Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell. With Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, by Bruce A. Tate, you'll go beyond the syntax-and beyond the 20-minute tutorial you'll find someplace online. This book has an audacious goal: to present a meaningful exploration of seven languages within a single book. Rather than serve as a complete reference or installation guide, Seven Languages hits what's essential and unique about each language. Moreover, this approach will help teach you how to grok new languages. For each language, you'll solve a nontrivial problem, using techniques that show off the language's most important features. As the book proceeds, you'll discover the strengths and weaknesses of the languages, while dissecting the process of learning languages quickly--for example, finding the typing and programming models, decision structures, and how you interact with them. Among this group of seven, you'll explore the most critical programming models of our time. Learn the dynamic typing that makes Ruby, Python, and Perl so flexible and compelling. Understand the underlying prototype system that's at the heart of JavaScript. See how pattern matching in Prolog shaped the development of Scala and Erlang. Discover how pure functional programming in Haskell is different from the Lisp family of languages, including Clojure. Explore the concurrency techniques that are quickly becoming the backbone of a new generation of Internet applications. Find out how to use Erlang's let-it-crash philosophy for building fault-tolerant systems. Understand the actor model that drives concurrency design in Io and Scala. Learn how Clojure uses versioning to solve some of the most difficult concurrency problems. It's all here, all in one place. Use the concepts from one language to find creative solutions in another-or discover a language that may become one of your favorites.

In just a matter of days, you can develop powerful web applications with Rails that once took weeks or months to produce with other web frameworks. If that sounds too good to be true, it isn't. Find out for yourself with "Rails: Up and Running", the concise and popular book that not only explains how Rails works, but guides you through a complete test drive. Perfect for beginning web developers, this thoroughly revised edition teaches you the basics of installing and using Rails 2.1 and the Ruby scripting language. While Rails is praised for its simplicity, there are still a few tricky steps to master along the way."Rails: Up and Running" offers lots of examples and covers just about everything you need to build functional Rails applications right away. Learn how to: create simple database-backed applications, and build dynamic user-centric web pages using Ajax and REST; exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails and implement web services; map data to an imperfect table, traverse complex relationships, and build custom finders; and, find performance problems and apply performance-optimizing techniques. See how fast you can go on Rails, and how reliable it's become with the stability and power of version 2.1. With "Rails: Up and Running", you'll discover why Rails is a remarkable new way to build database-driven web applications.

Sometimes the simplest answer is the best. Many Enterprise Java developers, accustomed to dealing with Java's spiraling complexity, have fallen into the habit of choosing overly complicated solutions to problems when simpler options are available. Building server applications with "heavyweight" Java-based architectures, such as WebLogic, JBoss, and WebSphere, can be costly and cumbersome. When you've reached the point where you spend more time writing code to support your chosen framework than to solve your actual problems, it's time to think in terms of simplicity.

In "Better, Faster, Lighter Java," authors Bruce Tate and Justin Gehtland argue that the old heavyweight architectures are unwieldy, complicated, and contribute to slow and buggy application code. As an alternative means for building better applications, the authors present two "lightweight" open source architectures: Hibernate--a persistence framework that does its job with a minimal API and gets out of the way, and Spring--a container that's not invasive, heavy or complicated.

Hibernate and Spring are designed to be fairly simple to learn and use, and place reasonable demands on system resources. "Better, Faster, Lighter Java" shows you how they can help you create enterprise applications that are easier to maintain, write, and debug, and are ultimately much faster.

Written for intermediate to advanced Java developers, "Better, Faster, Lighter Java," offers fresh ideas--often unorthodox--to help you rethink the way you work, and techniques and principles you'll use to build simpler applications. You'll learn to spend more time on what's important. When you're finished with this book, you'll find that your Java is better, faster, and lighter than ever before.

Bruce Tate, author of the Jolt Award-winning "Better, Faster, Lighter Java" has an intriguing notion about the future of Java, and it's causing some agitation among Java developers. Bruce believes Java is abandoning its base, and conditions are ripe for an alternative to emerge.

In "Beyond Java," Bruce chronicles the rise of the most successful language of all time, and then lays out, in painstaking detail, the compromises the founders had to make to establish success. Then, he describes the characteristics of likely successors to Java. He builds to a rapid and heady climax, presenting alternative languages and frameworks with productivity and innovation unmatched in Java. He closes with an evaluation of the most popular and important programming languages, and their future role in a world beyond Java.

If you are agree with the book's premise--that Java's reign is coming to an end--then this book will help you start to build your skills accordingly. You can download some of the frameworks discussed and learn a few new languages. This book will teach you what a new language needs to succeed, so when things do change, you'll be more prepared. And even if you think Java is here to stay, you can use the best techniques from frameworks introduced in this book to improve what you're doing in Java today.

Since development first began on Spring in 2003, there's been a constant buzz about it in Java development publications and corporate IT departments. The reason is clear: Spring is a lightweight Java framework in a world of complex heavyweight architectures that take forever to implement. Spring is like a breath of fresh air to overworked developers.

In Spring, you can make an object secure, remote, or transactional, with a couple of lines of configuration instead of embedded code. The resulting application is simple and clean. In Spring, you can work less and go home early, because you can strip away a whole lot of the redundant code that you tend to see in most J2EE applications. You won't be nearly as burdened with meaningless detail. In Spring, you can change your mind without the consequences bleeding through your entire application. You'll adapt much more quickly than you ever could before.

"Spring: A Developer's Notebook" offers a quick dive into the new Spring framework, designed to let you get hands-on as quickly as you like. If you don't want to bother with a lot of theory, this book is definitely for you. You'll work through one example after another. Along the way, you'll discover the energy and promise of the Spring framework.

This practical guide features ten code-intensive labs that'll rapidly get you up to speed. You'll learn how to do the following, and more:

install the Spring Framework

set up the development environment

use Spring with other open source Java tools such as Tomcat, Struts, and Hibernate

master AOP and transactions

utilize ORM solutions

As with all titles in the Developer's Notebook series, this no-nonsense book skips allthe boring prose and cuts right to the chase. It's an approach that forces you to get your hands dirty by working through one instructional example after another-examples that speak to you instead of at you.