Written by the developer of the Ruby project Prawn, this concise book explains how to design beautiful APIs and domain-specific languages with Ruby, as well as how to work with functional programming ideas and techniques that can simplify your code and make you more productive. You'll learn how to write code that's readable, expressive, and much more.Ruby Best Practices will help you:Understand the secret powers unlocked by Ruby's code blocks Learn how to bend Ruby code without breaking it, such as mixing in modules on the fly Discover the ins and outs of testing and debugging, and how to design for testability Learn to write faster code by keeping things simple Develop strategies for text processing and file management, including regular expressions Understand how and why things can go wrong Reduce cultural barriers by leveraging Ruby's multilingual capabilities This book also offers you comprehensive chapters on driving code through tests, designing APIs, and project maintenance. Learn how to make the most of this rich, beautiful language with Ruby Best Practices.

    This is why it is imperative to build systems that are flexible and can adapt to changing requirements, both expected and (more often) unexpected. That is why I've written this book.From 2009 to 2014, I traveled the world working with software developers, both individually and in teams, to improve their craft. Primarily, I did this through a training workshop format called coderetreat. Over those years, I had the opportunity to watch 1000's of pairs of programmers work on exactly the same system, Conway's Game of Life. As time progressed, I began to see patterns arise. I noticed common techniques and designs that spanned languages and companies and crossed national borders.As co-founder and a facilitator of coderetreat workshops, I had the unique opportunity to provide feedback, both direct and through questions, on improving the act of writing adaptable, simple code. Through the day, we worked on improving our ability to make good choices around the minute-by-minute decisions made while writing code.This book is about those things I learned from watching these 1000's of pairs working on the same problem. It contains a large part of the feedback that I provide during a typical coderetreat. The primary focus is on the thought process behind refactoring, and how that is influenced by the 4 rules of simple design.This book is not about Conway's Game of Life. Instead, it uses its domain as a backdrop to discuss the thoughts and ideas behind the 4 rules of simple design. It focuses on the small decisions made while designing your code with the goal of building robust, adaptable codebases that can stand the test of time.

    But when his team more than doubled the conversion rates for a wide range of sites, they identified simple yet powerful solutions involving design, copy, appropriate analysis, classic optimization techniques, and targeted testing. You'll find the fixes easy to implement, and they're all right here.Understand the essentials - your market, your proposition, and your delivery.Create a site that is seen by the right people, provides a compelling experience, and generates the desired action.Learn how to use testing to improve your site's conversion rate.Discover the holistic nature of web site optimization and why multiplicity matters.Examine dozens of simple techniques for building traffic, engaging your audience, and crafting effective calls to action. Combine creativity with analysis for the best possible results. Ben Hunt is Principal Consultant for Scratchmedia Ltd. He operates webdesignfromscratch.com, which provides tutorials and advice to over 120,000 web developers each month. Ben has been designing, coding, and producing web sites for clients worldwide for more than 15 years, and is considered a leader in the web usability industry.Forewords by Ken McCarthy, founder of the System Seminar, and Drayton Bird, Drayton Bird Associates.

    The quick reference section organizes all the core functions of PHP alphabetically so you can find what you need easily; the slim size means you can keep it handy beside your keyboard for those times when you want to look up a function quickly without closing what you're doing.This valuable little book provides an authoritative overview of PHP packed into a pocket-sized guide that's easy to take anywhere. It is also the ideal companion for O'Reilly's comprehensive book on PHP, Programming PHP.The PHP Pocket Reference an indispensable (and inexpensive) tool for any serious PHP coder.

    Indeed, that's what computers are for. You can enlist your own computer to automate all of your project's repetitive tasks, ranging from individual builds and running unit tests through to full product release, customer deployment, and monitoring the system.Many teams try to do these tasks by hand. That's usually a really bad idea: people just aren't as good at repetitive tasks as machines. You run the risk of doing it differently the one time it matters, on one machine but not another, or doing it just plain wrong. But the computer can do these tasks for you the same way, time after time, without bothering you. You can transform these labor-intensive, boring and potentially risky chores into automatic, background processes that just work.In this eagerly anticipated book, you'll find a variety of popular, open-source tools to help automate your project. With this book, you will learn: How to make your build processes accurate, reliable, fast, and easy. How to build complex systems at the touch of a button. How to build, test, and release software automatically, with no human intervention. Technologies and tools available for automation: which to use and when. Tricks and tips from the masters (do you know how to have your cell phone tell you that your build just failed?) You'll find easy-to-implement recipes to automate your Java project, using the same popular style as the rest of our Jolt Productivity Award-winning Starter Kit books. Armed with plenty of examples and concrete, pragmatic advice, you'll find it's easy to get started and reap the benefits of modern software development. You can begin to enjoy pragmatic, automatic, unattended software production that's reliable and accurate every time.

    Keagan, her sweet, sensitive boyfriend, is happy to follow her wherever she may lead. Reese is an ace/aro visual artist with plans to travel the world. Santiago is off to Stanford on a diving scholarship, with very real Olympic hopes. And Bellamy? Physics genius Bellamy is admitted to MIT—but the student loan she’d been counting on is denied when it turns out her estranged father—one Robert Foster—is loaded.Nari isn’t about to let her friend’s dreams be squashed by a deadbeat billionaire, so she hatches a plan to steal just enough from Foster to allow Bellamy to achieve her goals.

    Along the way, we encounter black holes, turtles, snakes, dragons, axe-sharpening, and yak-shaving—and take a guided tour through the theories and methods, both brilliant and misguided, that litter the history of software development, from the famous ‘mythical man-month’ to Extreme Programming. Not just for technophiles but for anyone captivated by the drama of invention, Dreaming in Code offers a window into both the information age and the workings of the human mind.

    But they've often been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize.Author Claire L. Evans finally gives these unsung female heroes their due with her social history of the Broad Band, the women who made the internet what it is today. Learn from Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, who wove numbers into the first program for a mechanical computer in 1842. Seek inspiration from Grace Hopper, the tenacious mathematician who democratized computing by leading the charge for machine-independent programming languages after World War II. Meet Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, the one-woman Google who kept the earliest version of the Internet online, and Stacy Horn, who ran one of the first-ever social networks on a shoestring out of her New York City apartment in the 1980s. Evans shows us how these women built and colored the technologies we can't imagine life without.Join the ranks of the pioneers who defied social convention and the longest odds to become database poets, information-wranglers, hypertext dreamers, and glass ceiling-shattering dot com-era entrepreneurs.

    It listens to everyone around you and tells you if they're lying. When the app goes viral, its teenage creator, Jarli, becomes famous overnight. But being a celebrity can be dangerous. Especially when you've just exposed everyone's deepest, darkest secrets. Now everyone is out to get Jarli. Kids at school. Teachers. The police. Even his own family. And the secret network of criminals based in Kelton have just added Jarli to their hit list. The TRUTH doesn't always set you free...

    To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok.In the first-ever account of Bayes' rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it. She traces its discovery by an amateur mathematician in the 1740s through its development into roughly its modern form by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years—at the same time that practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information (Alan Turing's role in breaking Germany's Enigma code during World War II), and explains how the advent of off-the-shelf computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes' rule is used everywhere from DNA de-coding to Homeland Security.Drawing on primary source material and interviews with statisticians and other scientists, The Theory That Would Not Die is the riveting account of how a seemingly simple theorem ignited one of the greatest controversies of all time.

    But not all know how to craft great code - code that is well written and easy to understand. Code Craft teaches programmers how to move beyond writing correct code to writing great code. The book covers code writing concerns, including code presentation style, variable naming, error handling, and security; and the wider issues of programming in the real world, such as good teamwork, development processes, and documentation. Code Craft presents language-agnostic advice that is relevant to all developers, from an author with loads of practical experience. A Q&A section at the end of each chapter helps readers to review the material and makes the book suited for academic use as well.

    He needed a way to keep track of software development over time – whatever he was thinking about or working on. He researched subjects he found interesting, then documented his research with a public blog post, which he could easily find and refer to later. Over time, increasing numbers of blog visitors found the posts helpful, relevant and interesting. Now, approximately 100,000 readers visit the blog per day and nearly as many comment and interact on the site.In “How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome Instead” you’ll find a thought-provoking and entertaining collection of Jeff’s writings on several programming-related topics.

    We'll cover resources, messages, cookies, and authentication protocols. We'll look at how HTTP clients can use persistent and parallel connections to improve performance,and see how the web scales to meet demand using cache headers andproxy servers. By the end of the book you will have the knowledge tobuild better web applications and web services.

    Relentlessly practical, the book delivers insight, not documentation, to teach developers what they need to know to build the next generation of SOAs.After explaining the advantages of service-orientation for application design and teaching the basics of how to develop SOAs using WCF, the book shows how you can take advantage of built-in features such as service hosting, instance management, asynchronous calls, synchronization, reliability, transaction management, disconnected queued calls and security to build best in class applications. "Programming WCF Services" focuses on the rationale behind particular design decisions, often shedding light on poorly-documented and little-understood aspects of SOA development. Developers and architects will learn not only the "how" of WCF programming, but also relevant design guidelines, best practices, and pitfalls. Original techniques and utilities provided by the author throughout the book go well beyond anything that can be found in conventional sources.Based on experience and insight gained while taking part in the strategic design of WCF and working with the team that implemented it, "Programming WCF Services" provides experienced working professionals with the definitive work on WCF. Not only will this book make you a WCF expert, it will make you a better software engineer. It's the Rosetta Stone of WCF.

    The content assumes no previous programming experience, other than knowing how to create a basic web page in HTML & CSS. You'll learn how to achieve techniques seen on many popular websites (such as adding animation, tabbed panels, content sliders, form validation, interactive galleries, and sorting data)..Introduces core programming concepts in JavaScript and jQueryUses clear descriptions, inspiring examples, and easy-to-follow diagramsTeaches you how to create scripts from scratch, and understand the thousands of JavaScripts, JavaScript APIs, and jQuery plugins that are available on the webDemonstrates the latest practices in progressive enhancement, cross-browser compatibility, and when you may be better off using CSS3If you're looking to create more enriching web experiences and express your creativity through code, then this is the book for you.This book is also available as part of a set in hardcover - Web Design with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery, 9781119038634 - and in softcover - Web Design with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery, 9781118907443.