IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
I have just about every SQL Server book out there. This one is my favorite. It is not a long book but it is more concentrated than probably any technical book I own. If you get this book not only will you learn about Transact-SQL you will also learn a lot about SQL Server in general. And you will learn how a master teacher teaches. I read this through when I first got it, then read it again. It seems like everytime I pick it up I learn something new. That alone makes it my favorite and I think it will be yours to.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Mastering Oracle SQL, 2nd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Sanjay Mishra, Alan Beaulieu
Rating: 2/5
Title: Mastering Oracle SQL, 2nd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Sanjay Mishra, Alan Beaulieu
Rating: 2/5
Half of this 450 page book surveys basic SQL, and the other half is on features Oracle added to SQL in versions 9i and especially 10g. The book seems to have been intentionally "crippled" to limit it to the category of introductory overview, because much of what you need to know to work with Oracle SQL is simply not there:
* Most technical books begin the discussion of each new operation with a syntax diagram. Not this one! All you get here is a code example or two that supports the text.
* There is little discussion of built-in functions beyond the date/time ones.
* The index is very skimpy. It doesn't even contain all the Oracle reserved words that are used in the text. For example, has the use of the SIBLINGS keyword slipped your mind? Don't expect any help looking it up again! Heck, there aren't even entries for DUAL, COMMIT and ROLLBACK, or COUNT() !
* There isn't a single word about materialized views, which is something you will need to know about in the real world.
* There is nothing about triggers.
* There is no discussion of the various Oracle clients available (Toad, SQL*Plus, SQL Navigator, etc)
Ironically, since the book wants to cover all the new extended functionality, some very basic information is included only as it pertains to an advanced topic. For example:
* DDL is generally ignored. This leaves you clueless about the regular CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW (for example) statements that you will encounter and use daily as an Oracle developer. But there's lots of DDL in the sections on classes and objects, hierarchical queries, collections -- stuff that you'll use infrequently if at all.
* There is nothing about performance. Yes, a full discussion of tuning is beyond the scope of an introductory text, but jeez they don't even discuss indexes, except in the section on partitioning!
* There is nothing about relational integrity (or constraints of any kind) except in the section on hierarchical queries.
It's clear O'Reilly wants you to buy this expensive but slim volume as part of a set, probably with another book to provide the rest of the information about SQL; a "nutshell" book to cover syntax and options; a guide to Toad or some other client; a DBA book for basic information about DDL and indexes; a performance/tuning book; and a PL-SQL book.
Another area of major weakness might not bother a reader who is completely new to relational databases. But if you are coming to Oracle from DB2 or SQL Server, this book is not much help. Oracle SQL is only superficially similar to ANSI SQL. Unfortunately, this bookmakes no mention of the things Oracle leaves out. Two big issues for me, were that Oracle won't let you write an outer join that uses both join-conditions and where-conditions; and Oracle has no simple way to insert into one table from a join with another table. I wasted several days in anguished de-bugging of SQL logic that I "knew" worked in all DBMSs -- NOT! (Now I know why Oracle code so often consists of a mess of layers and layers of inline views).
There are other, less-major problems with this book that I might as well pile on:
* There is too much explanation of how things used to be done in 8i. Hello, that version is five years old! If any shop is still running 8i, they have lots of dusty manuals laying around. 8i shouldn't take up more than a paragraph or two in a book that purports to cover 9i and 10g.
* The author's coding style is idiosyncratic, in my opinion. Is it too much to ask that elements at the same logical level be indented to the same number of places??
To sum up, this book is like a series of magazine articles describing *what* can be done with Oracle SQL. But it doesn't do a good job of telling you *how* to do it.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP Developer's Cookbook (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Sterling Hughes, Andrei Zmievski
Rating: 2/5
Title: PHP Developer's Cookbook (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Sterling Hughes, Andrei Zmievski
Rating: 2/5
Bought this book hoping it would be similar to the Perl cookbook - as another reviewer commented, there are "gaps" in the content. Every time I needed a solution to a particular problem in Perl, I found the answer in the Perl cookbook. Every time I needed a similar solution in PHP, I found myself using [their wedsite] because the PHP Cookbook made no mention of the problem.Hopefully there are better PHP books out there - I think I'll stick to [the website] for now and get free, detailed help from the PHP community.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle Web Applications: Pl/Sql Developer's Introduction
Publisher:
Authors: Andrew Odewahn
Rating: 4/5
Title: Oracle Web Applications: Pl/Sql Developer's Introduction
Publisher:
Authors: Andrew Odewahn
Rating: 4/5
Reviewer Jay missed the point. The book is clearly for beginners and does a good job of informing them. In this field there are varying levels of expertise so the book buyer should keep that in mind when purchasing a book. I for one found the book to be informative and worthwhile for my particular level of expertise
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Advanced Oracle PL/SQL Programming with Packages (Nutshell Handbook)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Steven Feuerstein
Rating: 5/5
Title: Advanced Oracle PL/SQL Programming with Packages (Nutshell Handbook)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Steven Feuerstein
Rating: 5/5
The author has followed a very clear and thorough line of thinking in preparing his packages. It would do any programmer well to follow his lead.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: A Guide to SQL, Seventh Edition
Publisher: Course Technology
Authors: Philip J. Pratt
Rating: 2/5
Title: A Guide to SQL, Seventh Edition
Publisher: Course Technology
Authors: Philip J. Pratt
Rating: 2/5
Sketchy at best. Gives some good examples but does not cover all of the SQL language. Jumps around a lot. Definitely not worth the 30+ dollars.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: DB2 SQL Procedural Language for Linux, Unix and Windows
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Authors: Paul Yip, Drew Bradstock, Hana Curtis, Michael Gao, Zamil Janmohamed, Clara Liu, Fraser McArthur
Rating: 5/5
Title: DB2 SQL Procedural Language for Linux, Unix and Windows
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Authors: Paul Yip, Drew Bradstock, Hana Curtis, Michael Gao, Zamil Janmohamed, Clara Liu, Fraser McArthur
Rating: 5/5
This comprehensive yet concise introduction to DB2's SQL procedural language is the first and best place to find guidance on this crucial topic. Stored procedures are fast becoming the mainstay of successful client/server and Web-based DB2 applications, and this book WILL teach you how to develop them, even if all you currently know is just a bit of SQL.Written by DB2 experts from the IBM Toronto Labs, this is one of those rare texts that actually imparts expertise. It is eminently readable and crystal clear in its explanations of concepts and their application.Any and every developer of DB2 stored procedures should read -- and enjoy -- this book
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: The SQL Programmer's Reference: Windows 95/Nt & Unix
Publisher: Ventana Communications Group
Authors: Wayne S. Freeze
Rating: 1/5
Title: The SQL Programmer's Reference: Windows 95/Nt & Unix
Publisher: Ventana Communications Group
Authors: Wayne S. Freeze
Rating: 1/5
I couldn't even find a single reference to join, one of the key concepts in SQL. I returned it in a matter of hours, and I'd like those hours back.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: XML and PHP
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Vikram Vaswani
Rating: 5/5
Title: XML and PHP
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Vikram Vaswani
Rating: 5/5
XML is technology that has been around for several years now. PHP has been capable of dealing with XML for different purposes. Oddly, before this book there was little or no books at all specifically about developing with XML in PHP.After reading the book you can realize why there were not really many books filling this void. It is that it is not really easy to write a good PHP book on XML because you need to know so much about both things to write such a valuable book as this. Congratulations for Vikram for having done it first and so well.....While many publishers insist on hiding the information to access book the authors, certainly these forums are good example of how you can get further value from a book beyhond the hundreds of pages of printed paper that you paid for.
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 bought this book about 2 months ago. The book is well organized and it follows the sequence of objectives of oracle 9i sql exam. It is very easy to read and in a very good format. Even though it didn't cover everything for all new 9i features, it is a good study guide.However, as a study guide the contents are supposed to be very accurate and precise. I found many mistakes on this book and on the exercises. Sometimes I felt I had to do further research to clear things up.
