Book picks similar to
Code Complete by Steve McConnell


programming
computer-science
tech
software

Cryptography Engineering: Design Principles and Practical Applications


Niels Ferguson - 2010
    Cryptography is vital to keeping information safe, in an era when the formula to do so becomes more and more challenging. Written by a team of world-renowned cryptography experts, this essential guide is the definitive introduction to all major areas of cryptography: message security, key negotiation, and key management. You'll learn how to think like a cryptographer. You'll discover techniques for building cryptography into products from the start and you'll examine the many technical changes in the field.After a basic overview of cryptography and what it means today, this indispensable resource covers such topics as block ciphers, block modes, hash functions, encryption modes, message authentication codes, implementation issues, negotiation protocols, and more. Helpful examples and hands-on exercises enhance your understanding of the multi-faceted field of cryptography.An author team of internationally recognized cryptography experts updates you on vital topics in the field of cryptography Shows you how to build cryptography into products from the start Examines updates and changes to cryptography Includes coverage on key servers, message security, authentication codes, new standards, block ciphers, message authentication codes, and more Cryptography Engineering gets you up to speed in the ever-evolving field of cryptography.

The Software Craftsman: Professionalism, Pragmatism, Pride


Sandro Mancuso - 2014
    Why? Too many organizations still view software development as just another production line. Too many developers feel that way, too--and they behave accordingly. In The Software Craftsman: Professionalism, Pragmatism, Pride, Sandro Mancuso offers a better and more fulfilling path. If you want to develop software with pride and professionalism; love what you do and do it with excellence; and build a career with autonomy, mastery, and purpose, it starts with the recognition that you are a craftsman. Once you embrace this powerful mindset, you can achieve unprecedented levels of technical excellence and customer satisfaction. Mancuso helped found the world's largest organization of software craftsmen; now, he shares what he's learned through inspiring examples and pragmatic advice you can use in your company, your projects, and your career. You will learn Why agile processes aren't enough and why craftsmanship is crucial to making them work How craftsmanship helps you build software right and helps clients in ways that go beyond code How and when to say "No" and how to provide creative alternatives when you do Why bad code happens to good developers and how to stop creating and justifying it How to make working with legacy code less painful and more productive How to be pragmatic--not dogmatic--about your practices and tools How to lead software craftsmen and attract them to your organization What to avoid when advertising positions, interviewing candidates, and hiring developers How developers and their managers can create a true culture of learning How to drive true technical change and overcome deep patterns of skepticism Sandro Mancuso has coded for startups, software houses, product companies, international consultancies, and investment banks. In October 2013, he cofounded Codurance, a consultancy based on Software Craftsmanship principles and values. His involvement with Software Craftsmanship began in 2010, when he founded the London Software Craftsmanship Community (LSCC), now the world's largest and most active Software Craftsmanship community, with more than two thousand craftsmen. For the past four years, he has inspired and helped developers to organize Software Craftsmanship communities throughout Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world.

Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems


Ross J. Anderson - 2008
    Spammers, virus writers, phishermen, money launderers, and spies now trade busily with each other in a lively online criminal economy and as they specialize, they get better. In this indispensable, fully updated guide, Ross Anderson reveals how to build systems that stay dependable whether faced with error or malice. Here's straight talk on critical topics such as technical engineering basics, types of attack, specialized protection mechanisms, security psychology, policy, and more.

Exceptional Ruby: Master the Art of Handling Failure in Ruby


Avdi Grimm - 2011
    Writing code that handles unexpected errors and still works is really hard. Most of us learn by trial and error. This short book removes the uncertainty. With over 100 pages of content and dozens of working examples, you’ll learn everything from the mechanics of how exceptions work to how to design a robust failure management architecture for your app or library. Whether you are a Ruby novice or a seasoned veteran, Exceptional Ruby will help you write cleaner, more resilient Ruby code.

The Imposter's Handbook


Rob Conery - 2016
    New languages, new frameworks, new ways of doing things - a constant struggle just to stay current in the industry. This left no time to learn the foundational concepts and skills that come with a degree in Computer Science.

Practices of an Agile Developer: Working in the Real World


Venkat Subramaniam - 2006
    You'll learn pragmatic ways of approaching the development process and your personal coding techniques. You'll learn about your own attitudes, issues with working on a team, and how to best manage your learning, all in an iterative, incremental, agile style. You'll see how to apply each practice, and what benefits you can expect. Bottom line: This book will make you a better developer.

The Soul of a New Machine


Tracy Kidder - 1981
    Tracy Kidder got a preview of this world in the late 1970s when he observed the engineers of Data General design and build a new 32-bit minicomputer in just one year. His thoughtful, prescient book, The Soul of a New Machine, tells stories of 35-year-old "veteran" engineers hiring recent college graduates and encouraging them to work harder and faster on complex and difficult projects, exploiting the youngsters' ignorance of normal scheduling processes while engendering a new kind of work ethic.These days, we are used to the "total commitment" philosophy of managing technical creation, but Kidder was surprised and even a little alarmed at the obsessions and compulsions he found. From in-house political struggles to workers being permitted to tease management to marathon 24-hour work sessions, The Soul of a New Machine explores concepts that already seem familiar, even old-hat, less than 20 years later. Kidder plainly admires his subjects; while he admits to hopeless confusion about their work, he finds their dedication heroic. The reader wonders, though, what will become of it all, now and in the future. —Rob Lightner

Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management


Scott Berkun - 2001
    Each essay distills complex concepts and challenges into practical nuggets of useful advice, and the new edition now adds more value for leaders and managers of projects everywhere. Based on his nine years of experience as a program manager for Internet Explorer, and lead program manager for Windows and MSN, Berkun explains to technical and non-technical readers alike what it takes to get through a large software or web development project. Making Things Happen doesn't cite specific methods, but focuses on philosophy and strategy. Unlike other project management books, Berkun offers personal essays in a comfortable style and easy tone that emulate the relationship of a wise project manager who gives good, entertaining and passionate advice to those who ask. Topics in this new edition include:How to make things happenMaking good decisionsSpecifications and requirementsIdeas and what to do with themHow not to annoy peopleLeadership and trustThe truth about making datesWhat to do when things go wrongComplete with a new forward from the author and a discussion guide for forming reading groups/teams, Making Things Happen offers in-depth exercises to help you apply lessons from the book to your job. It is inspiring, funny, honest, and compelling, and definitely the one book that you and your team need to have within arm's reach throughout the life of your project. Coming from the rare perspective of someone who fought difficult battles on Microsoft's biggest projects and taught project design and management for MSTE, Microsoft's internal best practices group, this is valuable advice indeed. It will serve you well with your current work, and on future projects to come.

Java Generics and Collections: Speed Up the Java Development Process


Maurice Naftalin - 2006
    Generics and the greatly expanded collection libraries have tremendously increased the power of Java 5 and Java 6. But they have also confused many developers who haven't known how to take advantage of these new features.Java Generics and Collections covers everything from the most basic uses of generics to the strangest corner cases. It teaches you everything you need to know about the collections libraries, so you'll always know which collection is appropriate for any given task, and how to use it.Topics covered include:• Fundamentals of generics: type parameters and generic methods• Other new features: boxing and unboxing, foreach loops, varargs• Subtyping and wildcards• Evolution not revolution: generic libraries with legacy clients and generic clients with legacy libraries• Generics and reflection• Design patterns for generics• Sets, Queues, Lists, Maps, and their implementations• Concurrent programming and thread safety with collections• Performance implications of different collectionsGenerics and the new collection libraries they inspired take Java to a new level. If you want to take your software development practice to a new level, this book is essential reading.Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, where his research focuses on the design of programming languages. He is a co-designer of GJ, work that became the basis for generics in Sun's Java 5.0.Maurice Naftalin is Technical Director at Morningside Light Ltd., a software consultancy in the United Kingdom. He has most recently served as an architect and mentor at NSB Retail Systems plc, and as the leader of the client development team of a major UK government social service system."A brilliant exposition of generics. By far the best book on the topic, it provides a crystal clear tutorial that starts with the basics and ends leaving the reader with a deep understanding of both the use and design of generics." Gilad Bracha, Java Generics Lead, Sun Microsystems

User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product


Jeff Patton - 2012
    With this practical book, you'll explore the often-misunderstood practice of user story mapping, and learn how it can help keep your team stay focused on users and their experience throughout the development process.You and your team will learn that user stories aren't a way to write better specifications, but a way to organize and have better conversations. This book will help you understand what kinds of conversations you should be having, when to have them, and what to keep track of when you do. Learn the key concepts used to create a great story map. Understand how user stories really work, and how to make good use of them in agile and lean projects. Examine the nuts and bolts of managing stories through the development cycle. Use strategies that help you continue to learn before and after the product's release to customers and usersUser Story Mapping is ideal for agile and lean software development team members, product managers and UX practitioners in commercial product companies, and business analysts and project managers in IT organizations—whether you're new to this approach or want to understand more about it.

Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud


Brendan Gregg - 2013
    Now, internationally renowned performance expert Brendan Gregg has brought together proven methodologies, tools, and metrics for analyzing and tuning even the most complex environments. Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud focuses on Linux(R) and Unix(R) performance, while illuminating performance issues that are relevant to all operating systems. You'll gain deep insight into how systems work and perform, and learn methodologies for analyzing and improving system and application performance. Gregg presents examples from bare-metal systems and virtualized cloud tenants running Linux-based Ubuntu(R), Fedora(R), CentOS, and the illumos-based Joyent(R) SmartOS(TM) and OmniTI OmniOS(R). He systematically covers modern systems performance, including the "traditional" analysis of CPUs, memory, disks, and networks, and new areas including cloud computing and dynamic tracing. This book also helps you identify and fix the "unknown unknowns" of complex performance: bottlenecks that emerge from elements and interactions you were not aware of. The text concludes with a detailed case study, showing how a real cloud customer issue was analyzed from start to finish. Coverage includes - Modern performance analysis and tuning: terminology, concepts, models, methods, and techniques - Dynamic tracing techniques and tools, including examples of DTrace, SystemTap, and perf - Kernel internals: uncovering what the OS is doing - Using system observability tools, interfaces, and frameworks - Understanding and monitoring application performance - Optimizing CPUs: processors, cores, hardware threads, caches, interconnects, and kernel scheduling - Memory optimization: virtual memory, paging, swapping, memory architectures, busses, address spaces, and allocators - File system I/O, including caching - Storage devices/controllers, disk I/O workloads, RAID, and kernel I/O - Network-related performance issues: protocols, sockets, interfaces, and physical connections - Performance implications of OS and hardware-based virtualization, and new issues encountered with cloud computing - Benchmarking: getting accurate results and avoiding common mistakes This guide is indispensable for anyone who operates enterprise or cloud environments: system, network, database, and web admins; developers; and other professionals. For students and others new to optimization, it also provides exercises reflecting Gregg's extensive instructional experience.

Engineering a Compiler


Keith D. Cooper - 2003
    No longer is execution speed the sole criterion for judging compiled code. Today, code might be judged on how small it is, how much power it consumes, how well it compresses, or how many page faults it generates. In this evolving environment, the task of building a successful compiler relies upon the compiler writer's ability to balance and blend algorithms, engineering insights, and careful planning. Today's compiler writer must choose a path through a design space that is filled with diverse alternatives, each with distinct costs, advantages, and complexities.Engineering a Compiler explores this design space by presenting some of the ways these problems have been solved, and the constraints that made each of those solutions attractive. By understanding the parameters of the problem and their impact on compiler design, the authors hope to convey both the depth of the problems and the breadth of possible solutions. Their goal is to cover a broad enough selection of material to show readers that real tradeoffs exist, and that the impact of those choices can be both subtle and far-reaching.Authors Keith Cooper and Linda Torczon convey both the art and the science of compiler construction and show best practice algorithms for the major passes of a compiler. Their text re-balances the curriculum for an introductory course in compiler construction to reflect the issues that arise in current practice.

Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight


John W. Foreman - 2013
    Major retailers are predicting everything from when their customers are pregnant to when they want a new pair of Chuck Taylors. It's a brave new world where seemingly meaningless data can be transformed into valuable insight to drive smart business decisions.But how does one exactly do data science? Do you have to hire one of these priests of the dark arts, the "data scientist," to extract this gold from your data? Nope.Data science is little more than using straight-forward steps to process raw data into actionable insight. And in Data Smart, author and data scientist John Foreman will show you how that's done within the familiar environment of a spreadsheet. Why a spreadsheet? It's comfortable! You get to look at the data every step of the way, building confidence as you learn the tricks of the trade. Plus, spreadsheets are a vendor-neutral place to learn data science without the hype. But don't let the Excel sheets fool you. This is a book for those serious about learning the analytic techniques, the math and the magic, behind big data.Each chapter will cover a different technique in a spreadsheet so you can follow along: - Mathematical optimization, including non-linear programming and genetic algorithms- Clustering via k-means, spherical k-means, and graph modularity- Data mining in graphs, such as outlier detection- Supervised AI through logistic regression, ensemble models, and bag-of-words models- Forecasting, seasonal adjustments, and prediction intervals through monte carlo simulation- Moving from spreadsheets into the R programming languageYou get your hands dirty as you work alongside John through each technique. But never fear, the topics are readily applicable and the author laces humor throughout. You'll even learn what a dead squirrel has to do with optimization modeling, which you no doubt are dying to know.

Dependency Injection in .NET


Mark Seemann - 2011
    Instead of hard-coding dependencies, such as specifying a database driver, you inject a list of services that a component may need. The services are then connected by a third party. This technique enables you to better manage future changes and other complexity in your software.About this BookDependency Injection in .NET introduces DI and provides a practical guide for applying it in .NET applications. The book presents the core patterns in plain C#, so you'll fully understand how DI works. Then you'll learn to integrate DI with standard Microsoft technologies like ASP.NET MVC, and to use DI frameworks like StructureMap, Castle Windsor, and Unity. By the end of the book, you'll be comfortable applying this powerful technique in your everyday .NET development.This book is written for C# developers. No previous experience with DI or DI frameworks is required. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book. Winner of 2013 Jolt Awards: The Best Books—one of five notable books every serious programmer should read.What's InsideMany C#-based examplesA catalog of DI patterns and anti-patternsUsing both Microsoft and open source DI frameworksTabel of ContentsPART 1 PUTTING DEPENDENCY INJECTION ON THE MAPA Dependency Injection tasting menuA comprehensive exampleDI ContainersPART 2 DI CATALOGDI patternsDI anti-patternsDI refactoringsPART 3 DIY DIObject CompositionObject LifetimeInterceptionPART 4 DI CONTAINERSCastle WindsorStructureMapSpring.NETAutofacUnityMEF

Kubernetes: Up & Running


Kelsey Hightower - 2016
    How's that possible? Google revealed the secret through a project called Kubernetes, an open source cluster orchestrator (based on its internal Borg system) that radically simplifies the task of building, deploying, and maintaining scalable distributed systems in the cloud. This practical guide shows you how Kubernetes and container technology can help you achieve new levels of velocity, agility, reliability, and efficiency.Authors Kelsey Hightower, Brendan Burns, and Joe Beda--who've worked on Kubernetes at Google--explain how this system fits into the lifecycle of a distributed application. You will learn how to use tools and APIs to automate scalable distributed systems, whether it is for online services, machine-learning applications, or a cluster of Raspberry Pi computers.Explore the distributed system challenges that Kubernetes addressesDive into containerized application development, using containers such as DockerCreate and run containers on Kubernetes, using Docker's Image format and container runtimeExplore specialized objects essential for running applications in productionReliably roll out new software versions without downtime or errorsGet examples of how to develop and deploy real-world applications in Kubernetes