GoodReads Summary: The man. The movies. The life. The legend. He’s played a deranged groundskeeper, a bellowing lounge singer, a paranormal exterminator, and a grouchy weatherman. He is William James “Bill” Murray, America’s greatest national treasure. From his childhood lugging golf bags at a country club to his first taste of success on Saturday Night Live, from his starring roles in Hollywood blockbusters to his reinvention as a hipster icon for the twenty-first century, The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray chronicles every aspect of his extraordinary life and career.

GoodReads Summary: A modern classic now available from Grove Press, Being There is one of the most popular and significant works from a writer of international stature. It is the story of Chauncey Gardiner - Chance, an enigmatic but distinguished man who emerges from nowhere to become an heir to the throne of a Wall Street tycoon, a presidential policy adviser, and a media icon. Truly "a man without qualities," Chance's straightforward responses to popular concerns are heralded as visionary. But though everyone is quoting him, no one is sure what he's really saying. And filling in the blanks in his background proves impossible. Being There is a brilliantly satiric look at the unreality of American media culture that is, if anything, more trenchant now than ever.

GoodReads Summary: Young Gav can remember the page of a book after seeing it once, and, inexplicably, he sometimes "remembers" things that are going to happen in the future. As a loyal slave, he must keep these powers secret, but when a terrible tragedy occurs, Gav, blinded by grief, flees the only world he has ever known.

GoodReads Summary: Rust is a new systems programming language that combines the performance and low-level control of C and C++ with memory safety and thread safety. Rust's modern, flexible types ensure your program is free of null pointer dereferences, double frees, dangling pointers, and similar bugs, all at compile time, without runtime overhead. In multi-threaded code, Rust catches data races at compile time, making concurrency much easier to use.

I keep seeing people call tests "integration tests", while they are perfect unit tests. So maybe what we call "unit tests" shouldn't be called unit tests.

GoodReads Summary: The 21st century was on the brink of nuclear confrontation when the 300 kilometer-long stone flashed out of nothingness and into Earth's orbit. NASA, NATO, and the UN sent explorers to the asteroid's surface...and discovered marvels and mysteries to drive researchers mad.

GoodReads Summary: Sita Dulip has missed her flight. But instead of listening to garbled announcements in the airport, she has found a method of bypassing the crowds at the desks, the long lines at the toilets, the nasty lunch, the whimpering children and punitive parents, the bookless bookstores, and the blue plastic chairs bolted to the floor.

GoodReads Summary: Hadoop in Practice collects nearly 100 Hadoop examples and presents them in a problem/solution format. Each technique addresses a specific task you'll face, like querying big data using Pig or writing a log file loader. You'll explore each problem step by step, learning both how to build and deploy that specific solution along with the thinking that went into its design. As you work through the tasks, you'll find yourself growing more comfortable with Hadoop and at home in the world of big data.

GoodReads Summary: Hap Collins is a complicated man. He looks like a good ‘ol boy, but his politics don’t match. After way too many jobs, Hap has discovered what he’s best at: kicking ass. Vietnam veteran Leonard Pine is even more complicated: black, Republican, gay—and an occasional arsonist. As childhood friends and business associates, Hap and Leonard have a gift for the worst kind of trouble: East Texan trouble.

GoodReads Summary: A heretic thief is the empire’s only hope in this fascinating tale that inhabits the same world as the popular novel, Elantris.