IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP Advanced for the World Wide Web Visual QuickPro Guide
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Authors: Larry Ullman
Rating: 5/5
Title: PHP Advanced for the World Wide Web Visual QuickPro Guide
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Authors: Larry Ullman
Rating: 5/5
If you ever read a book from Peachpit Press, then you know what the wonderful Visual QuickPro Guides are like. PHP Advanced Visual QuickPro Guide uses pictures rather than lengthy explanations. You'll be learning the more advanced features of PHP no time!" Larry Ullman's book on PHP is a great place to start when you are looking to advance your skills.PHP is such a hot topic on the web now, that there are so many books out there on the subject, and so many of them make it more complicated then it really is. This book does a great job at teaching you the advanced use of PHP scripting. The author explains all the code that he has written, and goes through it in a language that anyone can understand.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: MCDBA SQL Server 7 Administration Study Guide (Book/CD-ROM Set)
Publisher: Mcgraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Syngress
Rating: 1/5
Title: MCDBA SQL Server 7 Administration Study Guide (Book/CD-ROM Set)
Publisher: Mcgraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Syngress
Rating: 1/5
As a certified SQL 6.5 and 7.0 instructor, I had purchased this book for use in my classroom by students looking for additional help. I was extremely disappointed in this book as it has old and incorrect info. For example, this book had the number of data page types wrong and the new size of stored procedures wrong ... I would NOT recommend this book! It was an obvious (bad) patch job from their earlier 6.5 study guide. I, personally, returned this book within a couple of days of purchase.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: MCSE Training Kit : Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Database Design and Implementation (Exam 70-229)
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: Microsoft Corporation
Rating: 1/5
Title: MCSE Training Kit : Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Database Design and Implementation (Exam 70-229)
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: Microsoft Corporation
Rating: 1/5
Aside from an occasional good definition, this book is an example of how not to write a technical book. The authors assume so much on the part of the reader that even this IT pro has difficulty following him. I am certified in 7 and I found this book quite incomprehensible. I am getting the Wrox series to see how good they are. I generelly find MS-Press books to be rather good but this one seems to be a copy of Books Online. In fact the authors skip over so much material casuaslly refering the reader to see "Books Online." If I wanted to do that, I wouldn't have gotten the book.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional SQL Server 2000 Data Warehousing with Analysis Services
Publisher: Peer Information Inc.
Authors: Chris Graves, Mark Scott, Mike Benkovich, Paul Turley, Robert Skoglund, Robin Dewson, Sakhr Youness, Denny Lee, Sam Ferguson, Tony Bain, Terrence Joubert
Rating: 1/5
Title: Professional SQL Server 2000 Data Warehousing with Analysis Services
Publisher: Peer Information Inc.
Authors: Chris Graves, Mark Scott, Mike Benkovich, Paul Turley, Robert Skoglund, Robin Dewson, Sakhr Youness, Denny Lee, Sam Ferguson, Tony Bain, Terrence Joubert
Rating: 1/5
Been a Wrox fan for some time. This is the worst book their team has produced. The material is cursory at best and totally theoretical. Very few practical examples. Never thought I would point to an MSPress Step-by-Step book, however it is far superior to this junk.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Rasmus Lerdorf
Rating: 2/5
Title: PHP Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Rasmus Lerdorf
Rating: 2/5
...if this is the best technical writing he can do, I understand why people complain of a lack of PHP documentation. This book is 90-some percent a list of PHP functions and their input and output types. However, it fails to give indication of what any function does, what the input means to the function, or what the output means to you. The rest of the book is a very basic PHP overview which states about twice a page that if you want any real information you need to visit the Web site. I can still see a use for this book, despite its utter lack of information: if you already use PHP and you know programming in general and you have a good idea of what kind of function you need but have no idea what it's named in PHP and don't want to spend hours on end trudging through the online manual, you can use the book to flip through function names 'til you find one that looks like it may be what you want, then search for that function online and see if it is.
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 own several of the author's other books, and this one carries on the fine "Guru's Guide" tradition quite well. As with his other books, the author doesn't bother getting into topics you can find information on in the product documentation or in other readily available books. Instead, the book covers the things those sources leave out, and it does so in spectacular detail with prose that is lucid and adroitly written. I have always enjoyed Ken Henderson's writing, and this book is no exception. I think I would enjoy reading through it even if the technical depth wasn't there. But, as it is, the technical information is there in abundance, as is a really distinct, enjoyable writing style.It strikes me that, in striving to avoid recovering what has already been covered over and over by other books, the author had a really difficult task with this book because he also had to avoid recovering what he himself has covered in other books. His previous book, The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL, is all most people would need to become proficient stored procedure coders, so it naturally begs the question: How do you improve on this? How do you keep from repeating yourself? What do you do for an encore to a very successful book on essentially the same subject? Well, rest easy: This book does all that and more. Beyond the nuances of the T-SQL language, this book covers stored procedure development from the standpoint of traditional software development. It talks about subjects typically associated with more formal software development: coding conventions, testing, refactoring, source code management and version control, design patterns, etc. All of these are crucial areas for development with other languages, so the implicit question asked by this book is: Why are they not also important to Transact-SQL stored procedure development? Ken Henderson opines that they should be, and spends the entire book making his case as only a true guru could.I own several of the other Guru's Guide books and was proud to add this one to my collection. There's nary a SQL Server or T-SQL problem I can't find an answer to in at least one of them.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Rasmus Lerdorf
Rating: 4/5
Title: PHP Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Rasmus Lerdorf
Rating: 4/5
Good quick reference, but could use a little more. It'd be nice if they had a quick example of each function and it'd be nice if they had a quick section on classes, but other than that its a useful and inexpensive book. And it is small enough to fit in your pocket. (Still, I'd probably rather have a reference card and you could fit almost as much info on one.)
Product: Book Paperback
Title: MySQL/PHP Database Applications
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Jay Greenspan, Brad Bulger
Rating: 2/5
Title: MySQL/PHP Database Applications
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Jay Greenspan, Brad Bulger
Rating: 2/5
Making the transition from flat HTML to PHP/Mysql, this COULD'VE been a great book. However, because of the numerous errors contained in the application scripts, none of them see to work out of the box, and it ends up being more confusing for the novice. I suppose it is good debugging training, but it's a rough way to learn! If anyone ever comes up with an "Errata" site or updated scripts, please let me know. The editor/proofreader should be out of a job. Meanwhile, I'm out $30!!
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: OCP Introduction to Oracle9i: SQL Exam Guide
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Jason Couchman
Rating: 3/5
Title: OCP Introduction to Oracle9i: SQL Exam Guide
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Jason Couchman
Rating: 3/5
I studied this book in detail. I passed the exam with 82%...
It gives good info, but I found several key errors.
Recommend looking at oracle docs and running examples in SQL Plus.A few questions on the test were not mentioned in the book (as far as I can tell), but overall it helped me pass.Also, reading the "Tips" is good, but some of the key points are burried in the text.I recommend it, but you need the corrections ... And augment with oracle server docs, especially on outer join topics.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional Oracle 8i Application Programming with Java, PL/SQL and XML
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Michael Awai, Matthew Bortniker, John Carnell, Kelly Cox, Daniel O'Connor, Mario Zucca, Sean Dillon, Thomas Kyte, Ann Horton, Frank Hubeny, Glenn E. Mitchell II, Kevin Mukhar, Gary Nicol, Guy Ruth Hammond
Rating: 5/5
Title: Professional Oracle 8i Application Programming with Java, PL/SQL and XML
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Michael Awai, Matthew Bortniker, John Carnell, Kelly Cox, Daniel O'Connor, Mario Zucca, Sean Dillon, Thomas Kyte, Ann Horton, Frank Hubeny, Glenn E. Mitchell II, Kevin Mukhar, Gary Nicol, Guy Ruth Hammond
Rating: 5/5
One of the best books around for database application developers working with Java/XML on the Oracle platform and who don't nowadays! The book is up-to-date with Oracle 8.1.7 and covers new aspect such as JDBC2.0 and the Java to native compiler (NCOMP). I give it five stars because it covers all important Java/XML aspects in great detail and because it already proved its worth by providing me with solutions for really tricky problems. The only neagtive thing I can think of is its size. But I guess the American authors probably got paid per line.
