Jack the Ripper and legacy codebases have more in common than you'd think. Inspired by forensic psychology methods, you'll learn strategies to predict the future of your codebase, assess refactoring direction, and understand how your team influences the design. With its unique blend of forensic psychology and code analysis, this book arms you with the strategies you need, no matter what programming language you use. Software is a living entity that's constantly changing. To understand software systems, we need to know where they came from and how they evolved. By mining commit data and analyzing the history of your code, you can start fixes ahead of time to eliminate broken designs, maintenance issues, and team productivity bottlenecks. In this book, you'll learn forensic psychology techniques to successfully maintain your software. You'll create a geographic profile from your commit data to find hotspots, and apply temporal coupling concepts to uncover hidden relationships between unrelated areas in your code. You'll also measure the effectiveness of your code improvements. You'll learn how to apply these techniques on projects both large and small. For small projects, you'll get new insights into your design and how well the code fits your ideas. For large projects, you'll identify the good and the fragile parts. Large-scale development is also a social activity, and the team's dynamics influence code quality. That's why this book shows you how to uncover social biases when analyzing the evolution of your system. You'll use commit messages as eyewitness accounts to what is really happening in your code. Finally, you'll put it all together by tracking organizational problems in the code and finding out how to fix them. Come join the hunt for better code! What You Need: You need Java 6 and Python 2.7 to run the accompanying analysis tools. You also need Git to follow along with the examples.

Jack the Ripper and legacy codebases have more in common than you'd think. Inspired by forensic psychology methods, you can apply strategies to identify problems in your existing code, assess refactoring direction, and understand how your team influences the software architecture. With its unique blend of criminal psychology and code analysis, Your Code as a Crime Scene arms you with the techniques you need to take on any codebase, no matter what programming language you use. Software development might well be the most challenging task humanity ever attempted. As systems scale up, they also become increasingly complex, expensive to maintain, and difficult to reason about. We can always write more tests, try to refactor, and even fire up a debugger to understand complex coding constructs. That's a great starting point, but you can do so much better. Take inspiration from forensic psychology techniques to understand and improve existing code. Visualize codebases via a geographic profile from commit data to find development hotspots, prioritize technical debt, and uncover hidden dependencies. Get data and develop strategies to make the business case for larger refactorings. Detect and fix organizational problems from the vantage point of the software architecture to remove bottlenecks for the teams. The original Your Code as a Crime Scene from 2014 pioneered techniques for understanding the intersection of people and code. This new edition reflects a decade of additional experience from hundreds of projects. Updated techniques, novel case studies, and extensive new material adds to the strengths of this cult classic. Change how you view software development and join the hunt for better code! What You Need: You need to be comfortable reading code. You also need to use Git (or Subversion, Mercurial or similar version-control tool).

What others in the trenches say about The Pragmatic Programmer... “The cool thing about this book is that it’s great for keeping the programming process fresh. The book helps you to continue to grow and clearly comes from people who have been there.” — Kent Beck, author of Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change “I found this book to be a great mix of solid advice and wonderful analogies!” — Martin Fowler, author of Refactoring and UML Distilled “I would buy a copy, read it twice, then tell all my colleagues to run out and grab a copy. This is a book I would never loan because I would worry about it being lost.” — Kevin Ruland, Management Science, MSG-Logistics “The wisdom and practical experience of the authors is obvious. The topics presented are relevant and useful.... By far its greatest strength for me has been the outstanding analogies—tracer bullets, broken windows, and the fabulous helicopter-based explanation of the need for orthogonality, especially in a crisis situation. I have little doubt that this book will eventually become an excellent source of useful information for journeymen programmers and expert mentors alike.” — John Lakos, author of Large-Scale C++ Software Design “This is the sort of book I will buy a dozen copies of when it comes out so I can give it to my clients.” — Eric Vought, Software Engineer “Most modern books on software development fail to cover the basics of what makes a great software developer, instead spending their time on syntax or technology where in reality the greatest leverage possible for any software team is in having talented developers who really know their craft well. An excellent book.” — Pete McBreen, Independent Consultant “Since reading this book, I have implemented many of the practical suggestions and tips it contains. Across the board, they have saved my company time and money while helping me get my job done quicker! This should be a desktop reference for everyone who works with code for a living.” — Jared Richardson, Senior Software Developer, iRenaissance, Inc. “I would like to see this issued to every new employee at my company....” — Chris Cleeland, Senior Software Engineer, Object Computing, Inc. “If I’m putting together a project, it’s the authors of this book that I want. . . . And failing that I’d settle for people who’ve read their book.” — Ward Cunningham Straight from the programming trenches, The Pragmatic Programmer cuts through the increasing specialization and technicalities of modern software development to examine the core process--taking a requirement and producing working, maintainable code that delights its users. It covers topics ranging from personal responsibility and career development to architectural techniques for keeping your code flexible and easy to adapt and reuse. Read this book, and you'll learn how to Fight software rot; Avoid the trap of duplicating knowledge; Write flexible, dynamic, and adaptable code; Avoid programming by coincidence; Bullet-proof your code with contracts, assertions, and exceptions; Capture real requirements; Test ruthlessly and effectively; Delight your users; Build teams of pragmatic programmers; and Make your developments more precise with automation. Written as a series of self-contained sections and filled with entertaining anecdotes, thoughtful examples, and interesting analogies, The Pragmatic Programmer illustrates the best practices and major pitfalls of many different aspects of software development. Whether you're a new coder, an experienced programmer, or a manager responsible for software projects, use these lessons daily, and you'll quickly see improvements in personal productivity, accuracy, and job satisfaction. You'll learn skills and develop habits and attitudes that form the foundation for long-term success in your career. You'll become a Pragmatic Programmer.

A revealing guide to a career as a crime scene investigator written by acclaimed journalist Jacqueline Detwiler-George and based on the real-life experiences of the CSI team at the Baltimore police department—required reading for anyone considering a path to this profession. Becoming a Crime Scene Investigator takes you behind the scenes to find out what it’s really like, and what it really takes, to become a crime scene investigator. Acclaimed journalist Jacqueline Detwiler-George shadows the crime scene investigators of the Baltimore Police Department to show how this job becomes a reality. Forensic science is an essential component of any criminal investigation. CSI evidence can tip the scales of justice during trials, helping to free the innocent and convict the guilty. Discover what it’s like to process a crime scene by collecting evidence, documenting via photos, dusting for fingerprints, and analyzing blood spatter. Confront the gruesome realities of the job, tour their in-house crime labs, and watch as they process results. Gain wisdom and insight from the director of the forensic laboratory and the chief of the forensic division—and learn how this essential job is performed at the highest level.

Are you working on a codebase where cost overruns, death marches, and heroic fights with legacy code monsters are the norm? Battle these adversaries with novel ways to identify and prioritize technical debt, based on behavioral data from how developers work with code. And that's just for starters. Because good code involves social design, as well as technical design, you can find surprising dependencies between people and code to resolve coordination bottlenecks among teams. Best of all, the techniques build on behavioral data that you already have: your version-control system. Join the fight for better code! Use statistics and data science to uncover both problematic code and the behavioral patterns of the developers who build your software. This combination gives you insights you can't get from the code alone. Use these insights to prioritize refactoring needs, measure their effect, find implicit dependencies between different modules, and automatically create knowledge maps of your system based on actual code contributions. In a radical, much-needed change from common practice, guide organizational decisions with objective data by measuring how well your development teams align with the software architecture. Discover a comprehensive set of practical analysis techniques based on version-control data, where each point is illustrated with a case study from a real-world codebase. Because the techniques are language neutral, you can apply them to your own code no matter what programming language you use. Guide organizational decisions with objective data by measuring how well your development teams align with the software architecture. Apply research findings from social psychology to software development, ensuring you get the tools you need to coach your organization towards better code. If you're an experienced programmer, software architect, or technical manager, you'll get a new perspective that will change how you work with code. What You Need: You don't have to install anything to follow along in the book. TThe case studies in the book use well-known open source projects hosted on GitHub. You'll use CodeScene, a free software analysis tool for open source projects, for the case studies. We also discuss alternative tooling options where they exist.

The Forensic Crime Scene: A Visual Guide, Second Edition presents knowledgeable chapters on crime scene investigation, the various types of documentation, scene reconstruction, and the value of evidence and proper evidence collection. Additionally, a companion site hosts video and additional instructional materials. The primary goal of this book is to provide visual instruction on the correct way to process a forensic crime scene. By using photographs and video clips to show proper vs. improper procedures, the reader will be able to identify the correct principles required to process a scene. Provides coverage of techniques, documentation and reconstruction of crime scenes Shows side-by-side comparisons of the correct vs. incorrect process Online website hosts videos and additional instructional materials

Blood Secrets reveals how forensic experts read the story of a murder told in the traces of blood left behind, providing crucial evidence that has helped convict criminals who might have otherwise walked free. When Rod Englert began his career in law enforcement, virtually no police force in the world knew how to correctly examine blood spatter. He spent years studying and testing how blood behaves, pioneering a vital new tool that is now a part of any criminal investigation. In Blood Secrets he demonstrates how detectives and forensic experts use blood-spatter analysis to solve real cases. How can the police tell what type of murder weapon was used when the body is missing and all that's left is a trace of gore? How can they tell if a victim was moved, or which person in a room fired the fatal shot? Englert lays out what he's learned on a variety of intriguing cases, from puzzling murders in tiny, remote towns to the highest-profile celebrity trials--including O. J. Simpson, Robert Blake, and many others. Filled with fascinating details of forensic science and real-life CSI stories, Blood Secrets shows the techniques and tools used to decipher blood spatter's code.