Book Description

At last, here’s an approachable introduction to the widely used Portable Document Format. PDFs are everywhere, both online and in printed form, but few people take advantage of the useful features or grasp the nuances of this format. This concise book provides a hands-on tour of the world’s leading page-description language for programmers, power users, and professionals in the search, electronic publishing, and printing industries. Illustrated with lots of examples, this book is the documentation you need to fully understand PDF.

• Build a simple PDF file from scratch in a text editor
• Learn the layout and content of a PDF file, as well as the syntax of its objects
• Examine the logical structure of PDF objects, and learn how pages and their resources are arranged into a document
• Create vector graphics and raster images in PDF, and deal with transparency, color spaces, and patterns
• Explore PDF operators for building and showing text strings
• Get up to speed on bookmarks, metadata, hyperlinks, annotations, and file attachments
• Learn how encryption and document permissions work in PDF
• Use the pdftk program to process PDF files from the command line

Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Building a Simple PDF Download Now »

Book Description

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. Download Now »

Book Description

Renowned neuroscientist Dr. Masao Ito advances a sophisticated new view of the cerebellum’s roles in brain function, explaining how its multiple neuronal machine modules enable humans to unconsciously master motor skills through practice, and suggesting how it may serve implicit thought and cognitive processes that manipulate knowledge—playing a surprising role in intuition, imagination, and hallucination.

From the Back Cover
A New Assessment of the Cerebellum’s Role in Brain Function by One of the Field’s Most Respected Researchers

In The Cerebellum, leading neuroscientist Masao Ito draws on current research to advance a detailed new view of the cerebellum’s multiple roles in brain function.

The cerebellum’s role in coordinating body movement control and facilitating motor skills learning has long been recognized. Ito presents new insights into how it accomplishes these tasks. He explains how the cerebellum assembles numerous neuronal machine modules, each providing implicit learning capabilities—and how these modules enable humans to unconsciously learn motor skills through practice by forming internal models that simulate the control system properties of body parts.

Ito shows how the cerebellum also serves higher brain functions, including implicit components of thought and cognitive processes that manipulate knowledge. In particular, he discusses evidence of the cerebellum’s role in complex mental actions—such as intuition, imagination, hallucination, and delusion—and in supporting the implicit self. Download Now »

Book Description

Bookbinding may well be a dying art in this digital age, but you can still learn how to do it yourself with this easy-to-follow ebook. In fact, you can reverse the course of evolution and convert this particular digital specimen into a durable, hand-stitched book that will last for generations. When you’re finished, this ebook will truly be “hands-on.”

O’Reilly Senior Editor Brian Sawyer takes you through the process with step-by-step instructions and scores of instructive photographs. All you need to bring to the table are a few simple materials—including magazines you’d like to preserve. Discover how simple, unmessy, fun, and satisfying binding books by hand can be.

• Print the pages of this ebook or remove the existing cover from a magazine
• Create signatures and prepare them for stitching
• Glue the spine
• Build and attach the cover boards
• Cover the exterior and interior of the cover boards

About the Author
Brian Sawyer is a Senior Editor for O’Reilly Media, where he manages the Missing Manuals division. He has also served as lead editor for the company’s popular Hacks series, editor for Head First and Make: Books titles, and contributing editor to Craft magazine. When not writing or editing about technology, he uses it to help train for marathons (see Chapter 4 of Best Android Apps). Download Now »

Book Description

Leading neuroscientist Samuel Barondes shares scientific frameworks and tools for improving your intuitions about people, and sizing them up more consciously, systematically, and successfully. He shows how to use the latest research about personality and character to get along better, choose great friends, decide whom to trust, and avoid narcissists and sociopaths.

From the Back Cover
“This pioneering book does for our mental life what the periodic table did for chemistry; it breaks the mind down into elementary constituents and their interactions–thereby transforming personality research into science. In addition to being a rich treasure-trove of insights into human nature, it can potentially enrich your relationships with people. Barondes has written a masterpiece.”
–V.S. Ramachandran, author of Phantoms in the Brain and The Tell-Tale Mind

“We’re a fantastically social species, constantly taking the measure of everyone’s personality. In this wise, enjoyable book, the esteemed biological psychiatrist Sam Barondes considers ways to build up this vital skill. The book is clear, entertaining, and educational, and will not only make you a more adept social primate, but a more self-reflective one as well.”
–Robert Sapolsky, Professor of Biology, Stanford University; author of A Primate’s Memoir and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

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Book Description

The Logic of Chance offers a reappraisal and a new synthesis of theories, concepts, and hypotheses on the key aspects of the evolution of life on earth in light of comparative genomics and systems biology. The author presents many specific examples from systems and comparative genomic analysis to begin to build a new, much more detailed, complex, and realistic picture of evolution. The book examines a broad range of topics in evolutionary biology including  the inadequacy of natural selection and adaptation as the only or even the main mode of evolution; the key role of horizontal gene transfer in evolution and the consequent overhaul of the Tree of Life concept;  the central, underappreciated evolutionary importance of viruses; the origin of eukaryotes as a result of endosymbiosis; the concomitant origin of cells and viruses on the primordial earth; universal dependences between genomic and molecular-phenomic variables; and the evolving landscape of constraints that shape the evolution of genomes and molecular phenomes.

From the Back Cover
An Outline of a Fundamentally New Evolutionary Synthesis Reflecting Key Advances in Genomics, Systems Biology, and Biological PhysicsIn this ambitious book, Eugene V. Koonin illuminates the gamut of randomness and regularity that is at the heart of life.

Pointing the way beyond Modern Synthesis, Koonin brings together new data and concepts in an attempt to achieve a far deeper understanding of the interplay between chance and necessity that drives biological evolution. Download Now »