IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Hardcover
Title: Data Warehousing With Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Technical Reference (Microsoft Technical Reference)
Publisher: Microsoft Pr
Authors: Jake Sturm
Rating: 5/5
Title: Data Warehousing With Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Technical Reference (Microsoft Technical Reference)
Publisher: Microsoft Pr
Authors: Jake Sturm
Rating: 5/5
goob this book is very good for cetifications
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Authors: Joe Celko
Rating: 5/5
Title: Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Authors: Joe Celko
Rating: 5/5
I cannot work without this book. Stuck with a poor database structure and huge volumes of data, I have had to explore every trick of the trade. Few computer books in general provide information that is accurate, helpful, and not repetitive of manuals and online material that is already available to you. This book is of exceptional value. Someone swiped mine and believe me, I must have another copy. How many of the computer books you have purchased get that kind of respect?Warning: Beginners may need another book and it is not a replacement for your SQL vendor specific reference.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP and MySQL
Publisher: SitePoint
Authors: Kevin Yank
Rating: 3/5
Title: Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP and MySQL
Publisher: SitePoint
Authors: Kevin Yank
Rating: 3/5
I'd like to recommend this book because there is a lot going for it. The text is readable. The illustrations and screenshots are well done. And the book presents a nice learning curve from beginner to reasonably high level concepts. But the book has some technical flaws that other beginning PHP books do not. An example is the authors use of SQL, a primary feature of this type of book, which is implemented using string concatenation. This type of SQL is not only inefficient, it's also prone to SQL injection attacks which means that any code based on this book will have serious security issues.
There are some very good parts, however. The chapter that introduces relational databases is very well done.
I recommend O'Reilly's Learning PHP 5 as an alternative to this book.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: A Guide to SQL, Seventh Edition
Publisher: Course Technology
Authors: Philip J. Pratt
Rating: 1/5
Title: A Guide to SQL, Seventh Edition
Publisher: Course Technology
Authors: Philip J. Pratt
Rating: 1/5
Sketchy at best. Gives some good examples but does not cover all of the SQL language. Jumps around a lot. Definitely not worth the 30+ dollars.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Tuning
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Dan Tow
Rating: 5/5
Title: SQL Tuning
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Dan Tow
Rating: 5/5
"Tell me something I don't already know", that's what crosses my mind every time I pick up a new performance, tuning book. If you're like me, 90% of the content in any DBA book in the store is 'old hat'.This book is refreshing. It doesn't waste time going over all of the stuff you learned years ago. Knowing how to read an execution plan or when to pick a hash join over a nested loop join is not what this book is about. There are plenty of books on the market that cover basic, vendor specific, query tuning. I personally have about 20 of these books on my bookshelf here at home. (Over the years I've worked on Sybase, SQL Server, Informix XPS, & Oracle.)Here's the deal...Anyone who has worked with really big systems will eventually run into an optimization problem that seems to be unsolvable. You can try histograms, compressed key indexes, partitioning, pre-joined indexes, and materialized views, but you still can't get the performance that's being requested. For a DBA, it can be a very frustrating dilemma. This is especially true when you know from the data volume that you should be able to get there.The truth is, optimizers can't always get the right solution, even with correct statistics. There are some good technical reasons why this is true, but that's out of scope for my review. In any case, that's where this book comes to the rescue. I feel that it gives you some insight into the optimization problem and tells you how to correct the problems that your optimizer can't figure out. This book is NOT for use on 95% of your queries. Most optimizers will pick the correct access plan if the DBA does his/her job correctly and collects the appropriate statistics.In my experience, I get two types of problems that I have trouble getting the optimizer to solve:#1. Joining together a large number (8-14) of tables. At least 1 or 2 of the tables have over 30G of real data. By `real data', I mean that 30G of data is actually populated.#2. Making high transaction queries read the fewest amount of buffers in order to get rid of latching problems.After I read the first few diagramming chapters of this book, I thought I'd give it a try on a problem that was recently solved at work. I was surprised. It worked, and even with my clumsiness with the method, it only took me about 2 hours to get a solution. It took us about 3 days at work. Our trial and error solution was slightly better, than what I came up with using the author's method. However, it was so close that had I used his method, I most certainly would have gone on to another problem. (The author's solution was strange because I would never have solved the join order the way that he did. His solution actually had me pick the largest table, out of 10, to drive the query. I thought this was odd because my test query had some very good filters on smaller tables.)These were the results per execution: Optimizer - 100K buffers.
Trial & Error - 1700 buffers.
Book method (basic graphing) - 2000 buffers.If I had known about this book, I could have solved this problem in a few hours. Instead it took several DBA's, a few day's time to come up with a solution that was only marginally better.Since this method appeared to work so well for OLTP, I went back and looked at a very large OLAP query that I had worked on last year. I and several developers had spent days trying to get it to run faster. Even with the author's method, I still couldn't make it better, but I was happy to see that the join order picked by the optimizer was almost identical to what I had calculated using the book.I plan on studying this guide over and over until I've memorized this method. I don't think it will solve every problem, but I think it gives you an edge over using experience alone.Before you purchase this book...Keep in mind, that SQL tuning is fundamentally *not a simple problem*, so readers should not buy the book expecting an easy list of simple tips and tricks. (If the problem was easy, the optimizer likely would have got it right in the first place, and you wouldn't be tuning!) The correct solution to the problem is fairly complex, as complex as it *needs* to be.Also, it's not noted anywhere, but I gathered that the author assumes that the reader will have basic high school Algebra skills, and will have taken a basic statistics course in order to fully understand the reasoning behind the explanations. Although, Algebra and statistical knowledge are probably not necessary to learn the tuning method presented. I state this because I told a good friend about this book, and his first question was, "Does it have a lot of math to go through?" So, if statistics is not your thing, don't worry. The author only presents enough information to give you a level of comfort that his method is based on mathematics. He doesn't require that you know "graph theory" or anything like that.By the way, our change from 100K buffers per transaction to 1700 buffers, dropped the CPU utilization for the website that was running the OLTP query by about 70%. That was on a 16 CPU, Sun/Solaris box. So proper SQL tuning can save you a lot of $$$.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Oracle PL/SQL Programming, Third Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Steven Feuerstein
Rating: 1/5
Title: Oracle PL/SQL Programming, Third Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Steven Feuerstein
Rating: 1/5
O'Reilly publishes good reference books. I always look for one of their books first when I am looking for a book in a given subject area. No one book in their Oracle series has it all, though. Each book covers it's subject area in depth...just make sure you get the right book! If you like the "Whatever For Dummies" kind of books, then O'Reilly books aren't for you. My only knock is that there are more books in the Oracle series than is really necessary...marketing at it's worst! Some of the seperate PL/SQL related books should have been combined into one volume.
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
Chapters are out of order, functions are mentioned and used before they are explained. It is not written for the learning user. As I read through the book functions were mentioned in chapter 2 when they aren't even introduced or explained until Chapter 4. I'm sure the knowledge of the writer is vast, but the book is not well written.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Writing Stored Procedures with Microsoft SQL Server: The Authoritative Solution
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Matt Shepker
Rating: 1/5
Title: Writing Stored Procedures with Microsoft SQL Server: The Authoritative Solution
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Matt Shepker
Rating: 1/5
It seems to me that the authors don't have real working experience on either sybase or microsoft sql server.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Server 2000 Fast Answers for DBAs and Developers
Publisher: Glasshaus
Authors: Joseph Sack
Rating: 5/5
Title: SQL Server 2000 Fast Answers for DBAs and Developers
Publisher: Glasshaus
Authors: Joseph Sack
Rating: 5/5
Not a tutorial, but a practical working guide to administering SQL Server 2000. Lots of "How to" items covered.You don't need to read the entire book in order to benefit from it. Specific topics are covered using Checklists to make sure you don't miss anything important. Highly recommended!
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
Here are some reasons to buy this book if you wish to become proficient in SQL:1) This book does not read like a reference. It is the only SQL book that I have found that does not.2) This book is full of practical examples, all of which start by creating new tables with SQL statements (i.e. they are self-contained).3) This book contains a lot of context in each chapter.
