IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP 5 for Dummies
Publisher: For Dummies
Authors: Janet Valade
Rating: 5/5
Title: PHP 5 for Dummies
Publisher: For Dummies
Authors: Janet Valade
Rating: 5/5
I like the Dummies books.OK, so I'm not sophisticated, professional, or even very smart. But so many computer books seem to forget the first twenty pages that explain just what the hell you are trying to do. Perhaps the Dummies books take 40 pages to explain what could have been donw in 20, but that's not a problem. I can read fast.It has often happened that I first read a Dummies book and then once I'm deep into doing something with that language I need to go get a more complete Bible type book. I haven't gotten far enough into PHP yet to know if this is true, but in moving a web site over to Unix (BSD), Postgre, Apache, and PHP; I don't have the time to read a Bible on each one of these. This book, along with some other Dummies books is getting me started a lot faster than I thought possible.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Google for Dummies
Publisher: For Dummies
Authors: Brad Hill
Rating: 3/5
Title: Google for Dummies
Publisher: For Dummies
Authors: Brad Hill
Rating: 3/5
First, let me say, that I did enjoy the first half of the book. I learned several things. The best part of the book was learning about the answer feature of google that I knew existed but never ventured into it because of the fee-based feature. If anything, he said to check how the researcher use google to answer people questions.Good information! And several key word operators were helpful. So,as a reference to check into once in awhile is not bad.But at 22 dollars I will explain why I was disappointed.
Mr. Hill spends way to much time on silly, worthless topics that are indirectly related to google. For God sake, he talks about a site that called elgooG that emulated google but everything is reverse.Why would I want to know that and how will that help me find information on google?
After the first half, I was ready to dig into it and waiting for some concrete examples of doing research with google.
In part 3, Putting google to work for you, I thought this is it. But rather then give numerous example how you can use google (using the main features )to get what you want, he talks about downloading google toolbar, or changing the language interface, duh! Anyone that has use google for than 1 month knows all that.
The book misses an oportunity to show how an expert researcher will use google to acquire information. Rather than spend time on stupid google games, alternatives to google,google site that mirrors google in reverse, I wish more time would have been spend on google and how to do kick ass research using one example and going through all the features and operators.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Troubleshooting SQL
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Authors: Forrest, Ph.D. Houlette
Rating: 3/5
Title: Troubleshooting SQL
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Authors: Forrest, Ph.D. Houlette
Rating: 3/5
This book is about developing the skills to debug SQL. I particularly like the chapter
on best practices and the chapter on trees. Best practices talk about the things that
one should follow when doing SQL. I guess this would be particularly useful for people
developing "standard procedures" company-wide.The other chapter on Trees talks about implementing tree-like structure in databases. It
covers quite thoroughly on this topic and also zoomed in on various database-specific commands
like "connect by"(Oracle).Overall, this book is a good book on SQL, with chapters that cover normalization, choosing
datatypes and create,delete, insert ... and aggregate commands. The only thing I dislike
is that the author seems to be more well-verse in SQL Server and the examples are rather
SQL Server specific. :(
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
I do not even want to count how many hundreds of dollars I have spent on PHP development books that were awful. Acres of code but if you are like me, and want practical applications of that code to truely understand it.The first paragraph states that this book is not that laundry list of code and then proceeds (IN PLAIN ENGLISH!) to explain some basics of code and then practical application of that code. What a breath of fresh air this book is.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP Black Book
Publisher: Coriolis Group Books
Authors: Peter Moulding
Rating: 5/5
Title: PHP Black Book
Publisher: Coriolis Group Books
Authors: Peter Moulding
Rating: 5/5
i read this book , i read this book again and i read this book thrice . except for a few things there is nothing that helped me . Most of the examples are poor to follow and many of them do not work .the only thing that can be learnt from the book is that there's nobody else in the world who can program better than Peter Moulding . Peter Moulding is a guru , he has learnt 50 websites , 25 years of experience , lots of languages etc. etc. etc. and other people who make websites are foolish but call themselves 'experts' .I am not writing this because of frustration but thats how the book really is
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 4/5
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 4/5
I'm a developer with some SQL experience who was new to Sybase ASE when I picked up this book. I found it very helpful and well written. I refer to this book every day, and it hass improved my programming skills. This was the only book I could find that covered T-SQL for Sybase at all. Without it, I would have a hard time doing my job. However, I have found a few inaccuracies and code that will not work (check out ANSI-style joins and DEFAULT inside a CREATE TABLE to see what I mean). This is why this otherwise excellent book only rates 4 stars.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: Microsoft SQL Server(TM) 7.0 Performance Tuning Technical Reference
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: Jamie A. Reding, Steve Adrien DeLuca, Edward Whalen, Marcilina Garcia
Rating: 5/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server(TM) 7.0 Performance Tuning Technical Reference
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: Jamie A. Reding, Steve Adrien DeLuca, Edward Whalen, Marcilina Garcia
Rating: 5/5
I have been tuning SQL Server databases for some time, and have not seen such a good reference short of the Inside SQL Server series originated by Ron Soukup.I strongly recomend this book for everyone creating or maintaining an enterprise database.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Core PHP Programming, Third Edition
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Authors: Leon Atkinson, Zeev Suraski
Rating: 1/5
Title: Core PHP Programming, Third Edition
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Authors: Leon Atkinson, Zeev Suraski
Rating: 1/5
This is a fantastic book if you already know PHP. If you're like me -- transitioning from ASP to PHP -- this book is completely, utterly, worthless.In order to understand the programming syntax, you must already be familiar with C. The book does a poor job of acclimating you to it's backwards, excessively abbreviated method of coding.The vast majority of functions and methods described in the book have absolutely NO CODE EXAMPLES whatsoever. Many functions get exactly one small paragraph of description, without any detail of input, output or expected return data. A great example is the $_REQUEST pregen variable. How do you use it? Don't rely on this book to figure it out. There's NO DOCUMENTATION. What if you want to know how to connect to a MySQL server that isn't your "localhost"? This book doesn't even touch the syntax of mysql_connect. All of the examples in the book use "localhost" over and over again. Apparently, the good people at PHP don't think that you would ever ever in a million years connect to a MySQL server that isn't on your local system. Oops.Furthermore, the Index is also worthless. Referring to the previous example, let's say you wanted to find what little information there is on the $_REQUEST pregen variable. If you look under "R", you won't find it. If you look under "$", you still won't find it. Somehow, you must magically know to look under "pregenerated variables" in order to find the index entry for $_REQUEST. That's great if you already knew that you were looking for something that was classified as a pregen variable. But, if you didn't know that tidbit of information, then this book left you high & dry.This book makes great leaps of abstraction. They explain a small amount of syntax, and expect you to re-apply that syntax haphazardly when you write your code. Here is a brief allegory of their style of explanation, so you understand what we're talking about:1. The universe is made from sub-atomic particles.
2. Sub-atomic particles make atoms.
3. From this, we can understand how Man creates skyscrapers.That's how this insipid book reads from cover to cover.The second half of this book ignores the concept of "reference manual" completely, and dives into program theory. It's a great computer science 101 refresher course on sorting algoriths and program structure, and even coding styles!To sum up, if you already know PHP and you enjoy a trip through abstracted fantasy land, buy this book. On the other hand, if you exist in reality and you want to learn how to write PHP code, skip this useless paperweight.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 4/5
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 4/5
I can't recommend this text to engouh T-SQL programmers (or dabblers). The content and layout make this one of my favorite SQL references. The clear descriptions of syntax make this one of the first (actual physical text) places I go when I need an explanation or some examples to refresh my memory. I feel that its an important part of any SQL reference library and I'm looking forward to a new edition in the near future.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache in 24 Hours
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 3/5
Title: Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache in 24 Hours
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 3/5
I have been a mainframe programmer for 13 years and have done web design for the past year. The following is my experience with this book.First the good news:
1. I was able to successfully install PHP, Apache & MySQL.
2. I was able to successfully complete all the projects in the book.
3. I published one of my projects on a website.Now the bad news:1. There were critical typos in the book--not just captions under the wrong pictures but incorrect code. I spent many hours debugging the PHP code for the projects. The code errors I found were not in the errata on the SAMS website OR on thickbook.com. I sent one code correction to the editors and received an acknowledgement, but I just checked and the code typo is not included in the errata. There are code errors on pp. 245, 406, 417. E-mail me if you are also having problems with the code on those pages as the SAMS people do not seem to be concerned or aware of these errors. 2. The installation of the products did not go as smoothly as I hoped either. The instructions on what to download did not match how the websites now look. There was some missing information. I was able to get it all working only with a lot of trial and error.This book contained projects that I was interested in learning: address book, storefront, shopping cart. With a little more diligence on the part of the proofreaders and technical editors, this book would have been great and I would have given it 5 stars.
