IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP: Your Visual Blueprint for Creating Open Source, Server-Side Content
Publisher: Visual
Authors: Paul Whitehead, Joel Desamero
Rating: 5/5
Title: PHP: Your Visual Blueprint for Creating Open Source, Server-Side Content
Publisher: Visual
Authors: Paul Whitehead, Joel Desamero
Rating: 5/5
In less than 300 pages, this book manages to explain the simpler concepts while not omitting the more advanced topics of PHP programming that aren't covered adequately in other books with over 1000 pages. If a PHP book gets into things like object oriented PHP, using multiple tables in your PHP/database projects, session management and even frequently overlooked things like foreach conditional statements, then it is worth considering. This book covers all that without being annoyingly verbose like so many other books. Topics that take 30 pages of excessive rambling in some books are concisely covered in several pages with diagrams of code to illustrate. I have over a half dozen books on PHP/MySQL and I find that this is the most useful and easy to understand and can be used as a tutorial and quick reference. This book is useful for both beginners and experienced programmers and really does lives up to its motto "Read Less, Learn More".
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Dreamweaver MX: PHP Web Development
Publisher: Peer Information
Authors: Bruno Mairlot, Gareth Downes-Powell, Tim Green
Rating: 4/5
Title: Dreamweaver MX: PHP Web Development
Publisher: Peer Information
Authors: Bruno Mairlot, Gareth Downes-Powell, Tim Green
Rating: 4/5
Well, I've used this book to learn how to use this new Dreamweaver MX/PHP combination using my various Apple computers with great success.Sure it's not geared towards Mac users, but I would have felt not a little cheated, had I discovered nothing but page after page about how to download and install PHP or MySQL on Macs. You can find all that stuff on-line - especially at Mark Liyanage's excellent Entropy website! It's true that there is too much included on how to install these packages on PCs - but we all know PC users are a little shy of their wits, and they probably need all the help they can get, the poor dears!What this book does do, is get you running good and fast, creating an example website. I've done some web design before, but haven't made it very far. I always find myself in an awful dither about how to structure a database for a website. I found the book's example very helpful in this respect. It was a realistic project (a hotel booking system) and you are shown how easy Dreamweaver makes it to read and write stuff on a database like this. I actually used the same approach as the book's example, for a website I built for a local conference centre. I must say that the only thing I wish is that these authors would write me a follow on title, to extend on what I've now learnt. The book is great for learning, but is not really geared towards people in the situation where I now find myself - uploading stuff from my Mac onto my ISPs Cobalt Linux servers, for instance! In a way, it teases you, because it takes you this far and then says "there you go, you're on your own, now!"Four stars, I think, authors! A nice book, of a nice size, but give me a follow on title, so as I can make it to the stars!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Instant SQL Programming
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Joe Celko
Rating: 1/5
Title: Instant SQL Programming
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Joe Celko
Rating: 1/5
Myself and another person who bought this book as required by an online SQL class both agree that this is not a well-written book. On many occasions during the first few chapters (that's all I could take) I found myself thinking "where did that come from?". The book does not follow a logical progression nor does it explain itself well. Additionally, the quality and quantity of examples are lacking.In fact, my lack of tolerance with this book caused me to drop the class. I have used other WROX publications ("Visual Basic 5", "Active Server Pages"), and have found them to be finely written books. WROX should really consider talking to the person who proofed this book and gave it the "Yes, that's what WROX wants to be its SQL book" stamp.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Googles and the planet of Goo (A children's edutainment book)
Publisher: Googles Children's Workshop
Authors: Steven A Silvers
Rating: 5/5
Title: Googles and the planet of Goo (A children's edutainment book)
Publisher: Googles Children's Workshop
Authors: Steven A Silvers
Rating: 5/5
Great imagination experience for all young children that is well needed for this time and age, clean adventures for the young mind, great book!!!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: MySQL/PHP Database Applications
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Jay Greenspan, Brad Bulger
Rating: 2/5
Title: MySQL/PHP Database Applications
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Jay Greenspan, Brad Bulger
Rating: 2/5
I found the first few chapters to be the most valuable ones, providing overviews of general topics. In particular the chapter on relational database design would be good for someone who's a new or intermediate database designer.After the first few overview or theoretical chapters, though -- once you "dive into the code" -- things start to unravel pretty quickly. The choice of topics covered via code examples seems random and arbitrary. It's possible that perusing the code included on the CD would be of value. That might be true if the code wer not riddled with typos and errors. As for the text itself, once you get into the code sections, you can almost count on a typo or more per page. I even found errors in the entity relationship diagrams. As another reader pointed out, discovering the errors may serve as a debugging exercise, but that's not why you buy a book like this. And if you just want to peruse code, there is plenty of open source stuff out there for free.As a web developer with some familiarity with MySQL and PHP (and extensive programming experience in other areas) I found this book to be incomplete and spotty as a guide to developing PHP/MySQL applications. You could do worse, but you could do a whole lot better.I get the feeling that they ran out of time with this one, and rushed to finish it up. It's too bad that the second half of the book isn't as good as the first half.
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: 2/5
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: 2/5
This book gives many tips for how to structure your database
and about the behavior of some SQL commands (much of which
is common sense anyway), but does
nothing to help the reader actually learn the language.
Examples are scarce and many of them are C code rather than SQL.
I was very disappointed with this book and must continue my
search for an SQL textbook.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Fundamentals
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Authors: John J. Patrick
Rating: 3/5
Title: SQL Fundamentals
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Authors: John J. Patrick
Rating: 3/5
I bought this book to cram for a job interview; although I've spent some time as an Access developer (read: power user), I've never really spent that much time looking at SQL as a language. I bought this book because it focused on Access and Oracle. I really like the format of this book, because it does read like a workbook. The author introduces a topic, provides some examples, and then gives you some exercises. The code is available on a CD-ROM (which is nice if you're trying to cram a lot of information in a very tight time frame).However, the editing is horrible, and it can detract from the learning. One example is the note from the editor to the author that was mistakenly left in the manuscript (whoops!) on page 347.Overall, it is a handy workbook/reference, and should probably stay on your shelf.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Server 7 Backup & Recovery
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Authors: Anil Desai
Rating: 5/5
Title: SQL Server 7 Backup & Recovery
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Authors: Anil Desai
Rating: 5/5
I bought this book because of its name. However after I read it, I am very disappointed.The reason is that 1. It does not not cover in-depth experience/knowledge/troubleshooting. 2. The details of the table are like a plate of salad. So much NT and SQL Server basic stuff most of reader should already know and do not want read it. 3. The most disappointing part is that it does not touch real-world trouble from SQL DBA about backup and restore.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional SQL Server 2000 XML
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Paul J. Burke, Sam Ferguson, Denise Gosnell, Paul Morris, Karli Watson, Darshan Singh, Brian Smith, Carvin Wilson, Warren Wiltsie, Jan Narkiewicz, J Michael Palermo, John Reid
Rating: 2/5
Title: Professional SQL Server 2000 XML
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Paul J. Burke, Sam Ferguson, Denise Gosnell, Paul Morris, Karli Watson, Darshan Singh, Brian Smith, Carvin Wilson, Warren Wiltsie, Jan Narkiewicz, J Michael Palermo, John Reid
Rating: 2/5
I had mistakenly thought that Wrox books were held to a higher standard. First getting a taste for them going through both of Rob Vieira's two SQL Server Programming books and regarding them as the finest technical books I've ever seen. However this Professional SQL Server 2000 XML is a disappointment. Part of the problem lies with having 12 different authors because it seems a bit jumpy. I think I'll really try to limit my future purchases to single source efforts. Also, no care was taken with the code examples that you can download from the Wrox website. The book shows the source but there is really no way of really matching the example to the source other than guessing the name. Often I've needed to open up all 15 or so files in the directory to realize that the particular example is not included. I'm picking my way through but it is not pleasant.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Php Fast & Easy Web Development (Fast & Easy Web Development)
Publisher: Premier Press
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 5/5
Title: Php Fast & Easy Web Development (Fast & Easy Web Development)
Publisher: Premier Press
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 5/5
This book is perfect for the novice who wants to jump into coding right away. I found examples which were perfect for the application I wanted to use PHP for. (There are other PHP books out there that suck so badly that I was compelled to rush to my keyboard and praise this one!) The usefulness of the examples also show that the writer has had some practical experience, as opposed to other books which regurgitate the docs and raise the question as to whether those authors actually understand the language.
