IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Google: The Missing Manual
Publisher: O'Reilly Rating: 5/5
Title: Google: The Missing Manual
Publisher: O'Reilly Rating: 5/5
Last summer, I had the surprise of receiving and reviewing the Google Pocket Guide. I thought it was for people who didn't know how to use a search engine, but was quickly corrected in that misconception. Google's power is phenominal. Because of that, I decided to read and review Google: The Missing Manual (O'Reilly). Once again, I continue to be amazed at what Google has put together. The service, and this book, are great.This book is split out into five parts with the following chapters: Introduction; Google 101; Superior Searching; Googling Further: Images, News, and the Directory; Googling With Others: Groups and Answers; Shopping with Google; The Google Toolbar; More Cool Google Tools; Becoming A Search Result; Making Money With Google; Appendix: The Google Wide WebDue to fewer space constraints than a Pocket Guide would have, Milstein and Dornfest can take more time to explain and illustrate the various features that make up the current Google universe. If you did nothing more than read the chapters on Google 101 and Superior Searching, you'd know more than the average Google user. You'd also give yourself a huge edge in finding relevant content on the web without slogging through thousands of results. Using their tips, you quickly pick up the separating line between searching science and searching art. All the remaining chapters go into features that are less known and used, but that will blow you away once you find them. Even if you already know about a feature, like Google images, the chapter can help you figure out how those image indexes are created, and how to use the Google search syntax to narrow down your results more quickly.Another feature I really appreciate about this book is the instruction on how to manage and design your site to maximize it's Google interaction. The authors go into the robots.txt specification and how to either block off your entire site or just certain pages. In addition, they give you a great overview of how Google crawls and indexes pages, so you can make sure your site is Google-friendly for the best search results possible.You may think you're a Google wizard, but chances are you're not tapping the full potential. With this book, you can learn how to turn Google into your second brain and personal research assistant.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: DB2 Universal Database SQL Developer's Guide
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Authors: Roger E. Sanders, Roger Sanders
Rating: 4/5
Title: DB2 Universal Database SQL Developer's Guide
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Authors: Roger E. Sanders, Roger Sanders
Rating: 4/5
This book makes a great reference guide for anyone needing to create or sort SQL queries and reports in the DB2 environment. It goes through everything, from the initial setup to the basic queries to how to really get the most from your database.To be honest, it's a little narrow in focus in that it concentrates so exclusively on one application of SQL, but it's pretty up front about it's target audience so you can't really fault it there.Not a book for SQL beginners then, or even for anyone looking for a general SQL guide, but a must-have for anyone serious about using it with DB2 every day, or looking for an addition to their office library. In fact, the book is pricey enough to imply that it's intended as a resource for the whole office to use - though the inclusion of a full copy of IBM DB2 more than makes up for the cost.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Performance Tuning
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Peter Gulutzan, Trudy Pelzer
Rating: 3/5
Title: SQL Performance Tuning
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Peter Gulutzan, Trudy Pelzer
Rating: 3/5
The book gives many examples of how to fine-tune SQL statements, and usually displays performance gain/loss resulted from the fine-tuning right below the examples. But the result is shown in the format "##/8", meaning the DBMS's of ## vendors out of the "big 8" show performance gain. For me this information is not too much helpful, since I only work on Microsoft SQL Server and am not very interested in other verdors. If the book can give more vendor-specific examples and explanations it will be more helpful, at least for me.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Server 7 Administration
Publisher: Osborne Publishing
Authors: Mark A. Linsenbardt, M. Shane Stigler, Shane Stigler
Rating: 5/5
Title: SQL Server 7 Administration
Publisher: Osborne Publishing
Authors: Mark A. Linsenbardt, M. Shane Stigler, Shane Stigler
Rating: 5/5
I used this book in combination with some web information to study for the Microsoft Certification test. (70-028) This book was great at updating what I knew for 6.5. This book is aimed at experienced SQL Server users.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Google Hacks
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest
Rating: 4/5
Title: Google Hacks
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest
Rating: 4/5
Upon picking up this book, I was immediately overwhelmed with the amount of "hacks" outlined. Basically, this book shows various different ways to get Google to provide you with the information you want. Additionally, there is a discussion on accessing the Google API, to integrate this search engine with your custom application. Finally, there is a discussion on what a webmaster can do to increase their "page ranking", the way Google ranks sites.My favorite section of this book was on accessing the Google web API. Basically, this API allows you to integrate Google searches directly into your application via a web service. In addition to discussing the API, actual program examples are provided in Perl, Java, C#, Python, and VB.NET. For example, you could integrate Google's dictionary directly into Microsoft Word to provide a more comprehensive dictionary than is provided. Another really cool example provided integrates the Google and Amazon.com's API. In this example, the author shows how these APIs are integrated to show a list of "most popular" books, followed by recent news articles on the books and a list of items that people bought who also purchased the book in question. It's pretty cool and quite impressive.The book ends with a section dedicated to the web master. This section goes over a good guess for the mathematical equation used in Google's mysterious page algorithm, and describes what you can do to increase your visibility on Google. The book even includes a list of "thou shalt not", which can keep your site from being indexed by Google.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: A Guide to SQL Server 2000 Transactional and Snapshot Replication
Publisher: Not While the Surf's Up Press
Authors: Hilary Cotter
Rating: 5/5
Title: A Guide to SQL Server 2000 Transactional and Snapshot Replication
Publisher: Not While the Surf's Up Press
Authors: Hilary Cotter
Rating: 5/5
This is a great book, jam-packed with information that's either tough to find, or doesn't exist, in Microsoft's documentation. I liked that the author delved through the basics, and then showed the pros and cons of each approach (SPs, DMO, ActiveX). He also documented Microsoft's replication system procedures much better than they ever could, and explained some of the caveats that they conveniently leave out.
Probably not a book you would read straight through in a single evening, but if you are involved with replication, this is the one book I think you need to have by your side.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Beginning E-Commerce with Visual Basic, ASP, SQL Server 7.0 and MTS
Publisher: Peer Information
Authors: Matthew Reynolds
Rating: 3/5
Title: Beginning E-Commerce with Visual Basic, ASP, SQL Server 7.0 and MTS
Publisher: Peer Information
Authors: Matthew Reynolds
Rating: 3/5
The first time I read this book I found that it quickly put me in a position to develop real world applications. I continue to read through this book and find that each time a new idea or approach to a problem can be extracted an applied to my project at hand.One of the better books I've read on e-commerce in the past 2 years.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: A Guide to SQL Server 2000 Transactional and Snapshot Replication
Publisher: Not While the Surf's Up Press
Authors: Hilary Cotter
Rating: 5/5
Title: A Guide to SQL Server 2000 Transactional and Snapshot Replication
Publisher: Not While the Surf's Up Press
Authors: Hilary Cotter
Rating: 5/5
This book is the only choice for a reference on replication -- and not just because it's literally the only book available, but also because Cotter has jammed it full of information. This book covers every aspect of transactional and snapshot replication, from basics all the way through to deep internals. Cotter leaves few, if any, issues uncovered.
For replication beginners -- like me -- this book is certainly not an easy read. Replication has a steep learning curve, with lots of new terminology to learn. And it's a huge topic -- this book can only be fairly described as a tome. However, Cotter's casual writing style helps the reader get comfortable with replication quickly and easily.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to successfully work with replication.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Google Pocket Guide
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest, DJ Adams
Rating: 5/5
Title: Google Pocket Guide
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest, DJ Adams
Rating: 5/5
Like all great products, the ability to start using it should be instant, but the possible features up for usage should be very deep.
Google makes it simple for anyone to do a search. This book helps make it simple for anyone to do a GREAT search.
Well worth the money.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Advanced Transact-SQL for SQL Server 2000
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Itzik Ben-Gan, Tom Moreau
Rating: 2/5
Title: Advanced Transact-SQL for SQL Server 2000
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Itzik Ben-Gan, Tom Moreau
Rating: 2/5
If you like code that won't run out of the box, get this book. Many of the examples simply don't run. These are usually minor errors, but I don't think the book should have gotten into print with them.I spend a lot of time helping people solve T-SQL-related problems. When I was recommending this book (I've stopped doing that) about half the people who got it ran into these code bugs. The authors would do the world a big favor to correct these in a subsequent release of the book. For now, I advise people to stay away from this book. If you want the best T-SQL book out there, get Henderson's Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL.
