IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Learning Oracle PL/SQL
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Bill Pribyl
Rating: 5/5
Title: Learning Oracle PL/SQL
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Bill Pribyl
Rating: 5/5
Listen Software Solutions: PL/SQL introduces a new dimension of power programming capability for the developer. The goal of reusable code measurely improves quality verse vast amounts of non-reusable SQL. PL/SQL packages describe function and procedure specification and body. The specification describes the package interface to the calling application. The package specification approach is part of good design. The package specification exposes procedures and their parameter properties to external applications. Each specification has a package body. Within the package body various data structures, such as arrays and tables can be referenced, functions called, and procedures executed. Developers new to PL/SQL often understand insert, update, and delete data manipulations; but are confused about selection. This is because they don't know about cursors. I recommend this book. As a developer having knowledge resource information is critical.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Advanced Oracle PL/SQL Programming with Packages (Nutshell Handbook)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Steven Feuerstein
Rating: 3/5
Title: Advanced Oracle PL/SQL Programming with Packages (Nutshell Handbook)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Steven Feuerstein
Rating: 3/5
The book is structured around a set of packages called PL/Vision. Eighty percent of the book is devoted to describing how to use PL/Vision and what it can do. PL/Vision is a useful set of tools; the P package in particular will be useful to any developer, though most will have already written something similar (though maybe not so fancy) for themselves. P is a packaged version of the dbms_output routines, and allows formatted output, debug output and other similar facilities.However, the book is not really a reference for Oracle packages. Most of what you need as a reference can be found in Feuerstein's "Oracle PL/SQL Programming", which I recommend. This book is more to give you an idea of what you can do with packages. I found it interesting, but I rarely refer to it--the other Feuerstein book is so comprehensive it covers almost all my questions.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, 2nd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Hugh E. Williams
Rating: 5/5
Title: Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, 2nd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Hugh E. Williams
Rating: 5/5
Arguably, this is the best introductory PHP + MySQL book around. The material is very readable and well organized, making the book an excellent foundation for additional detailed study. My only peeve is that some of the code samples are sloppy. For instance, Example.9-9.php does not run because $databaseName is not specified. Maybe it was the authors'intent to have the debugging effort provide part of the learning experience. Overall, though, it's a great buy.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 3/5
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 3/5
Considering the five starts each of the previous reviewers gave this book, I was more than a bit disappointed with it's lack of guru-like information - espeically with regards to multi-database scenarios. With the exception of a small blurb on database context on the top of page 94, he gives no examples or help on ways of working with multi-database scenarios. Surely this guru doesn't expect in the real world that people don't have to work with multiple databases, does he? Fortunately, I had a copy of "teach yourself Transact-SQL in 21 days" (1997 copyright date) which explained how to do this. Quite frankly, I haven't found anything in this book that I haven't already seen in the other Transact-SQL books that I own. It's still a descent reference manual, just not at the level I was expecting.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Server 7 Developer's Guide
Publisher: Osborne Publishing
Authors: Michael Otey, Paul Conte
Rating: 3/5
Title: SQL Server 7 Developer's Guide
Publisher: Osborne Publishing
Authors: Michael Otey, Paul Conte
Rating: 3/5
If you only want one book on the subject of developing for SQL Server 7.0, this book is it. What separates this book from others is its ability to successfully transition from a 50,000' overview to the ground level where the job is done. The process of landing high level concepts occurs through resolving timeless issues that confront every professional developer, regardless of the platform. This book takes on the fundamentals of SQL, provides insight on database design techniques and then explains the mechanics of how to link an application with SQL Server. Although there are books available on each of these subjects, the authors present the information with the right blend of brevity & thoroughness.SQL Server 7.0 has many new features. The authors do a complete job of explaining what the new features are. They have provided insights and tips you need to know when it is time to set up and administrate the database. The book also nicely covers replication, a subject given one page in Soukup's "Inside SQL Server," and ignored in Vaughn's "Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Basic and SQL Server."I found this book clearly written and concise, although it is almost one thousand pages. Code samples provided on the CD actually work. This is not a comment on the authors - similar books have burned me too many times whose CDs do not support the text. Like the rest of the book, the code is clear, and insightful. I look forward to future books by these authors.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Unleashed, Second Edition (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Sakhr Youness
Rating: 4/5
Title: SQL Unleashed, Second Edition (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Sakhr Youness
Rating: 4/5
SQL Unleashed has quickly become one of more well-worned reference titles in my library. As a beginner in SQL just a few months past, it quickly brought me up to speed on the essentials. Now with a little experience behind me, I find still a vast amount of yet untapped information waiting for me to discover. Thanks Hans for the time invested in this book.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: OCP Introduction to Oracle9i: SQL Exam Guide
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Jason Couchman
Rating: 4/5
Title: OCP Introduction to Oracle9i: SQL Exam Guide
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Jason Couchman
Rating: 4/5
Overall I thought this was a very good book. There were some typos, and an error or two on the sample test CD that was included, but many typos (errors in book questions) are corrected on the exampilot website "exam guide fixes" page. As someone with some SQL and Oracle experience I was able to pass the actual exam by just studying from this book, but there were a few questions on the exam that were not covered in this book so I recommend supplementing with a basic SQL book (I like "The Practical SQL Handbook" by Bowman, Emerson, Darnovsky), and a basic Oracle DBA book like "The Oracle9i DBA Handbook" by Loney and Theriault.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP Cookbook
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: David Sklar, Adam Trachtenberg
Rating: 3/5
Title: PHP Cookbook
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: David Sklar, Adam Trachtenberg
Rating: 3/5
I ordered a copy of the "PHP Cookbook ORA", along with a copy of the "Professional PHP 4 web Development Solutions WROX". Upon reading both these books, i thought i should offer a honest review comparing the two:Both the books were informative in their own right o The ORA book had small snippets of code based solutions (very similar to the PHP Developers cookbook from Sterling and Andrei) that are very useful for programmers who are confounded with small to medium coding problems. However, there was nothing enterprising about the coverage, that one could not achieve from using a combination of the online docs + mailing lists. Another downside was that i could not find full solutions that i could re-use in my projects.On the Other hand, i found o The WROX book offered complete solutions to real world problems - a Simple/advanced CMS (the core of which you can plug into your site), a simple search engine, a classified ads board, and lots of cool creative case study solutions that i could extend to use in my hobby sites. The content was very enterprising and all of the solutions presented are the most popular one's amongst web developers these days. More interesting is that these solutions can be completely re-used and extended into your projects. However, the downside of this book is that you would need to have prior PHP knowledge either picked up from WROX' Professional PHP 4 (as is mentioned as a pre-requisite in the book) or from the Programming PHP ORA, or any another competent professional PHP programming books in the market.So the bottomline is:oCare for an appetiser - Pick up the ORA book.
oCare for a full meal - Pick up the Wrox book.I am posting this same review for both the books (so customers can benefit from it). However, i have ranked the Wrox book, a notch above this one, simply because i wanted a burp:-)
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional SQL Server 2000 DTS (Data Transformation Services)
Publisher: Wrox
Authors: Mark Chaffin, Brian Knight, Todd Robinson
Rating: 3/5
Title: Professional SQL Server 2000 DTS (Data Transformation Services)
Publisher: Wrox
Authors: Mark Chaffin, Brian Knight, Todd Robinson
Rating: 3/5
You'd think an 880-page tome from Wrox on something as specialised as DTS would pretty much have you covered anytime you need a reliable DTS reference to get you through your Data Transformation tasks. I have found myself looking to this book for guidance on many occasions during development, only to be consistently disappointed. For a start, the Index is downright useless, since I was never able to find words I would expected to, such as delimiter, lineage, disconnected edit, parameterised query, identity insert, but it has an entry for DNS?? (which, btw refers to a 3-line explanation of URLs when using Internet Explorer!) The book is so large mainly because every other page is a GUI snapshot, most of which are unnecessary. I don't need a whole page dedicated to the "Syntax check was successful" message box. I give it 3 stars because they do a good job of at least mentioning probably every concept that relates to DTS, but coverage is mostly shallow and out of focus. There does seem to be heavy emphasis on data warehousing, which I haven't used so far, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt regarding coverage there. Overall I still think I might find something good when I need a reference but so far I have mostly found SQL Books Online equally, or sometimes more useful.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL: The Complete Reference, Second Edition
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: James R Groff, Paul N. Weinberg
Rating: 1/5
Title: SQL: The Complete Reference, Second Edition
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: James R Groff, Paul N. Weinberg
Rating: 1/5
Covers a lot of topics but only at the most basic level. I was particularly interested in complex DML statements such as updating one section of a Table based on data contained in the latest entries. I got more information from the Transact-SQL help screens from Microsoft. I suppose this would be a useful introduction for someone who new absolutely nothing about the topic, but as a professional reference it was a waste of money.
