IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Seo a'Chroit Ruadh
Publisher: Child's Play International Ltd
Authors: Child's Play
Rating: 5/5
Title: Seo a'Chroit Ruadh
Publisher: Child's Play International Ltd
Authors: Child's Play
Rating: 5/5
We like this book because each page reveals a new animal that was hiding on Old MacDonald's farm. Each page also reveals the noise that animal makes right along with the famous kids' song. The cutouts, hidden animals, escalating noise on the farm, and the farmer's increasing discomfort make for a fun read. At the very end, a whole new slew of animals and noises are presented, just in case you still have breath in you to keep on singing.
The illustrations are fantastic. They are fun, colorful, and present animals behaving in pretty funny ways.
This is a repeat read, as so many kids' books are.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: MCSE System Administration for Microsoft SQL Server 7
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Authors: Jeffry Byrne, Jeffrey Byrne
Rating: 1/5
Title: MCSE System Administration for Microsoft SQL Server 7
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Authors: Jeffry Byrne, Jeffrey Byrne
Rating: 1/5
I bought this book only to find out for starters that I have been lied to. The following text is what I have sent to both the publisher and the author:"I have just received this book. I am not happy. First the $225 CBT value is wrong. It is exactly the same sample available for free from the Scholars.com web site as a demo of their training. There is NO difference. It fact it is only one of many available from Scholars.com so it is in NO way a complete course to prepare you for study. Why was it advertised as such?Secondly the INTERACTIVE Training Website advertised in this book appears to be non-existent. If I am in error then send me the URL to get to it. The only Items I saw on your Interactive page where marketing plugs for the MultiMedia CD-ROM/book sets you have out on C++, JAVA and VB.To be direct I feel that Prentice Hall and the author are guilty of blantly misleading advertising and statements. You put your names on it".I realize the axiom "Buyer beware" but at some point Prentice Hall and the author should care enough about their reputation to not mislead the consumer. Right now the word "fabrication" is a good name by which to call both.Leave this book on the shelf. I doubt it capable of helping you pass the exam since the Beta Exam isn't even due out until Feb 99. Any enity that knowingly misleads is not worth your hard earned money.Regards.
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: 5/5
Title: The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
The book covers so many challenging subjects with such ease. It starts out with a primer on stored procedures. It devotes chapters to database design, triggers, views, UDF's, XML, and .NET, to list some of the topics. Once you read Mr. Henderson's book, you see there is so much to learn about SQL Server. I especially liked the chapter on UDF's. If you've ever searched for a better alternative to the builtin Soundex function, Mr. Henderson provides *the* best Soundex solution for SQL Server. In fact, that alone makes the book worthwhile. And let's not forget his listing and explanation of dozens of undocumented functions and features in SQL Server.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional SQL Server 2000 Programming
Publisher: Wrox
Authors: Robert Vieira
Rating: 5/5
Title: Professional SQL Server 2000 Programming
Publisher: Wrox
Authors: Robert Vieira
Rating: 5/5
This book has some good info, but the book itself has many flaws. First, much of the info is copied verbatim from the 7.0 book. That would be OK if this were a second edition, but it is being sold as a whole new book. Second, half the book consists of printouts of the screens from the various Sql Server tools. For example, the DTS and replication coverage consists almost entirely of screen printouts. Some pages are literally two screen prints with a sentence or two between them. One gets the impression the Rob hasn't used these technologies much and is using graphics to bulk up the book. Regardless of the reasons for the flaws, they greatly devalue the book for me. I would say that if you have the 7.0 book, you don't need this one. Also, keep in mind that if you are working with DTS, replication, XML, OLAP and many others you will need other books unless you simply want to review printouts of Sql Server screen printouts.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Microsoft Access Developer's Guide to SQL Server
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Andy Baron, Mary Chipman
Rating: 5/5
Title: Microsoft Access Developer's Guide to SQL Server
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Andy Baron, Mary Chipman
Rating: 5/5
They pulled no punches: from the very beginning of the introduction to this book, Mary and Andy hit the very first point that every Access developer has to deal with -- Access is dead, Access is a toy, etc. etc. Of course, 800 pages later they have proven that all the people who thought this were not very bright (or at least did not know much about Access!).Especially cool are the huge chapters on views, stored procedures, and Access reports. I usually am pretty proud of the fact that I do not ever learn very many new things from books. But Mary and Andy ruined that one pleasure for me because I learned things that I did not know about, even when I was working on the Access team, in the source code!I mentioned the chapter on stored procedures, but I wanted to emphasize that these 52 pages are one of the most impressive intros to using them that I have come across. It is at the perfect level for an experienced Access developer who does not want to have feel dumb for "starting over" in SQL Server. In fact, the whole book is designed that way: you can leverage all your existing knowledge to help you learn about another, more powerful platform -- and the long term direction of Access itself.This book is a must have for anyone who wants to make that jump from Access to SQL Server: whether you are using MDBs or ADPs, traditional forms or DAPs, stored procs/SQL or ADO recordsets, if you are doing anything that go between Access and SQL Server then THIS is the book that will take you there.
Product: Book Unknown Binding
Title: Sybase SQL Server 11 Unleashed
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Ray Rankins, Jeff Garbus, David Solomon, Bennett W. McEwan
Rating: 5/5
Title: Sybase SQL Server 11 Unleashed
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Ray Rankins, Jeff Garbus, David Solomon, Bennett W. McEwan
Rating: 5/5
I have used many a technical manual in my day and this is by far the best. You don't need anything else. I have been working with relation database management systems for close to a decade. This book has everything from undocumented DBCC commands to a description of RAID devices to transact sql help. I don't care if you are a developer or a dba get this book. You will not be disappointed.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Tuning
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Dan Tow
Rating: 5/5
Title: SQL Tuning
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Dan Tow
Rating: 5/5
"Tell me something I don't already know", that's what crosses my mind every time I pick up a new performance, tuning book. If you're like me, 90% of the content in any DBA book in the store is 'old hat'.This book is refreshing. It doesn't waste time going over all of the stuff you learned years ago. Knowing how to read an execution plan or when to pick a hash join over a nested loop join is not what this book is about. There are plenty of books on the market that cover basic, vendor specific, query tuning. I personally have about 20 of these books on my bookshelf here at home. (Over the years I've worked on Sybase, SQL Server, Informix XPS, & Oracle.)Here's the deal...Anyone who has worked with really big systems will eventually run into an optimization problem that seems to be unsolvable. You can try histograms, compressed key indexes, partitioning, pre-joined indexes, and materialized views, but you still can't get the performance that's being requested. For a DBA, it can be a very frustrating dilemma. This is especially true when you know from the data volume that you should be able to get there.The truth is, optimizers can't always get the right solution, even with correct statistics. There are some good technical reasons why this is true, but that's out of scope for my review. In any case, that's where this book comes to the rescue. I feel that it gives you some insight into the optimization problem and tells you how to correct the problems that your optimizer can't figure out. This book is NOT for use on 95% of your queries. Most optimizers will pick the correct access plan if the DBA does his/her job correctly and collects the appropriate statistics.In my experience, I get two types of problems that I have trouble getting the optimizer to solve:#1. Joining together a large number (8-14) of tables. At least 1 or 2 of the tables have over 30G of real data. By `real data', I mean that 30G of data is actually populated.#2. Making high transaction queries read the fewest amount of buffers in order to get rid of latching problems.After I read the first few diagramming chapters of this book, I thought I'd give it a try on a problem that was recently solved at work. I was surprised. It worked, and even with my clumsiness with the method, it only took me about 2 hours to get a solution. It took us about 3 days at work. Our trial and error solution was slightly better, than what I came up with using the author's method. However, it was so close that had I used his method, I most certainly would have gone on to another problem. (The author's solution was strange because I would never have solved the join order the way that he did. His solution actually had me pick the largest table, out of 10, to drive the query. I thought this was odd because my test query had some very good filters on smaller tables.)These were the results per execution: Optimizer - 100K buffers.
Trial & Error - 1700 buffers.
Book method (basic graphing) - 2000 buffers.If I had known about this book, I could have solved this problem in a few hours. Instead it took several DBA's, a few day's time to come up with a solution that was only marginally better.Since this method appeared to work so well for OLTP, I went back and looked at a very large OLAP query that I had worked on last year. I and several developers had spent days trying to get it to run faster. Even with the author's method, I still couldn't make it better, but I was happy to see that the join order picked by the optimizer was almost identical to what I had calculated using the book.I plan on studying this guide over and over until I've memorized this method. I don't think it will solve every problem, but I think it gives you an edge over using experience alone.Before you purchase this book...Keep in mind, that SQL tuning is fundamentally *not a simple problem*, so readers should not buy the book expecting an easy list of simple tips and tricks. (If the problem was easy, the optimizer likely would have got it right in the first place, and you wouldn't be tuning!) The correct solution to the problem is fairly complex, as complex as it *needs* to be.Also, it's not noted anywhere, but I gathered that the author assumes that the reader will have basic high school Algebra skills, and will have taken a basic statistics course in order to fully understand the reasoning behind the explanations. Although, Algebra and statistical knowledge are probably not necessary to learn the tuning method presented. I state this because I told a good friend about this book, and his first question was, "Does it have a lot of math to go through?" So, if statistics is not your thing, don't worry. The author only presents enough information to give you a level of comfort that his method is based on mathematics. He doesn't require that you know "graph theory" or anything like that.By the way, our change from 100K buffers per transaction to 1700 buffers, dropped the CPU utilization for the website that was running the OLTP query by about 70%. That was on a 16 CPU, Sun/Solaris box. So proper SQL tuning can save you a lot of $$$.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Creating Interactive Web Sites with PHP and Web Services
Publisher: Sybex
Authors: Eric Rosebrock, Eric Rosebrock, Sybex
Rating: 5/5
Title: Creating Interactive Web Sites with PHP and Web Services
Publisher: Sybex
Authors: Eric Rosebrock, Eric Rosebrock, Sybex
Rating: 5/5
I read this book and found it be one of the better ones out there. Author does a good job of explaining the code which goes a long way in helping you to understand why he does things the way he does.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Teach Yourself Pl/SQL in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself)
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Tom Luers, Timothy Atwood, Jonathan Gennick
Rating: 3/5
Title: Teach Yourself Pl/SQL in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself)
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Tom Luers, Timothy Atwood, Jonathan Gennick
Rating: 3/5
This book is alright but for the serious errors in listings of code(Typographical I suppose!). For a beginner this problem may confuse.Concepts must be fully explained before listings containing these schema objects are displayed.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP and MySQL Web Development
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Luke Welling, Laura Thomson
Rating: 3/5
Title: PHP and MySQL Web Development
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Luke Welling, Laura Thomson
Rating: 3/5
This is a great book for the new and expert in PHP. I have ask for a customer help on the publisher but 2 months later, im still wating for there answer.
