What do you do if you're a fourteen-year-old geek, and a Beautiful Girl appears in your world? For Archie, the natural reaction is to duck and cover, however he decides to embark on a daring Quest to win the Beautiful Girl's heart. But when geek meets girl what could possibly go right? Suggested level: secondary.

In a perfect world, software engineers who produce the best code are the most successful. But in our perfectly messy world, success also depends on how you work with people to get your job done. In this highly entertaining book, Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman cover basic patterns and anti-patterns for working with other people, teams, and users while trying to develop software. This is valuable information from two respected software engineers whose popular series of talks—including "Working with Poisonous People"—has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers. Writing software is a team sport, and human factors have as much influence on the outcome as technical factors. Even if you’ve spent decades learning the technical side of programming, this book teaches you about the often-overlooked human component. By learning to collaborate and investing in the "soft skills" of software engineering, you can have a much greater impact for the same amount of effort. Team Geek was named as a Finalist in the 2013 Jolt Awards from Dr. Dobb's Journal. The publication's panel of judges chose five notable books, published during a 12-month period ending June 30, that every serious programmer should read.

Calling all Geek Dads! What would it take to tear your kids away from their computers? How about if they could launch a camera into orbit, make their own cartoon film, or even build a rope swing?This hands-on manual is packed with fun-filled projects for dads and kids to enjoy together. Water slides, electronic origami, illuminated wallets, exploding drinks... There are activities for all ages, from five to 15 years old. With easy to follow step-by-step instructions you can choose a perfect project to fill a few minutes or to make a long afternoon fly past.It's time to get geeky.

The Washington Post "[G]randly ambitious... another masterpiece... this genre includes some of the greatest novels of our time, from Pynchon’s V. to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. That’s the troupe Larsen has decided to join, and I Am Radar is a dazzling performance." The moment just before Radar Radmanovic is born, all of the hospital’s electricity mysteriously fails. The delivery takes place in total darkness. Lights back on, the staff sees a healthy baby boy—with pitch-black skin—born to the stunned white parents. No one understands the uncanny electrical event or the unexpected skin color. “A childbirth is an explosion,” the ancient physician says by way of explanation. “Some shrapnel is inevitable, isn’t it?” A kaleidoscopic novel both heartbreaking and dazzling, Reif Larsen’s I Am Radar begins with Radar’s perplexing birth but rapidly explodes outward, carrying readers across the globe and throughout history, as well as to unknown regions where radio waves and subatomic particles dance to their own design. Spanning this extraordinary range with grace and empathy, humor and courage, I Am Radar is the vessel where a century of conflict and art unite in a mesmerizing narrative whole. Deep in arctic Norway, a cadre of Norwegian schoolteachers is imprisoned during the Second World War. Founding a radical secret society that will hover on the margins of recorded history for decades to come, these schoolteachers steal radioactive material from a hidden Nazi nuclear reactor and use it to stage a surreal art performance on a frozen coastline. This strange society appears again in the aftermath of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime, when another secret performance takes place but goes horrifically wrong. Echoes of this disaster can be heard during the Yugoslavian wars, when an avant-garde puppeteer finds himself trapped inside Belgrade while his brother serves in the genocidal militia that attacks Srebrenica. Decades later, in the war-torn Congo, a disfigured literature professor assembles the largest library in the world even as the country around him collapses. All of these stories are linked by Radar—now a gifted radio operator living in the New Jersey Meadowlands—who struggles with love, a set of hapless parents,and a terrible medical affliction that he has only just begun to comprehend. As I Am Radar accelerates toward its unforgettable conclusion, these divergent strands slowly begin to converge, revealing that beneath our apparent differences, unseen harmonies secretly unite our lives. Drawing on the furthest reaches of quantum physics, forgotten history, and mind-bending art, Larsen’s I Am Radar is a triumph of storytelling at its most primal, elegant, and epic: a breathtaking journey through humanity’s darkest hours only to arrive at a place of shocking wonder and redemption. Cleveland Plain-Dealer "Larsen’s is an extraordinarily lush and verdant imagination, blooming wildly on the borders of the absurd and the riotous, the surreal and the ordinary…Quite unlike any [novel] I’ve read in a long time. One doesn’t consume it; one enters it, as part of a literary enactment… Brilliant…The effort is well-rewarded: It is both maddening and marvelous…I can’t wait to see what he pulls off next."

"We regularly read and hear exhortations for women to take up positions in STEM. The call comes from both government and private corporate circles, and it also emanates from enthusiasts for free and open source software (FOSS), i.e. software that anyone is free to use, copy, study, and change in any way. Ironically, rate of participation in FOSS-related work is far lower than in other areas of computing. A 2002 European Union study showed that fewer than 2 percent of software developers in the FOSS world were women. How is it that an intellectual community of activists so open in principle to one and all -a community that prides itself for its enlightened politics and its commitment to social change - should have such a low rate of participation by women? This book is an ethnographic investigation of efforts to improve the diversity in software and hackerspace communities, with particular attention paid to gender diversity advocacy"--

You can make a geek a model, but you can't make her chic. More hilarity and high fashion await in the second book in the internationally bestselling Geek Girl series, perfect for fans of Morgan Matson and Julie Buxbaum! Harriet Manners is a model—but she feels even less popular and more awkward than she did when she was just a geek. So a summer modeling job in Japan sounds like the perfect vacation, even if she has to bring along her crazy grandma Bunty, and even if she might run into Nick, her gorgeous supermodel ex-boyfriend. No one is going to ruin Harriet's fabulous Tokyo adventure—unless she accidentally ruins it herself.

From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Farsighted Forget everything you’ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, unfailingly intelligent, thoroughly researched, and surprisingly convincing big idea book, Steven Johnson draws from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory to argue that the pop culture we soak in every day—from Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons—has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. After reading Everything Bad is Good for You, you will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again. With a new afterword by the author.