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SQL Cookbook

You know the rudiments of the SQL query language, yet you feel you aren’t taking full advantage of SQL’s expressive power. You’d like to learn how to do more work with SQL inside the database before pushing data across the network to your applications. You’d like to take your SQL skills to the next level.

Let’s face it, SQL is a deceptively simple language to learn, and many database developers never go far beyond simple select statements. But there is so much more you can do with the language. In the SQL Cookbook, experienced SQL developer Anthony Molinaro shares his favorite SQL techniques and features.

Price: $26.37

Mr. Irresponsible’s Bad Advice : How to Rip the Lid Off Your Id and Live Happily Ever After

Mr. Irresponsible breaks all the rules with his thoughts on modern manners, life in the workplace, romance, money and more. Do you wonder what to do when screaming kids disrupt an expensive dinner in a fancy restaurant? Mr. Irresponsible knows what to do. Are you unsure how to handle the dolt who sits behind you in the movies and offers a running commentary? Mr. Irresponsible has some thoughts on that. (Hint: It involves a telescoping crowd-control baton.) Are you puzzled by how to get an inattentive salesperson to pay attention to you? Mr. Irresponsible can tell you. Get all this and more, plus his carefully-crafted 10 Commandments of Bad Advice, in one slim, easy-to-digest volume!

Price: $5.18

Swimming Holes of California: Day Trips With a Splash

A backcountry tip sheet on where to jump into more than 100 secluded waterfalls, remote two-person tubs, hidden pools throughout the Golden State. All of them are at least six feet deep. All are in creeks and rivers less than three hours from the trailhead. Each entry lists expectation of privacy along with a photo and topographic map with GPS waypoints. Icons indicate the best season to visit, the difficulty of approach, and the overall rating, whether fair, good, excellent or classic. Dog owners can tell at a glance if four-legged hikers are appropriate. Families with small children can easily determine if the journey is a good one for the little dippers.

Price: $12.32

Who Controls the Internet? : Illusions of a Borderless World (Hardcover)

In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet’s challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It’s a book about the fate of one idea–that the Internet might liberate us forever from
government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google’s struggles with the French government and Yahoo’s capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay’s struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned
to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the
conflicts within and between them.

Price: $18.48

How to Find Lost Objects

Urville (Hardcover)

Price: $25.00

No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP

A practical and concise book that teaches XML from the ground up. This tutorial style presents various XML methodologies and techniques in an easy to understand way, building a basis for further exploration.

XML is essentially an enabling technology, dry and boring on its own. As a result, most books on the market are dry, and academic in nature teaching theory rather than practice. This book actually teaches practical, real-world applications of XML, using the very latest version of PHP (PHP 5) as the base language.

No Nonsense XML Web Development with PHP explains how XML can be put to use in real-world projects. The book also covers buzz topics such as RSS and Web Services.

Price: $25.17

Magic for Beginners

The nine stories in Link’s second collection are the spitting image of those in her acclaimed debut, Stranger Things Happen: effervescent blends of quirky humor and pathos that transform stock themes of genre fiction into the stuff of delicate lyrical fantasy. In “Stone Animals,” a house’s haunting takes the unusual form of hordes of rabbits that camp out nightly on the front lawn. This proves just one of several benign but inexplicable phenomena that begin to pull apart the family newly moved into the house as surely as a more sinister supernatural influence might. The title story beautifully captures the unpredictable potential of teenage lives through its account of a group of adolescent schoolfriends whose experiences subtly parallel events in a surreal TV fantasy series. Zombies serve as the focus for a young man’s anxieties about his future in “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” and offer suggestive counterpoint to the lives of two convenience store clerks who serve them in “The Hortlak.” Not only does Link find fresh perspectives from which to explore familiar premises, she also forges ingenious connections between disparate images and narrative approaches to suggest a convincing alternate logic that shapes the worlds of her highly original fantasies.

Price: $16.32

Stranger Things Happen

The 11 fantasies in this first collection from rising star Link are so quirky and exuberantly imagined that one is easily distracted from their surprisingly serious underpinnings of private pain and emotional estrangement. In “Water Off a Black Dog’s Back,” a na‹ve young man who has never known personal loss finds that the only way he can curry favor with his lover’s physically afflicted family is to suffer a bizarre amputation. The protagonist in “Travels with the Snow Queen” reconsiders her fairy-tale romance when she deconstructs the clich‚s of traditional fairy tales and realizes that their heroines inevitably sacrifice and suffer much more than their heroes do. Link favors impersonal and potentially off-putting postmodern narrative approaches, but draws readers to the emotional core of her stories through vulnerable but brave characters who cope gamely with all the strangeness the world can throw their way. In the book’s most effective tale, “Vanishing Act,” a young girl’s efforts to magically reunite herself with her distant family by withdrawing from the world around her poignantly calls attention to the spiritual vacancies and absence of affection in the family she stays with. “The Specialist’s Hat” features twin sisters whose morbid obsessions seems due as much to their father’s parental neglect as their mother’s death. Although a few of the selections seem little more than awkward freshman exercises in the absurd, the best shed a warm, weird light on their worlds, illuminating fresh perspectives and fantastic possibilities.

Price: $10.88

Storytelling through Animation

Using detailed explanations of principles and techniques and a variety of film examples, this book guides animantors through every step of the production process, and teaches them how to infuse their story and develop emotional connections in every part of the production.

Price: $32.97