IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Google Hacking for Penetration Testers
Publisher: Syngress
Authors: Johnny Long
Rating: 5/5
Title: Google Hacking for Penetration Testers
Publisher: Syngress
Authors: Johnny Long
Rating: 5/5
We all use Google, for many different reasons. But Long points out that its sheer effectiveness has lead to an insidious activity. By crackers and phishers ("black hats"), who are trying to break into systems and get confidential data. Like being able to find a person's real name and US Tax Id or credit card numbers.
Long shows how Google's many search options and comprehensive data can be used by a cracker. For example, searching for a text string written by a common web search, like Apache or IIS, that gives the server's name and version number. Typically, these are default strings that some sysadmins don't bother changing. So when the pages are made public, those strings appear, and Google lets the cracker find them. If she knows of a security bug in that server version, she can Google for who is running it and then drill down. Long goes into far more complicated attacks than that. But the example shows the gist of how Google can be (mis-)used.
Long writes a disquieting text for sysadmins and Web administrators. In the rush by so many organisations to make information available, even if ostensibly only to your employees and customers, Google can expose you to vulnerability. A compelling read.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Professional SQL Server 7.0 Development Using SQL-DMO, SQL-NS & DTS
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Frank Miller, Rachelle Reese, Martin Harwar
Rating: 1/5
Title: Professional SQL Server 7.0 Development Using SQL-DMO, SQL-NS & DTS
Publisher: Wrox Press
Authors: Frank Miller, Rachelle Reese, Martin Harwar
Rating: 1/5
This is an absolute rehash of the SQL Server Books Online, the samples are too. It is very light on DMO, SQL Namespace Objects and DTS. It is all very basic, does not explain the main concepts of SQL-DMO, does not explain the meta data cache for example. The biggest part of the book are the Appendix which are object models and rehashes of Microsoft matrials.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Database Administrator's Guidebook
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Authors: Carl H. Speshock
Rating: 5/5
Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Database Administrator's Guidebook
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Authors: Carl H. Speshock
Rating: 5/5
I am a DBA Manager and have purchased and read this book with much satisfaction. The book has been thought out and reads very well. The use of bullets throughout the book allows my DBAs to get to the information quickly without fumbly through alot of text. I am excited about the chapters that go beyond understanding SQL Server technology (which the book does a great job going ove: Backups and Restores, OLTP, Capacity Planning, OLAP, and much more) and help a DBA understand and better themselves in their role. I am talking about the Data Modeling, Technical Writing, Verbal/oral communication chapters. The chapters in the book that go over Oracle and Sybase Databases migrations to SQL Server have helped us tremendously during our Oracle to SQL Server Data Warehouse projects. The included CDROM is exceptional. I have not seen any CDROM like this included in any books before. It is a CDROM that my DBAs access and use on a daily basis. It helps many DBA support documents (for inventorying servers, creating a backup and disaster recovery plan, drawings that define SQL Server hardware configurations for Database servers, and much more) that have assisted me in my daily tasks.
I have purchased 5 additional copies for each DBA on my team and will suggest this to other SQL Server DBA Managers.I can definitely tell that this book was written by a DBA who has much interest in his work and the SQL Server DBA role.I highly recommend purchasing this book!!
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
This book should be required reading for anyone who is a DBA or programmer for SQL Svr applications. It is far and away the best book on the subject.The first thing I will point out is the lack of screen prints. Unlike most other computing books this book has almost no screen prints. Only one chapter has any at all, and that his the query performance chapter where screen prints of query execution plans are shown. The book is tight and lacks the filler and fluff in almost every other SQL Svr book.The next thing is the style of writing. The author says he tries to write the way that people speak. That is exactly how the book reads: very plain spoken and easy to understand.The next great thing about the book is the range of topics covered. I didn't expect to find anything about full-text search or transaction management in a book like this, but they are there. I didn't expect any discussion of Automaton, but there is a chapter on it. In addition to what one would expect in a book like this, many other related topics are discussed in detail as well.The query performance chapter could be sold by itself - its that good. I learned more from it than I have from whole books about query performance. The indexing internals were particularly useful, especially the part about covered indexes and index intersections and joins.The chapter on cursors was also a godsend. I used it to convince some colleagues to redesign their part of an application we are working on. Like most of the book, no one has said it better.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: PHP3: Programming Browser-Based Applications with PHP
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Authors: Dave Medinets
Rating: 5/5
Title: PHP3: Programming Browser-Based Applications with PHP
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
Authors: Dave Medinets
Rating: 5/5
It's AMAZING! I'm *finally* understanding how this all goes together.Every other PHP manual or tutorial I've seen just gave lists of commands and how to use them, but didn't really explain the thought-process behind making real working functions.This one actually walks you through the creation-from-scratch showing first "goals" even for little tiny one-page projects, then follows through on making it happen. Very cool. This book even gives his 20-year-programmer's advice such as, "You could do it this way, but I recommend doing it this way instead."It's nice to have more than "just the facts" - and that's why I've learned more from this book in the last 2 days than any other PHP tutorial I've done in the last 5 months.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Php Fast & Easy Web Development (Fast & Easy Web Development)
Publisher: Premier Press
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 1/5
Title: Php Fast & Easy Web Development (Fast & Easy Web Development)
Publisher: Premier Press
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 1/5
Great book for people just getting started with PHP, even if you're not an HTML expert. She doesn't assume that you already know everything and walks you through the examples step-by-step. On the other hand, if you're already familiar with PHP and have been reading through the online manual, or have programming experience with other languages, you might want to start out with something a little more advanced. Definitely a clear, instructive book that's easy to follow. I'm sure I'll be buying other books by Julie Meloni in the future.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
Title: The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
The Guru Guide books are the best books available for SQL SERVER. I have all three and never ceased to be impressed with how much I learn each time I read one of them. Each book requires and rewards careful rereading. There is always more there than you glean the first time. I am still reading the first one nearly four years after I originally bought it. I never cease to find some new nuggest when I research a solution to my latest SQL SERVER challenge.I also like the non-technical writing in each book. The personal anecdotes, the essays, the quotes at the head of each chapter: they all give you the impression that you are being taught by, as Ron Soukup says, a veteran developer who knows what he is talking about because he has lived it
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Apache: the Definitive Guide (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Ben Laurie, Peter Laurie
Rating: 1/5
Title: Apache: the Definitive Guide (With CD-ROM)
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Ben Laurie, Peter Laurie
Rating: 1/5
This book, unlike virtually every other O'Reilly book I own, almost completely fails in its effort to educate the reader. Each chapter starts out with a page or two of well-written text, then, just when you become interested you're faced with page after page of configuration settings, with very little explanation of what each setting does or, more importantly, why you would ever care what it does. Worse, the authors tend to use a lot of words where a few would have been better. For example, instead of just saying that Apache would report an error they say "you have a problem that's signaled by disagreeable messages at the client end, plus equivalent stories in the log files on the server..."Huh?As I said in the title, you'd be better off printing the Apache help, because at least it's free.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Google Hacks
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest
Rating: 5/5
Title: Google Hacks
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest
Rating: 5/5
This book is what exactly you expect from O'Reilly - great tips, well written, carefully organized and attractively formatted.It may be that all this information is available for free at various sites on the internet. That does not detract from the value of having valuable information at your fingertips when you need it. Each hack in the book can be located and read in minutes, saving hours of "free" search time. That alone makes the book's price a bargain.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Developing Time-Oriented Database Applications in SQL (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
Authors: Richard T. Snodgrass, Christian S. Jensen
Rating: 4/5
Title: Developing Time-Oriented Database Applications in SQL (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
Authors: Richard T. Snodgrass, Christian S. Jensen
Rating: 4/5
I've used this book while working as the lead data architect on several large database projects, and it's been a lifesaver. It brings rigor and discipline to a very difficult area for SQL (true relational) databases: handling, reporting on, and storing the changing [versions of] data over time. The concepts are themselves quite difficult and challenging, and I would be loathe to even attempt to build a system tracking changing data over time without this book's priceless assistance. Another reviewer, an instructor, didn't like the book: it is not a tutorial and may be hard to use, understand, or follow if you are not already working on a problem that this book can help you solve. But if you are involved in creating (say) an insurance application that must handle retroactivity, or a financial system that must be able to re-create an earlier financial report and explain why today's version of Q2 is different from yesterday's, then you NEED this book.
