Ruby Performance Optimization »

You don't have to accept slow Ruby or Rails performance. Learn how to write faster Ruby code and discover the perils and joys of memory and CPU optimization, profiling, measuring, performance testing, garbage collection, and tuning. You'll find that all those "hard" things aren't so difficult after all, and your code will run orders of magnitude faster.

Your Code as a Crime Scene »

Jack the Ripper and legacy codebases have more in common than you'd think. Inspired by forensic psychology methods, this book teaches you strategies to predict the future of your codebase, assess refactoring direction, and understand how your team influences the design.

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Did you know that Saturn's largest moon, Titan, was discovered on this day in 1655 by Huygens? It's amazing the things you can discover if you just know where to look.

The art of performance optimization is all about knowing where to look. Learn the secrets in Ruby Performance Optimization: Why Ruby Is Slow, and How to Fix It (pragprog.com/book/adrpo).

And speaking of learning secrets, what happens when you apply forensic psychology techniques to your project and code base? Find out how in Your Code as a Crime Scene: Use Forensic Techniques to Arrest Defects, Bottlenecks, and Bad Design in Your Programs, now in print and shipping from pragprog.com/book/atcrime.

Read on for details...

Ruby Performance Optimization: Why Ruby Is Slow, and How to Fix It

This is the first book ever that consolidates all the Ruby performance optimization advice in one place. It's your comprehensive guide to memory optimization, CPU optimization, garbage collector tuning, profiling, measurements, performance testing, and more.

You'll go from performance rookie to expert. First, you'll learn the best practices for writing Ruby code that's easy not only on the CPU, but also on memory, and that doesn't trigger the dreaded garbage collector. You'll find out that garbage collection accounts for 80% of slowdowns, and often takes more than 50% of your program's execution time. And you'll discover the bottlenecks in Rails code and learn how selective attribute loading and preloading can mitigate the performance costs of ActiveRecord.

As you advance to Ruby performance expert, you'll learn how to profile your code, how to make sense out of profiler reports, and how to make optimization decisions based on them. You'll make sure slow code doesn't creep back into your Rails application by writing performance tests, and you'll learn the right way to benchmark Rails.

And finally, you'll dive into the Ruby interpreter internals to really understand why garbage collection makes Ruby so slow, and how you can tune it up.

Now available in beta from pragprog.com/book/adrpo.

Your Code as a Crime Scene: Use Forensic Techniques to Arrest Defects, Bottlenecks, and Bad Design in Your Programs

Software is a living entity that's constantly changing. To understand software systems, we need to know where they came from and how they evolved. By mining commit data and analyzing the history of your code, you can start fixes ahead of time to eliminate broken designs, maintenance issues, and team productivity bottlenecks.

In this book, you'll learn forensic psychology techniques to successfully maintain your software. You'll create a geographic profile from your commit data to find hotspots, and apply temporal coupling concepts to uncover hidden relationships between unrelated areas in your code. You'll also measure the effectiveness of your code improvements. You'll learn how to apply these techniques on projects both large and small. For small projects, you'll get new insights into your design and how well the code fits your ideas. For large projects, you'll identify the good and the fragile parts.

Large-scale development is also a social activity, and the team's dynamics influence code quality. That's why this book shows you how to uncover social biases when analyzing the evolution of your system. You’ll use commit messages as eyewitness accounts to what is really happening in your code. Finally, you'll put it all together by tracking organizational problems in the code and finding out how to fix them. Come join the hunt for better code!

Now in print and shipping from pragprog.com/book/atcrime.

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