IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
Title: The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
I showed this to my students and it scared the s**t out of them. An extremely counter-productive experience!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle9i PL/SQL Programming
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Scott Urman
Rating: 4/5
Title: Oracle9i PL/SQL Programming
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Scott Urman
Rating: 4/5
I have several books by Urman. I have both 8i PL/SQL Programming books by Urman, as well as the 2001 edition of the 9i PL/SQL Programming book. The 8i edition of this book is is 978 pages. The 2001 edition of the 9i book is 631. The 9i book has much less content than the 8i book even though more features have been added to Oracle 9i. There is also a large "Advanced" 8i PL/SQL Programming book because the basic book is just not big enough at 978 pages! My conclusion is that while you MUST own this book, the 9i book does not adequately cover PL/SQL programming. Too much is left to the reader to puzzle-out on his own using other books and resources like Metalink or on-line documents. Why the book shrunk since 8i is a real mystery . . .
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 4/5
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 4/5
Just finished reading "Guru's Guide". There is not much I can add to all the other reviews: it is an outstanding book, and I am sure I will reach for it again and again when the real-life problems come up. I have less than 1 year SQL Server experience, so it was somewhat hard for me to read, but hey, this is called learning process (as the title implies, read something more introductory if you are a complete newbie). The only downside is that author allowed his political inclinations to show up in a couple of places in the book, hence 4 stars. Other than that, do yourself a favor and buy it!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Optimizing SQL Server 7: Planning and Building a High-Performance Database (Prentice Hall Series on Microsoft Technologies)
Publisher: Prentice Hall Ptr
Authors: Jeffrey R. Garbus, Robert D. Schneider
Rating: 1/5
Title: Optimizing SQL Server 7: Planning and Building a High-Performance Database (Prentice Hall Series on Microsoft Technologies)
Publisher: Prentice Hall Ptr
Authors: Jeffrey R. Garbus, Robert D. Schneider
Rating: 1/5
This book blatantly lies about what is in SQL 7. It's somewhat accurate about 6.5, but who cares? I would have given this 0 stars if I could.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP Advanced for the World Wide Web Visual QuickPro Guide
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Authors: Larry Ullman
Rating: 4/5
Title: PHP Advanced for the World Wide Web Visual QuickPro Guide
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Authors: Larry Ullman
Rating: 4/5
This book has been quite useful in helping me to wrap my head around OOP. Like one of the earlier reviewers, I was initially suspicious of this series, as it has carried some lightweight books in the past, with loads of annoying, useless pictures of dialog boxes.While some of those are still there, and still annoying, the layout of the series has been refined since I first looked at it. I was swayed by a comparison of this book and O'Reilley's offering. For one thing, it was cheaper.But more importantly, it's more balanced, more approachable, and less boring. The design of the Html template classes are indeed a bit odd, but I presume Ullman designed them primarily as a teaching tool, not for a real site, and they do make his points clearly. After all, there is plenty of open source code on the web to emulate or build on -- the important thing is grasping the concepts. I think this book will help there.One thing that I consider a serious drawback is that the entire book is littered with ugly table layouts. My eyes crossed from sifting through seas of <tr>'s and <td>'s. A book on web design should have up to date design, and table layouts are not are
straight out of the 90s.If only someone would come out with a book on PHP/MySql that used decent CSS, now that would be something I'd pay to read.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: Kalen Delaney
Rating: 5/5
Title: Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: Kalen Delaney
Rating: 5/5
If you want to be a SQL Server DBA, there are really only three resources you need in order to gain a solid foundation of knowledge. Your first resource is Books Online, which is part of the SQL Server software. Next, read Ken England's book on Performance Optimization (ISBN 1-55558-241-9). When you finish those, read this book.What I like about this book is that the author explains WHY SQL Server does things in a particular way. The book goes into great detail about SQL Server's architecture and internal processes. For this reason, the book is a great ally to have when you're working with a developer who doesn't understand database concepts. Yet, at the same time, it is easy to read.This book is especially ideal for those who need to get a thorough understanding of transactions, locking and performance tuning.When you're ready to become an expert in SQL Server, read this book.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Php Fast & Easy Web Development (Fast & Easy Web Development)
Publisher: Premier Press
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 3/5
Title: Php Fast & Easy Web Development (Fast & Easy Web Development)
Publisher: Premier Press
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 3/5
This was a rather short book. 472 pages but the fonts and diagrams were huge. I read it in three days. What this book covered was the basics of PHP, good for any beginners wanting to learn PHP with no prior programming experience (With the exception of HTML). There was no case assigments or anything in this book to test your knoweldge of PHP. There were a few, not many, but a few typo errors in some of the source code in the book, which may confuse a beginner if they are just starting out. This book covered the basics and *only* the basics of PHP web development. However, this book has a very good constructed reference of PHP functions and MySQL.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Queries for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Data Manipulation in SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Michael J. Hernandez, John L. Viescas
Rating: 5/5
Title: SQL Queries for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Data Manipulation in SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Michael J. Hernandez, John L. Viescas
Rating: 5/5
This books is about to change my life. Call me dumb, but after buying 3 other books, I was still at loss how to just sit down and find the things I was looking for in the database. This is the book that opened my eyes. If you're a beginner, start with this book and you'll save yourself money, time, and your boss asking every 5 minutes, why are you taking so long???
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2000 with XML, Second Edition
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: Graeme Malcolm
Rating: 5/5
Title: Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2000 with XML, Second Edition
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: Graeme Malcolm
Rating: 5/5
I never expected so much useful information into such a small book. Good books don't sell by weight or page count.
I found this book concise and clear (this man knows how to teach). It sure doesn't explain everything about the subject, but it gives the big picture, with an impressive number of details too.
Ideal to start working in small time.
NOTE about who is this book for:
As title state, this book teaches how to use the XML features of SQL Server 2000, not how to use SQL2000, so if you don't know SQL Server you better read something else first.
From the XML XSL XPath X... side, this book is also for novices as it has a very good appendix that teaches all you need to understand the book.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle SQL Tuning & CBO Internals
Publisher: Rampant Techpress
Authors: Kimberly Floss
Rating: 1/5
Title: Oracle SQL Tuning & CBO Internals
Publisher: Rampant Techpress
Authors: Kimberly Floss
Rating: 1/5
First, I'm not one of the contributors to this book unlike others here who of course rated it highly, putting their interests first. Amazon, you should do a better job of checking someone's role before you let the rating get skewed by unscrupulous contributors.
Second, I did my PhD in this area and teach graduate school in database theory. So I was excited to read the description.
Unfortunately, the other reviewers are accurate: this covers multiple versions which are not interchangeable; has errors; covers nothing not available on the Oracle website; uses many different authors. I found it very misleading that the publisher let a compilation of mostly old articles pass as a new text with this title. Of course Rampant also says that books in this series are for professionals who know the concepts and it keeps its books at 200 pages or less to be concise. When I last checked the number of people who really knew optimizer internals was very small. Oh, and this declaration was on page 341. I guess Rampant needs more editing expertise.
Bottom line don't waste your money. Don't contribute to the hacks using this as marketing for their consulting efforts.
