Posts Tagged ‘Books’
Monday, December 21st, 2009
Although I love the thrill of speaking in public, I unfortunately don’t get to do it as often as I used to (once, maybe twice a year lately). The few times I do speak, though, I’ld like it to be as good as possible. That’s why I was very interested in O’Reilly’s announcement of Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker, and so I put the book on my shopping list right away. Not having heard of the author before, I was hoping for the best (light, interesting, with a touch of “funny”), but expecting the worst (“I am your presentation God; people sell their own mother to hear my voice; although you are not worthy, I will lower myself to your level and give some insight in why I am so fantastic.”). After receiving the book in the mail, I read it from the first page to the last in merely one day (a new personal record). Needless to say the book exceeded my expectations.
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Tags: Books, O'Reilly, Presenting, Reviews
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Monday, November 2nd, 2009
O’Reilly recently released the book Beautiful Testing, a collection of essays about testing and QA in general. As I mentioned earlier, I wrote an article in that book on (unit) testing XMPP protocols, using Swift as a motivating example. Since the book’s scope may (oddly enough) not always be as interesting for developers in general, I released my article under a Creative Commons Attribution license (thanks to the good folks from O’Reilly for encouraging us to do this), which you can find here (or directly from my Git repository). The original excerpt from the book (including the index, list of biographies, and all the fancy artwork) is also available for download under the same license.
I of course encourage you to buy either the PDF or dead tree version of the book, as all the proceeds of the book go to charity.
Tags: Books, Jabber, Nothing But Nets, O’Reilly, Swift, Unit Testing, XMPP
Posted in Swift, Writing | 2 Comments »
Friday, September 4th, 2009
When I was a kid, I used to be fascinated by Swiss clocks and watches (actually, mostly anything that was made in Switzerland). However, my attention in watches seems to have faded shortly after I got my very own black & red strapped Swatch: only a few years later, I replaced the Swatch with a digital Casio with built-in calculator, because it looked flashy and cool. I have to admit that the watches I wore (if any) haven’t really improved much since then. However, since I recently came to be without a timepiece again, I took the opportunity to read up on watches before buying a new one. I ordered the first well-rated book on the subject I could find, which happened to be Gene Stone’s The Watch. It turns out that this book was one of the most entertaining books I recently read, and I must admit I have become a watch fanatic ever since I read it.
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Tags: Books, Casio, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Reverso, Reviews, Swatch, Switzerland, Watches
Posted in Books | 1 Comment »
Monday, July 13th, 2009
Although the primary focus of XMPP: The Definitive Guide is explaning the XMPP protocol and all its extensions through text and illustrations, we also included a few Python code examples to help people get started with implementing their own ideas. In fact, we devoted a whole chapter to building an XMPP application, starting out with a simple bot implementation, but gradually extending the application into a full server component. For people who want to try this out for themselves, we’re releasing the source code of all code examples, including a simple echo bot, and different variants of the CheshiR microblogging platform XMPP interface.
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Tags: Books, Jabber, Python, SleekXMPP, XMPP, XMPP-TDG
Posted in Jabber, Programming, Writing | No Comments »
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009
Adam Goucher and Tim Riley (Director of QA at Mozilla) announced a few months ago that they are putting together a Beautiful Testing book for O’Reilly. I took the opportunity to write a chapter about testing in the context of XMPP (more specifically, about testing protocol implementations in Swift), and just submitted the final draft for technical review. The book is expected to be released this August.
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Tags: Books, C++, Jabber, Nothing But Nets, O’Reilly, Swift, Unit Testing, XMPP
Posted in Swift, Writing | 1 Comment »
Sunday, February 8th, 2009
O’Reilly just sent us the cover for our upcoming XMPP Book, and it seems we got the world’s smallest ungulate: the lesser mouse-deer. I haven’t seen one in real life before, am not sure I ever want to, but still: great! Have a look below to see what the cover of the book will look like when it hits the stores in 2 months.
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Tags: Books, Jabber, O'Reilly, XMPP, XMPP-TDG
Posted in Jabber, Writing | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
After a few weeks of heavy labour and long nights, Peter, Kevin, and I just submitted the final revision of “XMPP: The Definitive Guide” to the folks at O’Reilly. All the feedback from our (thorough) reviewers has been processed, we added quite a few extra bits and clarifications (58 pages to be exact), polished the whole thing up, and went through the resulting manuscript with a fine toothed comb. We hope the people who will read this book will be as satisfied with the end result as we are. If all goes according to plan, the book should roll out of the presses in about 2 months. In the mean time, you can expect an update to the on-line rough cut version of the book in the next couple of days.
Tags: Books, Jabber, O'Reilly, XMPP, XMPP-TDG
Posted in Jabber, Writing | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
While Kevin, Peter, and I are working very hard to finish the first draft of our upcoming book ‘XMPP: The Definitive Guide’, O’Reilly has recently released early versions of most of the chapters of the book as Rough Cuts. People interested in learning about XMPP today can now get a preliminary version of the book, and get updates as the book progresses.
Tags: Books, Jabber, O'Reilly, XMPP, XMPP-TDG
Posted in Jabber, Writing | 2 Comments »
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
I’m excited to announce that Peter, Kevin, and I recently got the green light from O’Reilly to start writing a book about Jabber/XMPP. The book will be targeted at a diverse public: on one hand, people who want to get acquainted with XMPP and will get an introduction and a general overview of XMPP, its workings, and its possibilities. On the other hand, software engineers who want to integrate XMPP into their products will get a guide to implementing different use cases of XMPP through a series of different developer stories. The book is expected to be available in 2009, so start making some room on your bookshelf!
Tags: Books, Jabber, O'Reilly, XMPP, XMPP-TDG
Posted in Jabber, Writing | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
At the occasion of `Read an eBook week’, I thought I’ld do something you can’t actually do with real books: buy (and read) a version of a book before it is released. Andy Hunt, author of the excellent book `The Pragmatic Programmer’ (a must read for every developer!), recently announced the availability of a `beta’ version of his new book, `Refactor your wetware’. This beta version is an early electronic version of the book, which gives the reader the opportunity to get a sneak peek at the book, and give feedback for the final version (which, as a beta book owner, you can also download when it is released). So, I went over to the `Pragmatic Bookshelf’ store, ordered my copy, and got an e-mail with my personalized copy only a few seconds later.
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Tags: Andy Hunt, Books, eBooks, Pragmatic Bookshelf, Reviews
Posted in Books | No Comments »
