Can't remember those grueling grammar lessons from junior high? Troubled that your professional writing lacks polish? Stop worrying! You've just picked up the painless prescription for proper English!

Acclaimed grammarians Mark Lester and Larry Beason know that English teachers aren't the only ones who expect careful and correct language choices. Precision in language can be the deciding factor when it comes to getting a job or winning a promotion. The McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar and Usage gives you bottom-line definitions, tips, and simple rules that summarize

the essentials you need to know.

This second edition includes a chapter dedicated to grammar and its usage in digital communication, including texting, e-mail, social media, and new technology, so you can communicate correctly in any format.

Whether your skills need drastic improvement or a quick brush-up, The McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar and Usage will get your grammar back on the right track with:

Some leaders are too harsh. Some are too lenient. Others are completely disengaged from employee performance management. Striking a delicate balance between supportive leadership and accountability is the key to ensuring employees are as effective and productive as possible.

Sylvia Melena is the architect of the Supportive Accountability Leadership Model, a simple but powerful framework that helps leaders create a motivating work environment while promoting accountability and improving performance.

Through a mix of stories, actionable tips, and templates, you'll learn how to master the art of supportive leadership; inspire employees to advance your organization's vision; monitor performance and customer service efficiently; lead effective performance improvement conversations; pinpoint critical support factors to unleash performance; wield the power of employee recognition; boost performance through progressive discipline; and document skillfully.

Readers of��Radical Candor,��Dare to Lead��and��Mastering Leadership��will love Scott Miller’s��Management Mess to Leadership Success.

Rise from Rock Bottom:��Scott Miller knows what it’s like to fail. He was demoted from his first leadership position after only three weeks—and that’s just one of several messy management stories in��Management Mess to Leadership Success. Scott’s not alone. Everyone fails. But something sets Scott apart: he knows that failure is not a synonym for unwanted retirement.

From Boss to Leader:��Scott knows firsthand what it’s like to go from out-of-touch boss to team-growing leader. In��Management Mess to Leadership Success, you’ll find 30 leadership challenges, honed by FranklinCovey through years of research, instructional programs, and executive consultancy, and illustrated with real-life experiences shared by someone who’s lived these challenges.

Be a Strategic Maverick:��Leaders aren’t hired to maintain the status quo. The whole point of leadership is to create positive (often radical) change. Sometimes, that means watching someone you’ve coached succeed—and maybe even surpass you. Sometimes, it means saying “no�� more often than saying “yes.�� But always, it means improving yourself and your team in new and unconventional ways. Dare to do the unexpected—dare to lead.

Management Mess to Leadership Success��combines the wisdom, expertise, and practical advice of successful leaders with proven methods to make effective changes to your leadership strategies. Learn how to:

Don’t miss out on this upcoming classic from FranklinCovey, the company behind��The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

What if you could predict the trends that will change your business?

For the past ten years, Rohit Bhargava’s signature annual Non-Obvious Trend Report has helped over a million readers discover more than 100 trends changing our culture.

Now for the first time, Rohit and his team of Non-Obvious trend curators reveal ten revolutionary new Megatrends that are transforming how we work, play and live.

�� How might the evolution of gender fluid toys change our culture?
�� What can the popularity of handmade umbrellas and board games teach us about the future of business?
�� Why do robot therapists and holographic celebrities actually demonstrate the importance of humanity?

The answers to these questions may not be all that obvious, and that’s exactly the point. This completely revised 10th Anniversary edition of Non-Obvious also offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes at the author’s signature Haystack Method for identifying trends, and how you can learn to curate and predict trends for yourself.

You don’t need to be a futurist or innovator to learn to think like one. The key to growing your business or propelling your career into the next decade lies in better understanding the present. The future belongs to non-obvious thinkers and this book is your guide to becoming one.

Winner: Eric Hoffer Business Book of the Year
Winner: Axiom Award Silver Medal (Business Theory)
Winner: INDIE Gold Medal (Business Business Book)
Finalist: Leonard L. Berry Marketing Book Award
Winner: IPPY Silver Medal (Best Business Book)
Finalist: International Book Award (Best Business Book)
Official Selection: Gary’s Book Club at CES
Winner: Non-Fiction Book Award (Gold Medal)
Winner: Pinnacle Best Business Book Award

We live in the age of speed. We strain to be more efficient, to cram more into each minute, each hour, each day. Since the Industrial Revolution shifted the world into high gear, the cult of speed has pushed us to a breaking point. Consider these facts: Americans on average spend seventy-two minutes of every day behind the wheel of a car, a typical business executive now loses sixty-eight hours a year to being put on hold, and American adults currently devote on average a mere half hour per week to making love.

Living on the edge of exhaustion, we are constantly reminded by our bodies and minds that the pace of life is spinning out of control. In Praise of Slowness traces the history of our increasingly breathless relationship with time and tackles the consequences of living in this accelerated culture of our own creation. Why are we always in such a rush? What is the cure for time sickness? Is it possible, or even desirable, to slow down? Realizing the price we pay for unrelenting speed, people all over the world are reclaiming their time and slowing down the pace -- and living happier, healthier, and more productive lives as a result. A Slow revolution is taking place.

Here you will find no Luddite calls to overthrow technology and seek a preindustrial utopia. This is a modern revolution, championed by cell-phone using, e-mailing lovers of sanity. The Slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word -- balance. People are discovering energy and efficiency where they may have been least expected -- in slowing down.

In this engaging and entertaining exploration, award-winning journalist and rehabilitated speedaholic Carl Honoré details our perennial love affair with efficiency and speed in a perfect blend of anecdotal reportage, history, and intellectual inquiry. In Praise of Slowness is the first comprehensive look at the worldwide Slow movements making their way into the mainstream -- in offices, factories, neighborhoods, kitchens, hospitals, concert halls, bedrooms, gyms, and schools. Defining a movement that is here to stay, this spirited manifesto will make you completely rethink your relationship with time.

Jam-packed with tools and examples, What Customers Crave helps you reinvent how you engage with customers (both digitally and non-digitally) and:

�� Gain invaluable insights into who they are and what they care about
�� Use listening posts and Contact Point Innovation to refine customer types
�� Engineer experiences for each micromarket that are not only exceptional, but insanely relevant
�� Connect across the five most important touchpoints
�� Co-create with your customers
�� And much more

When you learn to provide your customers with exactly what they want, they not only buy—they come back again and again…and bring their friends.

Can you step outside your comfort zone? Bounce back from failure? Build new skills? Tapping into your true potential is no idle endeavor. It demands creativity, dedication, and a whole lot of hustle.

With wisdom from 21 leading creative minds, 99U's Maximize Your Potential will show you how to generate new opportunities, cultivate your creative expertise, build valuable relationships, and take bold, new risks so that you can utilize your talents to the fullest.

Maximize Your Potential features contributions from: Teresa Amabile, Sunny Bates, Michael Bungay Stanier, David Burkus, John Caddell, Ben Casnocha, Jack Cheng, Jonathan Fields, Joshua Foer, Jocelyn K. Glei, Heidi Grant Halvorson, Frans Johansson, Steffen Landauer, Mark McGuinness, Cal Newport, Robert Safian, Michael Schwalbe, Tony Schwartz, Tina Seelig, and Scott H. Young. Plus, a foreword from Behance founder & CEO Scott Belsky.

Yet Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. Prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else. The habit of exchange and specialization—which started more than 100,000 years ago—has created a collective brain that sets human living standards on a rising trend. The mutual dependence, trust, and sharing that result are causes for hope, not despair.

This bold book covers the entire sweep of human history, from the Stone Age to the Internet, from the stagnation of the Ming empire to the invention of the steam engine, from the population explosion to the likely consequences of climate change. It ends with a confident assertion that thanks to the ceaseless capacity of the human race for innovative change, and despite inevitable disasters along the way, the twenty-first century will see both human prosperity and natural biodiversity enhanced. Acute, refreshing, and revelatory, The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.

If you’ve ever wondered: Can I set limits and still be a loving person? How do I answer someone who wants my time, love, energy, or money? Why do I feel guilty when I consider setting boundaries? Unpacking the 10 laws of boundaries, Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend give you biblically based answers to these and other tough questions, and show you how to set healthy boundaries with your spouse, children, friends, coworkers, and even with yourself.

In��Boundaries, Drs. Cloud and Townsend show you how to bring new health to your relationships. You’ll discover firsthand how to reclaim your freedom to walk as the loving, giving, fulfilled individual God created you to be.��

Renowned negotiation expert William Ury has taught tens of thousands of people from all walks of life—managers, lawyers, factory workers, coal miners, schoolteachers, diplomats, and government officials—how to become better negotiators. Over the years, Ury has discovered that the greatest obstacle to successful agreements and satisfying relationships is not the other side, as difficult as they can be. The biggest obstacle is actually our own selves—our natural tendency to react in ways that do not serve our true interests.

But this obstacle can also become our biggest opportunity, Ury argues. If we learn to understand and influence ourselves first, we lay the groundwork for understanding and influencing others. In this prequel to Getting to Yes, Ury offers a seven-step method to help you reach agreement with yourself first, dramatically improving your ability to negotiate with others.

Practical and effective, Getting to Yes with Yourself helps readers reach good agreements with others, develop healthy relationships, make their businesses more productive, and live far more satisfying lives.

Through exercises, meditations, and instructional anecdotes, The Code of the Extraordinary Mind is a blueprint for retraining our minds to hack everything: how we work, love, parent, and heal. Lakhiani helps you confront common misperceptions about money, happiness, time management, personal potential, and productivity, and teaches you how to overcome them to achieve your true passions and purpose.

Now, in this updated edition, Dr Burns adds an all-new Consumer′s Guide To Antidepressant Drugs, as well as a new introduction to help answer your questions about the many options available for treating depression.

Recognise what causes your mood swings.

Nip negative feelings in the bud.

Deal with guilt.

Handle hostility and criticism.

Overcome addiction to love and approval.

Build self-esteem.

Feel good everyday.

Some text and images that appeared in the print edition of this book are unavailable in the electronic edition due to rights reasons.

Advance your electronics knowledge and gain the skills necessary to develop and construct your own functioning gadgets. Written by a pair of experienced engineers and dedicated hobbyists, Practical Electronics for Inventors, Fourth Edition, lays out the essentials and provides step-by-step instructions, schematics, and illustrations. Discover how to select the right components, design and build circuits, use microcontrollers and ICs, work with the latest software tools, and test and tweak your creations. This easy-to-follow book features new instruction on programmable logic, semiconductors, operational amplifiers, voltage regulators, power supplies, digital electronics, and more.



Practical Electronics for Inventors, Fourth Edition, covers:

Twelve years prior, Adelaide Mannheim—daughter of Mordecai, the only Jewish planter in the county—was given her own maid, a young slave named Rachel. The two became friends, and soon they discovered a secret: Mordecai was Rachel’s father, too.

As the country moved toward war, Adelaide and Rachel struggled to navigate their newfound sisterhood—from love and resentment to betrayal and, ultimately, forgiveness.

Now, facing these Union soldiers as General Sherman advances nearer, their bond is put to the ultimate test. Will the plantation be spared? Or will everything they’ve lived for be lost?

Revised edition: Previously published as Slave and Sister, this edition of Sister of Mine: A Novel includes editorial revisions.