Databases

An upcoming book to be published by Profile Books.

A fantasy whodunit for the digital age that introduces the concepts behind search algorithms and important data structures, through the medium of a mystery novel.

The system that governs how money works, with its brokers and middlemen, has stayed roughly the same for centuries. Now there's an alternative, and it puts us on the cusp of a revolution that could reshape our world. At the heart of this lie cryptocurrencies, a technology with th...e transformative potential of the printing press or the internet. They bypass the elites and cut out the gatekeepers. Unlike traditional money they're peer-to-peer, they don't have a nationality, they're digital and democratic. They are also lawless. For the Afghani woman denied a bank account by a repressive society, or any of the world's 2.5 billion unbanked individuals, cryptocurrencies open new possibilities. What would a world without banks or credit cards or even national currencies look like for all of us? From Silicon Valley to the streets of Beijing, this is a book about a revolution in the making, a story of human invention, and a guide to the future.
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Microsoft PowerPivot is a free add-on to Excel from Microsoft that allows users to produce new kinds of reports and analyses that were simply impossible before, and this book is the first to tackle DAX formulas, the core capability of PowerPivot, from the perspective of the Excel... audience. Written by the world's foremost PowerPivot blogger and practitioner, the book's concepts and approach are introduced in a simple, step-by-step manner tailored to the learning style of Excel users everywhere. The techniques presented allow users to produce, in hours or even minutes, results that formerly would have taken entire teams weeks or months to produce. It includes lessons on the difference between calculated columns and measures; how formulas can be reused across reports of completely different shapes; how to merge disjointed sets of data into unified reports; how to make certain columns in a pivot behave as if the pivot were filtered while other columns do not; and how to create time-intelligent calculations in pivot tables such as Year over Year and Moving Averages whether they use a standard, fiscal, or a complete custom calendar. The pattern-like techniques and best practices contained in this book have been developed and refined over two years of onsite training with Excel users around the world, and the key lessons from those seminars costing thousands of dollars per day are now available to within the pages of this easy-to-follow guide. This updated second edition cover new features introduced with Office 2015.
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Business analysts, managers, researchers, and students are rushing to master powerful machine learning techniques for improving decision-making and scaling analysis to immense datasets. Machine Learning with Python for Everyone brings together all they'll need to succeed: a pract...ical understanding of the machine learning process, accessible code, skills for implementing that process with Python and the scikit-learn library, and real expertise in using learning systems intelligently. Reflecting 20 years of experience teaching non-specialists, Dr. Mark Fenner teaches through carefully-crafted datasets that are complex enough to be interesting, but simple enough for non-specialists. Building on this foundation, Fenner presents real-world case studies that apply his lessons in detailed, nuanced ways. Throughout, he offers clear narratives, practical code-alongs, and easy-to-understand images -- focusing on mathematics only where it's necessary to make connections and deepen insight.
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