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In June 2020 we migrated to a new web store. The new system is faster, friendlier, more responsive and more robust than the previous system. We now use third-party shopping cart and fulfillment by Sendowl.com, you may notice their URL when checking out and downloading.
Your old password (prior to June 2020) will not work. If you’ve placed an order with us in the last four years, then we have automatically migrated all your orders for books still in print to the new system.
If you just want to download your books, you can resend your order emails. If you want to create a password to access your orders, enter your email address on the login page and click “Set/reset password.” You’ll receive a link via email to set your new password. If you don’t receive an email, you might not have been migrated, but don’t worry, we can do it manually.
Most orders for most customers have been migrated to the new system successfully. If you need access to older orders that aren’t showing up, please email support@pragprog.com for assistance.
The new system is much more conscious of your privacy, and the only account information we keep consists of the products and orders you’ve placed, associated with the email address you provided.
↑ Back to TopPlease email support@pragprog.com with your name, old email and new email address and we’ll change the email address on your existing orders.
↑ Back to TopOur site and checkout/shopping cart provider use browser cookies to keep track of your session and items you’ve put in your cart. We do not use cookies for marketing or tracking purposes, nor do we share them with anyone for any purpose other than fulfilling and processing your order.
If your browser does not allow cookies from all sites, you may find the shopping cart does not work for more than one item. You need to allow “cross site cookies” or “cookies from all sites, not just visited” in order for the cart to function.
↑ Back to TopWriting books takes a long time. Our readers used to ask us whether it’s possible to get access to the material in a new book before it has been published—a sort of “beta test” form of the book, if you will. And so the Beta Book program was born. First, the drawbacks:
Before a book gets to the final, ready-to-publish state, it normally looks quite rough. It will have hundreds of typos and grammatical errors. It’s likely to have technical errors that would normally get corrected in a final read-through by reviewers. And it’ll certainly look fairly ugly—we don’t do any layout work until just prior to sending a book to the printer, so there will be widows, orphans, text split across page turns and so on.
The level of completeness of a beta varies by title and by the timing of your purchase. If you buy a beta book closer to the estimated completion date, you will be getting a more complete book. If you buy a beta when it is first released, then it is closer to the 50% complete mark.
Despite these challenges, we think the idea of giving you early access to the latest, cutting-edge, great material is important. It helps you out, and it helps us and the author as we get feedback.
A couple of months before a book is due to appear in its final form, we might release a title under the Beta Book program. We’ll make the eBook available in our store in eBook form (PDF, epub, and mobi).
When you place your order, we’ll ship you the Beta Book in its current state as an eBook. Note: this could be as little as 50% complete or as much as 100% complete—it depends on how much the author has been able to write. You will automatically receive an email when the book gets updated.
Of course! When the final book is released, we’ll let you know that the final version of the ebook is ready. You’ll also continue to get fixes to the final edition eBook for free for the lifetime of that edition.
When you buy an ebook from us, you’re entitled to free updates for the lifetime of that edition of the book. If we create a new edition, then that will be a separate purchase.
It might. When a book is started, a target date is put on the schedule. The actual date may shift depending on a variety of factors such as:
If you have any questions regarding the ship date of a beta book, please check the website for the estimated date.
Each book’s home page on pragprog.com has links for reporting errors, typos, suggestions, and any other errata. Also, if you look at the bottom of each page in the PDF version, you’ll see a hyperlink labeled “Report Erratum.”
At this stage we’re really interested in hearing about content: technical errors and missing or hard-to-understand text.
Please do not report layout issues (overlong lines, widows and orphans, bad page breaks, figure placement, and so on). These sorts of layout issues are fixed later during typesetting. Also, in general typos and grammatical mistakes will be fixed later by our copyeditors.
↑ Back to TopWhen you buy an eBook directly from our website, you get DRM-free ebooks for use on iPhone/iPad, Kindle, Android, Sony, Nook, and other eBook readers, as well as on desktop and laptop computers. You can download your ebook in all available formats at no extra charge for your own individual, personal use. Currently those formats are PDF, epub, and mobi formats, unless otherwise indicated for a particular title.
The PDF format is most often used on desktop and laptop computers.
Epub format is used by most ebook readers, including Apple’s iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, Android, Sony, Nook, and most other eBook readers.
The mobi format is used by the Amazon Kindle. Limitations in the mobi file format may cause it to display differently on different physical Kindle devices. Mobi files that are not purchased directly from the Amazon store may have additional issues: Amazon may or may not support syncing notes across devices, availability via the Kindle App, availability via the cloud, and so on. For more information on Amazon’s support of user-loaded documents, please check with Amazon.com.
If you purchase an eBook of one of our titles from somewhere else, you are subject to that vendor’s policies.
You may make copies for you own personal use (e.g., one on your laptop while traveling and one on your home machine, backup copies in case your system crashes, etc.) but you may not give your ebook files to other people.
There is no copy protection or functionality restrictions in our ebooks. You may view or print them for your own individual, personal use as you see fit.
You may not share your personal PDF, epub or mobi versions with other people, but you can buy multiple licenses of an ebook title for your team or organization. For more information about multi-license and volume purchases, see Teams, Groups, and Bulk Orders.
No; ownership of PDF, epub or mobi files cannot be transferred.
Yes, but the results may not be what you expect. Even the PDF files are formatted specifically for on-screen viewing, and as such have some differences from the paper book version: left and right pages are set identically, which will make the margins turn out funny when printed. There are no blank pages, which means that some chapters may not open on the right-hand page when printed, as they would in the paper book version.
↑ Back to TopThere are many different applications and devices available to read ebooks, and as publisher, we cannot give specific technical support for any particular reader. But here are some general guidelines that we’ve found helpful.
PDF format is the most faithful to the printed version of the book. PDFs are presented in pages and are generally read on a laptop or desktop, less often on a tablet, and probably hard to read on a phone. You are welcome to copy-and-paste from our PDFs to take notes, but we recommend downloading the accompanying code archive for code samples. The PDF format is not designed to support copy-and-paste, and while it sometimes works okay, a lot of the time it does not, and will corrupt the code you are pasting in. Use the downloaded code instead.
Epub format is not page based, so the text just flows. The advantage is that you can resize and read the text more easily on tablets and phones. iBooks is the recommended reader on Apple products.
Mobi format is for Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem. To be honest, the mobi format is not great for technical titles. It’s more limited than epub, and some book features may not be available in mobi format. Also, mobi is best supported on actual Kindle hardware devices (Fire, PaperWhite, etc.). We do not recommend the Kindle app on tablets and phones. In our experience, it is remarkably buggy and non-standards compliant.
You may have noticed that most stores allow returns of physical goods but not of digital goods. There’s a good (and obvious) reason for that. Although we’d like to break the mold, we’ve had some bad experiences in the past, so we’ve had to make a simple rule:
We can’t accept returns of audio books or titles in any ebook format. Once purchased, they cannot be refunded.
If you were gifted an ebook or accidentally bought the same ebook twice, then contact us at support@pragprog.com with your order numbers. We’ll take a look at it and potentially refund a duplicate purchase.
↑ Back to TopWe no longer sell paperback books from this website. There are many fine booksellers and online vendors who do a much better job of shipping our titles to you in a timely and cost-effective fashion.
Please support your local independent bookstore if you can, or resort to the usual massive online retailers if you must. Our titles are available from all major booksellers both in the domestic US and internationally. Translations are often available from our partners in other countries as well.
↑ Back to TopWe accept payment with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and PayPal.
Declines are generated by our payment gateway or by your card-issuing company. There are (in general) two kinds of decline. One is some kind of data mismatch. The most common of these is to do with your address: our gateway checks the billing address you give us against the address on file for your card. The other common situation is a general decline that comes from your card issuer.
Please note that some credit card databases aren’t very good at addresses that contain international characters. You might want to try substituting plain character equivalents (i.e., no accents or umlauts).
Credit card companies seem to decline a certain percentage of online transactions. This seems to be a fraud prevention measure—by declining the transactions, they force you to contact them, and they can therefore verify that you are the actual card owner.
Credit card transactions are authorized in two steps. In the first, the payment gateway says “I want to charge $xx to card Y.” If the card has these funds available, the card company places a provisional hold on those $xx and responds OK back to the gateway. Along with that response, the card company sends the gateway some account information (such as the cardholder address). The gateway then performs the second part of the validation, checking this address against the billing address you supplied. If this match fails, the gateway tells both us and the card issuer. The funds that were placed under hold are never captured—you will not be charged.
However, some card issuers release these held funds in a batch process, typically one that runs overnight. Because of this, you may see the held transaction appearing in your online credit card statement for a day or two.
Our database is behind an internal firewall and is not directly connected to the online web store.
We never store your credit card details on any of our systems. The form that captures your credit card sends the information using the secure HTTPS protocol directly to our payment gateway—we never see the credit card number. This means that if our servers were compromised, no credit card details would be revealed.
Administrative access to our customer data is over HTTPS, and requires authorization and authentication. All access is logged.
↑ Back to TopWhat a great idea!
Yes, you can “gift” an eBook to another person. Once you’ve added an item to your cart and have entered billing information, proceed to the Payment Details screen. Then, along with your name, email address and payment information, click the “gift box” in the email field and enter the recipient’s name and email address, as well as a delivery date and a personal message (optional). The Recipient will get the email notification with the eBook link in it and you will get the order receipt.
↑ Back to TopInterested in technical reviewing our books?
Just to let you know, we don’t pay reviewers. But we do acknowledge reviewers by name in the book’s acknowledgments, and send reviewers a free copy of the book when it’s published.
If you’re interested in becoming a technical reviewer, please let us know what areas you’d be interested in reviewing (languages, technologies, particular technical areas, and so on).
Send your information to proposals@pragprog.com, and we’ll let the editors know you’re available.
↑ Back to TopThe following are claimed as trademarks of The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC: