IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Tuning
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Dan Tow
Rating: 5/5
Title: SQL Tuning
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Dan Tow
Rating: 5/5
Disclaimer: I am the CTO of youDevise Ltd., a firm that distributes a product of the author's former employer, TenFold Corporation. I worked with him on performance tuning projects several years ago during his employment there.I have been running high-volume performance tuning projects for the past four years, using both SQL Server and Oracle. Our products generate their SQL, so we cannot edit it; nevertheless, our job is to make that SQL run faster, normally with hints, indexes, and parameter changes. I have observed Dan apply the method he describes in the book to help us resolve our performance problems, and it really does work as quickly and effectively as other reviewers describe. My teams and I have also tried tuning SQL ourselves, and _that_ is as difficult and ineffective as you might expect - on more than one occasion we've had to resort to hacks like denormalisation. The difference really is a few minutes versus several days.After reading the book, I finally understand what Dan was doing that let him tune our SQL so effectively. The method is highly algorithmic - you follow a series of fairly simple steps to draw a graph and out pops a near-optimal query plan. Dan also describes how to influence your database to use the query plan you found with his method. My team and I haven't had the chance to apply Dan's method yet, but it's very simple and I'm confident we will be able to do so. I plan to make the book required reading for the team before our next project.My only complaint about the book - and it's quite a minor one - is that it doesn't cover open-source alternatives like mySQL or PostgreSQL. Applying the method to these alternative databases would be fairly simple, but coverage of the basics like identifying the query plan or influencing the optimiser would be nice to have under one cover.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: MCSD: SQL Server 6.5 Database Design Study Guide
Publisher: Sybex Inc
Authors: Kevin Hough
Rating: 1/5
Title: MCSD: SQL Server 6.5 Database Design Study Guide
Publisher: Sybex Inc
Authors: Kevin Hough
Rating: 1/5
There are far too many technical errors in the text and many of the answers to the questions both in the book & in the supplied test exams are wrong. The exam engine supplied is bug-ridden and the questions are far too easy to provide proper preparation for the MCSD exams. Many of important topics are skimmed over for example Stored Procedures take up less than 10 pages. This book appeaers to have been rushed into publication without the technical checking & editting that I expect from a publisher such as Sybex. Save your money - it's a major disappointment.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP MySQL Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Chris Lea, Mike Buzzard, Dilip Thomas, Jessey White-Cinis
Rating: 1/5
Title: PHP MySQL Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Chris Lea, Mike Buzzard, Dilip Thomas, Jessey White-Cinis
Rating: 1/5
I know all of the other reviews are glowing, but I was actully disappointed by this book. While it is very thorough, I found the structure of the book to be haphazard and unintuitive. There are a lot of occurances of "but first, lets go back a bit," a sure sign of poor writing. While trying to keep to the problem-design-solution framework, the authors often introduced ideas in the problem phase, but never clearly addressed them in the design and solution phase -- often vaguely tying it all together with a statement like "and we took care of this problem as well" without really referencing it.There is a great deal of information in this book, but I found it very difficult to extract coherently. And saying "but its not for beginners" is no excuse for poor writing.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle PL/SQL 101
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Christopher Allen
Rating: 5/5
Title: Oracle PL/SQL 101
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Christopher Allen
Rating: 5/5
Coming from a non-technical background, I have often been intimidated and frustrated at the book choices available to "newbies" to this field. But out of the myriad of books I've tried, this by far the most well-written and straightforward I've encountered. Technical acuman and communication skills do not often go hand in hand, but Christopher Allen appears to have mastered both.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: Inside Microsoft SQL Server 7.0
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: Ron Soukup, Kalen Delaney
Rating: 5/5
Title: Inside Microsoft SQL Server 7.0
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Authors: Ron Soukup, Kalen Delaney
Rating: 5/5
Trying to get your mind around OLAP Server? Guess we'll have to wait for an OLAP book. MDX? Not even in the index! Will DTS suffice for your ETL problems? No help here. English Query? Nope. These are classified as tools that ship with SQL Server, and when they are mentioned, the reader is pointed towards Books Online.The book appears to be a straight revision of the 6.5 edition - you might get by with that edition and the documentation that ships with SQL Server 7.0. I'd give it five stars for describing the core product in detail - its stated mission - but leaving out the new toys???
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 1/5
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 1/5
Book is lack in coverage of 7.0. Only one chapter on it, while the rest of book emphasises older versions. Where is SELECT TOP? Where are meta functions? Many things change with new release -- book should show that.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP for the World Wide Web : Visual QuickStart Guide (2nd Edition) (Visual Quickstart Guides)
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Authors: Larry Ullman
Rating: 5/5
Title: PHP for the World Wide Web : Visual QuickStart Guide (2nd Edition) (Visual Quickstart Guides)
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Authors: Larry Ullman
Rating: 5/5
I've gone through several php books, but this one is easy for the beginner php'er and not so technical user. The examples were easy to follow and definitely worth while, unlike some other books that include examples that you would never use in a real life situation. I probably would not recommend this book for someone who has some background in php, since the contents covered within this book are very basic. But for a beginner like myself, it has helped immensely
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: 5/5
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: 5/5
I have read many books on PHP, but this one had a lot of professional PHP knowledge to impart.Also helped me brush up my PHP knowledge.Keep these books coming.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Beginning Php 4 (Programmer to Programmer)
Publisher: Peer Information
Authors: Chris Lea, Allan Kent, Ganesh Prasad, Chris Ullman
Rating: 5/5
Title: Beginning Php 4 (Programmer to Programmer)
Publisher: Peer Information
Authors: Chris Lea, Allan Kent, Ganesh Prasad, Chris Ullman
Rating: 5/5
Well, they promised it. They said HTML was enough, and it is. The only programming I ever did was on the C-64, in basic, but I never really got beyond the '10 PRINT "hello world", 20 GOTO 10'- level. This book takes you step for step all the way through to a basic understanding of php. It has good examples, and solid explanation afterwards.The book also has good indices, so it will be very easy to use it to look something up again later. Two thumbs up!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Authors: Joe Celko
Rating: 5/5
Title: Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Authors: Joe Celko
Rating: 5/5
This is a new edition which expands the programming tips from the first edition and removes the theoretical content (theory is now covered in DATA & DATABASES).
