Practical Development Environments - O'Reilly's Latest Release

For Immediate Release
For more information, a review copy, cover art, or an interview with
the author, contact:
Kathryn Barrett (707) 827-7094 or kathrynb@oreilly.com

A Guide for Toolsmiths--The Unsung Heroes of Software Development
O'Reilly Releases "Practical Development Environments"

Sebastopol, CA-- You can have great coders, a terrific idea,
top-of-the-line technology, even deep funding, but a project can still
fail without a toolsmith. Every project has a toolsmith--some are
pre-defined full-time positions, but often the de facto (and usually
unspoken role) of toolsmith falls to the person who happens to have the
skill set, the interest, or who just didn't duck the onerous task quickly
enough.  Either way, making the choices about tools, installing them, and
then maintaining the tools that everyone else depends upon can prove vital
to the project.  Matthew Doar, author of the just-released "Practical
Development Environments" (O'Reilly, US $39.95) agrees, adding: "A good
technical environment for developing software can make or break a
project--or even a company."

Building a development environment may not be a sexy topic to most people,
but it's an essential one.  Developers want to write code, not maintain
makefiles. Writers want to write content instead of managing templates. IT
provides machines, but doesn't have time to maintain all the different
tools. And managers, of course, want the product to move smoothly from
development to release.  Ergo, the onus of creating and maintaining a
productive technical environment rests with the individual who ends up
being a toolsmith for his or her group.

Unlike most tech books, "Practical Development Environments" doesn't tell
you how to write faster code, or how to write code with fewer memory
leaks, or even how to debug code at all. It's a practical approach to the
challenges that confront toolsmiths every day: how to build the product in
better ways, how to keep track of the code that's written, and how to
track the bugs in code.

"An incredible number of projects don't use any version control at all.
That's staggering, given the risk of losing what you've worked so hard on,
and how little effort it takes to set up a minimal tool to do this," says
Doar. "Many developers spend a lot of their time waiting for a build to
finish, so it makes sense to be able to ask where the time was spent. Most
build tools can't even tell you that. The book describes some tools that
can."

But building an effective development environment is not only not sexy;
it's not easy either. How do you decide which tools to use for any given
project?  What do you look for in a tool--and what do you avoid? Which can
you rely on? Which will help automate your processes?  How do you discover
the pitfalls or annoyances of any given tool--before you're in knee deep?


Practical advice is hard to come by, and trial and error on the fly is not
only time consuming and frustrating, but potentially hazardous to the
health of a project.  "I don't use words like paradigm and ontology," says
Doar. "In my book, companies and projects release products, they don't
'optimize passions for agile solutions.' And bugs are called bugs.
Toolsmiths need practical commonsense advice--the kind of advice you wish
you had thought of before the project began."

Topics include:
-Tools for tracking version of files
-Build tools
-Testing tools
-Bug tracking tools
-Tools for creating documentation
-Tools for creating packaged releases

"There are some uncomfortable software development mistakes that most
developers have stumbled across--or stepped into," says Doar. Avoiding
these costly mistakes easily justifies the price of this essential new
book.

Additional Resources:

Chapter 2, "Project Basics," is available online at:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/practicalde/chapter/index....

For more information about the book, including table of contents, index,
author bio, and samples, see:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/practicalde/index.html

For a cover graphic in JPEG format, go to:
ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/graphics/book_covers/hi-res/0596007...

Practical Development Environments
Matthew B. Doar
ISBN: 0-596-00796-5, 296 pages, $39.95 US, $55.95 CA
order@oreilly.com
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