IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Unleashed (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Ray Rankins, Paul Jensen, Paul Bertucci
Rating: 5/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Unleashed (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Ray Rankins, Paul Jensen, Paul Bertucci
Rating: 5/5
A great resource book! The real life examples that are presented in this book and the detail instructions on how to build something with SQL Server 2000 are extremely easy to understand and useful. This book is already helping my employee's build a data replication environment and do some complex data transformations using DTS. Some great example code on the CDROM as well.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Microsoft SQL Server High Availability
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Paul Bertucci
Rating: 4/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server High Availability
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Paul Bertucci
Rating: 4/5
Microsoft is attempting to move its SQL Server deeper into large scale corporate usage. And this book is a good reflection of the strategy. Bertucci directs it at IT managers, CTOs or CIOs who are looking for a "high availability" solution. He defines this as an availability of 95-99.4%. Notice that the book shies away from "extreme availability", which is more than 99.4%. As he explains, there are nonlinearities in costs for the latter that make it prohibitive for most companies. Whereas high availability is affordable in far more circumstances.
Implicitly, the book shows that Microsoft is staying away from the extreme case, for now. It cedes that ground to IBM and Oracle.
Bertucci goes into a moderate level of technical detail about what SQL Server offers for high availability. Like hardware replication using RAID arrays and hot swappable components. Though he warns of the costs of the latter. There is considerable detail about data replication and clustering. These are separate issues that have been heavily built up here in functionality. Quite mature.
As an aside, the capabilities described here also help preserve some operational distance between SQL Server and the low end open source rivals of MySQL and Postgres.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Apache Jakarta and Beyond : A Java Programmer's Introduction
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Larne Pekowsky
Rating: 5/5
Title: Apache Jakarta and Beyond : A Java Programmer's Introduction
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Larne Pekowsky
Rating: 5/5
Many tools were discussed. The Ant tool chapter alone was better than the whole book called "Ant the Definitive Guide". He explains ant in a very gentle way. Good job. You get a good feel of how the industry cranks out webapps with these tools like eclipse,struts,junit,cactus,etc,etc. Good coverage!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Creating Interactive Web Sites with PHP and Web Services
Publisher: Sybex
Authors: Eric Rosebrock, Eric Rosebrock, Sybex
Rating: 1/5
Title: Creating Interactive Web Sites with PHP and Web Services
Publisher: Sybex
Authors: Eric Rosebrock, Eric Rosebrock, Sybex
Rating: 1/5
This book was great! There were some slight errors, along with any book that you would find on the market, but this book was clearly a great read and I found it most valuable.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: MCDBA SQL Server 2000 Database Design Study Guide (Exam 70-229)
Publisher: Osborne/McGraw-Hill
Authors: Syngress Media Inc, Anil Desai, Jeffery Bane, Craig Robinson
Rating: 1/5
Title: MCDBA SQL Server 2000 Database Design Study Guide (Exam 70-229)
Publisher: Osborne/McGraw-Hill
Authors: Syngress Media Inc, Anil Desai, Jeffery Bane, Craig Robinson
Rating: 1/5
I used this book as the primary preparation method for taking the 70-229 test. It was not sufficient. I failed the test the first time I tried after using this book for 90% of my preparation. There are complete subjects on the test that the book leaves you unprepared for. I wanted to write a good review, hoping that the book was what it claimed but as it turns out it is not.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
Title: The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
Microsoft's SQL Server does not have all the functionality of Oracle or IBM's databases. But Microsoft has put a huge amount of work into beefing it up, as shown in this book. Henderson has done far more than just write a straightforward guide to the query syntax. In fact, the latter is not the emphasis here. Rather, he explains how SQL Server integrates into the Microsoft operating system, for one thing. Like memory mapped files, WinSock and network connections, and how they relate to SQL Server. He provides a long discussion of its memory management; crucial if you are heavily loading up the database. With queries and table joins, you get help on how to optimise, based on knowledge of SQL Server's innards. At over 900 pages, the breadth might seem daunting. But it reflects the complexity and potential of SQL Server.Henderson also provides some nice extra touches. Each chapter ends in a quick list of review questions, to see if you have been paying attention. Plus, at the book's end, he has 2 essays. One is on the drivel that constitutes most [all?] management fads. The second is on pseudo experts in newsgroups. The entire book is worth it, just for these essays! Very biting.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Authors: Joe Celko
Rating: 4/5
Title: Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Authors: Joe Celko
Rating: 4/5
This is a good book when used correctly: as an introduction to advanced database topics for someone who is already comfortable using SQL for "normal" problems. It is not a manual, a textbook, or an introduction to SQL. There are many parts of this book that I did not understand at all the first time I read them, but that I understood and found useful later when I returned to the book in the hope of getting ideas for a particular problem. Also, this book does not shy away from providing useful suggestions for procedural algorithms in areas where standard SQL is not enough. A few thought-provoking technical books like this are a good addition to a technical reference library.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Server Developer's Guide to OLAP with Analysis Services
Publisher: Sybex
Authors: Mike Gunderloy, Tim Sneath
Rating: 2/5
Title: SQL Server Developer's Guide to OLAP with Analysis Services
Publisher: Sybex
Authors: Mike Gunderloy, Tim Sneath
Rating: 2/5
I liked the book, but when I went to load the sample software called Proclarity, I got a message from Norton anti-virus that something was afoul in the install routine. Foolishly, I thought that Norton must be wrong. It turns out, I was wrong and the CD apparently had a virus or did something it shouldn't have done.Immediately after rebooting, my desktop disappeared after opening my first application. The mouse isn't working right either.So, the book is good. But don't load the sample software from Proclarity. Regarding the rest of the CD, I have not loaded it all, so I can't speak for whether it has any other viruses/problems. Just make sure you have your anti-virus software running. BTW, I'm running XP Pro.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: MCSE: SQL Server 2000 Design Study Guide (Exam 70-229)
Publisher: Sybex
Authors: Marc Israel, J. Steven Jones, Marc Israel, Steve Jones
Rating: 4/5
Title: MCSE: SQL Server 2000 Design Study Guide (Exam 70-229)
Publisher: Sybex
Authors: Marc Israel, J. Steven Jones, Marc Israel, Steve Jones
Rating: 4/5
I used this book to prepare for exam that I successfully passed. My overall impression from the book is very positive. It is well-structured; all explanations are clear and concise. It is strongly focused at exam and doesn't spend your time on irrelevant topics. I think it covers not less than 90% of what you need for exam. I recommend reading it along with enquiring Books Online.However it has noticeable amount of typos. Most of them are quite obvious, but I can recall at least a couple of typos that really made me confused.The companion CD is much worse. I expected the tests from CD to be a real help, but their format made them very inconvenient to use. Moreover, some test questions seemed to be corrupted. Honestly I think the CD is nearly useless.SUMMARY: this book is not ideal; however it can be certainly used to prepare for the exam.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 5/5
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 5/5
This book shows how to build better SQL, Stored procedure, and trigger
