IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP Cookbook
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: David Sklar, Adam Trachtenberg
Rating: 5/5
Title: PHP Cookbook
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: David Sklar, Adam Trachtenberg
Rating: 5/5
This book has been a lifesaver for me. As is the case with all those in the Cookbook series, this book is filled with practical examples. This isn't a tutorial book, but honestly, this book combined with the online docs were all I needed to build my own web site based around PHP. I definitely encourage you to buy this book if you're hoping to learn PHP!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: MCSE SQL 7 Database Design and Administration Practice Tests Exam Cram (Exam: 70-028, 70-079)
Publisher:
Authors: Geoffrey Alexander, Joseph, Jr. Alexander
Rating: 1/5
Title: MCSE SQL 7 Database Design and Administration Practice Tests Exam Cram (Exam: 70-028, 70-079)
Publisher:
Authors: Geoffrey Alexander, Joseph, Jr. Alexander
Rating: 1/5
I have never asked for my $ back for a book, but I am on this one. I took Practice Test 1: Almost 1 in 4 (13 out of 55) questions either have typos that would make the "correct" answer syntactically invalid, outright wrong "correct" answers, or very questionable "correct" answers. Q3. Typo: "VALUE" instead of "VALUES" Q7. Question is "What is relationship between Actors or Directors and Title." Answer incorrectly says "Many to Many". This would be true if question was "What is relationship between Actors and Directors." (One Actor can be directed by many Directors and one Director can direct many Actors). The title table is the resolution table for the many-to-many relationship between Actors and Directors. But per the question, one Actor can act in many titles; one Director can Direct many Titles. Q11. What is meant by the words "main" or "independent" entities? Where do these words come from? PaintScheme and OptionalEquipment should indeed be entities, but main? or independent? Also, recommends Customer table be keyed on Social Security numbers. These are not really unique (as they are supposed to be). Most pros would say this is a bad idea for a primary key. Q14. Since when is "Many to One" not a valid relationship cardinality? By convention, most people look at relationships like this as One to Many. It depends on which entity is your point of reference. Many to One is simply the inverse of One to Many; both are equally real and valid. Q16: Question refers to data type "text" generically in the question, but in the DDL mixes type text with type varchar. Q17: Question about relationship optionality. "Self-Recursive" is a word? Isn't that a tautology? What does recursive have to do with optionality? Q20: ">" sign is wrong for all answers according to the wording of the question. Should be "<" or "<=". Q22: Typo: "ANDprice" instead of "AND price" Q26: Adding memory to remote clients is not a hardware solution for poor performance? In a client/server environment? What about large, locally cached cursors? Q27. Question presupposes that we know and remember the exact schema of the (I assume) pubs database. Option "b" won't work because of ambiquous column names. This is true only because the particular data model chosen for pubs. It has nothing to do with SQL Server. This data model view is not given to us in the question. Also, the query has no join or where clause so we get nonsensical results (every author's name with every city/state we have & vice-versa). Q32. We are asked to insert 001001001 into an INT column. This is a bogus thing to do, but it works anyway. the value 1001001 is inserted (see Q34). Q34. This question is *exactly* the same as Q32, however this time, we are told the answer is "String or binary data would be truncated..." (see Q32). Which is right? Q40. Two of the answers given are 32,734 (this is the "correct" answer), and 32,768. According to SQL Server Books Online, neither is correct. BOL says: "A maximum of 32,767 databases can be created on a server." Q43. Asks a question about the 401K_Amt column of the Benefits table. All answers incorrectly transpose this to read 401K_Amt.Benefits instead of Benefits.401K_Amt. Q44. Maximum number of files used by a single database. I could not find answer anywhere, BOL, etc. Maybe this book is right. Correct answer given is 32,768. One option was 32,767, which, would agree with BOL's max number of DATABASES (Also incorrectly given in this book). What is a file? I hope they mean physical file, as in mydb.mdf. Q49. Each answer has a DDL statement that will not execute because it refers to a column that does not exist: prod_type(prod)
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Essence of SQL : A Guide to Learning Most of SQL in the Least Amount of Time
Publisher: Coriolis Group Books
Authors: David Rozenshtein
Rating: 1/5
Title: The Essence of SQL : A Guide to Learning Most of SQL in the Least Amount of Time
Publisher: Coriolis Group Books
Authors: David Rozenshtein
Rating: 1/5
This is probably the worst book I've ever bought. There is no index to help you locate procedures, commands, or concepts. Who has the time to flip through looking for something that approximates what you are trying to do? If you just want some light reading before you go to bed, by all means, buy this book. If you are trying to teach yourself SQL, run as fast as you can in the other direction. This book is useless as a teaching tool inless you are interested in learning a little terminology to impress your friends/colleagues but you aren't really going to do any real work.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional PHP4 XML
Publisher: Peer Information
Authors: Luis Argerich, Chris Lea, Ken Egervari, Matt Anton, Chris Hubbard, James Fuller, Charlie Killian
Rating: 5/5
Title: Professional PHP4 XML
Publisher: Peer Information
Authors: Luis Argerich, Chris Lea, Ken Egervari, Matt Anton, Chris Hubbard, James Fuller, Charlie Killian
Rating: 5/5
I've purchased many PHP books over the years, learning PHP and programming from the ground up. I've just started dabbling with XML and I needed a resource that would get me going on the right footing. After a bit of searching, I decided to purchase Professional PHP4 XML and I must say, this book told me everything I wanted to know and more! As I read each chapter, I gained new insight into how XML and it's various technologies could make me a better programmer, designer and could help my client's projects. By taking the author's advice, I even gained new insight to programming some tools to make my job easier as a whole. These guys are truely brilliant and well experienced with PHP and XML - truely the leaders in their respective field. Given that I was new to XML, I started at the beginning and worked my way through the book. Outside of the chapter on SVG graphics, I found this book to engage in everything I was looking for and more. Every page is filled with insight and the DOM chapter even has notes for PHP 4.3.0! Talk about the Wrox crew planning in advance! It is obvious they put a great deal of work into making sure this book is to last.Since I'm a businessman as well as a programmer, I gained valuable insight from manner of the chapters as it appears these authors are pretty smart business people as well. By seeing all perspectives in a consistent, seemless and non-bloated manner, I can honestly say I feel like a true expert with XML technologies. The book provides many examples, clearly explained as well as well written. Given the book outlines OO examples with the functional ones, I could see both paradigms being demonstrated together. This approached has engage me and my fellow programmers to write more OO code. This book has pretty much revolutionized my way of programming and thinking. I'd recommend it to any PHP programmer, regardless of their experience. Fantastic book!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle SQL*Loader: The Definitive Guide
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Jonathan Gennick, Sanjay Mishra
Rating: 5/5
Title: Oracle SQL*Loader: The Definitive Guide
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Jonathan Gennick, Sanjay Mishra
Rating: 5/5
Very good book on SQL loader. Eveything is in one place and easy to find. Answered all my questions and I got a few ideas about other ways to use SQL loader.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 7 Administrator's Guide
Publisher: Muska & Lipman/Premier-Trade
Authors: Ron Talmage
Rating: 4/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 7 Administrator's Guide
Publisher: Muska & Lipman/Premier-Trade
Authors: Ron Talmage
Rating: 4/5
My big problem with this book is the redundancy between it and the Microsoft documentation, particularly the BOL. Anything of value in this book is also in the BOL. The rest -- glib comments and generally poor writing -- you can do without. I'm a SQL Server trainer, and our books committee recently rejected this one for all the reasons above. Suggest that you do the same.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Hitchhiker's Guide to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services (Microsoft Windows Server System)
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Peter Blackburn, William R. Vaughn
Rating: 5/5
Title: Hitchhiker's Guide to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services (Microsoft Windows Server System)
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Peter Blackburn, William R. Vaughn
Rating: 5/5
As a Software Engineer I was looking for one concise source for everything I needed to know about Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. The book covers everything you need to know and would want to learn about, and more, in a manner which puts this book ahead of the competition.
The inside knowledge of Reporting Services from the Authors is clear from the outset and along with the very high quality video walkthroughs on the DVD, there really is no stone left uncovered in the area of Reporting Services.
The best practise guidelines include installation techniques, security options and their implications, query techniques and much more.
Every possible option possible within Reporting Services is explained and there is even content which goes beyond this showing you how to customize the look of the Reporting Services Manager.
In summary the inside knowledge of the Authors of this book coupled with the learning material including the DVD make this my favourite book of 2004.
Go buy it now!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The SQL Server 6.5 Performance Optimization and Tuning Handbook
Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
Authors: Ken England
Rating: 5/5
Title: The SQL Server 6.5 Performance Optimization and Tuning Handbook
Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
Authors: Ken England
Rating: 5/5
After you have spent 8-80 hours trying random combo's on the Server Configuration panel trying to guess what you should do, buy this book and score a direct hit! Microsoft should bundle this book with SQL Server. If a little more detail were provided on the internal data structures of SQL Server one could write a bulk loader that bypassed SQL Server entirely (I know its been done by others) and load 10 X as fast. (hint-hint) This is the closest thing to a K&R for MS SQL Server I've ever seen. I really like the brevity of this book. Every word counts! Very, very good job Ken!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 4/5
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 4/5
I have always used O'Reilly books when I can, because they don't have endless pages of filler material, like screenshots and repeated code listings, as many other books do. This book is no exception; it is concise and very helpful. The only reason it doesn't get five stars is because it claims to cover MS SQL 7.0 better than it does. A few of the examples need tweaking to work on 7.0, but it's nothing major. I think the succint style more than compensates and makes it better than most other bloated 800+ pages bricks out there.
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
This book taught me how to program in PHP in just one day. However, I don't think the beginner will spin up that quickly but I do recommend it for someone with some experience in programming that wants to learn what PHP is all about. This book actually had me writing code that would connect and use a MySQL database with ease. To be fair, sometimes the book didn't do a good job explaining some of the concepts but overall it was sufficient. I dont recommend this book to experienced PHP users. But it is great for beginners to intermediate.
