Shane Warden is the Online Managing Editor at O'Reilly Media. He promotes free and open source software for O'Reilly's Open Technology Exchange. In practice, this means editing and researching. He is a co-author of The Art of Agile Development.He has contributed to several projects including Perl 5, Perl 6, Pugs, and, these days, Parrot. Someday, he'd like to claim some responsibility for improving the quality of all software.Federico Biancuzzi is a freelance interviewer. His interviews appeared on publications such as ONLamp.com, LinuxDevCenter.com, SecurityFocus.com, NewsForge.com, Linux.com, TheRegister.co.uk, ArsTechnica.com, the Polish print magazine BSD Magazine, and the Italian print magazine Linux&C.

From the contents:

Foreword
Preface
Organization of the Material
Conventions Used in This Book
How to Contact Us
Safari® Books Online
Chapter 1C++
Design Decisions
Using the Language
OOP and Concurrency
Future
Teaching
Chapter 2Python
The Pythonic Way
The Good Programmer
Multiple Pythons
Expedients and Experience
Chapter 3APL
Paper and Pencil
Elementary Principles
Parallelism Legacy
Chapter 4Forth
The Forth Language and Language Design
Hardware
Application Design
Chapter 5BASIC
The Goals Behind BASIC
Compiler Design
Language and Programming Practice
Language Design
Work Goals
Chapter 6AWK
The Life of Algorithms
Language Design
Unix and Its Culture
The Role of Documentation
Computer Science
Breeding Little Languages
Designing a New Language
Legacy Culture
Transformative Technologies
Bits That Change the Universe
Theory and Practice
Waiting for a Breakthrough
Programming by Example
Chapter 7Lua
The Power of Scripting
Experience
Language Design
Chapter 8Haskell
A Functional Team
Trajectory of Functional Programming
The Haskell Language
Spreading (Functional) Education
Formalism and Evolution
Chapter 9ML
The Soundness of Theorems
The Theory of Meaning
Beyond Informatics
Chapter 10SQL
A Seminal Paper
The Language
Feedback and Evolution
XQuery and XML
Chapter 11Objective-C
Engineering Objective-C
Growing a Language
Education and Training
Project Management and Legacy Software
Objective-C and Other Languages
Components, Sand, and Bricks
Quality As an Economic Phenomenon
Education
Chapter 12Java
Power or Simplicity
A Matter of Taste
Concurrency
Designing a Language
Feedback Loop
Chapter 13Csharp
Language and Design
Growing a Language
Csharp
The Future of Computer Science
Chapter 14UML
Learning and Teaching
The Role of the People
UML
Knowledge
Be Ready for Change
Using UML
Layers and Languages
A Bit of Reusability
Symmetric Relationships
UML

Masterminds of Programming features exclusive interviews with the creators of several historic and highly influential programming languages. In this unique collection, you'll learn about the processes that led to specific design decisions, including the goals they had in mind, the trade-offs they had to make, and how their experiences have left an impact on programming today. Masterminds of Programming includes individual interviews with:Adin D. Falkoff: APL Thomas E. Kurtz: BASIC Charles H. Moore: FORTH Robin Milner: ML Donald D. Chamberlin: SQL Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan: AWK Charles Geschke and John Warnock: PostScript Bjarne Stroustrup: C++ Bertrand Meyer: Eiffel Brad Cox and Tom Love: Objective-C Larry Wall: Perl Simon Peyton Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, and John Hughes: Haskell Guido van Rossum: Python Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo and Roberto Ierusalimschy: Lua James Gosling: Java Grady Booch, Ivar Jacobson, and James Rumbaugh: UML Anders Hejlsberg: Delphi inventor and lead developer of C sharpIf you're interested in the people whose vision and hard work helped shape the computer industry, you'll find Masterminds of Programming fascinating.