Inspiring and immensely readable, Craft, Cost & Call offers hands-on help to people of faith who want to write well and understand what it takes to be published. For writers yearning to grow in their craft or hoping to launch a writing career, this unique guidebook provides a clear path forward filled with the hard-won wisdom of long-time and widely-published Christian writers. From the beauty of the call to write and insights on how to be published, the authors take their readers on a journey both practical and personal. Readers will find clear direction on writing with excellence and beauty, and “Try this” challenges that will move any aspiring writer out of their armchair and into their writing chair. Far from a manual, Craft, Cost & Call reads as a heartfelt conversation between writers, guiding, encouraging, and cheering others on to success.

Despite using them every day, most software engineers know little about how programming languages are designed and implemented. For many, their only experience with that corner of computer science was a terrifying "compilers" class that they suffered through in undergrad and tried to blot from their memory as soon as they had scribbled their last NFA to DFA conversion on the final exam. That fearsome reputation belies a field that is rich with useful techniques and not so difficult as some of its practitioners might have you believe. A better understanding of how programming languages are built will make you a stronger software engineer and teach you concepts and data structures you'll use the rest of your coding days. You might even have fun. This book teaches you everything you need to know to implement a full-featured, efficient scripting language. You'll learn both high-level concepts around parsing and semantics and gritty details like bytecode representation and garbage collection. Your brain will light up with new ideas, and your hands will get dirty and calloused. Starting from main(), you will build a language that features rich syntax, dynamic typing, garbage collection, lexical scope, first-class functions, closures, classes, and inheritance. All packed into a few thousand lines of clean, fast code that you thoroughly understand because you wrote each one yourself.

In today's competitive marketplace, customer value " a combination of product and service benefits at a fair price that creates value in the minds of customers " is the key variable for business success. Using several comprehensive and highly integrated frameworks, Peter Duchessi provides strategies for defining customer value and for developing the critical business, personnel, quality, and information systems that are responsible for delivering customer value. Whereas other books focus on just one of these critical areas, Crafting Customer Value provides a comprehensive account of what a company must do and how to go about doing it in each area. The author's numerous vignettes and cases illustrate how successful companies set clear business direction, formulate a customer value strategy, design and implement new business processes, develop a loyal cadre of employees, institute effective quality programs, and deploy state-of-the-art information systems. This book is a valuable guide for managers who are interested in transforming their companies into customer value-added enterprises that can earn high profits.

The most trustworthy source of information available today on savings and investments, taxes, money management, home ownership and many other personal finance topics.