Pragmatic Podcasts

Brian Marick talks to Daniel Steinberg on a wide variety of topics. Brian asks, who's smart enough to program?, and describes how he met Andy and Dave at the Agile Manifesto summit. He talks about using Lisp, Smalltalk and Ruby, and about introducing programming to testers. Brian also shares the secrets of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), and of course, his new book on Ruby Cocoa: marrying Ruby with the uber-cool Mac OS X Cocoa GUI framework, and test driven development with Ruby Cocoa code.

Pragmatic editor Susannah Pflazer interviews Mike Mangino, author of "Developing Facebook Platform Applications with Rails." Mike describes how Facebook works, and talks about using facebooker for Ruby on Rails to provide helpers, handle authentication, and more. Mike walks through developing an application in Facebook, describes the parts of Facebook, as well as messaging, testing, and engaging users. Find out about the magic 8-second rule and the key aspects of a successful Facebook application.

Daniel Steinberg interviews the Pragmatic Studio's Mike Clark. Mike talks about the Pragmatic Studio, the Edge Conferences, Screencasts and shoulder surfing, and how to get inside the head of an expert.

Join us as Daniel Steinberg interviews Pragmatic co-founder Andy Hunt. Andy describes his journey from the techniques in The Pragmatic Programmer, the programming language Ruby and the Agile development movement, to looking at wetware--the stuff in our heads. Andy discusses the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, lateral specialization in the brain, mindmaps and more. You'll find out why sometimes the best thing you can do is to step away from the keyboard.

Join us as Daniel Steinberg interviews Pragmatic co-founder Dave Thomas. Dave explains a bit about how we started the publishing business, and our unique production process and its separation of content from presentation. You'll hear all about reader involvement in our books, what makes a Pragmatic book, and Dave's take on the book industry as a whole. Dave reminds us of why we're in this business: for the joy and passion of programming.

Venkat Subramaniam, author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" talks at length with Daniel Steinberg about coding in Groovy, metaprogramming, and choosing a language. You'll learn when Groovy is a great choice, and when it's not. Venkat shares how to use builders to relieve the tedium of XML processing, explains why metaprogramming is so hard in Java, and why type-safety isn't what you think. Finally, Venkat explains how programming is a lot like a chainsaw.

FXRuby is a cross-platform GUI for Ruby. Listen as Pragmatic editor Susannah Pfalzer interviews Lyle Johnson, the lead developer of FXRuby and author of the new book, "FXRuby: Create Lean and Mean GUIs with Ruby." Lyle explains what you need to know before using FXRuby, some interesting aspects of FXRuby and the FOX toolkit, the target and message approach, automatic GUI updating, recommended guides to user interface design, and more!

Daniel Steinberg interviews Bill Dudney, author of "Core Animation for OS X: Creating Dynamic Compelling User Interfaces." Listen as Bill discusses user interfaces on the iPhone and desktop, and how you can develop using core animation on the desktop and apply it directly to iPhone development. Bill explains about using animated layers in 3D space, how Cocoa and Interface Builder avoid the trap of generated code stubs, the growing opportunities of internal fat-client apps on the iPhone platform, and opportunities in consulting for new rich user interfaces.

Pragmatic editor Jackie Carter talks to Craig Riecke, Rawld Gill, and Alex Russell, authors of the upcoming book, "Mastering Dojo: JavaScript and Ajax Tools for Great Web Experiences." Dojo gives you more than just Ajax Plumbing: you get everything from easy-to-use widgets for a rich UI, to optimization and deployment. Dojo covers a surprising depth and breadth of functionality, combining the best of leading edge features and stable, corporate-friendly maturity. Listen as the authors discuss Dojo, the Dojo foundation, and how Dojo is brutally Pragmatic.

Susannah Pfalzer interviews Derek DeVries, co-author of "Rails for PHP Developers." Listen as Derek describes structure in PHP vs. Rails, web programming frameworks and feature cross-pollination. Derek suggests the best way to learn Rails, discusses development process and best practices, and describes using ActiveResource to let PHP and Rails coexist. Is Rails better than PHP? It's all about using the right tool for the job at hand. Give a listen and Derek will explain.

Author Christophe Porteneuve explains what Prototype and script.aculo.us are, how they relate to Dojo, and why Javascript alone isn't enough for modern applications. See how to smooth over browser incompatibilities, tame the wild DOM, and more.

Pragmatic Editor Susannah Pfalzer interviews Jeremy Sydik, author of "_Design Accessible Web Sites_":/titles/jsaccess. You'll find that when you design your websites to be more accessible, the design is cleaner and more attractive to all of your visitors. Hear how you can best improve your whole website as Jeremy discusses accessibility and shares his Top Ten Design Principles for websites.

What should a manager actually do? What does multitasking really mean? What does an MBA qualify you for? Learn the answers to these and other critical questions as Johanna Rothman, author of "Manage It", explains how to really make teams go faster, and discover the importance of practice, feedback, and fun. Plus Johanna reads an except from her Schedule Games chapter.

Join MIke Nygard, author of "Release It!" as he explains that 50% of datacenter outages are human-induced, and how to approach configuration and deployment the right way. As an extra bonus, listen to Mike read an excerpt from his new book.

Just one hour of downtime on a Fortune 500 website can cost $300,000 or more. Join Mike Nygard, the author of "Release It!", as he explains how to use stability and capacity design patterns to avoid expensive, public disasters.