Learning JavaScript


Shelley Powers - 2006
    JavaScript lets designers add sparkle and life to web pages, while more complex JavaScript has led to the rise of Ajax -- the latest rage in web development that allows developers to create powerful and more responsive applications in the browser window."Learning JavaScript" introduces this powerful scripting language to web designers and developers in easy-to-understand terms. Using the latest examples from modern browser development practices, this book teaches you how to integrate the language with the browser environment, and how to practice proper coding techniques for standards-compliant web sites. By the end of the book, you'll be able to use all of the JavaScript language and many of the object models provided by web browsers, and you'll even be able to create a basic Ajax application.

Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming


Peter Seibel - 2009
    As the words "at work" suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day–to–day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting. Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: http://www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyone’s feedback, we selected 16 folks who’ve been kind enough to agree to be interviewed:- Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow- Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang- Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google- Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger- Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo!- L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1- Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation - Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal - Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer- Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler- Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX- Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI- Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress- Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX- Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hackerWhat you’ll learn:How the best programmers in the world do their jobWho is this book for?Programmers interested in the point of view of leaders in the field. Programmers looking for approaches that work for some of these outstanding programmers.

Working Effectively with Unit Tests


Jay Fields - 2014
    Unfortunately, developers are creating mountains of unmaintainable tests as a side effect. I've been fighting the maintenance battle pretty aggressively for years, and this book captures the what I believe is the most effective way to test.This book details my strong opinions on the best way to test, while acknowledging alternative styles and various contexts in which tests are written. Whether you prefer my style or not, this book will help you write better Unit and Functional Tests.

Writing An Interpreter In Go


Thorsten Ball - 2016
    Monkey has been specifically designed for this book: it's a language that looks a lot like C, has first class functions, closures, strings, hashes and arrays and its only implementation is the one we build in the book.In contrast to text books on interpreters & compilers, the focus of this book is working code. Code is not just found in the appendix -- no, nearly every page contains a snippet! And not only that, but also tests. The code presented in the book is fully tested and the test suite is included.For more information, check out: http://interpreterbook.com/

The Algorithm Design Manual


Steven S. Skiena - 1997
    Drawing heavily on the author's own real-world experiences, the book stresses design and analysis. Coverage is divided into two parts, the first being a general guide to techniques for the design and analysis of computer algorithms. The second is a reference section, which includes a catalog of the 75 most important algorithmic problems. By browsing this catalog, readers can quickly identify what the problem they have encountered is called, what is known about it, and how they should proceed if they need to solve it. This book is ideal for the working professional who uses algorithms on a daily basis and has need for a handy reference. This work can also readily be used in an upper-division course or as a student reference guide. THE ALGORITHM DESIGN MANUAL comes with a CD-ROM that contains: * a complete hypertext version of the full printed book. * the source code and URLs for all cited implementations. * over 30 hours of audio lectures on the design and analysis of algorithms are provided, all keyed to on-line lecture notes.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity


Alan Cooper - 1999
    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

Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age


Paul Graham - 2004
    Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care?Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local store are being replaced by the Internet.Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls “an intellectual Wild West.”The ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.

Advanced PHP Programming


George Schlossnagle - 2004
    The rapid maturation of PHP has created a skeptical population of users from more traditional enterprise languages who question the readiness and ability of PHP to scale, as well as a large population of PHP developers without formal computer science backgrounds who have learned through the hands-on experimentation while developing small and midsize applications in PHP. While there are many books on learning PHP and developing small applications with it, there is a serious lack of information on scaling PHP for large-scale, business-critical systems. Schlossnagle's Advanced PHP Programming fills that void, demonstrating that PHP is ready for enterprise Web applications by showing the reader how to develop PHP-based applications for maximum performance, stability, and extensibility.

Technical Blogging


Antonio Cangiano - 2012
    There is no magic to successful blogging; with this book you'll learn the techniques to attract and keep a large audience of loyal, regular readers and leverage this popularity to achieve your goals. Become more influential and earn extra money by blogging. Whether you want to create a popular technical blog from scratch or take your blog to the next level, this book shows you how. Technical blogging expert Antonio Cangiano shares his extensive expertise with you, sparing no details and laying out a complete step by step road map to help you plan, create, market, monetize, and grow your own popular blog. Antonio will guide you through all the choices you have to make in setting up a successful blog, teach you the key things you need to know to write blog posts that get read, and give you the tools to produce content regularly You'll learn how to promote your blog, understand traffic statistics, and build a community. And once you've built it, you'll learn how to benefit from it: advance your career, make money from your blog, use it to promote your products or company, and take advantage of your blog to the fullest. And when your blog takes off, Antonio will show you how to avoid the pitfalls of success.Technical Blogging is the only guide you'll need to create and maintain a successful technical blog.

Microinteractions: Designing with Details


Dan Saffer - 2013
    With this practical book, you’ll learn how to design effective microinteractions: the small details that exist inside and around features. How can users change a setting? How do they turn on mute, or know they have a new email message?Through vivid, real-world examples from today’s devices and applications, author Dan Saffer walks you through a microinteraction’s essential parts, then shows you how to use them in a mobile app, a web widget, and an appliance. You’ll quickly discover how microinteractions can change a product from one that’s tolerated into one that’s treasured.Explore a microinteraction’s structure: triggers, rules, feedback, modes, and loopsLearn the types of triggers that initiate a microinteractionCreate simple rules that define how your microinteraction can be usedHelp users understand the rules with feedback, using graphics, sounds, and vibrationsUse modes to let users set preferences or modify a microinteractionExtend a microinteraction’s life with loops, such as “Get data every 30 seconds”

Humans vs Computers


Gojko Adzic - 2017
    You'll read about humans who are invisible to computers, how a default password once caused a zombie apocalypse and why airlines sometimes give away free tickets. This is also a book on how to prevent, avoid and reduce the impact of such problems. Our lives are increasingly tracked, monitored and categorised by software, driving a flood of information into the vast sea of big data. In this brave new world, humans can't cope with information overload. Governments and companies alike rely on computers to automatically detect fraud, predict behaviour and enforce laws. Inflexible automatons, barely smarter than a fridge, now make life-changing decisions. Clever marketing tricks us into believing that phones, TV sets and even cars are somehow smart. Yet all those computer systems were created by people - people who are well-meaning but fallible and biased, clever but forgetful, and who have grand plans but are pressed for time. Digitising a piece of work doesn't mean there will be no mistakes, but instead guarantees that when mistakes happen, they'll run at a massive scale. The next time you bang your head against a digital wall, the stories in this book will help you understand better what's going on and show you where to look for problems. If nothing else, when it seems as if you're under a black-magic spell, these stories will at least allow you to see the lighter side of the binary chaos. For people involved in software delivery, this book will help you find more empathy for people suffering from our mistakes, and discover heuristics to use during analysis, development or testing to make your software less error prone. <

JavaScript Allongé: A strong cup of functions, objects, combinators, and decorators


Reginald Braithwaite - 2012
    JavaScript Allongé is for:-- Programmers learning JavaScript who want a thorough grounding in its fundamentals rather than a cursory treatment of its syntax.-- Programmers already using JavaScript who want to go back and take a deep dive into programming with functions and combinators.-- Any programmer curious about programming with functions.JavaScript Allongé's primary focus is functions as first-class values and topics built on those fundamentals such as objects, prototypes, "classes," combinators, method decorators, and fluent APIs.

Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters


Ryan Singer - 2019
    "This book is a guide to how we do product development at Basecamp. It’s also a toolbox full of techniques that you can apply in your own way to your own process.Whether you’re a founder, CTO, product manager, designer, or developer, you’re probably here because of some common challenges that all software companies have to face."

From Mathematics to Generic Programming


Alexander A. Stepanov - 2014
    If you're a reasonably proficient programmer who can think logically, you have all the background you'll need. Stepanov and Rose introduce the relevant abstract algebra and number theory with exceptional clarity. They carefully explain the problems mathematicians first needed to solve, and then show how these mathematical solutions translate to generic programming and the creation of more effective and elegant code. To demonstrate the crucial role these mathematical principles play in many modern applications, the authors show how to use these results and generalized algorithms to implement a real-world public-key cryptosystem. As you read this book, you'll master the thought processes necessary for effective programming and learn how to generalize narrowly conceived algorithms to widen their usefulness without losing efficiency. You'll also gain deep insight into the value of mathematics to programming--insight that will prove invaluable no matter what programming languages and paradigms you use. You will learn aboutHow to generalize a four thousand-year-old algorithm, demonstrating indispensable lessons about clarity and efficiencyAncient paradoxes, beautiful theorems, and the productive tension between continuous and discreteA simple algorithm for finding greatest common divisor (GCD) and modern abstractions that build on itPowerful mathematical approaches to abstractionHow abstract algebra provides the idea at the heart of generic programmingAxioms, proofs, theories, and models: using mathematical techniques to organize knowledge about your algorithms and data structuresSurprising subtleties of simple programming tasks and what you can learn from themHow practical implementations can exploit theoretical knowledge

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!