IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL: From Novice to Professional
Publisher: Apress
Authors: W. J. Gilmore
Rating: 5/5
Title: Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL: From Novice to Professional
Publisher: Apress
Authors: W. J. Gilmore
Rating: 5/5
I have well over 25 books on computer programming languages, from C, Perl, Python, Java. I have to give credit to Mr. Gilmore, this book was excellently written, everything is precise and to the point with code snippets to show. Definately enough in this book to get you a web server up and running with apache, PHP, and MySql loaded, and the ability to create a webpage using them all. A+
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP: Your Visual Blueprint for Creating Open Source, Server-Side Content
Publisher: Visual
Authors: Paul Whitehead, Joel Desamero
Rating: 4/5
Title: PHP: Your Visual Blueprint for Creating Open Source, Server-Side Content
Publisher: Visual
Authors: Paul Whitehead, Joel Desamero
Rating: 4/5
Books on PHP are definately improving as time goes on. This is the best book I've seen so far for the beginner, and I definately wish I had it when I was started learning 3 years ago. A wide variety of functions were covered to get the novice familiar with how PHP works, giving them a good foundation to move onto more advanced books and/or tutorials.I would have given it 5 stars if it weren't for the fact that it failed to stress the importance of form related security (which should definately be taught from the beginning), as well as writing with registered_globals off (which is the default setting in PHP for 4.2 or later). Many beginners who follow this book may wonder why their scripts aren't working because of it.Overall, though, I was very impressed with the layout of the example code, with plenty of pointers explaining what each part of the code is doing, as well as how easy it was to skim the text that came with it.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Visual Basic Developer's Guide to E-Commerce with ASP and SQL Server
Publisher: Sybex Inc
Authors: Noel Jerke
Rating: 2/5
Title: Visual Basic Developer's Guide to E-Commerce with ASP and SQL Server
Publisher: Sybex Inc
Authors: Noel Jerke
Rating: 2/5
I agree with many reviewers of this book that there are simply too many errors. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is devoted to the development of a website. The second part is devoted to the management of a website. It is in the second part of this book that one would find a majority of the errors. Most of the errors I found are simple typos, such as on page 413 the author forgot to close an input tag. There are some many of these types of errors that I grew accustomed to finding them whenever I tested the codes. Some errors I found are logical errors. They consumed a lot of my time whenever I tried to fix them. Take for example; on page 466 the author did not include codes to clear several option variables. Thus, each time a new loop was performed, the option variables still contained old values from the previous loop. This produced very unexpected results. Once I added my own codes to clear the option variables before a new loop, the problem was solved. It became clear to me that the author had not tested the codes because if he had, he would have discovered the same errors.Use this book as a learning tool. But proceed with caution as it is plagued with many errors.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Programming PHP
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Rasmus Lerdorf, Kevin Tatroe
Rating: 4/5
Title: Programming PHP
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Rasmus Lerdorf, Kevin Tatroe
Rating: 4/5
I liked this book. As an experienced programmer I like that it dove right in and gave me the basics of the language that I needed to get going. Since I am new to PHP I can't speak to what might be missing, as some of the other reviewers allude to, but it certainly seems to have all of the nuts and bolts necessary to get a quick grasp of the language and the "system".So, why did I give it only 4 stars? Well, there are so many errors in the sample code and between the descriptions and the sample code that it significantly slowed me down, by confusing me. These errors aren't always horrible, but just to give an example the book says, on page 84, that you call the get_meta_tags() function by passing it "the HTML for a web page in a string". Well, the sample shows passing it a URL and if you do pass it a string, it turns out, PHP crashes (at least my installation of PHP does). There are many other examples.My advice is to not buy this if you expect it to teach you how to program, but if you already have a couple of other languages under your belt, and how to build web pages, this book will get you into PHP quick.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Understanding the New SQL : A Complete Guide (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Authors: Jim Melton, Alan R. Simon
Rating: 4/5
Title: Understanding the New SQL : A Complete Guide (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Authors: Jim Melton, Alan R. Simon
Rating: 4/5
This is a very useful book, and every professional user of SQL should read it. The authors demonstrate a clear understanding of the subject matter, and their writing style, with good examples, down-to-earth explanations, and the occasional touch of humor, is simply enjoyable. A particularly helpful feature of this book, is that syntax is shown in easy-to-read railroad diagrams. It would have been helpful if the index was organized in such a way that one could immediately locate the railroad diagram for a given SQL statement. A separate list of railroad diagrams would also be nice. And although I consider heavy reliance on defaults to be bad programming practice, I would have appreciated it if just a quick look at a railroad diagram told me what defaults, if any, applied for the statement in question. Any author of books or articles must have his or her target audience in mind. For example, what may be an excellent article for a trade magazine, would almost certainly be rejected by a scientific journal. Thus, when judging this book one must keep in mind the perspective of its authors. If you are looking for an academic textbook with emphasis on scientific rigor, then this book will disappoint you. It is pretty obvious that is not what this book was meant to be. If, on the other hand, you want a practically oriented book that will help you do your job in a better way, then this is a great place to start.Having worked with databases and related technologies for 18 years, I have seen so many books where the number of pages outweigh the knowledge of their authors by a factor of 2 or more (and just in case there are any publishers out there listening; computer professionals are sick and tired of having to read through hundreds of pages of blah-blah-blah in order to find the information we are looking for). This book is different. It contains 394 pages of ordinary chapters, followed by 133 pages of appendices, and the signal-to-noise ratio in all these pages is excellent. If you are an application programer, a database administrator, or some other kind of database practitioner, and you are serious about your work, then there are some books I would consider more or less mandatory reading. This is one of them.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 7 Data Warehousing Training Kit: McSe Training for Exam 70-019 (Training Kit)
Publisher: Microsoft Pr Rating: 5/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 7 Data Warehousing Training Kit: McSe Training for Exam 70-019 (Training Kit)
Publisher: Microsoft Pr Rating: 5/5
I begins to read this book a few weeks ago and was able to understand a lot better about how Microsoft implement data warehouse using "Microsoft Data Warehousing Framwork". This book is easy to read and ideal for beginner that has little or no data warehouse experience.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL In A Nutshell, 2nd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Kevin Kline, Daniel Kline, Brand Hunt
Rating: 1/5
Title: SQL In A Nutshell, 2nd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Kevin Kline, Daniel Kline, Brand Hunt
Rating: 1/5
I too wonder if those that gave this book bad reviews actually looked at any section of the book. This is a reference book. And a wonderful one at that. It specifically says that it is a quick reference (on the cover). I found the book layout very useful and easy to follow. As far as content, the authors review each command (specific to each of the four DBMS's covered) in detail, with syntax. Sure, it left a couple of vendor specific items out, but if more information is needed, I recommend buying a book specifically on that product.I am a consultant and find that this book has more information in one place than several reference sites I would normally look in, and is light enough when traveling.I'm not saying this is the only book you'll ever need to buy, but for quick reference and comparison of SQL among MS SQL, Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL it is by far the most complete book on the market that I have been able to find.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 2/5
Title: The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 2/5
I don't see it ... what the other reviewers exaulted about, must be friends.
I read a lot of books, this one and another I purchased by this author are at most lead weights. Sparse, sketchy and cryptic. I read to learn not because I already know. If you really want to try this book BUY mine, 2 weeks old / half price.
Ken - remember the English 101 chocolate chip cookie paper, write to convey.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Server 7, colección MEGA+, en español, in spanish (Mega +)
Publisher: ENI Publishing, Limited Rating: 4/5
Title: SQL Server 7, colección MEGA+, en español, in spanish (Mega +)
Publisher: ENI Publishing, Limited Rating: 4/5
Este libro trae todos los conceptos basicos que se requieren para un buen desarrollo en el ambiente de trabajo SQL.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL: From Novice to Professional
Publisher: Apress
Authors: W. J. Gilmore
Rating: 3/5
Title: Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL: From Novice to Professional
Publisher: Apress
Authors: W. J. Gilmore
Rating: 3/5
Hi,
When I read a few pages of this book at my local bookstore, I was impressed. The author is eloquent and candid, the code was legible and easy to follow, and the price was reasonable. It all was good until I started to notice that Mr. Gilmore was giving such a trivial examples that I really can't find much use for them. The book's subtitle "From Novice To Professional" is a blatant exageration. As a programmer, I could tell Mr. Gilmore did not address any advanced subject with any emphasis whatsoever.
One thing that bugged me quite a bit is the fact that I found at least 3 hypothetical outputs that were wrong with respect to what the code sample should have produced (all in the first 4 chapters). To me, that's unacceptable. When writing code, one has to think in layers and keep in mind the behavior of pretty much all of the routines and values of variables at any given time. If you are told by the author that function x(foo) sorts foo in ascending order but the output is in descending order then what gives? should you use that function to sort ascending- or descending-wise?
The coverage of simple programming principles is laughable (id est what's a queue and a stack, loops, time complexity, etc) or right out non-existant.
It's a good book for BEGINNERS (in the most literal sense of the word), but pretty much of no use for intermediates or advanced users.
