Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams


Tom DeMarco - 1987
    The answers aren't easy -- just incredibly successful.

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.

Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software


Eric Evans - 2003
    "His book is very compatible with XP. It is not about drawing pictures of a domain; it is about how you think of it, the language you use to talk about it, and how you organize your software to reflect your improving understanding of it. Eric thinks that learning about your problem domain is as likely to happen at the end of your project as at the beginning, and so refactoring is a big part of his technique. "The book is a fun read. Eric has lots of interesting stories, and he has a way with words. I see this book as essential reading for software developers--it is a future classic." --Ralph Johnson, author of Design Patterns "If you don't think you are getting value from your investment in object-oriented programming, this book will tell you what you've forgotten to do. "Eric Evans convincingly argues for the importance of domain modeling as the central focus of development and provides a solid framework and set of techniques for accomplishing it. This is timeless wisdom, and will hold up long after the methodologies du jour have gone out of fashion." --Dave Collins, author of Designing Object-Oriented User Interfaces "Eric weaves real-world experience modeling--and building--business applications into a practical, useful book. Written from the perspective of a trusted practitioner, Eric's descriptions of ubiquitous language, the benefits of sharing models with users, object life-cycle management, logical and physical application structuring, and the process and results of deep refactoring are major contributions to our field." --Luke Hohmann, author of Beyond Software Architecture "This book belongs on the shelf of every thoughtful software developer." --Kent Beck "What Eric has managed to capture is a part of the design process that experienced object designers have always used, but that we have been singularly unsuccessful as a group in conveying to the rest of the industry. We've given away bits and pieces of this knowledge...but we've never organized and systematized the principles of building domain logic. This book is important." --Kyle Brown, author of Enterprise Java(TM) Programming with IBM(R) WebSphere(R) The software development community widely acknowledges that domain modeling is central to software design. Through domain models, software developers are able to express rich functionality and translate it into a software implementation that truly serves the needs of its users. But despite its obvious importance, there are few practical resources that explain how to incorporate effective domain modeling into the software development process. Domain-Driven Design fills that need. This is not a book about specific technologies. It offers readers a systematic approach to domain-driven design, presenting an extensive set of design best practices, experience-based techniques, and fundamental principles that facilitate the development of software projects facing complex domains. Intertwining design and development practice, this book incorporates numerous examples based on actual projects to illustrate the application of domain-driven design to real-world software development. Readers learn how to use a domain model to make a complex development effort more focused and dynamic. A core of best practices and standard patterns provides a common language for the development team. A shift in emphasis--refactoring not just the code but the model underlying the code--in combination with the frequent iterations of Agile development leads to deeper insight into domains and enhanced communication between domain expert and programmer. Domain-Driven Design then builds on this foundation, and addresses modeling and design for complex systems and larger organizations.Specific topics covered include:Getting all team members to speak the same language Connecting model and implementation more deeply Sharpening key distinctions in a model Managing the lifecycle of a domain object Writing domain code that is safe to combine in elaborate ways Making complex code obvious and predictable Formulating a domain vision statement Distilling the core of a complex domain Digging out implicit concepts needed in the model Applying analysis patterns Relating design patterns to the model Maintaining model integrity in a large system Dealing with coexisting models on the same project Organizing systems with large-scale structures Recognizing and responding to modeling breakthroughs With this book in hand, object-oriented developers, system analysts, and designers will have the guidance they need to organize and focus their work, create rich and useful domain models, and leverage those models into quality, long-lasting software implementations.

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX


Eric Berger - 2021
    Less than 20 years after its founding, it boasts the largest constellation of commercial satellites in orbit, has pioneered reusable rockets, and in 2020 became the first private company to launch human beings into orbit. Half a century after the space race it is private companies, led by SpaceX, standing alongside NASA pushing forward into the cosmos, and laying the foundation for our exploration of other worlds.But before it became one of the most powerful players in the aerospace industry, SpaceX was a fledgling startup, scrambling to develop a single workable rocket before the money ran dry. The engineering challenge was immense; numerous other private companies had failed similar attempts. And even if SpaceX succeeded, they would then have to compete for government contracts with titans such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who had tens of thousands of employees and tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue. SpaceX had fewer than 200 employees and the relative pittance of $100 million in the bank.In Liftoff, Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, takes readers inside the wild early days that made SpaceX. Focusing on the company’s first four launches of the Falcon 1 rocket, he charts the bumpy journey from scrappy underdog to aerospace pioneer. We travel from company headquarters in El Segundo, to the isolated Texas ranchland where they performed engine tests, to Kwajalein, the tiny atoll in the Pacific where SpaceX launched the Falcon 1. Berger has reported on SpaceX for more than a decade, enjoying unparalleled journalistic access to the company’s inner workings. Liftoff is the culmination of these efforts, drawing upon exclusive interviews with dozens of former and current engineers, designers, mechanics, and executives, including Elon Musk. The enigmatic Musk, who founded the company with the dream of one day settling Mars, is the fuel that propels the book, with his daring vision for the future of space.Filled with never-before-told stories of SpaceX’s turbulent beginning, Liftoff is a saga of cosmic proportions.

Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering


Robert L. Glass - 2002
    Though it may not seem this way for those who have been in the field for most of their careers, in the overall scheme of professions, software builders are relative "newbies." In the short history of the software field, a lot of facts have been identified, and a lot of fallacies promulgated. Those facts and fallacies are what this book is about. There's a problem with those facts-and, as you might imagine, those fallacies. Many of these fundamentally important facts are learned by a software engineer, but over the short lifespan of the software field, all too many of them have been forgotten. While reading Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering , you may experience moments of "Oh, yes, I had forgotten that," alongside some "Is that really true?" thoughts. The author of this book doesn't shy away from controversy. In fact, each of the facts and fallacies is accompanied by a discussion of whatever controversy envelops it. You may find yourself agreeing with a lot of the facts and fallacies, yet emotionally disturbed by a few of them! Whether you agree or disagree, you will learn why the author has been called "the premier curmudgeon of software practice." These facts and fallacies are fundamental to the software building field-forget or neglect them at your peril!

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture


Martin Fowler - 2002
    Multi-tiered object-oriented platforms, such as Java and .NET, have become commonplace. These new tools and technologies are capable of building powerful applications, but they are not easily implemented. Common failures in enterprise applications often occur because their developers do not understand the architectural lessons that experienced object developers have learned. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture is written in direct response to the stiff challenges that face enterprise application developers. The author, noted object-oriented designer Martin Fowler, noticed that despite changes in technology--from Smalltalk to CORBA to Java to .NET--the same basic design ideas can be adapted and applied to solve common problems. With the help of an expert group of contributors, Martin distills over forty recurring solutions into patterns. The result is an indispensable handbook of solutions that are applicable to any enterprise application platform. This book is actually two books in one. The first section is a short tutorial on developing enterprise applications, which you can read from start to finish to understand the scope of the book's lessons. The next section, the bulk of the book, is a detailed reference to the patterns themselves. Each pattern provides usage and implementation information, as well as detailed code examples in Java or C#. The entire book is also richly illustrated with UML diagrams to further explain the concepts. Armed with this book, you will have the knowledge necessary to make important architectural decisions about building an enterprise application and the proven patterns for use when building them. The topics covered include - Dividing an enterprise application into layers - The major approaches to organizing business logic - An in-depth treatment of mapping between objects and relational databases - Using Model-View-Controller to organize a Web presentation - Handling concurrency for data that spans multiple transactions - Designing distributed object interfaces

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell


Phil Lapsley - 2013
    Starting with Alexander Graham Bell's revolutionary "harmonic telegraph," by the middle of the twentieth century the phone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same.Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first time. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T's monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell's Achilles' heel. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of "phone phreaks" who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI.The product of extensive original research, Exploding the Phone is a ground-breaking, captivating book.

Modern Perl


chromatic - 2010
    With countless satisfied developers, tens of thousands of freely available libraries, and continual improvements to the language and its ecosystem, modern Perl development can be easy, reliable, and fun. To take advantage of the full power of Perl 5--to become a true expert, capable of solving any problem put before you--you must understand the language. Modern Perl explains Perl 5 from theory to implementation, including Perl 5.12.

Deep Learning with Python


François Chollet - 2017
    It is the technology behind photo tagging systems at Facebook and Google, self-driving cars, speech recognition systems on your smartphone, and much more.In particular, Deep learning excels at solving machine perception problems: understanding the content of image data, video data, or sound data. Here's a simple example: say you have a large collection of images, and that you want tags associated with each image, for example, "dog," "cat," etc. Deep learning can allow you to create a system that understands how to map such tags to images, learning only from examples. This system can then be applied to new images, automating the task of photo tagging. A deep learning model only has to be fed examples of a task to start generating useful results on new data.

That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea


Marc Randolph - 2019
    Late fees were ubiquitous, video-streaming unheard was of, and widespread DVD adoption seemed about as imminent as flying cars. Indeed, these were the widely accepted laws of the land in 1997, when Marc Randolph had an idea. It was a simple thought—leveraging the internet to rent movies—and was just one of many more and far worse proposals, like personalized baseball bats and a shampoo delivery service, that Randolph would pitch to his business partner, Reed Hastings, on their commute to work each morning.But Hastings was intrigued, and the pair—with Hastings as the primary investor and Randolph as the CEO—founded a company. Now with over 150 million subscribers, Netflix's triumph feels inevitable, but the twenty first century's most disruptive start up began with few believers and calamity at every turn. From having to pitch his own mother on being an early investor, to the motel conference room that served as a first office, to server crashes on launch day, to the now-infamous meeting when Netflix brass pitched Blockbuster to acquire them, Marc Randolph's transformational journey exemplifies how anyone with grit, gut instincts, and determination can change the world—even with an idea that many think will never work.What emerges, though, isn't just the inside story of one of the world's most iconic companies. Full of counter-intuitive concepts and written in binge-worthy prose, it answers some of our most fundamental questions about taking that leap of faith in business or in life: How do you begin? How do you weather disappointment and failure? How do you deal with success? What even is success?From idea generation to team building to knowing when it's time to let go, That Will Never Work is not only the ultimate follow-your-dreams parable, but also one of the most dramatic and insightful entrepreneurial stories of our time.

Algorithms


Robert Sedgewick - 1983
    This book surveys the most important computer algorithms currently in use and provides a full treatment of data structures and algorithms for sorting, searching, graph processing, and string processing -- including fifty algorithms every programmer should know. In this edition, new Java implementations are written in an accessible modular programming style, where all of the code is exposed to the reader and ready to use.The algorithms in this book represent a body of knowledge developed over the last 50 years that has become indispensable, not just for professional programmers and computer science students but for any student with interests in science, mathematics, and engineering, not to mention students who use computation in the liberal arts.The companion web site, algs4.cs.princeton.edu contains An online synopsis Full Java implementations Test data Exercises and answers Dynamic visualizations Lecture slides Programming assignments with checklists Links to related material The MOOC related to this book is accessible via the "Online Course" link at algs4.cs.princeton.edu. The course offers more than 100 video lecture segments that are integrated with the text, extensive online assessments, and the large-scale discussion forums that have proven so valuable. Offered each fall and spring, this course regularly attracts tens of thousands of registrants.Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne are developing a modern approach to disseminating knowledge that fully embraces technology, enabling people all around the world to discover new ways of learning and teaching. By integrating their textbook, online content, and MOOC, all at the state of the art, they have built a unique resource that greatly expands the breadth and depth of the educational experience.

CSS Secrets: Better Solutions to Everyday Web Design Problems


Lea Verou - 2014
    Based on two popular talks from author Lea Verou--including "CSS3 Secrets: 10 things you may not know about CSS"--this practical guide provides intermediate to advanced CSS developers with more than 40 undocumented techniques and tips for using CSS3 to create better websites.The talks that spawned this book have been top-rated by attendees in every conference they were presented, and praised in industry media such as ."net" magazine.Get information you won't find in any other bookLearn through small, easily digestible chaptersHelps you understand CSS more deeply so you can improve your own solutionsApply Lea's techniques to practically every CSS problem you faceGain tips from a rockstar author who serves as an Invited Expert in W3C's CSS Working Group

The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise


Martin L. Abbott - 2009
    Abbott and Michael T. Fisher cover everything IT and business leaders must know to build technology infrastructures that can scale smoothly to meet any business requirement. Drawing on their unparalleled experience managing some of the world s highest-transaction-volume Web sites, the authors provide detailed models and best-practice approaches available in no other book. Unlike previous books on scalability, "The Art of Scalability" doesn t limit its coverage to technology. Writing for both technical and nontechnical decision-makers, this book covers everything that impacts scalability, including architecture, processes, people, and organizations. Throughout, the authors address a broad spectrum of real-world challenges, from performance testing to IT governance. Using their tools and guidance, organizations can systematically overcome obstacles to scalability and achieve unprecedented levels of technical and business performance. Coverage includes Staffing the scalable organization: essential organizational, management, and leadership skills for technical leaders Building processes for scale: process lessons from hyper-growth companies, from technical issue resolution to crisis management Making better build versus buy decisions Architecting scalable solutions: powerful proprietary models for identifying scalability needs and choosing the best approaches to meet them Optimizing performance through caching, application and database splitting, and asynchronous design Scalability techniques for emerging technologies, including clouds and grids Planning for rapid data growth and new data centers Evolving monitoring strategies to tightly align with customer requirements "

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World


Cade Metz - 2021
    Through the lives of Geoff Hinton and other major players, Metz explains this transformative technology and makes the quest thrilling.--Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker Recipient of starred reviews in both Kirkus and Library JournalTHE UNTOLD TECH STORY OF OUR TIMEWhat does it mean to be smart? To be human? What do we really want from life and the intelligence we have, or might create?With deep and exclusive reporting, across hundreds of interviews, New York Times Silicon Valley journalist Cade Metz brings you into the rooms where these questions are being answered. Where an extraordinarily powerful new artificial intelligence has been built into our biggest companies, our social discourse, and our daily lives, with few of us even noticing.Long dismissed as a technology of the distant future, artificial intelligence was a project consigned to the fringes of the scientific community. Then two researchers changed everything. One was a sixty-four-year-old computer science professor who didn't drive and didn't fly because he could no longer sit down--but still made his way across North America for the moment that would define a new age of technology. The other was a thirty-six-year-old neuroscientist and chess prodigy who laid claim to being the greatest game player of all time before vowing to build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.They took two very different paths to that lofty goal, and they disagreed on how quickly it would arrive. But both were soon drawn into the heart of the tech industry. Their ideas drove a new kind of arms race, spanning Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and OpenAI, a new lab founded by Silicon Valley kingpin Elon Musk. But some believed that China would beat them all to the finish line.Genius Makers dramatically presents the fierce conflict between national interests, shareholder value, the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and the very human concerns about privacy, security, bias, and prejudice. Like a great Victorian novel, this world of eccentric, brilliant, often unimaginably yet suddenly wealthy characters draws you into the most profound moral questions we can ask. And like a great mystery, it presents the story and facts that lead to a core, vital question:How far will we let it go?

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn


Richard Hamming - 1996
    By presenting actual experiences and analyzing them as they are described, the author conveys the developmental thought processes employed and shows a style of thinking that leads to successful results is something that can be learned. Along with spectacular successes, the author also conveys how failures contributed to shaping the thought processes. Provides the reader with a style of thinking that will enhance a person's ability to function as a problem-solver of complex technical issues. Consists of a collection of stories about the author's participation in significant discoveries, relating how those discoveries came about and, most importantly, provides analysis about the thought processes and reasoning that took place as the author and his associates progressed through engineering problems.