Rob Conery

Don't have a CS degree? Neither does Rob. That's why he wrote this book: to fill the gaps in his career. The result? Over 450 pages of essentials skills and ideas every developer should know with illustrations by the author, who loves to sketch. An illustrated CS Primer, if you will. Rob is a self-taught software developer (like so many) and for most of his career he learned what was required to get the job done. When conversations veered toward core concepts, he disengaged. Rob decided to change all of this in 2014. He sat down and looked up all of the topics that a typical CS degree covers and then dove in. Half way through, he decided to write a book about what he was learning. That book is The Imposter's Handbook, a compendium of useful programming concepts from Algorithms to Complexity Theory, TDD to Garbage Collection. Things you should really know if you're paid to write software.

A CS Primer for Self-Taught Developers

The Imposter's Handbook

The Imposter's Handbook Season 2

The Imposter's Handbook, Second Edition

Starting an application is simple enough, whether you use migrations, a model-synchronizer or good old-fashioned hand-rolled SQL. A year from now, however, when your app has grown and you're trying to measure what's happened... the story can quickly change when data is overwhelming you and you need to make sense of what's been accumulating. Learning how PostgreSQL works is just one aspect of working with data. PostgreSQL is there to enable, enhance and extend what you do as a developer/DBA. And just like any tool in your toolbox, it can help you create crap, slice off some fingers, or help you be the superstar that you are.That's the perspective of A Curious Moon - data is the truth, data is your friend, data is your business. The tools you use (namely PostgreSQL) are simply there to safeguard your treasure and help you understand what it's telling you.But what does it mean to be "data-minded"? How do you even get started? These are good questions and ones I struggled with when outlining this book. I quickly realized that the only way you could truly understand the power and necessity of solid databsae design was to live the life of a new DBA... thrown into the fire like we all were at some point...Meet Dee Yan, our fictional intern at Red:4 Aerospace. She's just been handed the keys to a massive set of data, straight from Saturn, and she has to load it up, evaluate it and then analyze it for a critical project. She knows that PostgreSQL exists... but that's about it.Much more than a tutorial, this book has a narrative element to it a bit like The Martian, where you get to know Dee and the problems she faces as a new developer/DBA... and how she solves them.The truth is in the data...

A Data Science Mystery Featuring Postgresql, Cassini and Enceladus

A Curious Moon

"Winterland is a no-holds-barred tale of a young man who stops at nothing to save a small ski town from falling into the hands of corporate America. If you've ever lived in a ski town this is a must read." -Todd Jones, filmmaker, Teton Gravity Research For Easy Ed Stallings, the past few years have been one long party. Now he's dead broke, and has to flee his home - a decrepit trailer near, but not quite in, Key West. But on his last night in town, he suddenly strikes it rich. While he's out fishing in the mangroves, drug smugglers give him $60,000 worth of marijuana for pointing out where the cops are. It's a pittance to them - a king's ransom to him. Soon Ed finds himself the owner of Trappers, the only real bar in run-down, ramshackle Winterland, Colorado, a town on the verge of going under and fading into the collective memory of the West. In Winterland, the cattle yard has closed. Nearly everyone is out of work. The town has nothing going for it, except one thing. It gets 400 inches of snow a year. The local ski area - nearly bankrupt itself - attracts a growing stream of twentysomething ski bums, vagabonds, dope smokers and freaks. As the ski season approaches, they navigate the high mountain passes and into town; traveling in old cars, VW buses and camper vans. They come not so much because the skiing is exceptional, but because the rents are cheap. They can ski all winter without sleeping in their cars, without begging on the sidewalks, and without making meals out of saltine crackers and free condiment packets. Texas oil magnate Nut Richards wants to change all that. Richards is going to buy the ski area and half the town at distress sale prices, then subdivide the whole place and turn it into a second-rate Aspen or Vail. Part of his plan includes driving the ski bums, and people like Ed Stallings, out of town. Ed and his friends - bartender Danny Stewart, rabblerousing ex-hippie reporter Kent Jennings, and three young women who run the local burrito joint and call themselves Tres Hermanas - band together in a desperate battle against the Big Money that wants to take away their town, and erase a way of life. "A carved up mogul run of money and drugs, big deals, bad decisions, high stakes and higher times." -Charles Graeber, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Nurse "A bright, funny and brilliant novel." - John Ennis, actor, Mr. Show

Winterland

Scott Hanselman

Phil Haack

Scott Guthrie

This book begins with you working along as Scott Guthrie builds a complete ASP.NET MVC reference application. He begins NerdDinner by using the File->New Project menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET MVC Application. You'll then incrementally add functionality and features. Along the way you’ll cover how to create a database, build a model layer with business rule validations, implement listing/details data browsing, provide CRUD (Create, Update, Delete) data form entry support, implement efficient data paging, reuse UI using master pages and partials, secure the application using authentication and authorization, use AJAX to deliver dynamic updates and interactive map support, and implement automated unit testing. From there, the bulk of the rest of the book begins with the basic concepts around the model view controller pattern, including the little history and the state of the MVC on the web today. We'll then go into the ways that MVC is different from ASP.NET Web Forms. We'll explore the structure of a standard MVC application and see what you get out of the box. Next we dig deep into routing and see the role URLs play in your application. We'll deep dive into controllers and views and see what role the Ajax plays in your applications. The last third of the book focuses entirely on advanced techniques and extending the framework. In some places, we assume that you're somewhat familiar with ASP.NET WebForms, at least peripherally. There are a lot of ASP.NET WebForms developers out there who are interested in ASP.NET MVC so there are a number of places in this book where we contrast the two technologies. Even if you're not already an ASP.NET developer, you might still find these sections interesting for context, as well as for your own edification as ASP.NET MVC may not be the web technology that you're looking for.

Rob Conery

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