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New This Week

January PragPub »

  • Why AR Will Win — and Why It Matters How It Will Win
  • The Platform Is the Enemy
  • Remembering the Mother of All Demos

Plus Swaine’s World, Technically Awake, New Manager’s Playbook, Shady Illuminations, On Tap, the PragPub Puzzle, Antonio on Books, From the Pragmatic Bookshelf, and the BoB Page.

Recently Released:

 

Coming Up Next:

  • Genetic Algorithms and Machine Learning for Programmers: Create AI Models and Evolve Solutions, in print
  • Property-Based Testing with PropEr: Find Bugs Before Your Users Do, in print
  • Programming Crystal: Create High-Performance, Safe, Concurrent Apps, in print
  • Docker for Rails Developers: Build, Ship, and Run Your Applications Everywhere, in print
  • Modern Systems Programming with Scala Native: Write Lean, High-Performance Code without the JVM, in beta
January PragPub
January 02, 2019

Happy New Year! Welcome to the unfolding future that will be 2019. We've got a ton of great new books coming this year, so stay tuned! This week marks a new issue of PragPub magazine. Read on for details.

January PragPub Magazine

Fifty years ago, Stewart Brand said in The Whole Earth Catalog, “We are as gods, we might as well get good at it.” Fifty years later, it’s as good a mantra for a software developer as you could ask for.

You’re in the future-building business. What kind of future are you building? Our two lead articles in this month’s PragPub take on this question.

David Smith is sure that augmented reality is going to change our lives in the future. But he’s less sure about what that augmented reality will look like and about how we will create it. Will we build a world in which we are manipulated by software or one in which we ourselves are augmented? And will we continue to try to build AR from the outside, or will we develop the tools to create and modify AR from within so that we truly understand its workings and potential?

Daniel Markham looks at the platforms we are building, and he wonders if we are making the right choices. Should we view the goal of technology to be a brain extension, helping us to decide what to do and then help us get it done? Or to be a hand-held power tool, helping us accomplish the things we’ve already decided to do? Does it make a difference? Are we as gods or are we building platforms that usurp that role?

David Smith’s idea that we should build software from within is not new: it was at the heart of Douglas Engelbart’s famous Mother of All Demos fifty years ago, and was the idea behind Smalltalk’s enabling the developer/user to modify the system dynamically as it is running. David has been working with Alan Kay for almost thirty years now on how to make these ideas live again. Mike revisits that Engelbart demo in the latest installment of his computer history series.

Our regular contributors are all here this month: Russ Olsen on optimization, Marcus Blankenship on managing, Antonio Cangiano on tech books, and John Shade on CEObots. Plus there’s a puzzle! We hope you enjoy this first PragPub issue of 2019!

Now available from theprosegarden.com.

Upcoming Author Appearances

  • 2019-01-02 Johanna Rothman, Secrets of Successful Non-Fiction Writers (Workshop 2)
  • 2019-01-08 Andy Lester, Codemash 2019, Sandusky, Ohio
  • 2019-02-04 Frances Buontempo, C++ On Sea, Folkestone, Kent, UK from 4th-6th February 2019.

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