In a stretch of just seven years, the Beatles recorded hundreds of songs which tower above those of their worthy peers as both the product of cultural leadership and an artistic reflection of their turbulent age, the1960s. Walter Everett and Tim Riley's What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music, and Their Time blends historical narrative, musicology, and music analysis to tell the full story of the Beatles and how they redefined pop music. The book traces the Beatles' development chronologically, marking the band's involvement with world events such as the Vietnam War, strides in overcoming racial segregation, gender stereotyping, student demonstrations, and the generation gap. It delves deeply into their body of work, introducing the concepts of musical form, instrumentation, harmonic structure, melodic patterns, and rhythmic devices in a way that is accessible to musicians and non-musicians alike. Close readings of specific songs highlight the tensions between imagination and mechanics, songwriting and technology, and through the book's musical examples, listeners will learn how to develop strategies for creating their own rich interpretations of the potential meanings behind their favorite songs. Videos hosted on the book's companion website offer full definitions and performance demonstrations of all musical concepts discussed in the text, and interactive listening guides illustrate track details in real-time listening. The unique multimedia approach of What Goes On reveals just how great this music was in its own time, and why it remains important today as a body of singular achievement.

The origins of the word problem are in group theory, decidability and complexity. But through the vision of M. Gromov and the language of filling functions, the topic now impacts the world of large-scale geometry. This book contains accounts of many recent developments in Geometric Group Theory and shows the interaction between the word problem and geometry continues to be a central theme. It contains many figures, numerous exercises and open questions.

Successful software depends as much on scrupulous testing as it does on solid architecture or elegant code. But testing is not a routine process, it's a constant exploration of methods and an evolution of good ideas. Beautiful Testing offers 23 essays from 27 leading testers and developers that illustrate the qualities and techniques that make testing an art. Through personal anecdotes, you'll learn how each of these professionals developed beautiful ways of testing a wide range of products -- valuable knowledge that you can apply to your own projects.Here's a sample of what you'll find inside: Microsoft's Alan Page knows a lot about large-scale test automation, and shares some of his secrets on how to make it beautifulScott Barber explains why performance testing needs to be a collaborative process, rather than simply an exercise in measuring speedKaren Johnson describes how her professional experience intersected her personal life while testing medical softwareRex Black reveals how satisfying stakeholders for 25 years is a beautiful thingMathematician John D. Cook applies a classic definition of beauty, based on complexity and unity, to testing random number generators

All author royalties will be donated to the Nothing But Nets campaign to save lives by preventing malaria, a disease that kills millions of children in Africa each year.This book includes contributions from: Adam GoucherLinda WilkinsonRex BlackMartin SchroderClint TalbertScott BarberKamran KhanEmily ChenBrian NitzRemko TronconAlan PageNeal NorwitzMichelle LevesqueJeffrey YasskinJohn D. CookMurali NandigamaKaren N. JohnsonChris McMahonJennitta AndreaLisa CrispinMatt HeusserAndreas ZellerDavid SchulerTomasz KojmAdam ChristianTim RileyIsaac Clerencia

In his commanding new book, the eminent NPR critic Tim Riley takes us on the remarkable journey that brought a Liverpool art student from a disastrous childhood to the highest realms of fame.
Riley portrays Lennon's rise from Hamburg's red light district to Britain's Royal Variety Show; from the charmed naivete of "Love Me Do" to the soaring ambivalence of "Don't Let Me Down"; from his shotgun marriage to Cynthia Powell in 1962 to his epic media romance with Yoko Ono. Written with the critical insight and stylistic mastery readers have come to expect from Riley, this richly textured narrative draws on numerous new and exclusive interviews with Lennon's friends, enemies, confidantes, and associates; lost memoirs written by relatives and friends; as well as previously undiscovered City of Liverpool records. Riley explores Lennon in all of his contradictions: the British art student who universalized an American style, the anarchic rock 'n' roller with the moral spine, the anti-jazz snob who posed naked with his avant-garde lover, and the misogynist who became a househusband. What emerges is the enormous, seductive, and confounding personality that made Lennon a cultural touchstone.
In "Lennon," Riley casts Lennon as a modernist hero in a sweeping epic, dramatizing rock history anew as Lennon himself might have experienced it."

In "Fever," music critic Tim Riley argues that while political and athletic role models have let us down, rock and roll has provided enduring role models for men and women. From Elvis Presley to Tina Turner to Bruce Springsteen to Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Riley makes a persuasive case that rock and roll, far from the corrosive force that conservative critics make it out to be, has instead been a positive influence in people's lives, laying out gender-defying role models far more enduringly than movies, TV, or "real life."

A unique combination of musical analysis and cultural history, Tell Me Why stands alone among Beatles books with its single-minded focus on the most important aspect of the band: its music. Riley offers a new, deeper understanding of the Beatles by closely considering each song and album they recorded in an exploration as rigorous as it is soulful. He tirelessly sifts through the Beatles discography, making clear that the legendary four were more than mere teen idols: They were brilliant innovators who mastered an extremely detailed art. Since the first publication of Tell Me Why in 1988, much new primary source material has appeared,Paul McCartney's authorized biography, the Anthology CDs and videos, the complete Parlophone-sequenced albums on CD, the Live at the BBC sessions, and the global smash 1 . Riley incorporates all the new material in an update that makes this a crucial book for Beatles fans.

Ranging over 30 years of albums and outtakes, bootleg recordings, films, and live concerts, Riley delivers fresh analyses of Bob Dylan's songs, charts the mercurial shifts in the Dylan persona, assesses the singer's debt to earlier musicians, and reveals the shadow he casts on the work of Springsteen and others.