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.

    Each mini-chapter adds one feature to the ray tracer, and by the end the reader can produce the image on the book cover. Details of basic ray tracing code architecture and C++ classes are given.

    Guns, which lead to so much death, work exactly as they’re designed to work. And every time we “improve” their design, they get better at killing. Facebook’s privacy settings, which have outed gay teens to their conservative parents, are working exactly as designed. Their “real names” iniative, which makes it easier for stalkers to re-find their victims, is working exactly as designed. Twitter’s toxicity and lack of civil discourse is working exactly as it’s designed to work.The world is working exactly as designed. And it’s not working very well. Which means we need to do a better job of designing it. Design is a craft with an amazing amount of power. The power to choose. The power to influence. As designers, we need to see ourselves as gatekeepers of what we are bringing into the world, and what we choose not to bring into the world. Design is a craft with responsibility. The responsibility to help create a better world for all.Design is also a craft with a lot of blood on its hands. Every cigarette ad is on us. Every gun is on us. Every ballot that a voter cannot understand is on us. Every time social network’s interface allows a stalker to find their victim, that’s on us. The monsters we unleash into the world will carry your name.This book will make you see that design is a political act. What we choose to design is a political act. Who we choose to work for is a political act. Who we choose to work with is a political act. And, most importantly, the people we’ve excluded from these decisions is the biggest (and stupidest) political act we’ve made as a society.If you’re a designer, this book might make you angry. It should make you angry. But it will also give you the tools you need to make better decisions. You will learn how to evaluate the potential benefits and harm of what you’re working on. You’ll learn how to present your concerns. You’ll learn the importance of building and working with diverse teams who can approach problems from multiple points-of-view. You’ll learn how to make a case using data and good storytelling. You’ll learn to say NO in a way that’ll make people listen. But mostly, this book will fill you with the confidence to do the job the way you always wanted to be able to do it. This book will help you understand your responsibilities.

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    One slogan of Perl is that it makes easy things easy and hard things possible. "Intermediate Perl" is about making the leap from the easy things to the hard ones.Originally released in 2003 as "Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules" and revised and updated for Perl 5.8, this book offers a gentle but thorough introduction to intermediate programming in Perl. Written by the authors of the best-selling "Learning Perl," it picks up where that book left off. Topics include: Packages and namespacesReferences and scopingManipulating complex data structuresObject-oriented programmingWriting and using modulesTesting Perl codeContributing to CPANFollowing the successful format of "Learning Perl," we designed each chapter in the book to be small enough to be read in just an hour or two, ending with a series of exercises to help you practice what you've learned. To use the book, you just need to be familiar with the material in "Learning Perl" and have ambition to go further.Perl is a different language to different people. It is a quick scripting tool for some, and a fully-featured object-oriented language for others. It is used for everything from performing quick global replacements on text files, to crunching huge, complex sets of scientific data that take weeks to process. Perl is what you make of it. But regardless of what you use Perl for, this book helps you do it more effectively, efficiently, and elegantly."Intermediate Perl" is about learning to use Perl as a programming language, and not just a scripting language. This is the book that turns the Perl dabbler into the Perl programmer.

    If you have read the Swift Programming Guide, and want to explore more, this book is for you.Swift is a great language for systems programming, but also lends itself for very high-level programming. We'll explore both high-level topics (for example, programming with generics and protocols), as well as low-level topics (for example, wrapping a C library and string internals).

    That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth. With an approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook debunks commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and gives you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness.

    This book is for anyone who has an interest in SQL Server 2012 and wants to understand its capabilities, including database administrators, application developers, and technical decision makers.

    The key, as the authors show, is to integrate regularly and often using continuous integration (CI) practices and techniques. The authors first examine the concept of CI and its practices from the ground up and then move on to explore other effective processes performed by CI systems, such as database integration, testing, inspection, deployment, and feedback. Through more than forty CI-related practices using application examples in different languages, readers learn that CI leads to more rapid software development, produces deployable software at every step in the development lifecycle, and reduces the time between defect introduction and detection, saving time and lowering costs. With successful implementation of CI, developers reduce risks and repetitive manual processes, and teams receive better project visibility. The book covers How to make integration a "non-event" on your software development projects How to reduce the amount of repetitive processes you perform when building your software Practices and techniques for using CI effectively with your teams Reducing the risks of late defect discovery, low-quality software, lack of visibility, and lack of deployable software Assessments of different CI servers and related tools on the market The book's companion Web site, www.integratebutton.com, provides updates and code examples

    However, successful applications have a habit of growing. Eventually the development team ends up in what is known as monolithic hell. All aspects of software development and deployment become painfully slow. The solution is to adopt the microservice architecture, which structures an application as a services, organized around business capabilities. This architecture accelerates software development and enables continuous delivery and deployment of complex software applications.Microservice Patterns teaches enterprise developers and architects how to build applications with the microservice architecture. Rather than simply advocating for the use the microservice architecture, this clearly-written guide takes a balanced, pragmatic approach. You'll discover that the microservice architecture is not a silver bullet and has both benefits and drawbacks. Along the way, you'll learn a pattern language that will enable you to solve the issues that arise when using the microservice architecture. This book also teaches you how to refactor a monolithic application to a microservice architecture.

    Drawing on Lopp's management experiences at Apple, Netscape, Symantec, and Borland, this book is full of stories based on companies in the Silicon Valley where people have been known to yell at each other. It is a place full of dysfunctional bright people who are in an incredible hurry to find the next big thing so they can strike it rich and then do it all over again. Among these people are managers, a strange breed of people who through a mystical organizational ritual have been given power over your future and your bank account.Whether you're an aspiring manager, a current manager, or just wondering what the heck a manager does all day, there is a story in this book that will speak to you.

    As a professional C++ developer and former Harvard teaching fellow, I know what you need to know to be a great C++ programmer, and I know how to teach it, one step at a time. I know where people struggle, and why, and how to make it clear. I cover every step of the programming process, including:Getting the tools you need to program and how to use them*Basic language feature like variables, loops and functions*How to go from an idea to code*A clear, understandable explanation of pointers*Strings, file IO, arrays, references*Classes and advanced class design*C++-specific programming patterns*Object oriented programming*Data structures and the standard template library (STL)Key concepts are reinforced with quizzes and over 75 practice problems.

    How do you present large volumes of information to people who need to find what they're looking for quickly? This classic primer shows information architects, designers, and web site developers how to build large-scale and maintainable web sites that are appealing and easy to navigate. The new edition is thoroughly updated to address emerging technologies -- with recent examples, new scenarios, and information on best practices -- while maintaining its focus on fundamentals. With topics that range from aesthetics to mechanics, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web explains how to create interfaces that users can understand right away. Inside, you'll find:* An overview of information architecture for both newcomers and experienced practitioners* The fundamental components of an architecture, illustrating the interconnected nature of these systems. Updated, with updates for tagging, folksonomies, social classification, and guided navigation* Tools, techniques, and methods that take you from research to strategy and design to implementation. This edition discusses blueprints, wireframes and the role of diagrams in the design phase* A series of short essays that provide practical tips and philosophical advice for those who work on information architecture* The business context of practicing and promoting information architecture, including recent lessons on how to handle enterprise architecture* Case studies on the evolution of two large and very different information architectures, illustrating best practices along the way* How do you document the rich interfaces of web applications? How do you design for multiple platforms and mobile devices? With emphasis on goals and approaches over tactics or technologies, this enormously popular book gives you knowledge about information architecture with a framework that allows you to learn new approaches -- and unlearn outmoded ones.

     Coauthored by the designer of the Scala language, this authoritative book will teach you, one step at a time, the Scala language and the ideas behind it. The book is carefully crafted to help you learn. The first few chapters will give you enough of the basics that you can already start using Scala for simple tasks. The entire book is organized so that each new concept builds on concepts that came before - a series of steps that promises to help you master the Scala language and the important ideas about programming that Scala embodies. A comprehensive tutorial and reference for Scala, this book covers the entire language and important libraries.

    It starts with core concepts like sending, receiving, routing, and transforming data and then shows readers the entire lifecycle. The book goes in depth on how to test, deal with errors, scale, deploy, and monitor apps and even how to build custom tooling. Written by core developers of Camel and the authors of the first edition, this book distills their experience and practical insights so that readers can tackle integration tasks like a pro.Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.