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Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?

Chances are, you don’t. All too often, our natural talents go untapped. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to fixing our shortcomings than to developing our strengths.

To help people uncover their talents, Gallup introduced the first version of its online assessment, StrengthsFinder, in 2001 which ignited a global conversation and helped millions to discover their top five talents.

In its latest national bestseller, StrengthsFinder 2.0, Gallup unveils the new and improved version of its popular assessment, language of 34 themes, and much more (see below for details). While you can read this book in one sitting, you’ll use it as a reference for decades.

Loaded with hundreds of strategies for applying your strengths, this new book and accompanying website will change the way you look at yourself — and the world around you — forever.

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Derek is the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. Just as important, perhaps more so–he is a phenomenal teacher. Whether detailing the fascinating rise of CDBaby, explaining catastrophic (but common) founder mistakes, or teaching me about relational databases in two minutes using analogies, he makes the complex simple. Moreover, he makes it all actionable.

If you want a true manifesto, a guidebook with clear signposts, and a fun ride you’ll return to again and again, you have it here in this book. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. –Tim Ferriss

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Kaufman, a former middle manager at Proctor & Gamble and founder of personalmba.com, argues that those interested in business would be better served by skipping the M.B.A. and focusing on the critically important concepts that really make or break a business. According to the author, much of what is taught in business schools is outdated; you’re better off saving the expense and finding other ways to learn about these core principles–which Kaufman synthesizes–in such areas as value creation, marketing, sales, and finance. He also explores the psychological side of business and examines how consumers take in information, make decisions, and decide what to do or not to do. Acknowledging the panoramic overview his approach necessitates, he includes a fairly lengthy list of sources to seek out if more information is needed. While Kaufman’s rallying call will not eradicate the need or desire for M.B.A. degrees, he does provide a surprisingly solid alternative full of information that even those already in the workplace will respond to.

ASP.NET MVC 2.0 is C# on the web done right. No more fiddling around with Viewstate, IsPostBack(), and drag-and-drop coding. Microsoft has addressed the shortcomings of ASP.NET and created a framework that goes toe-to-toe with other popular web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails. Programming in C# is fun again!

This book uses a test-driven development (TDD) approach to the features of ASP.NET MVC. You’ll get hands-on experience building and deploying a time-management web application from start to finish. From building your first page, to data access, to integrating with web services such as Blogger.com, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC guides you step by step. You’ll come away with a complete understanding of web services and data access, and you’ll learn how to test each component so that your code is bug-free and maintainable from the start. You’ll see how to handle security, logging, and error handling. Then, you’ll protect your site with ASP.NET MVC’s advanced security features.

Software isn’t useful until it’s deployed into production. We’ll cover automated deployment using MSBuild, a build tool product that can help you get your site online, repeatably and reliably. Throughout, you’ll work with open source projects that complement ASP.NET MVC, including NHibernate, MVCContrib, and Castle Windsor Container. These tools speed up developing database components, architecture layers, and testing your code.

As you build and deploy your application, you’ll not only learn the framework itself, but also gain valuable experience with the test-first methodology, driving your application development through small and measurable incremental improvements.

Debug It! will equip you with the tools, techniques, and approaches to help you tackle any bug with confidence. These secrets of professional debugging illuminate every stage of the bug life cycle, from constructing software that makes debugging easy; through bug detection, reproduction, and diagnosis; to rolling out your eventual fix.

Whether you’re writing Java or assembly language, targeting servers or embedded micro- controllers, or using agile or traditional approaches, the same basic bug-fixing principles apply.

You’ll learn an empirical approach that leverages your software’s unique ability to show you what’s really happening, the importance of finding a reliable and convenient means of reproducing a bug, and how to avoid common pitfalls. You’ll see how to use commonly available tools to automatically detect problems before they’re reported by customers. You’ll construct “self-debugging” software that automatically provides access to crucial internal information and identifies the broken assumptions that lead to bugs.

To all those wondering “Why?” and “How?” certain organizations are more productive than their peers, Logan, King and Fischer-Wright have some concrete answers. In their landmark book, “Tribal Leadership”, they explore the essence of organizational culture. What they have uncovered is a dynamic at least 15,000 years in the making, and at the heart of all human organizations: the tribe. We operate in a “tribe”-a group of 20 to 150 people- in which important decisions are made and productivity is determined. Larger organizations are “tribes of tribes”. Five stages describe the evolution of the tribe, from savage and dysfunctional to innovative and powerfully inspirational. What sets this work apart is its practical advice on both identifying the stage of the tribe and the means to advance to the next stage. Laced with real-life examples, the book is eminently readable. There is no doubt it will transform the reader, no matter where their own tribe finds itself. They will understand the difference between leading and commanding.

The visionary CEO of Zappos explains how an emphasis on corporate culture can lead to unprecedented success.

Pay new employees $2000 to quit. Make customer service the entire company, not just a department. Focus on company culture as the #1 priority. Apply research from the science of happiness to running a business. Help employees grow both personally and professionally. Seek to change the world. Oh, and make money too.

Sound crazy? It’s all standard operating procedure at Zappos.com, the online retailer that’s doing over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales every year.

In 1999, Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay) sold LinkExchange, the company he co-founded, to Microsoft for $265 million. He then joined Zappos as an adviser and investor, and eventually became CEO.

In 2009, Zappos was listed as one of Fortune magazine’s top 25 companies to work for, and was acquired by Amazon later that year in a deal valued at over $1.2 billion on the day of closing.

In his first book, Tony shares the different business lessons he learned in life, from a lemonade stand and pizza business through LinkExchange, Zappos, and more. Ultimately, he shows how using happiness as a framework can produce profits, passion, and purpose both in business and in life. (edited by author)

The practice of enterprise application development has benefited from the emergence of many new enabling technologies. Multi-tiered object-oriented platforms, such as Java and .NET, have become commonplace. These new tools and technologies are capable of building powerful applications, but they are not easily implemented. Common failures in enterprise applications often occur because their developers do not understand the architectural lessons that experienced object developers have learned. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture is written in direct response to the stiff challenges that face enterprise application developers. The author, noted object-oriented designer Martin Fowler, noticed that despite changes in technology–from Smalltalk to CORBA to Java to .NET–the same basic design ideas can be adapted and applied to solve common problems. With the help of an expert group of contributors, Martin distills over forty recurring solutions into patterns. The result is an indispensable handbook of solutions that are applicable to any enterprise application platform. This book is actually two books in one. The first section is a short tutorial on developing enterprise applications, which you can read from start to finish to understand the scope of the book’s lessons. The next section, the bulk of the book, is a detailed reference to the patterns themselves. Each pattern provides usage and implementation information, as well as detailed code examples in Java or C#. The entire book is also richly illustrated with UML diagrams to further explain the concepts. Armed with this book, you will have the knowledge necessary to make important architectural decisions about building an enterprise application and the proven patterns for use when building them. The topics covered include:

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NHibernate is an open source object-relational mapper, or simply put, a way to retrieve data from your database into standard .NET objects. Quite often we spend hours designing the database, only to go back and re-design a mechanism to access that data and then optimize that mechanism. This book will save you time on your project, providing all the information along with concrete examples about the use and optimization of NHibernate.

Connecting to a database to retrieve data is a major part of nearly every project, from websites to desktop applications to distributed applications. Using the techniques presented in this book, you can access data in your own database with little or no code.

This book covers the use of NHibernate from a first glance at retrieving data and developing access layers to more advanced topics such as optimization and Security and Membership providers. It will show you how to connect to multiple databases and speed up your web applications using strong caching tools. We also discuss the use of third-party tools for code generation and other tricks to make your development smoother, quicker, and more effective.

This easy-to-follow guide will show you how to connect the NHibernate object-relational mapper to your projects to create a rich, efficient, object-oriented data access layer with little or no additional work

What you will learn from this book

• Use NHibernate to retrieve and store data in your database
• Develop an efficient, robust data access layer with little or no code
• Design or modify your database for high performance
• Connect to multiple databases or database backends with simple code
• Implement base classes to provide basic functionality for all database objects
• Improve the performance of your data retrieval methods with proven open source technology
• Make web applications faster using strong caching strategies such as memcached
• Simplify data storage and display using built-in .NET data controls with NHibernate
• Using NHibernate to control application security using Membership and Role providers and .NET security controls

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