No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology: The 2007 Edition (Paperback)

by Neal Ford (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Twenty-seven weekends a year, the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference rolls into another town, featuring the world's best technical speakers and writers. Up until now, you had to go to one of the shows to soak up their collective wisdom. Now, you can hold it in the palm of your hand. The No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology represents topics presented on the tour, written by the speakers who created it. This book allows the authors the chance to go more in depth on the subjects for which they are passionate. It is guaranteed to surprise, enlighten, and broaden your understanding of the technical world in which you live.

The No Fluff, Just Stuff Symposium Series is a traveling conference series for software developers visiting 27 cities a year. No Fluff has put on over 75 symposia throughout the U.S. and Canada, with more than 12,000 attendees so far. Its success has been a result of focusing on high quality technical presentations, great speakers, and no marketing hype. Now this world-class material is available to you in print for the first time.

About the Author
Authors include well-known, previously published and best-selling authors Glenn Vanderburg, Rebecca Parsons,Ted Neward, Scott Davis, Brian Sletten, Howard Lewis Shipp, David Geary, Neal Ford, Paul Duvall, David Bock, Venkat Subramaniam, Nate Schutta, Jared Richardson, David Hussman, Mark Richards, Scott Leberknight

Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf (April 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0978739280
• ISBN-13: 978-0978739287
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 7.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,201,938 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Knowledge of experts, balance of FOX news, June 22, 2007

By	Y. Bronshteyn "Just me" (Waltham, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There is not a single good reason known to me not to read the second No Fluff Just Stuff Anthology. Most engineers I know spend far more time coding than catching up on the latest tricks and trends in the engineering world. To those engineers, present company included, an anthology like this is invaluable. However, NFJS Anthology Vol. 2 is also grievously unbalanced.

Much material in this volume is written by agitators of the "new age" software movement, for lack of a better word. They gravitate towards weaker contracts (i.e. REST over WS-*), loose typing (i.e. Ruby over Java), relaxed processes (i.e. Agile over anything else), and so forth... While all authors are entitled to their opinions, I find it unsettling that the "new age" dogma dominates much of the publication. Brian Sletten assaults WS-* in his essay "Give it a Rest", but where is the counterargument? The three paragraphs Sletten himself offers? Or does the editor wish to suggest, quite falsely if so, that there really is no business case to explain why top enterprises leverage WS-* based solutions in spite of their cost?

How about Jared Richardson's article on JRuby titled "Integrating Ruby with legacy code"? Since when is Java considered legacy code? Since when has the free world stopped developing solutions in Java except when under the whip of mighty yet incompetent management? And once again, where is the refutation? Where is the essay on the dangers of mixing and matching languages and platforms? The weaknesses of purely-dynamic languages? Certainly not in this NFJS anthology (sorry, Jared, two brush-off bullet points don't count). And what of a counterargument to Venkat Sabramaniam's essay on Agile Methodologies? While deeply insightful into agile techniques, it also seems to offer Agile as a panacea of sorts, omitting any discussion of when an agile process may be unfitting or even crippling. Once again, shop somewhere else for the complete story.
Ultimately, the single greatest failure of this compilation can be attributed to Neal Ford's role as its editor. A quick glance at his blog allows one to glean Ford's biases with a naked eye. While the strength of Ford's dispositions does not detract from his status or credibility as a great speaker and author, it renders him unfit to edit such a compilation as this anthology. Ford goes so far as to violate a key principle of the NFJS series by propagandizing a $500 IDE (Chapter 10), while devoting less than half that real estate to Eclipse techniques (Chapter 11), despite the latter's prevalence in availability and market share. In short, Ford allows what would otherwise be an invaluable educational resource to become a hideous concoction of information and propaganda.

Fortunately, Ford's negligence toward balance was slightly tempered by the diversity and insight of several of the authors. Howard Lewis Ship's essay on testing tools and techniques (Chapter 7), David Geary's introduction to the Google Web Toolkit (Chapter 8), and Scott Leberknight's "Data Access using Spring, Hibernate, and JDBC" (Chapter 19). These chapters stand out due to both their relevance and their instructional approach. These essays teach, rather than preach, and set a wonderful example of what the rest of this volume should have looked like. While I look forward to attending this year's No Fluff Just Stuff conference in Boston and even hearing some of the people whose work I criticized in the preceding paragraphs, I hope the 2008 NFJS anthology will offer less demagoguery and more substance, less fluff and more stuff.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Winner from Pragmatic!, July 25, 2006

By	James Holmes "Co-Author 'Windows Developer Po... (South Central Ohio) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology: The 2006 Edition (Pragmatic Programmers) (Paperback)

This book is every bit its title: Concise, targeted chapters getting right to the gist of a topic. Furthermore, the chapters are written by some of the sharpest folks in the software industry -- they know a thing or three and are great authors who've written clear, understandable pieces. The book is based on the No Fluff, Just Stuff Symposium series (ww.nofluffjuststuff.com) in which the authors travel around North America giving intense multi-day seminars.

The book's first chapter, "Real World Web Services" by Scott Davis, sets the tone for the rest of the book: a nice walkthrough of Service-Oriented Architeture, cutting through all the hype surrounding SOA and doing a great job of explaining it in five short paragraphs. Davis moves on to more detail on web services, walking the reader through SOAP, REST, and JSON.

The other chapters follow the same line with clear background and focused discussion on the most important parts of the topic. You can read about instrumenting software, using code coverage, or even dealing with CSS from a developer's perspective. Much of the book's code is Java-centric, but the concepts are important and similar across platforms, so any developer (even a .NET geek like me) can get a lot out of the book.

Additionally, the book's not solely focused on pure code. Several chapters highlight process or methodology topics, like Jared Richardson's "The Cornerstone of a Great Shop" which discusses build processes, or Venkat Subramaniam's "From Fragility to Agility: Methodologies and Practices" which hits the main points of rolling into agile development.

This book is a terrific read. It's concise, it's detailed, it's well-written. Definitely a keeper for my bookshelf.

(Disclaimer: I got this as a free review copy. So what? It's a killer book!)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars eclectic, September 25, 2006

By	D. Graham (Wakefield, UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology: The 2006 Edition (Pragmatic Programmers) (Paperback)

This is certainly an eclectic mix of a book. Topics from 15 authors covering subjects such as language-oriented programming, through agile methodology and CSS.

Written by leaders in their fields, this book doesn't aim to be definitive, but consists of essays by those people about the stuff which interests them. I didn't follow all of the subjects covered, and I think that you would be hard-pressed to. All were well written and would appeal to followers of that particular facet of information technology.

One particular thing I liked about this was the appendix covering each author's favourite reads and tools, plus a comprehensive bibliography.

I'm sure you'll find, as I did, half a dozen topics of interest, with several others opening up previously unknown fields of study. I'm looking forward to the next edition.