All in favor of improving meeting procedures, say Aye! Trying to keep your in-person and virtual meetings on track and running smoothly? You need Robert's Rules of Order! These rules for conducting meetings have stood the test of time as the gold standard for practical and effective procedure in group settings like corporate and nonprofit boards, councils, and more. And there's no better way to learn the latest version of the rules than with Robert's Rules For Dummies. This handy guide demystifies the Rules and offers readers a practical roadmap to applying efficient procedures to everything from conducting online and in-person meetings to voting by email. It also: Contains brand-new, updated content on the latest 12th Edition of Robert's Rules Offers sample meeting agendas, minutes, scripts, and other material to show you how the pros keep meeting records Walks you through the basic--and not so basic--ways to nominate and elect officers and directors in organizations Ideal for board members, convention delegates, business owners, nonprofit executives, and anyone else trying to maintain an orderly flow of business--online or in person--Robert's Rules For Dummies is a need-to-read resource that will make you wonder how you ever survived without it.

An accessible guide to our digital infrastructure, explaining the basics of operating systems, networks, security, and other topics for the general reader. Most of us feel at home in front of a computer; we own smartphones, tablets, and laptops; we look things up online and check social media to see what our friends are doing. But we may be a bit fuzzy about how any of this really works. In Bits to Bitcoin, Mark Stuart Day offers an accessible guide to our digital infrastructure, explaining the basics of operating systems, networks, security, and related topics for the general reader. He takes the reader from a single process to multiple processes that interact with each other; he explores processes that fail and processes that overcome failures; and he examines processes that attack each other or defend themselves against attacks. Day tells us that steps are digital but ramps are analog; that computation is about "doing something with stuff" and that both the "stuff" and the "doing" can be digital. He explains timesharing, deadlock, and thrashing; virtual memory and virtual machines; packets and networks; resources and servers; secret keys and public keys; Moore's law and Thompson's hack. He describes how building in redundancy guards against failure and how endpoints communicate across the Internet. He explains why programs crash or have other bugs, why they are attacked by viruses, and why those problems are hard to fix. Finally, after examining secrets, trust, and cheating, he explains the mechanisms that allow the Bitcoin system to record money transfers accurately while fending off attacks.