Book picks similar to
What Every Engineer Should Know about Software Engineering by Philip A. LaPlante
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Microsoft Windows Internals: Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000 (Pro-Developer)
Mark E. Russinovich - 2004
This classic guidefully updated for Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000, including 64-bit extensionsdescribes the architecture and internals of the Windows operating system. You’ll find hands-on experiments you can use to experience Windows internal behavior firsthand, along with advanced troubleshooting information to help you keep your systems running smoothly and efficiently. Whether you’re a developer or a system administrator, you’ll find critical architectural insights that you can quickly apply for better design, debugging, performance, and support.Get in-depth, inside knowledge of the Windows operating system: Understand the key mechanisms that configure and control Windows, including dispatching, startup and shutdown, and the registry Explore the Windows security model, including access, privileges, and auditing Investigate internal system architecture using the kernel debugger and other tools Examine the data structures and algorithms that deal with processes, threads, and jobs Observe how Windows manages virtual and physical memory Understand the operation and format of NTFS, and troubleshoot file system access problems View the Windows networking stack from top to bottom, including mapping, APIs, name resolution, and protocol drivers Troubleshoot boot problems and perform crash analysis
Micro-Isv: From Vision to Reality
Bob Walsh - 2006
As for the latter, are you a programmer and curious about being your own boss? Where do you turn for information? Until now, online and traditional literature havent caught up with the reality of the post-dot com bust.Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality explains what works and why in today's emerging micro-ISV sector. Currently, thousands of programmers build and deliver great solutions ISV-style, earning success and revenues much larger than you might guess. Written by and for micro-ISVs, with help from some of the leaders of the field, this book takes you beyond just daydreaming to running your own business. It thoroughly explores how it is indeed possible to launch and maintain a small and successful ISV business, and is an ideal read if you're interested in getting started.
Elements of Clojure
Zachary Tellman - 2019
This is necessary because, in the words of Michael Polanyi, "we can know more than we can tell." Our design choices are not the result of an ineluctable chain of logic; they come from a deeper place, one which is visceral and inarticulate.Polanyi calls this "tacit knowledge", a thing which we only understand as part of something else. When we speak, we do not focus on making sounds, we focus on our words. We understand the muscular act of speech, but would struggle to explain it.To write software, we must learn where to draw boundaries. Good software is built through effective indirection. We seem to have decided that this skill can only be learned through practice; it cannot be taught, except by example. Our decisions may improve with time, but not our ability to explain them. It's true that the study of these questions cannot yield a closed-form solution for judging software design. We can make our software simple, but we cannot do the same to its problem domain, its users, or the physical world. Our tacit knowledge of this environment will always inform our designs.This doesn't mean that we can simply ignore our design process. Polanyi tells us that tacit knowledge only suffices until we fail, and the software industry is awash with failure. Our designs may never be provably correct, but we can give voice to the intuition that shaped them. Our process may always be visceral, but it doesn't have to be inarticulate.And so this book does not offer knowledge, it offers clarity. It is aimed at readers who know Clojure, but struggle to articulate the rationale of their designs to themselves and others. Readers who use other languages, but have a passing familiarity with Clojure, may also find this book useful.
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.
JavaScript Enlightenment
Cody Lindley - 2012
In this concise book, JavaScript expert Cody Lindley (jQuery Cookbook) provides an accurate view of the language by examining its objects and supporting nuances.Libraries and frameworks help you build web applications quickly and efficiently, but when things go wrong or performance becomes an issue, knowing how and why they work is critical. If you're ready to go under the hood and get your hands dirty with JavaScript internals, this is your book. Get a short and digestible summary of ECMA-262, Edition 3, backed by real code you can run instantly Examine the creation of JavaScript objects Learn complex values, primitive values, scope, and inheritance Understand the importance of the head object Work with string, number, and Boolean objects and values Discover how to use the null value and the built-in math object Get into the details--beyond Mozilla's reference guide for JavaScript 1.5
Java Performance: The Definitive Guide
Scott Oaks - 2014
Multicore machines and 64-bit operating systems are now standard even for casual users, and Java itself has introduced new features to manage applications. The base JVM has kept pace with those developments and offers a very different performance profile in its current versions. By guiding you through this changing landscape, Java Performance: The Definitive Guide helps you gain the best performance from your Java applications.You’ll explore JVM features that traditionally affected performance—including the just-in-time compiler, garbage collection, and language features—before diving in to aspects of Java 7 and 8 designed for maximum performance in today's applications. You’ll learn features such as the G1 garbage collector to maximize your application’s throughput without causing it to pause, and the Java Flight Recorder, which enables you to see application performance details without the need for separate, specialized profiling tools.Whether you’re new to Java and need to understand the basics of tuning the JVM, or a seasoned developer looking to eek out that last 10% of application performance, this is the book you want.
The Leprechauns of Software Engineering
Laurent Bossavit - 2012
You can think of this problem as a variant of the well known "telephone game", where some trivial rumor is repeated from one person to the next until it has become distorted beyond recognition and blown up out of all proportion.Unfortunately, the objects of this telephone game are generally considered cornerstone truths of the discipline, to the point that their acceptance now seems to hinder further progress.In this short ebook, we will take a look at some of those "ground truths": the claimed 10x variation in productivity between developers; the "software crisis"; the cost-of-change curve; the "cone of uncertainty"; and more. We'll hone our scholarship skills by looking up the original source for these ideas and taking a deep dive in the history of their development. We'll assess the real weight of the evidence behind these ideas.And we'll confront the scary prospect of moving the state of the art forward in a discipline that has had the ground kicked from under it.
The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact
Edmond Lau - 2015
I'm going to share that mindset with you — along with hundreds of actionable techniques and proven habits — so you can shortcut those years.Introducing The Effective Engineer — the only book designed specifically for today's software engineers, based on extensive interviews with engineering leaders at top tech companies, and packed with hundreds of techniques to accelerate your career.For two years, I embarked on a quest seeking an answer to one question:How do the most effective engineers make their efforts, their teams, and their careers more successful?I interviewed and collected stories from engineering VPs, directors, managers, and other leaders at today's top software companies: established, household names like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn; rapidly growing mid-sized companies like Dropbox, Square, Box, Airbnb, and Etsy; and startups like Reddit, Stripe, Instagram, and Lyft.These leaders shared stories about the most valuable insights they've learned and the most common and costly mistakes that they've seen engineers — sometimes themselves — make.This is just a small sampling of the hard questions I posed to them:- What engineering qualities correlate with future success?- What have you done that has paid off the highest returns?- What separates the most effective engineers you've worked with from everyone else?- What's the most valuable lesson your team has learned in the past year?- What advice do you give to new engineers on your team? Everyone's story is different, but many of the lessons share common themes.You'll get to hear stories like:- How did Instagram's team of 5 engineers build and support a service that grew to over 40 million users by the time the company was acquired?- How and why did Quora deploy code to production 40 to 50 times per day?- How did the team behind Google Docs become the fastest acquisition to rewrite its software to run on Google's infrastructure?- How does Etsy use continuous experimentation to design features that are guaranteed to increase revenue at launch?- How did Facebook's small infrastructure team effectively operate thousands of database servers?- How did Dropbox go from barely hiring any new engineers to nearly tripling its team size year-over-year? What's more, I've distilled their stories into actionable habits and lessons that you can follow step-by-step to make your career and your team more successful.The skills used by effective engineers are all learnable.And I'll teach them to you. With The Effective Engineer, I'll teach you a unifying framework called leverage — the value produced per unit of time invested — that you can use to identify the activities that produce disproportionate results.Here's a sneak peek at some of the lessons you'll learn. You'll learn how to:- Prioritize the right projects and tasks to increase your impact.- Earn more leeway from your peers and managers on your projects.- Spend less time maintaining and fixing software and more time building and shipping new features.- Produce more accurate software estimates.- Validate your ideas cheaply to reduce wasted work.- Navigate organizational and people-related bottlenecks.- Find the appropriate level of code reviews, testing, abstraction, and technical debt to balance speed and quality.- Shorten your debugging workflow to increase your iteration speed.
What's New in Java 7?
Madhusudhan Konda - 2011
Madhusudhan Konda provides an overview of these, including strings in switch statements, multi-catch exception handling, try-with-resource statements, the new File System API, extensions of the JVM, support for dynamically-typed languages, and the fork and join framework for task parallelism.
Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases Through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
Jez Humble - 2010
This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours-- sometimes even minutes-no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base. Jez Humble and David Farley begin by presenting the foundations of a rapid, reliable, low-risk delivery process. Next, they introduce the "deployment pipeline," an automated process for managing all changes, from check-in to release. Finally, they discuss the "ecosystem" needed to support continuous delivery, from infrastructure, data and configuration management to governance. The authors introduce state-of-the-art techniques, including automated infrastructure management and data migration, and the use of virtualization. For each, they review key issues, identify best practices, and demonstrate how to mitigate risks. Coverage includes - Automating all facets of building, integrating, testing, and deploying software - Implementing deployment pipelines at team and organizational levels - Improving collaboration between developers, testers, and operations - Developing features incrementally on large and distributed teams - Implementing an effective configuration management strategy - Automating acceptance testing, from analysis to implementation - Testing capacity and other non-functional requirements - Implementing continuous deployment and zero-downtime releases - Managing infrastructure, data, components and dependencies - Navigating risk management, compliance, and auditing Whether you're a developer, systems administrator, tester, or manager, this book will help your organization move from idea to release faster than ever--so you can deliver value to your business rapidly and reliably.
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. - 1975
With a blend of software engineering facts and thought-provoking opinions, Fred Brooks offers insight for anyone managing complex projects. These essays draw from his experience as project manager for the IBM System/360 computer family and then for OS/360, its massive software system. Now, 45 years after the initial publication of his book, Brooks has revisited his original ideas and added new thoughts and advice, both for readers already familiar with his work and for readers discovering it for the first time.The added chapters contain (1) a crisp condensation of all the propositions asserted in the original book, including Brooks' central argument in The Mythical Man-Month: that large programming projects suffer management problems different from small ones due to the division of labor; that the conceptual integrity of the product is therefore critical; and that it is difficult but possible to achieve this unity; (2) Brooks' view of these propositions a generation later; (3) a reprint of his classic 1986 paper "No Silver Bullet"; and (4) today's thoughts on the 1986 assertion, "There will be no silver bullet within ten years."
The Psychology of Computer Programming
Gerald M. Weinberg - 1971
Weinberg adds new insights and highlights the similarities and differences between now and then. Using a conversational style that invites the reader to join him, Weinberg reunites with some of his most insightful writings on the human side of software engineering.Topics include egoless programming, intelligence, psychological measurement, personality factors, motivation, training, social problems on large projects, problem-solving ability, programming language design, team formation, the programming environment, and much more.Dorset House Publishing is proud to make this important text available to new generations of programmers -- and to encourage readers of the first edition to return to its valuable lessons.
NoSQL Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence
Pramod J. Sadalage - 2012
Advocates of NoSQL databases claim they can be used to build systems that are more performant, scale better, and are easier to program." ""NoSQL Distilled" is a concise but thorough introduction to this rapidly emerging technology. Pramod J. Sadalage and Martin Fowler explain how NoSQL databases work and the ways that they may be a superior alternative to a traditional RDBMS. The authors provide a fast-paced guide to the concepts you need to know in order to evaluate whether NoSQL databases are right for your needs and, if so, which technologies you should explore further. The first part of the book concentrates on core concepts, including schemaless data models, aggregates, new distribution models, the CAP theorem, and map-reduce. In the second part, the authors explore architectural and design issues associated with implementing NoSQL. They also present realistic use cases that demonstrate NoSQL databases at work and feature representative examples using Riak, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Neo4j. In addition, by drawing on Pramod Sadalage's pioneering work, "NoSQL Distilled" shows how to implement evolutionary design with schema migration: an essential technique for applying NoSQL databases. The book concludes by describing how NoSQL is ushering in a new age of Polyglot Persistence, where multiple data-storage worlds coexist, and architects can choose the technology best optimized for each type of data access.
How Linux Works: What Every Superuser Should Know
Brian Ward - 2004
Some books try to give you copy-and-paste instructions for how to deal with every single system issue that may arise, but How Linux Works actually shows you how the Linux system functions so that you can come up with your own solutions. After a guided tour of filesystems, the boot sequence, system management basics, and networking, author Brian Ward delves into open-ended topics such as development tools, custom kernels, and buying hardware, all from an administrator's point of view. With a mixture of background theory and real-world examples, this book shows both "how" to administer Linux, and "why" each particular technique works, so that you will know how to make Linux work for you.
Learning UML 2.0: A Pragmatic Introduction to UML
Russ Miles - 2006
Every integrated software development environment in the world--open-source, standards-based, and proprietary--now supports UML and, more importantly, the model-driven approach to software development. This makes learning the newest UML standard, UML 2.0, critical for all software developers--and there isn't a better choice than this clear, step-by-step guide to learning the language."--Richard Mark Soley, Chairman and CEO, OMGIf you're like most software developers, you're building systems that are increasingly complex. Whether you're creating a desktop application or an enterprise system, complexity is the big hairy monster you must manage.The Unified Modeling Language (UML) helps you manage this complexity. Whether you're looking to use UML as a blueprint language, a sketch tool, or as a programming language, this book will give you the need-to-know information on how to apply UML to your project. While there are plenty of books available that describe UML, Learning UML 2.0 will show you how to use it. Topics covered include:Capturing your system's requirements in your model to help you ensure that your designs meet your users' needsModeling the parts of your system and their relationshipsModeling how the parts of your system work together to meet your system's requirementsModeling how your system moves into the real world, capturing how your system will be deployedEngaging and accessible, this book shows you how to use UML to craft and communicate your project's design. Russ Miles and Kim Hamilton have written a pragmatic introduction to UML based on hard-earned practice, not theory. Regardless of the software process or methodology you use, this book is the one source you need to get up and running with UML 2.0.Russ Miles is a software engineer for General Dynamics UK, where he works with Java and Distributed Systems, although his passion at the moment is Aspect Orientation and, in particular, AspectJ. Kim Hamilton is a senior software engineer at Northrop Grumman, where she's designed and implemented a variety of systems including web applications and distributed systems, with frequent detours into algorithms development.