IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: OCA/OCP: Introduction to Oracle9i SQL Study Guide
Publisher: Sybex
Authors: Chip Dawes, Biju Thomas, Chip Dawes, Biju Thomas
Rating: 5/5
Title: OCA/OCP: Introduction to Oracle9i SQL Study Guide
Publisher: Sybex
Authors: Chip Dawes, Biju Thomas, Chip Dawes, Biju Thomas
Rating: 5/5
The book is very comprehensive, and allowed me to breeze through the exam in 45 minutes. The questions in the exam is very similar. I definitely recommend this book for people who already have a working knowledge of SQL/ PLSQL. One problem I did have was the way in which the Sybex test questions are formatted: The little windows with the scrollbars make hugh chunks of code reallt hard to read. My suggestion is to use this as a study guide, but take the test at a prometric center, as they have a easier to use interface.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Brian Larson
Rating: 3/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Brian Larson
Rating: 3/5
SQL Server reporting services are a relatively new feature of SQL Server 2000, so I was quite excited to pick up a copy of this book. While this is a good beginning book for learning SQL and the basics of SQL Server reporting services, I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in both the presentation and depth of content this book provides. Again, this book provides some good explanation, however, the reader should be prepared for an introductory book, certainly not an advanced text.
The first section of the book provides a very good introduction to SQL and SQL Server. However, this is still very introductory information, and will only be useful for very beginning readers. In fact, the author doesn't begin discussing the books topic until page 161. Again, this introductory information is quite necessary to understand the rest of the text, I was just hoping for a more abbreviated version of the introductory material.
The rest of the book is actually much better and much more met my expectations. The author then proceeds to discuss how to generate reports. While much of the work involved in creating reports with SQL reporting services involves the use of a wizard, the author does a good job demonstrating how to expand reports beyond the default. The last section of the book goes through many of the more advanced options found in reporting services. There is a good discussion on exporting reports to different formats (including PDF, TIFF, and CSV). The final two chapters of the book are excellent, which discuss such advanced options as configuring subscriptions for reporting services and ASP.NET Code Access Security (CAS).
This is really a good book, it's just not as advanced as I was hoping for. While it's certainly a valuable resource for anyone working on SQL Server reporting services, it would have been preferable if the introductory content wasn't quite as extensive. In spite of this complaint, I would still recommend it.
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
This book has been my best resource for fine tuning my transact SQL code and optimizing code for top pereformance. This is a must have for all developers working with large databases that are concerned about speed.
Product: Book
Title: How to Use Google : The 30 Most Important Tips, Hacks and Tricks
Publisher:
Authors: Tod Sacerdoti
Rating: 5/5
Title: How to Use Google : The 30 Most Important Tips, Hacks and Tricks
Publisher:
Authors: Tod Sacerdoti
Rating: 5/5
This e-book is great for learning useful tips and tricks for Google. It has saved me tons of time searching. Anyone who uses Google regularly--anyone who needs information at their fingertips, really--will benefit from this book. And at 1.99 you simply cannot beat it.
Product: Book Textbook Binding
Title: McSe Training Guide: SQL Server 6.5 Design and Implementation (Training Guides (New Riders))
Publisher: New Riders Pub
Authors: David Besch, Sean Baird
Rating: 5/5
Title: McSe Training Guide: SQL Server 6.5 Design and Implementation (Training Guides (New Riders))
Publisher: New Riders Pub
Authors: David Besch, Sean Baird
Rating: 5/5
I believe that the level of the text is reasonably geared for the intended audience. (If you're an old SQL pro, you probably don't really need a book like this and if you're a complete novice, you're probably not ready to think about taking the exam) This series uses the framework of the published Microsoft Exam topics to arrange the material covered. Despite the constraint, this book does a rather decent job of actually teaching one to use SQL Server. The authors frequently reference outside material, often the online docs, for further study. There are extensive exercises and question sets at the end of each chapter, though the questions are not "exam sound alikes". In any case I would suggest that someone hitting SQL cold, would do well to first spend some time with MS Access to learn the fundamentals of Relational Data Base Design (Teach Yourself Access 97 in 14 Days from Sams might be a good choice). Follow up with this book, and then the SQL Server online docs.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL In A Nutshell, 2nd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Kevin Kline, Daniel Kline, Brand Hunt
Rating: 4/5
Title: SQL In A Nutshell, 2nd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Kevin Kline, Daniel Kline, Brand Hunt
Rating: 4/5
[A review of the 2nd edition, 2004.]
Perhaps the best virtue of this book is that it spans all the major variants of SQL - db2, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft's SQL Server. The authors are not beholden to any particular vendor. Thus the book describes the common ground. That is, the commands and usage that are most likely to be the same or similar across these implementations. Because a major use of this book might be in migrating. To this end, the more code you can have in this common area, the less painful the migration.
Another possible usage is if you are a DBA in charge of running 2 [or more] of these implementations. Perhaps due to some legacy issues, you have to support them. If you cannot merge SQL code into one common version, you can get problems. Being able to use this book to find quickly common commands and options to those commands might greatly help you maximise a common body of code.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL for Dummies
Publisher: For Dummies
Authors: Allen G. Taylor
Rating: 2/5
Title: SQL for Dummies
Publisher: For Dummies
Authors: Allen G. Taylor
Rating: 2/5
Poorly written, jumps back and force between the topics not yet explained
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: MCDBA SQL Server 7 Administration Study Guide (Book/CD-ROM Set)
Publisher: Mcgraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Syngress
Rating: 2/5
Title: MCDBA SQL Server 7 Administration Study Guide (Book/CD-ROM Set)
Publisher: Mcgraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Syngress
Rating: 2/5
If you have absolutely no knowledge of the rudiments of SQL Server 7.0, then buy this book. If you want to pass the test, look elsewhere. This book glosses over the exam objectives- certain key objectives are handled with single paragraphs!!!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional PHP4 Programming
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Deepak Thomas, Wankyu Choi, John Coggeshall, Ken Egervari, Martin Geisler, Zak Greant, Andrew Hill, Chris Hubbard, James Moore, Devon O'Dell, Jon Parise, Harish Rawat, Tarique Sani, Christopher Scollo, Chris Ullman, et al
Rating: 4/5
Title: Professional PHP4 Programming
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Deepak Thomas, Wankyu Choi, John Coggeshall, Ken Egervari, Martin Geisler, Zak Greant, Andrew Hill, Chris Hubbard, James Moore, Devon O'Dell, Jon Parise, Harish Rawat, Tarique Sani, Christopher Scollo, Chris Ullman, et al
Rating: 4/5
In simple words - a great book. If you are looking to dive into some serious developing with PHP, this book could definitely help you find a path. Pros:
- ammount of code as example
- in depth real world case studies
- the presentation of the book
- programmer to programmer approachCould have:
- more about XML and PHP but you could buy 'Professional PHP4 XML'.
- more about the PHP's multimedia capabilities but again the book 'Professional PHP4 Multimedia Programming' is present.I am not promoting Wrox Press but they did a great job on this PHP thing. I would expect them to present something with in depth coverage of PHP and Databases.
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
This is an excellent book as it covers a lot of ground in one volume. If you work in a organisation that has Oracle as the engine for their web based applications, you must have this book.
Many books cover Java or XML or SQL and the like; but this is one of the few books that delves into HOW to put all of these together to make it work! As this book is released in newer additions, I shall be buying it as soon as it is available.
