Seven Mobile Apps in Seven Weeks »

Build your app for ALL mobile devices all at once: Mobile Web, iOS, Android, Windows, RubyMotion, React Native, and Xamarin. Find out which cross-platform solution makes the most sense for your needs, whether you’re new to mobile or an experienced developer expanding your options. Start covering all of the mobile world today.

Manage Your Project Portfolio, Second Edition »

This fully updated and expanded bestseller arms you with agile and lean ways to collect all your work and decide which projects you should do first, second, and never. Tie your work to your organization’s mission, picture the work you have, and make those difficult decisions, ensuring that all your strength is focused where it needs to be.

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Now in print and shipping! Two great titles this week for your reading pleasure, and see below for Q&A with the authors.

Learn how to build apps using seven different platforms: Mobile Web, iOS, Android, Windows, RubyMotion, React Native, and Xamarin. Seven Mobile Apps in Seven Weeks shows you how, now at pragprog.com/book/7apps.

Stop wasting time on emergency fire drills and ineffective multitasking. Manage Your Project Portfolio, Second Edition gives you insightful ways to rank all the projects you're working on and figure out the right staffing and schedule so projects get finished faster. Now at pragprog.com/book/jrport2.

Bugs Bunny was introduced to the world on this day in 1940 in the short A Wild Hare, making Bugs 76 years old. Just thought you'd like to know.

Come and get 'em!

Seven Mobile Apps in Seven Weeks: Native Apps, Multiple Platforms

Understanding the idioms, patterns, and quirks of the modern mobile platforms gives you the power to choose how you develop. Over seven weeks you'll build seven different mobile apps using seven different tools. You'll start out with Mobile Web; develop native apps on iOS, Android, and Windows; and finish by building apps for multiple operating systems using the native cross-platform solutions RubyMotion, React Native, and Xamarin.

For each platform, you’ll build simple, but non-trivial, apps that consume JSON data, run on multiple screen sizes, or store local data. You’ll see how to test, how to build views, and how to structure code. You’ll find out how much code it's possible to share, how much of the underlying platform you still need to know, and ultimately, you'll get a firm understanding of how to build apps on whichever devices your users prefer.

This book gives you enough first-hand experience to weigh the trade-offs when building mobile apps. You’ll compare writing apps on one platform versus another and understand the benefits and hidden costs of cross-platform tools. You’ll get pragmatic, hands-on experience writing apps in a multi-platform world.

Interview with Tony Hillerson, author of Seven Mobile Apps in Seven Weeks

1. Who should read this book? Mobile developers? College students? I think anyone with programming experience, whether on mobile or not, would get something from this book. The goal is that you can get a good comparison of different platforms and tools by building apps. Since we take you through the app building, you can follow along, or see where we start and branch off with the challenges at the end of each day.

2. Can we really build seven apps in only seven weeks? I believe it's not difficult to follow the book at that pace, but of course you can take as much time as you'd like. Really, since the code is included it's not so much that building the apps is the focus, but exploring the platforms by solving a small set of use cases.

3. Where did you get your information or ideas for this book? Having been a mobile developer for a while now, this book was a book that I wanted to have. I was in a number of situations where I needed to write an app on a few platforms, or speak intelligently to questions about cross-platform mobile tools. I've always liked the 'Seven in Seven' series, and given those ingredients, the idea for this book just jumped fully formed into my head.

4. Why did you pick these particular platforms? These platforms and tools are all native, as opposed to running in a web view. I believe the native platforms make for a better user experience. That doesn't mean the web view based tools are necessarily bad, just that we've prioritized for native here. If you can learn the native platforms, you should have no trouble picking up the web view technologies later.

5. What are the top three reasons for reading this book, compared to other books or online resources? I'm not aware of any other comparative study of mobile technologies quite like this book. The approach of quickly trying out different mobile platforms and tools side by side with others is a novel approach patterned after other 'Seven in Seven' books, and no others.

6. How far will this book take me? Where should I go from here? This book walks you through building apps on Mobile Web, iOS, Android, Universal Windows Platform, Ruby Motion, Xamarin, and React Native. You'll be able to compare your initial experience across these seven apps. After that you can dig deeper into one or more of them, or at least be able to answer common questions your clients or product owners may have. A good place to start digging deeper is with the challenges at the end of each day.

Now available from pragprog.com/book/7apps.

Manage Your Project Portfolio, Second Edition: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects

All your projects and programs make up your portfolio. But how much time do you actually spend on your projects, and how much time do you spend on emergency fire drills or waste through multitasking? This book gives you insightful ways to rank all the projects you're working on and figure out the right staffing and schedule so projects get finished faster.

The trick is adopting lean and agile approaches to projects, whether they're software projects, projects that include hardware, or projects that depend on chunks of functionality from other suppliers. Find out how to define the mission of your team, group, or department, with none of the buzzwords that normally accompany a mission statement. Armed with the work and the mission, you'll manage your portfolio better and make those decisions that define the true leaders in the organization.

With this expanded second edition, discover how to scale project portfolio management from one team to the entire enterprise, and integrate Cost of Delay when ranking projects. Additional Kanban views provide even more ways to visualize your portfolio.

Q&A with Manage Your Project Portfolio author Johanna Rothman

What is the project portfolio? The project portfolio is the ranking of work from #1, #2, #3, to never. It’s all the work the organization might consider and the relative rank.

How is the project portfolio different from the product roadmap? A product roadmap optimizes for features—when the team delivers them—for a given project or program.

A project portfolio optimizes the work through the organization.

When you flow work through teams, the team can take the next chunk of work off a given product roadmap, finish it, and get the next chunk of work. If this project is done enough—so that the product roadmap says, “Yes, release”—then the team can take the next project. That project might be on another product roadmap.

What are the advantages of managing the project portfolio? Everyone has a project portfolio. If you manage it, you avoid these problems: * multitasking * emergency projects * not being able to tell when any project will be done * needing experts, and having to move people around to just the “right” project at just the “right” time.

Aside from avoiding all these time-wasters, everyone focuses on delivering against the organization’s strategy. You’re all working together, not separately.

How does project portfolio management work? First, collect all the work. I like to start with a team or a couple of groups, not more than that. Now write a sticky with each project or chunk of work on it. Place the sticky in the box in the figure to see where it goes.

You’ll notice there is an Unstaffed row, too. As you work through the project portfolio the first time, you’ll discover work you or your team should not be doing. You might not be able to stop doing it until you have someone who can take the work.

Once you have a draft portfolio, you can work with all the other people across the organization to decide how your portfolio interacts with theirs, how often you want to reevaluate the portfolio, and how to visualize the portfolio.

What will people take away from reading your book? They will learn how to create the first draft of their project portfolio. Once they have that, they will learn to rank each chunk of work, and how to meet to discuss the portfolio as an organization. There are chapters about measurements, both project/program and portfolio measures, as well as chapters about scaling, mission, and strategy.

Any manager—project and program managers, directors, VPs, CxOs—either needs to manage the project portfolio or is affected by portfolio decisions. They will be able to create and manage their project portfolios.

Now available from pragprog.com/book/jrport2.

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