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...

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...

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...

The book you hold in your hands, or see on your screen, is the result of a series of studies of how teams all over the world specify, develop, and deliver the right software, without defects, in very short cycles. It presents the collective knowledge of about 50 projects, ranging from public websites to internal back-office systems....

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...

I can tell you how much I enjoy being a geek. I can tell you how fascinated I was with the punch-cards my dad showed me back in 1985. I can tell you how I got my first computer when I was seven. And I can tell you that I’ve loved programming since 1989. I can tell you a great many things about all that, but I’m not sure how...

The idea of a writing a book about Android development can be somewhat futile at times, considering the pace at which Android continues to expand, morph, and change. What started out as a book project a few years ago has now become a series of updates to the original work with the page count nearly double the original project—...