IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: A Visual Introduction to SQL
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: David Chappell, J. Harvey Trimble
Rating: 5/5
Title: A Visual Introduction to SQL
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: David Chappell, J. Harvey Trimble
Rating: 5/5
I am currently enrolled in a Database Management (Oracle/SQL) class at Boston College. Right off the bat, I knew I was in trouble when we were told the professor would be unavailable for help and most of students in class were computer science majors. (I was taking the class to broaden my computer skills above and beyond front-end web design.) The textbook in class was the heinously monstrous 1200+ page Oracle 9i The Complete Reference by Kevin Loney. After struggling through many chapters and finding our professor's teaching style very unhelpful, I decided it was time for another resource. I checked on Amazon ... and found Sam's Teach Yourself SQL in 10 minutes to be semi-helpful. Then at the Harvard Coop, I stumbled upon it - - A VISUAL INTRODUCTION TO SQL. The problem, I realized, was that I am a visual learner and need to see all the schema tables and step-by step actions to describe what happens as I develop queries. This books is key for any layman, like myself. It walks you through very basic (and more complex) problems in an easy-to-read visual approach. While using SQL on the PC, viewing the tables is difficult and this book helps you map out the problems to figure them out. I was especially impressed after emailing the author about a table question and getting a personalized response. If you are in a bind to learn SQL on your own, this book is great and won't kill you lugging it around either. P.S. A great addition I found to this book was a Mac client software (that can access Oracle Databases) called SQL Grinder. Like the book, this program is also very visual and the GUI (MAC) clearly reigns over any PC. Sorry Windows users! Thanks for your help, David Chappell! ;-)
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: 3/5
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: 3/5
My usual approach to CS books is to read them from cover to cover. I don't try the examples, don't run the code, don't do the exercises. What I try to do is getting a "coarse memory map" of what the book teaches, so when I encounter a problem in my line of work I can say "well, I remember something about it in ZZZ" or "YYY had a chapter on this". Obviously I tend to favour cookbooks on purely abstract theory. When I bought Joe Celko's book I hoped to get just this: an SQL cookbook with easily appliable tips and techniques to a vast range of recurring SQL problems. In my opinion, the book tries to cover too much, and ends up unfocused. There are a lot of examples, but they look a little too vague to me (and as others noticed, they seem to be plagued with typoes). Often the method works for the toys tables used to introduce the problem, but I'm left wondering what would happen if the data were a little more complex. There are chapters devoted to subtle problems in SQL standards, numerical precision, query optimizations, but the general message seems to always boil down to "well, different vendors do things differently, so check out your product docs". The book hints to powerful SQL techniques to solve some recurring problems: it devotes two chapters to modeling trees and graphs in RDBs, but again, the discussion is not really complete, and even if it proves that trees can be represented and manipulated in standard SQL (without STARTS WITH or other proprietary dialects) a lot of important things are missing, like what to do if you need to represent different trees in the same table, instead of a single tree. They also suffer from the "toy example syndrome" I explained before. The book devotes some pages to design constraints and strategies, but does not discuss how to present object oriented classes in standard RDB. Maybe it's just me, but I think this should have been included, considering the widespread use of OO or quasi-OO languages in the industry. To sum it up, the book demonstrates that the author has a very good knowledge of standards, is intimate with at least a dozen different commercial RDBS, and has a tendency to write intricate SQL queries to show that "it can be done in SQL, no needs to resort to procedural language". This is fine for his magazine columns, but I wonder if and when I will ever consult the book to solve a real-world problem in my job.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: Physical Database Design for Sybase Sql Server (Sybase Series)
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Authors: Rob Gillette, Dean Muench, Jean Tabaka
Rating: 4/5
Title: Physical Database Design for Sybase Sql Server (Sybase Series)
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Authors: Rob Gillette, Dean Muench, Jean Tabaka
Rating: 4/5
The authors do a good job explaining physical database considerations. It is also a good source for developing some standards such as naming conventions for objects.
You could easily devise a checklist of activities for moving from a logical to physical design, but I'd read the entire book well in advance of your need to do so.
The book does not cover how each task may fit into an overall methodology, so you better understand the lifecycle and where each task needs to be performed.
This is not for beginners and doesn't cover any logical modeling principles, but is an excellent read for experienced modelers needing a Sybase implementation guide
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Optimizing Transact-SQL : Advanced Programming Techniques
Publisher: SQL Forum Press
Authors: David Rozenshtein, Anatoly Abramovich, Eugene Birger
Rating: 1/5
Title: Optimizing Transact-SQL : Advanced Programming Techniques
Publisher: SQL Forum Press
Authors: David Rozenshtein, Anatoly Abramovich, Eugene Birger
Rating: 1/5
First, this 132 page "book" is really just a collection of SQL Forum magazine reprints from the early 90s. Second, the tricks introduced here have very little practical value. It seems the whole goal was to show what neato things could be done with a single SELECT statement. No thought is given to readability or performance. Cross joins in particular, a favorite technique of the authors, perform very poorly over large sets of data -- the very type of data sets people interested in these types of computations would likely have. Multiple nested subqueries of a given table constructed solely to avoid having multiple select statements are hardly performant. You will be much better served with Henderson's T-SQL Guru's Guide book. It shows how to perform row-positioning computations (such as statistics, runs, and so forth) in Transact-SQL without resorting to arcane, obscure techniques that perform poorly.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Writing Stored Procedures with Microsoft SQL Server: The Authoritative Solution
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Matt Shepker
Rating: 3/5
Title: Writing Stored Procedures with Microsoft SQL Server: The Authoritative Solution
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Matt Shepker
Rating: 3/5
Though this book helped me breeze through a project
and enabled me to write stored procedures even with
minimal SQL experience, I noticed that the information in
this book can be found online. If you can manage to look
at the monitor for hours at a time then don't buy this book,
you can readily get the information online.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional Apache Tomcat
Publisher: Wrox
Authors: Chanoch Wiggers, Ben Galbraith, Vivek Chopra, Sing Li, Debashish Bhattacharjee, Amit Bakore, Romin Irani, Sandip Bhattacharya, Chad Fowler
Rating: 5/5
Title: Professional Apache Tomcat
Publisher: Wrox
Authors: Chanoch Wiggers, Ben Galbraith, Vivek Chopra, Sing Li, Debashish Bhattacharjee, Amit Bakore, Romin Irani, Sandip Bhattacharya, Chad Fowler
Rating: 5/5
I am a professor at a large technical college. I use Tomcat in my Distributed Java class and I have to say this is one of the finest books on Tomcat I have seen. I have recommended this book to all of my students.The book is well-laid out. It offers a good overview of all of the major pieces of functionality in Tomcat and does a particularly good job of describing the different manners which you can integrate Tomcat and Apache.My only complaint might be that the section on Axis was extremly light-weight. I would have loved to see more detail in this chapter, even though the information in the chapter was a good starter.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Understanding Relational Databases with Examples in SQL-92
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Authors: Fabian Pascal
Rating: 4/5
Title: Understanding Relational Databases with Examples in SQL-92
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Authors: Fabian Pascal
Rating: 4/5
This book may be short in length; however, it is has enormous informational depth. Pascal certainly knows his stuff. In this book he writes about concepts and practices that are greatly lacking in the world of database management and development. He points out how, even, expert players of the database world fail to give the most fundamental and important aspects of database design/development proper emphasis. And he tells us why it is so important.Readers really should have a good understanding of SQL before reading this book. If the reader has solid understanding of set theory (collage level) they should follow this book easily. If the reader is not too sharp with math they will struggle with many of the advance concepts that Pascal covers. But the reader should still understand the underlying message, database integrity. This book explains why database integrity is vital to a successful database, as well as, how to implement good database integrity. Pascal does get a little too passionate, well actually, he rants. Some people might find it a little dark, but I thought it was a kind of funny.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Server 7: A Beginner's Guide
Publisher: Osborne Publishing
Authors: Dusan Petkovic
Rating: 4/5
Title: SQL Server 7: A Beginner's Guide
Publisher: Osborne Publishing
Authors: Dusan Petkovic
Rating: 4/5
I bought this book in hopes it would prepare me for the certification test but as broad as this book is I will have to find another source. Although, if you are looking for an introductory book to SQL 7 than this is a book for you. Be sure to follow it up with more indepth books before even thinking about entering a production environment
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Teach Yourself SQL in 21 Days
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Ronald R. Plew, Bryan Morgan, Jeff Perkins
Rating: 1/5
Title: Teach Yourself SQL in 21 Days
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Ronald R. Plew, Bryan Morgan, Jeff Perkins
Rating: 1/5
This is the worst technical book I've ever read. I expect examples to work; I expect quiz questions to be based on material actually included in the chapter. If there's sample code, I expect to see the results of the sample code. No excuse.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP MySQL Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Chris Lea, Mike Buzzard, Dilip Thomas, Jessey White-Cinis
Rating: 5/5
Title: PHP MySQL Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Chris Lea, Mike Buzzard, Dilip Thomas, Jessey White-Cinis
Rating: 5/5
A book like this was long awaited. There is no better way to learn than the method this book enunciates - the construction of each module that makes up a web site is clearly described through each of its chapters. It was also refreshing to see that the application that was implemented in the book is available online - forums,newsgroups, news feeds, message boards, complete shopping cart with check out features, and a very neatly written final chapter that takes a look at what could have been done better - refactoring, templating etc along with a fullish perspective of the whole application.Kudos to the author team, for a job well done. I recommend this book to any programmer that wants to learn PHP, use PHP better (thru an OO approach) and build an effective and useful web site.
