Beta Books

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	Agile Web Development with Rails by Sam Ruby Rails just keeps on changing. Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9 bring hundreds of improvements, including new APIs and substantial performance enhancements. The fourth edition of this award-winning classic has been reorganized and refocused so it’s more useful than ever before for developers new to Ruby and Rails. Rails 3 is a major release—the changes aren’t just incremental, but structural. So we decided to follow suit. This book isn’t just a mild reworking of the previous edition to make it run with the new Rails. Instead, it’s a complete refactoring. You’ll still find the Depot example at the front, but you’ll also find testing knitted right in. Gone are the long reference chapters—that’s what the web does best. Instead you’ll find more targeted information on all the aspects of Rails that you’ll need to be a successful Web developer.
	Arduino: A Quick-Start Guide by Maik Schmidt Arduino is an open-source platform that makes DIY electronics projects easier than ever. Gone are the days when you had to learn electronics theory and arcane programming before you could even get an LED to blink. Now, with Arduino: A Quick-Start Guide, readers with no electronics experience can create their first gadgets within a few minutes. This book will cover the official Arduino 1.0 release, with step-by-step instructions for building a universal remote, a motion-sensing game controller, and many other fun, useful projects. See some photos of projects built by our readers over on Flickr. (And if you have photos of your project, please send them to support@pragprog.com). WE WILL GO TO PRINT FOR THIS BOOK WHEN ARDUINO 1.0 BECOMES AVAILABLE. IN THE MEANTIME, THE COMPLETE FIRST DRAFT OF THE BOOK IS NOW AVAILABLE IN EBOOK AND BETA-ON-PAPER FORMATS.
	Code in the Cloud: Programming Google AppEngine by Mark C. Chu-Carroll Join the next wave of Web 2.0 software development in the cloud! Cloud applications are the next big shift in application development: instead of building single-user applications to run on a personal computer, new applications are being built as multi-user services that run in data centers around the world. One of the most exciting new environments for building services in the cloud is Google’s AppEngine. AppEngine is a powerful, easy-to-use framework for developing cloud-based services. This book will teach you what you need to make the shift to cloud development using AppEngine.
	Driving Technical Change: Why People On Your Team Don't Act On Good Ideas, and How to Convince Them They Should by Terrence Ryan Your co-workers’ resistance to new technologies can be baffling. Logical arguments can fail. If you don’t do politics, you will fail. With Driving Technical Change, by Terrence Ryan, you’ll learn to read users’ “patterns of resistance”—and then dismantle their objections. Every developer must master the art of evangelizing. With these techniques and strategies, you’ll help your organization adopt your solutions—without selling your soul to organizational politics.
	HTML5 and CSS3: Develop with Tomorrow's Standards Today by Brian P. Hogan HTML5 and CSS3 are the future of web development, but you don’t have to wait to start using them. Even though the specification is still in development, many modern browsers and mobile devices already support HTML5 and CSS3. This book gets you up to speed on the new HTML5 elements and CSS3 features you can use right now, and backwards compatible solutions ensure that you don’t leave users of older browsers behind.
	iPad Programming: A Quick-Start Guide for iPhone Developers by Daniel H Steinberg and Eric T Freeman It’s not an iPhone and it’s not a laptop: the iPad is a groundbreaking new device. You need to create true iPad apps to take advantage of all that is possible with the iPad. If you’re an experienced iPhone developer, iPad Programming will show you how to write these outstanding new apps while completely fitting your users’ expectation for this device. Available in Beta: First NINE chapters available Now!
	Rails Test Prescriptions: Keeping Your Application Healthy by Noel Rappin Rails Test Prescriptions is a comprehensive guide to testing Rails applications, covering Test-Driven Development from both a theoretical perspective (why to test) and from a practical perspective (how to test effectively). It covers the core Rails testing tools and procedures for Rails 2 and Rails 3, and introduces popular add-ons, including Cucumber, Shoulda, Machinist, Mocha, and Rcov.
	Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages by Bruce A. Tate You should learn a programming language every year, as recommended by The Pragmatic Programmer. But if one per year is good, how about Seven Languages in Seven Weeks? In this book you’ll get a hands-on tour of Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby. Whether or not your favorite language is on that list, you’ll broaden your perspective of programming by examining these languages side-by-side. You’ll learn something new from each, and best of all, you’ll learn how to learn a language quickly.
	Test Driven Development for Embedded C by James W. Grenning Test Driven Development (TDD) is changing how seasoned software developers create and evolve software systems. Instead of coding first and debugging later, test driven developers get feedback every few minutes, ensuring that their code does what they expect. Many C programmers have viewed this practice as impractical for their challenging work. This book shows you how to apply TDD to C, with a focus on the unique challenges facing embedded programmers.
	The Agile Samurai: How Agile Masters Deliver Great Software by Jonathan Rasmusson Faced with a software project of epic proportions? Tired of over-committing and under-delivering? Enter the dojo of the agile samurai, where agile expert Jonathan Rasmusson shows you how to kick-start, execute, and deliver your agile projects. Combining cutting-edge tools with classic agile practices, The Agile Samurai gives you everything you need to deliver something of value every week and make rolling your software into production a non-event.
	The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends by David Chelimsky, Dave Astels, Zach Dennis, Aslak Hellesøy, Bryan Helmkamp, Dan North Is your team trying to do TDD and failing? Are you finding your test suites bloated and difficult to read, understand, or maintain? Business applications today are plagued with features that are never used, highly coupled code that is hard to change, and expensive test suites that aren’t run any more because they are brittle and unreadable. RSpec, Ruby’s leading Behaviour Driven Development tool, helps you do TDD right by embracing the design and documentation aspects of TDD. It encourages readable, maintainable suites of code examples that not only test your code, they document it as well. The RSpec Book will teach you how to use RSpec, Cucumber, and other Ruby tools to develop truly agile software that gets you to market quickly and maintains its value as evolving market trends drive new requirements.
	Using JRuby: Bringing Ruby to Java by Charles O Nutter, Thomas Enebo, Nick Sieger, Ola Bini, and Ian Dees Ruby has the heart, and Java has the reach. With JRuby, you can bring the best of Ruby into the world of Java. Written in 100% Java, JRuby has Ruby’s expressiveness and wide array of open-source libraries—it’s an even better Ruby. With Using JRuby, the entire JRuby core team helps experienced Java developers and Rubyists exploit the interoperability of their respective languages. With JRuby, you’ll be surprised at what’s now possible.