Showing results by narrator "Mark Thomas" in All Categories

In 2008 veteran journalist Evan Wright, acclaimed for his New York Times best-selling book Generation Kill and co-writer of the Emmy-winning HBO series it spawned, began a series of conversations with super-criminal Jon Roberts, star of the fabulously successful documentary Cocaine Cowboys. Those conversations would last three years, during which time Wright came to realize that Roberts was much more than the de-facto “transportation chief” of the Medellin Cartel during the 1980s, much more than a facilitator of a national drug epidemic.

I didn’t know Raphael Amado when he turned up on our doorstep demanding restitution for an old debt. My grandfather knew him well, though, and he quickly conceded. That restitution? Me. Six months later, Raphael came to claim me. He took me from my home, taking me to his Tuscan estate, where from the crumbling chapel to the destroyed vineyard to that dark cellar, the past stalked him like a shadow. Even the walls held secrets here, and I’d need to uncover them all to survive.

Writing computer programs in Python just got a lot easier! Use AI-assisted coding tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT to turn your ideas into applications faster than ever.

Imagine how different your life would be if you could lose fat, increase muscle mass, and cleanse your body all at the same time just by changing "when" you eat. Can you really have your cake and eat it? Excuse the pun, but with intermittent fasting you really can. I know this sounds like an exceptional claim, but in my opinion, this way of eating really is the panacea to virtually all human ailments....

Seventeenth-century England, and a plough uncovers a grisly skull in the furrows of a farmer's field. The skull disappears, but its malefic influence begins to work in insidious ways upon the nearby village of Hexbridge. First, the cows stop milking and the fruit turns rotten on the trees. Then, an insolent ungodliness takes hold of the local children, mysterious fur patches appear on limbs and people start disappearing.... Something evil is stirring in the woods.

Natural Language Processing in Action is your guide to building machines that can read and interpret human language. In it, you'll use readily available Python packages to capture the meaning in text and react accordingly. The book expands traditional NLP approaches to include neural networks, modern deep learning algorithms, and generative techniques as you tackle real-world problems like extracting dates and names, composing text, and answering free-form questions.

Reactive Design Patterns is a clearly written guide for building message-driven distributed systems that are resilient, responsive, and elastic. In this book you'll find patterns for messaging, flow control, resource management, and concurrency, along with practical issues like test-friendly designs. All patterns include concrete examples using Scala and Akka.

Mark Williams-Thomas is a former police detective and multi-award-winning investigative journalist. He has been at the centre of some of the most high-profile investigations of recent years involving killers and paedophiles. In this gripping and unflinching audiobook, Mark reveals how he has pieced together these complex cases. Through tireless research and perseverance, Mark takes us on a journey of discovery gathering and pursuing new evidence, earning the trust of silent witnesses and sharing the personal toll this extraordinary job takes on him.

Listen to this collection of Robert Louis Stevenson classics today.

Deep Learning with Python introduces the field of deep learning using the Python language and the powerful Keras library. Written by Keras creator and Google AI researcher François Chollet, this audiobook builds your understanding through intuitive explanations and practical examples. You'll explore challenging concepts and practice with applications in computer vision, natural-language processing, and generative models. By the time you finish, you'll have the knowledge and hands-on skills to apply deep learning in your own projects.  

There are countless ways to put deep learning to good use: improved medical imaging, credit card fraud detection, long range weather forecasting. PyTorch puts these superpowers in your hands, providing a comfortable Python experience that gets you started quickly and then grows with you as you - and your deep-learning skills - become more sophisticated.

Grokking Simplicity is a friendly, practical guide that will change the way you approach software design and development. Distributed across servers, difficult to test, and resistant to modification - modern software is complex. Grokking Simplicity is a friendly, practical guide that will change the way you approach software design and development. It introduces a unique approach to functional programming that explains why certain features of software are prone to complexity, and teaches you the functional techniques you can use to simplify these systems.

Discover best practices, reproducible architectures, and design patterns to help guide deep learning models from the lab into production. In Deep Learning Patterns and Practices you will learn: Internal functioning of modern convolutional neural networks, procedural reuse design pattern for CNN architectures, models for mobile and IoT devices, assembling large-scale model deployments, optimizing hyperparameter tuning, and migrating a model to a production environment.

Algorithms and Data Structures for Massive Datasets reveals a toolbox of new methods that are perfect for handling modern big data applications. You’ll explore the novel data structures and algorithms that underpin Google, Facebook, and other enterprise applications that work with truly massive amounts of data.

Big Data teaches you to build big data systems using an architecture designed specifically to capture and analyze web-scale data. This book presents the Lambda Architecture, a scalable, easy-to-understand approach that can be built and run by a small team. You'll explore the theory of big data systems and how to implement them in practice. In addition to discovering a general framework for processing big data, you'll learn specific technologies like Hadoop, Storm, and NoSQL databases.  

Critical business applications worldwide are written in the versatile C# language and the powerful .NET platform, running on desktops, cloud systems, and Windows or Linux servers. Code Like a Pro in C# makes it easy to turn your existing abilities in C# or another OO language (such as Java) into practical C# mastery. There’s no “Hello World” or Computer Science 101 basics - you’ll learn by refactoring an out-of-date legacy codebase, using new techniques, tools, and best practices to bring it up to modern C# standards.

Drones: The Mastery Collection was designed to pull together all the relevant information that any prospective UAV/drone pilot requires in order to go from beginner to master drone pilot. The two books contained within this collection work in unison through direct information and simple-to-follow how-to guides that cover all aspects of UAV aviation. The collection contains Drones: The Professional Drone Pilot's Manual and Drones: Mastering Flight Techniques.

This is no ordinary management book. It's a deep-dive exploration into the world of micromanagement, dissecting its roots, examining its impacts, and shedding light on its unsightly consequences. More importantly, this short audiobook is a beacon of hope, a survival guide for those navigating the maddening labyrinth of micromanagement. It equips you with the skills and strategies needed to dodge the micromanager's hawk-eyed gaze and work effectively under their radar. Brown teaches you how to turn the tables and subtly wrestle back control.

Hungry and exhausted, Ryan and his band emerge from a redoubt into a remarkably untouched pre-dark city and uncover a cache of weapons and food. But the group is not alone. Among other interlopers, the city is guarded by huge winged creatures, protecting the grisly secrets of a nearby barony. Holed up inside an old government building, where Ryan's son, Dean, lies near death, Ryan and Krysty must raid the treacherous ville across the desert where a local baron uses human flesh as fertilizer.

 The Art of Unit Testing, Second Edition guides you step-by-step from writing your first simple tests to developing robust test sets that are maintainable, readable, and trustworthy. You'll master the foundational ideas and quickly move to high-value subjects like mocks, stubs, and isolation, including frameworks such as Moq, FakeItEasy, and Typemock Isolator.