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Vicky Ward is a New York Times bestselling author, investigative reporter, and magazine columnist. She is the author of the bestselling books The Liar’s Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How one Building Broke the World’s Toughest Tycoons (Wiley) and The Devil’s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers (Wiley). 

She is an editor at large at HuffPost and HuffPost’s long-form magazine, Highline, as well as at Town & Country magazine. She was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair for eleven years, where she covered politics, finance, art, and culture.

Performance is a feature. 

This book provides a hands-on overview of what every web developer needs to know about the various types of networks (WiFi, 3G/4G), transport protocols (UDP, TCP, and TLS), application protocols (HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2), and APIs available in the browser (XHR & Fetch, WebSocket, WebRTC, and more) to deliver the best—fast, reliable, and resilient—user experience.

Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings written by masters. In contrast, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well—usually programs they wrote themselves—and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another's mistakes rather than building on one another's successes.

Our goal is to change that. In these two books, the authors of four dozen open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to these books provide unique insights into how they think.

If you are a junior developer, and want to learn how your more experienced colleagues think, these books are the place to start. If you are an intermediate or senior developer, and want to see how your peers have solved hard design problems, these books can help you too.

Follow us on our blog at http://aosabook.org/blog/, or on Twitter at @aosabook and using the #aosa hashtag.

How Google Wins Over Users By Giving Them Less

www.fastcodesign.com

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity by Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn.

“Focusing is about saying no. You’ve got to say no, no, no. The result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.” --Steve Jobs

When Google introduced its now famous search engine, it wasn’t the first to offer search capability to consumers. But Google’s version quickly left competitors behind, gaining mainstream acceptance.

...

The company actually developed a rigorous system that imposed tight restrictions upon what could and could not be added to the page. Its leaders had to stand firm against Google’s own creative and well-meaning engineers. And in some cases they even had to defy the wishes of customers.

...

When we spoke to Mayer about how she managed this, she surprised us by using a word you tend to hear from theatrical casting directors, not tech managers. Mayer explained that any potential new feature hoping to get on the Google home page must go through an “audition.” First the feature is tried out on Google’s advanced search page to see how it performs there. But even if the new idea demonstrates its viability in the advanced search, it still goes through a tough scoring system developed by Google.

...

Here’s how the scoring system works:

1. They assign a point for each change in type style, type size, or color.
2. They add the points; the maximum allowed for a promotion is three points.

The goal for the home page is the fewest possible number of points. As Mayer says, “More points equals less simplicity.”

This free book is what I wanted when I started working with single page apps. It's not an API reference on a particular framework, rather, the focus is on discussing patterns, implementation choices and decent practices.

I'm taking a "code and concepts" approach to the topic - the best way to learn how to use something is to understand how it is implemented. My ambition here is to decompose the problem of writing a web app, take a fresh look at it and hopefully make better decisions the next time you make one.

Update: the book is now also on Github. I'll be doing a second set of updates to the book later on. Right now, I'm working a new lightweight open source view layer implementation, which has changed and clarified my thinking about the view layer.

www.readwriteweb.com

The Chrome folks have put together a Field Guide for Web Applicationsthat is almost as notable for its design as the content itself. The field guide is a short resource with four chapters on Web apps, and one devoted to "Bert Appward" – the fictitious author of the guide.

The guide is laid out as a book, and works as an offline application. For example, you can give the app permission to store itself on your mobile device and read it even if you're away from a data connection.

Google's Pete LaPage says that the guide uses AppCache for offline use and the HTML5 History API maintain page state. The entire "app" is a single HTML page.

For new recruits, keeping secrets begins even before they learn which building they'll be working in. Many employees are hired into so‑called dummy positions, roles that aren't explained in detail until after they join the company. "They wouldn't tell me what it was," remembered a former engineer who had been a graduate student before joining Apple. "I knew it was related to the iPod, but not what the job was." Others do know but won't say, a realization that hits the newbies on their first day of work at new-employee orientation.

"You sit down, and you start with the usual roundtable of who is doing what," recalled Bob Borchers, a product marketing executive in the early days of the iPhone. "And half the folks can't tell you what they're doing, because it's a secret project that they've gotten hired for."

...

Apple employees and their projects are pieces of a puzzle. The snapshot of the completed puzzle is known only at the highest reaches of the organization. It calls to mind the cells a resistance organization plants behind enemy lines, whose members aren't given information that could incriminate a comrade. Jon Rubinstein, formerly Apple's senior hardware executive, once deployed the comparison in a less flattering but equally effective manner. "We have cells, like a terrorist organization," he told Business Week in 2000. "Everything is on a need‑to‑know basis."

...

Apple's culture is the polar opposite of Google's, where fliers announcing extracurricular activities -- from ski outings to a high-profile author series -- hang everywhere. At Apple, the iTunes team sponsors the occasional band, and there is a company gym (which isn't free), but by and large Apple people come to work to work. "At meetings, there is no discussion about the lake house where you just spent the weekend," recalled a senior engineer. "You get right down to business." The contrast with the non-Apple world is stark. "When you interact with people at other companies, there's just a relative lack of intensity," said this engineer. "At Apple, people are so committed that they go home at night and don't leave Apple behind them. What they do at Apple is their true religion."

"In new free book the authors of twenty-five open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to this book provide unique insights into how they think."