The definitive novel of today’s Silicon Valley, After On flash-captures our cultural and technological moment with up-to-the-instant savvy. Matters of privacy and government intrusion, post-Tinder romance, nihilistic terrorism, artificial consciousness, synthetic biology, and much more are tackled with authority and brash playfulness by New York Times bestselling author Rob Reid.Meet Phluttr—a diabolically addictive new social network and a villai...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERLow-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun show up at his office. But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling) extraterrestrials. The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on American pop songs ever since “Year Zero” (1977 to us), resulting in the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang and bankrupting the...

Home to Chicago's Polish Village, impressive examples of architecture, and the legendary Olson Waterfall, Avondale is often called "the neighborhood that built Chicago." Images of America: Avondale and Chicago's Polish Village sheds light on the little known history of the community, including its fascinating industrial past. From its beginnings as a sleepy subdivision started by a Michigan senator, it became a cultural mecca for Chicago's Polish community, playing a crucial role in Poland...

Reaching Reluctant Young Readers features 150 middle-grade books. Each profiled title has the potential to hook the reluctant reader and lure them to read the entire book. To specifically encourage elementary and middle-school-age reluctant children to read, there is first a pitch to get the reader’s attention. That is followed by a short reading passage to “set the hook” and encourage the young person to read the rest of the book on their own. Further, the book contains several hundred ad...

CockroachDB is the distributed SQL database that handles the demands of today's data-driven applications. The second edition of this popular hands-on guide shows software developers, architects, and DevOps/SRE teams how to use CockroachDB for applications that scale elastically and provide seamless delivery for end users while remaining indestructible.Data professionals will learn how to migrate existing applications to CockroachDB's performant, cloud-native data architecture. You'...

Get a practical introduction to CockroachDB. This book starts with installation and foundational concepts and takes you through to creating clusters that are ready for production environments. You will learn how to create, optimize, and operate CockroarchDB clusters in single and multi-region environments. You will encounter anti-patterns to avoid, as well as testing techniques for integration and load testing.The book explains why CockroachDB exists, goes over its major benefits, ...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAn alien advance party was suddenly nosing around my planet.Worse, they were lawyering up. . . .In the hilarious tradition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Rob Reid takes you on a headlong journey through the outer reaches of the universe—and the inner workings of our absurdly dysfunctional music industry.Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an...

The definitive novel of today’s Silicon Valley, After On flash-captures our cultural and technological moment with up-to-the-instant savvy. Matters of privacy and government intrusion, post-Tinder romance, nihilistic terrorism, artificial consciousness, synthetic biology, and much more are tackled with authority and brash playfulness by New York Times bestselling author Rob Reid.Meet Phluttr—a diabolically addictive new social network and a villai...

Now available for the first time with two additional stories!Have you ever wondered what it's like to be bitten by a zombie or live through a bioweapon attack? In Cory Doctorow's collection of novellas, he wields his formidable experience in technology and computing to give us mind-bending sci-fi tales that explore the possibilities of information technology—and its various uses—run amok."Anda's Game" is a spin on the bizarre new phenomenon of "cyber sweatshops," in which p...

From award winning tech-journalist and io9 founder Annalee Newitz comes a highly anticipated science fiction debut!Autonomous will pull listeners into a dark and dirty world that feels, at times, a bit too familiar.Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap scrips for poor people who can’t otherwise afford them. But her late...

Aristide, a semi-retired computer scientist turned swordsman, is a scholar of the implied spaces, seeking meaning amid the accidents of architecture in a universe where reality itself has been sculpted and designed by superhuman machine intelligence. While exploring the pre-technological world Midgarth, one of four dozen pocket universes created within a series of vast, orbital matrioshka computer arrays, Aristide uncovers a fiendish plot threatening to set off a nightmare scenario, perhap...

In a dystopian world ravaged by war and environmental collapse, one man fights history to discover the truth about his wife and child. After decades of war, the brutal Tathadann Party restored order to shattered Eitan City by outlawing the past and rewriting history. Memory is a commodity - bought and sold, and experienced like a drug. Henraek works as a Tathadann memory thief, draining citizens' memories. Everything changes when Henraek harvests a memory of his own wife's death, in the hi...