IT programming books related reviews
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: 5/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Unleashed (Unleashed)
Publisher: Sams Pub
Authors: David Solomon, Ray Rankins, David S. Solomon, Jeff Steinmetz
Rating: 5/5
it?s a great book for my every-day work, i?m a DBA of a private bank and i use it all days, grat for administering and understand knowledge
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional SQL Server 2000 XML
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Paul J. Burke, Sam Ferguson, Denise Gosnell, Paul Morris, Karli Watson, Darshan Singh, Brian Smith, Carvin Wilson, Warren Wiltsie, Jan Narkiewicz, J Michael Palermo, John Reid
Rating: 3/5
Title: Professional SQL Server 2000 XML
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Paul J. Burke, Sam Ferguson, Denise Gosnell, Paul Morris, Karli Watson, Darshan Singh, Brian Smith, Carvin Wilson, Warren Wiltsie, Jan Narkiewicz, J Michael Palermo, John Reid
Rating: 3/5
It is a good book as far as explaning what SQL Server has to offer regarding XML capabilities but it should have covered the case studies fully with the .Net Framework. Also, it covers very good the IIS configuration, and how to manage XML Templates, XPath and Schemas. The book has a migration example from ASP to ASP.Net which does not cover ADO.Net. If you want a rich source on how to integrate SQLXML and the .Net Framework THIS IS NOT THE BOOK.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP and MySQL Web Development, Second Edition
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Luke Welling, Laura Thomson
Rating: 2/5
Title: PHP and MySQL Web Development, Second Edition
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Luke Welling, Laura Thomson
Rating: 2/5
This an acceptable book, it does assume previous programming experience and more specifically C programming experience. The examples are rather pathetic and they don't spend really anytime explaining the examples, they just suddenly appear out of no where. I wouldn't know what book to recommend but I wouldn't recommend this book for most people. I think where the examples went wrong is they went off into some huge programming example instead of using a short example to demonstrate the current topic. Large sourcecode programming projects I think are better left for the back of the book or for the authors websites.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Server Query Performance Tuning Distilled, Second Edition
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Sajal Dam
Rating: 4/5
Title: SQL Server Query Performance Tuning Distilled, Second Edition
Publisher: Apress
Authors: Sajal Dam
Rating: 4/5
For the book itself, it's well worth the 5 stars. It can actually bring your sql server skills to the next level, from intermediate to senior. And the layout of the book is very clear, it first lists every item and then talk about it in detail.But I am frustrated about unable to find the source code from the website provided in the book. Anyone can help me on that?
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Apache: the Definitive Guide (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Ben Laurie, Peter Laurie
Rating: 3/5
Title: Apache: the Definitive Guide (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Ben Laurie, Peter Laurie
Rating: 3/5
I had been dealing with Apache before I purchased this book, and I tell you, learnt a lot. The feature of the book that I liked the most was illustration servers that they build on each chapter (almost on each chapter). Every single configuration is built upon the previous one. For example, they build the first web server in chapter 2, site.toddle with just the following configuration:User webuser
Group webgroup
Servername yourmachinename
DocumentRoot /usr/www/site.toddle/htdocsThen in the following chapters they introduce different issues, and keep adding lines to the above configuration file and building seperate versions of more advanced sites. However, there're several things that you might wanna be aware of before purchasing this book. Although the above mentioned feature of the book claims it's well-organized, it's not. Some of the directives just pop-up in the middle of the discussion, where they are not supposed to belong. I found that pretty annoying and confusing. I can recall the one about CERN Metafiles in chapter 3. Another annoying thing was the way they introduce directives. Consider the following lines from page 53:ServerSignature [off|on|email]
Default: off
Directory, .htaccess[ ...6 line description follows...]Yes, it reminds me of the Apache's online documentation (which even does way better job than the above cold-blooded description). Of course, one expects more from a book than citing the online documentaion.If you want to know what kind of audience the book is designed for, my answer is straightforward: I don't know, period! I have a feeling even the authors don't know anything about their potential readers. They try to get as detailed as they can where it doesn't make sence to do so. And when you expect some detail, they just ignore you. I used the book as a referense during my internship, but it still didn't keep me from having to visit apache.org for more details. Now I am considering buying another book on Apache. I'll let you know :)
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Php Fast & Easy Web Development (Fast & Easy Web Development)
Publisher: Premier Press
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 4/5
Title: Php Fast & Easy Web Development (Fast & Easy Web Development)
Publisher: Premier Press
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 4/5
This is an absolutely fabulous book for beginning PHP. If only they made books like this for every scripting language. The examples are simple, easy to understand and hell, they work! PHP is a pretty complex language but this book dives right into the core of what you need to know about CGI with PHP. Even if it doesn't explain the code in depth enough it at least allows the user to have a basic grasp of what the language is doing with line-by-line explainations. The section on mySQL is very complete and should allow the reader to take off running with mySQL, plus when you are done with the exercise, you have a web interface for mySQL that you can use indefinately. Any experienced perl programmer will be able to see the advantages of PHP just by thumbing the pages (me for example).The only reason I give it four stars is because of the annoying blue text - please tell me this was a mistake. The HUGE TEXT was a turn off as well, reads like a child's book. I'll take it though and I recomend it to all BEGINNERS in PHP.
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: OCP Introduction to Oracle9i: SQL Exam Guide
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Jason Couchman
Rating: 2/5
Title: OCP Introduction to Oracle9i: SQL Exam Guide
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Authors: Jason Couchman
Rating: 2/5
The book is very well organized and easy to follow. It is an excellent tool to prepare for the OCP. I strongly agree with the other reviewers that there are some errors in the book that are frustrating. I was pleased that there is a nice errata web page posted ... and this helped me edit the text so I was studying the correct information for the OCP. I am VERY disappointed with the CD_ROM software that comes with the textbook and provides interactive questions to prepare for the OCP. There are incorrect answers provided in this software, so the end result is that I found myself dilligently learning wrong answers for the OCP. There is no errata for the CD-ROM. You're on your own figuring out what's correct and what's incorrect. It's a dangerous tool to use due to the fact you can study very hard and the end result will be that you learned wrong answers to the OCP test. Perhaps an easy solution to this problem could be to simply have errata included on the existing errata web site for the CD-ROM questions. The CD-ROM questions have unique numbers, so it would be easy to post the correct answers to these questions on the errata web site. In the meantime I'm focusing on the book and leaving the CD-ROM unused. The book though is excellent. The author did a super job, and I hope the other three Oracle Press books that follow in the Oracle 9i OCP sequence are as good as this one is.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: .NET Enterprise Design with Visual Basic .NET and SQL Server 2000
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Jimmy Nilsson, Jimmy Nilsson
Rating: 5/5
Title: .NET Enterprise Design with Visual Basic .NET and SQL Server 2000
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Jimmy Nilsson, Jimmy Nilsson
Rating: 5/5
It's a delight to come across book nowadays that's focusing on a complete solution instead of merely decorating a product manual with better sounding sentences and some miniature sample code.This book is not a Visual Basic .NET or SQL Server 2000 book. Instead, it's a book on how to build N-tier enterprise applications with these products being the main tools. The author takes an academic approach to his discussions, first bringing us proposals, then rounds up the (sometimes lengthy) discussions with an evaluation of proposals and finally a recommendation. I for one like this approach and it comes as no surprise that the author also gives university courses (at least that's what the back cover claims).The reviewer below complaining that he doesn't find any sample code to copy-and-paste has obviously bought a book that's way over his head and consequently not qualified to review this book at all.On the contrary, this book isn't intended to give you any quick solutions, tricks or hacks. Instead it's a book for those who are seriously interested in enhancing the methods they use to build large-scale enterprise applications to make them easier to maintain in the long run. It's a book to make you start think!
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Transact-SQL Cookbook (O'Reilly Windows)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Ales Spetic, Jonathan Gennick
Rating: 1/5
Title: Transact-SQL Cookbook (O'Reilly Windows)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Ales Spetic, Jonathan Gennick
Rating: 1/5
This book isn't worth the paper its printed on. The code is all stuff from magazines and other books. I see a lot of code from Henderson's book here. The writing is also terrible - no explanations whatsoever. Suggest spending your money on something else-just about anything, in fact.
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
I'm a consultant working with SQL Server for several years now and I'm using T-SQL more and more each day.This book is THE FIRST and usually ONLY T-SQL book I reach for when I have a T-SQL question or need a solution. I also own "Transact-SQL Programming" from O-Reilly (ISBN 1565924010), but unfortunately it reads much more like a plain textbook. I really enjoy Henderson's writing style - it's very easy to read for a technical book and one of the few that I can just pickup and read anytime without falling alseep to gleem information from several of the more interesting chapters. There is not a lot of "fluff" added to enlarge the size of the book - the author gets right to the point.As a previous reviewer stated, "I began moving to the next level almost immediately." If you buy just one T-SQL reference book, this should be it.
