Productivity. You know you want it, but how do you get there?

We’ve collaborated with accomplished entrepreneur, developer, and life coach Lars Pind to bring you a practical plan customized for programmers.

Programming is hard work that requires creativity, problem solving, and even physical stamina. Over the course of 40 minutes, Lars will teach you how to

• Set achievable, measurable goals
• Prepare for the work of thinking
• Achieve focus
• Find shortcuts
• Maximize your natural rhythm and energy

We’ve personally benefited from the ideas presented here and we’re confident that you will, too.

Available to all PeepCode Unlimited subscribers, or at a discount during the month of Peepvember!

Now with 25% more pixels than the competition! Uses a full 1000×600 of screen real estate for easier viewing. Decorated with top quality video footage and beautiful nature photography. Includes a 17 page typed transcript.

Technical editing by Joshua Sierles, sysadmin at 37signals.

Content by Geoffrey Grosenbach in collaboration with Casimir Saternos.

Part of our job at PeepCode is to research new and upcoming technologies that alpha geeks are talking about. XMPP/Jabber instant messaging has been getting more buzz recently. What is it? What does it do? How can you use it to enhance your applications?

XMPP is an open, real-time instant messaging platform that is useful for sending and receiving notifications between servers and humans. You can use it to receive administrative notifications from your website or to push notifications to subscribers much more efficiently than current poll-based solutions such as RSS.

After viewing this 48 minute screencast, you’ll be able to work with XMPP from Ruby, including:

• Connect to a Jabber server
• Send presence notifications and update the user icon
• Receive message notifications and friend requests
• Use DRb (distributed Ruby) together with Jabber to send messages from a Rails application

Available to all PeepCode Unlimited subscribers, or at a discount during the month of Peepvember!

Now with 25% more pixels than the competition! Uses a full 1000×600 of screen real estate with smoother, high frame rate animations.

MySQL (or Postgres) does a fine job when querying specific rows, but it’s not so great when it comes to searching on large text fields. Sphinx is a search service that makes full text searching quite easy and throws in extra features like boolean search (“rails OR merb”), word proximity, and custom filtering.

Pat Allan is the author of the popular Thinking Sphinx plugin for Rails (and Merb apps that use ActiveRecord!). He also wrote the Riddle gem for lower level interaction with Sphinx. Pat starts out by introducing the basic features of Sphinx, then dives straight into installation on popular platforms.

In this 60-page PDF you’ll learn to build an address book with Thinking Sphinx starting with simple searches then progressing onto filtered, sorted, and delta-based searches. You’ll learn about the geo-searching features of Sphinx, including integration with Google Maps.

He closes out the book with a 20-page reference that you’ll want to keep close as you use the more advanced features of Sphinx.

If you use MySQL or Postgres databases with text fields, this book will teach all you’ll need to know to work confidently with Sphinx.

Included for all PeepCode Unlimited subscribers or available as a single purchase for only US$9!

• Understanding Sphinx
• Installation
• Building an Address Book with Sphinx
• Reference
• Additional Resources

By Jarkko Laine, workshop teacher and author of the Apress book Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce

Modern web developers have learned to organize their server-side code into model, view, and controller.

Your front-end development can also benefit from organization into content and behavior, which is much easier to accomplish than you might think. Dare I say that it makes front-end web programming as easy as Visual Basic’s object and event hooks?

Jarkko Laine steps through the features of Dan Webb’s Low Pro library to help you attach functionality to HTML elements and events. You’ll see how Prototype.js can drive a full-featured application and give you organizational tools to keep your Javascript code maintainable.

Chapters include:

• Towards Accessible Javascript
• Brief History or Javascript on Rails
• Introducing Low Pro
• Refactoring an Existing Rails Application
• Going DRY With Multiple Elements
• Bubbling Performance with Event Delegation
• More on Behavior Classes

Refactoring your front end code will make it easier to work with, easier to extend, and easier to use. Get the scoop with this PeepCode PDF book.

Available to all PeepCode Unlimited subscribers or as a single purchase for only US$9.

Guyren Howe has considerable experience with both MySQL and PostgreSQL. He discusses the myriad technical and other advantages to using PostgreSQL instead of MySQL for, well, pretty much anything.
Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.

When we first built BuildingWebApps.com, it was a dedicated application. As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve since rewritten it as a multi-tenant application, in support of our new business, Webvanta.

We’re pleased to announce that the second site on the platform is now live: Spartina.com is a “knowledge base for entrepreneurs ready to turn their ideas into great Internet businesses.”

You’ll see some visual design similarities to BuildingWebApps, which are not due to any platform constraints but simply to the fact that the same designer created both designs and reused some elements for efficiency. The Webvanta platform enables each site to be completely re-skinned.

If you’re interested in creating your own knowledge base site on any topic, please send us a message and we’ll get in touch.

Technical editing by CouchDB committers Jan Lehnardt and Chris Anderson

Imagine a world where there is no SQL. Your database doesn’t have a schema. You don’t have to worry about indexes. Replication is built-in. Scaling is part of the plan from day one.

This is the world promised to you by CouchDB, an Apache Foundation incubator project in the genre of Amazon’s SimpleDB (but open source!). This 60 minute screencast clearly explains the forward-thinking features of CouchDB and shows you how to use CouchDB with Rails.

This screencast is the product of months of research, a trip across the world to Berlin, hours of coding on the CouchRest gem, and technical editing by a pair of CouchDB committers.

You’ll learn how to install CouchDB from source, how to use the CouchRest gem, and you’ll build a personal notes application that uses CouchDB. You’ll learn about different ways to serialize Ruby objects to JSON. You’ll write custom views in Javascript and synchronize them to your database. Oh, and you’ll also learn a bit about the daring personal history behind the CouchDB project!

Whether you’re planning to use CouchDB on an upcoming Ruby project or just want to be informed about current developments in database technology, you’ll find it in this screencast.

The code used in the screencast is included. A typed transcript is also included with the code download. Video is in our new extra-wide 1000×600 format!

Available to PeepCode Unlimited Subscribers or alone for only US$9.

Patrick Crowley talks about Paperclip, a lightweight plugin for handling attachments.
Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.

Sensors and servos in hand, JD Barnhart shows off the current state of RAD, the Rails inspired framework bringing convention over configuration and Ruby sensibility to the Arduino Physical computing platform.
Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.