Bøger af John Elder

Learning Ruby on Rails has never been this fast and easy, or fun! Veteran Codemy.com programmer John Elder walks you step by step through the ins and outs of Rails for Web Development. Written for the absolute beginner, you don't need any programming experience to dive in and get started with this book. Follow along as John builds a Pinterest-style website from start to finish that allows people to sign up, log in and out, edit their profile, upload images to the database and style those images on the screen. By the end, you'll be well on your way to becoming a professional Ruby on Rails coder!*AUTHOR UPDTE: C9, the development environment we used in the book, was purchased by Amazon and is no longer accepting new users unless you sign up through my education account at Codemy.com/c9

Learning Ruby has never been this fast and easy, or fun!Veteran Codemy.com programmer John Elder walks you step by step through the ins and outs of Ruby Programming. Written for the absolute beginner, you don't need any programming experience to dive in and get started with this book. Follow along as John teaches you to set up a development environment and write your first program. You'll learn about Variables, Math, IF/THEN Statements, Array, Hashes, Loops, Methods and much more.By the end, you'll be well on your way to becoming a professional Ruby coder!Build on your skills with practice exercises at the end of each chapter and build a math flashcard game using all the skills you've learned throughout the book. It really is this easy to learn Ruby!*AUTHOR UPDATE: C9, the development environment we used in the book, was purchased by Amazon and is no longer accepting new users unless you sign up through my education account at Codemy.com/c9

More people are starting tech companies today than ever before. Tech Incubators are popping up all across the country, and shared office space is available everywhere. When people think about building a startup, they immediately jump on the seemingly tried and true path...find a co-founder, get into an incubator, start pitching venture capitalists on your business plan, then crush it! But there's another way...a better way...a smarter way....the Smart Startup way. In the Smart Startup, veteran serial entrepreneur John Elder describes his tried and true method for building startups without the need of a co-founder, an incubator, or venture capital money. John first started building Smart Startups in the mid 90's when he created one of the Internets earliest advertising exchanges and sold it to a publicly traded company at the height of the first dot-com boom. After that he built a b2b biotech company and sold it to a group of investment bankers before developing one of the earliest desktop SEO software titles used by over three million people. If you've ever dreamed of starting your own online business, this is the book for you.

Are you presenting a scientific research poster at an upcoming conference? Then this is the book for you! You'll learn how to make a great research poster that gets noticed. It discusses technical aspects to making a poster, as well as marketing tactics to make your poster stand out! It covers: - What software to use to create your poster - What size should your poster be - What font sizes should you use - What color schemes should you use - Should you use a template or design your own? - What file formats should you use for charts, graphs, and images - What is whitespace and what's it good for - Bold, Italics, Underlined text - what's appropriate and where - What are aspect ratios and why are they important - What should you expect to pay for a poster at different places - How to make your posters title stand out - How to make them stop walking and pay attention to your poster - And much much more. If you need to make a scientific research poster but don't know where to start, this is the book for you. It was written by John Elder and the good folks at MakeSigns.com and filled with tips, tricks, and online resources to help you make the best poster possible.

Prophets, Idols and Diggers, published in 1960, describes how the resources of modern science are used by the archeologist to reconstruct the life and times of the ancient world. It is a fascinating account of the way in which archeological discoveries confirm and support Biblical references to people, places and events.Since the discovery of the ancient civilizations of Babylon, Nineveh and Tyre, the science of Biblical archeology has assumed increased importance. Forgotten cities have been unearthed, contemporary records of Biblical events have been found and the uniqueness of Biblical revelation has been confirmed.Dr. Elder offers a rewarding reading experience to everyone interested in archeology, religion or the fabulous past. In reviewing the findings of archeology as they illuminate the Scriptures, Dr. Elder shows how science has enriched our understanding of passages once thought confusing, contradictory or obscure. Although much study remains to be done and doubtless many additional discoveries are to be made, the past is yielding up its secrets.

Ensemble methods have been called the most influential development in Data Mining and Machine Learning in the past decade. They combine multiple models into one usually more accurate than the best of its components. Ensembles can provide a critical boost to industrial challenges -- from investment timing to drug discovery, and fraud detection to recommendation systems -- where predictive accuracy is more vital than model interpretability. Ensembles are useful with all modeling algorithms, but this book focuses on decision trees to explain them most clearly. After describing trees and their strengths and weaknesses, the authors provide an overview of regularization -- today understood to be a key reason for the superior performance of modern ensembling algorithms. The book continues with a clear description of two recent developments: Importance Sampling (IS) and Rule Ensembles (RE). IS reveals classic ensemble methods -- bagging, random forests, and boosting -- to be special cases of a single algorithm, thereby showing how to improve their accuracy and speed. REs are linear rule models derived from decision tree ensembles. They are the most interpretable version of ensembles, which is essential to applications such as credit scoring and fault diagnosis. Lastly, the authors explain the paradox of how ensembles achieve greater accuracy on new data despite their (apparently much greater) complexity. This book is aimed at novice and advanced analytic researchers and practitioners -- especially in Engineering, Statistics, and Computer Science. Those with little exposure to ensembles will learn why and how to employ this breakthrough method, and advanced practitioners will gain insight into building even more powerful models. Throughout, snippets of code in R are provided to illustrate the algorithms described and to encourage the reader to try the techniques. The authors are industry experts in data mining and machine learning who are also adjunct professors and popular speakers. Although early pioneers in discovering and using ensembles, they here distill and clarify the recent groundbreaking work of leading academics (such as Jerome Friedman) to bring the benefits of ensembles to practitioners. Table of Contents: Ensembles Discovered / Predictive Learning and Decision Trees / Model Complexity, Model Selection and Regularization / Importance Sampling and the Classic Ensemble Methods / Rule Ensembles and Interpretation Statistics / Ensemble Complexity

"e;Set aside your Bella Tuscanys and Year in Provences for a different kind of travel book. Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa puts a walking stick in your hand and Marsh's Man and Nature in your knapsack, exploring how Italians have managed their natural and cultural heritage in ways that sustain both. John Elder's poetic meditations on land and life demonstrate that only by searching beyond our familiar boundaries can we discover better ways of living back at home."e;-Marcus Hall, author of Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration "e;This collaboration-between George Perkins Marsh and John Elder, between Vermont and Italy, between maple and olive-is one of the smartest, soundest, deepest books about the relationship between people and nature that I've ever read. It will be a classic."e;-Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature"e;Elder's impassioned pilgrimage shows us how to delight in messy wilderness, to secure a curative habitation of the world, and, with Marsh, to lend ecological nous to our gravest task: knowing ourselves and respecting one another. Let the maple seeds and olive stones of Elder's visionary harvest restore to us a reflective and redemptory future."e;-from the foreword by David LowenthalThe pivotal figure in Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa is the nineteenth-century diplomat and writer George Perkins Marsh, generally regarded as America's first environmentalist. Like Elder, Marsh was a Vermonter, and his diplomatic career took him for some years to Italy, where, witnessing the ecological devastation wrought upon the landscape by runaway deforestation and the plundering of other natural resources, he was moved to produce his famous manifesto, Man and Nature. Marsh drew parallels between the despoiled Italian environment and his home landscape of Vermont, warning that the latter was vulnerable to ecological woes of a similar magnitude if not carefully maintained and protected. In short, his was a prescient voice for stewardship. Elder follows in Marsh's footsteps along a trajectory running from Vermont to Italy, and at length fetches up at the managed forest of Vallombrosa. Punctuated throughout with learned and genial considerations of the poetry of Wordsworth, Basho, Dante, and Frost, Elder's narrative takes up issues of sustainability as practiced locally, reports on family doings, and returns finally-as did Marsh's-to Vermont, where he measures traditional stewardship values against more aggressive conservation-oriented measures such as the expansion of wilderness areas. John Elder, Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, is the author of Reading the Mountains of Home and The Frog Run.Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

This text explores the way in which our attitudes toward nature are mirrored in, and influenced by poetry. It illustrates how poetry can identify, interpret and celebrate issues related to nature and our place in it, with examples from poets such as T.S. Eliot and Robinson Jeffers.