Book Phobia: 2010

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

As his fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry approaches, 15-year-old Harry Potter is in full-blown adolescence, complete with regular outbursts of rage, a nearly debilitating crush, and the blooming of a powerful sense of rebellion. It's been yet another infuriating and boring summer with the despicable Dursleys, this time with minimal contact from our hero's non-Muggle friends from school. Harry is feeling especially edgy at the lack of news from the magic world, wondering when the freshly revived evil Lord Voldemort will strike. Returning to Hogwarts will be a relief... or will it?

The long-awaited, eagerly anticipated, arguably over-hyped Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has arrived, and the question on the minds of kids, adults, fans, and skeptics alike is, "Is it worth the hype?" The answer, luckily, is simple: yep. A magnificent spectacle more than worth the price of admission, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will blow you away. However, given that so much has gone into protecting the secrets of the book (including armored trucks and injunctions), don't expect any spoilers in this review. It's much more fun not knowing what's coming--and in the case of Rowling's delicious sixth book, you don't want to know.

With this introductory novel was published in 1997, few would have predicted the unprecedented success this series would produce. And everything that made Harry Potter so successful is all first shown, though hardly fully explained, in this book, HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSPHER'S STONE. The novel opens with Harry living under the cupboard with his abusive aunt and uncle.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the seventh and final book in the Harry Potter series of novels by J. K. Rowling. The book title was announced on 21 December 2006 via a special Christmas-themed hangman puzzle on Rowling's website and confirmed shortly afterwards by the book's publishers.Rowling has stated that the final volume relates so closely to the previous book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, "almost as though they are two halves of the same novel."

Reviewers were happy to report that the Hunger Games trilogy is alive and well, and all looked forward to the third book in the series after this one's stunning conclusion. But they disagreed over whether Catching Fire was as good as the original book Hunger Games or should be viewed as somewhat of a "sophomore slump." Several critics who remained unconvinced by Katniss's romantic dilemma made unfavorable comparisons to the human-vampire-werewolf love triangle in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series.

Katniss is a 16-year-old girl living with her mother and younger sister in the poorest district of Panem, the remains of what used be the United States. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, "The Hunger Games." The terrain, rules, and level of audience participation may change but one thing is constant: kill or be killed.

A comprehensive resource on Verilog HDL for beginners and experts. Large and complicated digital circuits can be incorporated into hardware by using Verilog, a hardware description language (HDL). A designer aspiring to master this versatile language must first become familiar with its constructs, practice their use in real applications, and apply them in combinations in order to be successful. Design Through Verilog HDL affords novices the opportunity to perform all of these tasks, while also offering seasoned professionals a comprehensive resource on this dynamic tool.

This book provides a rich toolbox of design techniques and templates to solve practical, every-day problems using FPGAs. Using a modular structure, the book gives 'easy-to-find' design techniques and templates at all levels, together with functional code, which engineers can easily match and apply to their application.

This book provides instruction on how to use the OrCAD design suite to design and manufacture printed circuit boards. The primary goal is to show the reader how to design a PCB using OrCAD Capture and OrCAD Editor. Capture is used to build the schematic diagram of the circuit, and Editor is used to design the circuit board so that it can be manufactured.

Basic Engineering Circuit Analysis, Ninth Edition maintains its student friendly, accessible approach to circuit analysis and now includes even more features to engage and motivate students. In addition to brand new exciting chapter openers, all new accompanying photos are included to help engage visual learners. This revision introduces completely re-done figures with color coding to significantly improve student comprehension and FE exam problems at the ends of chapters for student practice.

Analog Circuits Cookbook is a collection of tried and tested recipes form the masterchef of analog and RF design. Based on articles from Electronics World, this book provides a diet of high quality design techniques and applications, and proven ciruit designs, all concerned with the analog, RF and interface fields of electronics. Ian Hickman uses illustrations and examples rather than tough mathematical theory to present a wealth of ideas and tips based on his own workbench experience.

Plan and launch your PPC campaign and keep track of its progress. If you want potential customers to form a traffic jam at your Web site, Pay Per Click just might do the trick. This book will help you decide! It tells you all about Google AdWords and Yahoo! Sponsored Search, targeting your customers, watching out for fraud, assessing the pros and cons of Pay Per Click, and making Pay Per Click work for you.

Get your Web site to `show you the money` by using Google to draw more eyes--and wallets--to your content. In this friendly, four-color guide from veteran author and Web developer Eric Giguere, you'll learn all about Google's AdSense program and how you can use it to make your Web site or blog more profitable.

When it comes to advertising on the web, you just can't argue with the numbers. A $7 billion market today is expected to grow to $18.9 billion by 2010. Jupiter Research also estimates that search advertising will be a larger share of the market than display advertising by 2010. These phenomenal numbers are due largely to Google, which has changed the way the world publishes content - and advertises.

You can get paid for online ad placement with Google AdSense! If you've ever considered using AdSense to improve revenue for your Web site, Google AdSense For Dummies will get you started. It's loaded with tips to help you implement a successful AdSense program.

AdWords lets every business-from eBay PowerSellers to Fortune 500 companies-create targeted, cost-efficient advertising campaigns on the Web, and accounts for the bulk of Google's $6 billion in annual revenues This all-new guide helps advertisers get a handle on AdWords complexities and nuances, adopt AdWords best practices, and turn clicks into ka-ching!

This is the ultimate guide for those who want to move beyond AdWords basics to learn and apply the advanced techniques and tactics that Google's expert consultant teaches to Fortune 500 companies in his seminars. Advanced Google AdWords will provide deep insight into AdWords' functionality and advanced features, explaining how they work and providing tips, tactics, and hands-on tutorials that readers can immediately use on their own PPC campaigns.

An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind's classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder. In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift-an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and frest-cut wood.

"The awful thing about life is this:" says Octave to the Marquis in Renoir's Rules of the Game. "Everyone has his reasons." That could be a motto for novelists as well, few more so than Jonathan Franzen, who seems less concerned with creating merely likeable characters than ones who are fully alive, in all their self-justifying complexity. Freedom is his fourth novel, and, yes, his first in nine years since The Corrections. Happy to say, it's very much a match for that great book, a wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than the fictional St. Jude).

A Little Death In Dixie provides a fascinating insight into the world of law enforcement, and the corruption sometimes found there. The novel opens with a murder scene in Memphis, Tennessee. As the reader immediately gets involved in the drama, we discover that this crime isn't what's important to the story the author is telling us, but the reactions of the officers investigating the crime do become integral to the story, as we will soon see.

Bella and Edward are married, but their honeymoon is cut short when Bella discovers she is pregnant. Her pregnancy progresses rapidly, severely weakening her. She nearly dies giving birth to her and Edward's half-vampire-half-human daughter, Renesmee, but Edward injects Bella with his venom to save her life by turning her into a vampire. A vampire from another coven sees Renesmee and mistakes her for an "immortal child", whose existence violates vampire law, and informs the Volturi. The Cullens gather vampire witnesses who can verify that Renesmee is not an immortal child.

When it comes to civil engineering, handy access to the right schematics and plans can mean the difference between a winning idea -- and a concept that dies on the drawing board. That's why if adding efficiencies to your work as an engineer is essential, McGraw-Hill's Civil Engineer's Illustrated Sourcebook is the one volume you shouldn't be without.

While the static behavior of concrete has been the subject of numerous works, the same cannot be said for the dynamic behavior. This book sets out to remedy this situation: it begins by presenting the most frequently used experimental techniques in the study of the dynamic behavior of concrete, then continues by examining seismicity and seismic behavior, soil behavior, models of concrete structures subject to seismic activity, seismic calculation methods of structures, and paraseismic engineering.

Mathematica Cookbook helps you master the application's core principles by walking you through real-world problems. Ideal for browsing, this book includes recipes for working with numerics, data structures, algebraic equations, calculus, and statistics. You'll also venture into exotic territory with recipes for data visualization using 2D and 3D graphic tools, image processing, and music. Although Mathematica 7 is a highly advanced computational platform, the recipes in this book make it accessible to everyone -- whether you're working on high school algebra, simple graphs, PhD-level computation, financial analysis, or advanced engineering models.

This book relates the recent developments in several key electrical engineering R&D labs, concentrating on power electronics switches and their use. The first sections deal with key power electronics technologies, MOSFETs and IGBTs, including series and parallel associations. The next section examines silicon carbide and its potentiality for power electronics applications and its present limitations. Then, a dedicated section presents the capacitors, key passive components in power electronics, followed by a modeling method allowing the stray inductances computation, necessary for the precise simulation of switching waveforms.

This book offers comprehensive coverage of all the mathematical tools needed by engineers in the field of processing and transport of all forms of information, data and images - as well as many other engineering disciplines. It provides essential theories, equations and results in probability theory and statistics, which constitute the basis for the presentation of signal processing,information theory, traffic and queueing theory, and reliability. The mathematical foundations of simulation are also covered.

Covering the vast majority of current and emerging home networking technologies, standards and trends, this new, practical resource offers you a comprehensive understanding of this developing area. The book presents an `end-to-end reference architecture`, where the main residential services are identified and their network requirements are fully analyzed. You find detailed coverage of both wireless and wireline technologies, including IEEE 802.11, Firewire, USB, HiperLAN, and Bluetooth.

Sounds pretty impressive, doesn't it? Your own home network. Should you have one? Are they hard to set up? How would it help? Are home networks more vulnerable to security risks? If you've asked yourself any of these questions, this updated Third Edition of Home Networking For Dummies is exactly what you need.

Everything you need to know to set up a home network. Is a home network for you? This comprehensive guide covers everything from deciding what type of network meets your needs to setting up the hardware and software, connecting different operating systems, installing the necessary applications, managing the network, and even adding home entertainment devices. Fully updated with new material on all the latest systems and methods, it's just what you need to set up your network and keep it running safely and successfully.

Millions of computers around the world today are connected by the Internet, so why is it still so hard to hook up a few PCs in you own home? Whether you want to share an Internet connection, install WiFi, or maybe just cut down on the number of printers you own, home networks are supposed to help make your life easier.

You have a family computer for e-mail and browsing the Internet. Your son and daughter have their own computer for school work and your spouse has a laptop that he or she brings home from work every day. With your family spread out all over the house on their computers, wouldn't it be nice if you could make them all work together?

Discover the latest programming tips and techniques. Start writing programs for Windows®, Linux®, Macintosh®, Palms, and PocketPCs. Ready to take control of your computer by writing your own programs? Mixing concepts with humor, author Wallace Wang shows you how to begin programming as simply and quickly as possible.

So you want to be a programmer? Or maybe you just want to be able to make your computer do what YOU want for a change? Maybe you enjoy the challenge of identifying a problem and solving it. If programming intrigues you for whatever reason, Beginning Programming All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies is like having a starter programming library all in one handy, if beefy, book.

Programming allows developers to create a sequence of instructions that enable computers to perform certain functions and tasks Offering the basic best practices and skills for novice programmers, this book helps readers gain new skills for writing programs and developing applications.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is a novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit-hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures. The tale is filled with allusions to Dodgson's friends. The tale plays with logic in ways that have given the story lasting popularity with adults as well as children. It is considered to be one of the most characteristic examples of the genre of literary nonsense, and its narrative course and structure has been enormously influential, mainly in the fantasy genre.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of twelve stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, featuring his famous detective and illustrated by Sidney Paget. These are the first of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, originally published as single stories in the Strand Magazine from July 1891 to June 1892.

One comment from Amazon: "A delightful book, entertaining and full of wisdom. The author takes us along on her year-long journey to find her true self. Her account feels honest and yet has a lot of humor. Sprinkled in is interesting information about the countries she is visiting which I enjoyed as well."

The Girl Who Played with Fire (original title in Swedish: "Flickan som lekte med elden") is the second novel in the million-selling Millennium Trilogy by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson. It was published posthumously in Swedish in 2006 and in English in January 2009. The book features many of the characters that appeared in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, among them Lisbeth Salander, the "Girl" of the title and a social misfit hacker, and Mikael Blomkvist, a investigative journalist and publisher of Millennium magazine.

"Lisbeth Salander—the heart of Larsson’s two previous novels—is under close supervision in the intensive care unit of a Swedish city hospital. She’s fighting for her life in more ways than one: when she’s well enough, she’ll stand trial for three murders. With the help of her friend, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, she will have to prove her innocence, and to identify the corrupt politicians who have allowed the vulnerable, like herself, to suffer abuse. And, on her own, she will plot her revenge—against the man who tried to kill her and the government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life.

Once you start The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, there's no turning back. This debut thriller--the first in a trilogy from the late Stieg Larsson--is a serious page-turner rivaling the best of Charlie Huston and Michael Connelly.

The story begins with Gandalf and the hobbit Peregrin Took (Pippin) arriving at Minas Tirith in the kingdom of Gondor, delivering the news to Denethor, the Lord and Steward of Gondor, that a devastating attack on his city by Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor is imminent. Pippin then enters the service of the Steward as repayment of a debt he owes to Boromir, Denethor's dead son and preferred heir. Now clad in the uniform of the tower guard, Pippin watches the fortunes of war unfold, while the Lord Denethor descends into madness as the hosts of Mordor press ever closer to Gondor's capital city of Minas Tirith.

The Lord of the Rings is composed of 6 "books", aside from an introduction, a prologue and 6 appendices. The novel was originally published as 3 separate volumes due to post-World War II paper shortages and size and price considerations. The Two Towers covers Books III and IV.

Tolkien wrote, "The Two Towers gets as near as possible to finding a title to cover the widely divergent Books 3 & 4; and can be left ambiguous."

In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell into the hands of Bilbo Baggins, as told in THE HOBBIT. In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is the phenomenal bestseller about a modern search to locate the legendary Holy Grail before it--and an alternate history of Christ that could topple the Church--is destroyed forever. Millions have been enthralled by its fascinating historical speculations--from the meaning of the Mona Lisa's smile to the suppressed "Apocryphal Gospels" to alleged clues in Da Vinci's paintings. But many readers have been left wondering what in the plot is actual history, what is based on ancient legend, and what has been invented by the author.

8 books in 1 - your key to terrific digital photos! Your one-stop, full-color guide to creating digital images with `wow`. From picking your camera to posting photos on the Web, here's what you need to know about digital photography in eight easy-to-use minibooks!

An 816-page All-in-One guide designed for both beginning and experienced digital photographers, offering seven minibooks on everything from buying a camera and choosing the right equipment to editing with high-end tools and restoring photos digitally Includes chapters on basics such as point-and-shoot photography, with later chapters exploring editing, printing, and shooting portraits or high-speed action.

The major function of photography is to capture a picture from what is in front of you. Whether a picture of the family pet or advertising spread, the acquisition of the scene is the first step in the digital image process. Digital Photographic Capture takes that first step and it breaks it down in detail so you can understand and better manipulate the mechanics of the process.

The second edition is an `all-in-one` combination of basic theory and practical exercises with software and data included on a CD-ROM. Potential readers/users are students of Photogrammetry, Geodesy, Geography and other sciences, but also all who are interested in this topic.

Over 50,000 photographers can't be wrong! John and Barbara Gerlach finally write the book their workshop attendees have been asking for! Digital Nature Photography is a how-to guide for photographers who want to take their work to the next level.

`Digital Infrared Photography,` an all new guide that illustrates and explores the enchantingly beautiful world of infrared images. By simply adding a filter to the camera lens, or using a converted camera, digital photographers can capture infrared (IR) images featuring expressive skies, dramatic clouds, and intriguing white foliage.