"The Pragmatic Programmer" by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt - A foundational book for software developers, with a 20th-anniversary edition mentioned, that originated from notes for consulting clients.
"The Manifesto for Agile Software Development" - Referenced as a significant work that Dave Thomas contributed to.
"Programming Ruby" by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt - A book on the Ruby programming language, where every code example is run and verified during the book build process.
"Agile Web Development with Rails" by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson - Another book by Dave Thomas related to web development.
"Programming Elixir" by Dave Thomas - A book focused on the Elixir programming language.
"Simplicity" by Dave Thomas - A more recent book by Dave Thomas, currently running the Pragmatic Bookshelf.
People Mentioned
Andy Hunt (Co-founder of The Pragmatic Programmer) - Collaborated with Dave Thomas on "The Pragmatic Programmer" and other works, emphasizing plain text and a unique publishing workflow.
Peter Wire - Mentioned as a guest on SE Radio episode 532, discussing the 30 years of PDF.
Jeff Johnson - Mentioned as a guest on SE Radio episode 532, discussing the 30 years of PDF.
Don Knuth (Creator of TeX) - His layout system, TeX, was used by Dave Thomas for producing nicer output for books after initially using troff.
Brian Kernighan - Quoted for his view on WYSIWYG editors, suggesting they should be "WYSIAYG" (What You See Is All You Get).
Organizations & Institutions
IEEE Computer Society - A sponsor of Software Engineering Radio.
IEEE Software Magazine - A sponsor of Software Engineering Radio, available online at computer.org/software.
Addison-Wesley - The publisher that accepted "The Pragmatic Programmer" and worked with Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt on their innovative publishing process.
Bell Labs - The origin of the troff typesetting tool, part of the Unix Documenter's Workbench.
Tools & Software
Microsoft Word - Discussed as a word processor not ideally suited for writing and laying out books due to its focus on WYSIWYG and performance issues with large documents.
FrameMaker - A layout software used by publishers for importing and formatting book content.
Adobe InDesign - A modern layout software used by publishers.
troff (t r o f f) - An early text formatting tool from the Unix Documenter's Workbench used by Dave Thomas, which used period-prefixed instructions for formatting.
TeX - Don Knuth's layout system, which replaced troff for producing higher quality book output for "The Pragmatic Programmer".
LaTeX - A document preparation system built on TeX, used by Dave Thomas to define book layouts.
XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) - A technology used for transforming XML documents, specifically for converting PML to XHTML for ebooks and XSL:FO for PDFs.
XSL:FO (Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects) - An XML format used to describe text laid out in two dimensions, which is then used to generate PDFs.
jruby - A version of Ruby that runs inside the Java Virtual Machine, used in the Pragmatic Bookshelf's toolchain.
Subversion - A version control tool used by Pragmatic Bookshelf for managing author repositories.
Git - Mentioned as a version control system used by some authors, sometimes with automated cherry-pick tools.
ChatGPT - An AI tool discussed in the context of content generation and as a "pragmatic assistant" for authors.
Rust Rover (JetBrains IDE) - Mentioned as an IDE for writing code and Markdown, which performs grammar and spell checking.
Copilot - An AI code completion tool mentioned for its potential to guide authors' writing process.
Websites & Online Resources
SE Radio Net - The website for Software Engineering Radio.
Computer.org/software - The online presence for IEEE Software Magazine.
Creators.pragprog.com - The backend system for authors at Pragmatic Bookshelf to access build logs and download book versions.
Pragprog.com - The website for Pragmatic Bookshelf, where information on writing for them and contact details can be found.
Pragdave.me - Dave Thomas's personal website containing articles.
Articles.pragdave.me (Substack) - Dave Thomas's Substack for articles.
SEradio.slack.com - The Slack channel for Software Engineering Radio.
LinkedIn - A platform where SE Radio can be reached.
Facebook - A platform where SE Radio can be reached.
Twitter - A platform where SE Radio can be reached.
Other Resources
EPUB - The current standard format for ebooks, based on unzipped HTML, assets, and manifest files.
MOBI - An older ebook format previously used by Amazon, which had limitations compared to EPUB, especially for technical content.
PDF - A fixed-format document that can be read electronically, but is not reflowable like typical ebooks.
HTML Disclosure Lists - A native HTML feature for collapsible content, experimented with in ebooks.
Pragmatic Assistant - A ChatGPT project trained on Pragmatic Bookshelf's guidelines to assist authors with writing style and voice.
