IT programming books related reviews
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
For a developer with weak or mediocre SQL Server skills, this is the best place to go. It is very readable without being too wordy, and the coverage is awesome, actually much wider than is needed for the 70-229 exam. Amazingry this book is both exactly what I need as a professional developer AND exactly what I needed to pass 70-229. (I should mention that for that exam you need to be very familiar with the command line and GUI tools and options, DBCC etc, which are covered by this book.)
I cannot imagine a better SQL Server 2000 "bible" for developers. It's true it lacks super advanced information on performance tuning, OLAP, and DTS, but all of these topics are covered well enough for the needs of a professional developer who is not on a specialty project and is not acting as a power DBA. And to add more of such advanced details, cutting out fat to make room would not be an option, because there is no fat in this book, it is already 1400 pages because it covers everything. Unless you are already a SQL Server expert, I think you shouldn't go without this book.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: MCDBA SQL Server 2000 All-in-One Exam Guide (Book/CD Set)
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Authors: Dave Perkovich
Rating: 1/5
Title: MCDBA SQL Server 2000 All-in-One Exam Guide (Book/CD Set)
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Authors: Dave Perkovich
Rating: 1/5
I bought this book because I couldn't find any others in my local bookstores. When I 'browsed' it, it seemed clear enough so I took a chance. Now that I've read all but the last few chapters (and done all the exercises, etc), I feel I would buy it again and, indeed, recommend it with a small qualification or two.Positives:First, it is not the bottom of the heap - far from it. I've read much poorer quality technical books before. I rated it at 3 stars but, if it hadn't claimed to be a test prep book, I would have rated it at 4 stars.Second, it is great for new people. So what if it misses a few of the finer points (even necessary ones?) Within two days of starting with it I was using DTS and replication and getting XML responses back through IIS. I found it very clear to get these services going.Third, I don't mind pictures and this book has quite a few. Nothing like a picture to show you what screen you *should* be looking at.Fourth, other than minor typos, the author is literate. Better than many other books out there.Negatives:First, this is *not* a test prep book. I've taken a number of cert tests (dozens) and I don't feel like I'm even close to ready for testing. However, I do feel a lot more confident about understanding the questions. A lot more.Second, there are some awful mistakes in some of the exercises. All of them are correctable and you have to correct them but it makes you suspicious whenever you start an exercise. For me, that isn't a bad thing. For a complete newbie, it could be a bit distressing.Third, the test banks don't work well. This doesn't make it a '1' in my opinion. I've not seen a test bank in a book that is representative of the real test. However, it does degrade my overall score for the book a little. Like I said when I started, if the book hadn't advertised it was a test prep book, I would have given it a '4'.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Core PHP Programming: Using PHP to Build Dynamic Web Sites (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Pearson Education
Authors: Leon Atkinson
Rating: 1/5
Title: Core PHP Programming: Using PHP to Build Dynamic Web Sites (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Pearson Education
Authors: Leon Atkinson
Rating: 1/5
The index in this book is appalling. The index is 95% function listings. How do I do search and replace on strings? If I don't know the name of the function that does it (the very reason I checked the book), then I'm out of luck.Also amusing is the egregious cut'n'paste error on the page explaining the CD-ROM, where they refer to the licensing for the Core Java Web Server CD-ROM. Ooops!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Dreamweaver MX: Advanced PHP Web Development
Publisher: Glasshaus
Authors: Glasshaus Author Team
Rating: 1/5
Title: Dreamweaver MX: Advanced PHP Web Development
Publisher: Glasshaus
Authors: Glasshaus Author Team
Rating: 1/5
This is supposed to be advance, but it looks more like confusion. This book is poorly written, full of assumptions. Unless you're willing to spend the time to ponder what's going on, don't even waste your money.Furthermore, the bank has pulled the plug on the publisher, so you won't even get any support.I'd say scrap this book, better to buy WROX's Professional PHP Program instead.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: MySQL/PHP Database Applications
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Jay Greenspan, Brad Bulger
Rating: 4/5
Title: MySQL/PHP Database Applications
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Jay Greenspan, Brad Bulger
Rating: 4/5
Only one year ago I had no understanding on PHP, MYSQL, Apache, RedHat or Unix, nor did I have any formal training in programming. Now, I have written very elaborate and fully expandable programs that are portable from one application to another and have been promoted Sr. Web Designer in the Internet Systems Department of my company.
This book was one of my frequently used library of books which included MySQL, PHP, Apache, Redhat and Unix Manuals. If you have a good base for programming you may not need it but it will help you create a structure for your code to follow, unlike most PHP code that is out on the web now. PHP is a pretty easy to understand language once you make it past the learning curve so, therefore there are tons and tons of horribly disgusting code that works. This book will help you learn to build your code so that you can use it over and over and not limit your ability for expansion. I do recommend this book but only if you accompany it with other important manuals.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: DB2(R) SQL PL : Essential Guide for DB2(R) UDB on Linux(TM), UNIX(R), Windows(TM), i5/OS(TM), and z/OS(R) (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Authors: Zamil Janmohamed, Clara Liu, Drew Bradstock, Raul F. Chong, Michael Gao, Fraser McArthur, Paul Yip
Rating: 4/5
Title: DB2(R) SQL PL : Essential Guide for DB2(R) UDB on Linux(TM), UNIX(R), Windows(TM), i5/OS(TM), and z/OS(R) (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Authors: Zamil Janmohamed, Clara Liu, Drew Bradstock, Raul F. Chong, Michael Gao, Fraser McArthur, Paul Yip
Rating: 4/5
The book describes IBM's Procedural Language, which runs on their db2 servers. It is not a general purpose language, like C or Java. Rather, it is tied directly to db2 and IBM's implementation of SQL. But within this context, the book explains the expressive power of PL. It shows at length how you can write stored procedures, triggers and functions in PL. The level of detail and the cited examples should reassure you of PL's capability.
But why even write business logic code at the database layer? There have been other books on n-tier application design, which call for the locating of business logic in a middle tier and not at the database. The authors' rejoinder is that while that makes for an elegant design, practical experience shows that often, crucial logic needs to be at the database. This reduces networks traffic and can heavily improve perforance. Hence the need for PL, or something like it.
Be wary of the book's claim that PL lets you write "portable application logic". It is portable only between instances of db2 running under linux, unix, Microsoft Windows or IBM's operating systems. When you write embedded logic in PL, you are also embedding yourself or your company into db2. Which may indeed be fine by you. But just so you know.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes, Third Edition
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Ben Forta
Rating: 4/5
Title: Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes, Third Edition
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Ben Forta
Rating: 4/5
This book provides a quick, no frills tour through SQL. But it's done very well, covering key SQL statements, clauses, operators and functions. It's a basic starter book with clear, concise information on some of the most useful SQL commands.I found it helpful to download the tables from the author's Web site and work with all the examples (scripts and examples run using SQL Server 7 Desktop). Completed the book in a few days, and now feel more confident to learn more complex SQL features if required. However, in the next issue, please tell the reader just ONCE that they need to "refer to the DBMS documentation for complete information"!
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: OCP Introduction to Oracle9i: SQL Exam Guide
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Jason Couchman
Rating: 3/5
Title: OCP Introduction to Oracle9i: SQL Exam Guide
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Jason Couchman
Rating: 3/5
This book is structured well for studying as it contains tips, two minute drills, and study questions both within a chapter and at the end of each chapter. The practice exams in the book and CD are good with only a few errors in them. Studying with this book will provide much of the information you need to pass the test, but it does not contain everything. Such as the use of any/all in single-row subqueries as one example. I did passed the test using this book alone (52/57), but I have a few years of SQL experience. While the CD's practice exams are good, I would avoid using the study sessions. There are some many errors in them as to be useless and misleading. I would also start studying with this book by first printing the Errata to make sure you have the latest corrections.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional SQL Server 7.0 Programming
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Rob Vieira
Rating: 5/5
Title: Professional SQL Server 7.0 Programming
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Rob Vieira
Rating: 5/5
This is absolutely the best SQL Server 7.0 development book on the market. I had done a reasonable amount of SQL Server 6.x development in the past, but then spent almost two years working on other things. When a client asked me to do a 7.0 project I went rushing out for a book to get me back up to speed. I bought this one based on the previous reviews and it was some of the best money I've ever spent on a programming book.Robert is obviously a professional SQL Server programmer who clearly understands exactly what's important and what's not. He's also an excellent writer, which makes the book a very enjoyable read. This book is not for beginners or academics, but for working programmers. Robert wastes no time on unnecessary introductory-level material or obscure technical details that you're unlikely to ever need. He gets right to the point and stays there.I'd usually indicate which parts of a book I thought were particularly noteworthy, but after flipping back through the chapters I have to say this book is just uniformly excellent. My only complaint, which unfortunately applies to almost every programming book I've bought over the past few years, is that the book contained numerous minor typographical errors. This was a failure on the part of the editors, however, and none of the typos interfered with the technical quality of the material.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lincoln Stein, Doug MacEachern
Rating: 5/5
Title: Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lincoln Stein, Doug MacEachern
Rating: 5/5
I once read that you could not consider yourself a Unix Wizard until you had hand written a SendMail configure script once, and that no sane person ever did it twice.The first part of that truism can perhaps be said of Web Wizards and Apache modules. Fortunately Apache modules are a little easier to write than Sendmail configurations and this book makes it easier still. Let's not mince words. Perl scripts and other CGI software can quickly become performance bottlenecks on any server, no matter the size of your hardware. The most powerful way of fixing this is to fold a fair amount of that programming inside the server where the overhead of loading interpreters, libraries and code is already taken care of, not to mention you find yourself with much more power and control over the dialogue between server and browser.Unfortunately writing to an API as large and complex as that in Apache is not always easy. MacEachern and Stein go to a great deal of trouble and exert a fair degree of skill in breaking the learning down into manageable chunks and explaining it all with a large number of examples.This was the first book I read that really made me understand the process going on, both between the two pieces of software and inside Apache, when a page is requested. From there the book goes on to give you a marvellous understanding of how to write a module in Perl that fits into that process. Finally the last three chapters are excellent API reference guides, one on the Perl API and two on the C API, and an excellent index (which indexes every function in the API's as well as key concepts) make this a superb tool when you get down to writing.The book does not cover using C in any where near as much depth, but the vital conceptual understanding required and explained in the Perl chapters means that once you have written a module in Perl I don't believe you will find it a problem to do it in C. I have to say though, as a C programmer I am yet to do it, I get so much performance out of a module in Perl I've yet to find the need.I read this book before starting my first module and I have now written three. I would never have even contemplated the task before reading this volume. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to get a full understanding of writing software for the web and anyone who wants a quantum leap in the performance of their web software. You will need some fair Perl skills and preferably written a few CGI scripts as this book does not cover the language skills required at all.
