Project Management for Mere Mortals® strips away the myths and mysteries of effective project management, giving you the skills, tools, and insights to succeed with your next project—and every project after that. Long-time project manager and trainer, Claudia Baca, walks you through all five process groups of project management: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and closing. Baca examines each process group from the perspectives of the working project manager and team member, highlighting the organizational issues most likely to arise and offering proven solutions. For each process group, she presents tools you can start using right now—and demonstrates those tools at work in a realistic running case study. This guide takes you from the absolute basics through advanced techniques, such as measures of performance and change control. You’ll learn how to • Accurately scope projects and build workable timetables • Create trustworthy budgets and use them to manage your project • Organize work assignments for maximum efficiency • Build project teams, and keep them motivated • Intelligently assess quality goals, and decide “how good it has to be” • Identify and mitigate the real risks your project will encounter • Control changes and stay on track, no matter what surprises occur • Close projects successfully, and learn lessons for future projects • Gain crucial skills you’ll need for PMI certification

In Extended STL , renowned C++ expert Matthew Wilson shows how to go beyond the C++ standard and extend the Standard Template Library into the wider C++ world of APIs and non-standard collections, to write software that is more efficient, expressive, flexible, and robust.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Provocative and appealing . . . well worth your extremely limited time." —Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks. Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.

Pro Web Project Management is a collection of hard-won lessons the authors have learned managing modern web projects with small and medium budgets in a consulting environment. This isn’t a book about project management theory. Pro Web Project Management tells how to create real deliverables, get answers from indecisive clients, manage wayward programmers, and use checklists to wow clients. This book is made up of real examples, real lessons, real documents, and real tips woven together into a step-by-step walkthrough of a project's life cycle. Pro Web Project Management is written for both the full-time project manager and the aspiring project manager who might have a role that blends client support, web development, and project management. The project budget sweet spot for this book is $50,000 to $500,000. If you manage a project in this space, reading this book will make you a better project manager. Learn how to manage a modern web project with a budget of $50,000 to $500,000 Get actionable tips on dealing with real project management challenges Learn the simple, defined process—refined over the years—to take simple and complex projects from proposal to successful launch

This book goes beyond just the technical explanation of Project and really focuses on how to apply methodology, best practices and tool knowledge as a project manager or anyone wanting to create a schedule.

The #1 Easy, Common-Sense Guide to SQL Queries--Updated for Today's Databases, Standards, and Challenges SQL Queries for Mere Mortals ® has earned worldwide praise as the clearest, simplest tutorial on writing effective SQL queries. The authors have updated this hands-on classic to reflect new SQL standards and database applications and teach valuable new techniques. Step by step, John L. Viescas and Michael J. Hernandez guide you through creating reliable queries for virtually any modern SQL-based database. They demystify all aspects of SQL query writing, from simple data selection and filtering to joining multiple tables and modifying sets of data. Three brand-new chapters teach you how to solve a wide range of challenging SQL problems. You'll learn how to write queries that apply multiple complex conditions on one table, perform sophisticated logical evaluations, and think "outside the box" using unlinked tables. Coverage includes -- Getting started: understanding what relational databases are, and ensuring that your database structures are sound -- SQL basics: using SELECT statements, creating expressions, sorting information with ORDER BY, and filtering data using WHERE -- Summarizing and grouping data with GROUP BY and HAVING clauses -- Drawing data from multiple tables: using INNER JOIN, OUTER JOIN, and UNION operators, and working with subqueries -- Modifying data sets with UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE statements Advanced queries: complex NOT and AND, conditions, if-then-else using CASE, unlinked tables, driver tables, and more Practice all you want with downloadable sample databases for today's versions of Microsoft Office Access, Microsoft SQL Server, and the open source MySQL database. Whether you're a DBA, developer, user, or student, there's no better way to master SQL. informit.com/aw forMereMortals.com

This book on generic SQL can be used by new users to learn the foundations of SQL or act as a reference for more experienced users. This new edition brings the content up-to-date with the latest versions of the major proprietary database systems, including Access, Oracle and MySQL.