A young boy is just short of a monster. He is adopted by a loving man and his wacky wife. The laughs keep coming as the boy pushes them to the limits.

In Los Angeles, a depressed writer named Solo has writers block after a successful first book of which hes ashamed, and hes broke, thanks to a year in classical psychoanalysis. In their final session, his therapist suggests that he gets a pet, so Solo buys a scrawny terrier that adds to his problems: the dog isnt house-trained; he owes money to a thug whos angry; at a dog park, he begs a woman hes just met to pay the veterinarians bill when the dog is bitten; and his friend Casper has introduced him to a persistent rich girl who decides that she wants the dog. He could sell, settle his debts, and return to life with a clean carpet, or he could figure out why he doesnt want to part with the dog.

The job of Linux systems administrator is interrupt-driven and requires constant learning in byte-wise chunks. This book gives solutions to modern problems, even some you might not have heard of, such as scripting LDAP, making Mac clients play nice with Linux servers, and backup, security, and recovery scripts. Author Juliet Kemp takes a broad approach to scripting using Perl and bash, and all scripts work on Debian or Red Hat lineage distributions. Plus she dispenses wisdom about time management, dealing with desperate colleagues, and how to avoid reinventing the wheel!

Hibernate continues to be the most popular out-of-the-box framework solution for Java Persistence and data/database accessibility techniques and patterns. It is used for e-commerce-based web applications as well as heavy-duty transactional systems for the enterprise.