Manning authors know their stuff because they’re plugged into their communities–blogging, speaking, and, of course, coding. Our job is to take all the experience earned by our busy authors and turn it into books that will save you time. Here’s a glimpse at the recent activities of three Manning authors, along with an opportunity to add some great books to your collection at a great discount.

Nina Zumel, coauthor of Practical Data Science with R, blogs on data science topics ranging from marketing algorithms to NASA’s recent discovery of 715 new planets. Check out these new posts on ninazumel.com and win-vector.com.

What is Verification by Multiplicity? » Learn about the statistical technique that NASA scientists used to winnow out so many planets from the bulk data.

Popularity and Social Networks: Life is still like high school » Why does it matter how many people follow your blog?

Bandit Formulations for A/B Testing » How big a population do you need to reliably detect a difference to the desired statistical significance?

Roland Kuhn co- author of Reactive Design Patterns, is taking the Reactive Application message on the road. Roland’s just finished talks at JFokus in Stockholm and, along with coauthor Jamie Allen, at PhillyETE in Philadelphia. Next, he’s off to BigTechDay, München, 33degree, Krakow, and ScalaDays, Berlin. You can catch his recent webinar “Introducing Reactive Streams” on YouTube.

Carter Sande, coauthor of Hello World! Computer programming for kids and other beginners, just took second place in the Alameda County Apps Challenge “hackathon” for his app “isthisbizgreen.” (That’s Carter’s fresh face in the picture.) He also managed to score a student scholarship to Apple’s WWDC. Last, but not least, Hello World! was recently voted a winner in the 2014 Practical Homeschooling Reader Awards. Looks to us like Carter is just getting started!

Storm Applied » Author Sean T. Allen has just posted Chapter 5, “Tuning in Storm.”

Oculus Rift in Action » Recent additions by Bradley Austin Davis include Chapter 12, “Using Unity Pro to Create Rift Applications” and updates to chapters 1-4.

D3 in Action » Chapter 5, “Layouts” is now available, fresh from the desk of Elijah Meeks.

Elixir in Action » Sasa Juric finished Chapter 6, “Actors,” to be followed soon by Chapter 7, “Fault-tolerance”

Node.js in Practice » read Chapter 10, “The Web: Build leaner and meaner web applications” and Chapter 11, “Debugging: Designing for introspection and resolving issues” courtesy of authors Mark Harter and Alex Young.