Books by Jonathan Alexander

An unvarnished accounting of one man's struggle toward sexual and emotional maturity. In this unconventional memoir, Jonathan Alexander addresses wry and affecting missives to a conflicted younger self. Focusing on three years--1989, 1993, and 1996--Dear Queer Self follows the author through the homophobic heights of the AIDS epidemic, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of Bill Clinton, and the steady advancements in gay rights that followed. With humor and wit afforded by hindsight, Alexander relives his closeted college years, his experiments with his sexuality in graduate school, his first marriage to a woman, and his budding career as a college professor. As he moves from tortured self-denial to hard-won self-acceptance, the author confronts the deeply uncomfortable ways he is implicated in his own story. More than just a coming-out narrative, Dear Queer Self is both an intimate psychological exploration and a cultural examination--a meshing of inner and outer realities and a personal reckoning with how we sometimes torture the truth to make a life. It is also a love letter, an homage to a decade of rapid change, and a playlist of the sounds, sights, and feelings of a difficult, but ultimately transformative, time.

Writing Youth: Young Adult Fiction as Literacy Sponsorship shows how many young adult novels model for young people ways to manage the various media tools that surround them. Jonathan Alexander examines not only young adult texts and their media ecologies but also young people's multiliterate media making in response to their favorite texts and stories. As such, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned about young people's literacies and the relationship between literacy development and the culture industries.

A comprehensive selection of Professor Alexander's papers that consider Italian manuscript illumination through the medieval and Renaissance periods. The volume includes a new essay on marginal illustrations as well as older papers which discuss some of the most celebrated works of the period, and have been revised and updated here.

How can you help your software team improve? This concise book introduces codermetrics, a clear and objective way to identify, analyze, and discuss the successes and failures of software engineersnot as part of a performance review, but as a way to make the team a more cohesive and productive unit.Experienced team builder Jonathan Alexander explains how codermetrics helps teams understand exactly what occurred during a project, and enables each coder to focus on specific improvements. Alexander presents a variety of simple and complex codermetrics, and teaches you how to create your own.Learn how codermetrics changes long-held assumptions and improves team dynamicsGet recommendations for integrating codermetrics into existing processesAsk the right questions to determine the type of data you need to collectUse metrics to measure individual coder skills and a teams effectiveness over timeIdentify the contributions each coder makes to the teamAnalyze the response to your software and its featuresand verify that you're meeting team and organizational goalsBuild better teams, using codermetrics to make personnel adjustments and additions