A quick look at your local bookstore’s Internet section will tell you that there are quite a few commercial packages out there for building web sites. What those books often fail to mention is that many of the world’s most popular web sites were built using freely available tools, and run on free operating systems (OS). They...

When I started playing with the first-generation iPhone back in 2008, I was amazed by the simplicity and versatility of the smart phone. With the iPhone in hand, I could take pictures, navigate with GPS, tell time, and of course, play games—especially when I was bored while waiting in line at the DMV for my license plate....

Welcome to Agile ALM. This book has three main goals. The first is to describe Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) in practical terms and to provide a plan for rolling out Agile strategies and best-of-breed tools. The second purpose is to explain how to create ALM toolboxes based on standard tools used in advanced, real-world...

When I began writing this book, I spent quite a bit of time searching for a good quote to start things off. I ended up with two. R is a wonderfully flexible platform and language for exploring, visualizing, and understanding data. I chose the quote from Alice in Wonderland to capture the flavor of statistical analysis today—an...

When I first discovered DMVs, I was enthralled because they made many difficult things so easy. It was simple to identify, typically within seconds, the core performance problems that affect SQL Server databases. For example, I could quickly discover which queries were taking the longest time to run, which indexes were missing, and...

Yatta, we did it! We wrote a book about Entity Framework! It’s not our first book, but it’s the first one written in English and distributed worldwide. It was a great challenge, but having the opportunity to spread the word about Entity Framework made it worth the effort. Entity Framework is a great tool that speeds up the...

In that first edition, Ryan and I tried to cover every corner of...

This has been a very long journey. We found that writing this book was a challenging task, a much harder one than we had anticipated, but there were also moments of joy and discovery along the way! The idea for the book first came to us 18 months ago, and many days and nights have come and gone between the first sentence we wrote and...

Well, it’s been a wild ride since the first edition of this book was released. At that time, PowerShell had just shipped and had a fairly limited scope of influence. Things have changed a lot. PowerShell now ships in the box with Windows (at least Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2). The number of PowerShell users is now in the hundreds...

To this day, enterprise message queuing is a concept that is not well understood by most software developers. Commercial message-oriented middleware (MOM) did not help to encourage adoption of the process; most of the MOMs on the market were closed source, were costly to buy and support, and required trained system administrators for...