And now there’s a sure-fire way to solve their problems and test solutions: the sprint.While working at Google, designer Jake Knapp created a unique problem-solving method that he coined a “design sprint”—a five-day process to help companies answer crucial questions. His ‘sprints’ were used on everything from Google Search to Chrome to Google X. When he moved to Google Ventures, he joined Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky, both designers and partners there who worked on products like YouTube and Gmail. Together Knapp, Zeratsky, and Kowitz have run over 100 sprints with their portfolio companies. They’ve seen firsthand how sprints can overcome challenges in all kinds of companies: healthcare, fitness, finance, retailers, and more.A practical guide to answering business questions, Sprint is a book for groups of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to non-profits. It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.

    

    Leading Scrum coach and trainer Kenny Rubin illuminates the values, principles, and practices of Scrum, and describes flexible, proven approaches that can help you implement it far more effectively. Whether you are new to Scrum or years into your use, this book will introduce, clarify, and deepen your Scrum knowledge at the team, product, and portfolio levels. Drawing from Rubin's experience helping hundreds of organizations succeed with Scrum, this book provides easy-to-digest descriptions enhanced by more than two hundred illustrations based on an entirely new visual icon language for describing Scrum's roles, artifacts, and activities. Essential Scrum will provide every team member, manager, and executive with a common understanding of Scrum, a shared vocabulary they can use in applying it, and practical knowledge for deriving maximum value from it.

    Cooper details many of these meta functions to explain his central thesis: programmers need to seriously re-evaluate the many user-hostile concepts deeply embedded within the software development process. Rather than provide users with a straightforward set of options, programmers often pile on the bells and whistles and ignore or de-prioritise lingering bugs. For the average user, increased functionality is a great burden, adding to the recurrent chorus that plays: "computers are hard, mysterious, unwieldy things." (An average user, Cooper asserts, who doesn't think that way or who has memorised all the esoteric commands and now lords it over others, has simply been desensitised by too many years of badly designed software.) Cooper's writing style is often overblown, with a pantheon of cutesy terminology (i.e. "dancing bearware") and insider back-patting. (When presenting software to Bill Gates, he reports that Gates replied: "How did you do that?" to which he writes: "I love stumping Bill!") More seriously, he is also unable to see beyond software development's importance--a sin he accuses programmers of throughout the book. Even with that in mind, the central questions Cooper asks are too important to ignore: Are we making users happier? Are we improving the process by which they get work done? Are we making their work hours more effective? Cooper looks to programmers, business managers and what he calls "interaction designers" to question current assumptions and mindsets. Plainly, he asserts that the goal of computer usage should be "not to make anyone feel stupid." Our distance from that goal reinforces the need to rethink entrenched priorities in software planning. -- Jennifer Buckendorff, Amazon.com

    Is it time to become a manager? Tell your boss he’s a jerk? Join that startup? Author Michael Lopp recalls his own make-or-break moments with Silicon Valley giants such as Apple, Netscape, and Symantec in Being Geek -- an insightful and entertaining book that will help you make better career decisions.With more than 40 standalone stories, Lopp walks through a complete job life cycle, starting with the job interview and ending with the realization that it might be time to find another gig. Many books teach you how to interview for a job or how to manage a project successfully, but only this book helps you handle the baffling circumstances you may encounter throughout your career.Decide what you're worth with the chapter on "The Business"Determine the nature of the miracle your CEO wants with "The Impossible"Give effective presentations with "How Not to Throw Up"Handle liars and people with devious agendas with "Managing Werewolves"Realize when you should be looking for a new gig with "The Itch"

    The ability to effectively articulate design decisions is critical to the success of a project, because the most articulate person often wins. This practical book provides principles, tactics, and actionable methods for talking about designs with executives, managers, developers, marketers, and other stakeholders who have influence over the project with the goal of winning them over and creating the best user experience.

    But, although they use these patterns purposefully, they often use them informally and nearly unconsciously. This book organizes this substantial emerging "folklore" of system design -- with its rich language of system description -- and closes the gap between the useful abstractions (constructs and patterns) of system design and the current models, notations and tools. It identifies useful patterns clearly, gives examples, compares them, and evaluates their utility in various settings -- allowing readers to develop a repertoire of useful techniques that goes beyond the single-minded current fads. KEY TOPICS: Examines the ways in which architectural issues can impact software design; shows how to design new systems in principled ways using well-understood architectural paradigms; emphasizes informal descriptions, touching lightly on formal notations and specifications, and the tools that support them; explains how to understand and evaluate the design of existing software systems from an architectural perspective; and presents concrete examples of actual system architectures that can serve as models for new designs. MARKET: For professional software developers looking for new ideas about system organization.

    His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant—or it will be closed by corporate HQ, with hundreds of job losses. It takes a chance meeting with a colleague from student days—Jonah—to help him break out of conventional ways of thinking to see what needs to be done.The story of Alex's fight to save his plant is more than compulsive reading. It contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas which underline the Theory of Constraints (TOC) developed by Eli Goldratt.

    It is designed to ensure a flexible, coordinated and integrated system for the effective governance and management of IT-enabled services."ITIL Foundation" is the first ITIL 4 publication and the latest evolution of the most widely-adopted guidance for ITSM. Its audience ranges from IT and business students taking their first steps in service management to seasoned professionals familiar with earlier versions of ITIL and other sources of industry best practice.The guidance provided in this publication can be adopted and adapted for all types of organizations and services. To show how the concepts of ITIL can be practically applied to an organization's activities, ITIL Foundation follows the exploits of a fictional company on its ITIL journey.

    If you are an organization that really needs to start grokking UX this book is also for you. " -- Chris Bernard, User Experience Evangelist, Microsoft User experience design is the discipline of creating a useful and usable Web site or application--one that's easily navigated and meets the needs of both the site owner and its users. But there's a lot more to successful UX design than knowing the latest Web technologies or design trends: It takes diplomacy, project management skills, and business savvy. That's where this book comes in. Authors Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler show you how to integrate UX principles into your project from start to finish. - Understand the various roles in UX design, identify stakeholders, and enlist their support- Obtain consensus from your team on project objectives- Define the scope of your project and avoid mission creep- Conduct user research and document your findings- Understand and communicate user behavior with personas- Design and prototype your application or site- Make your product findable with search engine optimization- Plan for development, product rollout, and ongoing quality assurance

    It also works beautifully with other open source tools, such as the MySQL database and the Apache web server. However, as more web sites are developed in PHP, they become targets for malicious attackers, and developers need to prepare for the attacks.Security is an issue that demands attention, given the growing frequency of attacks on web sites. Essential PHP Security explains the most common types of attacks and how to write code that isn't susceptible to them. By examining specific attacks and the techniques used to protect against them, you will have a deeper understanding and appreciation of the safeguards you are about to learn in this book.In the much-needed (and highly-requested) Essential PHP Security, each chapter covers an aspect of a web application (such as form processing, database programming, session management, and authentication). Chapters describe potential attacks with examples and then explain techniques to help you prevent those attacks.Topics covered include:Preventing cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilitiesProtecting against SQL injection attacksComplicating session hijacking attemptsYou are in good hands with author Chris Shiflett, an internationally-recognized expert in the field of PHP security. Shiflett is also the founder and President of Brain Bulb, a PHP consultancy that offers a variety of services to clients around the world.

    “Big data” refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena—from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books—into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. A revolution on par with the Internet or perhaps even the printing press, big data will change the way we think about business, health, politics, education, and innovation in the years to come. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior.In this brilliantly clear, often surprising work, two leading experts explain what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards. Big Data is the first big book about the next big thing.www.big-data-book.com

    We're going to do that by introducing you to Example.com, where you're going to start a new job as one of its SysAdmins. The first project you'll be in charge of is developing its new log management solution. We'll teach you how to:* Install and deploy LogStash.* Ship events from a LogStash Shipper to a central LogStash server.* Filter incoming events using a variety of techniques.* Output those events to a selection of useful destinations.* Use LogStash's Web interface and alternative interfaces like Kibana.* Scale out your LogStash implementation as your environment grows.* Quickly and easily extend LogStash to deliver additional functionality you might need.By the end of the book you should have a functional and effective log management solution that you can deploy into your own environment.

    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

    In the late 1990s, it provided an optimistic model for public