Coder to Developer helps you excel at the many non-coding tasks entailed, from start to finish, in just about any successful development project. What’s more, it equips you with the mindset and self-assurance required to pull it all together, so that you see every piece of your work as part of a coherent process. Inside, you’ll find plenty of technical guidance on such topics as:

• Choosing and using a source code control system
• Code generation tools–when and why
• Preventing bugs with unit testing
• Tracking, fixing, and learning from bugs
• Application activity logging
• Streamlining and systematizing the build process
• Traditional installations and alternative approaches

To pull all of this together, the author has provided the source code for Download Tracker, a tool for organizing your collection of downloaded code, that’s used for examples throughout this book. The code is provided in various states of completion, reflecting every stage of development, so that you can dig deep into the actual process of building software. But you’ll also develop “softer” skills, in areas such as team management, open source collaboration, user and developer documentation, and intellectual property protection. If you want to become someone who can deliver not just good code but also a good product, this book is the place to start. If you must build successful software projects, it’s essential reading.

Highlights include

• How software projects resemble other projects—and how they’re different
• The iterative problem-solving clock: ending the day with real solutions
• The realities of scheduling: How late are you going to be?
• Trade-offs, estimating, project rhythm, and getting products out the door
• Understanding what you’re seeing, hearing, and feeling as a software manager
• The human element: politics, negotiation, compensation, culture, and growth
• Avoiding crises before they happen… and mitigating them when they do
• Thinking laterally: original ideas in software project management

When developers build software, they’re able to keep track of all the different versions and all the components they use with software configuration management (SCM) systems. One of the more popular SCM products is Perforce.Authored by Perforce’s own VP of product technology, Practical Perforce is the ideal complement to the existing product manual, focusing less on the ‘how” and more on the “why” and “when.” The book is not only a helpful introduction to Perforce, it’s an enlightening resource for those already familiar with this versatile SCM product. Whether you’re a programmer, product manager, or build engineer, you stand to benefit from the many insider tips and ideas presented in this convenient guide.

Practical Perforce is divided into two main parts. Part I offers a whirlwind technical tour, complete with careful descriptions of basic and advanced Perforce commands designed to give you a baseline knowledge. Part II describes the big picture-using Perforce in a collaborative software development. It outlines recommended best practices and quickly shows how to implement them with the Perforce operations introduced in Part I. Throughout the book, you’ll learn how to maximize Perforce so it completes tasks like these in the most efficient manner possible:

• Keep track of changes as you conduct concurrent parallel work on files
• Log activity
• Generate reports on who did what when
• Compare, merge and branch files
• Store files and file configurations
• Restore lost bug fixes

Recognizing the pitfalls and practices of an SCM system like Perforce is absolutely essential to producing good software. Now, with Practical Perforce, you have the edge you need to ensure success.

This book 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. What it does tell you is how to build your product in better ways, how to keep track of the code that you write, and how to track the bugs in your code. Plus some more things you’ll wish you had known before starting a project.Practical Development Environments is a guide, a collection of advice about real development environments for small to medium-sized projects and groups. Each of the chapters considers a different kind of tool - tools for tracking versions of files, build tools, testing tools, bug-tracking tools, tools for creating documentation, and tools for creating packaged releases. Each chapter discusses what you should look for in that kind of tool and what to avoid, and also describes some good ideas, bad ideas, and annoying experiences for each area. Specific instances of each type of tool are described in enough detail so that you can decide which ones you want to investigate further.

Developers want to write code, not maintain makefiles. Writers want to write content instead of manage templates. IT provides machines, but doesn’t have time to maintain all the different tools. Managers want the product to move smoothly from development to release, and are interested in tools to help this happen more often. Whether as a full-time position or just because they are helpful, all projects have toolsmiths: making choices about tools, installing them, and then maintaining the tools that everyone else depends upon. This book is especially for everyone who ends up being a toolsmith for his or her group.

Most IT projects fail to deliver, on average, all IT projects run over schedule by 82%, run over cost by 43% and deliver only 52% of the desired functionality. Pretty dismal statistics. Using the proven methods in this book, every IT project you work on from here on out will have a much higher likelihood of being on time, on budget and higher quality.This book provides clear, concise, information and hands-on training to give you immediate results. And, the companion Web site provides dozens of templates for managing IT projects. You don’t need an advanced degree in project management or a black belt in Six Sigma methodologies to improve your IT project results. What you need is a clear, concise and easy-to-implement system for managing all IT projects.

This book will teach you how to improve your IT project results from start to finish without bogging you down in complex project management jargon or systems. This book provides hands-on training to help you get immediate results. You can read the book straight through or work through it chapter by chapter–either way, you’ll pick up invaluable tools to help you on your next (or current) IT project. From idea to implementation, any IT project you work on will benefit immediately from applying the concepts in this book. If you could increase your project’s ROI by 80%, reduce your project’s schedule by 20% and increase your project success rate by 35%, wouldn’t you do that? These statistics are the average improvements seen after implementing IT project management. This book will assist you in improving every aspect of your IT projects and you’ll learn to develop the right size plan for your project– not a one size fits all approach.