Join Adam on a thrilling around-the-world adventure as he competes in the Great Global Game! Every kid's dream is to be named Most Valuable Player. But how many ever dream that the game is a race around the world (no flying allowed) in just forty days? That's the challenge Adam faces in the Great Global Game. As the player for the Magellan Voyage Project, he competes against others for a four-million-dollar prize! Trackers with blowguns and a nefarious baron don't make things easy.

Move over, Moneyball -- this New York Times bestseller examines major league baseball's next cutting-edge revolution: the high-tech quest to build better players. As bestselling authors Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik reveal in The MVP Machine, the Moneyball era is over. Fifteen years after Michael Lewis brought the Oakland Athletics' groundbreaking team-building strategies to light, every front office takes a data-driven approach to evaluating players, and the league's smarter teams no longer have a huge advantage in valuing past performance. Lindbergh and Sawchik's behind-the-scenes reporting reveals: How undersized afterthoughts José Altuve and Mookie Betts became big sluggers and MVPs How polarizing pitcher Trevor Bauer made himself a Cy Young contender How new analytical tools have overturned traditional pitching and hitting techniques How a wave of young talent is making MLB both better than ever and arguably worse to watch Instead of out-drafting, out-signing, and out-trading their rivals, baseball's best minds have turned to out-developing opponents, gaining greater edges than ever by perfecting prospects and eking extra runs out of older athletes who were once written off. Lindbergh and Sawchik take us inside the transformation of former fringe hitters into home-run kings, show how washed-up pitchers have emerged as aces, and document how coaching and scouting are being turned upside down. The MVP Machine charts the future of a sport and offers a lesson that goes beyond baseball: Success stems not from focusing on finished products, but from making the most of untapped potential.

From New York Times bestselling author and ESPN Television personality Mike Greenberg, host of the new morning talk show Get Up, and his wife Stacy comes a heartwarming, silly tale about a dog and her human pal. And all the authors’ proceeds from this book are going to combat pediatric cancer! Phoebe is a dog with a pink tail. She lives with her family—the Man in the Box, the Lady who Feeds Her, the Baby, and her sister the Girl with Curly Hair. Phoebe’s favorite time of day is when she and her sister go to the park and play. But today things are a different. Can Phoebe convince her best friend to try something new? And can she show her that sometimes it’s okay not to be perfect? Phoebe and her sister learn that no matter what happens and no matter how many mistakes you make, your family will always be there for you. In 2013, Mike and Stacy created the Heidi’s Angels Foundation to fund cancer research. The authors will donate their proceeds from this book to Heidi’s Angels, to help fight pediatric cancer through its support of the V Foundation for Cancer Research.

"Chili Dog MVP: Dick Allen, The 1972 White Sox and A Transforming Chicago" re-creates a unique time and place in baseball and Chicago history, when the arrival of a controversial slugger lifted the bedraggled Sox out of a daunting hole and briefly united a fractious fan base for the two hours-plus he played.Lead author John Owens, along with Dr. David Fletcher and George Castle, weave an entertaining narrative of Allen, his teammates and broadcaster Harry Caray bringing pride to a franchise that had one foot out of town to Milwaukee just 2 1/2 years previously and equal status in profile with the dominant Chicago Cubs.The best baseball books endeavor to re-create the time, place and "feel" of a team and the people around it. "Chili Dog MVP" follows in that tradition to recall a more innocent time in baseball intertwining with the hard truths of a hyper-political city like Chicago. In both baseball and life, for which the game is often a metaphor, past is prologue.Edited by baseball writer par excellence, George Castle. George has written 21 books, and is a historian for the Chicago Baseball Museum.

Summary SQL Server MVP Deep Dives, Volume 2 is a unique book that lets you learn from the best in the business - 64 SQL Server MVPs offer completely new content in this second volume on topics ranging from testing and policy management to integration services, reporting, and performance optimization techniques...and more. About this Book To become an MVP requires deep knowledge and impressive skill. Together, the 64 MVPs who wrote this book bring about 1,000 years of experience in SQL Server administration, development, training, and design. This incredible book captures their expertise and passion in 60 concise, hand-picked chapters and offers valuable insights for readers of all levels. SQL Server MVP Deep Dives, Volume 2 picks up where the first volume leaves off, with completely new content on topics ranging from testing and policy management to integration services, reporting, and performance optimization. The chapters fall into five parts: Architecture and Design, Database Administration, Database Development, Performance Tuning and Optimization, and Business Intelligence. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book. What's Inside Discovering servers with PowerShell Using regular expressions in SSMS Tuning the Transaction Log for OLTP Optimizing SSIS for dimensional data Real-time BI and much more Manning Publications and the authors of this book support the children of Operation Smile, an international children's medical charity that performs free reconstructive surgery for children suffering from facial deformities such as cleft lips and cleft palates by mobilizing medical volunteers who provide education and training programs to local doctors on the latest surgical techniques. ========================================​======= Table of Contents PART 1 ARCHITECTUREEdited by Louis Davidson Where are my keys? by Ami Levin "Yes, we are all individuals"A look at uniqueness in the world of SQL by Rob Farley Architectural growth pains by Chris Shaw Characteristics of a great relational database by Louis Davidson Storage design considerations by Denny Cherry Generalization: the key to a well-designed schema by Paul Nielsen PART 2 DATABASE ADMINISTRATION Edited by Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp Increasing availability through testing by Allan Hirt Page restores by Gail Shaw Capacity planning by Greg Larsen Discovering your servers with PowerShell and SMO by Joe Webb Will the real Mr. Smith please stand up? by John Magnabosco Build your own SQL Server 2008 performance dashboard by Pawl Potasinski SQL Server cost recovery by Peter Ward Best practice compliance with Policy-Based Management by Rod Colledge Using SQL Server Management Studio to the fullest by Rodney Landrum Multiserver management and Utility Explorer - best tools for the DBA by Satya Shyam K. Jayanty Top 10 SQL Server admin student misconceptions by Tibor Karaszi High availability of SQL Server in the context of Service Level Agreements by Tobiasz Janusz Koprowski PART 3 DATABASE DEVELOPMENT Edited by Paul Nielsen T-SQL: bad habits to kick by Aaron Bertrand Death by UDF by Kevin Boles Using regular expressions in SSMS by John Paul Cook SQL Server Denali: what's coming next in T-SQL by Sergio Govoni Creating your own data type by Hugo Kornelis Extracting data with regular expressions by Matija Lah Relational division by Peter Larsson SQL FILESTREAM: to BLOB or not to BLOB by Ben Miller Writing unit tests for Transact-SQL by Luciano Moreira Getting asynchronous with Service Broker by Mladen Prajdic Effective use of HierarchyId by Denis Reznik Let Service Broker help you scale your application by Allen White PART 4 PERFORMANCE TUNING AND OPTIMIZATION Edited by Brad M. McGehee Hardware 201: selecting and sizing database server hardware by Glenn Berry Parameter sniffing: your best friend...except when it isn't by Grant Fritchey Investigating the plan cache by Jason Strate What are you waiting for? An introduction to waits and queues by Robert Pearl You see sets, and I see loops by Linchi Shea Performance-tuning the transaction log for OLTP workloads by Brad M. McGehee Strategies for unraveling tangled code by Jennifer McCown Using PAL to analyze SQL Server performance by Tim Chapman Tuning JDBC for SQL Server by Jungsun Kim PART 5 BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE Edited by Greg Low Creating a formal Reporting Services report part library by Jessica M. Moss Improving report layout and visualization by Greg Low Developing sharable managed code expressions in SSRS by William Vaughn Designing reports with custom MDX queries by Paul Turley Building a scale-out Reporting Services farm by Edwin Sarmiento Creating SSRS reports from SSAS by Robert Cain Optimizing SSIS for dimensional data loads by Michael Coles SSIS configurations management by Andy Leonard Exploring different types of enumerators in the SSIS Foreach Loop container by Abolfazl Radgoudarzi and Shahriar Nikkhah Late-arriving dimensions in SSIS by John Welch Why automate tasks with SSIS? by Ted Krueger Extending SSIS using the Script component by Tim Mitchell ETL design checklist by Rafael Salas Autogenerating SSAS cubes by Johan Ahlen Scripting SSAS databases - AMO and PowerShell, Better Together by Darren Gosbell Managing context in MDX by Boyan Penev Using time intelligence functions in PowerPivot by Thiago Zavaschi Easy BI with Silverlight PivotViewer by Gogula Aryalingam Excel as a BI frontend tool by Pedro Perfeito Real-time BI with StreamInsight by Allan Mitchell BI solution development design considerations by Siddharth Mehta

The missing manual on how to apply Lean Startup to build products that customers love The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice. The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to successfully adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing. If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to develop winning products, this book is for you. This book describes the Lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit. It walks you through how to: Determine your target customers Identify underserved customer needs Create a winning product strategy Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Design your MVP prototype Test your MVP with customers Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products. As a hands-on consultant, he refined and applied the advice in this book as he helped many companies improve their product process and build great products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Epocrates, and Medallia. Entrepreneurs, executives, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find The Lean Product Playbook an indispensable, hands-on resource.

The sports world according to Michael Rapaport—actor, Top 50 podcaster, award-winning film maker, and sports fanatic—from the greatest and downright worst athletes, players, teams, and jerseys, but minus statistics, analytics, or anything else that isn’t pure hustle in this “hell of a book” (Shaquille O'Neal). In 1979, nine-year-old Michael Rapaport decided he was going to do whatever it took to be a pro baller. He practiced and practiced, but by the time he was fifteen, he realized there was no place for a slow, white Jewish kid in the NBA. So, he found another way to channel his obsession with sports: talking trash. In the “crazy, passionate, funny and intense” (Colin Cowherd) This Book Has Balls, Rapaport uses his signature smack-talk style and in-your-face humor to discuss everything from why LeBron will never be like Mike, that Tiger needs the ladies to get his golf game back, and how he once thought Mary Lou Retton was his true love. And, of course, why next year will be the year the New York Knicks win the championship. This book is a series of rants—some controversial, some affectionate, but all incredibly hilarious. “Something is wrong with Michael Rapaport but that’s what makes him right,” (Charlamagne tha God).