IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Microsoft SQL Server(TM) 7.0 Administrator's Pocket Consultant
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: William R. Stanek
Rating: 5/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server(TM) 7.0 Administrator's Pocket Consultant
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: William R. Stanek
Rating: 5/5
I was home sick and read this book through from cover to cover. This book covers all the basics. I would want to have a total coverage book around as well for reference, but for getting all the basic questions answered, this book does the job. It's hard to find answers to general questions in the heavier reference books due to their total coverage. This book gets to the point and tells you how to accomplish specific and important tasks.It's also light and small (relatively), so if you're a consultant you can easily carry it along with you. It's very clearly written.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional PHP Programming
Publisher:
Authors: Jesus Castagnetto, Sascha Schumann, Harish Rawat, Chris Scollo, Deepak T. Veliath
Rating: 4/5
Title: Professional PHP Programming
Publisher:
Authors: Jesus Castagnetto, Sascha Schumann, Harish Rawat, Chris Scollo, Deepak T. Veliath
Rating: 4/5
Okay - let's start by criticizing the bad parts. In my opinion at least, this book does not neccessarily cover good programming practices. I.e - html and php code are frequently mixed up in the same programs, which is usually not a good idea if you want to keep your logic separated from your design. It's almost always a good idea to have html separated from logic since you can much more easily change the design (using your favorite web-editor, which most probably won't understand PHP and will report constant errors in your code).Also, I think the book focuses too much on MySQL as the backend database. I know that mysql is very popular and does a great job in many circumstances, but the reason why I got this book was to learn PHP, not Mysql. I really needed a couple of more references and programming examples when you need to use PHP against other Databases, which in my case is Oracle 8i.This was my first book for PHP, a language I almost stumbled into by accident after spending lots and lots of time trying to figure out Microsoft's (in my view) arcane and difficult coding methods for .ASP and .NET. Not so with PHP! It's easy and quickly learned - and this book really enhanced my experience, touching on many subjects that I had problems grasping when learning from various disconnected tutorials lying around the web.It starts by showing you how to integrate PHP directly into your HTML, which, as I said, might be good for small one or two-page apps (and is also by many considered to PHP's greatest strength, but not really great if you need to write more of a web *application* per se. It also really covers arrays and functions in a good way, plus provides a good many (lengthy!) examples as the conclusion of the book. I think the inclusion of a couple of the appendixes might have been omitted and thus made the book a bit more "quick and easy". Especially Wrox's "ultimate HTML reference", which really doesn't belong in a PHP book. Get O'reilly's HTML Pocket Reference instead.One last bad point - I think a lot of the programming logic is just thrown at the user without really explaining all the nitty-gritty detail. So, this book is probably not for beginners.In conclusion - if you've touched on the language before, get this book. If you haven't, read something like "Learning PHP4" first. This book covers a lot of ground, and it's 909 pages long, so be ready to use quite some time to digest it all. That said, it serves greatly as a reference when you've read it through, and is now a permanent desktop-sitter on my desk.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Essential PHP Tools: Modules, Extensions, and Accelerators
Publisher: Apress
Authors: David Sklar
Rating: 3/5
Title: Essential PHP Tools: Modules, Extensions, and Accelerators
Publisher: Apress
Authors: David Sklar
Rating: 3/5
I bought this book with high expectations.
It is a very good book, well written, and David Sklar really has done a good job writing it. However, I didn't find it that useful. It wasn't even remotely close to comprehensive about what it covered, and made only footnote mention of other tools that are out there.
I ended up returning it -- something I rarely do. I didn't think it was worth the money. Most of this info is available for free online anyways.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP and MySQL
Publisher: SitePoint
Authors: Kevin Yank
Rating: 3/5
Title: Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP and MySQL
Publisher: SitePoint
Authors: Kevin Yank
Rating: 3/5
The combination of PHP and MySQL open source applications for developing a website has garnered wide attention. Yank explains why in this concise book. The scenario is that you want to build a website that has a back end database. From that database and also with input from the user, the web server has to get data and generate (ie. publish) dynamic HTML webpages.
The book quickly covers the panoply of topics needed to implement this goal. Yank starts by explaining how to use separately MySQL and PHP.
Then a chapter on relational databases. The weakest part of the book. No mention of the intricacies of normalisation or how to seriously design multiple tables with related keys. He gives a simple example that is correct insofar as it goes, and which lets him finesse not providing a fuller theoretical framework. If you have had no prior exposure to relational databases, then this chapter may be of limited usefulness in the context of your situation. Perhaps the best that can be said of the chapter is that it can motivate you to investigate designing a relational database, using a more extensive text devoted to that subject.
Later chapters then show how to combine the MySQL and PHP into an entire system. These chapters are better done.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Transact-SQL Cookbook (O'Reilly Windows)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Ales Spetic, Jonathan Gennick
Rating: 1/5
Title: Transact-SQL Cookbook (O'Reilly Windows)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Ales Spetic, Jonathan Gennick
Rating: 1/5
I wish I hadn't wasted my money on this. I recognize much of this 'cookbook' code from Ken Henderson's Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL book. That book is well-written and full of innovative code. This one isn't. This one is filled with horrid English and gradeschool grammar errors and code that looks like it came from somewhere else. There's little or no explanation for much of the code. What explanations there are are frequently wrong. I will be returning this for a refund.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Server 7 Data Warehousing
Publisher: Osborne Publishing
Authors: Michael J. Corey, Michael Abbey, Ian Abramson, Larry Barnes, Benjamin Taub, Rajan Venkitachalam
Rating: 1/5
Title: SQL Server 7 Data Warehousing
Publisher: Osborne Publishing
Authors: Michael J. Corey, Michael Abbey, Ian Abramson, Larry Barnes, Benjamin Taub, Rajan Venkitachalam
Rating: 1/5
I'm the lead developer for a software development and training firm. My boss had me buy this book, for an upcoming SQL Server data warehousing project. One problem though. This book doesn't tell you anything about how to build a data warehouse, it tells you why you would want one, but not what to do after you know you want it. Further more, it is the exact same book, word for word, with a few exceptions, as the Oracle 8 Data warehousing book, also written by Corey, Abbey, Abramson, and Taub. All they did differently, was they wrote about 10 pages on SQL Server, pulled out all of the information on UNIX, and did a find an replace for ORACLE and OEM. Other than that it's exactly the same book, they even left the chapter titles in the same order. I'm sorry, but letting the guy that made microsoft bob write two chapters doesn't make it a SQL Server book.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle PL/SQL 101
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Christopher Allen
Rating: 3/5
Title: Oracle PL/SQL 101
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Christopher Allen
Rating: 3/5
This book is good for beginners.... not recommended for advance users. Well together but not enough to cover the entire Pl/Sql concepts. If this book is your first Pl/Sql book I will also recommened "Oracle 8i Advance pl/sql programming book" by Oracle press. These 2 books should make you an expert in Pl/Sql.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Weekend Crash Course
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Alex Kriegel
Rating: 5/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Weekend Crash Course
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Alex Kriegel
Rating: 5/5
useful ground-zero stuff for dummies junkies and housewives you could jump-start from here to IT steering committee
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Advanced PHP for Flash
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Steve Webster, Matt Rice, Havard Eide, Jacob Hanson, Todd Marks, James Palmer, Kev Sutherland
Rating: 5/5
Title: Advanced PHP for Flash
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Steve Webster, Matt Rice, Havard Eide, Jacob Hanson, Todd Marks, James Palmer, Kev Sutherland
Rating: 5/5
If you love flash but wanted to increase your knowledge to make flash into a full blown dynamic site, then this is the book for you, it takes flash from the neat little animations that we all first learnt how to do, to a completely new level, with coding using php/mySQL and javascript, XML and more to make complete ecommerce sites , email servers , chat rooms, xml buttons that can be used in multiples sidutaions, ftp with flash, search engine with a full database coding for a complete cookbook (that if you wanted to, you could convert into a full blown serach directory, and much much... This book goes beyond what almost all flash users thought possible to do with flash.
I highly recommend it.
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
When I bought this book I was looking to create dynamic web pages, and had begun using Perl/CGI. I happened to come across the PHP manual on the net, and was amazed. I did not know much about PHP, and had never used mySQL so I wanted an entry-level book, and was lucky enough to purchase this one.
The authors did a wonderful job introducing me to both PHP and mySQL. The book takes you through building a members only site, and an e-commerce site. Unlike many books I have read all code is well commented, and uses only topics already introduced and explained, so it is never hard to follow.
I recommend reading the PHP chapter before the mySQL chapter, even though it comes after, then going back to the database chapter. Anyway you read it though it is a perfect starting point for learning the two. After reading this you will probably want to read a more advanced book on PHP, and maybe one on mySQL, as many of he less common features of both are left out. But thanks to this book you will feel after 1 week like you could build your own amazon.com.
