As a modern application developer you need to understand the emerging field of data management, both RDBMS and NoSQL. Seven Databases in Seven Weeks takes you on a tour of some of the hottest open source databases today. In the tradition of Bruce A. Tate's Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, this book goes beyond your basic tutorial to explore the essential concepts at the core each technology. Redis, Neo4J, CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase, Riak and Postgres. With each database, you'll tackle a real-world data problem that highlights the concepts and features that make it shine. You'll explore the five data models employed by these databases-relational, key/value, columnar, document and graph-and which kinds of problems are best suited to each. You'll learn how MongoDB and CouchDB are strikingly different, and discover the Dynamo heritage at the heart of Riak. Make your applications faster with Redis and more connected with Neo4J. Use MapReduce to solve Big Data problems. Build clusters of servers using scalable services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Discover the CAP theorem and its implications for your distributed data. Understand the tradeoffs between consistency and availability, and when you can use them to your advantage. Use multiple databases in concert to create a platform that's more than the sum of its parts, or find one that meets all your needs at once.Seven Databases in Seven Weeks will take you on a deep dive into each of the databases, their strengths and weaknesses, and how to choose the ones that fit your needs.What You Need: To get the most of of this book you'll have to follow along, and that means you'll need a *nix shell (Mac OSX or Linux preferred, Windows users will need Cygwin), and Java 6 (or greater) and Ruby 1.8.7 (or greater). Each chapter will list the downloads required for that database.

    

    You want to take your web skills to the next level. And you're finally ready to add "programmer" to the resume. It sounds like you're ready to learn the Web's hottest programming language: JavaScript. Head First JavaScript is your ticket to going beyond copying and pasting the code from someone else's web site, and writing your own interactive web pages. With Head First JavaScript, you learn:The basics of programming, from variables to types to looping How the web browser runs your code, and how you can talk to the browser with your code Why you'll never have to worry about casting, overloading, or polymorphism when you're writing JavaScript code How to use the Document Object Model to change your web pages without making your users click buttons If you've ever read a Head First book, you know what to expect -- a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works. Head First JavaScript is no exception. It starts where HTML and CSS leave off, and takes you through your first program into more complex programming concepts -- like working directly with the web browser's object model and writing code that works on all modern browsers. Don't be intimidated if you've never written a line of code before! In typical Head First style, Head First JavaScript doesn't skip steps, and we're not interested in having you cut and paste code. You'll learn JavaScript, understand it, and have a blast along the way. So get ready... dynamic and exciting web pages are just pages away.

    This book explains the technical aspects of hacking, including stack based overflows, heap based overflows, string exploits, return-into-libc, shellcode, and cryptographic attacks on 802.11b.

    In Eloquent Ruby, Russ Olsen helps you write Ruby like true Rubyists do-so you can leverage its immense, surprising power. Olsen draws on years of experience internalizing the Ruby culture and teaching Ruby to other programmers. He guides you to the "Ah Ha!" moments when it suddenly becomes clear why Ruby works the way it does, and how you can take advantage of this language's elegance and expressiveness. Eloquent Ruby starts small, answering tactical questions focused on a single statement, method, test, or bug. You'll learn how to write code that actually looks like Ruby (not Java or C#); why Ruby has so many control structures; how to use strings, expressions, and symbols; and what dynamic typing is really good for. Next, the book addresses bigger questions related to building methods and classes. You'll discover why Ruby classes contain so many tiny methods, when to use operator overloading, and when to avoid it. Olsen explains how to write Ruby code that writes its own code-and why you'll want to. He concludes with powerful project-level features and techniques ranging from gems to Domain Specific Languages. A part of the renowned Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series, Eloquent Ruby will help you "put on your Ruby-colored glasses" and get results that make you a true believer.

    In it, developer and life coach John Sonmez addresses a wide range of important "soft" topics, from career and productivity to personal finance and investing, and even fitness and relationships, all from a developer-centric viewpoint.For most software developers, coding is the fun part. The hard bits are dealing with clients, peers, and managers, staying productive, achieving financial security, keeping yourself in shape, and finding true love. This book is here to help.Soft Skills: The software developer's life manual is a guide to a well-rounded, satisfying life as a technology professional. In it, developer and life coach John Sonmez offers advice to developers on important "soft" subjects like career and productivity, personal finance and investing, and even fitness and relationships. Arranged as a collection of 71 short chapters, this fun-to-read book invites you to dip in wherever you like. A Taking Action section at the end of each chapter shows you how to get quick results. Soft Skills will help make you a better programmer, a more valuable employee, and a happier, healthier person.What's InsideBoost your career by building a personal brandJohn's secret ten-step process for learning quicklyFitness advice to turn your geekiness to your advantageUnique strategies for investment and early retirement

    Author John Myles White shows you how this powerful class of algorithms can help you boost website traffic, convert visitors to customers, and increase many other measures of success.This is the first developer-focused book on bandit algorithms, which were previously described only in research papers. You’ll quickly learn the benefits of several simple algorithms—including the epsilon-Greedy, Softmax, and Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithms—by working through code examples written in Python, which you can easily adapt for deployment on your own website.Learn the basics of A/B testing—and recognize when it’s better to use bandit algorithmsDevelop a unit testing framework for debugging bandit algorithmsGet additional code examples written in Julia, Ruby, and JavaScript with supplemental online materials

    Over the past five years, authors Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher have analyzed hundreds of examples of "bad code" (much of it their own) to determine why they’re bad and how they could be improved. Their conclusion? You need to write code that minimizes the time it would take someone else to understand it—even if that someone else is you.This book focuses on basic principles and practical techniques you can apply every time you write code. Using easy-to-digest code examples from different languages, each chapter dives into a different aspect of coding, and demonstrates how you can make your code easy to understand.Simplify naming, commenting, and formatting with tips that apply to every line of codeRefine your program’s loops, logic, and variables to reduce complexity and confusionAttack problems at the function level, such as reorganizing blocks of code to do one task at a timeWrite effective test code that is thorough and concise—as well as readable"Being aware of how the code you create affects those who look at it later is an important part of developing software. The authors did a great job in taking you through the different aspects of this challenge, explaining the details with instructive examples." —Michael Hunger, passionate Software Developer

    Written for both experienced and new programmers alike, Learning Ruby is a just-get-in-and-drive book -- a hands-on tutorial that offers lots of Ruby programs and lets you know how and why they work, just enough to get you rolling down the road. Interest in Ruby stems from the popularity of Rails, the web development framework that's attracting new devotees and refugees from Java and PHP. But there are plenty of other uses for this versatile language. The best way to learn is to just try the code! You'll find examples on nearly every page of this book that you can imitate and hack. Briefly, this book:Outlines many of the most important features of Ruby Demonstrates how to use conditionals, and how to manipulate strings in Ruby. Includes a section on regular expressions Describes how to use operators, basic math, functions from the Math module, rational numbers, etc. Talks you through Ruby arrays, and demonstrates hashes in detail Explains how to process files with Ruby Discusses Ruby classes and modules (mixins) in detail, including a brief introduction to object-oriented programming (OOP) Introduces processing XML, the Tk toolkit, RubyGems, reflection, RDoc, embedded Ruby, metaprogramming, exception handling, and other topics Acquaints you with some of the essentials of Rails, and includes a short Rails tutorial. Each chapter concludes with a set of review questions, and appendices provide you with a glossary of terms related to Ruby programming, plus reference material from the book in one convenient location. If you want to take Ruby out for a drive, Learning Ruby holds the keys.

    It's the expertise you need when your start-up gets an unexpected spike in web traffic, or when a new feature causes your mature application to fail. In this collection of essays and interviews, web veterans such as Theo Schlossnagle, Baron Schwartz, and Alistair Croll offer insights into this evolving field. You'll learn stories from the trenches--from builders of some of the biggest sites on the Web--on what's necessary to help a site thrive.Learn the skills needed in web operations, and why they're gained through experience rather than schoolingUnderstand why it's important to gather metrics from both your application and infrastructureConsider common approaches to database architectures and the pitfalls that come with increasing scaleLearn how to handle the human side of outages and degradationsFind out how one company avoided disaster after a huge traffic delugeDiscover what went wrong after a problem occurs, and how to prevent it from happening againContributors include:John AllspawHeather ChampMichael ChristianRichard CookAlistair CrollPatrick DeboisEric FlorenzanoPaul HammondJustin HuffAdam JacobJacob LoomisMatt MassieBrian MoonAnoop NagwaniSean PowerEric RiesTheo SchlossnagleBaron SchwartzAndrew Shafer

    Web Development With Clojure shows you how to apply Clojure programming fundamentals to build real-world solutions. You'll develop all the pieces of a full web application in this powerful language. If you already have some familiarity with Clojure, you'll learn how to put it to serious practical use. If you're new to the language, the book provides just enough Clojure to get down to business.You'll learn the full process of web development using Clojure while getting hands-on experience with current tools, libraries, and best practices in the language. You'll develop Clojure apps with both the Light Table and Eclipse development environments. Rather than frameworks, Clojure development builds on rich libraries. You'll acquire expertise in the popular Ring/Compojure stack, and you'll learn to use the Liberator library to quickly develop RESTful services. Plus, you'll find out how to use ClojureScript to work in one language on the client and server sides.Throughout the book, you'll develop key components of web applications, including multiple approaches to database access. You'll create a simple guestbook app and an app to serve resources to users. By the end, you will have developed a rich Picture Gallery web application from conception to packaging and deployment.This book is for anyone interested in taking the next step in web development.Q&A with Dmitri SotnikovWhy did you write Web Development with Clojure?When I started using Clojure, I found that it took a lot of work to find all the pieces needed to put together a working application. There was very little documentation available on how to organize the code, what libraries to use, or how to package the application for deployment. Having gone through the process of figuring out what works, I thought that it would be nice to make it easier for others to get started.What are the advantages of using a functional language?Over the course of my career, I have developed a great appreciation for functional programming. I find that it addresses a number of shortcomings present in the imperative paradigm. For example, in a functional language any changes to the data are created via revisions to the existing data. So they only exist in the local scope. This fact allows us to safely reason about individual parts of the program in isolation, which is critical for writing and supporting large applications.Why use Clojure specifically?Clojure is a simple and pragmatic language that is designed for real-world usage. It combines the productivity of a high-level language with the excellent performance seen in languages like C# or Java. It's also very easy to learn because it allows you to use a small number of concepts to solve a large variety of problems.If I already have a preferred web development platform, what might I get out of this book?If you're using an imperative language, you'll get to see a very different approach to writing code. Even if you're not going to use Clojure as your primary language, the concepts you'll learn will provide you with new ways to approach problems.Is the material in the book accessible to somebody who is not familiar with Clojure?Absolutely. The book targets developers who are already familiar with the basics of web development and are interested in learning Clojure in this context. The book introduces just enough of the language to get you productive and allows you to learn by example.

    Learn how to design beautiful user interfaces by yourself using specific tactics explained from a developer's point-of-view.

    

    We'll cover resources, messages, cookies, and authentication protocols. We'll look at how HTTP clients can use persistent and parallel connections to improve performance,and see how the web scales to meet demand using cache headers andproxy servers. By the end of the book you will have the knowledge tobuild better web applications and web services.

    The concepts and techniques described are the actual ones used by real game studios like Electronic Arts and Naughty Dog. The examples are often grounded in specific technologies, but the discussion extends way beyond any particular engine or API. The references and citations make it a great jumping off point for those who wish to dig deeper into any particular aspect of the game development process.Intended as the text for a college level series in game programming, this book can also be used by amateur software engineers, hobbyists, self-taught game programmers, and existing members of the game industry. Junior game engineers can use it to solidify their understanding of game technology and engine architecture. Even senior engineers who specialize in one particular field of game development can benefit from the bigger picture presented in these pages.