IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes, Third Edition
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Ben Forta
Rating: 5/5
Title: Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes, Third Edition
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Ben Forta
Rating: 5/5
Yet another well-written book by Ben Forta. This has got to be the smallest SQL book in existence. This is what makes it so great. I purchased this book for a handful of the more advanced users in my office. It allowed them to learn some basic SQL and bypass the very regimented structure of our report writer (Cognos Impromptu). This books carried them through SELECT, WHERE, GROUP BY, ORDER BY, HAVING and then went into joins. Along the way it briefly touched on a few of the text formatting and numeric functions. The ability to confront such a potentially overwhelming topic (SQL) with such a small book is refreshing. If you are looking for a book to set you on your path to database administration or design, this one will not get you very far. You will likely be better served by the typical doorstop book.
Product: Book
Title: PHP and MySQL For Dummies, 2nd Edition
Publisher:
Authors: Janet Valade
Rating: 3/5
Title: PHP and MySQL For Dummies, 2nd Edition
Publisher:
Authors: Janet Valade
Rating: 3/5
It's a good thing PHP and MySQL have such an extensive following or this book would be burned at the stake. Just a couple of examples: the function "isset" isn't even in the index so good luck finding it in the book (unless you want to read through it again). Nowhere in the book does it explain that when you encrypt a password into MySQL, you can NOT decrypt it. It has no mention of MD5 or AES_ENCRYPT, other alternatives for MySQL encryption. As mentioned in another post, many of the samples have errors including the two projects at the end, i.e., unset($do). POST or GET? If you don't catch this, you'll spend a few hours trying to figure out the problem.
I certainly would not rely on this book alone to satisfy your needs. Even if you're just developing a simple page, you might find yourself frustrated over the books uses of variables and constants. An earlier post said it's not the authors fault. Well, whoever or whatever, just find a companion book to help and be prepared to subscribe to many forums (because even the online documentation for PHP and MySQL can leave you lost in a split-second).
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle PL/SQL Programming: Guide to Oracle8i Features
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Steven Feuerstein
Rating: 4/5
Title: Oracle PL/SQL Programming: Guide to Oracle8i Features
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Steven Feuerstein
Rating: 4/5
I have been working with Oracle for serveral years. We recently upgraded to Oracle8i from Oracle7. I found this book to be very useful in quickly getting up to speed on the new features of Oracle8i. I found the chapters on Built-in packages and fine-grained access control to be particularly useful.I agree with another reviewers comment that more should have been done with Java. Perhaps, Java rates a book of its own.I hope Mr. Feuerstein will produce a similar book for Oracle9i.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP Developer's Cookbook (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Sterling Hughes, Andrei Zmievski
Rating: 5/5
Title: PHP Developer's Cookbook (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Sterling Hughes, Andrei Zmievski
Rating: 5/5
For anyone who learns by doing rather than memorising methods and functions, this is the book for you.I have read the Wrox Professionals, PHP Bible, Core and New Riders books but this is by far the best. Once you know the syntax of the language ..., you need a book which can show you examples of usage. I found myself revisiting a lot of my code after reading this book and changing the way I had done things.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP for the World Wide Web : Visual QuickStart Guide (2nd Edition) (Visual Quickstart Guides)
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Authors: Larry Ullman
Rating: 5/5
Title: PHP for the World Wide Web : Visual QuickStart Guide (2nd Edition) (Visual Quickstart Guides)
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Authors: Larry Ullman
Rating: 5/5
This book is very easy to use. It's organized so that you can go right to the stuff you need. Some of the examples continue from previous chapters but they are clear enough that you can apply them to your needs at any point. The companion website it amazing. The author moderates a forum where he and other knowledgable PHP'ers respond with useful, thoughtful suggestions very quickly. Some of the code is outdated because of new releases of PHP, but that's the nature of the topic. The website identifies many of the most important changes, and how to modify your scripts to work with newer releases.I'm glad I bought it when I did, but the author has since come out with "PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites." I'd probably buy that instead since I'm also trying to learn mySQL.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Core PHP Programming: Using PHP to Build Dynamic Web Sites (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Pearson Education
Authors: Leon Atkinson
Rating: 4/5
Title: Core PHP Programming: Using PHP to Build Dynamic Web Sites (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Pearson Education
Authors: Leon Atkinson
Rating: 4/5
This book provides an excellent reference material. If you are looking for a book to teach you PHP, this isn't it. I would recommend the PHP Bible for introductory material. However, if you have programming experience and feel comfortable in scripting languages such as ASP and JSP this book will provide you with the most commonly used functions, their syntax, and what they do.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Sams Teach Yourself SQL Server 7 in 24 Hours (Teach Yourself -- Hours)
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Matthew Shepker
Rating: 1/5
Title: Sams Teach Yourself SQL Server 7 in 24 Hours (Teach Yourself -- Hours)
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Matthew Shepker
Rating: 1/5
Don't waste your money or time with this book. The thought of picking up key SQL Server skills in a few hours is appealing, but this book will do you no favors.I bought the Microsoft Press Inside SQL Server by Soukup and Delaney as well and found it to be, even at twice the length, much more to the point.As mentioned previously, the writing and editing in Shepker's book is especially bad.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Tuning
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Dan Tow
Rating: 2/5
Title: SQL Tuning
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Dan Tow
Rating: 2/5
This book doesn't offer a practical approach to tuning Microsoft SQL Server 2000. If you want a generalist book with minimalistic theoretical ideas, this may be the one for you. If you need to become an expert at practical tuning of Microsoft SQL Server 2000, take a look at "SQL Server Query Performance Tuning: Distilled" instead. SQL Server 2000 has powerful Profiler and Query Analyzer tools which can be used to effectively diagnose performance bottlenecks and get SQL Server 2000 working at the high performance levels it can achieve. Those tools are basically ignored in this book. Oracle, DB2 and MS SQL Server each have specialized tools and unique performance characteristics that must be understood to get each of them performing at peak potential. In one example the author states that simple loop joins are preferable to hash joins and he even gives instructions on using join hints. This approach will get you in a world of performance trouble in the vast majority of instances. The cases were SQL Server can run out of hash join memory are virtually NIL. The facts are that it is better to understand how the cost based optimizer works and be able to tell when it has gone in the wrong direction (not real common) and coax it (not force it) into a better query plan. Learn how to use Query Analyzer to understand what the optimizer is up to. Chris - tuneSQLServer.com
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: 5/5
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: 5/5
This book is not his basic volume in SQL, but his advanced volume. It helps you along explaining different issues with an excellent explanation of NULLS, their pros and their cons. It gives examples of solving problems in different SQL ways. A great buy.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Upgrading to PHP 5
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Adam Trachtenberg
Rating: 5/5
Title: Upgrading to PHP 5
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Adam Trachtenberg
Rating: 5/5
A very good choice. PHP5 is a new wave in dynamic web development. It dramaticly improved the handeling of classes and objects. This little book is your quick and easy to use refference of objects, methods, variables, scopes, functions. At Procreative Designs (procreative.ca), the company I work for this one was distributed all over our web development department at the beginning of last month. I personally find this book really handy and useful. Previously I owned PHP4 Refference and it always served me well. Overall its a great choice for quick refference.
