Listen to Our Podcasts

Susannah Pfalzer interviews Chad Fowler on his new book, “The Passionate Programmer.” Chad talks about the reality of the two job markets, and how you have to focus on winning, not just on “not losing.” He’ll discuss steps to take in avoiding a career-by-coincidence, and how improving your career is really improving your life. Unlike other projects you’ve worked on, this time you are the product. See how to make the most of it.

Stuart Halloway, author of “Programming Clojure”, tells Susannah Pfalzer all about this new and cool programming language. Stuart explains how Clojure helps you move beyond noun-based programming toward verb-based programming, and why pure functions are important for concurrency. It’s a lot of Lisp, but with Less parentheses—even fewer than Java itself. See how to be more expressive on the Java VM, and how Clojure is different from Scala and Groovy.

Pragmatic editor Susannah Pfalzer interviews authors Jeff Cohen and Brian Eng, asking “what do .NET developers find so compelling about Rails?” Jeff and Brian go on to explain the key differences between the .NET environment and the open source environment of traditional Ruby and Rails, the importance (and adoption) of MVC, unit tests, and differences in development styles. They’ll also explain how to use the right tool for the job and take a quick look at IronRuby, and Ruby’s interoperability with .NET.

In this interview by Pragmatic editor Jackie Carter, author Frederic Daoud explains what Stripes is, and why it’s a better Java web framework, featuring easy integration with other technologies including Hibernate, and why it’s vital if you’re creating applications that have to be multilingual.

Jackie Carter interviews Ian Dees, author of “Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby” Ian talks about using automation in support of GUI testing, and describes how automation allows you to do things you couldn’t do before. Frustrated with proprietary, difficult scripting languages, or fragile, coordinate-based systems, Ian describes how GUI testing with Ruby is such a pleasure. Ian’s new book gives you the actual techniques to take control of this window or that drop-down list—without hard-coded data. Ian describes his use of rSpec, randomized and matrix testing, writing stories for testing, and more.