Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, & technology book reviews, plus social, political, & economic commentary
Actually, no. This is not a post about that snarky kid named Eddie Haskell on the mid-20th-century TV sitcom “Leave It to Beaver.” (But I did watch “the Beave” and “Eddie” back then on a black-and-white television set with a rabbit-ears antenna.) The topic this time is Haskell, the not-so-popular software development language named for … Continue reading ‘What? Haskell??? Eddie Haskell?’
Mastering Go, 3rd Edition Mihalis Tsoukalous Packt Publishing, 978-180107-931-0 By Si Dunn To be honest, I’m not a great software developer. Actually, I retired from software development and software technical writing back in 2009, when the languages du jour–at least where I worked–were assembler and C, with a smattering of Erlang, and a relational database … Continue reading Going for It–with Go
Go in Practice Matt Butcher and Matt Farina Manning, paperback Considerable planning, effort and care have gone into writing Go in Practice, a new Golang programming book from Manning and also available from Amazon. The book’s structure and approach are both geared toward helping Go newbies move beyond the basics. The writing is clear, and the … Continue reading Get Better with Golang: ‘Go in Practice’
Java Testing with Spock Konstantinos Kapelonis Manning, paperback Spock, the author states, is “a comprehensive testing framework for Java (and Groovy) code that can help you automate the boring, repetitive, and manual process of testing a software application. Spock is comprehensive because it’s a union of existing testing libraries”—specifically JUnit, Mockito and JBehave. It … Continue reading Java Testing with Spock: A good (and sometimes Groovy) guide to using this powerful testing framework – #programming #java
Spring in Action Craig Walls Manning – paperback If you have worked with the decade-old Spring framework, you know well that it has a long history of providing configuration headaches for developers. The new Spring Boot framework, on the other hand, literally brings much-needed simplification and automation to the process of using Spring. And it … Continue reading ‘Spring Boot in Action’ can help you push aside the old drudgeries of configuring Spring applications – #programming #bookreview
Meteor in Action Stephan Hochhaus and Manuel Schoebel Manning – paperback I have worked with several JavaScript frameworks, and Meteor has become a favorite, mainly because it is closely related to the MEAN stack family and plays well with MongoDB and Node.js. As the Meteor in Action authors note: “Meteor runs on top of … Continue reading ‘Meteor in Action’: A good how-to guide for learning a popular JavaScript framework – #programming #bookreview
Agile Metrics in Action Christopher W. H. Davis Manning – paperback In the rapidly changing world of software development, metrics “represent the data you can get from your application lifecycle as it applies to the performance of software development teams,” Christopher W. H. Davis writes in his well-written, well-structured new book, Agile Metrics in Action. … Continue reading Agile Metrics in Action: A good how-to guide to getting better performance measurements – #programming #bookreview
Unity in Action Joseph Hocking Manning – paperback Unity, the cross-platform game development environment, is easy to download and get running. But it definitely is not easy to learn without some help. Fortunately, Joe Hocking’s Unity in Action makes it reasonably straightforward to learn how to develop games in 3D, as well as with Unity’s … Continue reading Unity in Action: A top-notch how-to guide for game developers – #gamedev #programming
Elixir in Action Saša Jurić Manning – paperback “Elixir,” Saša Jurić writes, “is a modern functional programming language for building large-scale, distributed, fault-tolerant systems for the Erlang virtual machine.” What Elixir really is, of course, is a breath of fresh air for software developers who find it hard or confusing to work with … Continue reading Elixir in Action: A good guide to the ‘alternative language for the Erlang virtual machine’ – #programming #bookreview
Groovy in Action, Second Edition Dierik König and Paul King, with Guillaume Laforge, Hamlet D’Arcy, Cédric Champeau, Eric Pragt and Jon Skeet Manning – paperback Groovy in Action, Second Edition, is not light reading. Indeed, the printed book weighs nearly three and a half pounds and has 880 pages. But it is great reading for anyone who wants … Continue reading Groovy in Action, Second Edition – A hefty how-to guide newly updated for Groovy 2.4 – #programming #bookreview
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