Working Effectively with Legacy Code


Michael C. Feathers - 2004
    This book draws on material Michael created for his renowned Object Mentor seminars, techniques Michael has used in mentoring to help hundreds of developers, technical managers, and testers bring their legacy systems under control. The topics covered include: Understanding the mechanics of software change, adding features, fixing bugs, improving design, optimizing performance Getting legacy code into a test harness Writing tests that protect you against introducing new problems Techniques that can be used with any language or platform, with examples in Java, C++, C, and C# Accurately identifying where code changes need to be made Coping with legacy systems that aren't object-oriented Handling applications that don't seem to have any structureThis book also includes a catalog of twenty-four dependency-breaking techniques that help you work with program elements in isolation and make safer changes.

HTTP: The Definitive Guide


David Gourley - 2002
    Understanding HTTP is essential for practically all web-based programming, design, analysis, and administration.While the basics of HTTP are elegantly simple, the protocol's advanced features are notoriously confusing, because they knit together complex technologies and terminology from many disciplines. This book clearly explains HTTP and these interrelated core technologies, in twenty-one logically organized chapters, backed up by hundreds of detailed illustrations and examples, and convenient reference appendices. HTTP: The Definitive Guide explains everything people need to use HTTP efficiently -- including the black arts and tricks of the trade -- in a concise and readable manner.In addition to explaining the basic HTTP features, syntax and guidelines, this book clarifies related, but often misunderstood topics, such as: TCP connection management, web proxy and cache architectures, web robots and robots.txt files, Basic and Digest authentication, secure HTTP transactions, entity body processing, internationalized content, and traffic redirection.Many technical professionals will benefit from this book. Internet architects and developers who need to design and develop software, IT professionals who need to understand Internet architectural components and interactions, multimedia designers who need to publish and host multimedia, performance engineers who need to optimize web performance, technical marketing professionals who need a clear picture of core web architectures and protocols, as well as untold numbers of students and hobbyists will all benefit from the knowledge packed in this volume.There are many books that explain how to use the Web, but this is the one that explains how the Web works. Written by experts with years of design and implementation experience, this book is the definitive technical bible that describes the why and the how of HTTP and web core technologies. HTTP: The Definitive Guide is an essential reference that no technically-inclined member of the Internet community should be without.

Purely Functional Data Structures


Chris Okasaki - 1996
    However, data structures for these languages do not always translate well to functional languages such as Standard ML, Haskell, or Scheme. This book describes data structures from the point of view of functional languages, with examples, and presents design techniques that allow programmers to develop their own functional data structures. The author includes both classical data structures, such as red-black trees and binomial queues, and a host of new data structures developed exclusively for functional languages. All source code is given in Standard ML and Haskell, and most of the programs are easily adaptable to other functional languages. This handy reference for professional programmers working with functional languages can also be used as a tutorial or for self-study.

The Art of Readable Code


Dustin Boswell - 2010
    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

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win


Gene Kim - 2013
    It's Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO. The company's new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced. With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited. In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never view IT the same way again.

Version Control with Subversion


Ben Collins-Sussman - 2004
    Today's increasingly fast pace of software development--as programmers make small changes to software one day only to undo them the next--has only heightened the problem; consecutive work on code or single-programmer software is a rare sight these days. Without careful attention to version control, concurrent and collaborative work can create more headaches than it solves. This is where Subversion comes into play.Written by members of the Subversion open source development team, Version Control with Subversion introduces the powerful new versioning tool designed to be the successor to the Concurrent Version System or CVS. CVS users will find the "look and feel" Subversion comfortably familiar, but under the surface it's far more flexible, robust, and usable, and more importantly, it improves on CVS's more notable flaws.The book begins with a general introduction to Subversion, the basic concepts behind version control, and a guided tour of Subversion's capabilities and structure. With thorough attention to detail, the authors cover every aspect of installing and configuring Subversion for managing a programming project, documentation, or any other team-based endeavor. Later chapters cover the more complex topics of branching, repository administration, and other advanced features such as properties, externals, and access control. The book ends with reference material and appendices covering a number of useful topics such as a Subversion complete reference and troubleshooting guide.Version Control with Subversion aims to be useful to readers of widely different backgrounds, from those with no previous experience in version control to experienced sysadmins. If you've never used version control, you'll find everything you need to get started in this book. And if you're a seasoned CVS pro, this book will help you make a painless leap into Subversion.

Learning the bash Shell


Cameron Newham - 1995
    This book will teach you how to use bash's advanced command-line features, such as command history, command-line editing, and command completion.This book also introduces shell programming,a skill no UNIX or Linus user should be without. The book demonstrates what you can do with bash's programming features. You'll learn about flow control, signal handling, and command-line processing and I/O. There is also a chapter on debugging your bash programs.Finally, Learning the bash Shell, Third Edition, shows you how to acquire, install, configure, and customize bash, and gives advice to system administrators managing bash for their user communities.This Third Edition covers all of the features of bash Version 3.0, while still applying to Versions 1.x and 2.x. It includes a debugger for the bash shell, both as an extended example and as a useful piece of working code. Since shell scripts are a significant part of many software projects, the book also discusses how to write maintainable shell scripts. And, of course, it discusses the many features that have been introduced to bash over the years: one-dimensional arrays, parameter expansion, pattern-matching operations, new commands, and security improvements.Unfailingly practical and packed with examples and questions for future study, Learning the bash Shell Third Edition is a valuable asset for Linux and other UNIX users.--back cover

Learning Perl


Randal L. Schwartz - 1993
    Written by three prominent members of the Perl community who each have several years of experience teaching Perl around the world, this edition has been updated to account for all the recent changes to the language up to Perl 5.8.Perl is the language for people who want to get work done. It started as a tool for Unix system administrators who needed something powerful for small tasks. Since then, Perl has blossomed into a full-featured programming language used for web programming, database manipulation, XML processing, and system administration--on practically all platforms--while remaining the favorite tool for the small daily tasks it was designed for. You might start using Perl because you need it, but you'll continue to use it because you love it.Informed by their years of success at teaching Perl as consultants, the authors have re-engineered the Llama to better match the pace and scope appropriate for readers getting started with Perl, while retaining the detailed discussion, thorough examples, and eclectic wit for which the Llama is famous.The book includes new exercises and solutions so you can practice what you've learned while it's still fresh in your mind. Here are just some of the topics covered:Perl variable typessubroutinesfile operationsregular expressionstext processingstrings and sortingprocess managementusing third party modulesIf you ask Perl programmers today what book they relied on most when they were learning Perl, you'll find that an overwhelming majority will point to the Llama. With good reason. Other books may teach you to program in Perl, but this book will turn you into a Perl programmer.

Implementing Domain-Driven Design


Vaughn Vernon - 2013
    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.

Mastering Emacs


Mickey Petersen - 2015
    In the Mastering Emacs ebook you will learn the answers to all the concepts that take weeks, months or even years to truly learn, all in one place.“Emacs is such a hard editor to learn”But why is it so hard to learn? As it turns out, it's almost always the same handful of issues that everyone faces.If you have tried to learn Emacs you will have struggled with the same problems everyone faces, and few tutorials to see you through it.I have dedicated the first half of the book to explaining the essence of Emacs — and in doing so, how to overcome these issues:Memorizing Emacs’s keys: You will learn Emacs one key at a time, starting with the arrow keys. To feel productive in Emacs, it’s important you start on an equal footing — without too many new concepts and keys to memorize. Each chapter will introduce more keys and concepts so you can learn at your own pace. Discovering new modes and features: Emacs is a self-documenting editor, and I will teach you how to use the apropos, info, and describe system to discover new modes and features, or help you find things you forgot! Customizing Emacs: You don’t have to learn Emacs Lisp to alter a lot of Emacs’s functionality. Most changes you want to make are possible using Emacs’s Customize interface and I will show you how to use it efficiently. Understanding the terminology: Emacs is so old it predates almost every other editor and all modern user interfaces. I have an entire chapter dedicated to the unique terminology in Emacs; how it is different from other editors, and what that means to you.

Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming


Marijn Haverbeke - 2010
    I loved the tutorial-style game-like program development. This book rekindled my earliest joys of programming. Plus, JavaScript!" —Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScriptJavaScript is the language of the Web, and it's at the heart of every modern website from the lowliest personal blog to the mighty Google Apps. Though it's simple for beginners to pick up and play with, JavaScript is not a toy—it's a flexible and complex language, capable of much more than the showy tricks most programmers use it for.Eloquent JavaScript goes beyond the cut-and-paste scripts of the recipe books and teaches you to write code that's elegant and effective. You'll start with the basics of programming, and learn to use variables, control structures, functions, and data structures. Then you'll dive into the real JavaScript artistry: higher-order functions, closures, and object-oriented programming.Along the way you'll learn to:Master basic programming techniques and best practices Harness the power of functional and object-oriented programming Use regular expressions to quickly parse and manipulate strings Gracefully deal with errors and browser incompatibilities Handle browser events and alter the DOM structure Most importantly, Eloquent JavaScript will teach you to express yourself in code with precision and beauty. After all, great programming is an art, not a science—so why settle for a killer app when you can create a masterpiece?

In the Beginning...Was the Command Line


Neal Stephenson - 1999
    And considering that the "one man" is Neal Stephenson, "the hacker Hemingway" (Newsweek) -- acclaimed novelist, pragmatist, seer, nerd-friendly philosopher, and nationally bestselling author of groundbreaking literary works (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc., etc.) -- the word is well worth hearing. Mostly well-reasoned examination and partial rant, Stephenson's In the Beginning... was the Command Line is a thoughtful, irreverent, hilarious treatise on the cyber-culture past and present; on operating system tyrannies and downloaded popular revolutions; on the Internet, Disney World, Big Bangs, not to mention the meaning of life itself.

A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming


Mark G. Sobell - 2005
    The book is a complete revision of the commands section of Sobell's Practical Guide to Linux - a proven best-seller. The book is Linux distribution and release agnostic. It will appeal to users of ALL Linux distributions. Superior examples make this book the the best option on the market! System administrators, software developers, quality assurance engineers and others working on a Linux system need to work from the command line in order to be effective. Linux is famous for its huge number of command line utility programs, and the programs themselves are famous for their large numbers of options, switches, and configuration files. But the truth is that users will only use a limited (but still significant) number of these utilities on a recurring basis, and then only with a subset of the most important and useful options, switches and configuration files. This book cuts through all the noise and shows them which utilities are most useful, and which options most important. And it contains examples, lot's and lot's of examples. programmability. Utilities are designed, by default, to work wtih other utilities within shell programs as a way of automating system tasks. This book contains a superb introduction to Linux shell programming. And since shell programmers need to write their programs in text editors, this book covers the two most popular ones: vi and emacs.

Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science


Ronald L. Graham - 1988
    "More concretely," the authors explain, "it is the controlled manipulation of mathematical formulas, using a collection of techniques for solving problems."

sed & awk


Dale Dougherty - 1990
    The most common operation done with sed is substitution, replacing one block of text with another. awk is a complete programming language. Unlike many conventional languages, awk is "data driven" -- you specify what kind of data you are interested in and the operations to be performed when that data is found. awk does many things for you, including automatically opening and closing data files, reading records, breaking the records up into fields, and counting the records. While awk provides the features of most conventional programming languages, it also includes some unconventional features, such as extended regular expression matching and associative arrays. sed & awk describes both programs in detail and includes a chapter of example sed and awk scripts. This edition covers features of sed and awk that are mandated by the POSIX standard. This most notably affects awk, where POSIX standardized a new variable, CONVFMT, and new functions, toupper() and tolower(). The CONVFMT variable specifies the conversion format to use when converting numbers to strings (awk used to use OFMT for this purpose). The toupper() and tolower() functions each take a (presumably mixed case) string argument and return a new version of the string with all letters translated to the corresponding case. In addition, this edition covers GNU sed, newly available since the first edition. It also updates the first edition coverage of Bell Labs nawk and GNU awk (gawk), covers mawk, an additional freely available implementation of awk, and briefly discusses three commercial versions of awk, MKS awk, Thompson Automation awk (tawk), and Videosoft (VSAwk).