Listen to Our Podcasts

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.