Simon St. Laurent

Crystal is for Ruby programmers who want more performance, or for developers who enjoy working in a high-level scripting environment. Crystal combines native execution speed and concurrency with Ruby-like syntax, so you will feel right at home. This book, the first available on Crystal, shows you how to write applications that have the beauty and elegance of a modern language, combined with the power of types and modern concurrency tooling. Now you can write beautiful code that runs faster, scales better, and is a breeze to deploy. Crystal is elegant to read and easy to program like Ruby, allowing full object-oriented development. Its compiler is powerful enough to nearly always infer the type of your variables. So you get the benefits of a statically typed language: more robust code, safety and execution speed, while still reaching high productivity in development. Null pointer exceptions as in JavaScript, Java or C#, are a thing of the past: Crystal annihilates them, just like Rust. Explore the building blocks and design of the language, and how you can use the Crystal tool-chain to build and manage powerful applications. Harness the power of the macro system, as well as how to work with fibers and channels, making concurrency as easy as possible. Learn how to use the Kemal web framework and access databases, and how to tap the potential of existing Crystal libraries. Find the spot that Crystal fills in today's software world with real-world examples. With Crystal, you can combine the best of both worlds: the high-level coding of dynamic languages, and the safety and blazing performance of a natively compiled language. What You Need: To develop in Crystal, you only need Crystal v 0.26 the latest version, a common text editor and a browser.

If you're new to Erlang, its functional style can seem difficult, but with help from this hands-on introduction, you'll scale the learning curve and discover how enjoyable, powerful, and fun this language can be. In this updated second edition, author Simon St.Laurent shows you how to write simple Erlang programs by teaching you one skill at a time. You'll learn about pattern matching, recursion, message passing, process-oriented programming, and establishing pathways for data rather than telling it where to go. By the end of your journey, you'll understand why Erlang is ideal for concurrency and resilience. Get cozy with Erlang's shell, its command line interface Define functions, using the fun tool, to represent repeated calculations Discover atoms, pattern matching, and guards: the foundations of your program structure Delve into the heart of Erlang processing with recursion, strings, lists, and higher-order functions Create processes, send messages among them, and apply pattern matching to incoming messages Store and manipulate structured data with Erlang Term Storage and the Mnesia database Learn about Open Telecom Platform, Erlang's open source libraries and tools

Smooth, powerful, and small, Elixir is an excellent language for learning functional programming, and with this hands-on introduction, you'll discover just how powerful Elixir can be. Authors Simon St. Laurent and J. David Eisenberg show you how Elixir combines the robust functional programming of Erlang with an approach that looks more like Ruby, and includes powerful macro features for metaprogramming. Updated to cover Elixir 1.4, the second edition of this practical book helps you write simple Elixir programs by teaching one skill at a time. Once you pick up pattern matching, process-oriented programming, and other concepts, you'll understand why Elixir makes it easier to build concurrent and resilient programs that scale up and down with ease. Get comfortable with IEx, Elixir's command line interface Learn Elixir's basic structures by working with numbers Discover atoms, pattern matching, and guards: the foundations of your program structure Delve into the heart of Elixir processing with recursion, strings, lists, and higher-order functions Create Elixir processes and send messages among them Store and manipulate structured data with Erlang Term Storage and the Mnesia database Build resilient applications with the Open Telecom Platform

Ready to learn Rails? Unlike most Rails books, Learning Rails is for web developers, and not for programmers. Rather than begin with the inner layers of a Rails web application - the models and controllers - this book approaches Rails development from the outer layer: the view side of an application. You'll start from the foundations of the Web you already know, and learn how to create something visible with Rails before reaching the more difficult database models and controller code. Each chapter includes exercises and review questions so you can test your understanding as you go. Present content by building an application with a basic view and a simple controller, while learning Ruby along the way Build forms and process their results, progressing from simple to more complex Connect forms to models by setting up a database, and use Rails' Active Record to create code that maps to database structures Use Rails scaffolding to build applications from a view-centric perspective Add common web application elements such as sessions, cookies, and authentication Build applications that combine data from multiple tables Create simple but dynamic interfaces with Rails and Ajax Learning Rails 3 covers the most recent developments.

XML, the Extensible Markup Language, is everywhere: the syntax of choice for newly designed document formats across almost all computer applications. Now used daily by developers, XML is living up to its reputation as one of the most important developments in document interchange in the history of computing. A perennial bestseller, the handy "XML Pocket Reference" from O'Reilly has been revised once again to give you quick access to the latest goods. In addition to its comprehensive look at XML, this third edition has been updated with new material on Namespaces and XML Schema - considered among the most important elements in current XML use; along with RELAX NG and Schematron, additional powerful tools for describing XML document structures. Like other titles in O'Reilly's "Pocket Reference" series, the "XML Pocket Reference, 3rd Edition" features a well-organized format that gets right to the point. As a result, it's already won over the allegiance of developers everywhere. If you need XML answers quick and on the fly, this compact book is most definitely the book for you.