Robot Dreams spans the body of Asimov's fiction from the 1940s to the mid-80s, and features classic Asimovian themes, from the scientific puzzle to the extraterrestrial thriller, all introduced in an exclusive essay written especially for this collection. TP: Ace.

Foundation marks the first of a series of tales set so far in the future that Earth is all but forgotten by humans who live throughout the galaxy. Yet all is not well with the Galactic Empire. Its vast size is crippling to it. In particular, the administrative planet, honeycombed and tunneled with offices and staff, is vulnerable to attack or breakdown. The only person willing to confront this imminent catastrophe is Hari Seldon, a psychohistorian and mathematician. Seldon can scientifically predict the future, and it doesn't look pretty: a new Dark Age is scheduled to send humanity into barbarism in 500 years. He concocts a scheme to save the knowledge of the race in an Encyclopedia Galactica. But this project will take generations to complete, and who will take up the torch after him? The first Foundation trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation) won a Hugo Award in 1965 for "Best All-Time Series." It's science fiction on the grand scale; one of the classics of the field. —Brooks Peck

The Foundation has managed to preserve humanculture and shorten the period of chaotic barbarism after the Galactic Empire began to decay. But the Foundation still faces great challenges in its struggle to survive.

The fifth novel in Asimov's popular Foundation series opens with second thoughts. Councilman Golan Trevize is wondering if he was right to choose a collective mind as the best possible future for humanity over the anarchy of contentious individuals, nations and planets. To test his conclusion, he decides he must know the past and goes in search of legendary Earth, all references to which have been erased from galactic libraries. The societies encountered along the way become arguing points in a book-long colloquy about man's fate, conducted by Trevize and traveling companion Bliss, who is part of the first world/mind, Gaia.

"Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight—how to get from shore to food and back again," writes author Richard Bach in this allegory about a unique bird named Jonathan Livingston Seagull. "For most gulls it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight." Flight is indeed the metaphor that makes the story soar. Ultimately this is a fable about the importance of seeking a higher purpose in life, even if your flock, tribe, or neighborhood finds your ambition threatening. (At one point our beloved gull is even banished from his flock.) By not compromising his higher vision, Jonathan gets the ultimate payoff: transcendence. Ultimately, he learns the meaning of love and kindness. The dreamy seagull photographs by Russell Munson provide just the right illustrations—although the overall packaging does seem a bit dated (keep in mind that it was first published in 1970). Nonetheless, this is a spirituality classic, and an especially engaging parable for adolescents. —Gail Hudson

In the heart of Lutyens' Delhi sits Jehangir Rangoonwalla, enlightened dispenser of tea, wisdom, and second-hand books. Among his customers are Brighu, a postmodern Ibn Batuta looking for obscure collectibles and a love life; Digital Dutta who lives mostly in his head, torn between Karl Marx and an H1-B visa; and the newly-married Shintu, looking for the ultimate aphrodisiac in the seedy by-lanes of old Delhi. Played out in the corridors of Connaught Place and Calcutta, the story captures the alienation and fragmented reality of urban life through an imaginative alchemy of text and image.

Born in Philadelphia, Steve McCurry studied history and cinematography at Pennsylvania State University before working as a freelance photographer in India. He is best known for his evocative colour photography, which has captured stories of human experience that, in the finest documentary tradition, cross boundaries of language and culture. His career was launched when he crossed the Pakistan border into rebel-controlled Afghanistan just before the Russian invasion to take the first pictures of the conflict. Since then many of McCurry's images have become modern icons. A high point of his career was the rediscovery of an unidentified Afghan refugee girl, which many have described as the most recognizable photograph in the world today. His coverage won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal for Best Photographic Reporting from Abroad, an award dedicated to photographers exhibiting exceptional courage and enterprise. McCurry has covered many areas of international and civil conflict, including the Iran-Iraq war, Beirut and the Gulf War. But his travels have also taken him to southeast Asia and the spiritual temples of Angkor Wat and Cambodia, made known to many through his memorable images for National Geographic magazine. A member of the international photo agency Magnum Photos since 1986, he is the recipient of numerous awards including Magazine Photographer of the Year, awarded by the National Press Photographers Association. This was awarded in the same year in which he won an unprecedented four first prizes in the World Press Photo Contest. He has won the Olivier Rebbot Memorial Award twice. This monograph on McCurry follows a chronological order, identifying major themes and examining key works; a beautifully produced, affordable introduction to one of the leading figures in photography today.

In What Should I Do with My Life? Po Bronson manages to create a career book that is a page-turner. His 50 vivid profiles of people searching for "their soft spot—their true calling" will engage readers because Bronson is asking himself the same question. He explores his premise, that "nothing is braver than people facing up to their own identity," as an anthropologist and autobiographer. He tackles thorny, nuanced issues about self-determination. Among them: paradoxes of money and meaning, authorship and destiny, brain candy and novelty versus soul food. Bronson’s stories, limited to professional people and complete with photos, are gems. They include a Los Angeles lawyer who became a priest, a Harvard MBA catfish farmer turned biotech executive, and a Silicon Valley real estate agent who opened a leather crafts factory in Costa Rica.

Bronson is a gifted intuitive writer, the bestselling author of The Nudist on the Late Shift, whose thoughtful, vulnerable voice emerges as the book’s greatest strength and challenge. He describes his subject’s lives along with the ways they annoy, puzzle, and worry him. He frets about meddling with his questions, yet once, memorably and appropriately, he offers a talented man a top post in his publishing company. While this creates the juiciness of his portraits, it also can make Bronson the book’s most memorable character and the only one whose story is not resolved. Even so, this remarkable career chronicle sets the gold standard for the worth of the examined life. —Barbara Mackoff

From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. Though A Short History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel (albeit without a plot). Each longish chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as "The Size of the Earth" and "Life Itself." Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author of Life and Trilobite) and these interviews are charming. But it's when Bryson dives into some of science's best and most embarrassing fights—Cope vs. Marsh, Conway Morris vs. Gould—that he finds literary gold. —Therese Littleton

“Next time some kid shows up at my door asking for a code review, this is the book that I am going to throw at him.”

 

–Aaron Hillegass, founder of Big Nerd Ranch, Inc., and author of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X

 

Unlocking the Secrets of Cocoa and Its Object-Oriented Frameworks

 

Mac and iPhone developers are often overwhelmed by the breadth and sophistication of the Cocoa frameworks. Although Cocoa is indeed huge, once you understand the object-oriented patterns it uses, you’ll find it remarkably elegant, consistent, and simple.

 

Cocoa Design Patterns begins with the mother of all patterns: the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, which is central to all Mac and iPhone development. Encouraged, and in some cases enforced by Apple’s tools, it’s important to have a firm grasp of MVC right from the start.

 

The book’s midsection is a catalog of the essential design patterns you’ll encounter in Cocoa, including Fundamental patterns, such as enumerators, accessors, and two-stage creationPatterns that empower, such as singleton, delegates, and the responder chainPatterns that hide complexity, including bundles, class clusters, proxies and forwarding, and controllers

And that’s not all of them! Cocoa Design Patterns painstakingly isolates 28 design patterns, accompanied with real-world examples and sample code you can apply to your applications today. The book wraps up with coverage of Core Data models, AppKit views, and a chapter on Bindings and Controllers.

 

Cocoa Design Patterns clearly defines the problems each pattern solves with a foundation in Objective-C and the Cocoa frameworks and can be used by any Mac or iPhone developer.

From early amateur snapshots to today’s advanced digital images, photography has been the perfect means to record people’s lives. This provocative book explores the complex and varied ways that five contemporary photographers––Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, and Larry Sultan––use their own daily experiences as inspiration for their art.

Each of these artists has created highly personal, shifting, and intriguing visions of his or her life. The works range from Tina Barney’s orchestrated depictions of her friends and family in affluent New England settings to Nan Goldin’s unabashed portrayal of intimate, and often brutally honest, moments. Sally Mann turned to her children and their surroundings as her subject, and Larry Sultan has accomplished something similar in his depictions of his parents. Philip-Lorca diCorcia offers up his “storybook life” in photographs that—like others in this group—span nearly twenty years.

So the Story Goes is arranged in portfolio format and features beautiful color reproductions of about twenty photographs by each artist. With an introductory essay that examines the development of personal narrative in photography, as well as insightful entries on each artist, the book analyzes how these works tell a life’s story.

A collection of the first five years of "Piled Higher and Deeper," a comic strip about life (or lack thereof) in graduate school, as it originally appeared in Stanford University's "The Stanford Daily Newspaper" and online at phd.stanford.edu.

"Piled Higher and Deeper" the comic strip is currently read by grad students from over 300 universities and from around the world.

This book is the second collection of the popular comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper, which chronicles life (or the lack thereof) in grad school. Includes the popular strip series "Procrastin-X", "Grad school makes you dumber", "The Thesis Zone" and Mike Slackenerny's improbable thesis defense. Bonus features include never-before published strips, author notes and a foreword by Karl Marx. Whether you managed to escape grad school, are struggling through it, or are thinking of applying to it, Piled Higher and Deeper will have you lauging and crying at the same time. Piled Higher and Deeper is published online at www.phdcomics.com, where it receives over 1.8 million page views a month from grad students all over the world.