As the midrange world continues to get more interesting, we're going to need to work together even more, and a good place to start is the forums.

Written by Joe Pluta

This article is entirely devoted to the idea of making the forums a kinder, gentler place for people to share information, and doing so is going to require that regular contributors learn to adhere to a slightly more civil demeanor, especially when dealing with "outsiders" or "newbies."

Short breaks restore health and productivity.

We've all seen programmers slumping in their chairs, eyes glazed, brows furrowed, having gone several hours past the point of accomplishing much, perhaps about to create bugs that will have to be corrected later. If they had taken short breaks all along, refreshing body and mind, they could have gotten just as much work done, while slowing the onset of debilitating repetitive strain injury (RSI).

This book isn't a training manual; it's a reference book.

The Modern RPG IV Language, Fourth Edition by Robert Cozzi, Jr. is the latest version of a book that has enjoyed a long history of popularity in the RPG community. With this book, MC Press continues its tradition of providing relevant and timely materials in a quality book format.

In these days of multiple languages and architectures, how do you cohesively train a group of people with very different development goals?

"We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."
—Benjamin Franklin

Two schools of thought exist in preparing software development teams. One is the compartmentalized approach, in which each person is involved in only his or her specific portion of the code and has no real contact with the other developers in the team, except through a project-tracking system.

The second approach is the group development effort, in which people not only are experts of their own domains, but are forced to walk a little way in the shoes of not only their coworkers but even their clients.