July PragPub »

• The Pragmatic Path
• When Best Practices Can Hurt You
• Tom Watson, Howard Aiken, and Who?

Plus: On Tap, Swaine’s World, Technically Awake, New Manager’s Playbook, The PragPub Puzzle, Antonio on Books, From the Pragmatic Bookshelf, The BoB Page, Beyond the Fields We Know, Shady Illuminations

Now available from theprosegarden.com.

Recently Released:

• Build Reactive Websites with RxJS 
• Rediscovering JavaScript 
• Programming Ecto 
• Programming Phoenix ≥ 1.4 

Happy Fourth of July to everyone! And happy Independence Day to everyone in the U.S. July brings us the latest issue of PragPub magazine and an update to iOS Apps with REST APIs. Read on!

iOS Apps with REST APIs updates

Christina Moulton's book is now out with some significant updates, including:

• Updated to Swift 4
• Uses Codable for JSON Parsing and Persistence (replacing use of NSCoding & NSKeyedArchiver)
• More clearly shows changes between code samples
• Expanded from 250 to 298 pages with more thorough explanations and new material on handling different data with Codable

If you bought from pragprog.com already, the update will already be in your account. If not, come grab a copy from pragprog.com/book/d-cmrest.

Enjoy!

/\ndy

July PragPub Magazine

With this issue, PragPub is entering its tenth year. Friend of the magazine Jeff Langr takes the occasion to reflect on the past nine years of PragPub, the 19 years since the publishing of The Pragmatic Programmer, and the nature and meaning of pragmatism.

Your editor is also in a reflective mood, and offers up a moment in the history of the computer, focusing on three individuals — Tom Watson, Howard Aiken, and Norman Bel Geddes. Each had an important part to play in the creation of an important early computer. Grace Hopper and Charles Babbage make cameo appearances, too.

Novi Milenkovic makes his first appearance in our pages, but not his last, with a thoughtful essay on agile practices, UX design, and the management of complexity. Best practices, he decides, can sometimes lead you astray.

Russ Olsen writes about Fermi questions this month. These are questions like, how many taxi cabs are there in New York City? Or how many M&Ms does it take to equal the weight of the Sun? Or how many pennies would you have to stack to equal the height of Mount Everest? Crazy questions for which you would think you lack the data to even make a plausible guess. But it turns out, you can often do better than that. Estimation on the basis of excruciatingly limited data is not an uncommon situation in software development, and sometimes this seems so impossible that we just guess. But you can, Russ explains, do better than that.

Marcus Blankenship, in his regular column on managing programmers, takes a surprising stance this month. I’ll leave it at that. Antonio Cangiano surveys all the recent tech books and is particularly taken by one on the Rust language. We have an excerpt from the upcoming Pragmatic Bookshelf book, Programming Phoenix 1.4. John Shade returns to the topic of self-driving cars. And this month’s puzzle is a sudoku plus an anagram plus some really lame puns on the names of Turing award winners.

Oh, and we’re launching a new feature focusing on science fiction.

We hope you enjoy it!

Now available from theprosegarden.com.

Upcoming Author Appearances

Audio Books!

Did you know we have audio books for your listening pleasure?

• Liftoff, Second Edition: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams
• Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer
• The Healthy Programmer: Get Fit, Feel Better, and Keep Coding
• The Agile Samurai: How Agile Masters Deliver Great Software
• The Developer's Code: What Real Programmers Do
• Pomodoro Technique Illustrated: The Easy Way to Do More in Less Time

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Andy Hunt
Publisher, Pragmatic Bookshelf

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