Publications
A selection of technical books authored, co-authored, or translated by Genki Labs Director Takaaki Mizuno.
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2026
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2025
ストリートコーダー
A "street coder" is a programmer who has learned real-world problem-solving skills on the job, through practical experience rather than formal training. This book is packed with hard-won lessons from the field: ways of thinking that are immediately useful in practice, realistic techniques, anti-patterns that actually work, the true purpose of testing, when to refactor (and when not to), and the kind of pragmatic optimization that only comes from experience. It's recommended both for engineers just starting out in the field and for programmers who have been working a few years but feel stuck, distilling knowledge the author gained the hard way, including things you were taught never to do that turn out to be necessary in practice (used carefully, with the reasoning explained). More experienced engineers will also find value here, as it puts clear, logical language to techniques they may have arrived at through trial and error. Real-world development is full of surprises. Use this book as your guide to navigating it.
Supervising Translator Shuwa System
システム設計面接の傾向と対策
A guide for engineers preparing for system design interviews. As the book repeatedly emphasizes, system design is an art with no single right answer, so rather than focusing only on theory, it works through concrete design problems, scenarios, and exercises to build practical skills. Because it covers everything from foundational concepts to real case studies, it doubles as a hands-on textbook for system design in general, not just interview prep. It's also useful for interviewers, offering ideas on what to ask and how to understand a candidate's thinking. Part 1 works like a standard textbook, covering the key topics that come up in system design interviews, from non-functional requirements to API design, data models built on industry-standard data stores and distributed transaction patterns, and modern approaches to observability and operations. Part 2 applies these concepts to 11 real-world design problems, from text messaging to Airbnb, teaching how to draw out the right requirements and identify trade-offs worth discussing in an actual interview.
Translator Shuwa System -
2024
ストレンジコード
This book explores esoteric programming languages, often dismissed as "useless," from every angle. It defines them as unconventional languages that reveal what a programming language can be, and how creatively and elegantly they can express thought and process. Some esolangs are pure hobbyist fun or jokes, but others turn out to be genuinely useful, and this book covers the full spectrum without distinction. It's organized into four parts. Part 1 provides background on programming language history (likened to paleontology) and the concept of Turing completeness. Part 2 introduces "non-mainstream" languages that bridge practical tools and true esolangs. Part 3 dives into five esoteric languages, ABC, FRACTRAN, Piet, Brainfuck, and Befunge, each strange in its own way. Part 4 details the design, implementation, and extension of two original esolangs created for this book, Filska and Firefly, plus an appendix on genetic programming with Firefly. Some knowledge of Python is helpful but not required; what matters most is curiosity. Welcome to the strange and wonderful world of weird languages.
Translator Shuwa System
クリエイティブプログラマー 創造力を駆使して問題解決するための7つのテーマ
Programming isn't just about writing code. Turning your ideas into code is a creative act, much like painting or writing fiction. This book is a practical guide to unlocking that creativity, exploring the thought processes and habits that help programmers find inventive, original solutions to complex problems. Creativity isn't reserved for a gifted few; it's a skill anyone can learn and develop. Chapter 1 unpacks what "creativity" means in this book, tracing the term back to its origins. Chapters 2 through 8 each explore one of seven themes: expertise, collaboration and communication, constraints, critical thinking, curiosity, creative states of mind, and creative techniques. Chapter 9 closes with reflections on bringing creativity into everyday programming work, along with recommended further reading. Written for programmers at any level, with no prerequisite knowledge of a specific language or technology, drawing instead on note-taking and information management techniques and grounding creativity in cognitive psychology, while referencing history, philosophy, art, and games throughout. The foreword is by Felienne Hermans, author of "The Programmer's Brain," a great companion read to this book.
Supervising Translator Shuwa System -
2023
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2014
サードパーティJavaScript
Third-party JavaScript is code, like a Hatena Bookmark button or a "Like" button, that gets embedded into other websites to provide functionality. If the visitor is the first party and the site owner the second party, this external script is the third party. Written by a developer of JavaScript widgets used on over a million sites, this book explains the essential techniques for building third-party JavaScript.
Translator Kadokawa ASCII Research Laboratories
Web API: The Good Parts
A guide to designing, building, and operating web APIs. It explains how to design and run APIs effectively, and what to watch out for to avoid common traps and pitfalls. The focus is on simple APIs where accessing a URI returns data such as XML or JSON, the XML-over-HTTP and JSON-over-HTTP styles.
Author O'Reilly Japan -
2012
オブジェクト指向JavaScript
A detailed look at JavaScript as a highly expressive, flexible, prototype-based object-oriented language, covering everything from its history to object-oriented principles and design patterns.
Translator ASCII Media Works
入門 機械学習
An introduction to machine learning written for readers with a programming background, requiring no math or theoretical prerequisites. It favors practice over theory, avoiding heavy theoretical explanations in favor of concrete techniques written from a programmer's perspective. It's an ideal choice for programmers who want practical knowledge and techniques for machine learning, especially for working with large-scale data.
Translator O'Reilly Japan -
2011
ハイパフォーマンス JavaScript
This book explains techniques and approaches for eliminating JavaScript performance bottlenecks. It covers execution time, download handling, and the page lifecycle, along with areas that even a fast JavaScript engine can't optimize away, such as DOM access, network latency, and blocking caused by simultaneous script downloads. These techniques matter for improving performance today, and will only become more important as low-level JavaScript execution times continue to shrink.
Translator O'Reilly Japan
入門 ソーシャルデータ ―データマイニング、分析、可視化のテクニック
Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn generate enormous amounts of "social data" every day. This book explains the techniques needed to extract valuable insight from that data, covering how to gather, analyze, and visualize the data these networks produce. Alongside the underlying concepts and theory, it introduces useful tools, giving developers a clear, practical foundation for understanding social data and how to work with it.
Translator O'Reilly Japan -
2010
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2009
docomo au SoftBank 各キャリアからのアクセスアップ! モバイルSEO完全計画
This book explains techniques for increasing traffic to mobile phone websites, a subject in high demand at the time of writing. With mobile phones nearly universal and many people accessing the internet exclusively through them, publishing a mobile site had become essential, but simply publishing one was no longer enough to attract visitors as competition for users intensified. Mobile sites use the same underlying internet technology as PC sites but had developed a distinct culture of their own, especially in Japan, requiring mobile-specific strategies. Around the time of writing, major search engines like Google and Yahoo! had entered mobile search and partnered with carriers, changing the landscape further. This book focuses mainly on techniques to help search engines properly evaluate your site, alongside a range of related ideas and approaches. Content is what matters most on any website, but with so much content already online, publishing alone doesn't guarantee visitors. This book aims to help readers use mobile SEO to give search engines and users the chance to properly discover their content, and help their sites thrive.
Author Sotec
ウェブアプリケーションのためのユニバーサルデザイン
This book applies the principles of universal design to web applications, showing how to make content accessible to as many people as possible. It covers designing so you don't need a separate interface for every browser or access method, supporting WAI-ARIA for dynamic content, best practices for adding JavaScript to web applications, and building accessible rich internet applications with Flash, Flex, and Silverlight. The Japanese edition includes an appendix on the accessibility situation in Japan.
Translator O'Reilly Japan
Yahoo!Googleで上位ランクするための 新版 SEO完全計画
This book addresses one of the perpetual challenges of running a website, increasing traffic, by explaining how to organize your site's information so that search engines can evaluate it correctly, and how to quickly identify and fix problems that hold your site back. It's a thorough revision of the 2006 title "SEO完全計画," updated with the latest SEO information, and traces its roots back to a 2003 title on driving traffic to websites. In the years between, the number of websites exploded, making traffic-building strategies more important than ever, and SEO practices continued to evolve rapidly. Even so, the underlying principle behind SEO hasn't changed: organize your information well and build a site that both human readers and search engines can understand correctly. This book is written from that perspective. Its techniques work best for sites that already have good content but haven't been built in a way that earns them the traffic they deserve; they're less suited to forcing traffic to a site without much to offer. Content remains the most important part of any website, and this book also explains how to create good content and present it well so a site can attract visitors and thrive.
Supervisor Sotec -
2008
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2007
目的別Google活用テクニック
Google was a fast-growing search engine in Japan at the time of writing, but it offered far more than search, including services like Google Earth, for exploring the world from your PC, and Google Calendar, for managing your schedule online. This book carefully explains Google's many services, organized by purpose so that even first-time users can quickly find the right service for what they want to do.
Author Shoeisha
Googleのすべてがわかる本
A comprehensive guide to Google's search engine and full range of services, building on the author's earlier books on Google, with fully updated information and expanded coverage of newer services. Google is best known as a search engine, but by the time of writing it also offered maps, webmail, scheduling, and much more. This book covers how to search more effectively, find information faster, and get the most out of Google's many services. At the time, Google ranked second in Japan behind Yahoo! JAPAN but was the world's most-used search engine, with roughly 60% market share, a popularity driven not only by search quality but by the appeal of its many services. Despite being highly functional, Google's services could feel unapproachable to new users, partly due to a lack of documentation and an "easy once you're used to it, harder to get started with" design. This book aims to smooth that learning curve, introducing the basics of each service alongside tips for using them more effectively, drawing on techniques discovered by users worldwide.
Author Sotec -
2006
俺流Amazonの作り方 ―Amazon Webサービス最新活用テクニック
Get the most out of Amazon! By customizing it with Amazon Web Services, you can build your own version of Amazon, one that's stylish, convenient, and profitable, all at once.
Author ASCII
Yahoo!GoogleでランクアップするためのSEO完全計画
This book introduces a range of techniques for increasing traffic to a website. It's a full revision of an earlier title by Takaaki Mizuno, with substantially expanded coverage of SEO (search engine optimization), reflected in the title itself. By the time of writing, a large share of website traffic came through search engines, and in Japan specifically, Yahoo! was a major source of traffic alongside Google, so effective SEO meant addressing Yahoo! Search Technology (YST) as well as Google. As the book itself notes, SEO isn't just a set of surface-level techniques; its basic principle is building a website that's easy to navigate, so that search engines and human readers alike can correctly understand its content. Chasing superficial tricks risks having your site penalized and removed from search results as spam. This book presents SEO from the perspective that building an easy-to-navigate site naturally benefits both visitors and search rankings, useful whether you're building a new site with SEO in mind or reviewing an existing approach.
Author Sotec -
2005
『詳解RSS 〜RSSを利用したサービスの理論と実践』
A detailed technical guide to RSS, an essential technology behind blogs, covering how to resolve issues in receiving and publishing RSS feeds, and how to build RSS-powered services and applications. RSS is an XML-based data format for summarizing and syndicating website content; using an RSS reader, users can automatically gather updates from multiple sites without visiting each one manually, driving its widespread adoption by blogs and news sites. This book is written for anyone who wants to understand the technical details of receiving and publishing RSS, troubleshoot related issues, or build RSS-based services. It covers the differences between RSS versions, how to generate and parse RSS data, common pitfalls when writing RSS parsers, character encoding and server load issues in publishing, security concerns, and related technologies such as Atom, podcasting, and OPML, providing everything needed to understand RSS from theory to practice. RSS is a versatile format with many possible uses, and this book aims to inspire readers to discover new ones.
Author D-Art
まるごとPerl! Vol.1
Feature topic: web application frameworks.
Author Impress
Sleipnir 2 完全攻略ガイド
The official guidebook for Sleipnir 2, a feature-rich web browser for Windows. Richly illustrated with screenshots, it covers everything from installation and basic operation to making the most of its many features, along with useful built-in and third-party scripts. It also explains how to fully customize Sleipnir 2 by editing configuration files, plus an introduction to writing your own scripts, and includes an article from the developer explaining how Sleipnir 2 works under the hood. Read this book and master Sleipnir 2 inside and out!
Author Impress
アクセス解析でホームページの集客を極める本
Author Sotec
Googleまるごと使い倒しガイド: Web検索だけじゃない!
The third in a series following two earlier books on Google, this book takes a deep dive into Google's many services beyond search, including Google Maps, Google Earth, Google News, Google Suggest, and Gmail. Search is what Google is best known for, but its other services are all unique, fun, and genuinely useful. This book shines a light on those lesser-known services and shows how to use them, helping readers make the most of Google's hidden gems and boost how efficiently they gather information.
Author Sotec -
2004
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2003
ホームページアクセスアップ完全計画: 検索エンジンからのリンクがどんどん増える!
Packed with essential techniques for turning your website into a popular destination, from search engine optimization (SEO) and analytics to registering your own domain. It covers what "increasing traffic" really means, techniques for attracting new visitors and bringing back repeat ones, ways to earn external links, SEO strategies, and how to use analytics, and beyond the techniques themselves, helps readers understand the underlying principles behind sustainable traffic growth. It also covers the mechanics of custom domains, how to register one, and how to use hosting and domain forwarding services.
Author Sotec
PerlによるWebユーザビリティ向上テクニック
Author CQ Publishing -
2002