The Rails Way


Obie Fernandez - 2007
    Now, for the first time, there s a comprehensive, authoritative guide to building production-quality software with Rails. Pioneering Rails developer Obie Fernandez and a team of experts illuminate the entire Rails API, along with the Ruby idioms, design approaches, libraries, and plug-ins that make Rails so valuable. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience, they address the real challenges development teams face, showing how to use Rails tools and best practices to maximize productivity and build polished applications users will enjoy. Using detailed code examples, Obie systematically covers Rails key capabilities and subsystems. He presents advanced programming techniques, introduces open source libraries that facilitate easy Rails adoption, and offers important insights into testing and production deployment. Dive deep into the Rails codebase together, discovering why Rails behaves as it does and how to make it behave the way you want it to. This book will help you Increase your productivity as a web developer Realize the overall joy of programming with Ruby on Rails Learn what s new in Rails 2.0 Drive design and protect long-term maintainability with TestUnit and RSpec Understand and manage complex program flow in Rails controllers Leverage Rails support for designing REST-compliant APIs Master sophisticated Rails routing concepts and techniques Examine and troubleshoot Rails routing Make the most of ActiveRecord object-relational mapping Utilize Ajax within your Rails applications Incorporate logins and authentication into your application Extend Rails with the best third-party plug-ins and write your own Integrate email services into your applications with ActionMailer Choose the right Rails production configurations Streamline deployment with Capistrano "

Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems


Sam Newman - 2014
    But developing these systems brings its own set of headaches. With lots of examples and practical advice, this book takes a holistic view of the topics that system architects and administrators must consider when building, managing, and evolving microservice architectures.Microservice technologies are moving quickly. Author Sam Newman provides you with a firm grounding in the concepts while diving into current solutions for modeling, integrating, testing, deploying, and monitoring your own autonomous services. You'll follow a fictional company throughout the book to learn how building a microservice architecture affects a single domain.Discover how microservices allow you to align your system design with your organization's goalsLearn options for integrating a service with the rest of your systemTake an incremental approach when splitting monolithic codebasesDeploy individual microservices through continuous integrationExamine the complexities of testing and monitoring distributed servicesManage security with user-to-service and service-to-service modelsUnderstand the challenges of scaling microservice architectures

Practical C Programming


Steve Oualline - 1992
    Style and debugging also play a tremendous part in creating programs that run well and are easy to maintain. This book teaches you not only the mechanics of programming, but also describes how to create programs that are easy to read, debug, and update.Practical rules are stressed. For example, there are fifteen precedence rules in C (&& comes before || comes before ?:). The practical programmer reduces these to two: Multiplication and division come before addition and subtraction.Contrary to popular belief, most programmers do not spend most of their time creating code. Most of their time is spent modifying someone else's code. This books shows you how to avoid the all-too-common obfuscated uses of C (and also to recognize these uses when you encounter them in existing programs) and thereby to leave code that the programmer responsible for maintenance does not have to struggle with. Electronic Archaeology, the art of going through someone else's code, is described.This third edition introduces popular Integrated Development Environments on Windows systems, as well as UNIX programming utilities, and features a large statistics-generating program to pull together the concepts and features in the language.

Programming in Lua


Roberto Ierusalimschy - 2001
    Currently, Lua is being used in areas ranging from embedded systems to Web development and is widely spread in the game industry, where knowledge of Lua is an indisputable asset. "Programming in Lua" is the official book about the language, giving a solid base for any programmer who wants to use Lua. Authored by Roberto Ierusalimschy, the chief architect of the language, it covers all aspects of Lua 5---from the basics to its API with C---explaining how to make good use of its features and giving numerous code examples. "Programming in Lua" is targeted at people with some programming background, but does not assume any prior knowledge about Lua or other scripting languages. This Second Edition updates the text to Lua 5.1 and brings substantial new material, including numerous new examples, a detailed explanation of the new module system, and two new chapters centered on multiple states and garbage collection.

Java Generics and Collections: Speed Up the Java Development Process


Maurice Naftalin - 2006
    Generics and the greatly expanded collection libraries have tremendously increased the power of Java 5 and Java 6. But they have also confused many developers who haven't known how to take advantage of these new features.Java Generics and Collections covers everything from the most basic uses of generics to the strangest corner cases. It teaches you everything you need to know about the collections libraries, so you'll always know which collection is appropriate for any given task, and how to use it.Topics covered include:• Fundamentals of generics: type parameters and generic methods• Other new features: boxing and unboxing, foreach loops, varargs• Subtyping and wildcards• Evolution not revolution: generic libraries with legacy clients and generic clients with legacy libraries• Generics and reflection• Design patterns for generics• Sets, Queues, Lists, Maps, and their implementations• Concurrent programming and thread safety with collections• Performance implications of different collectionsGenerics and the new collection libraries they inspired take Java to a new level. If you want to take your software development practice to a new level, this book is essential reading.Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, where his research focuses on the design of programming languages. He is a co-designer of GJ, work that became the basis for generics in Sun's Java 5.0.Maurice Naftalin is Technical Director at Morningside Light Ltd., a software consultancy in the United Kingdom. He has most recently served as an architect and mentor at NSB Retail Systems plc, and as the leader of the client development team of a major UK government social service system."A brilliant exposition of generics. By far the best book on the topic, it provides a crystal clear tutorial that starts with the basics and ends leaving the reader with a deep understanding of both the use and design of generics." Gilad Bracha, Java Generics Lead, Sun Microsystems

Seven Languages in Seven Weeks


Bruce A. Tate - 2010
    But if one per year is good, how about Seven Languages in Seven Weeks? In this book you'll get a hands-on tour of Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby. Whether or not your favorite language is on that list, you'll broaden your perspective of programming by examining these languages side-by-side. You'll learn something new from each, and best of all, you'll learn how to learn a language quickly. Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell. With Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, by Bruce A. Tate, you'll go beyond the syntax-and beyond the 20-minute tutorial you'll find someplace online. This book has an audacious goal: to present a meaningful exploration of seven languages within a single book. Rather than serve as a complete reference or installation guide, Seven Languages hits what's essential and unique about each language. Moreover, this approach will help teach you how to grok new languages. For each language, you'll solve a nontrivial problem, using techniques that show off the language's most important features. As the book proceeds, you'll discover the strengths and weaknesses of the languages, while dissecting the process of learning languages quickly--for example, finding the typing and programming models, decision structures, and how you interact with them. Among this group of seven, you'll explore the most critical programming models of our time. Learn the dynamic typing that makes Ruby, Python, and Perl so flexible and compelling. Understand the underlying prototype system that's at the heart of JavaScript. See how pattern matching in Prolog shaped the development of Scala and Erlang. Discover how pure functional programming in Haskell is different from the Lisp family of languages, including Clojure. Explore the concurrency techniques that are quickly becoming the backbone of a new generation of Internet applications. Find out how to use Erlang's let-it-crash philosophy for building fault-tolerant systems. Understand the actor model that drives concurrency design in Io and Scala. Learn how Clojure uses versioning to solve some of the most difficult concurrency problems. It's all here, all in one place. Use the concepts from one language to find creative solutions in another-or discover a language that may become one of your favorites.

Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud


Brendan Gregg - 2013
    Now, internationally renowned performance expert Brendan Gregg has brought together proven methodologies, tools, and metrics for analyzing and tuning even the most complex environments. Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud focuses on Linux(R) and Unix(R) performance, while illuminating performance issues that are relevant to all operating systems. You'll gain deep insight into how systems work and perform, and learn methodologies for analyzing and improving system and application performance. Gregg presents examples from bare-metal systems and virtualized cloud tenants running Linux-based Ubuntu(R), Fedora(R), CentOS, and the illumos-based Joyent(R) SmartOS(TM) and OmniTI OmniOS(R). He systematically covers modern systems performance, including the "traditional" analysis of CPUs, memory, disks, and networks, and new areas including cloud computing and dynamic tracing. This book also helps you identify and fix the "unknown unknowns" of complex performance: bottlenecks that emerge from elements and interactions you were not aware of. The text concludes with a detailed case study, showing how a real cloud customer issue was analyzed from start to finish. Coverage includes - Modern performance analysis and tuning: terminology, concepts, models, methods, and techniques - Dynamic tracing techniques and tools, including examples of DTrace, SystemTap, and perf - Kernel internals: uncovering what the OS is doing - Using system observability tools, interfaces, and frameworks - Understanding and monitoring application performance - Optimizing CPUs: processors, cores, hardware threads, caches, interconnects, and kernel scheduling - Memory optimization: virtual memory, paging, swapping, memory architectures, busses, address spaces, and allocators - File system I/O, including caching - Storage devices/controllers, disk I/O workloads, RAID, and kernel I/O - Network-related performance issues: protocols, sockets, interfaces, and physical connections - Performance implications of OS and hardware-based virtualization, and new issues encountered with cloud computing - Benchmarking: getting accurate results and avoiding common mistakes This guide is indispensable for anyone who operates enterprise or cloud environments: system, network, database, and web admins; developers; and other professionals. For students and others new to optimization, it also provides exercises reflecting Gregg's extensive instructional experience.

Version Control By Example


Eric Sink - 2011
    Topics covered include:Basic version control commands and conceptsIntroduction to Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS)Advanced branching workflowsStrengths and weaknesses of DVCS vs. centralized toolsBest practicesHow distributed version control works under the hoodFeaturing these open source version control tools:Apache SubversionMercurialGitVeracity

Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming


Marijn Haverbeke - 2010
    I loved the tutorial-style game-like program development. This book rekindled my earliest joys of programming. Plus, JavaScript!" —Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScriptJavaScript is the language of the Web, and it's at the heart of every modern website from the lowliest personal blog to the mighty Google Apps. Though it's simple for beginners to pick up and play with, JavaScript is not a toy—it's a flexible and complex language, capable of much more than the showy tricks most programmers use it for.Eloquent JavaScript goes beyond the cut-and-paste scripts of the recipe books and teaches you to write code that's elegant and effective. You'll start with the basics of programming, and learn to use variables, control structures, functions, and data structures. Then you'll dive into the real JavaScript artistry: higher-order functions, closures, and object-oriented programming.Along the way you'll learn to:Master basic programming techniques and best practices Harness the power of functional and object-oriented programming Use regular expressions to quickly parse and manipulate strings Gracefully deal with errors and browser incompatibilities Handle browser events and alter the DOM structure Most importantly, Eloquent JavaScript will teach you to express yourself in code with precision and beauty. After all, great programming is an art, not a science—so why settle for a killer app when you can create a masterpiece?

Professional Excel Development: The Definitive Guide to Developing Applications Using Microsoft Excel and VBA


Stephen Bullen - 2005
    It has become adevelopment platform in it own right. Applications written using Excel are partof many corporations' core suites of business-critical applications. In spite ofthis, Excel is too often thought of as a hobbyist's platform. While there arenumerous titles on Excel and VBA, until now there have been none thatprovide an overall explanation of how to develop professional-quality Excel-basedapplications. All three authors are professional Excel developers who runtheir own companies developing Excel-based apps for clients ranging fromindividuals to the largest multinational corporations. In this book they showhow anyone from power users to professional developers can increase thespeed and usefulness of their Excel-based apps.

The Rust Programming Language


Steve Klabnik
    This is the undisputed go-to guide to Rust, written by two members of the Rust core team, with feedback and contributions from 42 members of the community. The book assumes that you’ve written code in another programming language but makes no assumptions about which one, meaning the material is accessible and useful to developers from a wide variety of programming backgrounds.Known by the Rust community as "The Book," The Rust Programming Language includes concept chapters, where you’ll learn about a particular aspect of Rust, and project chapters, where you’ll apply what you’ve learned so far to build small programs.The Book opens with a quick hands-on project to introduce the basics then explores key concepts in depth, such as ownership, the type system, error handling, and fearless concurrency. Next come detailed explanations of Rust-oriented perspectives on topics like pattern matching, iterators, and smart pointers, with concrete examples and exercises--taking you from theory to practice.The Rust Programming Language will show you how to: Grasp important concepts unique to Rust like ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes Use Cargo, Rust’s built-in package manager, to build and maintain your code, including downloading and building dependencies Effectively use Rust’s zero-cost abstractions and employ your ownYou’ll learn to develop reliable code that’s speed and memory efficient, while avoiding the infamous and arcane programming pitfalls common at the systems level. When you need to dive down into lower-level control, this guide will show you how without taking on the customary risk of crashes or security holes and without requiring you to learn the fine points of a fickle toolchain.You’ll also learn how to create command line programs, build single- and multithreaded web servers, and much more.The Rust Programming Language fully embraces Rust’s potential to empower its users. This friendly and approachable guide will help you build not only your knowledge of Rust but also your ability to program with confidence in a wider variety of domains.

Perl Best Practices: Standards and Styles for Developing Maintainable Code


Damian Conway - 2005
    They aren't conscious of all the choices they make, like how they format their source, the names they use for variables, or the kinds of loops they use. They're focused entirely on problems they're solving, solutions they're creating, and algorithms they're implementing. So they write code in the way that seems natural, that happens intuitively, and that feels good.But if you're serious about your profession, intuition isn't enough. Perl Best Practices author Damian Conway explains that rules, conventions, standards, and practices not only help programmers communicate and coordinate with one another, they also provide a reliable framework for thinking about problems, and a common language for expressing solutions. This is especially critical in Perl, because the language is designed to offer many ways to accomplish the same task, and consequently it supports many incompatible dialects.With a good dose of Aussie humor, Dr. Conway (familiar to many in the Perl community) offers 256 guidelines on the art of coding to help you write better Perl code--in fact, the best Perl code you possibly can. The guidelines cover code layout, naming conventions, choice of data and control structures, program decomposition, interface design and implementation, modularity, object orientation, error handling, testing, and debugging.They're designed to work together to produce code that is clear, robust, efficient, maintainable, and concise, but Dr. Conway doesn't pretend that this is the one true universal and unequivocal set of best practices. Instead, Perl Best Practices offers coherent and widely applicable suggestions based on real-world experience of how code is actually written, rather than on someone's ivory-tower theories on how software ought to be created.Most of all, Perl Best Practices offers guidelines that actually work, and that many developers around the world are already using. Much like Perl itself, these guidelines are about helping you to get your job done, without getting in the way.Praise for Perl Best Practices from Perl community members:"As a manager of a large Perl project, I'd ensure that every member of my team has a copy of Perl Best Practices on their desk, and use it as the basis for an in-house style guide." -- Randal Schwartz"There are no more excuses for writing bad Perl programs. All levels of Perl programmer will be more productive after reading this book." -- Peter Scott"Perl Best Practices will be the next big important book in the evolution of Perl. The ideas and practices Damian lays down will help bring Perl out from under the embarrassing heading of "scripting languages". Many of us have known Perl is a real programming language, worthy of all the tasks normally delegated to Java and C++. With Perl Best Practices, Damian shows specifically how and why, so everyone else can see, too." -- Andy Lester"Damian's done what many thought impossible: show how to build large, maintainable Perl applications, while still letting Perl be the powerful, expressive language that programmers have loved for years." -- Bill Odom"Finally, a means to bring lasting order to the process and product of real Perl development teams." -- Andrew Sundstrom"Perl Best Practices provides a valuable education in how to write robust, maintainable P

Designing Data-Intensive Applications


Martin Kleppmann - 2015
    Difficult issues need to be figured out, such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. In addition, we have an overwhelming variety of tools, including relational databases, NoSQL datastores, stream or batch processors, and message brokers. What are the right choices for your application? How do you make sense of all these buzzwords?In this practical and comprehensive guide, author Martin Kleppmann helps you navigate this diverse landscape by examining the pros and cons of various technologies for processing and storing data. Software keeps changing, but the fundamental principles remain the same. With this book, software engineers and architects will learn how to apply those ideas in practice, and how to make full use of data in modern applications. Peer under the hood of the systems you already use, and learn how to use and operate them more effectively Make informed decisions by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of different tools Navigate the trade-offs around consistency, scalability, fault tolerance, and complexity Understand the distributed systems research upon which modern databases are built Peek behind the scenes of major online services, and learn from their architectures

Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job (Programmer to Programmer)


John Mongan - 2000
    This classic book uncovers what interviews are really like at America's top software and computer companies and provides you with the tools to succeed in any situation. The authors take you step-by-step through new problems and complex brainteasers they were asked during recent technical interviews. 50 interview scenarios are presented along with in-depth analysis of the possible solutions. The problem-solving process is clearly illustrated so you'll be able to easily apply what you've learned during crunch time. You'll also find expert tips on what questions to ask, how to approach a problem, and how to recover if you become stuck. All of this will help you ace the interview and get the job you want.What you will learn from this bookTips for effectively completing the job application Ways to prepare for the entire programming interview process How to find the kind of programming job that fits you best Strategies for choosing a solution and what your approach says about you How to improve your interviewing skills so that you can respond to any question or situation Techniques for solving knowledge-based problems, logic puzzles, and programming problems Who this book is for This book is for programmers and developers applying for jobs in the software industry or in IT departments of major corporations.Wrox Beginning guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and technologies easier than you think, providing a structured, tutorial format that will guide you through all the techniques involved.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs


Harold Abelson - 1984
    This long-awaited revision contains changes throughout the text. There are new implementations of most of the major programming systems in the book, including the interpreters and compilers, and the authors have incorporated many small changes that reflect their experience teaching the course at MIT since the first edition was published. A new theme has been introduced that emphasizes the central role played by different approaches to dealing with time in computational models: objects with state, concurrent programming, functional programming and lazy evaluation, and nondeterministic programming. There are new example sections on higher-order procedures in graphics and on applications of stream processing in numerical programming, and many new exercises. In addition, all the programs have been reworked to run in any Scheme implementation that adheres to the IEEE standard.