IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle PL/SQL 101
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Christopher Allen
Rating: 5/5
Title: Oracle PL/SQL 101
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Christopher Allen
Rating: 5/5
I just started to use oracle, and after I read the other reviews I got this book and I am not dissapointed. This book is very well written and informative. I would recommend this book for beginners to Oracle and sql and pl/sql.
Product: Book
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Database Development From Scratch
Publisher:
Authors: Rob Hawthorne
Rating: 5/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Database Development From Scratch
Publisher:
Authors: Rob Hawthorne
Rating: 5/5
The author really knows how to make the book fun to read. It spares you from the boring, technical parts and concentrates on the more, interesting and useful applications of SQL Server 2K, though it does feel like a book for kids after a while. The author shows his sense of humour along the way, making you laugh every now and then, which is good! :)The book goes through most, but not all the functionalities of SQL Server and brings you through building a SpyNet database. It even has a chapter on building the frontend with ASP, though it doesn't teach you any ASP and assumes that you either know ASP already or can make sense out of the comments he wrote together with the ASP scripts. The book touches only the surface of SQL Server concepts and thus is great for beginners wanting to start doing something with SQL Server, but not so appropriate for professionals.Highly recommended for beginners.
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
There certainly is a growing market for exam guides; unfortunately many publishers are repackaging their existing Beginner's Guides to try to fill the void. This book is an EXCELLENT guide for someone wanting to become a DBA, or to fill the gaps in their own experiential database. The downside is that this book will NOT prepare you for the exams - in fact, it doesn't even come close. Cheers for a easy-to-read book, but Jeers for misleading the buyer.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Php 4 Bible (Bible (Wiley))
Publisher: Hungry Minds
Authors: Tim Converse, Joyce Park
Rating: 3/5
Title: Php 4 Bible (Bible (Wiley))
Publisher: Hungry Minds
Authors: Tim Converse, Joyce Park
Rating: 3/5
I am very disappointed about this book! I bought the book because of the title. I expect much more for a book with this title. Unfortunately the examples are poor and mostly with errors. This book is not good even for beginners, because of the basics of PHP which were written in only 13 pages. Don't stay at the detail page of this book, go tho the PHP Cookbook and buy it! Virgilio Krumbacher
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional SQL Server Reporting Services
Publisher: Wrox
Authors: Paul Turley, Todd Bryant, James Counihan, George McKee, Dave DuVarney
Rating: 2/5
Title: Professional SQL Server Reporting Services
Publisher: Wrox
Authors: Paul Turley, Todd Bryant, James Counihan, George McKee, Dave DuVarney
Rating: 2/5
The amount of errors in this book is pathetic... obviously the pressures of publishing early is as great as the pressure to release software before it's ready.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional SQL Server 7.0 Development Using SQL-DMO, SQL-NS & DTS
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Frank Miller, Rachelle Reese, Martin Harwar
Rating: 3/5
Title: Professional SQL Server 7.0 Development Using SQL-DMO, SQL-NS & DTS
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Frank Miller, Rachelle Reese, Martin Harwar
Rating: 3/5
I cant speak to this book in its entirety, as I dont usually buy tech books to read them; rather when I encounter an obstacle I thrash thru books until I find something that addresses that obstacle, putting them back on the shelf once the problem is resolved. Thus, to me, the quality of a programming book is how helpful they are in solving obscure problems that usually are hard-to-impossible to find documentation for.Background: I primarily use VB and T-SQL to convert/transform environmental data from over 500 independent sources on a regular or sporadic release cycle into a site-organized perspective which I then convert into attribute-centric XML (each string the totality of a single site and all of its related children) to be stored in a single text field with its site info also stored in other fields as a header, id'd by GUIDs. We collect massive amounts of data in a wide variety of formats which we transform using 3rd party apps, custom apps, and when necessary via a Hand Keying agency for paper datasets. Our data process is many-stepped and complex and involves moving data between different formats and many different SQL Servers at various stages. To expedite this, a co-worker and I have written a collection of automation apps and utilities. However, at 2 different points in the process sombody has to manually DTS data either into SQL (typically from MSAccess which we use a convenient intermediary for analysis and conversion) or from SQL Server to SQL Server. The DTS Wizard makes this easy, but nevertheless manual, and therefore inefficient (and repititious/annoying). Previously we had played around with various methods of using packages, building packages on the fly, and more esoteric methods but due to the sheer diversity of incoming data and inconcistencies in format from data providers, nothing worked better or more easily than just biting the bullet and manually using the DTS Wizard.Recently, my coworker came across this book and noticed that, while most of it seems pretty uninteresting, Chapter 10 had very simplified code for creating simple DTS packages on the fly. The code & documentation we had found previously seemed to occlude/complicate the matter significantly, to the point that implementation would be too time consuming. However, the code in this book was easily adaptable to our purposes and in conjunction with some of our existing tools could become the basis of an in-line solution, removing the irritating manual DTS Wizard portion of our process. So, this book gets 3 stars on the basis of solving a single irritating issue thats been a thorn in our side for some time now. Be warned however, that we had to tape a yellow sticky over one of the writer's portraits; we kept having an unpleasant reaction everytime we looked at the book's cover. When you see it up close yourself, you'll understand what I mean...... ;)
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
This was a wonderful investment for me. It opened a whole new world of SQLSvr development to me. They say the first thing you need to do to become familiar with a new country is learn the language. Thanks to this book, I feel I'm finally on my way to learning the language of SQL Server, Transact-SQL.What I really like about the book is the effort to avoid repeating the Online Books. What you find in this book is everything that Microsoft left out of the docs that you need to know about Transact-SQL. Specifically the Cursors chapter and the Transactions chapter are real masterpieces. I highly recommend this book.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP Black Book
Publisher: Coriolis Group Books
Authors: Peter Moulding
Rating: 1/5
Title: PHP Black Book
Publisher: Coriolis Group Books
Authors: Peter Moulding
Rating: 1/5
I bought this book expecting it to be an exhaustive resource on how to start programing with PHP. I went into it with relatively little knowledge of server side programing, but the back of the book promised to fill me in on all the relevant details. It didn't.The book is organized into chapters on general subjects with an "intermediate solutions" and a "in depth" section in each. While it might make some sense for a book, the organization makes reading the book chronologically not work at all. Even the reference is shody at best, very irratic. It includes reference to virtually useless date functions for coverting between dates in the jewish and the roman calenders in the second chapter! The section on the MySQL database includes how to insert rows into a database and create tables, but not how to update or delete entries! Such erratic relevance is present throughout the book - there are many several page long sections which give a one sentense long description to an entire class of rarely used functions. Not only are the functions not especially useful, but the brief and cursory explainations mean that one would have to use another reference material to get them working in the first place. Additionally, many excerpts of complex code are presented without sufficient explaination of the basic concepts behind them. It's not explained well enough to impart a mastery of the skills upon the reader. The book sets out to be both a teaching tool and a reference material, but fails miserably on both accounts. One would be far better off merely learning the stuff at the PHP.net, as I was told when I asked on usenet for recommendation of a book and I foolishly ignored. At least the reference there is complete. Some subjects that are important today (that may not have been at the time of writing), such as setting register_globals to off in the php.ini settings are not even mentioned in the book.The other annoying aspect of the book is the author's sense of humor and his stories. As was mentioned in another review, it's fine if the material is good, but really is just fluff that covers up holes. His disdain for JavaScript is understandable, but uncalled for. When an author poorly describes even just the basics of a programing language, his extra comments aren't appreciated nor helpful. We'll be writing code that works worse than the poorly writen code of so called "professional" websites that he mentions his hate for many times, with only his book as a resource.Yes, the book does have a few useful excerpts and sections, but until the reader has a well educated knowledge of the subject, far beyond what the book imparts, it doesn't help at all. There's no compensation for the gaping holes in the text.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle SQL*Plus Pocket Reference (2nd Edition)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Jonathan Gennick
Rating: 3/5
Title: Oracle SQL*Plus Pocket Reference (2nd Edition)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Jonathan Gennick
Rating: 3/5
For those SQL*Plus keywords it contains, it's good. Very easy to use and helpful. What I'd really like to see is a more comprehensive reference that covers general SQL statements in SQL*Plus, without all the references to the other "flavors" of SQL out there (those weren't in this book, by the way). Exactly the same level of references found in the book now, but much more comprehensive, so I only need the one source for quick 'n' dirty query help. There were many SQL keywords and functions not found either here, or in The Complete SQL (not so complete, after all), making it difficult to move forward without looking elsewhere, like online using the search engine Copernicus.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Beginning E-Commerce with Visual Basic, ASP, SQL Server 7.0 and MTS
Publisher: Peer Information
Authors: Matthew Reynolds
Rating: 4/5
Title: Beginning E-Commerce with Visual Basic, ASP, SQL Server 7.0 and MTS
Publisher: Peer Information
Authors: Matthew Reynolds
Rating: 4/5
This is the first Wrox book I read and... I like it. Ok, admitted, hosting your own dll's is a problem but in general I like the book. It actually explores more topics than I expected.To comment on some of the other reviews stating this is not really a book for beginners I can only say, look at the cover. Didn't any of you see the black bar at the top where it states Programmer to Programmer?? To me this indicates some prior knowledge is required.
