No one wants to add to the scrap heap. But if you restrict yourself to only reading articles from people who have actually created a business, hit some revenue target, or broken out of the MVP-in-an-incubator stage, there’s very few books and blogs left. This is why we hope this book is relevant to you.It’s not packed with startup clichés, nor is it steeped in myths about how huge companies got their break. Yes, Airbnb sold cereal before they were a 31 billion dollar company, and Slack was one hell of a pivot, but those wells have been over-drilled for their useful lessons at this point. This book is our honest, opinionated take on what we’ve learned building Intercom over the past 6 years. You won’t like it all, you won’t agree with it all, but you’re not supposed to. Your mileage will vary.

    This practical guide explains how to create and use personas to make your site more successful. The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas takes you through each step of persona creation, including tips for conducting qualitative user research, new ways to apply quantitative research (such as surveys) to persona creation, various methods for generating persona segmentation, and proven techniques for making personas realistic. You'll also learn how to use personas effectively, from directing overall business strategy and prioritizing features and content to making detailed decisions about information architecture, content, and design.

    Following a cookbook-style Problem/Solution/Discussion format, this practical handbook builds on the foundational concepts of the Go language and introduces specific strategies you can use in your day-to-day applications. You'll learn techniques for building web services, using Go in the cloud, testing and debugging, routing, network applications, and much more.

    For decades, technology leaders have struggled to balance agility, reliability, and security. The consequences of failure have never been greater whether it's the healthcare.gov debacle, cardholder data breaches, or missing the boat with Big Data in the cloud.And yet, high performers using DevOps principles, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Etsy, and Netflix, are routinely and reliably deploying code into production hundreds, or even thousands, of times per day.Following in the footsteps of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook shows leaders how to replicate these incredible outcomes, by showing how to integrate Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, and Information Security to elevate your company and win in the marketplace."Table of contentsPrefaceSpreading the Aha! MomentIntroductionPART I: THE THREE WAYS1. Agile, continuous delivery and the three ways2. The First Way: The Principles of Flow3. The Second Way: The Principle of Feedback4. The Third Way: The Principles of Continual LearningPART II: WHERE TO START5. Selecting which value stream to start with6. Understanding the work in our value stream…7. How to design our organization and architecture8. How to get great outcomes by integrating operations into the daily work for developmentPART III: THE FIRST WAY: THE TECHNICAL PRACTICES OF FLOW9. Create the foundations of our deployment pipeline10. Enable fast and reliable automated testing11. Enable and practice continuous integration12. Automate and enable low-risk releases13. Architect for low-risk releasesPART IV: THE SECOND WAY: THE TECHNICAL PRACTICES OF FEEDBACK14*. Create telemetry to enable seeing abd solving problems15. Analyze telemetry to better anticipate problems16. Enable feedbackso development and operation can safely deploy code17. Integrate hypothesis-driven development and A/B testing into our daily work18. Create review and coordination processes to increase quality of our current workPART V: THE THRID WAY: THE TECHNICAL PRACTICES OF CONTINUAL LEARNING19. Enable and inject learning into daily work20. Convert local discoveries into global improvements21. Reserve time to create organizational learning22. Information security as everyone’s job, every day23. Protecting the deployment pipelinePART VI: CONCLUSIONA call to actionConclusion to the DevOps HandbookAPPENDICES1. The convergence of Devops2. The theory of constraints and core chronic conflicts3. Tabular form of downward spiral4. The dangers of handoffs and queues5. Myths of industrial safety6. The Toyota Andon Cord7. COTS Software8. Post-mortem meetings9. The Simian Army10. Transparent uptimeAdditional ResourcesEndnotes

    Concurrency and parallelism are the keys, and Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks equips you for this new world. See how emerging technologies such as actors and functional programming address issues with traditional threads and locks development. Learn how to exploit the parallelism in your computer's GPU and leverage clusters of machines with MapReduce and Stream Processing. And do it all with the confidence that comes from using tools that help you write crystal clear, high-quality code. This book will show you how to exploit different parallel architectures to improve your code's performance, scalability, and resilience. Learn about the perils of traditional threads and locks programming and how to overcome them through careful design and by working with the standard library. See how actors enable software running on geographically distributed computers to collaborate, handle failure, and create systems that stay up 24/7/365. Understand why shared mutable state is the enemy of robust concurrent code, and see how functional programming together with technologies such as Software Transactional Memory (STM) and automatic parallelism help you tame it. You'll learn about the untapped potential within every GPU and how GPGPU software can unleash it. You'll see how to use MapReduce to harness massive clusters to solve previously intractible problems, and how, in concert with Stream Processing, big data can be tamed. With an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each of the different models and hardware architectures, you'll be empowered to tackle any problem with confidence.What You Need: The example code can be compiled and executed on *nix, OS X, or Windows. Instructions on how to download the supporting build systems are given in each chapter.

    To leverage the performance and power of multiprocessor programming, also known as multicore programming, programmers need to learn the new principles, algorithms, and tools.The book will be of immediate use to programmers working with the new architectures. For example, the next generation of computer game consoles will all be multiprocessor-based, and the game industry is currently struggling to understand how to address the programming challenges presented by these machines. This change in the industry is so fundamental that it is certain to require a significant response by universities, and courses on multicore programming will become a staple of computer science curriculums.This book includes fully-developed Java examples detailing data structures, synchronization techniques, transactional memory, and more.Students in multiprocessor and multicore programming courses and engineers working with multiprocessor and multicore systems will find this book quite useful.

     It is easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of information we encounter each day. Whether at work, at school, or in our personal endeavors, there’s a deepening (and inescapable) need for people to work with and understand information. Information architecture is the way that we arrange the parts of something to make it understandable as a whole. When we make things for others to use, the architecture of information that we choose greatly affects our ability to deliver our intended message to our users. We all face messes made of information and people. I define the word “mess” the same way that most dictionaries do: “A situation where the interactions between people and information are confusing or full of difficulties.” — Who doesn’t bump up against messes made of information and people every day? This book provides a seven step process for making sense of any mess. Each chapter contains a set of lessons as well as workbook exercises architected to help you to work through your own mess.

    More than 250 color photos.

    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.

    Hundreds of thousands of Python developers around the world rely on Python for general-purpose tasks, Internet scripting, systems programming, user interfaces, and product customization. Available on all major computing platforms, including commercial versions of Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, Python is portable, powerful and remarkable easy to use.With its convenient, quick-reference format, "Python Pocket Reference," 3rd Edition is the perfect on-the-job reference. More importantly, it's now been refreshed to cover the language's latest release, Python 2.4. For experienced Python developers, this book is a compact toolbox that delivers need-to-know information at the flip of a page. This third edition also includes an easy-lookup index to help developers find answers fast!Python 2.4 is more than just optimization and library enhancements; it's also chock full of bug fixes and upgrades. And these changes are addressed in the "Python Pocket Reference," 3rd Edition. New language features, new and upgraded built-ins, and new and upgraded modules and packages--they're all clarified in detail.The "Python Pocket Reference," 3rd Edition serves as the perfect companion to "Learning Python" and "Programming Python."

    The book details the major subsystems and features of the Linux kernel, including its design, implementation, and interfaces. It covers the Linux kernel with both a practical and theoretical eye, which should appeal to readers with a variety of interests and needs. The author, a core kernel developer, shares valuable knowledge and experience on the 2.6 Linux kernel. Specific topics covered include process management, scheduling, time management and timers, the system call interface, memory addressing, memory management, the page cache, the VFS, kernel synchronization, portability concerns, and debugging techniques. This book covers the most interesting features of the Linux 2.6 kernel, including the CFS scheduler, preemptive kernel, block I/O layer, and I/O schedulers. The third edition of Linux Kernel Development includes new and updated material throughout the book:An all-new chapter on kernel data structuresDetails on interrupt handlers and bottom halvesExtended coverage of virtual memory and memory allocationTips on debugging the Linux kernelIn-depth coverage of kernel synchronization and lockingUseful insight into submitting kernel patches and working with the Linux kernel community

    This book contains the fundamental laws of software development, the primary pieces of understanding that make the difference between a mid-level/junior programmer and the high-level senior software engineer. The book exists to help all programmers understand the process of writing software, on a very fundamental level that can be applied to any programming language or project, from here into eternity. Code Simplicity is also written in such a way that even non-technical managers of software teams can gain an understanding of what the “right way” and the “wrong way” is (and why they are right and wrong) when it comes to software design. The focus of the book is primarily on “software design,” the process of creating a plan for a software project and making technical decisions about the pattern and structure of a system.

    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

    This authoritative book scrapes away these bad features to reveal a subset of JavaScript that's more reliable, readable, and maintainable than the language as a whole--a subset you can use to create truly extensible and efficient code.Considered the JavaScript expert by many people in the development community, author Douglas Crockford identifies the abundance of good ideas that make JavaScript an outstanding object-oriented programming language-ideas such as functions, loose typing, dynamic objects, and an expressive object literal notation. Unfortunately, these good ideas are mixed in with bad and downright awful ideas, like a programming model based on global variables.When Java applets failed, JavaScript became the language of the Web by default, making its popularity almost completely independent of its qualities as a programming language. In JavaScript: The Good Parts, Crockford finally digs through the steaming pile of good intentions and blunders to give you a detailed look at all the genuinely elegant parts of JavaScript, including:SyntaxObjectsFunctionsInheritanceArraysRegular expressionsMethodsStyleBeautiful featuresThe real beauty? As you move ahead with the subset of JavaScript that this book presents, you'll also sidestep the need to unlearn all the bad parts. Of course, if you want to find out more about the bad parts and how to use them badly, simply consult any other JavaScript book.With JavaScript: The Good Parts, you'll discover a beautiful, elegant, lightweight and highly expressive language that lets you create effective code, whether you're managing object libraries or just trying to get Ajax to run fast. If you develop sites or applications for the Web, this book is an absolute must.

    But developing these systems brings its own set of headaches. With lots of examples and practical advice, this book takes a holistic view of the topics that system architects and administrators must consider when building, managing, and evolving microservice architectures.Microservice technologies are moving quickly. Author Sam Newman provides you with a firm grounding in the concepts while diving into current solutions for modeling, integrating, testing, deploying, and monitoring your own autonomous services. You'll follow a fictional company throughout the book to learn how building a microservice architecture affects a single domain.Discover how microservices allow you to align your system design with your organization's goalsLearn options for integrating a service with the rest of your systemTake an incremental approach when splitting monolithic codebasesDeploy individual microservices through continuous integrationExamine the complexities of testing and monitoring distributed servicesManage security with user-to-service and service-to-service modelsUnderstand the challenges of scaling microservice architectures