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

    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.

    It features a novel way of teaching interactive designers how to create and improve their designs to incorporate the highest degree of fun. As the book shows, designing for fun is all about making interactive products like games highly entertaining, engaging, and addictive. The book's unique approach of providing a highly visual storyboard approach combined with a narrative on the art and practice of designing for fun is sure to be a hit with game and interactive designers.At first glance A Theory of Fun for Game Design is a book that will truly inspire and challenge game designers to think in new ways; however, its universal message will influence designers from all walks of life. This book captures the real essence of what drives us to seek out products and experiences that are truly fun and entertaining. The author masterfully presents his engaging theory by showing readers how many designs are lacking because they are predictable and not engaging enough. He then explains how great designers use different types of elements in new ways to make designs more fun and compelling. Anyone who is interested in design will enjoy how the book works on two levels--as a quick inspiration guide to game design, or as an informative discussion that details the insightful thinking from a great mind in the game industry.

    Tech companies in general lack the experience, tools, texts, and frameworks to do it well. And the handful of books that share tips and tricks of engineering management don t explain how to supervise employees in the face of growth and change.In this book, author Camille Fournier takes you through the stages of technical management, from mentoring interns to working with the senior staff. You ll get actionable advice for approaching various obstacles in your path, whether you re a new manager, a mentor, or a more experienced leader looking for fresh advice. Pick up this book and learn how to become a better manager and leader in your organization. * Discover how to manage small teams and large/multi-level teams * Understand how to build and bootstrap a unifying culture in teams * Deal with people problems and learn how to mentor other managers and new leaders * Learn how to manage yourself: avoid common pitfalls that challenge many leaders * Obtain several practices that you can incorporate and practice along the way

    Corporations & government agencies around the world are pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail—human-level intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful & more alien than we can imagine. Thru profiles of tech visionaries, industry watchdogs & groundbreaking AI systems, James Barrat's Our Final Invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? Will they allow us to?

    pThe benefits of our recently arrived-at state of connectivity have been myriad from the ease with which it has been possible to buy a new house to the convenience of borrowing and investing money profitably. But the luxuries of the connected age have taken on a momentum all of their own. By counter-intuitively anatomizing how being overconnected tends to create systems of positive feedback that have largely negative consequences, Davidow explains everything from the recent Subprime mortgage crisis to the meltdown of Iceland, from the loss of people s privacy to the spectacular fall of the stock market. All because we were so miraculously wired together.pExplaining how such symptoms of Internet connection as unforeseeable accidents and how thought contagions acted to accelerate the downfall and make us permanently vulnerable to catastrophe, Davidow places our recent experience in historical perspective and offers a set of practical steps to minimize similar disasters in the future.pWilliam Davidow is a successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist, philanthropist, and author, and as a senior vice-president of Intel Corporation, he was responsible for the design of the Intel microprocessor chip. He has written three previous books Marketing High Technology (The Free Press, 1986) and Total Customer Service (Harper, 1989), both with Bro Uttal, and The Virtual Corporation" (Harper, 1992), with Michael Malone as well as columns for Forbes and numerous op-ed pieces. He graduated from Dartmouth College, has a masters degree from the California Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. He serves on the boards of Cal Tech, the California Nature Conservancy, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

    In each essay, contributors present a notable software architecture, and analyze what makes it innovative and ideal for its purpose. Some of the engineers in this book reveal how they developed a specific project, including decisions they faced and tradeoffs they made. Others take a step back to investigate how certain architectural aspects have influenced computing as a whole. With this book, you'll discover:How Facebook's architecture is the basis for a data-centric application ecosystem The effect of Xen's well-designed architecture on the way operating systems evolve How community processes within the KDE project help software architectures evolve from rough sketches to beautiful systems How creeping featurism has helped GNU Emacs gain unanticipated functionality The magic behind the Jikes RVM self-optimizable, self-hosting runtime Design choices and building blocks that made Tandem the choice platform in high-availability environments for over two decades Differences and similarities between object-oriented and functional architectural views How architectures can affect the software's evolution and the developers' engagement Go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to design elegant software architecture, and how it can shape the way you approach your own projects, with Beautiful Architecture.

    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.

    The way that we make decisions as humans affects everything from our emotions to our security. Hackers, since the beginning of time, have figured out ways to exploit that decision making process and get you to take an action not in your best interest. This new Second Edition has been updated with the most current methods used by sharing stories, examples, and scientific study behind how those decisions are exploited.Networks and systems can be hacked, but they can also be protected; when the "system" in question is a human being, there is no software to fall back on, no hardware upgrade, no code that can lock information down indefinitely. Human nature and emotion is the secret weapon of the malicious social engineering, and this book shows you how to recognize, predict, and prevent this type of manipulation by taking you inside the social engineer's bag of tricks.Examine the most common social engineering tricks used to gain access Discover which popular techniques generally don't work in the real world Examine how our understanding of the science behind emotions and decisions can be used by social engineers Learn how social engineering factors into some of the biggest recent headlines Learn how to use these skills as a professional social engineer and secure your company Adopt effective counter-measures to keep hackers at bay By working from the social engineer's playbook, you gain the advantage of foresight that can help you protect yourself and others from even their best efforts. Social Engineering gives you the inside information you need to mount an unshakeable defense.

    Part One focuses on the exponential technologies that are disrupting today’s Fortune 500 companies and enabling upstart entrepreneurs to go from "I’ve got an idea" to "I run a billion-dollar company" far faster than ever before. The authors provide exceptional insight into the power of 3D printing, artificial intelligence, robotics, networks and sensors, and synthetic biology. Part Two of the book focuses on the Psychology of Bold, drawing on insights from billionaire entrepreneurs Larry Page, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos. In addition, Diamandis reveals his entrepreneurial secrets garnered from building fifteen companies, including such audacious ventures as Singularity University, XPRIZE, Planetary Resources, and Human Longevity, Inc. Finally, Bold closes with a look at the best practices that allow anyone to leverage today’s hyper-connected crowd like never before. Here, the authors teach how to design and use incentive competitions, launch million-dollar crowdfunding campaigns to tap into ten’s of billions of dollars of capital, and finally how to build communities—armies of exponentially enabled individuals willing and able to help today’s entrepreneurs make their boldest dreams come true.Bold is both a manifesto and a manual. It is today’s exponential entrepreneur’s go-to resource on the use of emerging technologies, thinking at scale, and the awesome power of crowd-powered tools.

    This expanded and completely updated edition covers the why of network design, focusing not just the specifications comprising today's systems but how key technologies and protocols actually work in the real world to solve specific problems. It is the only introductory computer networking book written by authors who have had first-hand experience with many of the protocols discussed in the text, who have actually designed some of them as well, and who are still actively designing the computer networks today.The book makes less use of computer code to explain protocols than earlier editions. Moreover, this new edition shifts the focus somewhat higher in the protocol stack where there is generally more innovative and exciting work going on at the application and session layers than at the link and physical layers. Other new features are: increased accessibility by clearly separating the advanced material from more fundamental via special headings and boxed features; the material is structured in such a way as to make it easier to teach top-down. Furthermore, the book outstrips the competitors in offering a more robust ancillary package for student and instructor support. The text is complemented with figures as well as links to networking resources on the Web and links to author-created materials on author-maintained Web site.Computer Networks, Fourth Edition, will be an invaluable resource for networking professionals and upper level undergraduate and graduate students in CS, EE, and CSE programs.

    Full of insights, arguments and philosophical perspectives, the book covers an amazing array of topics. Beginning in antiquity with Democritus, it progresses through logic and set theory, computability and complexity theory, quantum computing, cryptography, the information content of quantum states and the interpretation of quantum mechanics. There are also extended discussions about time travel, Newcomb's Paradox, the anthropic principle and the views of Roger Penrose. Aaronson's informal style makes this fascinating book accessible to readers with scientific backgrounds, as well as students and researchers working in physics, computer science, mathematics and philosophy.

    This concise introduction shows you how OAuth provides a single authorization technology across numerous APIs on the Web, so you can securely access users’ data—such as user profiles, photos, videos, and contact lists—to improve their experience of your application.Through code examples, step-by-step instructions, and use-case examples, you’ll learn how to apply OAuth 2.0 to your server-side web application, client-side app, or mobile app. Find out what it takes to access social graphs, store data in a user’s online filesystem, and perform many other tasks.Understand OAuth 2.0’s role in authentication and authorizationLearn how OAuth’s Authorization Code flow helps you integrate data from different business applicationsDiscover why native mobile apps use OAuth differently than mobile web appsUse OpenID Connect and eliminate the need to build your own authentication system

    Includes a compact disc which is playable on CD-ROM and audio CD players.

    Already used by people and companies around the world, many forecast that Bitcoin could radically transform the global economy. The value of a bitcoin has soared from less than a dollar in 2011 to well over $1000 in 2013, with many spikes and crashes along the way. The rise in value has brought Bitcoin into the public eye, but the cryptocurrency still confuses many people. Bitcoin for the Befuddled covers everything you need to know about Bitcoin—what it is, how it works, and how to acquire, store, and use bitcoins safely and securely. You'll also learn about Bitcoin's history, its complex cryptography, and its potential impact on trade and commerce. The book includes a humorous, full-color comic explaining Bitcoin concepts, plus a glossary of terms for easy reference.