Geekhood

What do you do if you're a fourteen-year-old geek, and a Beautiful Girl appears in your world? For Archie, the natural reaction is to duck and cover, however he decides to embark on a daring Quest to win the Beautiful Girl's heart. But when geek meets girl what could possibly go right? Suggested level: secondary.

Archie is a Geek to his core – and despite having a Close Encounter with Sarah at the beginning of term, he’s still completely clueless about girls. Enter Clare – an older woman (she’s sixteen) who Archie meets on his weekend trip to see his dad and his nightmare step-mum, Jane. Clare and Archie hit it off – and she comes up with a brilliant, foolproof way to get their crushes to notice them: pretend to be going out with one another! What can possibly go wrong? With school, Sarah, a fake girlfriend and his insane family to deal with, Archie and his mates step-up the nerdiness and go Live Action Role-play gaming. Ladies and gentlemen, we are entering a new era… A warm, witty tale of being a teenage geek, Geekhood captures the awkwardness of being a teenager perfectly. Geekhood has won huge acclaim and deserves a place in the heart of any teenager with even slightly geeky leanings. "A deliciously tender story that wittily captures the ecstasy and agony of being a teenager." Julia Eccleshare, Lovereading4kids. "This book makes being a geek sound pretty cool to me!" True Blood's Stephen Moyer.

When his dad moves out, Jamie tries to fill his shoes. He needs to become head of the household - right?With his mum dealing with the aftermath of toxic masculinity at its finest, and his little sister Bex struggling to understand what's going on, Jamie has to navigate the choppy waters of what he thinks it means to be a man.Having learned that the best way to deal with feelings is to push them down as far as they'll go, he finds help from an unlikely source. Drinking makes him feel invincible - Super Jim can take on anything - and anyone...But how long will it be before this particular well of wisdom runs dry? And what will it take for Jamie to realise that help was at hand all along?From the author of the Geekhood series, the first of which was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Award, comes Smashed by Andy Robb. Funny, touching, with a narrator readers' will instantly love, Smashed is a rollercoaster exploration of young masculinity.

From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Farsighted Forget everything you’ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, unfailingly intelligent, thoroughly researched, and surprisingly convincing big idea book, Steven Johnson draws from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory to argue that the pop culture we soak in every day—from Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons—has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. After reading Everything Bad is Good for You, you will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again. With a new afterword by the author.

"We regularly read and hear exhortations for women to take up positions in STEM. The call comes from both government and private corporate circles, and it also emanates from enthusiasts for free and open source software (FOSS), i.e. software that anyone is free to use, copy, study, and change in any way. Ironically, rate of participation in FOSS-related work is far lower than in other areas of computing. A 2002 European Union study showed that fewer than 2 percent of software developers in the FOSS world were women. How is it that an intellectual community of activists so open in principle to one and all -a community that prides itself for its enlightened politics and its commitment to social change - should have such a low rate of participation by women? This book is an ethnographic investigation of efforts to improve the diversity in software and hackerspace communities, with particular attention paid to gender diversity advocacy"--

At the age of seventeen, an Anishinabe boy who was raised in the south joined a James Bay Cree family in a one-room hunting cabin in the isolated wilderness of northern Quebec. Reflecting on his search for his own personal identity, that kid – Duncan McCue – takes us on an evocative exploration of the teenage years and the culture shock he experienced moving to the unfamiliar North. The result is a contemplative, honest, and unexpected coming-of-age memoir set in the context of the Cree struggle to protect their way of life, after massive hydro-electric projects forever altered the landscape they know as Eeyou Istchee.

Moore'ss novel tells of a young, orphaned woman who is scorned by society for her mixed human and elven blood. She discovers that she possesses a mysterious magical power and when she travels to Elven lands in search of answers, she discovers a shocking truth about her identity that will have epic consequences for an entire nation.

In a perfect world, software engineers who produce the best code are the most successful. But in our perfectly messy world, success also depends on how you work with people to get your job done. In this highly entertaining book, Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman cover basic patterns and anti-patterns for working with other people, teams, and users while trying to develop software. This is valuable information from two respected software engineers whose popular series of talks—including "Working with Poisonous People"—has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers. Writing software is a team sport, and human factors have as much influence on the outcome as technical factors. Even if you’ve spent decades learning the technical side of programming, this book teaches you about the often-overlooked human component. By learning to collaborate and investing in the "soft skills" of software engineering, you can have a much greater impact for the same amount of effort. Team Geek was named as a Finalist in the 2013 Jolt Awards from Dr. Dobb's Journal. The publication's panel of judges chose five notable books, published during a 12-month period ending June 30, that every serious programmer should read.