Not to worry: This book is the one place you can turn to find quick, non-intimidating, excellent design help. In The Non-Designer's Design Book, 2nd Edition, best-selling author Robin Williams turns her attention to the basic principles of good design and typography. All you have to do is follow her clearly explained concepts, and you'll begin producing more sophisticated, professional, and interesting pages immediately. Humor-infused, jargon-free prose interspersed with design exercises, quizzes, illustrations, and dozens of examples make learning a snap—which is just what audiences have come to expect from this best-selling author.

    'Programming The World Wide Web', written by bestselling author, Robert Sebesta, provides a comprehensive introduction to the programming tools and skills required for building and maintaining server sites on the Web.

    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.

    Good site defense can make or break the customer experience. This book shows the right (and wrong) ways to get defensive, offers guidelines to prevent errors and rescue customers if a breakdown occurs.It also shows you how to evaluate and improve your own site's defensive design.

    Anderson takes a fresh approach to designing sites and interactions based on the stages of seduction. This beautifully designed book examines what motivates people to act.Topics include: AESTHETICS, BEAUTY, AND BEHAVIOR: Why do striking visuals grab our attention? And how do emotions affect judgment and behavior? PLAYFUL SEDUCTION: How do you create playful engagements during the moment? Why are serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other delights critical to a good experience? THE SUBTLE ART OF SEDUCTION: How do you put people at ease through clear and suggestive language? What are some subtle ways to influence behavior and get people to move from intent to action? THE GAME OF SEDUCTION: How do you continue motivating people long after the first encounter? Are there lessons to be gained from learning theories or game design? Principles from psychology are found throughout the book, along with dozens of examples showing how these techniques have been applied with great success. In addition, each section includes interviews with influential web and interaction designers.

    This easy-to-follow guide is illustrated with lots of examples, and leads readers through the process of creating great websites from start to finish using HTML5 and CSS3.It also features details on all the new HTML5 and CSS3 elements and features information on the current level of browser support advice for creating great experiences for all users thanks to progressive enhancement.

    The 2nd edition is now full-color throughout and is completely updated and revised with the latest tips & tricks. This book will show you how to:Construct robust CSS layouts that work every time. Create sleek drop-down menus using only CSS. Build a professional tabbed navigation system. Replace image-based navigation with low-fat CSS lists. Design smarter, more usable CSS-flavored web forms. Use rounded corners minus the bloated HTML. Allow your visitors to select their preferred look and feel. Let the W3C validator do your debugging. Reduce the burden of site maintenance and updates. ... along with 92 other solutions to common questions and problems. The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks is ideal for experienced Web designers who would like to add sparkle to their existing designs, as well as newcomers who want to learn Web design the right way the first time.The book is written so that it can be read cover to cover, or referred to like a cookbook with 101 different recipies for your Website. It's written in an easy-to-follow, consistent format that's well illustrated with plenty of full color screenshots and code examples, providing quick visual cues. If you hate wading through dry academic-style texts, then the illustrations and examples throughout this book will suit you

    You can now easily extend the framework, change its behavior, and replace whole components to bend it to your will, all without messy hacks. This pioneering book is the first resource that deep dives into the new Rails 3 APIs and shows you how use them to write better web applications and make your day-to-day work with Rails more productive. Rails Core developer Jose Valim guides you through seven different tutorials, each of them using test-driven development to build a new Rails extension or application that solves common problems with these new APIs. You will understand how the Rails rendering stack works and customize it to read templates from the database while you learn how to mimic Active Record behavior, like validations, in any other object. You will find out how to write faster, leaner controllers, and you'll learn how to mix Sinatra applications into your Rails apps, so you can choose the most appropriate tool for the job. In addition, you will improve your productivity by customizing generators and responders. This book will help you understand Rails 3's inner workings, including generators, template handlers, internationalization, routing, and responders. With the knowledge you'll gain, you'll be ready to tackle complicated projects more easily than ever before, creating solutions that are well-tested, modular, and easy to maintain.

    In this book, you'll learn how to become an entrepreneur, driving your career in the direction of your choosing. You'll learn how to build your software development career step by step, following the same path that you would follow if you were building, marketing, and selling a product. After all, your skills themselves are a product. The choices you make about which technologies to focus on and which business domains to master have at least as much impact on your success as your technical knowledge itself--don't let those choices be accidental. We'll walk through all aspects of the decision-making process, so you can ensure that you're investing your time and energy in the right areas. You'll develop a structured plan for keeping your mind engaged and your skills fresh. You'll learn how to assess your skills in terms of where they fit on the value chain, driving you away from commodity skills and toward those that are in high demand. Through a mix of high-level, thought-provoking essays and tactical "Act on It" sections, you will come away with concrete plans you can put into action immediately. You'll also get a chance to read the perspectives of several highly successful members of our industry from a variety of career paths. As with any product or service, if nobody knows what you're selling, nobody will buy. We'll walk through the often-neglected world of marketing, and you'll create a plan to market yourself both inside your company and to the industry in general. Above all, you'll see how you can set the direction of your career, leading to a more fulfilling and remarkable professional life.

    You'll systematically discover each technology in the MEAN stack as you build up an application one layer at a time, just as you'd do in a real project.Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.About the TechnologyTraditional web dev stacks use a different programming language in every layer, resulting in a complex mashup of code and frameworks. Together, the MongoDB database, the Express and AngularJS frameworks, and Node.js constitute the MEAN stack--a powerful platform that uses only one language, top to bottom: JavaScript. Developers and businesses love it because it's scalable and cost-effective. End users love it because the apps created with it are fast and responsive. It's a win-win-win!About the BookGetting MEAN with Mongo, Express, Angular, and Node teaches you how to develop web applications using the MEAN stack. First, you'll create the skeleton of a static site in Express and Node, and then push it up to a live web server. Next, you'll add a MongoDB database and build an API before using Angular to handle data manipulation and application logic in the browser. Finally you'll add an authentication system to the application, using the whole stack. When you finish, you'll have all the skills you need to build a dynamic data-driven web application.What's InsideFull-stack development using JavaScriptResponsive web techniquesEverything you need to get started with MEANBest practices for efficiency and reusabilityAbout the ReaderReaders should have some web development experience. This book is based on MongoDB 2, Express 4, Angular 1, and Node.js 4.About the AuthorSimon Holmes has been a full-stack developer since the late 1990s and runs Full Stack Training Ltd.Table of ContentsPART 1 SETTING THE BASELINEIntroducing full-stack developmentDesigning a MEAN stack architecturePART 2 BUILDING A NODE WEB APPLICATIONCreating and setting up a MEAN projectBuilding a static site with Node and ExpressBuilding a data model with MongoDB and MongooseWriting a REST API: Exposing the MongoDB database to the applicationConsuming a REST API: Using an API from inside ExpressPART 3 ADDING A DYNAMIC FRONT END WITH ANGULARAdding Angular components to an Express applicationBuilding a single-page application with Angular: FoundationsBuilding an SPA with Angular: The next levelPART 4 MANAGING AUTHENTICATION AND USER SESSIONSAuthenticating users, managing sessions, and securing APIsAPPENDIXESInstalling the stackInstalling and preparing the supporting castDealing with all of the viewsReintroducing JavaScript - available online only

    It covers every aspect of call center management - service level, forecasting, scheduling, resource calculations, metrics, quality, budgeting, reporting, strategy and key enabling technologies - in a format that is well-organized and easy to understand. The updated and expanded edition contains important new information, including: Trends in customer expectations; Best practices in performance reports and objectives; How to create an effective customer access strategy appropriate for today's environment; How to manage multichannel contacts with quality; New technologies, and how they're changing customer contact services; Improving the call center's strategic impact and ROI; New case studies and examples from Wells Fargo, Starbucks, Aetna and many others.

    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!

    For years, Joel Spolsky has done exactly this at www.joelonsoftware.com. Now, for the first time, you can own a collection of the most important essays from his site in one book, with exclusive commentary and new insights from joel.

    You can think of this problem as a variant of the well known "telephone game", where some trivial rumor is repeated from one person to the next until it has become distorted beyond recognition and blown up out of all proportion.Unfortunately, the objects of this telephone game are generally considered cornerstone truths of the discipline, to the point that their acceptance now seems to hinder further progress.In this short ebook, we will take a look at some of those "ground truths": the claimed 10x variation in productivity between developers; the "software crisis"; the cost-of-change curve; the "cone of uncertainty"; and more. We'll hone our scholarship skills by looking up the original source for these ideas and taking a deep dive in the history of their development. We'll assess the real weight of the evidence behind these ideas.And we'll confront the scary prospect of moving the state of the art forward in a discipline that has had the ground kicked from under it.

    Weinberg adds new insights and highlights the similarities and differences between now and then. Using a conversational style that invites the reader to join him, Weinberg reunites with some of his most insightful writings on the human side of software engineering.Topics include egoless programming, intelligence, psychological measurement, personality factors, motivation, training, social problems on large projects, problem-solving ability, programming language design, team formation, the programming environment, and much more.Dorset House Publishing is proud to make this important text available to new generations of programmers -- and to encourage readers of the first edition to return to its valuable lessons.