Collection of strips from Xkcd, a free webcomic.

From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans' strangest questions. The queries he receives range from merely odd to downright diabolical: - What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool? - Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns? - What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City? - Are fire tornadoes possible? His responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, gleefully and accurately explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements. The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.

The creator of the popular webcomic "xkcd" uses line drawings and common words to provide simple explanations for how things work, including microwaves, bridges, tectonic plates, the solar system, the periodic table, helicopters, and other essential concepts.

AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “How To will make you laugh as you learn…With How To, you can't help but appreciate the glorious complexity of our universe and the amazing breadth of humanity's effort to comprehend it. If you want some lightweight edification, you won't go wrong with How To.” —CNET “[How To] has science and jokes in it, so 10/10 can recommend.” —Simone Giertz The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, the bestsellers What If? and Thing Explainer, and What If? 2, coming September 13, 2022 For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a 90's kid by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and powering your house by destroying the fabric of space-time. And if you want to get rid of the book once you're done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapor, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth's mantle, or launching it into the Sun. By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe doesn't just make things difficult for himself and his readers. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and fun illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.

The second collection of Abby Howard's humorous semi-autobiographical webcomic.

A fully revised and updated version of the classic baby name guide, featuring updated trends, facts, ideas, and thousands of enchanting names! Your baby’s perfect name is out there. This book will help you find it. The right baby name will speak to your heart, give your child a great start in life—and maybe even satisfy your relatives. But there’s no shortage of names to choose from, and you can’t expect to just stumble upon a name like that in an A-to-Z dictionary. Enter the revised and updated fourth edition of The Baby Name Wizard. This ultimate baby-name guide uses groundbreaking research and computer-generated models to create a visual image for each name, examine its usage and popularity over the last one hundred years, and suggest other specific and promising name ideas. Each unique “name snapshot” includes a rundown of style categories the name belongs to, nickname options, variants, pronunciations, prominent examples, and names with a similar style and feeling. This new edition also contains expanded sections on popular names and style lists. A perfect, up-to-date guide to the modern world of names, The Baby Name Wizard will delight you from the first name you look up and keep you enchanted through your journey to finding the just-right name for your baby.

A succinct and highly readable guide to creating effective graphs The right graph can be a powerful tool for communicating information, improving a presentation, or conveying your point in print. If your professional endeavors call for you to present data graphically, here's a book that can help you do it more effectively. Creating More Effective Graphs gives you the basic knowledge and techniques required to choose and create appropriate graphs for a broad range of applications. Using real-world examples everyone can relate to, the author draws on her years of experience in graphical data analysis and presentation to highlight some of today's most effective methods. In clear, concise language, the author answers such common questions as: What constitutes an effective graph for communicating data? How do I choose the type of graph that is best for my data? How do I recognize a misleading graph? Why do some graphs have logarithmic scales? In no time you'll graduate from bar graphs and pie charts to graphs that illuminate data like: Dot plots Box plots Scatterplots Linked micromaps Trellis displays Mosaic plots Month plots Scatterplot matrices . . . most of them requiring only inexpensive, easily downloadable software. Whether you're a novice at graphing or already use graphs in your work but want to improve them, Creating More Effective Graphs will help you develop the kind of clear, accurate, and well-designed graphs that will allow your data to be understood.

This collection of new essays explores various ways of reading, interpreting and using digital comics. Contributors discuss comics made specifically for web consumption, and also digital reproductions of print-comics. Written for those who may not be familiar with digital comics or digital comic scholarship, the essays cover perspectives on reading, criticism and analysis of specific titles, the global reach of digital comics, and how they can be used in educational settings.

Network Programming with Go teaches you how to write clean, secure network software with the programming language designed to make it seem easy. Build simple, reliable, network software Combining the best parts of many other programming languages, Go is fast, scalable, and designed for high-performance networking and multiprocessing. In other words, it’s perfect for network programming. Network Programming with Go will help you leverage Go to write secure, readable, production-ready network code. In the early chapters, you’ll learn the basics of networking and traffic routing. Then you’ll put that knowledge to use as the book guides you through writing programs that communicate using TCP, UDP, and Unix sockets to ensure reliable data transmission. As you progress, you’ll explore higher-level network protocols like HTTP and HTTP/2 and build applications that securely interact with servers, clients, and APIs over a network using TLS. You'll also learn: Internet Protocol basics, such as the structure of IPv4 and IPv6, multicasting, DNS, and network address translation Methods of ensuring reliability in socket-level communications Ways to use handlers, middleware, and multiplexers to build capable HTTP applications with minimal code Tools for incorporating authentication and encryption into your applications using TLS Methods to serialize data for storage or transmission in Go-friendly formats like JSON, Gob, XML, and protocol buffers Ways of instrumenting your code to provide metrics about requests, errors, and more Approaches for setting up your application to run in the cloud (and reasons why you might want to) Network Programming with Go is all you’ll need to take advantage of Go’s built-in concurrency, rapid compiling, and rich standard library. Covers Go 1.15 (Backward compatible with Go 1.12 and higher)

Mathematics has maintained a surprising presence in popular media for over a century. In recent years, the movies Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, and Stand and Deliver, the stage plays Breaking the Code and Proof, the novella Flatland and the hugely successful television crime series NUMB3RS all weave mathematics prominently into their storylines. Less obvious but pivotal references to the subject appear in the blockbuster TV show Lost, the cult movie The Princess Bride, and even Tolstoy's War and Peace. In this collection of new essays, contributors consider the role of math in everything from films, baseball, crossword puzzles, fantasy role-playing games, and television shows to science fiction tales, award-winning plays and classic works of literature. Revealing the broad range of intersections between mathematics and mainstream culture, this collection demonstrates that even "mass entertainment" can have a hidden depth.