The Pragmatic Programmers
Build Talking Apps for Alexa
For decades, voice-enabled computers have only existed in the realm of science fiction. But now the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) lets you develop your own voice-first applications. Leverage ASK to create engaging and natural user interfaces for your applications, enabling them to listen to users and talk back. You'll see how to use voice and sound as first-class components of user-interface design. We'll start with the essentials of building Alexa voice applications, called skills, including useful tools for creating, testing, and deploying your skills. From there, you can define parameters and dialogs that will prompt users for input in a natural, conversational style. Integrate your Alexa skills with Amazon services and other backend services to create a custom user experience. Discover how to tailor Alexa's voice and language to create more engaging responses and speak in the user's own language. Complement the voice-first experience with visual interfaces for users on screen-based ...
For decades, voice-enabled computers have only existed in the realm of science fiction. But now the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) lets you develop your own voice-first applications. Leverage ASK to create engaging and natural user interfaces for your applications, enabling them to listen to users and talk back. You'll see how to use voice and sound as first-class components of user-interface design. We'll start with the essentials of building Alexa voice applications, called skills, including useful tools for creating, testing, and deploying your skills. From there, you can define parameters and dialogs that will prompt users for input in a natural, conversational style. Integrate your Alexa skills with Amazon services and other backend services to create a custom user experience. Discover how to tailor Alexa's voice and language to create more engaging responses and speak in the user's own language. Complement the voice-first experience with visual interfaces for users on screen-based ...
Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager
Going from engineer to manager doesn't have to be intimidating. Engineers can be managers, and fantastic ones at that. Cast aside the rhetoric and focus on practical, hands-on techniques and tools. You'll become an effective and supportive team leader that your staff will look up to. Start with your transition to being a manager and see how that compares to being an engineer. Learn how to better organize information, feel productive, and delegate, but not micromanage. Discover how to manage your own boss, hire and fire, do performance and salary reviews, and build a great team. You'll also learn the psychology: how to ship while keeping staff happy, coach and mentor, deal with deadline pressure, handle sensitive information, and navigate workplace politics. Consider your whole department. How can you work with other teams to ensure best practice? How do you help form guilds and committees and communicate effectively? How can you create career tracks for individual contributors an ...
Going from engineer to manager doesn't have to be intimidating. Engineers can be managers, and fantastic ones at that. Cast aside the rhetoric and focus on practical, hands-on techniques and tools. You'll become an effective and supportive team leader that your staff will look up to. Start with your transition to being a manager and see how that compares to being an engineer. Learn how to better organize information, feel productive, and delegate, but not micromanage. Discover how to manage your own boss, hire and fire, do performance and salary reviews, and build a great team. You'll also learn the psychology: how to ship while keeping staff happy, coach and mentor, deal with deadline pressure, handle sensitive information, and navigate workplace politics. Consider your whole department. How can you work with other teams to ensure best practice? How do you help form guilds and committees and communicate effectively? How can you create career tracks for individual contributors an ...
Build Websites with Hugo
Database-driven sites bring complexity you might not need, but building a site by hand is too much work. Hugo is a static site generator and web development framework that creates content sites quickly without the overhead or dependencies of a dyanmic web framework. With Hugo, you use HTML templates and Markdown to build static sites you can host anywhere, letting you use the skills you already have. Develop your own theme using standard HTML and CSS, using Hugo's powerful templating features to organize your site's components. Create your site's content with HTML or Markdown and use Hugo's content templating features to build new content quickly. Build a fully-featured blog with archive pages, tagging, and pagination, and integrate an external commenting system to provide interactivity. Use data from front-matter, site-wide configuration, and external JSON sources to add content, and generate JSON others can use. Integrate JavaScript with your site to create a search engine. Get Hu ...
Database-driven sites bring complexity you might not need, but building a site by hand is too much work. Hugo is a static site generator and web development framework that creates content sites quickly without the overhead or dependencies of a dyanmic web framework. With Hugo, you use HTML templates and Markdown to build static sites you can host anywhere, letting you use the skills you already have. Develop your own theme using standard HTML and CSS, using Hugo's powerful templating features to organize your site's components. Create your site's content with HTML or Markdown and use Hugo's content templating features to build new content quickly. Build a fully-featured blog with archive pages, tagging, and pagination, and integrate an external commenting system to provide interactivity. Use data from front-matter, site-wide configuration, and external JSON sources to add content, and generate JSON others can use. Integrate JavaScript with your site to create a search engine. Get Hu ...
Practical Microservices
Much ink has been spilled on the topic of microservices, but all of this writing fails to accurately identify what makes a system a monolith, define what microservices are, or give complete, practical examples, so you're probably left thinking they have nothing to offer you. You don't have to be at Google or Facebook scale to benefit from a microservice-based architecture. Microservices will keep even small and medium teams productive by keeping the pieces of your system focused and decoupled. Discover the basics of message-based architectures, render the same state in different shapes to fit the task at hand, and learn what it is that makes something a monolith (it has nothing to do with how many machines you deploy to). Conserve resources by performing background jobs with microservices. Deploy specialized microservices for registration, authentication, payment processing, e-mail, and more. Tune your services by defining appropriate service boundaries. Deploy your services effecti ...
Much ink has been spilled on the topic of microservices, but all of this writing fails to accurately identify what makes a system a monolith, define what microservices are, or give complete, practical examples, so you're probably left thinking they have nothing to offer you. You don't have to be at Google or Facebook scale to benefit from a microservice-based architecture. Microservices will keep even small and medium teams productive by keeping the pieces of your system focused and decoupled. Discover the basics of message-based architectures, render the same state in different shapes to fit the task at hand, and learn what it is that makes something a monolith (it has nothing to do with how many machines you deploy to). Conserve resources by performing background jobs with microservices. Deploy specialized microservices for registration, authentication, payment processing, e-mail, and more. Tune your services by defining appropriate service boundaries. Deploy your services effecti ...
Real-Time Phoenix
Real-time applications come with real challenges - persistent connections, multi-server deployment, and strict performance requirements are just a few. Don't try to solve these challenges by yourself - use a framework that handles them for you. Elixir and Phoenix Channels provide a solid foundation on which to build stable and scalable real-time applications. Build applications that thrive for years to come with the best practices found in this book. Understand the magic of real-time communication by inspecting the WebSocket protocol in action. Avoid performance pitfalls early in the development life cycle with a catalog of common problems and their solutions. Leverage GenStage to build a data pipeline that improves scalability. Break your application before your users do and deploy with confidence. Build a real-world project using solid application design and testing practices that help make future changes a breeze. Create distributed apps that can scale to many users with tools li ...
Real-time applications come with real challenges - persistent connections, multi-server deployment, and strict performance requirements are just a few. Don't try to solve these challenges by yourself - use a framework that handles them for you. Elixir and Phoenix Channels provide a solid foundation on which to build stable and scalable real-time applications. Build applications that thrive for years to come with the best practices found in this book. Understand the magic of real-time communication by inspecting the WebSocket protocol in action. Avoid performance pitfalls early in the development life cycle with a catalog of common problems and their solutions. Leverage GenStage to build a data pipeline that improves scalability. Break your application before your users do and deploy with confidence. Build a real-world project using solid application design and testing practices that help make future changes a breeze. Create distributed apps that can scale to many users with tools li ...
Programming Flutter
Learn Flutter, Google's multi-platform mobile development framework. Instantly view the changes you make to an app with stateful hot reload, and define a declarative UI in the same language as the app logic without having to use separate XML UI files. You can also reuse existing platform-specific Android and iOS code and interact with it in an efficient and simple way. Use built-in UI elements - or build your own - to create a simple calculator app. Run native Java/Kotlin or Objective-C/Swift methods from your Flutter apps, and use a Flutter package to make HTTP requests to a Web API or to perform read and write operations on local storage. Apply visual effects to widgets, create transitions and animations, create a chat app using Firebase, and deploy everything on both platforms. Get native look and feel and performance in your Android and iOS apps, and the ability to build for both platforms from a single code base. ...
Learn Flutter, Google's multi-platform mobile development framework. Instantly view the changes you make to an app with stateful hot reload, and define a declarative UI in the same language as the app logic without having to use separate XML UI files. You can also reuse existing platform-specific Android and iOS code and interact with it in an efficient and simple way. Use built-in UI elements - or build your own - to create a simple calculator app. Run native Java/Kotlin or Objective-C/Swift methods from your Flutter apps, and use a Flutter package to make HTTP requests to a Web API or to perform read and write operations on local storage. Apply visual effects to widgets, create transitions and animations, create a chat app using Firebase, and deploy everything on both platforms. Get native look and feel and performance in your Android and iOS apps, and the ability to build for both platforms from a single code base. ...
Programming Machine Learning
Peel away the obscurities of machine learning, starting from scratch and going all the way to deep learning. Machine learning can be intimidating, with its reliance on math and algorithms that most programmers don't encounter in their regular work. Take a hands-on approach, writing the Python code yourself, without any libraries to obscure what's really going on. Iterate on your design, and add layers of complexity as you go. Build an image recognition application from scratch with supervised learning. Predict the future with linear regression. Dive into gradient descent, a fundamental algorithm that drives most of machine learning. Create perceptrons to classify data. Build neural networks to tackle more complex and sophisticated data sets. Train and refine those networks with backpropagation and batching. Layer the neural networks, eliminate overfitting, and add convolution to transform your neural network into a true deep learning system. Start from the beginning and code your ...
Peel away the obscurities of machine learning, starting from scratch and going all the way to deep learning. Machine learning can be intimidating, with its reliance on math and algorithms that most programmers don't encounter in their regular work. Take a hands-on approach, writing the Python code yourself, without any libraries to obscure what's really going on. Iterate on your design, and add layers of complexity as you go. Build an image recognition application from scratch with supervised learning. Predict the future with linear regression. Dive into gradient descent, a fundamental algorithm that drives most of machine learning. Create perceptrons to classify data. Build neural networks to tackle more complex and sophisticated data sets. Train and refine those networks with backpropagation and batching. Layer the neural networks, eliminate overfitting, and add convolution to transform your neural network into a true deep learning system. Start from the beginning and code your ...
Agile Web Development with Rails 6
Learn Rails the way the Rails core team recommends it, along with the tens of thousands of developers who have used this broad, far-reaching tutorial and reference. If you're new to Rails, you'll get step-by-step guidance. If you're an experienced developer, get the comprehensive, insider information you need for the latest version of Ruby on Rails. The new edition of this award-winning classic is completely updated for Rails 6 and Ruby 2.6, with information on processing email with Action Mailbox and managing rich text with Action Text. Ruby on Rails helps you produce high-quality, beautiful-looking web applications quickly - you concentrate on creating the application, and Rails takes care of the details. Rails 6 brings many improvements, and this edition is updated to cover the new features and changes in best practices. We start with a step-by-step walkthrough of building a real application, and in-depth chapters look at the built-in Rails features. Follow along with an exten ...
Learn Rails the way the Rails core team recommends it, along with the tens of thousands of developers who have used this broad, far-reaching tutorial and reference. If you're new to Rails, you'll get step-by-step guidance. If you're an experienced developer, get the comprehensive, insider information you need for the latest version of Ruby on Rails. The new edition of this award-winning classic is completely updated for Rails 6 and Ruby 2.6, with information on processing email with Action Mailbox and managing rich text with Action Text. Ruby on Rails helps you produce high-quality, beautiful-looking web applications quickly - you concentrate on creating the application, and Rails takes care of the details. Rails 6 brings many improvements, and this edition is updated to cover the new features and changes in best practices. We start with a step-by-step walkthrough of building a real application, and in-depth chapters look at the built-in Rails features. Follow along with an exten ...
Fixing Your Scrum
A Scrum Master needs to know when their team is in trouble and understand how to help them get back on the path to delivery. Become a better Scrum master so you can find the problems holding your teams back. Has your Daily Scrum turned in to a meeting? Does your team struggle with creating user stories? Are stakeholders disengaged during Sprint Review? These issues are common. Learn to use empiricism as your guide and help your teams create great products. Scrum is so much more than a checklist of practices to follow, yet that's exactly how many organizations practice it. Bring life back to your Scrum events by using advanced facilitation techniques to leverage the full intelligence of your team. Improve your retrospectives with new formats and exercises. Ask powerful questions that spark introspection and improvement. Get support and buy-in from management. Use Scrum as a competitive advantage for your organization. Create a definition of done that improves quality and fix failing ...
A Scrum Master needs to know when their team is in trouble and understand how to help them get back on the path to delivery. Become a better Scrum master so you can find the problems holding your teams back. Has your Daily Scrum turned in to a meeting? Does your team struggle with creating user stories? Are stakeholders disengaged during Sprint Review? These issues are common. Learn to use empiricism as your guide and help your teams create great products. Scrum is so much more than a checklist of practices to follow, yet that's exactly how many organizations practice it. Bring life back to your Scrum events by using advanced facilitation techniques to leverage the full intelligence of your team. Improve your retrospectives with new formats and exercises. Ask powerful questions that spark introspection and improvement. Get support and buy-in from management. Use Scrum as a competitive advantage for your organization. Create a definition of done that improves quality and fix failing ...
Modern Systems Programming with Scala Native
Access the power of bare-metal systems programming with Scala Native, an ahead-of-time Scala compiler. Without the baggage of legacy frameworks and virtual machines, Scala Native lets you re-imagine how your programs interact with your operating system. Compile Scala code down to native machine instructions; seamlessly invoke operating system APIs for low-level networking and IO; control pointers, arrays, and other memory management techniques for extreme performance; and enjoy instant start-up times. Skip the JVM and improve your code performance by getting close to the metal. Developers generally build systems on top of the work of those who came before, accumulating layer upon layer of abstraction. Scala Native provides a rare opportunity to remove layers. Without the JVM, Scala Native uses POSIX and ANSI C APIs to build concise, expressive programs that run unusually close to bare metal. Scala Native compiles Scala code down to native machine instructions instead of JVM bytecode ...
Access the power of bare-metal systems programming with Scala Native, an ahead-of-time Scala compiler. Without the baggage of legacy frameworks and virtual machines, Scala Native lets you re-imagine how your programs interact with your operating system. Compile Scala code down to native machine instructions; seamlessly invoke operating system APIs for low-level networking and IO; control pointers, arrays, and other memory management techniques for extreme performance; and enjoy instant start-up times. Skip the JVM and improve your code performance by getting close to the metal. Developers generally build systems on top of the work of those who came before, accumulating layer upon layer of abstraction. Scala Native provides a rare opportunity to remove layers. Without the JVM, Scala Native uses POSIX and ANSI C APIs to build concise, expressive programs that run unusually close to bare metal. Scala Native compiles Scala code down to native machine instructions instead of JVM bytecode ...
Competing with Unicorns
Today's tech unicorns develop software differently. They've developed a way of working that lets them scale like an enterprise while working like a startup. These techniques can be learned. This book takes you behind the scenes and shows you how companies like Google, Facebook, and Spotify do it. Leverage their insights, so your teams can work better together, ship higher-quality product faster, innovate more quickly, and compete with the unicorns. Massively successful tech companies, or Unicorns, have discovered how to take the techniques that made them successful as a startup and scale them to the enterprise level. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Spotify all work like startups, despite having workforces numbering in the tens of thousands. Ex-Spotify engineer and coach, Jonathan Rasmusson, takes you behind the scenes and shows you how to develop software the way the best companies do it. Learn how to give teams purpose through Missions, empower and trust with Squads, and align lar ...
Today's tech unicorns develop software differently. They've developed a way of working that lets them scale like an enterprise while working like a startup. These techniques can be learned. This book takes you behind the scenes and shows you how companies like Google, Facebook, and Spotify do it. Leverage their insights, so your teams can work better together, ship higher-quality product faster, innovate more quickly, and compete with the unicorns. Massively successful tech companies, or Unicorns, have discovered how to take the techniques that made them successful as a startup and scale them to the enterprise level. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Spotify all work like startups, despite having workforces numbering in the tens of thousands. Ex-Spotify engineer and coach, Jonathan Rasmusson, takes you behind the scenes and shows you how to develop software the way the best companies do it. Learn how to give teams purpose through Missions, empower and trust with Squads, and align lar ...