The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master is a book about software engineering by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, published in October, 1999. Characteristics of a Pragmatic Programmer: The authors also went on to write about the Ruby programming language in the book Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development with Rails, a book on Ruby on Rails which also touches on Ajax and the Ruby programming language. The book is the first in the a series of books under the The Pragmatic Bookshelf label and copyright The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC.