Best Tech Culture & Computer Literacy
By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century, human beings searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential—revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we’re afraid to ask that might be essential to our health—both emotional and physical. “Brimming with intriguing anecdotes and counterintuitive facts, Stephens-Davidowitz does his level best to help usher in a new age of human understanding, one digital data point at a time.” ( Fortune , Best New Business Books). “ Freakonomics on steroids—this book shows how big data can give us surprising new answers to important and interesting questions. Drawing on a wide variety of revelatory sources, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz will make you cringe, chuckle, and wince at the people you thought we were.” (Christian Rudder, author of Dataclysm ). “A tour de force—a well-written and entertaining journey through big data that, along the way, happens to put forward an important new perspective on human behavior itself. What he found is that Internet search data might be the Holy Grail when it comes to understanding the true nature of humanity.” ( New York Post ). “ Everybody Lies is an astoundingly clever and mischievous exploration of what big data tells us about everyday life. The empirical findings in Everybody Lies are so intriguing that the book would be a page-turner even if it were structured as a mere laundry list.” (The Economist). A book for those who are intensely curious about human nature, informational analysis, and amusing anecdotes to the tune of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakanomics.” ( Library Journal ). In this groundbreaking work, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a Harvard-trained economist, former Google data scientist, and New York Times writer, argues that much of what we thought about people has been dead wrong. New data from the internet—the traces of information that billions of people leave on Google, social media, dating, and even pornography sites—finally reveals the truth. Everybody Lies combines the informed analysis of Nate Silver’s TheSignal and the Noise, the storytelling of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and the wit and fun of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics in a book that will change the way you view the world.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"The basic thesis of "Everybody Lies" is that online data on human behavior, including Google searches and data from Facebook, shopping and pornographic sites, can reveal much about what we really think than data from surveys in which people might be too embarrassed to tell the truth. What has allowed us to access this pool of unguarded opinions and truckloads of data concerning human behavior is the Internet and the tools of "big" data. As the author puts it, this data is not just "big" but also "new", which means that the kind of data we can access is also quite different from what we are used to; in his words, we live in a world where every sneeze, cough, internet purchase, political opinion, and evening run can be considered "data". Generally speaking there is quite an emphasis on exploring human sexuality in the book, partly because sexuality is one of those aspects of our life that we wish to hide the most and are also pruriently interested in, and partly because investigating this data through Google searches and pornographic sites reveals some rather bizarre sexual preference that are also sometimes specific to one country or another. Based on Google searches in particular states, the author shows how racism (as indicated by racist Google searches) was a primary indicator of which states voted for Obama in the 2008 election and Trump in the 2016 election. The primary tool for doing all this data analysis is correlation or regression analysis, where you look at online searches and try to find correlations between certain terms and factors like geographic location, gender, ethnicity. There are tons of other amusing and informative studies - sometimes the author's own but more often other people's - that reveal human desires and behavior across a wide swathe of fields, including politics, dating, sports, education, shopping and sexuality. As the author himself acknowledges, understanding correlation is not the same as understanding causation, and it's in very few cases that a true causal relationship between people's Google searches and their true nature can be established. At the end of the day you could thus end up with a lot of data (including a lot of noise), but teasing apart the useful data points from the red herrings is a completely different matter. Secondly, it's usually quite hard to control for all possible variables that may reflect a Google search; for instance in concluding that racism contributes the most to a particular political behavior, it's very hard to tease out all other factors that also may do so, especially when you are talking about a heterogeneous collection of human beings."
"And the truths we have been telling Google on sex, racism, antisemitism, mental health and politics are coarse, frightening, disturbing, and altogether too human to ignore. Using a mountain of data from Google searches and other social media like Facebook and Twitter, Stephens-Davidowitz wrote a click-bait book full of insights on humanity based on "the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche." The digital truth serum, as he calls Google Search data, offers a glimpse at many things social scientists dream to understand, from sexual taboos, proclivities and insecurities, to political bias in the press and latent racism hidden in searches for jokes. Also, it doesn't entirely fall prey to the Big Data a-theoretical hype; discussions on A/B testing, out-of-sample prediction and natural experiments in economics balance the correlational narrative with a good dose of causal inference, which is often missing in books that describe stuff from large data sets."
"I read it in two days. The data is the data, but the interpretation is subjective."
EXPANDED & UPDATED - NOVEMBER, 2017 | Free Kindle updates for life No matter your background, SEO 2018 will walk you through search engine optimization techniques used to grow countless companies online, exact steps to rank high in Google, and how get a ton of customers. - Google's constant updates have made many popular SEO optimization strategies useless. August, 2017 - Google quietly releases a local SEO update dubbed the "Hawk" update, providing new challenges for local businesses. SEO 2018 covers the latest updates to Google's algorithm and how to use them to your advantage. With this best-selling SEO book, learn SEO from a fundamental level, achieve top rankings, and generate a wave of new customers to your site. This book reveals: - The inner mechanics of Google's algorithm, and how to rank your site at the top. - Recent Google updates—Google's Mobile First Index, Google Hawk update, Google FRED update, Accelerated Mobile Pages, and more... - Potential changes coming up in 2018. One of the most comprehensive SEO optimization and Internet marketing books ever published—now expanded and updated—of all best-selling SEO books, this is the only one with everything you need. ***** Holistic professional guide to best practice SEO. About the Author Adam Clarke is a Google-certified internet marketing professional who has achieved thousands of number one rankings over the past 10-years.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"The book should come with a warning: Once you start reading this book all your other work plans will fade into insignificance as SEO 2018 takes over your mind."
"I hoped reading your book would be like taking a college class, it turned out to be a SEO roundtable discussion."
"This book contains a lot of very solid advice and SEO strategy!"
"It's not filled with generalities like other books, it is SPECIFIC, with actionable advice you can put into action and build your sales."
"Very, very good."
"Very informative, and lots to learn."
"Great to get us started optimizing our site foe SEO."
This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena—from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books—into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior. A. Kenn has written about technology and business from Europe, Asia, and the US for The Economist , and is well-connected to the data community. Viktor had researched the information economy as a professor at Harvard and now at Oxford, and his book Delete had been well received. As we wrote the book, we had to dig deep to find unheard stories about big data pioneers and interview them. It is tempting to say that it was predicting exploding manholes, tracking inflation in real time, or how big data saves the lives of premature babies. But the biggest surprise for us perhaps was the very diversity of the uses of big data, and how it already is changing people’s everyday world. Big data improves economic efficiency, but that’s only a very small part of the story. We realized when talking to dozens and dozens of big data pioneers that it improves health care, advances better education, and helps predict societal change—from urban sprawl to the spread of the flu. We are very concerned about what we call in our book “the dark side of big data.” However the real challenge is that the problem is not necessarily where we initially tend to think it is, such as surveillance and privacy. We thought hard to suggest concrete steps that can be taken to minimize and mitigate big data’s risk, and came up with a few ways to ensure transparency, guarantee human free will, and strike a better balance on privacy and the use of personal information. Academic Mayer-Schönberger and editor Cukier consider big data the new ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw conclusions from it.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"The examples are incredibly repetitive, and I'm not sure the authors collaborated on topics as several sections repeat in their entirety."
"They discuss how big data has enabled entrepreneurs to inform customers about the optimal time to buy flight tickets given that airlines vary their prices according to hidden methods that big data statistics has helped to make more sense of. The authors discuss datification which means the consolidation of data into a larger database that can then be used to give much more useful guidance to the population at large about phenomenon that required a look from above at all the data together. The authors move on to the more concrete and start to discuss the value of big data. The value in big data is of course, the data, but the utility of that data might be further midstream or downstream that others are better placed to harvest. They use an example of how big data statistics was used to substantially improve the ability to find overcrowded illegal slum housing as a concrete example of how we can use data to enhance our cities and improve governance and efficiency. Big Data is an excellent readable overview of how data has always been used to guide policy, how big data is being used today, what the value chain of the data industry looks like, what the risks are of big data and how big data can enhance the future."
"This is a an extremely important and interesting book."
"His examples are solid about how companies already begin to collect data and use it to make major decisions, but I would've liked to read more about how, specifically, that data was collected (some programs were mentioned), analyzed, and used (be extremely specific)."
"They make the same argument that many others have made, namely, that big data emphasizes "correlation" as opposed to "causation," and that that is indeed a paradigm shift (they don't use that terminology, but I think it is apropos) in the way that we think about the world. In particular, it poses significant changes to fields such as statistics, where "the whole" is going to be analyzed now instead of "a sample.""
Best Blogging
With wit, wisdom, and the insight of someone who’s been there, Ruth Soukup shares how she grew her own blog, Living Well Spending Less, to over one million monthly visitors, earns a full time income, and still is able to write about the things she truly cares about. •Improve your productivity, learning to work smarter not harder, and take concrete steps to transform your blog into a business. Since launching in 2010, Living Well Spending Less has become one of the most popular personal finance blogs on the net, receiving more than one million visitors per month.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Many are common sense - such as "write awesome content" and "determine your main theme..." The chapter on social media was extremely helpful. Meaning, no awesome techniques or ideas that haven't already been talked about by 100 other authors in 100 other blogging ebooks. The bulk of my traffic has always come from search engines and, while social media is changing how we use the internet, I don't think enough emphasis can be put on the importance of search engines as a source of traffic for most blogs. I'd highly suggest spending your time reading stuff written by those whose sole purpose is teaching better blogging techniques...like the Smart Passive Income blog by Pat Flynn or ProBlogger with Darren Rowse."
"This isn't just a book you read through and say "oh, that was nice" its more like a manual that you can keep at your desk and refer back to you over and over again as you work through implementing all of the incredible strategies."
"This book is fantastic - I appreciated the straight forward, simplistic and easy to understand approach."
"I have found great ideas in this book that have really helped my blog."
"The information is so generic that it could apply to most anything."
"I found the book to be very helpful."
"If you start constructing your blog through wordpress.COM, you will likely spend a lot of time picking a theme and starting to write and organize your posts, only to discover that wordpress.COM does NOT support any ways to monetize your site. You will also waste a lot of time trying to move your site off of wordpress.com afterwards."
"I have been blogging for 18 months and there wasn't anything I didn't already know from just reading other blogs on blogging for free."
Best Computer Literacy
Gain the Sybex advantage with this complete guide to A+ certification The CompTIA A+ Complete Study Guide is your complete solution for A+ exam preparation. More than just a review of computer parts, this book covers everything you'll see on the exam. Covers 100% of exam objectives, including motherboard components, types of network cables and connectors, laptop hardware, Windows and other operating systems, security threats, prevention methods, and much more... You'll prepare for the exam smarter and faster with Sybex thanks to superior content including, assessment tests that check exam readiness, objective map, real-world scenarios, hands-on exercises, key topic exam essentials, and challenging chapter review questions. Handling storage devices and peripherals Setting up wired, wireless, and SOHO networks Working with laptops, smartphones, tablets, and e-readers Troubleshooting hardware and networks Managing different versions of Windows, Mac OS, and Linux Securing all types of networks Communicating effectively and professionally. 240 questions total! Toby Skandier, A+, Network+, i-Net+, Server+, is founder of Talskan Technologies, LLC, a technical education provider.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I have used the Deluxe Editions for Previous versions of A+, very helpful.This book delivers extremely concentrated content written on a college level with advanced terminology starting right away in the first few pages of the first chapter; and going forward throughout the book. This book disseminates information in a very concentrated and sophisticated manner."
"If you are taking the certification exam without taking a prep course I would really recommend this book."
"First off this book is very thick, but well put together."
"Good book and good price."
"Great quality and comprehensive well help with the Exam for sure."
"This has helped me prepared for and pass the test in a few weeks of study."
Best E-Commerce
A broad introduction of bitcoin and its underlying blockchain—ideal for non-technical users, investors, and business executives An explanation of the technical foundations of bitcoin and cryptographic currencies for developers, engineers, and software and systems architects Details of the bitcoin decentralized network, peer-to-peer architecture, transaction lifecycle, and security principles New developments such as Segregated Witness, Payment Channels, and Lightning Network A deep dive into blockchain applications, including how to combine the building blocks offered by this platform into higher-level applications User stories, analogies, examples, and code snippets illustrating key technical concepts. With experience ranging from hardware and electronics to high level business and financial systems technology consulting and years as CTO/CIO/CSO in many companies — he combines authority and deep knowledge with an ability to make complex subjects easy to understand. His expertise includes Bitcoin, crypto-currencies, Information Security, Cryptography, Cloud Computing, Data Centers, Linux, Open Source and robotics software development.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Deep complex book for programmers."
"It explains how keys work—even down to the level of the elliptic curve math—the ins and outs of transactions, and the components of Script, Bitcoin’s language for securing unspent transaction outputs (UTXO)."
"Fantastic book if you want to learn what Bitcoin is and how it works."
"I would recommend this book to everyone, who wants to know how the bitcoin works in bit level."
"Excelent information to for those who want to create blockchain related projects..."
"Very good book for both technical & non technical use."
"detailed, comprehensive, and masterful."
"great book very technical."
Best Electronic Publishing
This book will show you exactly what you need to do to start a profitable blog today based on what top bloggers are doing.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"The section on plug-ins for instance, suggests multiple plug-ins for success but it does not break down what the plug-ins do: in terms of their functions or what different qualities or levels of them might exist out there or why I might even want them. That way I could answer my own questions quickly within the book itself and then I have to go outside of it don't lose the momentum I've gained an understanding and concentration. Of course the author invites you to subscribe to his blog, both to keep up with what's the newest and as he explains throughout the book – to grow his own email list which is valuable."
"By sharing his simple formula it made it clear how to start a blog, how to blog and share your particular niche and later (hopefully, sooner than later) profit from blogging. I've read books about blogging before, but for some reason, this one clicked."
"While Hirsch did briefly outline the mechanics of set up a website and the blogging tools needed to get started, there was not a lot of conversation about the things to look for and about the tools that are needed or how they might help a blogging website. This might lead into a bigger discussion about how to use these tools to research things related to what one might want to blog about. Obviously it would be an extensive conversation to try to show someone how to find what they would want to blog about, but a step through of a blogging topic of any sort as an example would have been awesome. For the price, it probably is the best outline style book for getting introduced to the things needed to get your own blog up and running."
"This book has everything you needed to know in terms of blogging."
"There is some useful information here, but it's ironically content poor (short and wordy) and very poorly written with typos all over the place."
Best Information Technology
This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena—from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books—into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior. A. Kenn has written about technology and business from Europe, Asia, and the US for The Economist , and is well-connected to the data community. Viktor had researched the information economy as a professor at Harvard and now at Oxford, and his book Delete had been well received. As we wrote the book, we had to dig deep to find unheard stories about big data pioneers and interview them. It is tempting to say that it was predicting exploding manholes, tracking inflation in real time, or how big data saves the lives of premature babies. But the biggest surprise for us perhaps was the very diversity of the uses of big data, and how it already is changing people’s everyday world. Big data improves economic efficiency, but that’s only a very small part of the story. We realized when talking to dozens and dozens of big data pioneers that it improves health care, advances better education, and helps predict societal change—from urban sprawl to the spread of the flu. We are very concerned about what we call in our book “the dark side of big data.” However the real challenge is that the problem is not necessarily where we initially tend to think it is, such as surveillance and privacy. We thought hard to suggest concrete steps that can be taken to minimize and mitigate big data’s risk, and came up with a few ways to ensure transparency, guarantee human free will, and strike a better balance on privacy and the use of personal information. Academic Mayer-Schönberger and editor Cukier consider big data the new ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw conclusions from it.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"The examples are incredibly repetitive, and I'm not sure the authors collaborated on topics as several sections repeat in their entirety."
"They discuss how big data has enabled entrepreneurs to inform customers about the optimal time to buy flight tickets given that airlines vary their prices according to hidden methods that big data statistics has helped to make more sense of. The authors discuss datification which means the consolidation of data into a larger database that can then be used to give much more useful guidance to the population at large about phenomenon that required a look from above at all the data together. The authors move on to the more concrete and start to discuss the value of big data. The value in big data is of course, the data, but the utility of that data might be further midstream or downstream that others are better placed to harvest. They use an example of how big data statistics was used to substantially improve the ability to find overcrowded illegal slum housing as a concrete example of how we can use data to enhance our cities and improve governance and efficiency. Big Data is an excellent readable overview of how data has always been used to guide policy, how big data is being used today, what the value chain of the data industry looks like, what the risks are of big data and how big data can enhance the future."
"This is a an extremely important and interesting book."
"His examples are solid about how companies already begin to collect data and use it to make major decisions, but I would've liked to read more about how, specifically, that data was collected (some programs were mentioned), analyzed, and used (be extremely specific)."
"They make the same argument that many others have made, namely, that big data emphasizes "correlation" as opposed to "causation," and that that is indeed a paradigm shift (they don't use that terminology, but I think it is apropos) in the way that we think about the world. In particular, it poses significant changes to fields such as statistics, where "the whole" is going to be analyzed now instead of "a sample.""
Best Internet Culture
This bestselling on-the-job reference and test preparation guide has been fully revised for the new 2015 CompTIA exam objectives for exams 901 & 902 Written by the leading authority on CompTIA A+ certification and training, this self-study set has been thoroughly updated to cover 100% of the topics covered on the latest edition of the exam. He is author of Mike Meyers’ A+ Guide to Managing and Troubleshooting PCs and Mike Meyers’ Network+ Guide to Managing and Troubleshooting Networks .
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"My method of study i chose to read this textbook cover to cover, taking all practice tests at the end of each chapter, along with the included practice exams on the disc. In addition to this text i went further to find online practice exams and Professor Messer videos on Youtube as free self studying material. The book covered the objectives and even went beyond which is why this makes a great on-the-job reference."
"Most importantly, I was looking for a book that could not only keep me engaged yet also provide the necessary educational materials. Presently I'm over a hundred or so pages in (the book is Bible thick) and have purposely slowed myself down at times to ensure lesson absorption but honestly could read this book like it was a spellbinding work of fanciful fiction. It really helps to have an actual, honest interest in the subject matter and there are times where you'll want access to several different operating systems."
"Just started, but it has been an easy to follow book so far."
"It's alright, the language the guy uses isn't 100% professional but VERY relatable with the youth."
"Will always keep current copies of Mike Meyers books in my library."
"Gives a CD in order for you to have a digital copy of the book as well as other helpful quizzes....I do not have a CD drive on my laptop, had to go out of my way to find someone with a CD drive just to place it on a thumb drive."
"this is an IT field essential."
"Came it great condition, book is a bible but it very entertaining and it's enjoyable."
Best Online Services
If you use Linux in your day-to-day work, this popular pocket guide is the perfect on-the-job reference. He is the author of O'Reilly's Linux Pocket Guide, and the coauthor of two more O'Reilly books: Linux Security Cookbook, and SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Excellent."
"Nice book to have with you."
"Yep, they said second edition and I didn't catch it."
"What I like the most is the perfect index at your fingertips as well as the quality of substsnce."
"Great book for both beginner and for experienced, levelling out rough spots in knowledge, and that's not even its' intended purpose - being a handy reference guide."
"Awesome!"
Best Search Engines
Jason speaks in simple English and uses the metaphor of The Seven Steps to SEO Fitness to explain to you how to 'get SEO fit.'. Goals : Define Your SEO Goals Keywords : Identify Winnable, High Value SEO Keywords On Page SEO : Optimize Your Website to 'Speak Google' via Page Tabs, your home page, and structural elements Content Marketing : Learn to produce content that pleases Google and your customers Off Page SEO : Build links, leverage social media, and go local. Check out the other 2018 SEO Books on Amazon - SEO For Dummies , SEO for Growth , SEO Book , SEO Like I'm 5 etc., - they're great, they're good, but they don't include powerful step-by-step worksheets, links to online videos, and the free SEO Toolbook with hundreds of free tools for search engine optimization 2018. Listed on many SEO book lists as one of the best books SEO books of 2018 as well as a best SEO book for beginners. ~ Alexandra Hager. In Sept. and Oct. 2016, I took Jason's SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Ad Words, and Social Media Marketing online class series. However, since SEO, Ad Words, and Social Media live on the internet, watching Jason walk through everything in an online format works really well. He demonstrates this through his exhaustive list of resources that he shares in his classes as well as his expert, insider tips about internet marketing that you cannot get from Google. The book grew out of my class at Stanford University's Continuing Studies Program, "Marketing without Money."
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"SEO Fitness Workbook: 2017 Edition: The Seven Steps to Search Engine Optimization Success on Google. I'm glad I've got this handy SEO Book, it's my go-to guide for reference on SEO best practices."
"Whether you are a marketing professional, web developer, content writer or a business owner wanting to understand SEO, this is a great book to include in your library of knowledge!"
"I found the book a bit repetitious at times, and would prefer a shorter version, Still I won't take a star off."
"My goal is to be a small business owner and reducing the SEO to seven understandable steps relieves a small part of the business but also an important one."
"Off page SEO and On page SEO along with all of the other information to tie everything together."
"I haven't yet taken the time to do the exercises, because I wanted to get an overview, but I am looking forward to doing them.We are a highly non technical company populated by older folks who come from textile manufacturing and marketing."
"I write content for blogs and websites, so instead of Keeping Up with the Joneses, I have to Keep Up with the Search Engines. I could just throw up my hands in frustration and surrender. Good thing they are digital, because as often as I refer back to them, I'd wear the paper versions out in short order. The Kindle price was $9.99....imagine having a truly expert SEO person on hand 24/7 to answer questions, demonstrate SEO websites that return meaningful analysis of your content and SEO efforts, and provide easy-to-follow, step-by-step How To's on every aspect of SEO excellence. His sense of humor makes learning the oft times tedious material a load of fun."
Best Social Aspects of the Internet
By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century, human beings searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential—revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we’re afraid to ask that might be essential to our health—both emotional and physical. “Brimming with intriguing anecdotes and counterintuitive facts, Stephens-Davidowitz does his level best to help usher in a new age of human understanding, one digital data point at a time.” ( Fortune , Best New Business Books). “ Freakonomics on steroids—this book shows how big data can give us surprising new answers to important and interesting questions. Drawing on a wide variety of revelatory sources, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz will make you cringe, chuckle, and wince at the people you thought we were.” (Christian Rudder, author of Dataclysm ). “A tour de force—a well-written and entertaining journey through big data that, along the way, happens to put forward an important new perspective on human behavior itself. What he found is that Internet search data might be the Holy Grail when it comes to understanding the true nature of humanity.” ( New York Post ). “ Everybody Lies is an astoundingly clever and mischievous exploration of what big data tells us about everyday life. The empirical findings in Everybody Lies are so intriguing that the book would be a page-turner even if it were structured as a mere laundry list.” (The Economist). A book for those who are intensely curious about human nature, informational analysis, and amusing anecdotes to the tune of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakanomics.” ( Library Journal ). In this groundbreaking work, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a Harvard-trained economist, former Google data scientist, and New York Times writer, argues that much of what we thought about people has been dead wrong. New data from the internet—the traces of information that billions of people leave on Google, social media, dating, and even pornography sites—finally reveals the truth. Everybody Lies combines the informed analysis of Nate Silver’s TheSignal and the Noise, the storytelling of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and the wit and fun of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics in a book that will change the way you view the world.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"The basic thesis of "Everybody Lies" is that online data on human behavior, including Google searches and data from Facebook, shopping and pornographic sites, can reveal much about what we really think than data from surveys in which people might be too embarrassed to tell the truth. What has allowed us to access this pool of unguarded opinions and truckloads of data concerning human behavior is the Internet and the tools of "big" data. As the author puts it, this data is not just "big" but also "new", which means that the kind of data we can access is also quite different from what we are used to; in his words, we live in a world where every sneeze, cough, internet purchase, political opinion, and evening run can be considered "data". Generally speaking there is quite an emphasis on exploring human sexuality in the book, partly because sexuality is one of those aspects of our life that we wish to hide the most and are also pruriently interested in, and partly because investigating this data through Google searches and pornographic sites reveals some rather bizarre sexual preference that are also sometimes specific to one country or another. Based on Google searches in particular states, the author shows how racism (as indicated by racist Google searches) was a primary indicator of which states voted for Obama in the 2008 election and Trump in the 2016 election. The primary tool for doing all this data analysis is correlation or regression analysis, where you look at online searches and try to find correlations between certain terms and factors like geographic location, gender, ethnicity. There are tons of other amusing and informative studies - sometimes the author's own but more often other people's - that reveal human desires and behavior across a wide swathe of fields, including politics, dating, sports, education, shopping and sexuality. As the author himself acknowledges, understanding correlation is not the same as understanding causation, and it's in very few cases that a true causal relationship between people's Google searches and their true nature can be established. At the end of the day you could thus end up with a lot of data (including a lot of noise), but teasing apart the useful data points from the red herrings is a completely different matter. Secondly, it's usually quite hard to control for all possible variables that may reflect a Google search; for instance in concluding that racism contributes the most to a particular political behavior, it's very hard to tease out all other factors that also may do so, especially when you are talking about a heterogeneous collection of human beings."
"As someone who has worked on many social science research studies based on self-reported survey respondent data, I can fully appreciate the author's findings."
"I read it in two days. The data is the data, but the interpretation is subjective."
"Yes, subjects such as sex are discussed but in a manner of data extraction."
"A little long on commentary but easy read through."
"The truth is hard to bare, you might find yourself feeling sad to read about what some of the points talk about, but I think everyone should read this book, It is both entertaining and inspiring."
Best Social Media
Liar’s Poker meets The Social Network in an irreverent exposé of life inside the tech bubble, from industry provocateur Antonio García Martínez, a former Twitter advisor, Facebook product manager and startup founder/CEO. He also fathered two children with a woman he barely knew, committed lewd acts and brewed illegal beer on the Facebook campus (accidentally flooding Zuckerberg's desk), lived on a sailboat, raced sport cars on the 101, and enthusiastically pursued the life of an overpaid Silicon Valley wastrel. Weighing in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization and digital “privacy,” García Martínez shares his scathing observations and outrageous antics, taking us on a humorous, subversive tour of the fascinatingly insular tech industry. Chaos Monkeys lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world. This is not a whodunit (we know who did – Zuckerberg, those rowing twins, and assorted Harvard frenemies) so much as a procedural, a chronicle by the data-guru who was eventually forced out of Facebook (he went to Twitter) – but not before gathering some pretty interesting social data of his own: about Zuckerberg, about other Silicon valley “chaos monkeys,” and about the culture that spawned all of them. “Unlike most founding narratives that flow out of the Valley, Chaos Monkeys dives into the unburnished, day-to-day realities: the frantic pivots, the enthusiastic ass-kissing, the excruciating internal politics.... [García] can be rude, but he’s shrewd, too.” — Bloomberg Businessweek. “Traces the evolution of social media and online marketing and reveals how it’s become a part of our daily lives and how it will affect our future.” — Leonard Lopate, WNYC.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Facebook very carefully maintains a public relations campaign (almost more internally focused than external) to convince the world it is the best place to work… ever. It is all here… the creepy propaganda, the failed high-profile projects, the surreal manager/staff relationships, the cultivated cult-like atmosphere, the sharp divide between the have-it-all, and the "hope to have enough to escape" staff. Best of all it describes how the advertising media really operates, going back to the dawn of it, and how Facebook, Google, et al are merely extensions of a system that has existed for two centuries. For myself, having lived through much of the same experience at Facebook (from onboarding, the devotion, the cynicism, to the inglorious, frustrated exit bungled by one of the legion of Facebook's incompetent and narcissistic manager corps) I found myself going from laughter, to nodding agreement, to gut-wrenching bouts of PTSD as I turned the pages of 'Chaos Monkeys'. Now I no longer have to justify myself to people who ask me why I left Facebook - I can just tell them to read this book, since it explains it better than I ever could."
"If anything, the vivid metaphors he uses to describe the otherwise dull and esoteric details of identity matching and attribution will serve you well anytime you must summon a complete picture of this complex web in your head. Even non-specialists will find fascinating the descriptions of how private data is collected and sold, not to mention probably realizing they have been worried about the wrong kind of privacy violations. His detailed accounts of many of these meetings (confrontations) offer a unique behind-the-scenes vantage which many manuals for silicon valley success avoid, so the authors can remain in good stead with the figures involved. In reality, the unspoken “hard” part of any startup is not the actual hours involved, or the idea, or execution, but rather the unwavering conviction you must have to keep at it when things are totally falling apart. Every entrepreneur will immediately recognize what Antonio unabashedly portrays: the dreadful gulf between the inward awareness of all the chaos and flux at the startup, while preserving the outward image of polish, order and optimism. While I wouldn’t necessarily advocate “praying for Antonio’s soul,” as a previous reviewer stated, his relentless self-deprecation and raw honesty balance out some of the selfish decisions he makes in the book. He is extremely well read, and I suspect this background informs a somewhat tragic theme of the book— for a certain type of person, the only hope that can lift the cynicism and misanthropy of early life disappointment is to undergo a meaningful quest with loyal companions."
"I'm sure a lot of people are going to get hung up on some offhand sexist comments or the dirt thrown at Facebook's execs (and I'm sure that Martinez could have avoided both while keeping the book interesting)."
"I highly recommend this book if you have ever worked with or for a startup, are thinking of founding your own startup, or are simply curious about life in the Silicon Valley."
Best Virtual Reality
Ten years from today, the center of our digital lives will no longer be the smart phone, but device that looks like ordinary eyeglasses: except those glasses will have settings for Virtual and Augmented Reality. Med students and surgeons will learn and practice on virtual humans rather than cadavers; oil rig workers will understand how to handle emergencies, before the ever leave the home office. They hope readers will walk away understanding the massive changes rapidly arising, so that they will navigate a successful course through the changes they will be facing sooner than they—or their competitors-- may realize just yet.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"If you’re only casually aware of what’s out there, your current image of a VR enthusiast may be of a twenty-something gamer with an oversized headset strapped to their face, tethered to a powerful computer, stumbling and flailing blindly around a room, bumping into walls and furniture as they fight dragons, zombies, and aliens that only they can see. Scoble and Israel give us an insider’s glimpse into us what’s cooking in labs at startups (some them very well-funded and close to shipping), universities, and the top tier of established global corporations—in technology and entertainment. It’s an exhaustive, expansive survey, told with breathless enthusiasm (and ample warnings), covering a range of advances that are slated to arrive over the next decade. The core is a cluster of technologies already coming to market in their early primitive and/or over-priced versions: VR, AR, and MR. (respectively, Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality). If I happen to stare too long at a box on the supermarket shelf or a jacket on a department store mannikin, I’m not sure I’m ready to have it launch into a “buy me” pitch. The promise is that the data in my digital dossier will combine with advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence to filter out everything except the pitches and messages I will be glad to get, I’m dubious."
"The point is, this duo makes a convincing case that we are on the verge of a new media, a new capacity for story-telling, which as a nation and a world we have just learned once again is perhaps the most primal and powerful mover of human actions ever. As with past collaborations, digital pioneer and gadfly Scoble, and his literate scribe Mr. Israel, delve into the potential abuses of these technologies and the media they enable, as well as the upside. Unlike the three earlier transformations to which the book refers - mainframes, text-based operating systems and then graphical interfaces on computers and smartphones - this next medium is immersive and may soon be ubiquitous. While VR currently requires a masking headset to interface with the world, the promise of Augmented Reality (AR) is adding images and information to in line of sight during our everyday lives."
Best Web Programming
After reading a short chapter, you go to my website and complete twenty interactive exercises. Many learners hit a wall when they try to understand advanced concepts like variable scope and prototypes. But the fault lies with the authors, coding virtuosos who lack teaching talent. Thanks to the interactive exercises on my website, you'll always understand and remember everything necessary to confidently tackle the next concept. "I've signed up to a few sites like Udemy, Codecademy, FreeCodeCamp, Lynda, YouTube videos, even searched on Coursera but nothing seemed to work for me. It's how you wind up satisfied, confident, and proud, instead of confused, discouraged, and defeated. The exercises keep you focused, give you extra practice where you're shaky, and prepare you for each next step. But, as Amazon reviewer James Toban says, when you get to the end of the book, you've built "a tower of JavaScript." But if you're new to programming, more than a thousand five-star reviews are pretty good evidence that my book may be just the one to get you coding JavaScript successfully. "Mark Myers' method of getting what can be...difficult information into a format that makes it exponentially easier to consume, truly understand, and synthesize into real-world application is beyond anything I've encountered before." My professional focus is on using technology to reduce the effort and tedium of learning, primarily through interactivity. I'm developing the "A Smarter Way to Learn" series on programming, a collection of instructional books paired with online interactive exercises. Along with my wife Judy and our two politically-active cats, I live in Taos, NM, where I cook under the ghostly supervision of Marcella Hazan, read extensively, play showboat frisbee once a week, and long for more episodes of "Breaking Bad."
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"As part of my learning, I'm also taking another class by Jeff Escalante, it's called "Making Kittens fly with JavaScript", I'm learning so much already because his course actually involves building a project from scratch. I tried learning javascript before from the "Eloquent Javascript" book and it was more intermediate than beginners so hopefully once I'm done with a smarter way to learn javascript and the other class I'm taking, I'll be able to finally understand the content of that book."
"I love this book and it is helping me to learn JavaScript the way that I want to learn because Mark is teaching you new things in every chapter and reinforcing things that you learned in other chapters so that you don't forget what you have already learned."
"But it never has worked very well for me - I simply don't remember the details in order to write the code without going back to reference the lessons. I like the way Mark has divided up the content into small chunks, and then drills me on that material with the exercises on his website. Mark has invested a lot of time in creating these materials, and the price for the Kindle versions is so low - it's almost embarrassing!"
"I have done some programming in the past, so although I've never written a line of JavaScript the first 10 chapters have felt like extremely basic review. There are a couple exercise components I do not like including one where you need to drag and drop random code bits to form a proper JavaScript statement."
"I usually get sleepy learning to code even during working hour but with this book, learning is fun and keeps me alert even at 4 in morning. This book makes learning code fun and not overwhelming."
Best Web Services & APIs
Learn how to parse complicated HTML pages Traverse multiple pages and sites Get a general overview of APIs and how they work Learn several methods for storing the data you scrape Download, read, and extract data from documents Use tools and techniques to clean badly formatted data Read and write natural languages Crawl through forms and logins Understand how to scrape JavaScript Learn image processing and text recognition. Ryan Mitchell is a Software Engineer at LinkeDrive in Boston, where she develops their API and data analysis tools.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I really liked this book, for the following reasons: 1. This is the most challenging part of the book because it frequently involves combining tools and the reader will have to get his/her hands dirty and learn by doing also."
"Great book."
"Great examples and explanation."
"It's a great book."
"The author explained every details of web scraping domain. Throughout this book, it uses python library BeautifulSoup to do web scraping."
"Great code samples!"
"One of the better tech guides I've read in years."
"You'll get a solid foundation to launch into your own Web Scraping project, and learn just enough about additional topics (like MySql) to integrate them into your scraper."