chemicals in the brain regulate our moods. Once we understand how these biochemicals react to what we eat — or what we don't eat — we are free to control our lives. Serotonin, beta-endorphins and blood sugar need to be kept in balance. We can achieve this balance by following DesMaisons's inexpensive, all-natural nutritional plan, which has resulted in a 92 percent success rate with recovering alcoholics, and emotional stability for the thousands of people she has treated in her practice.

In addition to food charts, questionnaires to determine your own sugar sensitivity, and accessible scientific lessons that explain your body chemistry, DesMaisons provides a straightforward seven-step plan to overcome your addictions. There is no regime of measurements or self-denial: you tailor the plan to your tastes and lifestyle. These steps are actually more liberating than any diet could be. You will no longer settle for the short-term relief from pain or problems that cookies or ice cream might give you. You will find the optimism, energy and high self-esteem you have craved for so long. Because DesMaisons is committed to her own recovery, she is a compassionate, skilled guide in navigating you through this process, one choice at a time. And what you learn in the end, she says, is that the process isn't about food at all. "As we come into balance, we can shape our own direction rather than being driven by biochemical circumstances. We feel empowered to make changes in our lives and to control what is happening to us. What seemed like a story about food is really a story about possibility." You can change your life with Potatoes Not Prozac.

Jack Kerouac

ROBERT H. WATERMAN TOM PETERS

Susanna Clarke Two magicians shall appear in England. The first shall fear me; the second shall long to behold me The year is 1806. England is beleaguered by the long war with Napoleon, and centuries have passed since practical magicians faded into the nation's past. But scholars of this glorious history discover that one remains: the reclusive Mr Norrell whose displays of magic send a thrill through the country. Proceeding to London, he raises a beautiful woman from the dead and summons an army of ghostly ships to terrify the French. Yet the cautious, fussy Norrell is challenged by the emergence of another magician: the brilliant novice Jonathan Strange. Young, handsome and daring, Strange is the very opposite of Norrell. So begins a dangerous battle between these two great men which overwhelms the one between England and France. And their own obsessions and secret dabblings with the dark arts are going to cause more trouble than they can imagine.

Pauline McLynn

Robert Greene, Joost Ellfers, Joost Elffers Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills three thousand years of the history of power in to forty-eight well explicated laws. As attention—grabbing in its design as it is in its content, this bold volume outlines the laws of power in their unvarnished essence, synthesizing the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and other great thinkers. Some laws teach the need for prudence ("Law 1: Never Outshine the Master"), the virtue of stealth ("Law 3: Conceal Your Intentions"), and many demand the total absence of mercy ("Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally"), but like it or not, all have applications in real life. Illustrated through the tactics of Queen Elizabeth I, Henry Kissinger, P. T. Barnum, and other famous figures who have wielded—or been victimized by—power, these laws will fascinate any reader interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control.

Walter Murch In the Blink of an Eye is celebrated film editor Walter Murch's vivid, multifaceted, thought — provoking essay on film editing. Starting with what might be the most basic editing question — Why do cuts work? — Murch treats the reader to a wonderful ride through the aesthetics and practical concerns of cutting film. Along the way, he offers his unique insights on such subjects as continuity and discontinuity in editing, dreaming, and reality; criteria for a good cut; the blink of the eye as an emotional cue; digital editing; and much more. In this second edition, Murch reconsiders and completely revises his popular first edition's lengthy meditation on digital editing (which accounts for a third of the book's pages) in light of the technological changes that have taken place in the six years since its publication.

Bruce Schneier ". . .the best introduction to cryptography I've ever seen. . . . The book the National Security Agency wanted never to be published. . . ." -Wired Magazine

". . .monumental . . . fascinating . . . comprehensive . . . the definitive work on cryptography for computer programmers . . ." -Dr. Dobb's Journal

". . .easily ranks as one of the most authoritative in its field." -PC Magazine

". . .the bible of code hackers." -The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog

This new edition of the cryptography classic provides you with a comprehensive survey of modern cryptography. The book details how programmers and electronic communications professionals can use cryptography-the technique of enciphering and deciphering messages-to maintain the privacy of computer data. It describes dozens of cryptography algorithms, gives practical advice on how to implement them into cryptographic software, and shows how they can be used to solve security problems. Covering the latest developments in practical cryptographic techniques, this new edition shows programmers who design computer applications, networks, and storage systems how they can build security into their software and systems.

What's new in the Second Edition?
* New information on the Clipper Chip, including ways to defeat the key escrow mechanism
* New encryption algorithms, including algorithms from the former Soviet Union and South Africa, and the RC4 stream cipher
* The latest protocols for digital signatures, authentication, secure elections, digital cash, and more
* More detailed information on key management and cryptographic implementations

Janet Ashford, John Odam The art of mixed media has taken on new meaning in the digital production environment, and the second edition of Start with a Scan guides new artists through the maze of image acquisition, hardware, and software toward the goal of final output. This is not just a book on scanning and creating art, but about the art and science of scanning, editing, and tailoring an image to your needs, too.

Beginning by explaining how scanners work, the different types of scanners that are out there, and why it's important to know how the scanned image will be used, the book quickly digs into the meat and potatoes of editing, altering, tracing, and otherwise changing a scanned image to suit a project.

Arguably the most interesting chapters are "Creating Textures and Backgrounds from Print and Paper" and "Transforming Photos into Graphics." One of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks that a designer faces is finding and creating background elements and graphics. In these two chapters, which probably are worth the cover price alone, Scan explains how to use scanned photos or raw elements (cloth, paper, and so on) to create the element that you need.

Although the book deals with digital tools (e.g., scanners and computers), it hardly could be called a computer graphics book. The goal is teaching how to scan and alter images, and Scan never loses sight of that. The authors deserve a great deal of credit for creating what is an educational and inspirational book on a form of visual art that happens to use computers as tools, instead of a computer book that happens to talk about digital graphics. This is how books of the genre should be written. —Mike Caputo

Bryan F. Peterson Almost everyone can "see" in the conventional sense, but developing photographic vision takes practice. Learning to See Creatively helps photographers visualize their work, and the world, in a whole new light.

Now totally rewritten, revised, and expanded, this best-selling guide takes a radical approach to creativity. It explains how it is not some gift only for the "chosen few" but actually a skill that can be learned and applied. Using inventive photos from his own stunning portfolio, author and veteran photographer Bryan Peterson deconstructs creativity for photographers. He details the basic techniques that went into not only taking a particular photo, but also provides insights on how to improve upon it—helping readers avoid the visual pitfalls and technical dead ends that can lead to dull, uninventive photographs.

This revised edition features the latest information on digital photography and digital imaging software, as well as an all-new section on color as a design element. Learning to See Creatively is the definitive reference for any photographers looking for a fresh perspective on their work.

* New edition of a best-selling title
* Updated to include digital
* All new artwork, and a totally revised and expanded text
* All-new section on color as a design element
* Written by one of Amphoto's bestselling authors

Lee Frost

Ray Miller

Ansel Adams

John P. Schaefer The continuation volume to the highly successful Basic Techniques of Photography: Book One, this profusely illustrated manual offers a contemporary guide to Ansel Adams' brilliant approach to creative photography.Expanding on the fundamental principles of photography presented in Book One, this volume enables the committed amateur or student photographer to advance to higher levels of creative expression. Book Two offers essential chapters on exposure and development, including what is perhaps the clearest, most effective explanation of Ansel Adams' remarkable Zone System ever written.Dr. Schaefer goes on to explain and demonstrate the most important approaches to printmaking for those interested in darkroom and digital work, including such alternative printing processes as cyanotypes, salt printing, platinum/palladium printing, and gum printing. The theory and practice of color photography and printing are explained, and a thorough introduction to digital imaging is featured—all illustrated by numerous examples of work by Ansel Adams and many other photographers. Basic Techniques of Photography:Book Two is a "must-have" for anyone who wants to improve their skills as an image-maker.

John P. Schaefer

Damien Demolder, Nigel Atherton, Steve McCloud, Joel Lacey, Phillip Andrews

Klaus Mai, Louis A. Flanigan Brody had a forming influence on graphic design in the 80s, Carson mixed images and texts in the 90s, and km7 is the man with the style codes for the next century. This book showcases the various missions he has accomplished for clients like Jam and Spoon, Volkswagen, Nike and Sony - within an overall design structure of covert Bond style operations. The book roller-coasters through his contemporary world of graphic design with top print quality and overall humorous design. The new designers' bible has been created.

Jeremy Hardy

Scott Berkun

Michael Rymaszewski, Wagner James Au, Mark Wallace, Catherine Winters, Cory Ondrejka, Benjamin BatstoneCunningham

Betty Edwards

Betty Edwards

Michael Heron

Chris Jones, Genevieve Jolliffe

Freer Be a part of one of the worlds fastest growing imaging phenomenons: microstock photography. Microstock photography provides both professional and amateur photographers an opportunity to diversify their income and expand their artistic visibility by turning day trip photos or photography portfolios into viable business investments.

Douglas Freer has written a comprehensive book that details the technical and commercial processes of the microstock industry. A must read for entrants into the microstock photography field, Microstock Photography shows you how to:

Choose the right microstock agency
Shoot work that will sell
Navigate the strict technical requirements
Understand the likely financial returns
Review licensing models
Understand copyright issues

Over 60 illustrations and photographs help you improve your skills, learn new techniques specific to shooting stock photography and better understand what the microstock market demands. Anyone can shoot digital stock photography, but in order to make money and be successful, you need the practical advice that can only be found in this book.

*Learn how to start earning money fast from your personal photos or professional portfolio
*Contains invaluable information on the crucial technical and commercial requirements you'll need to meet to be successful in the microstock industry
*Over 60 full color images show you what sells and what doesn't

Dan Roam

John Medina

Iain Banks

David Allen With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, "flow", "mind like water", and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance.

Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Done offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-dos clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists—all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on. However, it still operates from the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really organised, we could turn ourselves into 24/7 productivity machines. (To wit, Allen, whom the New Economy bible Fast Company has dubbed "the personal productivity guru", suggests that instead of meditating on crouching tigers and hidden dragons while you wait for a plane, you should unsheathe that high-tech sabre known as the mobile phone and attack that list of calls you need to return.)

As whole-life-organising systems go, Allen's is pretty good, even fun and therapeutic. It starts with the exhortation to take every unaccounted-for scrap of paper in your workstation that you can't junk. The next step is to write down every unaccounted-for gotta-do cramming your head onto its own scrap of paper. Finally, throw the whole stew into a giant "in-basket".

That's where the processing and prioritising begin; in Allen's system, it get a little convoluted at times, rife as it is with fancy terms, subterms, and sub-subterms for even the simplest concepts. Thank goodness the spine of his system is captured on a straightforward, one-page flowchart that you can pin over your desk and repeatedly consult without having to refer back to the book. That alone is worth the purchase price. Also of value is Allen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes or less, then do it now, thus freeing up your time and mind tenfold over the long term. It's common sense advice so obvious that most of us completely overlook it, much to our detriment. Allen excels at dispensing such wisdom in this useful, if somewhat belaboured, self-improver aimed at everyone from CEOs to football mums (who, we all know, are more organised than most CEOs to start with). —Timothy Murphy

Gary Hamel

Stephen Michael Kosslyn

Timothy Ferriss

Daniel H. Pink

E Castronova

Tim Guest

Seth Godin

Chris Anderson

A Goldstein

W. Gilmore

Martin Sitter

Michael van Straten

Jill Butler Kritina Holden Will Lidwell

Garr Reynolds

William Gibson

William Gibson

William Gibson

Neil A. Fiore

Anthony Robbins

M.Scott Peck

Jim Slater

Jonathan Franzen Critically lauded and an Oprah Book Club choice, Jonathan Franzen's third novel The Correctionsis already a huge success in the US, and it's none too difficult to see why. Whereas his earlier novels, The Twenty-Seventh Cityand StrongMotioncould be seen as single-issue works (on inner city decay and abortion respectively), the long-awaited The Correctionsis far more grandiose in its ambition and its scale.

Framed by matriarch Enid Lambert's attempts to gather her three grown children back home for Christmas, The Correctionsexamines their lives: Enid's husband Alfred, sinking into dementia, her sons banker Gary and writer Chip (now in Lithuania) and daughter Denise, a chef, busily re-evaluating her sexual identity.

With these characters, Franzen gives himself plenty of room to examine the foibles, fears, hopes, anxieties and neuroses of 21st-century American life and the mad Lithuanian subplot provides some real laughs. But most striking and surprising about The Correctionsis its reassuring normality. Despite all its well-signposted dysfunction, this remains at heart a big sprawling family saga, with all the security that implies. The book closes with Enid noting "that current events in general were more muted or insipid nowadays than they'd been in her youth" during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Now, "disasters of this magnitude no longer seemed to befall the United States". It's a line Franzen couldn't have written after 11 September, 2001—and, perhaps because of its now forgotten confidence, The Correctionsis a book that readers will take to their hearts.—Alan Stewart

Katie Hafner Matthew Lyon Considering that the history of the Internet is perhaps better documented internally than any other technological construct, it is remarkable how shadowy its origins have been to most people, including die-hard Net-denizens!

At last, Hafner and Lyon have written a well-researched story of the origins of the Internet substantiated by extensive interviews with its creators who delve into many interesting details such as the controversy surrounding the adoption of our now beloved "@" sign as the separator of usernames and machine addresses. Essential reading for anyone interested in the past—and the future—of the Net specifically, and telecommunications generally.

With the incredible growth of the Internet in the 1990s and revolutions occurring almost daily, it is easy to overlook the origins of this cultural phenomenon. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon have captured the history of the Internet in this solid account. They explain the system's genesis as a device to link computer resources around the country—not to prepare communications for nuclear war strikes as is often thought—and how, as with many of us, e-mail was the application of choice for many users. It also tells of the story of the buttoned-up engineers who invented the Internet- -in contrast to the late-night hackers who pushed its evolution. In all, an interesting history about a medium that has fostered an aversion to the past.

Curly Martin

Patricia Wallace For Internet veterans, communicating by e-mail and arguing in newsgroups seem perfectly natural. Step back from the keyboard, though, and you might see some merit in Patricia Wallace's thesis that the Net "is a place where we humans are acting and interacting rather strangely at times". Her book explores on-line behaviours, mixing academic research and anecdote to create explanations that are both credible and accessible.

Despite the all-encompassing title, The Psychology of the Internetonly deals with technologies that enable Net users to communicate directly: e-mail, newsgroups, chat and MUD-type environments (virtual worlds where people can experiment with alternative personas). The Web gets mentioned in passing, chiefly as a repository for personal home pages, but if you are a Web designer wanting to know how people feel about colour schemes or navigation tools, you've come to the wrong book.

Wallace starts by looking at on-line identities and group dynamics, then considers specific activities such as flaming (arguments), romance, addiction and altruism. A chapter on pornography avoids sensationalism, but ends weakly with, "We know too little about pornography on the Internet—who uses it and how it affects them—to draw any firm conclusions yet". There is also a chapter on gender issues.

You don't need a background in psychology or a wealth of technical expertise to get something from this book. It will make you think twice about the next e-mail you type and throw some light on your experiences, but there are no great revelations. Wallace just tells it as it is, moderately and sensibly. —Mary Lojkine

John King Richard Nebesky Neil Wilson Where Paris once led the way as the centre of Europe's bohemian lifestyle, Prague now comes out on top. The fourth edition of Lonely Planet: Praguemanages to be both compact and comprehensive and is generally a good introduction to this city where European and North American wannabe poets now hang out.

Although the guide's structure follows the layout used by most books in the Lonely Planet series, there is more of a concentration on cultural issues than is often the case. As well as an illustrated colour guide to the city's memorable architecture, there are detailed sections on themes such as the history of the 1969 student rebellion against the Communists, the famous Karlos Most bridge, Franz Kafka and the vicissitudes of Prague's Jewish community. The sections on history and modern politics are perhaps a little weaker though, with no acknowledgement of the sizeable minority in the Czech Republic who have become disillusioned with Vaclav Havel.

The cultural side of the guide goes together with some hard-nosed advice on how to avoid scams in Prague's restaurants and foreign exchange bureaux. Only occasionally does the imperative of cost become a handicap, as when the authors make the inaccurate assertion that, when visiting Prague's "old-new synagogue", there is no need to rent the cheap yamulkahs as a bandanna will do. Still, this will be a very useful practical guide for anyone visiting Prague, with thorough accommodation and eating tips, colour photographs and some detailed and very well-researched maps. —Toby Green

Tom Clancy Steve Pieczenik

Isaac Asimov

China Mieville The question was always: what would he do for an encore? China Mieville's third novel The Scaris set in the same world as his award-winning Perdido Street Stationbut is a very different book, set in a very different city. Where his New Crobuzon was an old metropolis of cruelty, oppression and glamour, the floating freebooter city Armada is a place of refuge even for those who experience it as a prison. Brilliant linguist Bellis Coldwine is on the run when she is press-ganged by pirates who turn out to be rather more; her abilities make her a valuable commodity and she finds herself intermittently useful to a project so ambitious that it takes her much of the book to comprehend fully. Mieville takes interesting chances by making Bellis his protagonist—she has an arrogant selfishness that at times makes one breathless—but her guts, determination and intermittent realism about herself gradually endear her to us. This is an intelligent book about how individuals and events influence each other and the meaning of freedom. Mieville has a sense of the sea as the place of a menace almost incomprehensibly huge; like Perdido Street Station, The Scaris full of breath-taking moments of wonder which are also moments of heart-stopping terror. —Roz Kaveney

Piers Anthony

Umberto Eco

Baron Baptiste

Terry Pratchett Ian Stewart Jack S. Cohen Terry Pratchett needs no introduction. Ian Stewart has written fine nonfiction books on mathematics, and he and Jack Cohen collaborated on the quirkily inventive pop-science titles The Collapse of Chaosand Figments of Reality. What on earth, or on Discworld, are they all doing in the same book? Pratchett provides a very funny 30,000-word novella about Discworld science, beginning in the High Energy Magic faculty of Unseen University and leading his eccentric wizards to investigate an alien cosmos where there's no magic to keep things going. This is the Roundworld universe—ours. The key point: much that's true only on Discworld (eg: that suns orbit planets and not vice-versa) was once believed on Earth and the wizards' comic misunderstandings echo the history of real science ... Unusually, Pratchett's story is split into chapters and in between his chapters Stewart and Cohen wittily discuss the concepts underlying the fiction, from the Big Bang through stellar formation to life and evolution. Much of the science we know, they cheerfully insist, is "lies-to-children": good stories that are mostly untrue, like thinking of atoms as tiny solar systems. Discworld operates by narrative plausibility and so does human thought even when our Roundworld universe disagrees. Between the laughs, The Science of Discworldis a provocative, informative book that'll make you think about what you think you know. —David Langford

Dan Millman

Ric Alexander

David Kahn

Tom Clancy

Piers Anthony

Ann Wroe As one of the most remembered and controversial minor characters from the bestselling book of all time, Pontius Pilate makes an intriguing subject for a book of his own. His own ambivalent role in the drama leading up to the crucifixion, and his actions afterwards, have made him a character of great fascination over the centuries. He is not an easy man to pin down though and is, therefore, not an immediately obvious candidate for a biography. However this isn't strictly speaking your typical biographical work.

Pilate the man has become far more over the centuries since his destiny briefly and fatefully met that of Jesus of Nazareth, far more; a symbol, a portmanteau character, a name rich in meaning and filled with a subtle ambiguity that reaches to the essence of people's souls. The Bible says very little about him and accounts from the Gospels of events leading up to the crucifixion are inconsistent. According to St John, Pilate and Jesus entered into a serious discussion about the nature of God's kingdom before Pilate, finding no fault with Jesus, offered the Jewish crowd the opportunity of having "their King" released. They chose instead to free Barabbas, a robber and a murderer, and Pilate, no doubt mindful of the precarious political minefield he was navigating, ceded to their yobbish preference. Whether he ever really had a choice or was simply a pawn fulfilling his role is an unanswerable question that reaches to the very heart of the Christian religion. Anne Wroe has researched this study of an elusive man thoroughly and come up with an engaging book that explores every aspect of the man that can be discerned from the historical record, together with the layers of myth and legend, interpretation and judgement that have been laid down on top for the 2,000 years since. —Alisdair Bowles

Terry Brooks In 1977, Terry Brooks debut The Sword of Shannarabecame a surprise bestseller, launching one of the most popular series in all fantasy fiction. Apart from the ongoing Shannara saga and his later "Magic Kingdoms" sequence, Terry Brooks has written the novelisation of Star Wars: Episode 1 The Phantom Menace, and the "Demon" contemporary fantasy trilogy. Following Running With the Demonand A Knight of the Word, Angel Fire Eastis the finale, and while the books do stand alone there is greater enjoyment to be had by reading trilogy complete.

It is 10 years after the events depicted in the previous volume, and again the world is pitched between the Word and the Void. Over the week leading to Christmas Day John Ross (who in his dreams lives the hellish future struggles to prevent them becoming real) and Nest Freemark (who can see the Feeders, supernatural creatures sustained by human emotions) are going to fight their most deadly supernatural battle. Beautifully written and at times very moving, this is a considerably darker sequence than the Shannara books, and will appeal to fans of Clive Barker's Imagicaand Stephen King's Needful Things. With strong characterisation, a twisting plot and a real sense of dread and danger generating suspense and excitement, Angel Fire Eastcan be taken as a gripping battle between good and evil, or even as a powerful Christian allegory in the classic tradition of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. —Gary S. Dalkin

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman Yoshitaka Amano When, in 1996, Neil Gaiman laid his acclaimed Sandman series to rest after seven extraordinarily successful years, the fans lamented. And with good reason: its influence on the comic book industry was immeasurable; the harbinger of a renewed literary acceptance for the medium. Gaiman had expertly fashioned a vivid Gothic fantasy world that mixed the majesty of folklore with the horrors of modern life. The rich tapestry of stories that unfolded focused on a lonely Byronic figure called Morpheus, ruler of the amorphous world of our dreams. With The Dream Hunters, fans can rejoice as Gaiman returns to his signature work with a haunting fable of love, devotion and betrayal set in Ancient Japan. A lone monk spends his days tending to his temple garden, when he meets a Fox, a beautiful woman in human form, who becomes trapped within the monk's dreams. To save her, the monk must travel to the Realm of the Sandman and face a terrible choice between love and death. Meanwhile, a sinister magician makes nefarious plans against the pair to achieve his heart's desire. On this occasion, Gaiman's evocative prose is paired with the ethereally beautiful paintings of Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano. And what a pairing it is; this is a prime example of creative symbiosis if ever there was one. True, the story is slight, but Gaiman weaves his own magic of letting simplicity harbour a wondrous complexity that lurks in the background, wonderfully rendered by Amano. Fans will be delighted by this comeback, while others can be captivated by Gaiman's assurance that popular culture cannot displace old-fashioned tales of magic and wonder. —Danny Graydon

Hy Bender

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman Marc Hempel

Alan Moore Dave Gibbons Has any comic been as lauded as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons'Watchmen? Possibly only Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returnsbut Watchmenremains the critics' favourite. Why? Because Moore is a better writer, and Watchmena more complex and dark and literate creation than Miller's fantastic, subversive take on the Batman myth. Moore, renowned for many other of the genre's finest creations (Saga of the Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and recently From Hell, with Eddie Campbell) first put out Watchmenin 12 issues for DC in 1986-87. It won a comic award at the time (the 1987 Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards for Best Writer/Artist combination) and has continued to garner praise since.

The story concerns a group called the Crimebusters and a plot to kill and discredit them. Moore's characterisation is as sophisticated as any novel's. Importantly the costumes do not get in the way of the storytelling, rather they allow Moore to investigate issues of power and control—indeed it was Watchmen, and to a lesser extent Dark Knight, that propelled the comic genre forward, making "adult" comics a reality. The artwork of Gibbons (best known for 2000AD's Rogue Trooperand DC's Green Lantern) is very fine too, echoing Moore's paranoid mood perfectly throughout. Packed with symbolism, some of the overlying themes (arms control, nuclear threat, vigilantes) have dated but the intelligent social and political commentary, the structure of the story itself, its intertextuality (chapters appended with excerpts from other "works" and "studies" on Moore's characters, or with excerpts from another comic book being read by a child within the story), the fine pace of the writing and its humanity mean that Watchmenmore than stands up—it retains its crown as the best the genre has yet produced. —Mark Thwaite

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman There is a way into Faerie, beyond the fields we know, and it lies in a village called Wall, somewhere in the early Victorian era. Every nine years there is a fair on the other side of the wall, where Faerie sells its wares to the mundane. Farmer Duncan Thorne had his moment of mad love with a witch's bondservant; Tristan, his son, turned up in a basket nine months later. Now Tristan is old enough to fall in love, and promises Victoria a falling star... This is a fairy story in the tradition of George MacDonald and Hope Mirlees; a book of passion and terror and wit which reminds us that Faerie is not a safe place, or a fair one. And at its edges there lurk other stories—Neil Gaiman's work in comics and television has previously shown his capacity to evoke mystery and glorious magic by telling us just enough and no more, but he excels himself here. Charles Vess's illustrations, (Vess collaborated with Gaiman on key episodes of The Sandman), have charm and occasionally more—the stars dance, Pan looms from the forest, a witch queen rides a chariot driven by goats and Tristan journeys by candlelight leagues at a step. —Roz Kaveney

Neil Gaiman

Caitlin R. Kiernan Jeff Nicholson

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman "Wake up, sir. We're here". It's a simple enough opening line—although not many would have guessed back in 1991 that this would lead to one of the most popular and critically acclaimed comics of the second half of the century.

In Preludes and Nocturnes, Neil Gaiman weaves the story of a man interested in capturing the physical manifestation of Death but who instead captures the King of Dreams. By Gaiman's own admission there's a lot in this first collection that is awkward and ungainly—which is not to say there are not frequent moments of greatness here. The chapter "24 Hours" is worth the price of the book alone; it stands as one of the most chilling examples of horror in comics. And let's not underestimate Gaiman's achievement of personifying Death as a perky, overly cheery, cute goth girl! All in all, there is a roguish breaking of new ground in this book which is preferable to the often dull precision of the concluding volumes of the Sandman series. —Jim Pascoe

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman Within just a few pages of Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods, he commandingly reveals that he is at his considerable best with this disturbing and dark journey into the hidden soul of America. Gaiman, one of the most talented and imaginative writers at work today, achieved nigh-legendary status with his comic Sandman, which took the genre to heights that even the equally talented Alan Moore had not attained; Gaiman's subsequent career as a novelist has displayed the same glittering inventiveness and exquisite use of language.

Gaiman's protagonist Shadow has patiently done his time in prison. But as the moment of his release approaches, he begins to sense that some unnamed disaster is lying in wait for him. As he makes his way home, he encounters the mysterious Mr Wednesday, who appears to be both a refugee from a distant country at war and the King of America. And perhaps even a god. As Shadow and Mr Wednesday begin a bizarre odyssey across the United States, solving murders is only one of their accomplishments. With an epic storm of supernatural origin brewing, one questions whether they will be destroyed before Shadow pays the price for grim mistakes in his past.

The use of language here is impeccable, and it is wedded to a surreal narrative that brings out the most quirky and unsettling aspects of Gaiman's imagination. Forget Gaiman the Guru: just enjoy Gaiman the consummate writer:

He opened his mouth to catch the rain as it fell, moistening his cracked lips and his dry tongue, wetting the ropes that bound him to the trunk of the tree. There was a flash of lightning so bright it fell like a blow to his eyes, transforming the world into an intense panorama of image and after-image. The wind tugged at Shadow, trying to pull him from the tree, flaying him, cutting to the bone. Shadow knew in his soul that the real storm had truly begun...

—Barry Forshaw

Neil Gaiman

Balfour

David Berger Bruce Jackson There's "fooling" and there's "Fooling" and confusing the two could seriously damage your wealth. A "fool" trusts his money to the "wise men" of finance— governments, advisors, pensions companies—the monetary equivalent of cleaning the electric mower with the plug attached. For the "Fool", the cut-and-thrust comes from a sensible dose of knowledge and independence.

Following hot on the heels of the best selling Motley Fool UK Investment Guide, the Investment Workbookturns strategy into action with a series of examples, exercises and cases studies designed to transform you into the Sultan of stocks and the Maharaja of the markets. At very least, the nuts-and-bolts approach will help you get the fundamentals right. "What we're trying to do in this book is to give an everyday basis to the whole business of investing, to make it a bit less like consulting a soothsayer, a bit less of a mystical and unknowable undertaking, and bring it down to more concrete levels."

They succeed too, with information and challenges which will help the beginner and upwards take personal control, invest successfully and plan for the long-term financial future. The interactive A4 format imparts a school homework atmosphere (well, "you bought a workbook and you want your money's worth") but the tasks here have altogether more tangible benefits. With the Fool's inimitable style, industrious hours will fly by. What the subject lacks in thrills, the authors are happy to supply on the side;"It was not uncommon during World War 1 for men in trenches suddenly to fall asleep when the whistle which signalled they had to mount a suicidal attack against heavily defended enemy positions was blown. It was a kind of psychological defence, a mental withdrawal, in the face of an utterly horrific experience which no human being should have to suffer." Symptoms commonly linked to the appearance of your average investment book, they say.

The UK Investment Workbookchanges all that. It is insightful, constructive and fun—all practised well within recommended safety standards. The Fools have once again blown the whistle on investment waffle. —Iain Campbell

John Rothchild

Jean De La Fontaine

Jonathon Porritt

Jack Tottle

Reader's Digest

Peter Mark Roget, M.D., F.R.S.

Dale Carnegie

Chris Anderson

Patricia B. Seybold Lots of books have been written about how to do business on the Internet, but few can match the understanding and passion for making e-commerce work of Patricia Seybold's Customers.com. Drawing on case studies of companies and organizations as diverse as Boeing, Babson College, National Semiconductor, Hertz, PhotoDisc, and Wells Fargo, Seybold identifies what makes e-commerce work successfully. She argues that any e-commerce initiative has to begin with the customer. She writes:

In the electronic commerce world, knowing who your customers are and making sure you have the products and services they want becomes even more imperative than it is in the "real" world.... The corner grocery needs only to approximate what customers really want because the convenience factor brings in the business. But when you eliminate this advantage—when customers can go anywhere to get what they want—you—you'd better know what they're looking for.

The first section of the book outlines five steps aimed at any organisation grappling with the challenge of doing e-commerce right. The final section offers a technology roadmap and suggestions for getting e-commerce initiatives off the ground. But the heart of the book is the 16 case studies of companies that have successfully embraced e-business and e-commerce. Each is well researched, and includes an executive summary and "take-aways" about what each firm did right. If you're looking to develop your business online, this book belongs on your desk, not your bookshelf. Highly recommended. —Harry C. Edwards, Amazon.com

Frank Herbert

Nick Hornby In Nick Hornby's How To Be Good, Katie Carr is certainly trying to be. That's why she became a GP. That's why she cares about Third World debt and homelessness, and struggles to raise her children with a conscience. It's also why she puts up with her husband David, self-styled "Angriest Man in Holloway". But one fateful day, she finds herself in a Leeds car-park, having just slept with another man. What she doesn't yet realise is that her Fall from Grace is just the first step on a spiritual journey more torturous than the M25 at rush-hour. Because, prompted by his wife's actions, David is about to stop being Angry. He's about to become Good—not Guardian-reading, organic-food-eating good, but Good in the fashion of the Gospels. And that's no easier in modern-day Holloway than it was in ancient Israel.

Mr Hornby fires his central theme at us from the title page: how can we be good, and what does that mean? But, quite apart from demanding that his readers scrub their souls with the nearest available Brillo pad, he also mesmerises us with that cocktail of wit and compassion which has become his trademark. The result is a multi-faceted jewel of a book: a hilarious romp, a painstaking dissection of middle-class mores, and a powerfully sympathetic portrait of a marriage in its death throes. It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry as we watch David forcing his kids to give away their computers, drawing up schemes for the mass redistribution of wealth and inviting his wife's most desolate patients round for a Sunday roast. But that's because How To Be Goodmanages to be both brutally truthful and full of hope. It won't outsell the Bible, but it's a lot funnier. —Matthew Baylis

Stephan Bodian

John Humphrys John Humphrys has been a journalist since he left school at the age of 15. He is now one of the most respected broadcasters of his generation and his interviews on Radio Four's Todayprogramme are regarded by some as compulsive and compulsory listening. In his debut book, Devil's Advocate, he draws on 40 years of experience to look at the changes that have been happening in Britain and possible future scenarios. The first section of the book is devoted to what he calls "the shoulder-shrugging society" and he doesn't paint a very pretty picture. He argues that the British have lost the concept of shame—an excuse is always found if someone does something wrong; children are losing their innocence at an earlier age; people increasingly think of themselves as victims; they are terribly sentimental, confusing genuine caring with wearing a ribbon; and feeling good is the goal of modern life. So what is to blame for this appalling malaise? Humphrys believes it's "consumer populism"—everything being judged according to its commercial value. The situation is exacerbated by the media, which is also under commercial pressure, and becoming increasingly trivial in a bid to chase the ratings. He doesn't offer any quick-fix solutions to the problems, but encourages readers to dissent and keep questioning the accepted wisdom. This book is very strongly argued and there is plenty to agree and disagree with. It achieves exactly what Humphrys is famous for—stimulating debate. —Carina Trimingham

Steve Coomber Stuart Crainer Des Dearlove Stephen Coomber

Tim Hartnell

Mark Twain

John Pawson Annie Bell

Graham Linehan Arthur Mathews Lineham Graham

Louis V., Jr. Gerstner

Great Britain. Home Office

Matt Groening Viewers who acknowledge The Simpsonsas one of the best shows ever to hit television are doubtless already proud owners of The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family. But since the show is still in production, that guide is no longer complete. And can you really live a second longer without a full list of last season's blackboard inscriptions? Simpsonscreator Matt Groening and editor Scott M. Gimple come to the rescue with The Simpsons Forever! A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family—Continued. It's a complete listing of all the episodes of the ninth and tenth seasons, including screen shots, dialogue highlights (Moe, packing for Hawaii: "Ukulele, pineapples, beach pistol, scandalously revealing thong...") and "Stuff You May Have Missed" such as the fact that the motto of In 'n' Out Ear Piercing is "If It Dangles, We'll Punch a Hole in It". There are also brief bios of guest characters (Señor Ding Dong hates Chevy vans) song lyrics (Marge and Homer's version of "Those Were the Days") and a fond-without-being-icky tribute to Troy McClure. The truly obsessed will welcome the lists: every couch gag of the past two seasons, which actors do which voices, and every single time Homer has said "D'Oh!" for the past two years. The Simpsons Foreverdoes a terrific job of catching the humour and spirit of a truly great show. —Ali Davis, Amazon.com

Janet Fitch Astrid Magnussen, the teenage narrator of Janet Fitch's engrossing first novel, White Oleander, has a mother who is as sharp as a new knife. An uncompromising poet, Ingrid despises weakness and self- pity, telling her daughter that they are descendants of Vikings, savages who fought fiercely to survive. And when one of Ingrid's boyfriends abandons her, she illustrates her point, killing the man with the poison of oleander flowers. This leads to a life-sentence in prison, leaving Astrid to teach herself the art of survival in a string of Los Angeles foster homes.

As Astrid bumps from trailer park to tract house to Hollywood bungalow, White Oleander uncoils her existential anxieties. "Who was I, really?" she asks. "I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces." Fitch adroitly leads Astrid down a path of sorting out her past and identity. In the process, this girl develops a wire-tight inner strength, gains her mother's white-blonde beauty, and achieves some measure of control over their relationship. Even from prison, Ingrid tries to mould her daughter. Foiling her, Astrid learns about tenderness from one foster mother and how to stand up for herself from another. Like the weather in Los Angeles—the winds of the Santa Anas, the scorching heat—Astrid—Astrid's teenage life is intense. Fitch's novel deftly displays that, and also makes Astrid's life meaningful. —Katherine Anderson

Catherine Fox

James O'Barr

Barbara Strachey

Heiner Bastian Andy Warhol Retrospective, the huge National galerie Berlin and Tate Modern survey of the works of one of America's finest artists, Pop or otherwise, celebrates an enduring, too-often maligned creative force for whom 15 minutes of fame was never going to suffice. Split into "Early Drawings" and "Works 1960-1986", this bountiful exhibition catalogue, edited by curator Heiner Bastian who also contributes the volume's main essay, reproduces the Warhol oeuvre in rich detail, acknowledging the crucial role of colour in his work, which owed much to his years as a commercial artist.

A deeply superficial person by his own insistence, Warhol professedly concerned himself only with surface, and Donna De Salvo follows his advice in writing of his skills as a painter, shrewdly singling out the "after-image" aspect to his work. A third essay traces Warhol's similarities with Goya, while perhaps the best of the pieces, a short, unfussy study by Kirk Varnedoe, details the history of the infamous 32 Campbell's soup cans, created in 1962. Like the cans' reduced contents, Warhol's work was often highly condensed, then replicated until it assumed the proportions he required of it. In the same way, to see in either a gallery or a catalogue so many of his works is to experience a unifying sense of horror and beauty. In addition, it brings to mind not only his own influences, such as Klee, Rauschenberg, Cocteau (particularly in his early portraits of Truman Capote and James Dean), Duchamp and Grosz, but also to those who've subsequently drawn so heavily on his Pop imagery, particularly British artists like Jamie Reid and Damien Hirst.

Though defiantly anti-metaphorical, he fetishised the staples of American life, and as a lover of its icons—Coca Cola, refrigerators, Elvis, Marilyn, Jackie Kennedy, the electric chair, his own lifelong habit of self-portraiture and those soup cans—inevitably he became one. With its emphasis firmly on the pictures, this catalogue bears lavish witness to a productive vision and brilliant body of work that will only continue to grow in stature with every repetitive viewing. —David Vincent

E.E. 'Doc' Smith

P.G. Wodehouse

P.G. Wodehouse

Stephen R. Covey A.Roger Merrill

James F. Fixx

Acclaimed writer and editor Robert Silverberg gathered 11 of the finest writers in fantasy to contribute to this collection of short novels. Each of the writers was asked to write a new story based on one of his or her most famous series, and the results are wonderful. From Stephen King's opening piece set in his popular Gunslinger universe to Robert Jordan's early look at his famed Wheel of Time saga, each of these stories is exceptionally well written and universally well told. The authors here include King, Jordan, and Silverberg himself, as well as Terry and Lyn Pratchett, Terry Goodkind, Orson Scott Card, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tad Williams, George R.R. Martin, Anne McCaffrey, and Raymond E. Feist. This is not only a great book in and of itself, but it's also a perfect way for fantasy fans to find new novels and authors to add to their "to read" lists. — Craig E. Engler

Lisa McInnes Daniel Johnson Winston Marsh

Philip Pullman Philip Pullman brings The Amber Spyglassto the spellbinding His Dark Materialssequence, which dazzles everyone who reads it, children and adults alike. After the original Northern Lights, he kept up the quality in The Subtle Knife, the second title in the trilogy. Now he brings the series to an extraordinary conclusion. Will and Lyra, the two children at the heart of the books, have become separated amidst great dangers. Can they find each other, and their friends? Then complete their mysterious quest before it's too late? The great rebellion against the dark powers that hold Lyra's world, and many others, in thrall is nearing its climax. She and Will have crucial parts to play, but they don't know what it is that they must do, and terrible powers are hunting them down.

The pace of the book is compelling, the writing powerful. Pullman's plotting is intricate and cunning, surprising the reader again and again. Perhaps what is most striking of all, however, is the depth of the characterisation. Lord Asriel, Mrs Coulter, Iorek Byrnison the king of the armoured bears, a host of minor characters, most of all Will and Lyra themselves: the book is a library of beautifully drawn, remarkably convincing characters walking in worlds of marvels.

In this volume the cosmic dimensions of the story become more prominent, as a great conflict across many universes comes to a head—how well the narrative sustains such immensely weighty resonances is a question critics may well disagree on. The author's beliefs also come more into the open, and with them a polemic anti-religious theme that will please some readers and alienate others.

Philip Pullman's writing commands immense respect; more than that, it is raising the profile of the best children's books among adults, as demanding critics of all ages fall in love with this remarkable trilogy. —David Pickering

Philip Pullman At the end of The Northern Lights, Lyra Silvertongue watched in fear and fascination as her father, Lord Asriel, created a bridge between worlds. Lyra and her daemon, Pantalaimon, are now lost in an alternate universe where they meet Will Parry, a fugitive from a third universe. Will has found a small window between Cittagazze (a place where children roam unchecked but invisible Specters suck the spirit out of adults) and his Oxford, which, with its Burger Kings and cars, is frighteningly different from the Oxford Lyra knows.

Will's father, an explorer, disappeared years ago, but recently some odd characters have started asking questions about him, and now, having accidentally killed one of them, Will is wanted by the police. Armed with the Subtle Knife, a tool that cuts any material (including that which separates universes) and Lyra's alethiometer, the children set out to find John Parry, with adults of various stripes in desperate pursuit.

Lyra's finest qualities, her courage and quick mind, are stretched to the limit as she has to lie, cheat and steal to keep herself and Will out of danger. However, she must also learn when to tell the truth and when to trust, for, though she does not yet know it, she has a huge part to play in the upcoming battle between Good and Evil.

Stephen R Covey The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Changewas a groundbreaker when it was first published in 1990, and it continues to be a business bestseller, with more than 10 million copies sold. Stephen Covey, an internationally respected leadership authority, realizes that true success encompasses a balance of personal and professional effectiveness, so this book is a manual for performing better in both arenas. His anecdotes are as frequently from family situations as from business challenges.

Before you can adopt the seven habits, you'll need to accomplish what Covey calls a "paradigm shift"—a change in perception and interpretation of how the world works. Covey takes you through this change, which affects how you perceive and act regarding productivity, time management, positive thinking, developing your "proactive muscles" (acting with initiative rather than reacting) and much more.

This isn't a quick-tips-start-tomorrow kind of book. The concepts are sometimes intricate, and you'll want to study this book, not skim it. When you finish, you'll probably have Post-it notes or hand-written annotations in every chapter, and you'll feel like you've taken a powerful seminar by Covey. —Joan Price

Linda Smith

Stephen R. Covey

Stephen R. Covey

Hyrum W. Smith

Myles Downey

Graham Linehan Arthur Mathews

P.G. Wodehouse

Thomas J. Leonard

Kim Stanley Robinson In the near future Wade Norton has been sent to Antarctica by Senator Phil Chase to investigate rumours of environmental sabotage. He arrives on the frozen continent and immediately begins making contact with the various scientific and political factions that comprise Antarctic society. What he finds is an interesting and diverse mix of inhabitants who don't always mesh well but who all share a common love of Antarctica and a fierce devotion to their life there. He also begins to uncover layers of Antarctic culture that have been kept hidden from the rest of the world, some of which are dangerous indeed. Events are brought to a head when the saboteurs—or "ecoteurs" as they call themselves- -launch an attack designed to drive humans off the face of Antarctica. This is Kim Stanley Robinson's first book since his award-winning Marstrilogy, and while some of the themes may be familiar to seasoned Robinson readers the book is never less than engrossing. As usual Robinson does a masterful job with the setting of his story, and anyone interested in Antarctica won't want to miss this one. —Craig Engler, Amazon.com

George Orwell

Adrian Plass

Debra Schepp Brad Schepp

Juanita Ellis Steffano Korper What started as a curio, exclusive property of the IT-initiated and the technologically hip, is now a bona fidemainstream revolution embraced by prime ministers, pornographers and poets. And in there, deep in the engine room is business, buying in and getting bullish. Where would the modern manager be without an "e-commerce solution?" Problem is, the expertise that built the bricks-and-mortar business doesn't translate to success in the Internet gold rush. Half-term report for traditional businesses: "What your company lacks in e-skill, it makes up for in e-nthusiasm." Must try harder boys and girls.

The E-Commerce Bookis a paper-and-ink-solution but don't let that put you off, it promises to transform buy-in and bullishness into results. Korper and Ellis set out their stall early on, their goal "to give each reader the right tools to jump head-first into the pool of e-commerce and to find it comfortable and deep with opportunity." What you get is a thorough, no-nonsense guide to launching and maintaining a business on the Internet covering all points from sales and marketing to technology and architecture, stopping at globalisation and off-the-shelf e-commerce solutions along the way.

Refreshingly for the hyped and happening world of e-commerce, the authors make no dramatic claims—it isn't going to be easy, but with ambition, creativity and access to the right information (i.e. this book), it's possible to do e-business with the best of them. And if you're late, don't worry. "The Internet's extraordinary youth means its earnings potential has no apparent ceiling", they say. "Plenty of room still exists for pioneers to enjoy similar e-commerce success." The text is aimed squarely at businesses and the language and aspirations resound to an accessible commercial rhythm—variations on the phrase, "the beauty of electronic commerce is that when you do one thing right, you get paid over and over," are still in the count.

Age often takes second place to youth in adapting to technology and ideas—think of those organisations using pre-teen business advisors. With the help of The E-Commerce Bookyour company could soon be surfing with the little boys. —Iain Campbell

P.G. Wodehouse

Simson Garfinkel

Mike Loukides The second edition of System Performance Tuningoffers advice on where to look for bottlenecks in applications—both local and networked—that run under Unix. It also offers advice on provisioning new systems, which is to say it offers advice on deciding how much computing power is enough for a new system to be implemented.

The easy way to solve a performance problem—and the one to which hardware manufacturers love to call attention—is to apply more horsepower to the application in question. It's safe to bet that a server upgrade will speed things up. True information technology professionals, however, won't take the easy way out when dealing with an increased workload for older systems. They'll do their best to wring top performance (with required reliability) from existing hardware, thus improving their organisations' return on capital investment and demonstrating their own engineering skills.

Emphasising Solaris 8 and, to a lesser extent, Linux, the new version of this book represents a significant revision (the first came out in 1990, and was obsolete). There's coverage of advances in hardware—multiple processors, RAID storage, faster and cheaper memory and networked devices—as well as consideration of changes in the demands placed on machines (after all, few people were concerned about Web server performance in 1990). Administrators will get plenty of value from the authors' discussion of what goes on during, for example, a series of large store-to-disk operations, and be better able to optimise their systems. —David Wall

Topics covered:how to get top performance from computer systems (those running Linux and especially Sun Solaris 8) without adding processor capacity, memory and other resources at potentially great expense. The authors explain the ways in which operating systems and applications use processors, memory, persistent storage and networks, and point out potential bottlenecks. They also show how to use tools—such as execution timers—that you can use to benchmark performance changes.

Ben Laurie Peter Laurie Now in it's second edition, Apache: The Definitive Guideis a revised and improved tome which has been expanded to cover the Win32 and Unix flavours of the Apache server. Counting a member of the Apache development team as one of its authors, the new edition deals with server versions up to (and including) 1.3 giving detail on how to get hold of the source code (not necessary for the Win32 variant), compile it and latterly configure for authorisation and security.

However, getting the server up and running is one thing, administering it is quite another. Happily, the authors provide many pages of detail on subjects including setting up virtual servers, dealing with MIME types, proxies, server- side includes and more in a way which is informative, yet not too heavy on the brain. It has to be said that there's an overriding feeling the book leans towards the UNIX side of things but this in no way impedes the usefulness of the book—a big improvement on the first edition. Just for good measure a reference card containing all the information you'll ever need to know is included, together with a bonus CD containing all of the files necessary to mount Apache 1.3.3 on a Windows of Unix machine. All in all, pretty fine value for web admins and the web curious.

Michael S. Toot Mike Wooldridge

Carey Bunks The excitement described by Carey Bunks when he first beheld the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) in 1996 is palpable when you hold Bunks' new book in your hands. The phantasmagoric image on the cover of Grokking the GIMP: Advanced Techniques for Working with Digital Imagesmelds a photograph of the moon's surface from a high orbit with an apparent solar eclipse by the earth. A penguin floats discretely in a hot air balloon between sun, earth and moon. Is the sun-moon-earth image a bit of the penguin's imagination? Is it a piece of GIMP artist/developer Tuomas Kuosmanen's imagination? Maybe it is really a credit to the visionaries at New Riders who have produced an art book to suit the computer how-to market.

"Grokking" is a Robert Heinlein-ism for "appreciating", and docent Bunks takes us through the museum of computer art and method as he demonstrates the features of the freely-redistributable package. The contents follow that path set down by many other how-to tech book authors: tutorial, a taste of image theory, working with the independent features of GIMP (layers, selections, masks and colourspaces) before advancing to compositing and rendering, and ending with short reviews of web-based applications of image manipulation.

The book's strengths are Bunks' obvious passion for his subject, his mature didactic style, and the wonderfully spacious design and breathtaking colour-on-every-page strategy that allows him to beautifully frame GIMP features at their best. The most notable of his many case studies is the "Panorama" project that glues a series of laterally overlapping narrow-view photographs of an architecturally interesting room into a single, stunning wide-angle panorama of the whole. Bunks documents each step in the transformation and describes the required geometrical, hue and brightness adjustments needed to warp and blend them together.

Look again at the cover, but not literally. Ignore the unphysical details. Rather imagine the mind's capacity for juxtaposition and GIMP's power for actualising this visual synthesis. In form and content, Bunks and New Riders have shown that the possibilities for the tech book are far broader than previously imagined. This is an eye-opening contribution, indeed. —Peter Leopold, amazon.com

Dave Morris Matt Kelland Dave Lloyd

Charles Koppelman

Connie Smith

Rachel Pollack

Laurence G. Boldt

Bryan Costales Eric Allman

Simson Garfinkel Gene Spafford

D Libes

Simson Garfinkel Gene Spafford Practical Unix & Internet Securityis on its second edition, and its maturity shows. To call this highly readable book comprehensive is an understatement. The breadth is vast, from fundamentals (definitions of computer security; the history of Unix) and commonsense but little-observed security basics (making backups; physical and personnel security; buggy software) to modern software (NFS, WWW, firewalls) and the handling of security incidents. The section on users and passwords alone is 21 pages long—and worth every page. Useful appendices include a Unix security checklist, a list of emergency response organisations, and many references to electronic and paper resources.

The Internet covers too much and moves too quickly for any book to cover every security aspect of every piece of software, but this book comes close. More importantly, it gives you an exceptional grounding in the fundamental issues of security and teaches the right questions to ask—something that will stay with you long after today's software is obsolete. —Jake Bond

Lisa Bucki

Nigel ,Dr. Chapman

Maurice J. Bach

Julie Starr

Larry Wall Randal L. Schwartz Tom Christiansen Larry Wall wrote Perl and he wrote Programming Perl. Better yet, he writes amusingly and well—all of which comes across in this latest edition of the definitive guide to the language.

Like Topsy, Perl just grew, and as a result so has Programming Perl. It's now over 1,000 pages but needs to be as it does several different jobs. Firstly, it's an introduction to the Perl language for those new to programming. It's a guide for those coming from other languages and it's a Perl language reference.

Larry Wall is a linguist, among his other interests, and perhaps for this reason Perl is a peculiarly flexible language with many routes to achieving the same ends, as the authors ably demonstrate. It's also extensible in several ways, designed to work with many other languages and, as it's largely interpreted, Perl programs tend to run unmodified on a variety of platforms—though platform-specific Perl modules and programming practices are also discussed.

A major strength of Programming Perlis the way subject areas are approached from several directions. This constant viewpoint-shifting eliminates blind spots in the reader's understanding as well as providing a pleasing echo of the way Perl itself can take many routes from here to there.

Because the Perl community is both knowledgeable and active the language covers a lot more ground than it did at the time the last edition of Programming Perlwas published. Even if you have both previous editions you'll want this latest version—if only for the new jokes. —Steve Patient

Jeffrey E.F. Friedl Regular expressions—it sounds fairly ordinary in a regular sort of way, so therefore it must be very simple and very straightforward, right? Not quite.

The simple name hides an incredible amount of power when handling textual data with scripting languages such as Perl, Python and awk and more and the programmer that can master regular expressions can master just about anything.

From the off it's necessary to congratulate author Jeffrey Friedl on doing a superb job of asking what can be a very complex subject and breaking it down into digestible chunks that almost anyone can understand.

From the basics of character and pattern matching through to the recognition of complex string patterns and multiple character replacements to "greedy" metacharacters and how to curb their appetite, this is about as comprehensive as it gets.

With a handful of latter chapters devoted to the differences between scripting languages and the way in which they deal with regular expressions and so many examples it'll make your eyes water there's something here for everyone.

So, if you can examine a string like this "(\\.|[^"\\])*" and know what it does and how it does it there's plenty of reference material in here for those odd moments when you need a refresher. If, however, you've no idea what the above means, and you need the ability to handle textual data, buy this book. Now!

Johan Vromans

Sriram Srinivasan

Sir John Whitmore

D Pogue

Scott Meyers This exceptionally useful text offers Scott Myers's expertise in C++ class design and programming tips. The second edition incorporates recent advances to C++ included in the ISO standard, including namespaces and built-in template classes, and is required reading for any working C++ developer.

The book opens with some hints for porting code from C to C++ and then moves on to the proper use of the newand deleteoperators in C++ for more robust memory management. The text then proceeds to class design, including the proper use of constructors, destructors, and overloaded operator functions for assignment within classes. (These guidelines ensure that you will create custom C++ classes that are fully functional data types, which can be copied and assigned just like built- in C++ classes.)

The author also provides a handful of suggestions for general class design, including strategies for using different types of inheritance and encapsulation. Never doctrinaire and always intelligent, these guidelines can make your C++ classes more robust and easier to maintain. —Richard Dragan, Amazon.com

Bjarne Stroustrup In this third edition of The C++ Programming Language, author Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, presents the full specification for the C++ language and standard library, a spec that will soon become the joint ISO/ANSI C++ standard.

Past readers will find that the new edition has changed a great deal and grown considerably to encompass new language features, particularly run-time type identification, namespaces, and the standard library. At the same time, readers will recognise the lucid style and sensible advice that made previous editions so readable and enjoyable. Probably the biggest change is a substantial new section, well over 200 pages in length, covering the contents and design of the C++ standard library, the most important new feature of the C++ specification. The author has also added a substantial number of new exercises while keeping many from previous editions that have retained their value.

While The C++ Programming Languageis not a C++ tutorial, strictly speaking, anyone learning the language, especially those coming from C, will greatly benefit from the clear presentation of all its elements. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this book for anyone who is serious about using C++. —Jake Bond

Maureen O'Hagan Maureen Smith

David A. Whitsett Forrest A. Dolgener Tanjala Jo Kole

Anne Rice

Terry Brooks

Neil Gaiman

Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson Quicksilveris a massive, exuberant and wildly ambitious historical novel that's also Neal Stephenson's eagerly awaited prequel to Cryptonomicon—his pyrotechnic reworking of the 20th century, from World War II codebreaking and disinformation to the latest issues of Internet data privacy.

Quicksilver, "Volume One of the Baroque Cycle", backtracks to another time of high intellectual ferment: the late 17th century, with the natural philosophers of England's newly formed Royal Society questioning the universe and dissecting everything that moves. One founding member, the Rev John Wilkins, really did write science fiction and a book on cryptography—but this isn't history as we know it, for here his code book is called not Mercurybut Cryptonomicon. And although the key political schemers of Charles II's government still have initials spelling the word CABAL, their names are all different...

While towering geniuses like Newton and Leibniz decode nature itself, bizarre adventures (merely beginning with the Great Plague and Great Fire) happen to the fictional Royal Society member Daniel Waterhouse, who knows everyone but isn't quite bright enough for cutting-edge science. Two generations of Daniel's family appear in Cryptonomicon, as does a descendant of the Shaftoes who here are soldiers and vagabonds. Other links include the island realm of Qwghlm with its impossible language and the mysterious, seemingly ageless alchemist Enoch Root.

As the reign of Charles II gives way to that of James II and then William of Orange, Stephenson traces the complex lines of finance and power that form the 17th-century Internet. Gold and silver, lead and (repeatedly) mercury or quicksilver flow in glittering patterns between centres of marketing and intrigue in England, Germany, France and Holland. Paper flows as well: stocks, shares, scams and letters holding layers of concealed code messages. Binary code? Yes, even that had already been invented and described by Francis Bacon.

Quicksilveris crammed with unexpected incidents, fascinating digressions and deep-laid plots. Who'd believe that Eliza, a Qwghlmian slave girl liberated from a Turkish harem by mad Jack Shaftoe (King of the Vagabonds) could become a major player in European finance and politics? Still less believable, but all too historically authentic, are the appalling medical procedures of the time—about which we learn a lot. There are frequent passages of high comedy, like the lengthy description of a foppish earl's costume which memorably explains that someone seemed to have been painted in glue before "shaking and rolling him in a bin containing thousands of black silk doilies".

This is a huge, exhausting read, full of rewards and quirky insights that no other author could have created. Fantastic or farcical episodes sometimes clash strangely with the deep cruelty and suffering of 17th-century realism. Recommended, though not to the faint-hearted. —David Langford

Neal Stephenson

Scott Adams

Scott Adams

Scott Adams

Scott Adams

Scott Adams

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Scott Adams

Scott Adams

Scott Adams

Scott Adams

Scott Adams

Scott Adams

Scott Adams

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Scott Adams

Scott Adams

Scott Adams

Scott Adams This book is freedom for those who feel imprisoned in a cubicle. Called "the cartoon hero of the workplace" by the San Francisco Examiner, Dilbert is revered by technology and computer workers, engineers, white-collar types, scientists and everyone who works these days (in cubicles or not). This collection captures it all, from clueless management decrees to near revolts among the cubicly confined.

Robin Hobb The Golden Fool, the second volume of Robin Hobb's Tawny Man trilogy, is explicitly a sequel to both the Farseer and Liveship trilogies. The palace intrigues, which Fitz has found himself dragged back into, have as much to do with the politics of trade and conquest—the war between the Bingtown traders and their living ships and the theocratic bullies of Chalced—as with the oppression of the beast-speaking Witted by the majority and the terrorism of the Piebald faction among the Witted. Fitz has always been a deeply flawed hero—growing up as a royal bastard trained in assassination has not been good for his character—and his inability to understand how deeply he is loved upsets all the people around him.

One of Robin Hobb's strengths is her capacity to set up an interesting dialogue between metaphor and the literal; at both levels, The Golden Foolis a novel about moving through estrangement to reconciliation, about finding out the truth and then finding a way of living with it. This thoughtfulness means that, as always with Hobb, Fitz's role as tutor of a magically gifted prince, is as exciting as the book's occasional explosions of violence. —Roz Kaveney

Robin Hobb Fool's Fateconcludes Robin Hobb's fantasy trilogy "The Tawny Man"—in which Fitz, narrator-hero of the "Farseer" trio beginning with Assassin's Apprentice, plunges into new complexities of politics and magic 15 years later.

The goal is formal peace between Fitz's Six Duchies and the Outislander Raiders, ending a cycle of war fought with weapons that kill the soul, whose horror dominated that first trilogy. A royal marriage is arranged, with the puzzling condition that the Duchies' heir must bring a bride-price of the head of the last male dragon—who—who's alive but entombed in a glacier. Why?

Fitz's old friend the Fool, a once-albino who believes himself the White Prophet of this age but has mysteriously darkened into the Tawny Man, opposes this dragon-killing. It seems necessary to deceive and betray the Fool for his own good, if only to prevent his self-prophesied death.

Another betrayal: a halfwit master of the psychic "Skill" is needed for this mad quest, and must be lured by Fitz on to ship after ship despite his horror of the sea. Old deceptions return to haunt Fitz, such as the Skilled girl who doesn't know she's his daughter, and others long kept in the dark for what seemed excellent reasons.

Grim surprises, confrontations, a hidden enemy and the old horror of soul-draining ("Forging") all await on the island of the glacier and the dragon. Fitz has more than once been traumatically hauled back from death: now the risks are worse than ever, with an impasse that surely can't be resolved.

Do Fitz and his closest friends win through? That would be telling, but whatever happens, there are high prices to be paid. It's a measure of Robin Hobb's skill with characters and relationships that the final compromises and realistic settlements are so satisfying. Smoothly readable despite great length, laden with charm and terror, Fool's Fateis a fine ending to what is a family as well as a fantasy saga. —David Langford

Robin Hobb Robin Hobb's books combine heroic adventures by land and sea with a passionate urgency about the morality which underlies her character's deeds. Ship of Destiny, the third in The Liveship Traderstrilogy, involves us further with the efforts of the Vestrit family to reclaim the fortunes which war and piracy have cost them, raising interesting questions about the sources of even an attractive family's wealth. It is clear that the liveships Vivacia and Paragon were carved from husks which should have hatched dragons; that the attractive personalities of the figureheads are only pale shadows of the autonomous beings they might have been. Malta Vestrit has freed the last of the real dragons from an underground prison, and he is not especially grateful. The slave-liberating pirate Kennit, one of Hobb's richest creations, is ever more drawn to the darker side of his flawed nature in an attempt to hide from the secrets of his past.

This is one of the most satisfying heroic fantasies of recent years, simply because it is about difficult choices and complex emotions, while Hobb's tight plotting and fast-moving storytelling are fascinating in their own right.—Roz Kaveney

Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb High heroic fantasy has rarely paid enough attention to ships and sailors, the lifeblood, after all, of trade and survival in a non-technological world. In her Liveship Traders series, Robin Hobb more than makes up for this with a sequence in which economic survival is the principal objective of the merchant family, the Vestrits, who provide most of her viewpoint characters. The Mad Shiptakes up their adventures where Ship of Magicleft off, with young would-be priest Wintrow the captive of the pirate Kennit and bonded to the living figurehead of the family ship Vivacia; and his sister Malta caught up in the affairs of the changeling traders of the Rain Wild. Their aunt Althea, who feels she should have had command of Vivacia, is off having adventures as a sailor, and the mysterious Amber is trying to heal and repair the shattered mad hulk Paragon, who killed his crew and lies abandoned in the sand dunes. All this and war and conspiracy too—Hobb gives us a rich portrait of a world and a family in turmoil and raises some interesting questions about what it is to be used and make use of. —Roz Kaveney

Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb In Fool's Errand, first of the "Tawny Man" trilogy, Robin Hobb brings back Fitz, hero of her emotionally powerful and intrigue-filled Assassin trilogy, from 15 years of self-imposed exile from his royal relations and from the world of power. Hobb is particularly good at the passage of time and the things it does not change; Fitz plausibly thinks of himself as older and more settled than he actually is. She is also good on the actual changes—Fitz—Fitz's mentor Chade is teetering on the brink of old age and his androgynous ally the Fool has returned to court as the fop Lord Gallant; these are characters we cared about before and she makes it matter that they have aged or altered. Fitz is bonded by Wit to a wolf; the heir, Prince Dutiful, the son he never saw, is adrift with his own Wit in a world where people get lynched for it. Hobb's leisurely story-telling never lacks urgency and menace; this is a humane book which includes nightmarish touches along the way. Her sense of the world of magic and the world of political power is acute—she makes us see more than her flawed hero, even though we share his eyes.—Roz Kaveney

Robin Hobb Robin Hobb, author of the Farseer trilogy, has returned to that world for a new series. Ship of Magicis a sea tale, reminiscent of Moby Dickand Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series in its details of shipboard life. It is also a fantasy adventure with sea serpents, pirates and all sorts of magic. The "liveships" have distinct personalities and partner with specific people, somewhat like Anne McCaffrey's Brain ships and their Brawns, though these are trading ships and have full crews.

Hobb has peopled the book with many wonderfully developed characters. Most of the primary ones are members of the Vestritts, an Old Trader family which owns the liveship Vivacia. Their stories are intercut with those of Kennit, the ambitious pirate Brashen, the disinherited scion of another family who served on the Vestritt's ship, and Paragon, an abandoned old liveship believed to be insane. The sentient sea serpents have their own story which is hinted at as well.

Though Ship of Magicis full of action, none of the plot lines is resolved in this book. Readers who resent being left with many questions and few answers after almost 700 pages should think twice before starting, or wait until the rest of the series is out so that their suspense won't be too prolonged. But Hobb's writing draws you in and makes you care desperately about what will happen next, the mark of a terrific storyteller. —Nona Vero

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Neal Stephenson Frederick George

Neal Stephenson From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city states, and the Internet—incarnate as the Metaverse—looks something like last year's hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist—hacker, samurai swordsman and pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century novel, Snow Crashinterweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a whole lot more fun, Snow Crashis the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be plausible. —Acton Lane

Neal Stephenson Decades into the future, near the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neo-Victorians, by making an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer". Seattle Weeklycalled Stephenson's Snow Crash"The most influential book since ... Neuromancer."

Iain Banks

Susan Howatch

Susan Howatch

Susan Howatch

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Iain M. Banks Science fiction readers know that Iain Banks writes "respectable" novels (such as The Wasp Factory) while his alter ego Iain M. Banks produces equally well-written but often more playful sci-fi—most famously, the gaudy and galaxy- spanning Culture series. In Inversions, Banks is being tricky again. Besides extra moons in the sky and stories of devastating meteor showers that toppled a former Empire, this novel's squalid, preindustrial world seems to have no sci-fi elements. The two entwined stories feature a woman who becomes personal physician to one kingdom's absolute monarch, and the male bodyguard of a rival and more "progressive" country's Cromwell-like Protector. Both protagonists are mysterious outsiders from farther away than the King or Protector can ever imagine. Readers of Banks's other science fiction will spot the clues to their origins. Others may be slightly puzzled, especially by a seeming miracle which intervenes when the doctor faces torture—but can still enjoy the elegant narrative reversals, reflections and echoes. There are also generous helpings of blood, violence, poisoning, ingenious deceits and high excitement, spiced with political philosophy. Banks continues his pleasant habit of never repeating himself. —David Langford

Iain M. Banks When using that middle initial M., Iain Banks writes grand space opera combining galactic scope with twisty, tricky probes into the darkest secrets of human and other minds. Look to Windwardrevisits the utopian but ruthless interstellar Culture introduced in Consider Phlebas, exploring the complex aftermath of a rare Culture mistake—humanitarian tinkering with an unjust civilization that accidentally led to massive civil war and billions dead.

After a harrowing battle flashback, the scene shifts to one of the Culture's wonderfully landscaped, ring-shaped artificial worlds called Orbitals. A ghastly light is awaited in the sky from distant suns detonated in the war of Consider Phlebaseight centuries earlier; an occasion for sombre festivity, pyrotechnics, and a memorial symphony from exiled alien composer Ziller. Meanwhile another tortured member of Ziller's race—aggressors and victims in that more recent civil war—arrives on a mission whose dreadful nature emerges through fragments of slowly returning memory. Elsewhere, in the exuberantly imagined airsphere home of floating "behemothaurs" almost too huge to imagine, the clue to what's happening falls belatedly into inexperienced hands...

While scattering red herrings and building tension for his final burst of literal and moral fireworks, Banks shows us around the Orbital in sensuous, lyrical travelogues. Rich scenery, high living, low comedy and dangerous sports contrast with reflections on mortality and the lingering aftershock of both those wars, recalled by ravaged veterans. Look to Windwardculminates with deft twists, inversions, parallels, and savage justice, as unexpected as we expect from this author. Recommended. —David Langford

Iain Banks After the shock impact of the excellent The Wasp Factoryin 1984, Iain Banks' work has split along two lines. On the one hand, he has written a series of acclaimed science fiction novels (with a devoted following, their own fan magazine and inclusion of his middle initial); on the other hand, a number of diverse, and eclectic, forays into contemporary fiction (for example, the successful television adaption of The Crow Road).

The Businessis the `90s success story run riot. The eponymous organisation is ancient, rich and invisible. All it lacks is a certain political clout, something the Business has avoided for centuries but with which it is now beginning to toy. A seat in the UN is at stake as Kate Telman, Level 3 executive, is drawn into the (rather polite) machinations of her superiors. Those expecting John Grisham may be disappointed. No bad thing, perhaps: Kate's personal-professional life— there is, of course, no conflict here for the successful individual of the `90s—is the main concern. Banks' interest is in the moral debates about the position of the Business in a world it finds easy to manipulate, drawing the reader into a discussion of the place of the multi-national in contemporary economic and cultural life. "A lot of successful people are less hard-hearted than they like to think": is one view put forward, and not the only romantic but equivocal sentiment hiding somewhere in The Business.—John Shire

Iain Banks There's no question that the anticipation for each successive Iain Banks novel grows ever greater, and Dead Airis a literary event. The sardonic, inventive prose guarantees a unique reading experience with each new book (the misfires may be counted on one hand), and whatever genre he tackles, Banks is one of the most stimulating writers at work in Britain today.

His protagonist here is Ken Nott, a character as penetratingly realised as ever. He's a committed contrarian, ekeing out a living as a left-wing radio shock-jock in London. He makes his home in a loft apartment in the East End, in a former factory due to be demolished in a few days. After a wedding breakfast, people begin to pitch fruit from a balcony on to a deserted car park 10 storeys below; then they begin dispatching other things: a broken TV, a loudspeaker with a ruptured cone, bean bags and other useless furniture. Then the guests enter a kind of frenzy and start dropping things that are still working, at the same time trashing the rest of the apartment. But suddenly mobile phones start to ring urgently and they're told to turn on the TV, because a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center. And Ken Nott finds his life is to change irrevocably.

Banks's subject here is nothing less than the survival of the individual in the face of a chaotic world. The destruction of personality under the lacerating values of modernity is a subject repeatedly addressed by JG Ballard (and that author's shadow is clearly evident here), and although this is one of the Iain Banks novels in which he pointedly does not use the "M" in his name that marks his science fiction, this nightmare vision of contemporary London has more than a trace of that genre in its sense of fractured reality. But all the caustic humour and dark character development that Banks excels in are fully in place. —Barry Forshaw

Iain Banks Iain M. Banks paints a grim picture of a European nation after a bloody battle. Armed forces roam the lawless land where dark columns of smoke rise up from the surrounding farms and houses. For a young lord and lady, however, the trouble is only starting.

The couple are being kept captive in their home—a castle—by a sadistic female lieutenant from an outlaw band of guerillas. They are pawns in her dangerous game of desire, deceit, and death. The physical, sexual and political tensions that ensue catapult the narrative from war story to universal morality tale.

Susan Howatch

Susan Howatch