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Agile Web Development with Rails 5 »

Rails 5 and Ruby 2.2 bring many improvements, including new APIs and substantial performance enhancements, and the fifth edition of this award-winning classic is now updated! If you're new to Rails, you'll get step-by-step guidance. If you're an experienced developer, this book will give you the comprehensive, insider information you need for the latest version of Ruby on Rails. Free upgrade, see below for details.

April PragPub »

  • Testing in Python
  • Test Case Design in Python
  • Analyzing Cultural Domains with Python
  • Ted Nelson and the Days of the Dolphins

Plus: Swaine’s World, Rothman and Lester, New Manager’s Playbook, The Irrational Technologist, Antonio on Books, The BoB Pages

Recently Released:

 

Coming Up Next:

  • Manage Your Project Portfolio, Second Edition: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, in beta
  • Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams, in beta
  • Test-Driving JavaScript Applications: Rapid, Confident, Maintainable Code, in beta
  • Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web, in print
Rails 5; April PragPub
April 06, 2016

Tens of thousands of developers have used this award-winning book to learn Rails. It's a broad, far-reaching tutorial and reference that's recommended by the Rails core team itself, and now updated to the latest Rails 5.

Good news, if you bought the previous edition directly from pragprog.com, you get the ebook of this new edition for free. Just login to your account on pragprog.com, and you'll find a 100% coupon for this ebook. Redeem the coupon and you're on your way to Rails 5 mastery.

Buy copies for everyone on your team! Get the new folks up to speed quickly! Come and get 'em!

Now in beta from pragprog.com/book/rails5.

And do not miss the latest issue of PragPub magazine. Read on for details...

Agile Web Development with Rails 5

Ruby on Rails helps you produce high-quality, beautiful-looking web applications quickly. You concentrate on creating the application, and Rails takes care of the details. Learn Rails the way the Rails core team recommends it, along with the tens of thousands of developers who have used this broad, far-reaching tutorial and reference.

We start with a step-by-step walkthrough of building a real application, and in-depth chapters look at the built-in Rails features. Follow along with an extended tutorial as you write a web-based store application. Eliminate tedious configuration and housekeeping; internationalize your applications; incorporate Ajax, REST, web services, and e-mail handling into your applications; test your applications as you write them using the built-in testing frameworks; and deploy your applications easily and securely. New in this edition is coverage of Action Cable, and completely updated code for Rails 5.

Rails 1.0 was released in December 2005, more than 10 years ago. This book was there from the start, and didn’t just evolve alongside Rails, it evolved with Rails. It has been developed in consultation with the Rails core team. In fact, Rails itself is tested against the code in this book.

Now in beta from pragprog.com/book/rails5.

April PragPub Magazine

The folks who rank programming languages for popularity have been placing Python in the top ten for over a decade. It’s the language of choice for many programmers in scientific programming, AI and natural language processing, and web app development. It’s the language Google App Engine was designed for, and is officially the principal user-programming language for Raspberry Pi. It’s everywhere.

Python’s creator, Guido van Rossum, who is still actively involved in its development, designed Python to be highly readable, using whitespace indentation and English keywords where other languages use punctuation. We think Python is pretty magical and we wanted to share some Python magic with you this month.

The test of the seriousness of any programming project is the seriousness of its testing. This month Brian Okken takes us on a tour of testing in Python with two articles. First he works through some of the factors you need to weigh in choosing a test framework for Python. Then he shows the advantages of one approach to testing in Python, drawn from Behavior-Driven Development.

Python is popular in research for good reasons. Dmitry Zinoviev reveals some of those reasons in his article on analyzing cultural domains with Python. You’ll find it a good introduction to the techniques of data exploration and analysis used in social science research as well as an introduction to some of the goodies built into the Python language, in case you haven’t yet made the Python plunge.

Sometimes the best decision you will make all month long is not to do something. This month our columnists have some advice for you on things not to do. Andy Lester and Johanna Rothman discuss what not to do (and a few things to do) when you lose your job. Marcus Blankenship has some advice about what he calls “management smells”: bad management habits that you should watch out for. In a guest viewpoint, Dan Frost describes some hidden biases to avoid in making decisions in programming projects. And Antonio Cangiano offers up a list of new tech books that are not to be missed.

Finally, we have another installment in our series on the life of hypertext inventor Ted Nelson. This month we catch up with Ted in the 1960s, jamming with David Crosby in coffeehouses, making a dolphin movie for John Lilly, and giving a crucial talk before the Association of Computing Machinery — a talk that laid out his Xanadu vision for the first time to people who could actually help Ted realize it.

Now available from theprosegarden.com.

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