Many claims are made about how certain tools, technologies, and practices improve software development. But which claims are verifiable, and which are merely wishful thinking? In this book, leading thinkers such as Steve McConnell, Barry Boehm, and Barbara Kitchenham offer essays that uncover the truth and unmask myths commonly held among the software development community. Their insights may surprise you. Are some programmers really ten times more productive than others? Does writing tests first help you develop better code faster? Can code metrics predict the number of bugs in a piece of software? Do design patterns actually make better software? What effect does personality have on pair programming? What matters more: how far apart people are geographically, or how far apart they are in the org chart? Contributors include: Jorge Aranda Tom Ball Victor R. Basili Andrew Begel Christian Bird Barry Boehm Marcelo Cataldo Steven Clarke Jason Cohen Robert DeLine Madeline Diep Hakan Erdogmus Michael Godfrey Mark Guzdial Jo E. Hannay Ahmed E. Hassan Israel Herraiz Kim Sebastian Herzig Cory Kapser Barbara Kitchenham Andrew Ko Lucas Layman Steve McConnell Tim Menzies Gail Murphy Nachi Nagappan Thomas J. Ostrand Dewayne Perry Marian Petre Lutz Prechelt Rahul Premraj Forrest Shull Beth Simon Diomidis Spinellis Neil Thomas Walter Tichy Burak Turhan Elaine J. Weyuker Michele A. Whitecraft Laurie Williams Wendy M. Williams Andreas Zeller Thomas Zimmermann

All software design is composition: the act of breaking complex problems down into smaller problems and composing those solutions. Most developers have a limited understanding of compositional techniques. It's time for that to change.In "Composing Software", Eric Elliott shares the fundamentals of composition, including both function composition and object composition, and explores them in the context of JavaScript. The book covers the foundations of both functional programming and object oriented programming to help the reader better understand how to build and structure complex applications using simple building blocks.You'll learn: Functional programmingObject compositionHow to work with composite data structuresClosuresHigher order functionsFunctors (e.g., array.map)Monads (e.g., promises)TransducersLensesAll of this in the context of JavaScript, the most used programming language in the world. But the learning doesn't stop at JavaScript. You'll be able to apply these lessons to any language. This book is about the timeless principles of software composition and its lessons will outlast the hot languages and frameworks of today. Unlike most programming books, this one may still be relevant 20 years from now.This book began life as a popular blog post series that attracted hundreds of thousands of readers and influenced the way software is built at many high growth tech startups and fortune 500 companies

How can we co-opt digital tools to build a more beautiful future? In the spring of 2020-amidst a global pandemic, economic depression, and transformational movement for racial equity-we talked to artists and activists about tech's potential to help reinvent our shared realities. Published by Pioneer Works Press in collaboration with The Creative Independent and Are.na, Software for Artists Book: Building Better Realities is edited by Willa Köerner, and features contributions from Salome Asega, Stephanie Dinkins, Grayson Earle, ann haeyoung, Rindon Johnson, Ryan Kuo, and Tsige Tafesse-plus 47 Digital Diary entries from our community. A free PDF version of the book will be released on the occasion of Software for Artists Day 6, happening on July 18 & 19, 2020.

Joel, Apress, Blogs, and Blooks ...I was learning the hard way about how to be a publisher and probably spending way too much time looking at web sites and programming than I should have in response to that. Anyway, one day I came across this web site called , which was run by a guy with strong opinions and an unusual, clever writing style, along with a willingness to take on the conventional wisdom. In particular, he was writing this ongoing series about how bad most user interfaces were—mostly because programmers by and large knew, as Joel and I would say, using the same Yiddish–derived NYC vernacular that we both share, “bupkis” about what users really want. And I, like many, was hooked both by the series and the occasional random essay that Joel wrote. And then I had this epiphany: I'm a publisher, I like reading his stuff, why not turn it into a book?... Read the complete Foreword — Gary Cornell, Cofounder, Apress Since the release of the bestselling title Joel on Software in 2004, requests for a sequel have been relentless. So, we went back to the famed JoelonSoftware.com archives and pulled out a new batch of favorites, many of which have been downloaded over one million times. With Joel's newest book, More Joel on Software, you'll get an even better (not to mention updated) feast of Joel's opinions and impressions on software development, software design, running a software business, and so much more. This is a new selection of essays from the author's web site, http://www.joelonsoftware.com. Joel Spolsky started his weblog in March 2000 in order to offer his insights, based on years of experience, on how to improve the world of programming. This weblog has become infamous among the programming world, and is linked to more than 600 other web sites and translated into 30+ languages! Spolsky's extraordinary writing skills, technical knowledge, and caustic wit have made him a programming guru. With the success of Joel on Software, there has been a strong demand for additional gems and advice, and this book is the answer to those requests. Containing a collection of all–new articles from the original, More Joel on Software has even more of an edge than the original, and the tips for running a business or managing people have far broader application than the software industry. We feel it is safe to say that this is the most useful book you will buy this year.

Today, software engineers need to know not only how to program effectively but also how to develop proper engineering practices to make their codebase sustainable and healthy. This book emphasizes this difference between programming and software engineering. How can software engineers manage a living codebase that evolves and responds to changing requirements and demands over the length of its life? Based on their experience at Google, software engineers Titus Winters and Hyrum Wright, along with technical writer Tom Manshreck, present a candid and insightful look at how some of the world’s leading practitioners construct and maintain software. This book covers Google’s unique engineering culture, processes, and tools and how these aspects contribute to the effectiveness of an engineering organization. You’ll explore three fundamental principles that software organizations should keep in mind when designing, architecting, writing, and maintaining code: How time affects the sustainability of software and how to make your code resilient over time How scale affects the viability of software practices within an engineering organization What trade-offs a typical engineer needs to make when evaluating design and development decisions

“This book gives thorough, scholarly coverage of an area of growing importance in computer security and is a ‘must have’ for every researcher, student, and practicing professional in software protection.” —Mikhail Atallah, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University Theory, Techniques, and Tools for Fighting Software Piracy, Tampering, and Malicious Reverse Engineering The last decade has seen significant progress in the development of techniques for resisting software piracy and tampering. These techniques are indispensable for software developers seeking to protect vital intellectual property. Surreptitious Software is the first authoritative, comprehensive resource for researchers, developers, and students who want to understand these approaches, the level of security they afford, and the performance penalty they incur. Christian Collberg and Jasvir Nagra bring together techniques drawn from related areas of computer science, including cryptography, steganography, watermarking, software metrics, reverse engineering, and compiler optimization. Using extensive sample code, they show readers how to implement protection schemes ranging from code obfuscation and software fingerprinting to tamperproofing and birthmarking, and discuss the theoretical and practical limitations of these techniques. Coverage includes Mastering techniques that both attackers and defenders use to analyze programs Using code obfuscation to make software harder to analyze and understand Fingerprinting software to identify its author and to trace software pirates Tamperproofing software using guards that detect and respond to illegal modifications of code and data Strengthening content protection through dynamic watermarking and dynamic obfuscation Detecting code theft via software similarity analysis and birthmarking algorithms Using hardware techniques to defend software and media against piracy and tampering Detecting software tampering in distributed system Understanding the theoretical limits of code obfuscation