IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle PL/SQL Programming, Third Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Steven Feuerstein
Rating: 5/5
Title: Oracle PL/SQL Programming, Third Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Steven Feuerstein
Rating: 5/5
I have the second edition of this book. It is a very good book if you are learning PL/SQL. It can also be used as a reference book (mine is certainly full of page flags), but the book's text is narrative in nature. If you know any 3rd generation language (e.g. long live COBOL!) you will find this book very easy reading.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle 9i Java Programming: Solutions for Developers Using PL/SQL and Java
Publisher: Peer Information
Authors: Bjarki Holm, John Carnell, Tomas Stubbs, Poornachandra Sarang, Kevin Mukhar, Sant Singh, Jaeda Goodman, Ben Marcotte, Mauricio Naranjo, Anand Raj, Mark Piermanini
Rating: 1/5
Title: Oracle 9i Java Programming: Solutions for Developers Using PL/SQL and Java
Publisher: Peer Information
Authors: Bjarki Holm, John Carnell, Tomas Stubbs, Poornachandra Sarang, Kevin Mukhar, Sant Singh, Jaeda Goodman, Ben Marcotte, Mauricio Naranjo, Anand Raj, Mark Piermanini
Rating: 1/5
This book is a great guide to writing Oracle Java stored procedures. Of course, it has its cons and pros. On the bad side, there are the obvious differences in writing style and flavour of the different chapters (although not to the level of irritation), which is probably a result of so many authors. Although I had some experience with Java, JDBC and SQLJ before, I really liked many of the chapters dealing with the fundamentals, especially the Exception chapter. I found much of the Oracle-Java specific material very useful, such as the chapters on Java and SQL performance, on using Java and PL/SQL together, and more. All in all, this book is packed with useful examples and practical solutions to real-life issues (mostly scalability and performance related), which made it very useful and pleasent to read.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL/400 Developer's Guide
Publisher: 29th Street Press
Authors: Paul Conte, Mike Cravitz
Rating: 5/5
Title: SQL/400 Developer's Guide
Publisher: 29th Street Press
Authors: Paul Conte, Mike Cravitz
Rating: 5/5
This book is about perfect for a programmer who knows AS/400 DDS but needs to move to SQL. It starts with the basics, and every SQL explanation is tied back to the "native" DB2/400 file system. This made it a lot easier for me to pick up SQL very quickly. The other big help is that the authors provide a lot of comments and examples on good SQL coding techniques. With my AS/400 background, I was able to move through the fundamentals very quickly and now feel like I can actually use SQL in some of my company's future applications.There are quite a number of topics beyong SQL, too. My favorite is a very cool "soft-coding" technique that uses some recent RPG IV features to simplify writing trigger programs. There is also very detailed information on security, which is a big topic in my company.I would not hesitate to recommend this book to any AS/400 programmer.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Dreamweaver MX: PHP Web Development
Publisher: Peer Information
Authors: Bruno Mairlot, Gareth Downes-Powell, Tim Green
Rating: 1/5
Title: Dreamweaver MX: PHP Web Development
Publisher: Peer Information
Authors: Bruno Mairlot, Gareth Downes-Powell, Tim Green
Rating: 1/5
The book seamed perfect to help me learn PHP and MYSQL using DWMX. Too bad it's so full of errors and mistakes. Remeber trying to learn how to drive a car. Now imagine trying to learn on a car that stalls and breaks down constantly. That's what the book feels like to me. I find myself trouble shooting all the code and that is pretty hard when you are just learning.
There is no CD but you can download SOME of the code. Having a final (working) version of the site would have made all the errors stand out a bit more.
I am learnig from it, it's just a bit frustrating and slow.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP and MySQL Web Development
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Luke Welling, Laura Thomson
Rating: 5/5
Title: PHP and MySQL Web Development
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Luke Welling, Laura Thomson
Rating: 5/5
When I ordered this book (for work, but soon I'll have my own J) I didn't know what to expect, but I must say that I'm impressed.I feel that it is a mix between "PHP Developers cookbook" and "Professional PHP Programming". On top of that you get a basic introduction to the general programming theories. That alone is very positive!! Many other books give you just a simple example or two and you have to put that in to a greater context yourself.My hat off for this great book.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Programming Unleashed
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Dave Martin, John Papa, Marc Israel
Rating: 4/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Programming Unleashed
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Dave Martin, John Papa, Marc Israel
Rating: 4/5
Having written an entire data warehousing system in db_lib I thought I'd like to call attention to this book's very good introduction to db_lib. The sample application builds a bulk loader that requires NO, I repeat, NO disk storage. This is possible because Sybase put in a special sub-set of db_lib that implements a bulk-load API, and Microsoft got that in the bargain too. Using these techniques I have been loading 91 million rows to 38 tables in 5 hours on a old Compaq Proliant 4000. The total memory requirement for my loader, which is MetaData driven and so is doing a ton of other stuff too, is 4MB. It occured to me that somebody out there might really find this chapter a god-sent so I decided to add this footnote to my previous review. If you're doing SQL programming and you don't have this book you're working WAY too hard. Good luck!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 3/5
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 3/5
The thing that blew me away about this book is how well written it is. Henderson has a way of explaining the most difficult concepts is prose that is nitpickingly detailed, yet friendly and readable. The explanation and examples of tsql functions that do statististical calculations was marvelous. Absolutely excellent. The same is true of the rest of the book. It's definitely head and shoulders about the other tsql books out there, especially the one I got last week by Moreau and co. which I am considering returning.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP and MySQL Web Development
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Luke Welling, Laura Thomson
Rating: 4/5
Title: PHP and MySQL Web Development
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Luke Welling, Laura Thomson
Rating: 4/5
Yes, the book helped me with my first few contracts in PHP and MySQL, but what it didn't provide me with were good coding techniques. I've learned so much since from other books and developers, and looking back on this book and the code they provide as examples... well, I can't believe that people actually paid me for that early work.
------- what I wrote about it before
I owe my last 3 contracts to this book. It's that simple. I picked it up after setting up my BSD development platform and I was ready to go. If you're not a programmer, don't worry. The first 150 pgs are dedicated to you. It teaches you the basics of strings, variables, functions... everything. Even if you're a programming whiz, it's also good to have a refresher from time to time... hell, it corrected a few of my bad practices.
It walks you through the installation process of mysql and php on both *nix and windows systems in the appendix, and learning mysql from command line was simple after reading this book. For the more advanced people, you ever built your own shopping cart from scratch? Well, you will about 1/3 of the way through the book. It also provides insightful reading about security, best practices, etc. that are well written and necessary if you are to take what you learn in this book seriously.
I highly recommend it.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle PL/SQL Language Pocket Reference, 3rd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Chip Dawes, Steven Feuerstein, Bill Pribyl
Rating: 4/5
Title: Oracle PL/SQL Language Pocket Reference, 3rd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Chip Dawes, Steven Feuerstein, Bill Pribyl
Rating: 4/5
An index would make this pocket reference 5 stars. The TOC - (Table of Contents) is helpful but an Index would be better in addition to the TOC.Gio
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP and MySQL Web Development, Second Edition
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Luke Welling, Laura Thomson
Rating: 5/5
Title: PHP and MySQL Web Development, Second Edition
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Luke Welling, Laura Thomson
Rating: 5/5
Recently, I had to extend a popular PHP-based application, so I embarked on a quest to learn PHP as fast as I could to become productive. While there are plenty of easy to follow tutorials on the Net, as well as an extremely high-quality PHP manual, I decided to go the book route. After browsing the bookshelf with dozens of PHP books (ranging from such reputable houses as Prentice Hall and Addison-Wesley down to the toxic waste of "for dummies, complete idiots in 24 hours" series), I ended up with the book above. It seemed to provide a coverage broad enough without subjecting me to the slow torture of starting up from the very basics.There is a lot to like about this book:
- It covers both core PHP as well as a nice set of add-on modules. After you have read the book, you will hardly need anything beyond the PHP library reference to start producing full-featured apps (no, the book will not turn you into great programmer).
- Unlike a lot of books in this fast-paced world, it is not a book on PHP 3 that was hastily re-branded for PHP 4 by adding a bunch of footnotes describing changes. This is a book about PHP 4 and it describes and uses PHP 4 features.
- The example projects are realistic enough in size and usefullness yet not overwhelming. I liked a lot the discussion on website roll-out and maintenance - something most of the books on web programming omit. This section will beinvaluable for those who start using PHP for home projects.As usual, the book is not perfect. There is not much to complain and the issues are not too bad (other books are worse).
- There is very little space devoted to serious issues like PHP and MySQL security - about 3 pages all in all. MySQL optimization and performance analysis get same treatment. Yes, both subjects are quite broad and each of them requires a book on its own. Still, providing checklists and useful tips on both subjects would help raising awareness of the issues, especially for people who don't have any background in web server or database configuration.
- While the book has a lot of information on authentication, it is still unclear after reading it, how one would use basic authentication from PHP. The only half-page example is far from obvious and ther is not much commentary on it.
- When checking for existance of a presumably unique record in a database, authors consistently check whether the number of rows returned is bigger than zero. This is not what I call defensive programming - if they expect the record to be unique, they should check that it is unique indeed.These tiny issues notwithstanding, I consider it the best "not for Dummies" book on the subject. Not only that, this book immediately fell into the category of the books that I keep, so it now proudly stands on my shelf. Great job, Luke and Laura!
