This beautiful spring compendium from Pretty Nostalgic brings together stunning vintage illustrations and the best bits from the past: inspiring stories, treasured collections, and social and domestic history. Learn how to embrace the past through crafting, cooking, upcycling and more, with brilliantly British projects and inspiration throughout.The perfect start to the season of nesting, spring cleaning, fresh flowers and longer days.
In the #1 New York Times bestseller, The World Needs Who You Were Made to Be, Joanna Gaines celebrates how creativity and acceptance can come together to make for a bright and beautiful adventure. The book, illustrated by Julianna Swaney, follows a group of children as they each build their very own hot-air balloons. As the kids work together, leaning into their own skills and processes, we discover that the same is true for life—it's more beautiful and vibrant when our differences are celebrated. Together with Joanna, you and your kids will take a journey of growth and imagination as you learn in full color to: celebrate every child's one-of-a-kind strengths and differences; embrace teamwork; share our talents and abilities to make everything more beautiful; and lend a helping hand and do our best to show kindness and take care of one another. The World Needs Who You Were Made to Be is a vibrant picture book perfect for; children ages 4–8; grandparents, parents, teachers, and librarians; classroom story times and discussions about diversity and being a good human being; households that enjoy watching Chip and Joanna on Magnolia Network and HGTV's Fixer Upper; and holiday or Christmas gift-giving, birthdays, graduations, or other celebrations. With plenty of pink, a bounty of blue, orange and green and yellow too, this vibrant hot-air balloon adventure celebrates every child and teaches kids that we are in this together. “You're one of a kind, and it's so clear to see: The world needs who you were made to be.”
In this smart, engaging book, Lee Eisenberg, best-selling author of The Number: A Completely Different Way to Think about the Rest of Your Life, leads us on a provocative and entertaining tour of America's love/hate affair with shopping, a pursuit that, even in hard times, remains a true national pastime. Why do we shop and buy the way we do? In a work that will explain much about the American character, Eisenberg chronicles the dynamics of selling and buying from almost every angle. Neither a cheerleader for consumption nor an anti-consumerist scold, he explores with boundless curiosity the vast machinery aimed at inducing us to purchase everything from hair mousse to a little black dress. He leads us, with understated humor, into the broad universe of marketing, retailing, advertising, and consumer and scientific research--an arsenal of powerful forces that combine to form what he calls "The Sell Side." Through the rest of the book, Eisenberg leads us through the "Buy Side" -- a journey directly into our own hearts and minds, asking among other questions: What are we really looking for when we buy? Why are we alternately excited, guilt-ridden, satisfied, disappointed, and recklessly impulsive? What are our biases, need for status, impulses to self-express, that lead us individually to buy what we buy? Are you a classic buyer (your head wants to do the right thing), or a romantic buyer (your heart just wants to have fun)? How do men and women differ in their attitudes towards shopping, and does the old cliche -- "Women shop, men buy" -- apply any longer? Of special interest are the author's findings on the subject of What Makes a Good Buy? We all purchase things that we sooner or later regret, but what are the guidelines for making purchases that we'll never regret? What, for instance, defines the perfect gift? Brimming with wit and surprise, Shoptimism will be delightful and instructive reading for anyone with a credit card and a healthy curiosity about American culture, through good times and bad. For here, in one vivid journey, is a memorable, panoramic portrait of our everyday self-delusions, desires, and dreams.
Every enterprise application creates data, whether it’s log messages, metrics, user activity, outgoing messages, or something else. And how to move all of this data becomes nearly as important as the data itself. If you’re an application architect, developer, or production engineer new to Apache Kafka, this practical guide shows you how to use this open source streaming platform to handle real-time data feeds. Engineers from Confluent and LinkedIn who are responsible for developing Kafka explain how to deploy production Kafka clusters, write reliable event-driven microservices, and build scalable stream-processing applications with this platform. Through detailed examples, you’ll learn Kafka’s design principles, reliability guarantees, key APIs, and architecture details, including the replication protocol, the controller, and the storage layer. Understand publish-subscribe messaging and how it fits in the big data ecosystem. Explore Kafka producers and consumers for writing and reading messages Understand Kafka patterns and use-case requirements to ensure reliable data delivery Get best practices for building data pipelines and applications with Kafka Manage Kafka in production, and learn to perform monitoring, tuning, and maintenance tasks Learn the most critical metrics among Kafka’s operational measurements Explore how Kafka’s stream delivery capabilities make it a perfect source for stream processing systems
New York Times Bestseller Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, the Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal Winner of the Audie Award The New York Times bestseller from the author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta finally appears in a one-volume paperback. Begging comparisons to Tolstoy and Joyce, this “magnificent, sprawling cosmic epic” (Guardian) by Alan Moore—the genre-defying, “groundbreaking, hairy genius of our generation” (NPR)—takes its place among the most notable works of contemporary English literature. In decaying Northampton, eternity loiters between housing projects. Among saints, kings, prostitutes, and derelicts, a timeline unravels: second-century fiends wait in urine-scented stairwells, delinquent specters undermine a century with tunnels, and in upstairs parlors, laborers with golden blood reduce fate to a snooker tournament. Through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts singing hymns of wealth and poverty. They celebrate the English language, challenge mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon their slum as Blake’s eternal holy city in “Moore’s apotheosis, a fourth-dimensional symphony” (Entertainment Weekly). This “brilliant . . . monumentally ambitious” tale from the gutter is “a massive literary achievement for our time—and maybe for all times simultaneously” (Washington Post).
“Lake Wobegon Days is about the way our beliefs, desires and fears tail off into abstractions--and get renewed from time to time. . . this book, unfolding Mr. Keillor's full design, is a genuine work of American history.” —The New York Times “A comic anatomy of what is small and ordinary and therefore potentially profound and universal in American life…Keillor’s strength as a writer is to make the ordinary extraordinary.” —Chicago Tribune “Keillor’s laughs come dear, not cheap, emerging from shared virtue and good character, from reassuring us of our neighborliness and strength….His true subject is how daily life is shot with grace. Keillor writes a prose that can be turned to laughter, to tears…to compassion or satire, to a hundred effects. He is a brilliant parodist.” —San Francisco Chronicle
The software architecture landscape has evolved dramatically over the past decade. Microservices have displaced monoliths. Data and applications are increasingly becoming distributed and decentralised. But composing disparate systems is a hard problem. More recently, software practitioners have been rapidly converging on event-driven architecture as a sustainable way of dealing with complexity - integrating systems without increasing their coupling.In Effective Kafka, Emil Koutanov explores the fundamentals of Event-Driven Architecture - using Apache Kafka - the world's most popular and supported open-source event streaming platform.You'll learn: - The fundamentals of event-driven architecture and event streaming platforms- The background and rationale behind Apache Kafka, its numerous potential uses and applications- The architecture and core concepts - the underlying software components, partitioning and parallelism, load-balancing, record ordering and consistency modes- Installation of Kafka and related tooling - using standalone deployments, clusters, and containerised deployments with Docker- Using CLI tools to interact with and administer Kafka classes, as well as publishing data and browsing topics- Using third-party web-based tools for monitoring a cluster and gaining insights into the event streams- Building stream processing applications in Java 11 using off-the-shelf client libraries- Patterns and best-practice for organising the application architecture, with emphasis on maintainability and testability of the resulting code- The numerous gotchas that lurk in Kafka's client and broker configuration, and how to counter them- Theoretical background on distributed and concurrent computing, exploring factors affecting their liveness and safety- Best-practices for running multi-tenanted clusters across diverse engineering teams, how teams collaborate to build complex systems at scale and equitably share the cluster with the aid of quotas- Operational aspects of running Kafka clusters at scale, performance tuning and methods for optimising network and storage utilisation- All aspects of Kafka security -including network segregation, encryption, certificates, authentication and authorization.The coverage is progressively delivered and carefully aimed at giving you a journey-like experience into becoming proficient with Apache Kafka and Event-Driven Architecture. The goal is to get you designing and building applications. And by the conclusion of this book, you will be a confident practitioner and a Kafka evangelist within your organisation - wielding the knowledge necessary to teach others.
Born into a poor Virginian family, John Treville Latouche (1914-56), in his short life, made a profound mark on America's musical theater as a lyricist, book writer, and librettist. The wit and skill of his lyrics elicited comparisons with the likes of Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, and Cole Porter, but he had too, noted Stephen Sondheim, "a large vision of what musical theater could be," and he proved especially venturesome in helping to develop a lyric theater that innovatively combined music, word, dance, and costume and set design. Many of his pieces, even if not commonly known today, remain high points in the history of American musical theater. "A great American genius" in the words of Duke Ellington, Latouche initially came to wide public attention in his early twenties with his cantata for soloist and chorus, Ballad for Americans (1939), with music by Earl Robinson-a work that swept the nation during the Second World War. Other milestones in his career included the all-black musical fable, Cabin in the Sky (1940), with Vernon Duke; an interracial updating of John Gay's classic, The Beggar's Opera, as Beggar's Holiday (1946), with Duke Ellington; two acclaimed Broadway operas with Jerome Moross: Ballet Ballads (1948) and The Golden Apple (1954); one of the most enduring operas in the American canon, The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956), with Douglas Moore; and the operetta Candide (1956), with Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman. Extremely versatile, he also wrote cabaret songs, participated in documentary and avant-garde film, translated poetry, adapted plays, and much else. Meanwhile, as one of Manhattan's most celebrated raconteurs and hosts, he developed a wide range of friends in the arts, including, to name only a few, Paul and Jane Bowles (whom he introduced to each other), Yul Brynner, John Cage, Jack Kerouac, Frederick Kiesler, Carson McCullers, Frank O'Hara, Dawn Powell, Ned Rorem, Virgil Thomson, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams-a dazzling constellation of diverse artists working in sundry fields, all attracted to Latouche's brilliance and joie de vivre, not to mention his support for their work. This book draws widely on archival collections both at home and abroad, including Latouche's diaries and the papers of Bernstein, Ellington, Moore, Moross, and many others, to tell for the first time, the story of this fascinating man and his work.
The Atari 2600 might not have been the first ever games console but it was certainly the first one to be successful and launched an entire industry in the process. Originally known as the Video Computer System, it went on to sell over thirty million units and still holds the record for being the longest officially supported console; the first game arrived in 1977 with the last being released in 1992, an incredible 15 years later. With such a long life, the 2600 spawned a huge catalogue of cartridges that includes many of the gaming world's greatest classics. This book takes you through the history of the much-loved platform, sampling a varied cross-section of games; featured titles include early releases, modern retro classics and even originally unreleased prototypes. Each entry features a screenshot, review and publishing information, along with the author's personal rating for the title. With ten entries for each letter of the alphabet, this is not supposed to be a list of the best or the worst games; neither is it a complete guide to all that's available. It is simply a meandering journey through some thirty years of home computing history, and will interest dedicated fans and casual readers alike. A Compendium of Atari 2600 Games is a celebration of the classic console, filled with nostalgic memories, new opinions, interesting stories and so much more
