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Into the Flames

Grade 5-8-In this third book in the series, Peter and Elise, 12-year-old twins, collaborate with the resistance movement against the Nazi presence in occupied Denmark. Eventually they are arrested for their involvement with the “Free Dane,” an illegal newspaper. While in prison they discover that their Uncle Morten, previously arrested, escaped to freedom during an allied bombing. The story is fast paced, and the plot develops quickly. However, although the characters are appealing, they do not have the depth of Lisa and Kris in Carol Matas’s Lisa’s War (Scribners, 1989), which has a similar setting and plot. In addition, this series includes a religious theme. A good choice for libraries have a need for inspirational or Christian fiction.

Price: $5.99

Far from the Storm

After World War II, Peter and Elise seek to discover who is trying to destroy Uncle Morten for his work with the Danish Underground.

Price: $5.99

Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity

Creating Web sites is easy. Creating sites that truly meet the needs and expectations of the wide range of online users is quite another story. In Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, renowned Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen shares his insightful thoughts on the subject. Packed with annotated examples of actual Web sites, this book sets out many of the design precepts all Web developers should follow.

This guide segments discussions of Web usability into page, content, site, and intranet design. This breakdown skillfully isolates for the reader many subtly different challenges that are often mixed together in other discussions. For example, Nielsen addresses the requirements of viewing pages on varying monitor sizes separately from writing concise text for “scanability.” Along the way, the author pulls no punches with his opinions, using phrases like “frames: just say no” to immediately make his feelings known. Fortunately, his advise is some of the best you’ll find.

$27.90

CCNP: Support Study Guide (Hardcover)

Preparation material for CCNP exam 640-506, with authoritative coverage of all exam topics. Features preliminary assessment testing that helps direct test preparation. The CD-ROM contains the Sybex Edge testing engine for the exam, as well as flash cards for personal computer or Palm devices and two electronic books. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Price: $49.99

CCNP: Remote Access Study Guide (Hardcover)

With organizations diverging in ever-increasing numbers from the “big central headquarters” organizational model and relying more on geographically distributed work centers, wide area networking (WAN) experts now are in greater demand than ever before. To prove that you’re an expert in WAN connectivity, get your Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) rating. To get your CCNP rating, you’ll have to pass the Remote Access exam (640-505). That’s where CCNP: Remote Access Study Guide comes into play. It will prepare you for the test by helping you identify the relevant bits of your experience and filling you in on the pieces of WAN technology with which you’re less familiar. It’s uniformly well written and carefully organized.

Price: $49.99

CCNA Virtual Lab, Gold Edition (CD-ROM)

World renowned author Todd Lammle and instructional design expert William Tedder have created the CCNA Virtual Lab, Gold Edition from Sybex to give you more of what you need to prepare for the CCNA exam (640-507). Based upon the best-selling CCNA Virtual Lab, this software simulates a networking environment consisting of the following equipment:

· three 2500 series routers
· one 2621 series router
· two 1900 series Catalyst switch
· four hosts

You can hone your skills with built-in instructional labs or perform freeform configuration routines. An affordable alternative to products and courses costing hundreds, even thousands, of dollars, the CCNA Virtual Lab, Gold Edition allows you to work at your own pace, on your own time, so you get the most out of your exam preparation efforts. Used in conjunction with Sybex’s #1 best-selling CCNA: Cisco Certified Network Associate Study Guide, or with any other CCNA study program, the CCNA Virtual Lab, Gold Edition, will give you the skills you need to approach the exam with confidence.

Price: $149.99

Programming the Universe : A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos (Hardcover)

Lloyd, a professor at MIT, works in the vanguard of research in quantum computing: using the quantum mechanical properties of atoms as a computer. He contends that the universe itself is one big quantum computer producing what we see around us, and ourselves, as it runs a cosmic program. According to Lloyd, once we understand the laws of physics completely, we will be able to use small-scale quantum computing to understand the universe completely as well. In his scenario, the universe is processing information. The second law of thermodynamics (disorder increases) is all about information, and Lloyd spends much of the book explaining how quantum processes convey information. The creation of the universe itself involved information processing: random fluctuations in the quantum foam, like a random number generator in a computer program, produced higher-density areas, then matter, stars, galaxies and life. Lloyd’s hypothesis bears important implications for the red-hot evolution–versus–intelligent design debate, since he argues that divine intervention isn’t necessary to produce complexity and life.

Price: $17.13

1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Hardcover)

1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even “timeless” natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.

Price: $19.21

The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology (Hardcover)

Renowned inventor Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines) may be technology’s most credibly hyperbolic optimist. Elsewhere he has argued that eliminating fat intake can prevent cancer; here, his quarry is the future of consciousness and intelligence. Humankind, it runs, is at the threshold of an epoch (”the singularity,” a reference to the theoretical limitlessness of exponential expansion) that will see the merging of our biology with the staggering achievements of “GNR” (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) to create a species of unrecognizably high intelligence, durability, comprehension, memory and so on. The word “unrecognizable” is not chosen lightly: wherever this is heading, it won’t look like us. Kurzweil’s argument is necessarily twofold: it’s not enough to argue that there are virtually no constraints on our capacity; he must also convince readers that such developments are desirable. In essence, he conflates the wholesale transformation of the species with “immortality,” for which read a repeal of human limit. In less capable hands, this phantasmagoria of speculative extrapolation, which incorporates a bewildering variety of charts, quotations, playful Socratic dialogues and sidebars, would be easier to dismiss. But Kurzweil is a true scientist—a large-minded one at that—and gives due space both to “the panoply of existential risks” as he sees them and the many presumed lines of attack others might bring to bear. What’s arresting isn’t the degree to which Kurzweil’s heady and bracing vision fails to convince—given the scope of his projections, that’s inevitable—but the degree to which it seems downright plausible.

Price: $19.77

Fledgling : A Novel (Hardcover)

The much-lauded Butler creates vampires in her 12th novel (her first in seven years) that have about as much to do with Bram Stoker’s Dracula as HBO’s Deadwood does with High Noon. They need human blood to survive, but they don’t kill unless they have to, and (given several hundred years) they’ll eventually die peacefully of old age. They are Ina, and they’ve coexisted with humans for millennia, imparting robust health and narcotic bliss with every bite to their devoted human blood donors, aka “symbionts.” Shori is a 53-year-old Ina (a juvenile) who wakes up in a cave, amnesiac and seriously wounded. As is later revealed, her family and their symbionts were murdered because they genetically engineered a generation of part-Ina, part-human children. Shori was their most successful experiment: she can stay conscious during daylight hours, and her black skin helps protect her from the sun. The lone survivor, Shori must rely on a few friendly (and tasty) people to help her warn other Ina families and rediscover herself. Butler, keeping tension high, reveals the mysteries of the Ina universe bit by tantalizing bit. Just as the Ina’s collective honor and dignity starts to get a little dull, a gang of bigoted, black sheep Ina rolls into town for a species-wide confab-cum-smackdown. In the feisty Shori, Butler has created a new vampire paradigm—one that’s more prone to sci-fi social commentary than gothic romance—and given a tired genre a much-needed shot in the arm.

Price: $16.47