IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: A Guide to SQL Server 2000 Transactional and Snapshot Replication
Publisher: Not While the Surf's Up Press
Authors: Hilary Cotter
Rating: 5/5
Title: A Guide to SQL Server 2000 Transactional and Snapshot Replication
Publisher: Not While the Surf's Up Press
Authors: Hilary Cotter
Rating: 5/5
I have been waiting for a SQL Server replication book for the last few years and was excited to get hold of one of the first copies. Replication has been crying out for a comprehensive manual and finally we now have one. Firstly, it's a big tome - almost 1000 pages. If you've used replication before this'll be no surprise, as it is a deceptively 'wide' subject that really requires this size of book to do it justice. There are plenty of screenshots throughout the book to help guide newcomers and the first 5 chapters should take a complete beginner and make him more than proficient in planning and implementing snapshot and transactional replication. Some of this info is also in the microsoft help guide (Books On Line, BOL) but much is not - especially replication to other database systems, and many generally useful little tips. Later chapters concentrate on programming, replication internals and troubleshooting - valuable topics which IMHO need to be understood if you want to successfully support replication, and again topics which neither BOL nor on the net are really adequately covered. So, if you're thinking of getting involved with replication or even if you've been using it for some time - either way I'd definitely recommend getting this book.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Core PHP Programming: Using PHP to Build Dynamic Web Sites (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Pearson Education
Authors: Leon Atkinson
Rating: 1/5
Title: Core PHP Programming: Using PHP to Build Dynamic Web Sites (2nd Edition)
Publisher: Pearson Education
Authors: Leon Atkinson
Rating: 1/5
Having just finished Elisabeth Castro's "Perl and CGI for the WWW" may have made my judgement harsher, but alas! I bought this book mainly because there's not so much around on PHP yet, and I was still greatly disappointed. The author probably knows what he's talking about, but he is not able to share this knowledge with the avarage reader. In short, there's no "teaching" here, and surely no practical approach that gives the reader the feeling that he/she is accomplishing something. Some snippets of code may come in handy, but they're not worth the price.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 4/5
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 4/5
Anyone who uses Microsoft SQL Server or Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (or any of the related products) must have this book on the shelf. It is THE best-written and best-organized computer book I have come across. It picks up where the manual leaves off. Despite its name, this book is useful for someone who has just a little knowledge of T-SQL, as well as advanced users. Chapters 1 and 6 serve the beginner well. The information on performace tuning is great for the more experienced user. Even DBA's will find useful information. I don't know what I would do without this book. It showed me some of the techniques that I use regularly, such as the CASE statement.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Unleashed (Unleashed)
Publisher: Sams Pub
Authors: David Solomon, Ray Rankins, David S. Solomon, Jeff Steinmetz
Rating: 3/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Unleashed (Unleashed)
Publisher: Sams Pub
Authors: David Solomon, Ray Rankins, David S. Solomon, Jeff Steinmetz
Rating: 3/5
This book was extremely comprehensive and informative, however it wasn't always clearly written or well organized.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: High Performance Oracle8 SQL Programming and Tuning
Publisher: Coriolis Group Books
Authors: Pete Cassidy
Rating: 5/5
Title: High Performance Oracle8 SQL Programming and Tuning
Publisher: Coriolis Group Books
Authors: Pete Cassidy
Rating: 5/5
This book was a major disappointment. It is verbose, poorly oraganized, and contains numerous minor mis-statements. This appears to have been written about ver 7.3 and then a chapter was added to claim to cover ver. 8. Not recommended.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL: From Novice to Professional
Publisher: Apress
Authors: W. J. Gilmore
Rating: 5/5
Title: Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL: From Novice to Professional
Publisher: Apress
Authors: W. J. Gilmore
Rating: 5/5
I can summarize this review in nine words. If you want to learn PHP, buy this book. But that wouldn't be much of a review now would it. Jason Gilmore starts this book the way most beginner's books start; with some history. But hold on tight because it doesn't take long before your hands start getting dirty.
After the brief history the book jumps right into installing and configuration then blasts right into PHP basic; syntax, tags, data types. Then it's not long before you are writing functions, using arrays, and then one of the most updated features of PHP 5, OOP. The book keeps moving right along into advanced features like error handling, regular expressions, and networking. And just when you think you have learned it all and you couldn't possibly think of anything else you could do with PHP, the book throws MySQL into the mix. By the end of this book you should have no problems writing PHP and MySQL enabled web pages and applications.
This book is a perfect mix of what someone new to PHP needs to know as well as providing advanced material and a reference once you have a grasp of the basics. So to summarize, if you want to learn PHP, buy this book.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Mastering Oracle SQL
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Sanjay Mishra, Alan Beaulieu
Rating: 3/5
Title: Mastering Oracle SQL
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Sanjay Mishra, Alan Beaulieu
Rating: 3/5
One way to learn SQL is to type it in and run it against
the actual data. However the data for this book is not
available in the ora.com website. This sevrely limits the
usefulness of the book. I suggest that the authors make
the data and the scripts available.
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
If you find yourself tripping over the different flavors of SQL in MS SQL Server, MySQL, Postgre, and Oracle, then buy this book. This is not a good book to learn SQL or set theory. Nor is this a good book to use to learn how to manage or tune a database. This is a small enough reference that you can easily carry it out of the house or office.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Beginning Visual Basic SQL Server 7.0
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Thearon Willis
Rating: 4/5
Title: Beginning Visual Basic SQL Server 7.0
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Thearon Willis
Rating: 4/5
Thearon Willis's approach is pretty straight forward, and that's what I like. In short this book gets a solid positive review and has minor peeves.In short this is a great intro to SQL server 7. Good use of explaining triggers, and stored procedures. Most important the examples are REAL WORLD BUSINESS examples that you can use. So many other books get you to do things that are totaly useless.While I wouldn't design and interface like he did, or make the tables, as such, and I did find his stored procedures a bit overly lengthy, it's still a great book to get started on and has a lot of usefull stuff. Knowing VB helps but not neccesary and is of course not concentrated on either..solid 4, Another good Wrox book.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL for Dummies
Publisher: For Dummies
Authors: Allen G. Taylor
Rating: 5/5
Title: SQL for Dummies
Publisher: For Dummies
Authors: Allen G. Taylor
Rating: 5/5
This is a truly excellent book. I bought it knowing very little about databases, and to my pleasant surprise found that it covers far more than simply SQL - it also gives you a thorough and easy-to-understand grounding in what databases are, how they work, and why they work the way they do. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand databases from scratch, as well as anyone wanting to learn SQL.
