Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems


David J. Agans - 2002
    Written in a frank but engaging style, Debuggingprovides simple, foolproof principles guaranteed to help find any bug quickly. This book makes those shelves of application-specific debugging books (on C++, Perl, Java, etc.) obsolete. It changes the way readers think about debugging, making those pesky problems suddenly much easier to find and fix. Illustrating the rules with real-life bug-detection war stories, the book shows readers how to: * Understand the system: how perceiving the ""roadmap"" can hasten your journey * Quit thinking and look: when hands-on investigation can’t be avoided * Isolate critical factors: why changing one element at a time can be an essential tool * Keep an audit trail: how keeping a record of the debugging process can win the day

The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows


Raymond Chen - 2006
    With this book, Raymond shares his knowledge, experience, and anecdotal stories, allowing all of us to get a better understanding of the operating system that affects millions of people every day. This book has something for everyone, is a casual read, and I highly recommend it!--Jeffrey Richter, Author/Consultant, Cofounder of WintellectVery interesting read. Raymond tells the inside story of why Windows is the way it is.--Eric Gunnerson, Program Manager, Microsoft CorporationAbsolutely essential reading for understanding the history of Windows, its intricacies and quirks, and why they came about.--Matt Pietrek, MSDN Magazine's Under the Hood ColumnistRaymond Chen has become something of a legend in the software industry, and in this book you'll discover why. From his high-level reminiscences on the design of the Windows Start button to his low-level discussions of GlobalAlloc that only your inner-geek could love, The Old New Thing is a captivating collection of anecdotes that will help you to truly appreciate the difficulty inherent in designing and writing quality software.--Stephen Toub, Technical Editor, MSDN MagazineWhy does Windows work the way it does? Why is Shut Down on the Start menu? (And why is there a Start button, anyway?) How can I tap into the dialog loop? Why does the GetWindowText function behave so strangely? Why are registry files called hives?Many of Windows' quirks have perfectly logical explanations, rooted in history. Understand them, and you'll be more productive and a lot less frustrated. Raymond Chen--who's spent more than a decade on Microsoft's Windows development team--reveals the hidden Windows you need to know.Chen's engaging style, deep insight, and thoughtful humor have made him one of the world's premier technology bloggers. Here he brings together behind-the-scenes explanations, invaluable technical advice, and illuminating anecdotes that bring Windows to life--and help you make the most of it.A few of the things you'll find inside:What vending machines can teach you about effective user interfaces A deeper understanding of window and dialog management Why performance optimization can be so counterintuitive A peek at the underbelly of COM objects and the Visual C++ compiler Key details about backwards compatibility--what Windows does and why Windows program security holes most developers don't know about How to make your program a better Windows citizen

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.

Effective C++: 55 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs


Scott Meyers - 1991
    But the state-of-the-art has moved forward dramatically since Meyers last updated this book in 1997. (For instance, there s now STL. Design patterns. Even new functionality being added through TR1 and Boost.) So Meyers has done a top-to-bottom rewrite, identifying the 55 most valuable techniques you need now to be exceptionally effective with C++. Over half of this edition s content is new. Templates broadly impact C++ development, and you ll find them everywhere. There s extensive coverage of multithreaded systems. There s an entirely new chapter on resource management. You ll find substantial new coverage of exceptions. Much is gained, but nothing s lost: You ll find the same depth of practical insight that first made Effective C++ a classic all those years ago. Bill Camarda, from the July 2005 href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/newslet... Only

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow


Matthew Skelton - 2019
    But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity.In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams.Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

Git Pocket Guide


Richard E. Silverman - 2013
    It provides a compact, readable introduction to Git for new users, as well as a reference to common commands and procedures for those of you with Git experience.Written for Git version 1.8.2, this handy task-oriented guide is organized around the basic version control functions you need, such as making commits, fixing mistakes, merging, and searching history.Examine the state of your project at earlier points in timeLearn the basics of creating and making changes to a repositoryCreate branches so many people can work on a project simultaneouslyMerge branches and reconcile the changes among themClone an existing repository and share changes with push/pull commandsExamine and change your repository’s commit historyAccess remote repositories, using different network protocolsGet recipes for accomplishing a variety of common tasks

Python Cookbook


David Beazley - 2002
    Packed with practical recipes written and tested with Python 3.3, this unique cookbook is for experienced Python programmers who want to focus on modern tools and idioms.Inside, you’ll find complete recipes for more than a dozen topics, covering the core Python language as well as tasks common to a wide variety of application domains. Each recipe contains code samples you can use in your projects right away, along with a discussion about how and why the solution works.Topics include:Data Structures and AlgorithmsStrings and TextNumbers, Dates, and TimesIterators and GeneratorsFiles and I/OData Encoding and ProcessingFunctionsClasses and ObjectsMetaprogrammingModules and PackagesNetwork and Web ProgrammingConcurrencyUtility Scripting and System AdministrationTesting, Debugging, and ExceptionsC Extensions

Designing Data-Intensive Applications


Martin Kleppmann - 2015
    Difficult issues need to be figured out, such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. In addition, we have an overwhelming variety of tools, including relational databases, NoSQL datastores, stream or batch processors, and message brokers. What are the right choices for your application? How do you make sense of all these buzzwords?In this practical and comprehensive guide, author Martin Kleppmann helps you navigate this diverse landscape by examining the pros and cons of various technologies for processing and storing data. Software keeps changing, but the fundamental principles remain the same. With this book, software engineers and architects will learn how to apply those ideas in practice, and how to make full use of data in modern applications. Peer under the hood of the systems you already use, and learn how to use and operate them more effectively Make informed decisions by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of different tools Navigate the trade-offs around consistency, scalability, fault tolerance, and complexity Understand the distributed systems research upon which modern databases are built Peek behind the scenes of major online services, and learn from their architectures

Dive Into Design Patterns


Alexander Shvets - 2018
    You can’t just find a pattern and copy it into your program, the way you can with off-the-shelf functions or libraries. The pattern is not a specific piece of code, but a general concept for solving a particular problem. They are like pre-made blueprints that you can customize to solve a recurring design problem in your code.The book Dive Into Design Patterns illustrates 22 classic design patterns and 8 design principles that these patterns are based on.- Every chapter starts from a discussion of a real life software design problem which is then progressively solved by applying one of the patterns.- Then goes a detailed review of the pattern’s structure and its variations, followed by a code example.- Then the books shows various applications of the pattern and teaches how to implement the pattern step by step, even in an existing program.- Each chapter concludes with a discussion of pros and cons of the pattern and its relations, similarities and differences with other patterns.

Understanding Computation: From Simple Machines to Impossible Programs


Tom Stuart - 2013
    Understanding Computation explains theoretical computer science in a context you’ll recognize, helping you appreciate why these ideas matter and how they can inform your day-to-day programming.Rather than use mathematical notation or an unfamiliar academic programming language like Haskell or Lisp, this book uses Ruby in a reductionist manner to present formal semantics, automata theory, and functional programming with the lambda calculus. It’s ideal for programmers versed in modern languages, with little or no formal training in computer science.* Understand fundamental computing concepts, such as Turing completeness in languages* Discover how programs use dynamic semantics to communicate ideas to machines* Explore what a computer can do when reduced to its bare essentials* Learn how universal Turing machines led to today’s general-purpose computers* Perform complex calculations, using simple languages and cellular automata* Determine which programming language features are essential for computation* Examine how halting and self-referencing make some computing problems unsolvable* Analyze programs by using abstract interpretation and type systems

Elements of Programming


Alexander Stepanov - 2009
    And then we wonder why software is notorious for being delivered late and full of bugs, while other engineers routinely deliver finished bridges, automobiles, electrical appliances, etc., on time and with only minor defects. This book sets out to redress this imbalance. Members of my advanced development team at Adobe who took the course based on the same material all benefited greatly from the time invested. It may appear as a highly technical text intended only for computer scientists, but it should be required reading for all practicing software engineers." --Martin Newell, Adobe Fellow"The book contains some of the most beautiful code I have ever seen." --Bjarne Stroustrup, Designer of C++"I am happy to see the content of Alex's course, the development and teaching of which I strongly supported as the CTO of Silicon Graphics, now available to all programmers in this elegant little book." --Forest Baskett, General Partner, New Enterprise Associates"Paul's patience and architectural experience helped to organize Alex's mathematical approach into a tightly-structured edifice--an impressive feat!" --Robert W. Taylor, Founder of Xerox PARC CSL and DEC Systems Research Center Elements of Programming provides a different understanding of programming than is presented elsewhere. Its major premise is that practical programming, like other areas of science and engineering, must be based on a solid mathematical foundation. The book shows that algorithms implemented in a real programming language, such as C++, can operate in the most general mathematical setting. For example, the fast exponentiation algorithm is defined to work with any associative operation. Using abstract algorithms leads to efficient, reliable, secure, and economical software.This is not an easy book. Nor is it a compilation of tips and tricks for incremental improvements in your programming skills. The book's value is more fundamental and, ultimately, more critical for insight into programming. To benefit fully, you will need to work through it from beginning to end, reading the code, proving the lemmas, and doing the exercises. When finished, you will see how the application of the deductive method to your programs assures that your system's software components will work together and behave as they must.The book presents a number of algorithms and requirements for types on which they are defined. The code for these descriptions--also available on the Web--is written in a small subset of C++ meant to be accessible to any experienced programmer. This subset is defined in a special language appendix coauthored by Sean Parent and Bjarne Stroustrup.Whether you are a software developer, or any other professional for whom programming is an important activity, or a committed student, you will come to understand what the book's experienced authors have been teaching and demonstrating for years--that mathematics is good for programming, and that theory is good for practice.

Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications


Toby Segaran - 2002
    With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you've found it.Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general -- all from information that you and others collect every day. Each algorithm is described clearly and concisely with code that can immediately be used on your web site, blog, Wiki, or specialized application. This book explains:Collaborative filtering techniques that enable online retailers to recommend products or media Methods of clustering to detect groups of similar items in a large dataset Search engine features -- crawlers, indexers, query engines, and the PageRank algorithm Optimization algorithms that search millions of possible solutions to a problem and choose the best one Bayesian filtering, used in spam filters for classifying documents based on word types and other features Using decision trees not only to make predictions, but to model the way decisions are made Predicting numerical values rather than classifications to build price models Support vector machines to match people in online dating sites Non-negative matrix factorization to find the independent features in a dataset Evolving intelligence for problem solving -- how a computer develops its skill by improving its own code the more it plays a game Each chapter includes exercises for extending the algorithms to make them more powerful. Go beyond simple database-backed applications and put the wealth of Internet data to work for you. "Bravo! I cannot think of a better way for a developer to first learn these algorithms and methods, nor can I think of a better way for me (an old AI dog) to reinvigorate my knowledge of the details."-- Dan Russell, Google "Toby's book does a great job of breaking down the complex subject matter of machine-learning algorithms into practical, easy-to-understand examples that can be directly applied to analysis of social interaction across the Web today. If I had this book two years ago, it would have saved precious time going down some fruitless paths."-- Tim Wolters, CTO, Collective Intellect

Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change


Neal Ford - 2017
    Over the past few years, incremental developments in core engineering practices for software development have created the foundations for rethinking how architecture changes over time, along with ways to protect important architectural characteristics as it evolves. This practical guide ties those parts together with a new way to think about architecture and time.

Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C


Bruce Schneier - 1993
    … The book the National Security Agency wanted never to be published." –Wired Magazine "…monumental… fascinating… comprehensive… the definitive work on cryptography for computer programmers…" –Dr. Dobb's Journal"…easily ranks as one of the most authoritative in its field." —PC Magazine"…the bible of code hackers." –The Millennium Whole Earth CatalogThis new edition of the cryptography classic provides you with a comprehensive survey of modern cryptography. The book details how programmers and electronic communications professionals can use cryptography—the technique of enciphering and deciphering messages-to maintain the privacy of computer data. It describes dozens of cryptography algorithms, gives practical advice on how to implement them into cryptographic software, and shows how they can be used to solve security problems. Covering the latest developments in practical cryptographic techniques, this new edition shows programmers who design computer applications, networks, and storage systems how they can build security into their software and systems. What's new in the Second Edition? * New information on the Clipper Chip, including ways to defeat the key escrow mechanism * New encryption algorithms, including algorithms from the former Soviet Union and South Africa, and the RC4 stream cipher * The latest protocols for digital signatures, authentication, secure elections, digital cash, and more * More detailed information on key management and cryptographic implementations

PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy


David Powers - 2006
    How easy is easy? It's not like an instant cake mix: just add water and stir. Dynamic web design is--well-- dynamic. Every website is different, so it's impossible to grab a script, paste it into a web page, and expect it to work. Building dynamic sites involves diving into the code and adju- ing it to your own requirements. If that thought makes you break out in a cold sweat, just relax for a moment. PHP is not difficult, and I've written this book very much with the n- programmer in mind. I've done so because I don't come from a computing background myself. In fact, I went to school in the days before pocket calculators were invented, never mind personal computers. As a result, I don't assume that you drank in knowledge of arrays, loops, and conditional statements with your mother's milk. Everything is explained in plain, straightforward l- guage, and I've highlighted points where things may go wrong, with advice on how to solve the problem. At the same time, if you're working with computers and websites, you're bound to have a certain level of technical knowledge and skill. So I don't talk down to you either.