O'Reilly Programming

Garrett Grolemund, author of the forthcoming "Data Analysis with R" discusses the benefits of using a programming language like R, instead of traditional data analysis software, for data analysis.

The Elm Programming Language, created by Evan Czaplicki, tackles web interaction and takes on the big three — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Czaplicki to talk about why he decided to take on this daunting project and how Elm could revolutionize web programming.

Eric Meyer, the author of CSS: The Definitive Guide (and much more) has taught thousands of people CSS through his books, his talks, and his articles. I've always enjoyed hearing his take on the state of CSS, as he manages to find combinations of capabilities that make CSS more powerful than I thought it was when I first looked. We sat down last week to discuss the many huge changes CSS3 is bringing, from improvements to old capabilities to completely new tools for animations, transforms, and layout.

Scala, a language designed for well-structured and readable programs, is richly provisioned with testing frameworks. The community has adopted test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD) with zeal. These represent the baseline for trustworthy code development today.

WebGL (Web Graphics Library) is a JavaScript API maintained by the Khronos group, a standards body responsible for other open standards including OpenGL. WebGL allows developers to display hardware-accelerated interactive 3D graphics in the browser without installing additional software -- READ: no plug-ins needed. It’s currently supported by most of the major browsers (Chrome, Safari, and Firefox). Though it’s not clear when or if Microsoft will support WebGL, the applications created with WebGL are impressive. Ellie Goulding's Lights illustrates its power.

Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python. I recently had the opportunity to talk with him about the state of the language. You probably don't realize it, but Python's capabilities are pushed every time you use YouTube and Dropbox. During our interview, Van Rossum said both of these services are at the forefront of Python's development.

Doug Finke (@dfinke) is an O'Reilly author and software developer. He moderates a PowerShell for Developers forum at powershell.org. We sat down recently to talk about the PowerShell, which has a new version launching with Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, and how it has grown with this latest release.

The Go programming language was created by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, and Robert Griesemer. Pike (@rob_pike) recently told me that Go was born while they were waiting a long while for some code to compile — too long.

Chris Vander Mey, CEO of Scaled Recognition, and author of a new O'Reilly book, Shipping Greatness, lays out in this video some of the deep lessons he learned during his years working on some very high-impact and high-priority projects at Google and Amazon.

Glenn Block (@gblock) is an O'Reilly author and senior program manager on the Windows Azure Team at Microsoft. We sat down recently to talk about the newly released, which he helped develop, and why it will become essential to building RESTful applications.