Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday to the Bookshelf!

It’s the fifth birthday of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, but you get the presents. See below for details.

It’s our way of thanking you for your support over these last few years.

iPhone SDK Development

Now in Beta

The NDA is lifted, the clouds have parted, and heavenly rays of sun light up the mobile computing landscape. The long anticipated Pragmatic iPhone book is here. Today.

And, we’ll be adding the iPhone chapter back to the Core Animation book.

Recent and Upcoming titles

Coming up Next:

Recently released:


News from the Pragmatic Programmers

Greetings!

It’s hard to believe, but this month marks the fifth anniversary of the Pragmatic Bookshelf. Time flies when you’re having fun :-). We’ve got presents for you, a brand-new Beta book on the iPhone SDK, and a new screencast series.

For those of you having trouble reading this email, this newsletter is available online at:

media.pragprog.com/newsletters/2008-10-01.html

Happy Birthday to the Bookshelf!

Nearly ten years ago, Andy and Dave got together and wrote The Pragmatic Programmer, and Pragmatic Programming was born.

Five years ago this month, in October 2003, Andy and Dave wrote and published the first two books as the Pragmatic Bookshelf: Pragmatic Version Control with CVS and Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java. Five years later, we’ve got some seventy titles in print, a bunch of screencasts, and an ongoing podcast.

We’re taking the month of October to celebrate, and we hope you’ll join us.

It’s our birthday, but you get the presents. If you haven’t yet set up an account on pragprog.com, you’ll want to click here to create one so you can get your present.

The anniversary of our first sale is October 13th. Everyone who has bought something from us over the last five years and has an active account by then will find a nice surprise in their account.

It’s our way of thanking you for your tremendous support these last few years: Thanks for your many gracious emails, your kind reviews and blog posts, and for telling your friends and coworkers about us. We really appreciate it and we’ll continue to try and do our best for you.

In the meantime, business goes on with new titles and formats to help you stay on top of your game.

iPhone SDK Development

At long last, it’s here and available in Beta. The definitive Pragmatic book on the iPhone SDK.

Jump into application development for today’s most remarkable mobile communications platform with iPhone SDK Development. This Pragmatic guide takes you through the tools and APIs, the same ones Apple uses for its applications, that you can use to create your own software for the iPhone and iPod touch. Packed with useful examples, this book will give you both the big-picture concepts and the everyday “gotcha” details that developers need to make the most of the beauty and power of the iPhone OS platform.

With explanations of the big picture and an eye to the little details that you’ll need, this book goes beyond the basic developer docs to help you succeed on one of today’s most important mobile platforms.

Also, we’ll be adding the iPhone chapter back to the Core Animation book.

Rails Development for the Facebook Platform Screencast Series

Our newest screencast series, Rails Development for the Facebook Platform is now available.

Since the Facebook Development Platform was released in May 2007, more than 12,000 Facebook applications have been launched. The platform provides a very powerful means of distributing your application to potentially millions of users, but it can also be a bit intimidating.

These screencasts give you a front-row seat to learn from an experienced Facebook developer. You’ll learn how to quickly build a real Facebook application from scratch, and add social features, using the popular Ruby on Rails framework. Follow along with these screencasts, and your application could be the next hit on Facebook!

Together, we’ll build Run Tracker, a real Facebook Platform application, from configuration to deployment. The final application will allow you to track the times and distances of your runs, and runs of your friends. After deploying the core Rails application, we’ll incrementally add social features such as profile updates, news feeds on walls, and sending messages to friends. You’ll get hands-on with Facebook development right off the bat and you can follow along as we add advanced features and explore tricks of the trade.

Thanks for your continued support,

Andy Hunt & Dave Thomas
www.PragProg.com