IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Unleashed (Unleashed)
Publisher: Sams Pub
Authors: David Solomon, Ray Rankins, David S. Solomon, Jeff Steinmetz
Rating: 5/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Unleashed (Unleashed)
Publisher: Sams Pub
Authors: David Solomon, Ray Rankins, David S. Solomon, Jeff Steinmetz
Rating: 5/5
I read the others Inside SQL Server , SQL Server DBA Survial Guide, Inside SQL Server; but this is heads above the rest. The detailed low level analysis of walking data pages, distribution stats, Query showplan breakdown and Query analysis with trace flags, is awesome ! I only hope that the authors do a true upgrade for SQL 7. (Some of the other books are only paying lip service to the new features and changes in SQL 7.) Easily the best Advanced SQL 6.5 book out there.
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
This book/cd/ and access to an optional website combine to create an excellent resource that anyone dealing with Reporting Services needs to read.
The book is not a rehash of the documentation provided by Microsoft. It is a terrific top to bottom explanation of:
- how to install Reporting Services
- how to manage Reporting Services
- How to develop for reporting Services
- How to get Reporting Services to do things it doesnt do out of the box.
The attendant CD gives instructions, and a live demo, on how to setup and use SSL on your development web servers. In fact the CD has loads of walkthroughs, some with voice, that provide all kinds of information you need to know to properly configure SQL Reporting Services.
When SQL 2005 comes out I will buy the book these two write.
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
Excellent book, explains all the necessary to develop a good site. It contains very good examples to understand everything about PHP and MySQL. Definitively, my best purchase in PHP and MySQL.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Cristian Darie, Mihai Bucica
Rating: 5/5
Title: Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Cristian Darie, Mihai Bucica
Rating: 5/5
Cristian Darie has done it again. The last book I had authored by him was Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 E-Commerce. It was a book which guided me from the introduction of three-tier programming all the way to the creation of a full-blown, feature packed e-commerce website using Microsoft's ASP.NET Technologies.
This book, Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce was written with the similar concept in mind.
Very often, programmers are faced with situation where once the web application is fully developed, modifying or extending it in the near future is nothing but a nightmare! The solution? Three-Tier architecture! They are the presentation tier, business tier and the data tier. In this book, Christian Darie and his co-author Mihai Bucica, first introduces the reader into the world of three-tier architecture programming.
From there, the reader is given preliminary information such as the various technologies available for dynamic page creation and the different tools which the reader would expect to use during the course of the book such as PHP for dynamic web page generation and MySQL as the database management system.
One fundamental aspect of the book which I found rather interesting was the way the authors blended the different tools and programming language used to develop the e-commerce website with the context of the three-tier architecture as mentioned earlier.
The presentation tier here was presented with the a mix of both HTML and PHP. Instead of the confusing spaghetti code style where PHP coding is seen interleaved with HTML coding, Bucica and Darie introduced the idea of using Smarty Templates which is similar to Microsoft's ASP.NET code-behind concept where the programming language is separated from the HTML code to improve code management and readability.
The online store's business logic is then coded in PHP classes which represents the business tier of the architecture.
Then comes the third tier, also known as the data tier where the store's data management resides. This tier is represented by MySQL. However in an effort to provide a systematic way in managing SQL coding, the authors followed the idea of using Stored Procedures which, at the time of writing was not a feature available with MySQL. As such, a plugin name PEAR DB was introduced to help facilitate the usage of stored procedures.
With such clear cut separation between HTML, PHP coding, business logic PHP classes, MySQL for data management and PEAR DB to manage SQL Queries (stored procedures) , managing, upgrading and maintaining the application from a coding perspective is simply a breeze.
When it comes to learning, there is nothing like practical, hands-on work and this is where this book excels in. After introducing readers to the concept of the three-tier architecture, readers are then brought through a step-by-step creation of a fictional online e-commerce store called the TShirtShop which comes complete with a shopping cart, web based administration system for the online store all the way to receiving online payments through various channels such PayPal and credit cards.
If these may scare you, fear not, the authors present coding in a clear, easy to understand manner with suggestion of best coding practices, code manageability alongside with self-explaining comments within each snippet of code.
Another advantage when using this book is the different stages in which the authors introduce various features to compliment to the site. After completing the first few chapters (chapters 1 through 9), you have a complete site which comes with shopping cart functionality, catalogue search and ability in receiving orders. Other functionalities which were also covered in the book such as implementing credit card transactions, customer product reviews, product recommendations and integration to various web services such as that of Amazon.com can be implemented on a needed basis.
As such, if you have preliminary knowledge on the PHP programming language and would like to have a feature packed e-commerce solution on an open source platform, this is certainly one of the best books I would recommend to anyone venturing into the world of e-commerce.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Google for Dummies
Publisher: For Dummies
Authors: Brad Hill
Rating: 5/5
Title: Google for Dummies
Publisher: For Dummies
Authors: Brad Hill
Rating: 5/5
Buy this book for your aging parents rather than trying to teach them how to search the Internet. Saved me from so much frustration, I would have paid twice the price. I only wish I'd thought of this before I tried in the first place. I'll never have to research my mother's vacations or mutual funds for her online again.Plus, I consider myself a power searcher, and I even learned quite a bit I didn't know from this book.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Programming PHP
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Rasmus Lerdorf, Kevin Tatroe
Rating: 2/5
Title: Programming PHP
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Rasmus Lerdorf, Kevin Tatroe
Rating: 2/5
There isn't really enough of any one thing here to meet my needs. Generally O'Reilly are good at big lists of stuff (often the kind of stuff you can find in the man pages); with usually fairly terse definitions of what they actually are, alongside. Now, I'm all for aphorisms if they save on paper, but this book manages to have large gaps in its coverage, while still retaining that somewhat abrupt approach to what actually IS covered.I suppose I was particularly disappointed when I found that the example used to describe the array_filter function in Chapter 5 was almost exactly the same as is to be found on the Zend website! I say "almost", because that's exactly what it is - the book's example has been subjected to a somewhat half-hearted attempt at customisation, in my opinion, to try and make it look different from Zend's version. What is actually achieved in both cases is almost identical!Now, it has long been known that O'Reilly books often offer much the same information as can be found elsewhere (except at the expense of a few trees) - but what is the point, may I ask, of going to the trouble of making a few cursory modifications to an example, if you're not actually going to make the example DO anything different? Is it just me?I suppose it was just that I really wanted a different example of how to use that one function. However there are other functions related to array_filter which aren't even described in this text at all, and this is indicative of the content as a whole: big gaps in the information, interspersed with brief moments of Perl-like conciseness. Maybe a book of PHP function definitions is what I neeed, but what I don't need is this perfunctory Jack-of-all-Trades.Ironically, this publisher ha an excellent record for producing original and informative content ON-LINE (for which I am often grateful), but the same does not seem to hold for much of their printed material. How they make any money, I don't know!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Server DTS
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Jim Samuelson, M. Santos, S. Miller, S. Hughes, B. Sullivan
Rating: 2/5
Title: SQL Server DTS
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Jim Samuelson, M. Santos, S. Miller, S. Hughes, B. Sullivan
Rating: 2/5
Catherine is right. I tried to work through Chapter 2 which was touted as buildig a "simple" package. The package was simple but I spent hours on it trying to follow poorly laid out directions and missing parts. Chapter 2 needs a redo so that one heads into the rest of the book with confidence in the authors.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Resource Kit (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Corporation
Rating: 3/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Resource Kit (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Corporation
Rating: 3/5
The information in this book is useful only to those who are clueless of SQL. Most of the insights are rudimentary and its "best practices" are common sense to most experienced SQL DBAs. If you are an experienced SQL DBA, I would recommend this book for only two reasons:1)You want to obtain some stored procedures as a DBA utility. If you are already a good T-SQL programmer, this will bring you limited value.2)You want to have a good understanding of SQL Clustering and Log shipping. The book does better job than most in describing both SQL clustering and Log shipping. But the explanation is very general and more architectural than explaining how to implement and manage one.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional Linux Programming
Publisher: Peer Information Inc.
Authors: Neil Matthew and Richard Stones, Brad Clements, Andrew Froggatt, David J. Goodger, Ivan Griffin, Jeff Licquia, Ronald van Loon, Harish Rawat, Udaya Ranawake, Marius Sundbakken, Deepak Thomas, Stephen J. Turnbull, David Woodhouse, Richard Stones, Christopher Browne
Rating: 4/5
Title: Professional Linux Programming
Publisher: Peer Information Inc.
Authors: Neil Matthew and Richard Stones, Brad Clements, Andrew Froggatt, David J. Goodger, Ivan Griffin, Jeff Licquia, Ronald van Loon, Harish Rawat, Udaya Ranawake, Marius Sundbakken, Deepak Thomas, Stephen J. Turnbull, David Woodhouse, Richard Stones, Christopher Browne
Rating: 4/5
This book is a solid followup to their first edition. What I like about it is its breadth. It covers several topics (CVS, PHP, XML, CORBA, MySQL/Postgresql ) that would often have a whole book devoted to them. This book targets the developer who just needs a concise primer on the given topics, and doesn't have the time to read 1000 pages of fluff on every topic in the book.I only gave it four stars, because I felt that "Beginning Linux Programming" was more essential than this book. However, this is a very strong book and some of the topics here are not covered elsewhere ( for example, ORBit ). And there's certainly no other book that covers *all* the topics this book covers.Get this, but get "Beginning Linux Programming" first.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP Developer's Cookbook (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Sterling Hughes, Andrei Zmievski
Rating: 5/5
Title: PHP Developer's Cookbook (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Sterling Hughes, Andrei Zmievski
Rating: 5/5
Good for the intermediate programmer. This book is *not* a HOWTO or an introductory text. Instead the book lists common problems broken down by functionality and provides solutions and explanations to the problems. If you can't find a solution in there, it certainly provides an excellent place to look. I've always found the 'Cook Book' type programming books an excellent source of inspiration, and this book is no exception.
