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Groovy brings you the best of both worlds: a flexible, highly productive, agile, dynamic language that runs on the rich framework of the Java Platform. Groovy preserves the Java semantics and extends the JDK to give you true dynamic language capabilities. Programming Groovy 2 will help you, the experienced Java developer, learn and take advantage of the latest version of this rich dynamic language. You'll go from the basics of Groovy to the latest advances in the language, including options for type checking, tail-call and memoization optimizations, compile time metaprogramming, and fluent interfaces to create DSLs.

You don't have to leave the rich Java Platform to take advantage of Groovy. Groovy preserves Java's semantics and extends the JDK, so programming in Groovy feels like the Java language has been augmented; it's like working with a lighter, more elegant Java. If you're an experienced Java developer who wants to learn how Groovy works, you'll find exactly what you need in this book.

You'll start with the fundamentals of programming in Groovy and how it works with Java, and then you'll explore advanced concepts such as unit testing with mock objects, using Builders, working with databases and XML, and creating DSLs. You'll master Groovy's powerful yet complex run-time and compile-time metaprogramming features.

Much has evolved in the Groovy language since the publication of the first edition of Programming Groovy. Programming Groovy 2 will help you learn and apply Groovy's new features. Creating DSLs is easier now, and Groovy's already-powerful metaprogramming facilities have improved even more. You'll see how to work with closures, including tail call optimization and memoization. The book also covers Groovy's new static compilation feature.

Whether you're learning the basics of the language or interested in getting proficient with the new features, Programming Groovy 2 has you covered.

What You Need

To work on the examples in the book you need Groovy 2.0.5 and Java JDK 5 or higher.

Grails is a full-stack web development framework that enables you to build complete web applications in a fraction of the time and with less code than other frameworks. Grails uses the principle of convention over configuration and the dynamic Groovy programming language.

This revised and updated new edition shows you how to use Grails by iteratively building a unique, working application. By the time you're done, you'll have built and deployed a real, functioning website. Using this hands-on, pragmatic approach, you'll explore topics such as Ajax in Grails, custom tags, and plugins. You'll dig into Grails' powerful view technology, Groovy Server Pages, and see how you can easily leverage the help offered by scaffolding to create custom user interfaces faster than you would have thought possible. Along the way, you'll learn about domain classes, controllers, and GSP views. And you'll see how Grails enables you to use powerful frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate.

With Grails, you can get a lot done with little effort. With this book, you'll get a lot done as well. Get started with Grails today.

What You Need:

Grails 2 will run on any machine that supports Java. Grails applications can be deployed on any Java Servlet container, including Tomcat, Jetty, WebLogic, JBoss, and Websphere.

Virtualizing and Tuning Large-Scale Java Platforms

Technical best practices and real-world tips for optimizing enterprise Java applications on VMware vSphere®

Enterprises no longer ask, “Can Java be virtualized”? Today, they ask, “Just how large can we scale virtualized Java application platforms, and just how efficiently can we tune them?” Now, the leading expert on Java virtualization answers these questions, offering detailed technical information you can apply in any production or QA/test environment.

Emad Benjamin has spent nine years virtualizing VMware’s own enterprise Java applications and working with nearly 300 leading VMware customers on projects of all types and sizes—from 100 JVMs to 10,000+, with heaps from 1GB to 360GB, and including massive big-data applications built on clustered JVMs. Reflecting all this experience, he shows you how to successfully size and tune any Java workload.

This reference and performance “cookbook” identifies high-value optimization opportunities that apply to physical environments, virtual environments, or both. You learn how to rationalize and scale existing Java infrastructure, modernize architecture for new applications, and systematically benchmark and improve every aspect of virtualized Java performance. Throughout, Benjamin offers real performance studies, specific advice, and “from-the-trenches” insights into monitoring and troubleshooting.

Coverage includes

--Performance issues associated with large-scale Java platforms, including consolidation, elasticity, and flexibility

--Technical considerations arising from theoretical and practical limits of Java platforms

--Building horizontal in-memory databases with VMware vFabric SQLFire to improve scalability and response times

--Tuning large-scale Java using throughput/parallel GC and Concurrent Mark and Sweep (CMS) techniques

--Designing and sizing a new virtualized Java environment

--Designing and sizing new large-scale Java platforms when migrating from physical to virtualized deployments

--Designing and sizing large-scale Java platforms for latency-sensitive in-memory databases

--Real-world performance studies: SQLFire vs. RDBMS, Spring-based Java web apps, vFabric SpringTrader, application tiers, data tiers, and more

--Performance differences between ESXi3, 4.1, and 5

--Best-practice considerations for each type of workload: architecture, performance, design, sizing, and high availability

--Identifying bottlenecks in the load balancer, web server, Java application server, or DB Server tiers

--Advanced vSphere Java performance troubleshooting with esxtop

--Performance FAQs: answers to specific questions enterprise customers have asked

Intermediate level, for programmers fairly familiar with Java, but new to the functional style of programming and lambda expressions.

Get ready to program in a whole new way. Functional Programming in Java will help you quickly get on top of the new, essential Java 8 language features and the functional style that will change and improve your code. This short, targeted book will help you make the paradigm shift from the old imperative way to a less error-prone, more elegant, and concise coding style that's also a breeze to parallelize. You'll explore the syntax and semantics of lambda expressions, method and constructor references, and functional interfaces. You'll design and write applications better using the new standards in Java 8 and the JDK.

Lambda expressions are lightweight, highly concise anonymous methods backed by functional interfaces in Java 8. You can use them to leap forward into a whole new world of programming in Java. With functional programming capabilities, which have been around for decades in other languages, you can now write elegant, concise, less error-prone code using standard Java. This book will guide you though the paradigm change, offer the essential details about the new features, and show you how to transition from your old way of coding to an improved style.

In this book you'll see popular design patterns, such as decorator, builder, and strategy, come to life to solve common design problems, but with little ceremony and effort. With these new capabilities in hand, Functional Programming in Java will help you pick up techniques to implement designs that were beyond easy reach in earlier versions of Java. You'll see how you can reap the benefits of tail call optimization, memoization, and effortless parallelization techniques.

Java 8 will change the way you write applications. If you're eager to take advantage of the new features in the language, this is the book for you.

What you need:

Java 8 with support for lambda expressions and the JDK is required to make use of the concepts and the examples in this book.

Master The Crucial Technical Skills Every Software Architect Needs!

To succeed as a software architect, you must master both technical skills and soft skills. Dave Hendricksen illuminated the soft skills in his highly-regarded 12 Essential Skills for Software Architects. Now, in 12 More Essential Skills for Software Architects he turns to the technical side.

Drawing on his decades of experience, Hendricksen organizes technical skills into three areas.

PROJECT SKILLS: driving projects from ideation through delivery
TECHNOLOGY SKILLS: building, buying, and/or leveraging the right technologies
VISIONARY SKILLS: realizing an architectural vision that improves long-term competitiveness

He helps you develop and sharpen these key technical skills: from conceptualizing solutions to developing platforms and governance, and from selecting technology innovations to infusing architectures with an entrepreneurial spirit.

This guide reveals the technical skills you need and provides a coherent framework and practical methodology for mastering them.

Taken together, Hendricksen’s two books offer the most complete, practical pathway to excellence in software architecture. They’ll guide you through every step of your architecture career—from getting the right position to thriving once you have it.

Essential Architect Skills

Visionary Skills
Entrepreneurial Execution
Technology Innovation
Strategic Roadmapping

Technology Skills
Governance
Platform Development
Know-how
Architectural Perspective

Project Skills
Estimation
Partnership
Discovery
Management
Conceptualization

Dave Hendricksen is a big data architect for Thomson Reuters, where he works closely with the firm’s new product development teams to create innovative legal products for large-scale online platforms such as Westlaw.com. Hendricksen presented “Designing and Building Large-Scale Systems in an Agile World” at Carnegie Mellon University’s influential Software Engineering Institute. 

Java Programming 24-Hour Trainer, 2nd Edition is your complete beginner's guide to the Java programming language, with easy-to-follow lessons and supplemental exercises that help you get up and running quickly. Step-by-step instruction walks you through the basics of object-oriented programming, syntax, interfaces, and more, before building upon your skills to develop games, web apps, networks, and automations. This second edition has been updated to align with Java SE 8 and Java EE 7, and includes new information on GUI basics, lambda expressions, streaming API, WebSockets, and Gradle. Even if you have no programming experience at all, the more than six hours of Java programming screencasts will demonstrate major concepts and procedures in a way that facilitates learning and promotes a better understanding of the development process.

This is your quick and painless guide to mastering Java, whether you're starting from scratch or just looking to expand your skill set.

• Master the building blocks that go into any Java project
• Make writing code easier with the Eclipse tools
• Learn to connect Java applications to databases
• Design and build graphical user interfaces and web applications
• Learn to develop GUIs with JavaFX

If you want to start programming quickly, Java Programming 24-Hour Trainer, 2nd Edition is your ideal solution.

Our industry is moving toward functional programming, but your object-oriented experience is still valuable. Scala combines the power of OO and functional programming, and Pragmatic Scala shows you how to work effectively with both. Updated to Scala 2.11, with in-depth coverage of new features such as Akka actors, parallel collections, and tail call optimization, this book will show you how to create stellar applications.

This thorough introduction to Scala will get you coding in this powerful language right away. You'll start from the familiar ground of Java and, with easy-to-follow examples, you'll learn how to create highly concise and expressive applications with Scala. You'll find out when and how to mix both imperative and functional style, and how to use parallel collections and Akka actors to create high-performance concurrent applications that effectively use multicore processors.

Scala has evolved since the first edition of this book, and Pragmatic Scala is a significant update. We've revised each chapter, and added three new chapters and six new sections to explore the new features in Scala. You'll learn how to:

Safely manage concurrency with parallel collections and Akka actors

Create expressive readable code with value classes and improved implicit conversions

Create strings from data with no sweat using string interpolation

Create domain-specific languages

* Optimize your recursions with tail call optimization

Whether you're interested in creating concise, robust single-threaded applications or highly expressive, thread-safe concurrent programs, this book has you covered.

What You Need:

The Scala compiler (2.x) and the JDK are required to make use of the concepts and the examples in this book.

You have too many projects, and firefighting and multitasking are keeping you from finishing any of them. You need to manage your project portfolio. This fully updated and expanded bestseller arms you with agile and lean ways to collect all your work and decide which projects you should do first, second, and never. See how to tie your work to your organization's mission and show your managers, your board, and your staff what you can accomplish and when. Picture the work you have, and make those difficult decisions, ensuring that all your strength is focused where it needs to be.

All your projects and programs make up your portfolio. But how much time do you actually spend on your projects, and how much time do you spend on emergency fire drills or waste through multitasking? This book gives you insightful ways to rank all the projects you're working on and figure out the right staffing and schedule so projects get finished faster.

The trick is adopting lean and agile approaches to projects, whether they're software projects, projects that include hardware, or projects that depend on chunks of functionality from other suppliers. Find out how to define the mission of your team, group, or department, with none of the buzzwords that normally accompany a mission statement. Armed with the work and the mission, you'll manage your portfolio better and make those decisions that define the true leaders in the organization.

With this expanded second edition, discover how to scale project portfolio management from one team to the entire enterprise, and integrate Cost of Delay when ranking projects. Additional Kanban views provide even more ways to visualize your portfolio.

Debunk the myth that JavaScript is not easily testable. Whether you use Node.js, Express, MongoDB, jQuery, AngularJS, or directly manipulate the DOM, you can test-drive JavaScript. Learn the craft of writing meaningful, deterministic automated tests with Karma, Mocha, and Chai. Test asynchronous JavaScript, decouple and properly mock out dependencies, measure code coverage, and create lightweight modular designs of both server-side and client-side code. Your investment in writing tests will pay high dividends as you create code that's predictable and cost-effective to change.

Design and code JavaScript applications with automated tests. Writing meaningful tests is a skill that takes learning, some unlearning, and a lot of practice, and with this book, you'll hone that skill. Fire up the editor and get hands-on through practical exercises for effective automated testing and designing maintainable, modular code.

Start by learning when and why to do manual testing vs. automated verification. Focus tests on the important things, like the pre-conditions, the invariants, complex logic, and gnarly edge cases. Then begin to design asynchronous functions using automated tests. Carefully decouple and mock out intricate dependencies such as the DOM, geolocation API, file and database access, and Ajax calls to remote servers.

Step by step, test code that uses Node.js, Express, MongoDB, jQuery, and AngularJS. Know when and how to use tools such as Chai, Istanbul, Karma, Mocha, Protractor, and Sinon. Create tests with minimum effort and run them fast without having to spin up web servers or manually edit HTML pages to run in browsers. Then explore end-to-end testing to ensure all parts are wired and working well together.

Don't just imagine creating testable code, write it.

What You Need:

A computer with a text editor and your favorite browser. The book provides instructions to install the necessary automated testing-related tools.

Professional Git takes a professional approach to learning this massively popular software development tool, and provides an up-to-date guide for new users. More than just a development manual, this book helps you get into the Git mindset—extensive discussion of corollaries to traditional systems as well as considerations unique to Git help you draw upon existing skills while looking out—and planning for—the differences. Connected labs and exercises are interspersed at key points to reinforce important concepts and deepen your understanding, and a focus on the practical goes beyond technical tutorials to help you integrate the Git model into your real-world workflow.

Git greatly simplifies the software development cycle, enabling users to create, use, and switch between versions as easily as you switch between files. This book shows you how to harness that power and flexibility to streamline your development cycle.

• Understand the basic Git model and overall workflow
• Learn the Git versions of common source management concepts and commands
• Track changes, work with branches, and take advantage of Git's full functionality
• Avoid trip-ups and missteps common to new users

Git works with the most popular software development tools and is used by almost all of the major technology companies. More than 40 percent of software developers use it as their primary source control tool, and that number continues to grow; the ability to work effectively with Git is rapidly approaching must-have status, and Professional Git is the comprehensive guide you need to get up to speed quickly.