Now, for the first time, there s a comprehensive, authoritative guide to building production-quality software with Rails. Pioneering Rails developer Obie Fernandez and a team of experts illuminate the entire Rails API, along with the Ruby idioms, design approaches, libraries, and plug-ins that make Rails so valuable. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience, they address the real challenges development teams face, showing how to use Rails tools and best practices to maximize productivity and build polished applications users will enjoy. Using detailed code examples, Obie systematically covers Rails key capabilities and subsystems. He presents advanced programming techniques, introduces open source libraries that facilitate easy Rails adoption, and offers important insights into testing and production deployment. Dive deep into the Rails codebase together, discovering why Rails behaves as it does and how to make it behave the way you want it to. This book will help you Increase your productivity as a web developer Realize the overall joy of programming with Ruby on Rails Learn what s new in Rails 2.0 Drive design and protect long-term maintainability with TestUnit and RSpec Understand and manage complex program flow in Rails controllers Leverage Rails support for designing REST-compliant APIs Master sophisticated Rails routing concepts and techniques Examine and troubleshoot Rails routing Make the most of ActiveRecord object-relational mapping Utilize Ajax within your Rails applications Incorporate logins and authentication into your application Extend Rails with the best third-party plug-ins and write your own Integrate email services into your applications with ActionMailer Choose the right Rails production configurations Streamline deployment with Capistrano "

    Once you have thoroughly covered the basics, the book returns to each concept to cover more advanced examples and techniques. This book is for web designers who want to create interactive elements for their designs, and for developers who want to create the best user interface for their web applications. Basic JavaScript programming and knowledge of HTML and CSS is required. No knowledge of jQuery is assumed, nor is experience with any other JavaScript libraries.

    You'll find new chapters covering all the important new features that make .NET 4.5 the most comprehensive release yet, including:.NET APIs for Windows 8 style UI appsNew asynchronous task-based model for async operationsHow HTML5 support is being wrapped into C# web applicationsNew programming interfaces for HTTP applications, including improved IPv6 supportExpanded WPF, WCF and WF libraries giving C# more power than ever beforeThis comes on top of award winning coverage of core C# features, both old and new, that have made the previous editions of this book so popular (you'll find everything from generics to pLINQ covered here).The mission of this text is to provide you with a rock-solid foundation in the C# programming language and the core aspects of the .NET platform (assemblies, remoting, Windows Forms, Web Forms, ADO.NET, XML web services, etc.). Once you digest the information presented in these 25 chapters, you'll be in a perfect position to apply this knowledge to your specific programming assignments, and you'll be well equipped to explore the .NET universe on your own terms.

    Learn about the components of a BI architecture, how to choose the appropriate tools and technologies, and how to roll out a BI strategy throughout the organisation.

    It describes the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process decision framework and then works through a case study describing a typical agile team’s experiences adopting a disciplined agile approach. The book describes how the team develops the first release of a mission-critical application while working in a legacy enterprise environment. It describes their experiences from beginning-to-end, starting with their initial team initiation efforts through construction and finally to deploying the solution into production. It also describes how the team stays together for future releases, overviewing their process improvement efforts from their Scrum-based beginnings through to a lean continuous delivery approach that fits in with their organization’s evolving DevOps strategy. The DAD framework is a hybrid of existing methods such as Scrum, Kanban, Agile Modeling, SAFe, Extreme Programming, Agile Data, Unified Process and many others. DAD provides the flexibility to use various approaches and plugs the gaps not addressed by mainstream agile methods. In a nutshell, DAD is “pragmatic agile.” DAD describes proven strategies to adapt and scale your agile initiatives to suit the unique realities of your enterprise without having to figure it all out by yourself. Here’s an overview of what each chapter covers: * Chapter 1: Introduction. This chapter provides a quick overview of the book and a brief history of Disciplined Agile. * Chapter 2: Reality over Rhetoric. This chapter explores several common myths about DAD and more importantly disproves them. * Chapter 3: Disciplined Agile Delivery in a Nutshell. This chapter provides a brief yet comprehensive overview of the DAD framework. * Chapter 4: Introduction to the Case Study. This chapter introduces us to the team, describes the market opportunity that they hope to address, and describes the environment in which they’re working. * Chapter 5: Inception. The team’s initiation effort includes initial requirements modeling and planning with their stakeholders in a streamlined manner, initial architecture modeling, setting up their physical work environment, setting up the start of their tooling infrastructure, initial risk identification, and finally securing stakeholder support and funding for the rest of the first release. * Chapters 6 through 10: Construction. These chapters each describe a single Construction iteration, sharing the team’s experiences during each of those two-week timeboxes. * Chapter 11: Transition. The two-week transition phase focuses on final testing and fixing, training the support/help-desk staff, finishing a few short end-user “how to” videos, and deploying the solution into production. * Chapter 12: Future Releases. This chapter overviews the team’s improvement efforts over the next few releases, describing how they evolve from the agile Scrum-based lifecycle to a leaner approach and eventually to continuous delivery. * Chapter 13: Closing Thoughts. This chapter overviews the disciplined agile resources that are available to you. * Appendix: The Disciplined Agile IT Department. This short appendix overviews our ongoing work on the Disciplined Agile framework to address the full scope of an IT department. At 102 pages, you should find this book to be a quick, informative read.

    This book helps you use SQL and Excel to extract business information from relational databases and use that data to define business dimensions, store transactions about customers, produce results, and more. Each chapter explains when and why to perform a particular type of business analysis in order to obtain useful results, how to design and perform the analysis using SQL and Excel, and what the results should look like.

    Groovy in Action is a comprehensive guide to Groovy programming, introducing Java developers to the new dynamic features that Groovy provides. To bring you Groovy in Action, Manning again went to the source by working with a team of expert authors including both members and the Manager of the Groovy Project team. The result is the true definitive guide to the new Groovy language.Groovy in Action introduces Groovy by example, presenting lots of reusable code while explaining the underlying concepts. Java developers new to Groovy find a smooth transition into the dynamic programming world. Groovy experts gain a solid reference that challenges them to explore Groovy deeply and creatively.Because Groovy is so new, most readers will be learning it from scratch. Groovy in Action quickly moves through the Groovy basics, including:Simple and collective Groovy data types Working with Closures and Groovy Control Structures Dynamic Object Orientation, Groovy styleReaders are presented with rich and detailed examples illustrating Groovy's enhancements to Java, includingHow to Work with Builders and the GDK Database programming with GroovyGroovy in Action then demonstrates how to Integrate Groovy with XML, and provides:Tips and Tricks Unit Testing and Build Support Groovy on WindowsAn additional bonus is a chapter dedicated to Grails, the Groovy Web Application Framework.Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.

    Star Schema: The Complete Reference offers in-depth coverage of design principles and their underlying rationales. Organized around design concepts and illustrated with detailed examples, this is a step-by-step guidebook for beginners and a comprehensive resource for experts.This all-inclusive volume begins with dimensional design fundamentals and shows how they fit into diverse data warehouse architectures, including those of W.H. Inmon and Ralph Kimball. The book progresses through a series of advanced techniques that help you address real-world complexity, maximize performance, and adapt to the requirements of BI and ETL software products. You are furnished with design tasks and deliverables that can be incorporated into any project, regardless of architecture or methodology.Master the fundamentals of star schema design and slow change processingIdentify situations that call for multiple stars or cubesEnsure compatibility across subject areas as your data warehouse growsAccommodate repeating attributes, recursive hierarchies, and poor data qualitySupport conflicting requirements for historic dataHandle variation within a business process and correlation of disparate activitiesBoost performance using derived schemas and aggregatesLearn when it's appropriate to adjust designs for BI and ETL tools

    Vaughn Vernon couples guided approaches to implementation with modern architectures, highlighting the importance and value of focusing on the business domain while balancing technical considerations.Building on Eric Evans’ seminal book, Domain-Driven Design, the author presents practical DDD techniques through examples from familiar domains. Each principle is backed up by realistic Java examples–all applicable to C# developers–and all content is tied together by a single case study: the delivery of a large-scale Scrum-based SaaS system for a multitenant environment.The author takes you far beyond “DDD-lite” approaches that embrace DDD solely as a technical toolset, and shows you how to fully leverage DDD’s “strategic design patterns” using Bounded Context, Context Maps, and the Ubiquitous Language. Using these techniques and examples, you can reduce time to market and improve quality, as you build software that is more flexible, more scalable, and more tightly aligned to business goals.

    In 1999, "Refactoring" revolutionized design by introducing an effective process for improving code. With the highly anticipated " Refactoring to Patterns ," Joshua Kerievsky has changed our approach to design by forever uniting patterns with the evolutionary process of refactoring.This book introduces the theory and practice of pattern-directed refactorings: sequences of low-level refactorings that allow designers to safely move designs to, towards, or away from pattern implementations. Using code from real-world projects, Kerievsky documents the thinking and steps underlying over two dozen pattern-based design transformations. Along the way he offers insights into pattern differences and how to implement patterns in the simplest possible ways.Coverage includes: A catalog of twenty-seven pattern-directed refactorings, featuring real-world code examples Descriptions of twelve design smells that indicate the need for this book s refactorings General information and new insights about patterns and refactoringDetailed implementation mechanics: how low-level refactorings are combined to implement high-level patterns Multiple ways to implement the same pattern and when to use each Practical ways to get started even if you have little experience with patterns or refactoring"Refactoring to Patterns" reflects three years of refinement and the insights of more than sixty software engineering thought leaders in the global patterns, refactoring, and agile development communities. Whether you re focused on legacy or greenfield development, this book will make you a better software designer by helping you learn how to make important design changes safely and effectively. "

    A new four-part organizational structure increases the flexibility of the text, and all material is presented in a straightforward manner accompanied by an array of examples and visual diagrams.

    This one's a keeper." --Robert C. Martin "If you want to be an expert in the state of the art in TDD, you need to understand the ideas in this book."--Michael Feathers Test-Driven Development (TDD) is now an established technique for delivering better software faster. TDD is based on a simple idea: Write tests for your code before you write the code itself. However, this simple idea takes skill and judgment to do well. Now there's a practical guide to TDD that takes you beyond the basic concepts. Drawing on a decade of experience building real-world systems, two TDD pioneers show how to let tests guide your development and "grow" software that is coherent, reliable, and maintainable. Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce describe the processes they use, the design principles they strive to achieve, and some of the tools that help them get the job done. Through an extended worked example, you'll learn how TDD works at multiple levels, using tests to drive the features and the object-oriented structure of the code, and using Mock Objects to discover and then describe relationships between objects. Along the way, the book systematically addresses challenges that development teams encounter with TDD--from integrating TDD into your processes to testing your most difficult features. Coverage includes - Implementing TDD effectively: getting started, and maintaining your momentum throughout the project - Creating cleaner, more expressive, more sustainable code - Using tests to stay relentlessly focused on sustaining quality - Understanding how TDD, Mock Objects, and Object-Oriented Design come together in the context of a real software development project - Using Mock Objects to guide object-oriented designs - Succeeding where TDD is difficult: managing complex test data, and testing persistence and concurrency

    Discarding overwhelming statistics, buzzwords and acronyms, Levinson and Gibson provide a step-by-step social media attack plan. Following their take-no-prisoners guerilla approach, you’ll learn how to identify unconventional social media opportunities, engage customers, motivate action, and capture profits away from your competitors. Includes: • 19 secrets every guerrilla social media marketer needs to know • The Guerrilla Social Media Toolkit • The Seven-Sentence Social Media Attack Plan • 22-point social site and blog checklist • 20 types of ROI • Free guerrilla intelligence tools • Future social media weapons that are worth knowing about • And more! This is THE social media guerrilla’s go-to guide—learn how to employ a social media plan that earns attention—and profits!

    Build hands-on expertise through a series of lessons, exercises, and suggested practices—and help maximize your performance on the job.Provides in-depth, hands-on training you take at your own pace Focuses on job-role-specific expertise for using HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3 to begin building modern web and Windows 8 apps Features pragmatic lessons, exercises, and practices Creates a foundation of skills which, along with on-the-job experience, can be measured by Microsoft Certification exams such as 70-480 Coverage includes: creating HTML5 documents; implementing styles with CSS3; JavaScript in depth; using Microsoft developer tools; AJAX; multimedia support; drawing with Canvas and SVG; drag and drop functionality; location-aware apps; web storage; offline apps; writing your first simple Windows 8 apps; and other key topics

    A focus is placed on the principles and practices of decomposing a complex problem space as well as the implementation patterns and best practices for shaping a maintainable solution space.