Books about Pragmatic from Amazon.com

Together we'll journey together through bits of cognitive and neuroscience, learning and behavioral theory. You'll discover some surprising aspects of how our brains work, and see how you can beat the system to improve your own learning and thinking skills.

In this book you'll learn how to:

Use the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition to become more expert

Leverage the architecture of the brain to strengthen different thinking modes

Avoid common "known bugs" in your mind

Learn more deliberately and more effectively

Manage knowledge more efficiently

Software development happens in your head. Not in an editor, IDE, or design tool. It's time to take a pragmatic approach to thinking and learning, and start to refactor-and redesign-your brain..
Price: $23.07 [Notify me when price goes down.]

If I'm putting together a project, it's the authors of this book that I want. . . . And failing that I'd settle for people who've read their book." -- Ward Cunningham

Straight from the programming trenches, The Pragmatic Programmer cuts through the increasing specialization and technicalities of modern software development to examine the core process--taking a requirement and producing working, maintainable code that delights its users. 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 to

• Fight 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. .
Price: $31.37 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Mac OS X Leopard introduces a fantastic new technology that makes writing applications with animated and cinematic user interfaces much easier. We'll explore this new technology by starting with the familiar concepts you already know from the pre-Leopard development kits.

Then we'll see how they apply to the new frameworks and APIs. We'll build on your existing knowledge of Cocoa and bring you efficiently up to speed on what Core Animation is all about.

With this book in hand, you can add Core Animation to your Cocoa applications, and make stunning user interfaces that your user's will be showing off to their friends..
Price: $19.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Ubuntu builds on a solid base of Debian Linux to create an award-winning operating system that's light-years ahead of its competitors Ubuntu consistently tops lists of the most popular Linuxes amongst professionals and enthusiasts; Dell recently embraced Ubuntu in its product lines after a user survey indicated overwhelming public support.

Ubuntu Kung Fu provides hints, hacks, tweaks and tricks for every level of user. Guaranteed to be free of the usual dross that fills tips books, Ubuntu Kung Fu is written to be entertaining and, above all, readable. Its 300+ concise tips utilize and exploit hidden or lesser-known features to boost day-to-day productivity. You'll also find tips on tweaking Ubuntu, wrangling the system into shape, optimizing, enhancing security, and lots more. Learn what extraordinary things can be done with Ubuntu.

Written with the migrating Windows or Mac OS X user in mind, Ubuntu Kung Fu avoids the usual Linux/Unix folklore that can send most of us to sleep. The tips have one aim--to produce results as quickly as possible, in an environment where the reader can polish their skills as they read. This is the Linux book for the rest of us..
Price: $17.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Ruby is an increasingly popular, fully object-oriented dynamic programming language, hailed by many practitioners as the finest and most useful language available today. When Ruby first burst onto the scene in the Western world, the Pragmatic Programmers were there with the definitive reference manual, Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide.

Now in its second edition, author Dave Thomas has expanded the famous Pickaxe book with over 200 pages of new content, covering all the improved language features of Ruby 1.8 and standard library modules. The Pickaxe contains four major sections:

• An acclaimed tutorial on using Ruby.
• The definitive reference to the language.
• Complete documentation on all built-in classes, modules, and methods
• Complete descriptions of all 98 standard libraries.

If you enjoyed the First Edition, you'll appreciate the expanded content, including enhanced coverage of installation, packaging, documenting Ruby source code, threading and synchronization, and enhancing Ruby's capabilities using C-language extensions. Programming for the World Wide Web is easy in Ruby, with new chapters on XML/RPC, SOAP, distributed Ruby, templating systems, and other web services. There's even a new chapter on unit testing.

This is the definitive reference manual for Ruby, including a description of all the standard library modules, a complete reference to all built-in classes and modules (including more than 250 significant changes since the First Edition). Coverage of other features has grown tremendously, including details on how to harness the sophisticated capabilities of irb, so you can dynamically examine and experiment with your running code. "Ruby is a wonderfully powerful and useful language, and whenever I'm working with it this book is at my side" --Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks.
Price: $24.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The definitive, Jolt-award winning guide to learning and using Rails is now in its Second Edition Rails is a new approach to web-based application development that enables developers to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications using less code and less effort. Now programmers can get the job done right and still leave work on time.

NEW IN THE SECOND EDITION: The book has been updated to take advantage of all the new Rails 1.2 features. The sample application uses migrations, Ajax, features a REST interface, and illustrates new Rails features. There are new chapters on migrations, active support, active record, and action controller (including the new resources-based routing). The Web 2.0 and Deployment chapters have been completely rewritten to reflect the latest thinking. Now you can learn which environments are best for your style application, and see how Capistrano makes managing your site simple. All the remaining chapters have been extensively updated. Finally, hundreds of comments from readers of the first edition have been incorporated, making this book simply the best available.

Rails is a full-stack, open source web framework that enables you to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications with a twist...you can create a full Rails application using less code than the setup XML you'd need just to configure some other frameworks.

With this book, you'll learn how to use Rails Active Record to connect business objects and database tables. No more painful object-relational mapping. Just create your business objects and let Rails do the rest. You'll learn how to use the Action Pack framework to route incoming requests and render pages using easy-to-write templates and components. See how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, talk to web services, and interact dynamically with JavaScript applications running in the browser (the "Ajax" architecture).

You'll see how easy it is to deploy Rails. You'll be writing applications that work with your favorite database (MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and more) in no time at all..
Price: $25.16 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Erlang solves one of the most pressing problems facing developers today: how to write reliable, concurrent, high-performance systems. It's used worldwide by companies who need to produce reliable, efficient, and scalable applications. Invest in learning Erlang now.

Moore's Law is the observation that the amount you can do on a single chip doubles every two years. But Moore's Law is taking a detour. Rather than producing faster and faster processors, companies such as Intel and AMD are producing multi-core devices: single chips containing two, four, or more processors. If your programs aren't concurrent, they'll only run on a single processor at a time. Your users will think that your code is slow.

Erlang is a programming language designed for building highly parallel, distributed, fault-tolerant systems. It has been used commercially for many years to build massive fault-tolerated systems that run for years with minimal failures.

Erlang programs run seamlessly on multi-core computers: this means your Erlang program should run a lot faster on a 4 core processor than on a single core processor, all without you having to change a line of code.

Erlang combines ideas from the world of functional programming with techniques for building fault-tolerant systems to make a powerful language for building the massively parallel, networked applications of the future.

This book presents Erlang and functional programming in the familiar Pragmatic style. And it's written by Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang.

It includes example code you'll be able to build upon. In addition, the book contains the full source code for two interesting applications:

A SHOUTcast server which you can use to stream music to every computer in your house, and

a full-text indexing and search engine that can index gigabytes of data.

Learn how to write programs that run on dozens or even hundreds of local and remote processors. See how to write robust applications that run even in the face of network and hardware failure, using the Erlang programming language..
Price: $20.51 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The last couple of years have seen big changes in server-side web programming Now it's the client's turn; Dojo is the toolkit to make it happen and Mastering Dojo shows you how.

Dojo is a set of client-side JavaScript tools that help you build better web applications Dojo blurs the line between local, native applications and browser based applications; the browser becomes the user interface platform. "Modern" browsers provide an incomplete, inconvenient, and incompatible programming environment, but Dojo eliminates these problems. While there are many JavaScript libraries available, most focus on just one thing (for example, effects libraries, perceived JavaScript omissions, or HTML widgets). Dojo addresses all of these functional areas-and many others-extensively.

In Mastering Dojo, you'll get the whole story, from basic usage to advanced idioms. Mastering Dojo starts out with a fast moving tutorial that will give you techniques that you can start using right away. You'll learn all about Dojo Core--the foundation on which all things Dojo stand. See how you can modularize your project for development and automatically package your release for optimal download performance. You'll also learn how Dojo:

augments the core JavaScript library

fixes the event system

simplifies DOM programming

provides a complete class definition facility

includes a powerful remote scripting (XHR) framework

... and much more.

You'll love using Dojo's HTML user interface control widget system, Dijit. See how to use over 40 widgets, including the rich yet easy-to-use tree and grid controls.

Finally, you'll get an in-depth look at how to design and build a single-page, rich Internet Application..
Price: $22.58 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Ruby on Rails continues to build up a tremendous head of steam. Fueled by significant benefits and an impressive portfolio of real-world applications already in production, Rails is destined to continue making significant inroads in coming years.

Each new Rails application showing up on the web adds yet more to the collective wisdom of the Rails development community. Yesterday's best practices yield to today's latest and greatest techniques, as the state of the art is continually refined in kitchens all across the Internet. Indeed, these are times of great progress.

At the same time, it's easy to get left behind in the wake of progress. Advanced Rails Recipes keeps you on the cutting edge of Rails development and, more importantly, continues to turn this fast-paced framework to your advantage.

Advanced Rails Recipes is filled with pragmatic recipes you'll use on every Rails project. And by taking the code in these recipes and slipping it into your application you'll not only deliver your application quicker, you'll do so with the confidence that it's done right.

The current beta includes contributions from Aaron Batalion, Adam Keys, Adam Wiggins, Andre Lewis, Andrew Kappen, Benjamin Curtis, Ben Smith, Chris Bernard, Chris Haupt, Chris Wanstrath, Cody Fauser, Dan Benjamin, Dan Manges, Daniel Fischer, David Bock, David Chelimsky, David Heinemeier Hansson, Erik Hatcher, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Geoffrey Grosenbach, Giles Bowkett, Greg Hansen, Gregg Pollack, Hemant Kumar, Hugh Bien, Jamie Orchard-Hays, Jamis Buck, Jared Haworth, Jarkko Laine, Jason LaPier, Jay Fields, John Dewey, Jonathan Dahl, Josep Blanquer, Josh Stephenson, Josh Susser, Kevin Clark, Luke Francl, Mark Bates, Marty Haught, Matthew Bass, Michael Slater, Mike Clark, Mike Hagedorn, Mike Mangino, Mike Naberezny, Mike Subelsky, Nathaniel Talbott, PJ Hyett, Patrick Reagan, Peter Marklund, Pierre-Alexandre Meyer, Rick Olson, Ryan Bates, Scott Barron, Tony Primerano, Val Aleksenko, and Warren Konkel..
Price: $18.86 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Whether it's in Java, .NET, or Ruby on Rails, getting your
application ready to ship is only half the battle. Did you design
your system to survive a sudden rush of visitors from Digg or
Slashdot? Or an influx of real world customers from 100 different
countries? Are you ready for a world filled with flakey networks,
tangled databases, and impatient users?

If you're a developer and don't want to be on call at 3AM for the
rest of your life, this book will help.

In Release It!, Michael T. Nygard shows you how to design and
architect your application for the harsh realities it will face.
You'll learn how to design your application for maximum uptime,
performance, and return on investment.

Mike explains that many problems with systems today start with the
design:

"It's disconnected from the real world. It's the same as cars
designed solely in the cool comfort of the lab-they look great in
models and CAD systems, but don't work well in the real world. You
want a car designed by somebody who knows that oil changes are always
3,000 miles late; that the tires must work just as well on the last
sixteenth of an inch of tread as on the first; and that you will
certainly, at some point, stomp on the brakes while you're holding an
Egg McMuffin in one hand and a cell phone in the other."

With a combination of case studies and practical advice, Patterns to
follow and Anti-Patterns to avoid, Release It! will help you manage
the pitfalls that cost companies huge amounts of time and money each
year.

.
Price: $19.42 [Notify me when price goes down.]