This short SitePoint book provides readers with a fun and yet practical introduction to Sinatra, a framework that makes web development with Ruby extremely simple. It's not intended to be a completely comprehensive guide to the framework or an in-depth Ruby tutorial, but will quickly get you up to speed with Sinatra and give you the confidence to start experimenting on your own. The book is built around a real-life example project: a content management system. It's a fun and easily understandable project that is used to demonstrate the concepts outlined in the book in a practical way. This is a clear, approachable and very easy-to-follow book that will get you to to speed with Sinatra in no time.

Take advantage of Sinatra, the Ruby-based web application library and domain-specific language used by Heroku, GitHub, Apple, Engine Yard, and other prominent organizations. With this concise book, you will quickly gain working knowledge of Sinatra and its minimalist approach to building both standalone and modular web applications. Sinatra serves as a lightweight wrapper around Rack middleware, with syntax that maps closely to functions exposed by HTTP verbs, which makes it ideal for web services and APIs. If you have experience building applications with Ruby, you’ll quickly learn language fundamentals and see under-the-hood techniques, with the help of several practical examples. Then you’ll get hands-on experience with Sinatra by building your own blog engine. Learn Sinatra’s core concepts, and get started by building a simple application Create views, manage sessions, and work with Sinatra route definitions Become familiar with the language’s internals, and take a closer look at Rack Use different subclass methods for building flexible and robust architectures Put Sinatra to work: build a blog that takes advantage of service hooks provided by the GitHub API

Frank Sinatra was the best-known entertainer of the twentieth century—infinitely charismatic, lionized and notorious in equal measure. But despite his mammoth fame, Sinatra the man has remained an enigma. Now James Kaplan brings deeper insight than ever before to the complex psyche and turbulent life behind that incomparable voice, from Sinatra’s humble beginning in Hoboken to his fall from grace and Oscar-winning return in From Here to Eternity. Here at last is the biographer who makes the reader feel what it was really like to be Frank Sinatra—as man, as musician, as tortured genius.

"An intimate, revealing portrait of Frank Sinatra-from the man closest to the famous singer during the last decade of his life. More than a hundred books have been written about legendary crooner and actor Frank Sinatra. Every detail of his life seems to captivate: his career, his romantic relationships, his personality, his businesses, his style. But a hard-to-pin-down quality has always clung to him-a certain elusiveness that emerges again and again in retrospective depictions. Until now. From Sinatra's closest confidant and an eventual member of his management team, Tony Oppedisano, comes an extraordinarily intimate look at the singing idol. Deep into the night, for more than two thousand nights, Frank and Tony would converse-about music, family, friends, great loves, achievements and successes, failures and disappointments, the lives they'd led, the lives they wished they'd led. In these full-disclosure conversations, Sinatra spoke of his close yet complex relationship with his father, his conflicts with record companies, his carousing in Vegas, his love affairs with some of the most beautiful women of his era, his triumphs on some of the world's biggest stages, his complicated relationships with his talented children, and, most important, his dedication to his craft. Toward the end, no one was closer to the singer than Oppedisano, who kept his own rooms at the Sinatra residences for many years, often brokered difficult conversations between family members, and held the superstar entertainer's hand when he drew his last breath. Featuring never-before-seen photos and offering startlingly fresh anecdotes and new revelations that center on some of the most famous people of the past fifty years-including Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Sam Giancana, Madonna, and Bono-Sinatra and Me pulls back the curtain to reveal a man whom history has, in many ways, gotten wrong"--

Learn time-tested, research-proven practices that generate creativity and innovation, helping you and/or your organization get a leg-up on the competition. Creativity is not random. There are reproducible tools and tactics that can help you think smarter and more creatively. Doug Hall and David Wecker work with executives, entrepreneurs, kids, teachers—and everyone who hungers for more wisdom, creativity, and personal growth—to invent ideas for solving problems 52 weeks a year using the Eureka! Way. Jump Start Your Brain Version 2.0 is your guide to a counter-corporate culture approach to creativity, urging you to break rules with childlike abandonment—and have fun doing it. The methods are tried and tested to make your brain 500 percent more creative! Get your cranium flowing with new feats of imagination. This book is a hotbed of innovation, turning the art of creativity into a reliable, renewable science to help you at every age. The Eureka! Way pushes the fear out and puts the fun back into the game. “[Doug Hall is] an eccentric entrepreneur who just might have what we’ve all been looking for—the happy secret to success.” —Dateline NBC “We’ve found Doug Hall’s methods to be different than most. They work.” —Michele Wojtyna, Pepsi-Cola Company

This is the story of the Outfit, the secretive organized crime cartel that began its reign in prohibition-era Chicago before becoming the real puppet master of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and Washington D.C. The Outfit recounts the adventures and exploits of its bosses, Tony 'Joe Batters' Accardo (the real Godfather), Murray 'The Camel' or 'Curly' Humphreys (one of the greatest political fixers and union organizers this country has ever known), Paul 'The Waiter' Ricca, and Johnny Rosselli (the liaison between the shadowy world and the outside world). Their invisibility was their strength, and what kept their leader from ever spending a single night in jail. The Outfit bosses were the epitome of style and grace, moving effortlessly among national political figures and Hollywood studio heads-until their world started to crumble in the 1970s. With extensive research including recently released FBI files, the Chicago Crime files of entertainer Steve Allen, first-ever access to the voluminous working papers of the Kefauver Committee, original interviews with the members of the Fourth Estate who pursued the Outfit for forty years, and exclusive access to the journals of Humphrey's widow, veteran journalist Gus Russo uncovers sixty years of corruption and influence, and examines the shadow history of the United States.

An insider's account of the downfall of the New York mob profiles organized crime at the height of its influence while recounting the author's participation in several lucrative heists and relating his decision to become a federal informant.