March PragPub »

• Thoughts on TDD — After Almost 20 Years
• Principles for Large Organizations
• Mapping Knowledge Domains with StackExchange
• Paying It Back: Hal Mentors His Mentor

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:

• The Ray Tracer Challenge 
• Docker for Rails Developers 
• Practical Security 
• Programming Crystal 

March is traditionally the month where the darkness of winter makes way for new growth and renewal, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. This month's PragPub features several articles with developers learning about new techniques and changing the way they work for the better.

Read on for the details!

March PragPub Magazine

James Grenning has been doing Test-Driven Development for almost twenty years. When he first discovered TDD, it ended his years of blissful ignorance. He had considered himself a pretty solid programmer. TDD taught him that he made mistakes all the time. TDD immediately put his mistakes right in his face. He decided that he liked coding with his eyes wide open. Two decades later, he reflects on the benefits of TDD — and the downside.

Tim Ottinger has accumulated a lot of experience as a developer, too, much of it working with very large organizations. Along the way he has collected and/or formed some observations on the dynamics of large organizations. This month he shares those observations, hoping to start a dialog on how large organizations really work — and how they can work better.

Also in this issue, Dmitry Zinoviev surveys the landscape of major programming languages and related applications and concepts, based on StackOverflow data. He describes how to get and analyze the StackOverflow data with Python and present the results, such as practical recommendations about which language to choose for which type of project.

And then there’s this:

Hal and Jim are friends. Jim was also Hal’s mentor back in the day. They’d get together to shoot the breeze and argue about the latest programming trend. Object-oriented programming: that one puzzled them both. What’s with this message-passing business? Fast forward a generation and Hal is a veteran Ruby programmer and it’s his turn to play the mentor. Follow along; you’ll enjoy it.

Our regular columnists are on board as well. John Shade thinks civilization is collapsing. Marcus Blankenship debunks four myths about programmer motivation. Antonio Cangiano has all the new tech books. Russ Olsen takes on the hardest thing in software. And, of course, there’s a puzzle.

We hope you enjoy this March issue of PragPub.

Upcoming Author Appearances

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