Book picks similar to
Best of Game Programming Gems by Mark DeLoura


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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

The Psychology of Computer Programming


Gerald M. Weinberg - 1971
    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.

GURPS Cyperpunk: High-Tech Low-Life Roleplaying


Lloyd Blankenship - 1990
    -- The book that was confiscated by the Secret Service because they thought it contained hacking secrets (It doesn't)-- Nominated for the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Supplement.

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering


Frederick P. Brooks Jr. - 1975
    With a blend of software engineering facts and thought-provoking opinions, Fred Brooks offers insight for anyone managing complex projects. These essays draw from his experience as project manager for the IBM System/360 computer family and then for OS/360, its massive software system. Now, 45 years after the initial publication of his book, Brooks has revisited his original ideas and added new thoughts and advice, both for readers already familiar with his work and for readers discovering it for the first time.The added chapters contain (1) a crisp condensation of all the propositions asserted in the original book, including Brooks' central argument in The Mythical Man-Month: that large programming projects suffer management problems different from small ones due to the division of labor; that the conceptual integrity of the product is therefore critical; and that it is difficult but possible to achieve this unity; (2) Brooks' view of these propositions a generation later; (3) a reprint of his classic 1986 paper "No Silver Bullet"; and (4) today's thoughts on the 1986 assertion, "There will be no silver bullet within ten years."

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses


Eric Ries - 2011
    But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on "validated learning," rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it's too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work


Scott Berkun - 2013
    The force behind WordPress.com is a convention-defying company called Automattic, Inc., whose 120 employees work from anywhere in the world they wish, barely use email, and launch improvements to their products dozens of times a day. With a fraction of the resources of Google, Amazon, or Facebook, they have a similar impact on the future of the Internet. How is this possible? What's different about how they work, and what can other companies learn from their methods?To find out, former Microsoft veteran Scott Berkun worked as a manager at WordPress.com, leading a team of young programmers developing new ideas. "The Year Without Pants" shares the secrets of WordPress.com's phenomenal success from the inside. Berkun's story reveals insights on creativity, productivity, and leadership from the kind of workplace that might be in everyone's future.Offers a fast-paced and entertaining insider's account of how an amazing, powerful organization achieves impressive resultsIncludes vital lessons about work culture and managing creativityWritten by author and popular blogger Scott Berkun (scottberkun.com)"The Year Without Pants" shares what every organization can learn from the world-changing ideas for the future of work at the heart of Automattic's success.

UML 2 and the Unified Process: Practical Object-Oriented Analysis and Design


Jim Arlow - 2001
    Even for people not working with the Unified Process, the book is still of great use. UML 2 and the Unified Process, Second Edition is a must-read for every UML 2 beginner and a helpful guide and reference for the experienced practitioner."--Roland Leibundgut, Technical Director, Zuehlke Engineering Ltd."This book is a good starting point for organizations and individuals who are adopting UP and need to understand how to provide visualization of the different aspects needed to satisfy it. "--Eric Naiburg, Market Manager, Desktop Products, IBM Rational SoftwareThis thoroughly revised edition provides an indispensable and practical guide to the complex process of object-oriented analysis and design using UML 2. It describes how the process of OO analysis and design fits into the software development lifecycle as defined by the Unified Process (UP). UML 2 and the Unified Process contains a wealth of practical, powerful, and useful techniques that you can apply immediately. As you progress through the text, you will learn OO analysis and design techniques, UML syntax and semantics, and the relevant aspects of the UP. The book provides you with an accurate and succinct summary of both UML and UP from the point of view of the OO analyst and designer.This book providesChapter roadmaps, detailed diagrams, and margin notes allowing you to focus on your needs Outline summaries for each chapter, making it ideal for revision, and a comprehensive index that can be used as a reference New to this edition:Completely revised and updated for UML 2 syntax Easy to understand explanations of the new UML 2 semantics More real-world examples A new section on the Object Constraint Language (OCL) Introductory material on the OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA) The accompanying website providesA complete example of a simple e-commerce system Open source tools for requirements engineering and use case modeling Industrial-strength UML course materials based on the book

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 Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact


Edmond Lau - 2015
    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.

The Nature of Software Development


Ron Jeffries - 2015
    

Working Effectively with Legacy Code


Michael C. Feathers - 2004
    This book draws on material Michael created for his renowned Object Mentor seminars, techniques Michael has used in mentoring to help hundreds of developers, technical managers, and testers bring their legacy systems under control. The topics covered include: Understanding the mechanics of software change, adding features, fixing bugs, improving design, optimizing performance Getting legacy code into a test harness Writing tests that protect you against introducing new problems Techniques that can be used with any language or platform, with examples in Java, C++, C, and C# Accurately identifying where code changes need to be made Coping with legacy systems that aren't object-oriented Handling applications that don't seem to have any structureThis book also includes a catalog of twenty-four dependency-breaking techniques that help you work with program elements in isolation and make safer changes.

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.

The Legend of Zelda (Legends of Localization, #1)


Clyde Mandelin - 2015
    Because it's a long way from Japan to the West, even for a legendary hero.

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10


Nick MontfortMark Sample - 2012
    The authors of this collaboratively written book treat code not as merely functional but as a text—in the case of 10 PRINT, a text that appeared in many different printed sources—that yields a story about its making, its purpose, its assumptions, and more. They consider randomness and regularity in computing and art, the maze in culture, the popular BASIC programming language, and the highly influential Commodore 64 computer.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master


Andy Hunt - 1999
    It covers topics ranging from personal responsibility and career development to architectural techniques for keeping your code flexible and easy to adapt and reuse. Read this book, and you'll learn how toFight software rot; Avoid the trap of duplicating knowledge; Write flexible, dynamic, and adaptable code; Avoid programming by coincidence; Bullet-proof your code with contracts, assertions, and exceptions; Capture real requirements; Test ruthlessly and effectively; Delight your users; Build teams of pragmatic programmers; and Make your developments more precise with automation. Written as a series of self-contained sections and filled with entertaining anecdotes, thoughtful examples, and interesting analogies, The Pragmatic Programmer illustrates the best practices and major pitfalls of many different aspects of software development. Whether you're a new coder, an experienced programmer, or a manager responsible for software projects, use these lessons daily, and you'll quickly see improvements in personal productivity, accuracy, and job satisfaction. You'll learn skills and develop habits and attitudes that form the foundation for long-term success in your career. You'll become a Pragmatic Programmer.