IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book
Title: Making Use of PHP
Publisher:
Authors: Ashok Appu
Rating: 5/5
Title: Making Use of PHP
Publisher:
Authors: Ashok Appu
Rating: 5/5
This book is sinply great for beginners who want to begin programming with PHP. The concepts are dealt with utmost care so as to impart the programming basics in the best possible way. The best part of the book is the unique methodology that it uses to deliver technical content. A real-life problem statement is included in the beginning of each chapter and aa solution is given at the end of the chapter. The code snippets in each chapter with output help the reader understand each concept properly.This book is indeed a great buy for beginners! I really was able to build a strong base for PHP after reading this book.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Secure PHP Development: Building 50 Practical Applications
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Mohammed J. Kabir, Mohammed J. Kabir
Rating: 1/5
Title: Secure PHP Development: Building 50 Practical Applications
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Mohammed J. Kabir, Mohammed J. Kabir
Rating: 1/5
I have a few issues to raise regarding the quality of this book and the supporting source code.Firstly, the book is littered with errors, typos, and poor grammar. It appears as though it was rushed into publication without any real editorial and technical review. Now this is nothing new in the world of IT books, but it is always disappointing. And there is not even an errata list on the wiley site or the evoknow site.Secondly, the source code does not run out of the box. This is normally ok if you are given clear instructions as to setting up and configuring, but alas there is no such information. Of course there have been source code updates (which are completely different file structure to the original on the cd, rendering the cd essentially useless) which indicates again that the publication was rushed without proper scrutiny and testing. Loading the code tree under "demo" and browsing to your web server accordingly immediately comes up with errors when loading the index.php home page. Not a good sign, I mean come on, is that the way to start us off? And how exactly has the source code itself changed? How can one know whether what is being read will match the supplied source code???Thirdly, you have made it clear your source code has not been tested on a Windows environment. I find this a major oversight as a large proportion of PHP development is done on Windows, even if it ends up running on *nix servers. There are also no setup instructions for Windows, only Linux. This is a seriously flawed presumption in my mind.I am hoping things get better with this book once I am able to set up and run the applications properly, and see the theory in the book (which is useful in the majority of cases) in practice. However, after paying ... here in Australia, I am left with a sour taste, and will think twice before buying a Wiley or Kabir publication again.Another thing that gets my goat is the boldfaced use of Internet Explorer, MS Access, MS Excel for presenting the screen dumps and what looks like MS Visio for the system diagrams. It just seems hypocritcal that this would occur, for at the same time not providing install instructions and unsupported and untested code for the Windows platform. I dunno about anyone else, but it just doesn't sit well with me. Part IV is totally useless to anyone not using Linux, and Red Hat 8 at that. Not only has this book marginalised Windows users, but reduced its usefulness to one flavour of Linux.This could have been a good book. It aims high, but falls terribly short. The framework might come of some use, but a lot of hacking about just to get something out of this disaster may prove less than worthy of my time and effort. Reading the source code from the book itself is just too painful. Poorly formatted, lots of repetition, and basically every line of the complete application code is printed. Whatever happened to highlighting important code as necessary to avoid redundancy? The problem with this kinda thing is that its difficult to write less but say more, and the bulk of this book shows just how much effort was avoided.It is a shame, because a book this ambitious is needed for PHP, but it really only provides a model of what NOT to do. I am out of pocket, disappointed, and will try to recover something (if not my dignity) on Ebay.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: MCSE Database Design on SQL Server 7 Exam Prep (Exam: 70-029)
Publisher: Coriolis Group Books
Authors: Brad Schulz, Greg Woody, Jose Amado-Blanco, Pam Barker, Christopher Leonard, Christopher A. Leonard, Pamela Barker
Rating: 3/5
Title: MCSE Database Design on SQL Server 7 Exam Prep (Exam: 70-029)
Publisher: Coriolis Group Books
Authors: Brad Schulz, Greg Woody, Jose Amado-Blanco, Pam Barker, Christopher Leonard, Christopher A. Leonard, Pamela Barker
Rating: 3/5
I found the book to be a very good one. It covers all the material that you need -theoretical stuff and the real world stuff. It gave me a very good way to learn every topic. Unfortunately the CD that came with the book wasn't as good. The CD stores the answers for the questions at the end of each chapter in the book. In some cases that wrong answers were given (for example - Null is the same as empty string, OLTP databases should be heavily indexed etc'). I ended up studying with the book and left the CD (In the book I didn't find those mistakes). I hope that they have another edition with a CD that is as good as the book.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP Essentials
Publisher: Muska & Lipman/Premier-Trade
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 1/5
Title: PHP Essentials
Publisher: Muska & Lipman/Premier-Trade
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 1/5
This book isn't written like a novel. It's not made to make you laugh, cry, or write art forms for programs. This is one of the most straighforward intro programming books I have covered in a long time.. and it was FUN -- I was up until 05:00 one night after starting into the book, just playing around with each new feature as Julie talked of them, writing my own test code as I went.The book covers many aspects of PHP in enough detail to get you started with the language. The first 8 pages of chapter 2 contain an HTML refresher on forms, tables, lists, etc, which was helpful to me: I haven't dabbled in HTML for some time. Also included is a pretty good Appendix (Appendix A) which contains a lot of reference material which makes reviewing the small details of functions you've previously read of quite easy. Though almost anyone can pick up the book and get started with some PHP, you'll get maximum enjoyment and will move faster through the book if you know some basic C++, as the loops are set up pretty much the exact same way. As well, knowledge of basic HTML (things such as the <img> and <font> tags, and the attributes that many tags can take.)If I could change something about the book it'd be: 1- more tables in the book (i.e., in the section on writing/reading data files, it lists the modes, but a table would make that very similar text easier to parse, and see differences.) 2- Add a small section early on with information on loops and general style for the 100% neophyte computer programmer. 3- A section on host security would be nice.. but that's just a personal wish, and can't really be expected in this type of book for beginning.To sum up-- if you want to jump into the language, hit every base while having fun and moving FAST, while having fun, jump all over this book. Want to get deep with PHP? When you're done, you'll be able to play with all of the features and continue into a book more concentrated on a certain aspect of the language. The author also has another PHP book out which I have yet to read, but I'll definantly thumb through it the next time I'm at the bookstore.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Mastering Oracle PL/SQL: Practical Solutions
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Connor McDonald, Chaim Katz, Christopher Beck, Joel R. Kallman, David C. Knox
Rating: 4/5
Title: Mastering Oracle PL/SQL: Practical Solutions
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Connor McDonald, Chaim Katz, Christopher Beck, Joel R. Kallman, David C. Knox
Rating: 4/5
The book takes a bottom-up approach: the first part shows useful coding and optimizing techniques, while the second one gives real world applications and tips on program design.
I have two minor complaints, however:
Most chapters assume at least a good knowledge of PL/SQL and build on that, which I think is fair for a book titled "Mastering ...". On the other hand, two of the chapters (Triggers especially, and PL/SQL Debugging to a degree) take a different approach and start from the beginning, explaining the basics, too. It may be just me, but I think those pages are wasted.
Furthermore, there is a certain amount of overlap with Tom Kyte's Expert One-on-One Oracle, also from Apress.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 2/5
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 2/5
Why do so many of the example queries not work in this book? I installed SQL Server 7.0 when I got this book hoping to work through it over a weekend. I kept running into code that wouldn't run in Query Analyzer. Why? Even after installing SP1, the code still wouldn't work. I liked a lot of the info in this book, I just wish I could actually use it.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Transact-SQL Cookbook (O'Reilly Windows)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Ales Spetic, Jonathan Gennick
Rating: 5/5
Title: Transact-SQL Cookbook (O'Reilly Windows)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Ales Spetic, Jonathan Gennick
Rating: 5/5
The chapters in the book are laid out properly. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to further expand their knowledge. There are some errors in the book. But this is so typical of programming books. I haven't run into any problems that I couldn't figure out. It helped me solve a problem that had been pestering me for some time. Like other O'Reilly titles, the book is an excellent piece of work.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Advanced Transact-SQL for SQL Server 2000
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Itzik Ben-Gan, Tom Moreau
Rating: 3/5
Title: Advanced Transact-SQL for SQL Server 2000
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Itzik Ben-Gan, Tom Moreau
Rating: 3/5
"Advanced"? What defines this? If you thought that this book's title ment "For the user that's already advanced and it will make you more advanced" then you were wrong. This *is* the general meaning of the title though. The intention was "For the user that that's intermediate whom would like to be advanced". There are not too many techniques in here and there are a few items that I needed to talk to the authors about. They were both very nice and had good intentions on writing this book. aPress needs to publish another "Advanced" book on this topic that would discuss some advanced techniques like table about Horizontal Paritioned Views some more, extended stored procedures, using the sp_OAxxx methods, reading and writing to the registry from inside T-SQL, bulk inserts, using the FOR XML and some XSLT. Itzik and Tom did a good job ... but the title is all wrong. It should be called "Get You To The Next Level: T-SQL" and mention on the cover that it's designed for the intermediate level. And anyone who says to just read BOL (books on line) ... you're just trying to intimidate others by stating that it's so easy for you that the standard docs are all you need. Don't be a bully. This is a fine book with the wrong title.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Basic & SQL Server: William R. Vaughn (Microsoft Programming Series)
Publisher: Microsoft Pr
Authors: William Vaughn
Rating: 3/5
Title: Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Basic & SQL Server: William R. Vaughn (Microsoft Programming Series)
Publisher: Microsoft Pr
Authors: William Vaughn
Rating: 3/5
but it lacks many programming examples to the things that need more (working) explanations. I hope the sixth edition doesn't go so much into the history of VB and SQL. I really don't care how it came to be what it is today, just explain to me how it works right now.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP3: Programming Browser-Based Applications with PHP
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Authors: Dave Medinets
Rating: 4/5
Title: PHP3: Programming Browser-Based Applications with PHP
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Authors: Dave Medinets
Rating: 4/5
Very appropriate for who is already a good programmer, but lacks informations about the very basics of PHP. Excellent when describes objects, but not so good when speaks about data bases and typical applications. Anyway, I have spent well my money.
