IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: MCDBA Administering SQL Server 2000 Study Guide (Exam 70-228)
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Joyjit Mukherjee
Rating: 5/5
Title: MCDBA Administering SQL Server 2000 Study Guide (Exam 70-228)
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Joyjit Mukherjee
Rating: 5/5
I used this book as a training/study guide, and passed exam 70-228. The topics are discussed logically and in a fair amount of detail. Real world situations are provided, procedure demonsrations providing actual screen shots, exam watch tips, and certification objectives. The two-minute drills at the end of each chapter are a good review, a help reinforce the material to memory.The CD contains practice exams with full explanations which are useful for exam preparation. There are also review sessions, which are just the 'two-minute' drills from the book provided in a 'flash-card' format. The full text is also on the CD for easy electronic searching.I would suggest the following for passing exam 70-228 (I am an MCSE, and 1 test away from MCDBA):
1.) Use this book to train and learn the content. Also Microsoft MOC or other MCT Training.
2.) Use ExamCram notes, "Cramsession.com", or "ExamNotes.net" study guides to review and commit the needed details to memory.
3.) Use "Transcender", the included "ExamSim" on the CD, or any other practice exams to learn the material and familiarize with MS exam format.Unfortunately the Syngress book for exam 70-229 SQL 2000 Design is not yet released, so I had to buy the Sybex MCSE SQL 2000 Design Study Guide.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Code Centric: T-SQL Programming with Stored Procedures and Triggers
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Garth Wells
Rating: 1/5
Title: Code Centric: T-SQL Programming with Stored Procedures and Triggers
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Garth Wells
Rating: 1/5
This book is an easy book to read and the examples help to clarify what Garth states in his book. Not only does he provide you with examples he also provides with you code that will cause error messages and then explains why. Even though I have bought numerous books on T-SQL this is by far one of the best and after reading it I will keep it handy as a reference. Great book Garth, thanks for writing it!!!!
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000(TM) Performance Tuning Technical Reference
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: Edward Whalen, Marcilina Garcia
Rating: 1/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000(TM) Performance Tuning Technical Reference
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: Edward Whalen, Marcilina Garcia
Rating: 1/5
I bought this book on the basis of the glowing recommendations here. As I have a number of servers to tune which execute some extremely complex SQL, and I need to be able to look inside with Perfmon and the profiler, I thought this book would be very useful. I particularly wanted help with sysmon.
This book gave me virtually nothing. Its coverage of tuning was shallow, information was repeated unnecessarily, text was copied almost verbatim from BOL, and it provided little or nothing that couldn't be found elsewhere and easily.
It tries to cover everything at the cost of giving real value. For example it provides 15 pages on data warehousing of which 12 are a description of data warehousing so cursory that if you don't know the subject you'll only be confused, and 3 pages on actual tuning which basically say that you should find out whether the bottleneck is CPU/disk/memory then add more CPU/disk/memory respectively.
Sizing and capacity planning are introduced with seven equations without justification. Okay, but completions C is given as the number of transactions that were completed during the observation period, but on the facing page C = 96 seconds [sic]. Did anyone proof-read this? With these and numerous other oddities (trunc. log on chkpt on SQL2000?) I don't know what I can trust.
The mathematics for this section is done and finished in 6 pages.
I was particularly looking for a comprehensive description of sysmon counters. Other than a quick rundown of the obvious ones there's a long list in the appendix of others, including such gems as "lock blocks allocated: the total number of allocated lock blocks". The whole point of buying this book was to find out how to use them, or indeed what they mean (Skipped Ghosted Records/Sec - means what?); merely giving me a list of them is redundant. This was the biggest letdown for me - I need this info!
There are other important omissions. I have spent literally weeks identifying and working round failures in the query plan optimiser. This serious issue is not properly addressed except for a chapter introducing query hints. A taxonomy of optimiser failures and ways of tackling each type might save others from the headaches I've had. Optimiser hints do not always suffice.
The book is rated on the back for user levels IT Implementer and Corporate Developer. That is far too generous.
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: 3/5
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: 3/5
I sat down with this book as I tried to bring myself up to speed on working with database design and operation. After reading the "companion" Database Design for Mere Mortals, I tackled SQL Queries for Mere Mortals. While some of the beginning was redundant, it popped me into buiding SQL queries with a ton of examples and hands on exercises. Slowly building your knowledge and allowing you to see how the pieces can stand alone or interlock in the syntax, you are given more and more specific examples to help understand the concept. Is it exhaustive? No. Is it a quick reference? Not really. What it is though is a good reference piece when I'm trying to remember how do write sytnax for a specific query, showing me a real life example, instead of a list of just possible uses. Many references simply give you the generic terms built into one example statement like "Outer Join Table1, Table2 on Field1 [Order by]...." Instead, this book shows you using databases you are introduced to so you see the syntax in action. Since I don't use SQL every day, it's nice to go here to jump start my brain after some time also. A great book for someone getting into database queries, or who works with them occasionally and needs a guide.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Rational Guide to: SQL Server Reporting Services (Rational Guides)
Publisher: Rational Press
Authors: Anthony T. Mann
Rating: 5/5
Title: The Rational Guide to: SQL Server Reporting Services (Rational Guides)
Publisher: Rational Press
Authors: Anthony T. Mann
Rating: 5/5
This is a good and concise book. Author is very focus on it's topic
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional SQL Server 7.0 Programming
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Rob Vieira
Rating: 4/5
Title: Professional SQL Server 7.0 Programming
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Rob Vieira
Rating: 4/5
This is absolutely the best SQL Server 7.0 development book on the market. I had done a reasonable amount of SQL Server 6.x development in the past, but then spent almost two years working on other things. When a client asked me to do a 7.0 project I went rushing out for a book to get me back up to speed. I bought this one based on the previous reviews and it was some of the best money I've ever spent on a programming book.Robert is obviously a professional SQL Server programmer who clearly understands exactly what's important and what's not. He's also an excellent writer, which makes the book a very enjoyable read. This book is not for beginners or academics, but for working programmers. Robert wastes no time on unnecessary introductory-level material or obscure technical details that you're unlikely to ever need. He gets right to the point and stays there.I'd usually indicate which parts of a book I thought were particularly noteworthy, but after flipping back through the chapters I have to say this book is just uniformly excellent. My only complaint, which unfortunately applies to almost every programming book I've bought over the past few years, is that the book contained numerous minor typographical errors. This was a failure on the part of the editors, however, and none of the typos interfered with the technical quality of the material.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Database Implementation Training Kit (Training Kit)
Publisher: Microsoft Press Rating: 2/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Database Implementation Training Kit (Training Kit)
Publisher: Microsoft Press Rating: 2/5
Overall, this kit is not a good value for the money. The strong suit of the book is the information it contains on indexing and the DBCC SHOWCONTIG statement in particular. But this information could be easily gotten from SQL Server Books Online. Throughout, the editing is poor with lots of typos and formatting errors. Plus the exercises and sample batch files and scripts will not execute properly if your SQL Server configuration differs even slightly from the book (like you don't install to the C drive). A much better book is Inside SQL Server 7.0 by Delaney and Soukup. In that book the writing is many times better, it's well edited, and it also comes with the same 120 day evaluation version of SQL Server 7.0. There isn't the same degree of hand-holding, but if you have any experience with SQL Server you'll appreciate the thourough and professional treatment of the topic, and you'll learn at least as much to apply towards the test.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Google Hacks
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest
Rating: 5/5
Title: Google Hacks
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest
Rating: 5/5
[A review of the 2ND EDITION.]
That was quick! The authors have just released this edition. So what is new? Gmail, above all. An entire chapter is devoted to this phenomenon. The obvious attraction is the 1 Gb quota. Though the authors omit mention, when Google announced Gmail, it triggered a response from the large ISPs, Yahoo and hotmail. Within several months, they increased their quotas. Yahoo went from 4 Mb to 250 Mb, and hotmail went from 2 Mb to 250 Mb. While the book rightfully talks about the virtues of Gmail, this response may have been the best thing about Gmail, if you are a user on those other ISPs, even if you never joined Gmail.
As for Gmail itself, it has excellent search capabilities. Big surprise, eh? Plus, the custom addressing is a nifty feature. So if you are jane@gmail, you can make arbitrary addresses like jane+test@gmail, jane+hobby+swim@gmail. All these resolve down to jane@gmail. Simple to implement, and possibly quite useful if you avail yourself of it. I'm surprised more ISPs haven't followed suit.
And you should [must?] look at hack 78. It turns that 1 Gb account into a linux file system, via a Python freeware called GmailFS. Bloody ingenious! It has implementations of the most common linux commands (mv, ls, ln, cp...) to make you feel at home.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Web Programming in Python: Techniques for Integrating Linux, Apache and MySQL
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Authors: George K. Thiruvathukal, Thomas W. Christopher, John P. Shafaee
Rating: 5/5
Title: Web Programming in Python: Techniques for Integrating Linux, Apache and MySQL
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Authors: George K. Thiruvathukal, Thomas W. Christopher, John P. Shafaee
Rating: 5/5
I don't know of any better book for those who need a quick start on serious applications using the Linux platform. It was written from the trenches, by experts in the subject who are not afraid of getting their hands dirty. The authors demonstrate a deep understanding of the details and have managed to keep a practical perspective. I haven't tested the code examples (bugs?), but the framework is extremely easy to use and very clever. I wish more books on Business Management and new technologies were written like this...
Product: Book Textbook Binding
Title: McSe Testprep: SQL Server 6.5 Design & Implementation (Testperp Series)
Publisher: New Riders Publishing
Authors: Rob Scrimger
Rating: 2/5
Title: McSe Testprep: SQL Server 6.5 Design & Implementation (Testperp Series)
Publisher: New Riders Publishing
Authors: Rob Scrimger
Rating: 2/5
Luckily, I'm an experienced SQL Server DBA and Developer. I'm only four chapters into the book, and already found plenty of errors in the answer section after each practice exercise. If you are new to this arena, then stay away from this book. The publisher should spent more time on QA of the content before its release. I'll never buy another "TestPrep" from New Riders again.
