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
Not only is this the best Transact SQL book around, it is also the best programming book of any kind that I have ever read. It doesn't waste your time with stuff you can find elsewhere. It gives you the things only a guru would know. My favorite parts are:1. Cursors chapter - worth the price alone2. Undocumented chapter - lots of hidden power3. Statistics chapter - already using some of these examples in my work4. Performance chapter - also worth the price by itselfI have all the other Transact SQL books and none of them compare. This is the best programming book around.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: MySQL/PHP Database Applications
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Jay Greenspan, Brad Bulger
Rating: 2/5
Title: MySQL/PHP Database Applications
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Jay Greenspan, Brad Bulger
Rating: 2/5
As a general overview, the content of the book is pretty good, and would have been great... but the authors and editors do a VERY poor job of being specific where necessary, verifying that the scripts offered in the text actually run, and explaining the concepts and language constructs before using them. For the beginner, this book would be confusing as all hell, due to the vague descriptions and error filled examples. For the experienced programmer looking to pick up PHP & mySQL skills, the book is pretty much an exercise in debugging and wince-management as the stream of vague descriptions of the topic at hand wash over you, or some language construct is used with no information about it anywhere close.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle PL/SQL 101
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Christopher Allen
Rating: 3/5
Title: Oracle PL/SQL 101
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Christopher Allen
Rating: 3/5
I realize that most of the people reading this review are Oracle people. I also realize most of the people here aren't interested in non-oracle products.However, some of us use open source databases. I personally use PostgreSQL. Postgres has pl/sql functionality, and I was looking to implement some stored procedures to optimize the functioning of several programs I have that iterate over a few hundred thousand rows. I talked to a couple Oracle admins about the problem, and they suggested pl/sql.Bear in mind, I am a perl programmer, and generally I am not interested in programming sql. However, when it comes to performance you really need to offload the brunt of the processing to the database.So I looked for a book on PL/SQL and found that there really werent any that were "beginner" books. Furthermore, I found that all of them were Oracle books. So, I crossed my fingers, and bought the beginner oracle pl/sql book. The first 80% of the book was entirely review, covering the barest basics of SQL, and moving into some other less basic but still not intermediate SQL.By the time the book began to cover pl/sql it had become a heavily windows- and oracle- centric discussion with little attention paid to other databases and other operating systems. The author does not even entertain that people create SQL queries with tools other than SQL*Plus.So perhaps the word on this book would be thus.If youre an oracle admin and windows user, you'll love it. It provides the basics of SQL, and gives a modest tutorial on pl/sql.If youre a programmer and or unix user, you may find yourself disgusted by how pedantic and shallow the book is. If you dont mind spending the $25 for the book, go ahead. Otherwise, there is probably an Oracle DBA around who has a copy of the book, who loved it, and would be happy to let you borrow it.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: MySQL/PHP Database Applications
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Jay Greenspan, Brad Bulger
Rating: 4/5
Title: MySQL/PHP Database Applications
Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Jay Greenspan, Brad Bulger
Rating: 4/5
I bought this book knowing next to nothing about PHP or MySQL. (I did have experience with Active Server Pages so I was familiar with using scripting languages in sites.) It has served as a great reference for me in learning PHP and becoming familiar with MySQL. PHP and MySQL are often used together in building sites and providing everything from installation instructions to function references is a great help. If information exists on a function that is out of the scope of this book, the authors refer you to specific pages on the Web that will provide you with those details.The index could use a little beefing up and there are a lot of typos, but the typos have not taken away from the usefulness of the book.This is the only book I have bought on PHP and MySQL and I don't feel inclined to buy another-- this one is just fine.
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 just wrote the test and received 87% which was a bit of a dissapointment since I have been using (as a developer) Oracle for several years. I found that the test was harder than expected and that this book by itself does not contain all the required information. This is most likely to keep the book to a reasonable length, but you should review all the available PL/SQL functions from another source. My test had no questions regarding the entire first chapter 'Overview of Oracle Databases'. My biggest complaint about the book is the number of errors, both in the text and on the cd sample questions. To compound the problem the errata on the website is extremely incomplete! I would have rated it 4 stars except for the errors. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of resources to choose from and based on the others that I have looked at this book seems to be the best.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Optimizing SQL Server 7: Planning and Building a High-Performance Database (Prentice Hall Series on Microsoft Technologies)
Publisher: Prentice Hall Ptr
Authors: Jeffrey R. Garbus, Robert D. Schneider
Rating: 1/5
Title: Optimizing SQL Server 7: Planning and Building a High-Performance Database (Prentice Hall Series on Microsoft Technologies)
Publisher: Prentice Hall Ptr
Authors: Jeffrey R. Garbus, Robert D. Schneider
Rating: 1/5
This book blatantly lies about what is in SQL 7. It's somewhat accurate about 6.5, but who cares? I would have given this 0 stars if I could.
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: 4/5
Title: Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Basic & SQL Server: William R. Vaughn (Microsoft Programming Series)
Publisher: Microsoft Pr
Authors: William Vaughn
Rating: 4/5
The coverage of DAO/RDO was absolutely brilliant,I found it more informative than microsoft's own manuals and help files. Williams sense of humour was great as well, I hope he is busy somewhere giving us another guide to Visual Basic ADO and SQL Server. Thanks for a great book
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle PL/SQL Programming, Third Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Steven Feuerstein
Rating: 3/5
Title: Oracle PL/SQL Programming, Third Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Steven Feuerstein
Rating: 3/5
I've hated this book. I am an experienced programmer, with little database experience. I like my technical books to be brief and to the point. I started reading the PL/SQL guide with a few simple questions: how can I write a stored procedure, what is a calling convention, where are they stored inside the DB. Skimming the book to find answers to these did not work, and the book was way too verbose (pages of common-sense stuff tangential to PL/SQL, such as "you should write as little code as possible", "Make comments easy to enter and maintain").If you are looking to get going quickly, Urman's book is much better.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: A Programmer's Introduction to PHP 4.0
Publisher: Apress
Authors: W. Jason Gilmore
Rating: 3/5
Title: A Programmer's Introduction to PHP 4.0
Publisher: Apress
Authors: W. Jason Gilmore
Rating: 3/5
This book does a good job of covering the content, but it touts itself as a PHP book for programmer's. by not covering the stuff you already know. Going through a switch statement is pretty basic, so it should be titled "The Non-C/Delphi/C++ programmers' guide. I am still not sure if I am getting more content from the book or PHP.NET. The book does a good job covering PHP 4 classes and other topics, so it is on point there.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Scripting XML and WMI for Microsoft(r) SQL Server 2000: Professional Developer's Guide
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Authors: Tobias Martinsson
Rating: 2/5
Title: Scripting XML and WMI for Microsoft(r) SQL Server 2000: Professional Developer's Guide
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Authors: Tobias Martinsson
Rating: 2/5
I thought this book was one of the worst I have ever purchased. There are annoying mistakes in the sample queries, e.g., mispelled field names that will just drive you crazy. I can't speak for the WMI section, I bought this book for the SQL Server 2000 with XML info. I learned more at MSDN.
