ASP.NET: The Complete Reference Review

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ASP.NET: The Complete Reference ReviewASP.Net is so different from ASP. I know that, having done Classic ASP for about 4 years now and ASP.Net from Beta1 onwards. And still this book changed the way I think of / do ASP.Net programming. The book can as well be titled "Object Oriented Approach to ASP.Net Programming". The author sticks strictly to best coding practices (than some easier way to code), goes thro most of the classes we will be using in ASP.Net and a lot more. He will go advanced but knows where to stop - telling you it's enouugh for ASP.Net (which I agree - I don't expect an ASP book to teach me .Net OOP tharoughly. I would rather turn to "OOP with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft Visual C# Step by Step" by Robin A. Reynolds-Haertle or the forthcoming "Visual Basic .Net Object and Component Handbook" by Peter Vogel ). The author explains you as if he is working with you in a senior position and has a relentless style to drag you thro all of the features in-depth and their benefits that someone new to .Net programming may be scared. VB.Net is used in sample codes (he explains every new concept with code) but initially he gives a real good comparison of C# and VB.Net including how to do the same thing in both languages (And again if I want to learn C#, I don't want to learn from some ASP.Net book - I'd rather learn from "Microsoft Visual C# .NET Step by Step" by John Sharp, Jon Jagger or "Programming C#, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly Windows)" by Jesse Liberty or "Programming Windows(r) with C# (Core Reference)" by Charles Petzold )
That said I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who has been familiar with ASP and done some programming and want to learn ASP.Net completely, tharoughly.ASP.NET: The Complete Reference Overview

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Real-Time Systems Review

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Real-Time Systems ReviewThis book covers real-time systems in a 'traditional', theoretical, way. The book focuses on hard real-time scheduling, and more recent issues - such as the use of time-triggered systems - are given no coverage. It does cover issues like RMA, etc, clearly. Further examples from real applications would be a real bonus: almost all the examples are of an abstract nature.Real-Time Systems Overview

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Ubuntu 8.10 Linux Bible Review

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Ubuntu 8.10 Linux Bible ReviewWithout a doubt the most comprehensive and useful book on Linux I have seen. The printing is a little light and small. But to get the amount of information that's in there in a book that you are able to pick up the small is necessary, but it could be a little darker. It is not "Ubuntu 8.10 for Dummies" but if you have a problem or question, the answer is probably in there.Ubuntu 8.10 Linux Bible Overview

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Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP): High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors Review

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Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP): High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors ReviewNo idea why the other reviewer gave this 3 stars.
He is 100% correct that this is a cut/paste from Wikipedia articles.
You can get the same info for free from Wikipeadia. So why pay for it?
Also, all of the info is thrown together, very unorganized. In fact, it is confusing.
Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP): High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors Overview

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The Undocumented PC: A Programmer's Guide to I/O, CPUs, and Fixed Memory Areas (2nd Edition) Review

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The Undocumented PC: A Programmer's Guide to I/O, CPUs, and Fixed Memory Areas (2nd Edition) ReviewThis book provides excellent information on hardware ports, CMOS, disk and video systems. It explains the differences between versions, lists known bugs and workarounds and even comes with functioning code examples. Some of the programming leaves a little to be desired, though. :) But if you're a good assembly programmer you'll understand it.
Overall it is an excellent book and a must have for anyone wanting direct hardware-level access (without the save-haven "buffer" provided through an API). This book is for real programmers only. Programmers who want to work at the machine level. It is, quite simply, the most comprehensive book I've found. A one-stop shop for information.
The only problem I found is that this book is slightly dated, originally published in 1996 or 1997. Newer features are not included.The Undocumented PC: A Programmer's Guide to I/O, CPUs, and Fixed Memory Areas (2nd Edition) Overview

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Modeling with Data: Tools and Techniques for Scientific Computing Review

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Modeling with Data: Tools and Techniques for Scientific Computing ReviewKlemens teaches how to tame and understand a dataset the way it should be done: in C. Invest some time in this excellent book full of gentle humor and respect for the reader's intelligence. The payoffs will be immense. The best resource (a full set of programs used in the book) accompanying this book is available for FREE(!) on Klemens's website!Modeling with Data: Tools and Techniques for Scientific Computing Overview

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Perl and XML Review

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Perl and XML ReviewI am a professional developer, working mostly with Perl. I work in the field of biology and bioinformatics, but have spent the last 8 years working as a web and database Internet developer. And, I own practically every O'Reilly Perl book ever published (not that I necessarily think they're all worth buying). So, now that you know where I'm coming from...
If you are preparing to do a serious amount of XML development, and you're in the process of determining a) which Perl XML modules on CPAN you want to use, and b) how to use them; and, you don't have a whole lot of time to spend tracking down the sometimes-hard-to-find documentation on these modules; then buying this book is a no-brainer. It covers all the major XML modules, how to use then and really helps you figure out when to use the different modules.
Even if you're not new to XML and Perl, this book would serve as an excellent refresher course on what XML tools are available out there for you... Maybe you haven't looked at your code in awhile, or want to update it to use a newer module from CPAN? Or, maybe you're looking for a better way to do it? Then, this book would definitely help you out.
While a fan of O'Reilly books in general, I'll be the first to admit some of them are more useful than others. I have to give this book a very solid rating, as it's actually useful, comprehensive and very well presented. I find myself cracking it open all the time, especially as my utilization of XML has grown more complicated. It has definitely earned its place in my Aqua Perl book collection.Perl and XML Overview

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Django 1.2 e-commerce Review

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Django 1.2 e-commerce Review"Django 1.2 E-Commerce" starts with a very ambitious goal: design, develop and deploy a functionam ecommerce web site for the fictional [...] company. Sounds great, doesn't it?
I started flipping through the usual introductory pages explaining what Django is and why use it for a project like this. It was all fairly brief which already led me to believe that knowledge of Django's inner works and basic setup and configuration was required to follow along.
Well, the instructions are not as streamlined as other programming books I've read and it could be fairly tricky to follow the examples and logic if you're not already familiar with how Django works. There are several typos in the example code as well, mostly due to missing spaces between the commands and arguments. Adding to the confusion is the style the author chose to deliver his explanation of specific code changes, displaying snippets of code that will leave the reader wondering what specific file is being discussed.
Now, if none of these things sound scary to you, you'll be happy to know that the project itself is fairly well designed and worth your time. It was also the first time I saw an example of integrating Django with Google Checkout to set up a "shopping cart" mechanism, and by the time you're done with the second chapter, you will have a very basic but functional ecommerce web site.
The subsequent chapters were a blur, talking about adding external modules and services to enhance your site's searching capabilities as well as exposing the data from your "store" via APIs and generating reports with ReportLab. The author also talks about making use of javascript to add that AJAX-y feeling that we've come to expect of most modern sites and how to take advantage of S3 storage to sell your product.
The last chapter finally walks you through a few different ways you can deploy your final project to the world out there. I thought it was interesting to see Fabric being mentioned as a driver for deployment, as I have been playing with it at work to help me perform a series of tests on several different hosts for QAing purposes. Come to think of it, this may have been the first time I've seen it mentioned in a book, so I'm glad that this project seems to be picking up steam.
Overall, even with the issues of poor proof checking of the source code and the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach to the first chapters, if you're not new to Django and need to get some ideas on how to design and develop an ecommerce website, you may want to check out this book. I give it 3 out of 5 stars.bout+making+use+of+javasDjango 1.2 e-commerce Overview

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MapReduce: High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors Review

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MapReduce: High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors ReviewWhat is this book? There is nothing useful in here. It is like a couple of random pages from wikipedia bound together.MapReduce: High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors Overview

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Practical Development Environments Review

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Practical Development Environments ReviewThis is an important work that should be required reading for the following individuals:
1. Software Engineering students
2. Build/Release engineers
3. All new software engineers starting off
When I started my professional software career, I wish that I had a book like this that I could have read before I ever wrote a line of code. When an engineer is starting off, they are fresh out of school with a whole bunch of theory floating in their head and a myriad of projects they have just worked on, but this does not deal with how software is actually MADE in the real world. No matter how well you understand the difference between a reference and a pointer, in order to be a successful software engineer you still need to know how software actually gets built by a team of people and that's what makes 'Practical Development Environments' by Matthew Doar so great and so USEFUL.
This book isn't about how to code, rather how code gets out the door. Sure you might be able to create some classes, methods, and know how to interact with them, but have you ever really thought about how code is managed? How it gets tested? How many engineers work on the same piece of code without stumbling on each others toes?
The author does just that in this book, as he examines the intricacies of what source control is and some of the most popular SCM solutions are out there. The author discusses how important testing is and the tools that can be used to track, modify, and fix bugs quickly and efficiently. Mr. Doar talks about the maintenance cycle of how code is hotfixed after releases are made, and the scripts and documentation that goes along with said releases and upgrades.
Writing code is not just about opening up a C++ project and making a few classes and doing some unit testing. Writing good code is a PROCESS in itself, and it's important that all engineers present and future understand what goes into getting a product out the door. I honestly wish that I had something like this back when I was in school, it would have prepared me better for everything that I learned later and possibly would have helped avoid some of the potholes that I encountered along the way.
This is an important work and I found it very useful, if for nothing else than stressing how many aspects there are to getting software out beyond writing it and selling it.
***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDEDPractical Development Environments Overview

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Groovy Programming: An Introduction for Java Developers Review

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Groovy Programming: An Introduction for Java Developers ReviewShort, plain, concise presentation of all features of Groovy, much in K&R style, without too many words and too much philosophy. I have both books, i.e. this one and "Groovy in Action". "Groovy in Action" concentrates on design goals and philosophy, and is more about using the language than about language itself. Reading "Groovy in Action" is fun, but when I do programming I have "Groovy Programming" on my desk all the time. And use it quite frequently.
By the way, the previous review here misses the point. Reviewer reviews Groovy, but not the book. Pity that he doesn't unserstand what are scripting languages and how they are used.Groovy Programming: An Introduction for Java Developers Overview

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C# 3.0 in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) Review

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C# 3.0 in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) ReviewI bought a copy of this book earlier in the week, and have been extremely impressed with it. It is one of the few books I keep on my desk as a quick reference.
What I like about the book is that it packs a lot of content, yet is structured in a way that is easy to read and lookup. Previous Nutshell series books I've used were more of an API reference (and contributed little over what you can lookup online in MSDN). This book doesn't focus on API listings (although it does include some tables of them), instead it quickly explains the relevant concepts in each chapter and provides real world code snippets showing how to use them.
Although called C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, the book covers much more than just C# as a language. The last 600 pages covers much of the core .NET Framework Base Class library - and has good chapters and samples on LINQ, XML, Streams, Regular Expressions, Threading, Collections, Serialization, etc. There is enough on each subject to be useful, while still being a quick read and easy to quickly look things up.
All in all, a book I recommend.C# 3.0 in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) Overview

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Python for Unix and Linux System Administration Review

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Python for Unix and Linux System Administration ReviewI recently got my hands on a copy of "Python for Unix and Linux System Administration". After reading it, I felt the time I've invested in reading it was well spent. The author introduced the reader to many different situations where python would help make their lives as system administrators easier, without confusing the reader with some complex forms or statements. My feeling is that this book is aimed at people who want to use Python to solve their problems quickly and efficiently, but only have a limited experience with the language - and the books fits that purpose well with its rather superficial approach that the reader can later extend later on with various available resources. It would only be fair that I too mention some of the shortcomings that I noticed while reading this book.
Pros:
1) The author introduces the reader to ways that Python can be used.
2) Most of the time there will be more than one way to accomplish a task. The author at times presents a scenario and showed the reader how to do the same task with different modules. This places the choice of which to use back where it belongs, with the reader.
3) The book has a website (most do these days) where the code examples can be downloaded. http://py4sa.appspot.com/
Cons:
1) More time was spent on iPython than was really needed.
2) The case of a word is important in Python. For instance "import Sys" and "import sys" are two completely different things. There were quite a few occasions where a module name was used as the first word in the sentence and because of that it was capitalized.
3) There was once instance that I saw where a script example had no indentation at all. Trying to run it would have resulted in complete failure.
4) It would have been nice if the script examples were named instead of leaving it to the reader to figure it out based on the imports used in another example.
When all is said and done I think I would recommend the book to others if I knew that they had at least some background with Python. And I would highly recommend that they check the addendum and errata pages.Python for Unix and Linux System Administration Overview

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Adobe ColdFusion Review

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Adobe ColdFusion ReviewThe book's title says it all: what you'll find in this anthology is a well-organized and compelling compendium of top contributions from over 30 authors on some of the latest and greatest developments as well as classic fundamentals in ColdFusion. The chapters appeared first as articles in the FusionAuthority Quarterly Update (FAQU), a high-quality journal that some readers here will know has served the CF community both in print (until recently) and always online by subscription.
** Not just a rehash, and updated for CF9:
"The Anthology" (as I suspect it may come to be known) offers a great cross-section of FAQU articles, edited and re-purposed for book format and presented in well-organized sections (more on the valuable editing later). Of course the book form will be great for reaching those who maybe never knew of the magazine.
But even though I'd read most of the articles in their original journal issues, it's still a compelling reprisal of so many great ones. More important, many have been updated to reflect changes in CF since their original writing.
Indeed, from the first chapter on you'll find that many of the articles refer to recent development in ColdFusion 9, and of course many refer to CF 8 (which some are still only now moving to). Still, many topics in CF are foundational, such that what's true a couple (or even a few) years ago is just as valuable now.
** A broad range of intermediate/advanced topics:
A quick scan by prospective readers of the Amazon preview of the complete Table of Contents will show that this is far from a beginner book. While it does start with fundamentals, it's *not* "how to do CFOUTPUT/CFQUERY", nor how to define datasources, etc. Far from it! Such bare essentials of CF are *assumed*.
Instead the first several chapters focus on effective use of CFC features (and a later section covers OOP). This is not "the idiot's guide to CF"!
Still, CF is a rich language and platform, and even those with years of experience can get bogged down leveraging only a subset of its functionality. This book can help change that. The remaining chapters range from easy-to-understand things like the compelling features to create PDFs, images, etc to subsequent sections on broader/deeper topics related to tuning, integration, frameworks, user interface, and all-important development tools.
Any CF developer who's gotten past the bare essentials would do very well to soak up the vast array of tips and traps shared by so many developers here.
** Presented from many perspectives, but with a unifying hand:
Indeed, it's great to have such a variety of knowledge and experience presented here, since In the CF world there are many ways to achieve a goal and certainly different opinions as well.
That said, many such anthologies often suffer precisely *because* of having so many authors. That should be less of an issue here. I can attest to this as one of the contributors (as well as a regular back-page columnist in the FAQU journal.)
All the writing here (and in the journal) has been edited under the firm but gentle guiding hand of editor Judith Dinowitz as well as her husband Michael and their team of technical editors (and those of the publisher). This book seems a fitting capstone to all they've done under the guise of FusionAuthority, helping advance the skills of so many CFers. You can learn more about all the contributors to and editors of the book in bios offered after the table of contents, again viewable in the preview here. (And in the interest of disclosure, the contributors have no financial share in sales of this book, so I offer my review here sincerely and to help readers.)
I recommend the Anthology to any CFer interested in advancing their skills in many ways.Adobe ColdFusion Overview

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Linq Pocket Reference (Pocket Reference (O'Reilly)) Review

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Linq Pocket Reference (Pocket Reference (O'Reilly)) ReviewSo if you have already bought C#3.0 in a nutshell from the same author, you don't need this at all.Linq Pocket Reference (Pocket Reference (O'Reilly)) Overview

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Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML Review

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Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML ReviewBeing a web designer from the birth of the web, I am well aware of the browser inconsistencies and implementation issues of technologies caused by the lack of consensus. In my opinion, "Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML" is the most comprehensive book on web standards, because most books with a title containing "Web Standards" usually provide technology descriptions only that are often limited to the discussion of markup and style sheets, thus oversimplifying web standardization to writing valid HTML and valid CSS. In fact, there are far more web standards than the ones that speficy markup or styles, as described in the book in detail. Full standard compliance also covers proper serving, accurate settings for character encoding, valid news feeds, valid metadata annotations, valid XML, valid implementation of objects and scripts, as well as browser and resolution independence. Even the markup should meet additional criteria on accessibility, document structure, semantics, and interoperability. "Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML" covers the UTF-8 character encoding, the MIME types, HTML5 APIs, CSS3 modules, SVG, MathML, RDF, XML serializations, Semantic Web standards and machine-readable metadata, accessibility, and standardization concerns. The book has a dedicated chapter on validation, which is a fundamental task in website standardization, however, it is still missing from all the similar titles I've read so far.
The reader gets a wonderful mixture of theory and practical techniques. The book provides not only a review of web standards, but also a huge number of sample code to demonstrate coding from scratch. The code listings benefit from the hand coding expertise of the author. Moreover, the logical structure makes it easy to find any code, making the book ideal for daily use. The author compares web standards by category, and contrasts the competing ones.
The chapters on Semantic Web and web accessibility are extraordinary, and are better than many books written exclusively about these fields.
Undoubtedly, "Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML" is the best book on web standards. I can recommend it to any developer, researcher, and enthusiast interested in web development and especially standards-compliant development. Even web browser vendors could learn a lot from it.
Since the references are precise and the W3C specifications can be retrieved through permanent URLs, the book might also be an excellent university textbook and ideal for web design courses.
A web designer without a copy of "Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML" is like an IT pro without a computer. The importance of web standards is unquestionable, and web developers have to face the inevitable differences of rendering engines on a daily basis. The book helps web developers deal with these challenges.
In my opinion, "Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML" is the ultimate book of web standards and deserves the honour of being called the "Bible of web standardization."Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML Overview

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Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective (v. 1) Review

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Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective (v. 1) ReviewI purchased the book to help me out with the recurring task of quickly understanding the nature of unfamiliar large software projects. Kudos to Mr. Spinellis for tackling this subject, which is a large part of the everyday work of programming.
Unfortunately, I feel that this book was of very limited use to me as an experienced programmer, and suffers from a rather basic flaw (as a topic). The problem is that the art of code reading is really the intersection of a deep and/or broad understanding of programming, in conjunction with a deep and/or broad understanding of the tools and practices employed. One could well assert that this book is about *debugging* unfamiliar codebases as much as it is about *reading* them, since code comprehension is a component of code debugging. This is a rather apt analogy, since many have attempted to describe the black art of debugging just as Mr. Spinellis has attempted with reading, and with no definitive "must-have" coverage to date.
The result is that I felt the book rushed through important programming concepts that were either extremely basic (global variables, while loops, conditionals, blocks), or language-specific (C typedef, arrays, function pointers), or too deep for the book to address adequately (trees, stacks, queues, hashes, graphs). With regard to the latter, I found it odd to be reading a lot of text about basic data structures, when it seemed to me that I should be assumed to already have this knowledge if I wanted to read code that used it. And if I did NOT know about basic data structures, I should be reading a book about data structures rather than a book about code reading. Software patterns are also presented (though not by the name, I think). If I was to encounter a codebase that employed some programming concept I didn't understand fully (for example, red-black trees), then I would first go to a book on data structures -- not a book on code reading.
Following the sections on what I would consider mandatory prerequisite understanding are some brief chapters software engineering concepts (version control, build systems, project organization, packaging, system structures), which might be useful to a reader who had never worked on a large-scale project before.
After all of the coverage of what I would consider prerequisite knowledge, the penultimate chapter finally gets to the topic of tools and techniques for actually reading code. This chapter is in fact what I had hoped Mr. Spinellis would devote the book to. Unfortunately, most of the tools and techniques presented are very basic and quickly encountered by any programmer: regular expressions, the fact that many editors include browsing support, the grep utility, differencing tools, the idea that you could write your own tools, using the compiler to emit warnings and preprocessed code, that beautifiers exist, profiling and annotating printouts. And that's it, in about forty pages, followed by a chapter devoted to an example session.
On the whole, I think this book comes up short. If you have a few years of programming experience under your belt, then you've already encountered the basic tools and techniques presented. If someone resorted to this book to learn about a basic programming construct, then they could read my code, but I'd be nervous about letting them modify it, until they read more focused texts.
I'm rating this book at three stars because there are some good pieces here and the effort was laudable. In the end, though, I really don't think that anybody needs this book on their shelf.Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective (v. 1) Overview

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Storing and managing big data- NoSql, Hadoop and more: High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors Review

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Storing and managing big data- NoSql, Hadoop and more: High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors ReviewIt is a good collection of things you might want to know, but the "chapters" are mostly just pulled directly from Wikipedia and there is not much (if any) original content here. If they publish a "look inside" of the Table of Contents, just take a look at that and search for each topic in Wikipedia. It is roughly the same thing.Storing and managing big data- NoSql, Hadoop and more: High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors Overview

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Physically Based Rendering, Second Edition: From Theory To Implementation Review

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Physically Based Rendering, Second Edition: From Theory To Implementation ReviewAlthough it is not possible here, I am fairly sure this book deserves such rating. This is truly remarkable work and is likely to become a classic text in the field of computer graphics.
It is not a survey-type book, instead of trying to describe every possible method out there, the authors have concentrated on a few selected techniques, that are not only good (modern, fast, easy to implement, etc.), but also have some pedagogical merits and can serve as a gentle introduction to the world of ray tracing and digital image synthesis. Despite focusing on selected areas, the authors managed to squeeze here in an amazing amount of material. Among other topics, this book covers: subdivision surfaces, ray-primitive intersection acceleration techniques (3D DDA and kd-tree), color and radiometry, anti-aliasing, tone mapping, physically based reflection models, texture mapping (including texture anti-aliasing using ray differentials), area lights and HDR Image Based Lighting, volume scattering and much more.
A large part of the book has been devoted to the light transport and Monte Carlo techniques. One can find there an introduction to the theory of Monte Carlo estimation (including selected methods for reducing variance and computation time, like Russian roulette, multiple importance sampling or stratified sampling) and explanation of important light transport equations (rendering and transfer equations).
Finally the authors have described (and implemented) several solutions for the rendering equation: Whitted-style recursive ray tracing, direct illumination estimation, path tracing, irradiance caching and photon mapping.
However, it is not only the vastness of the material covered in this book, that causes this volume should be praised so highly. Perhaps, the style, in which this book has been written, is even more impressive. For each of the topics, the authors start with what is usually known as "dry math and theory", and then show how it is supposed to work as an algorithm (including its dirty details) and finally they explain how to turn this algorithm into C++ code. Each of those transitions concentrates on a small portion of the problem, so it is still easy to understand. Anyone, who had to turn a SIGGRAPH paper into something that works, will immediately recognize what kind of gem this book is - it actually shows how to do it!
This brilliant blend of theory and practice is one of its brightest spots, for learning the theory and math formulas is one thing, but writing a working, robust implementation is completely another.
Those, who prefer studying sources, will get source code of a very good, physically based, extensible ray tracer (called pbrt) with the best documentation one could ever imagine. Documentation that gives the rationale for almost every line of code. It shows not only how they did it, but also why they did it that way.
It is not the only book, that one will ever need - computer graphics is a vast topic - too big to be covered in a single volume, even as huge as this one. However, it is certainly one of the books that everyone interested in photorealistic rendering should buy. The price of this book is really low, if you think about it as of an excellent, first-rate computer graphics course.
Aimed at students, researchers and people interested in computer graphics algorithms, it is an indispensable book for anyone willing to write his own photorealistic (not necessarily physically based!) ray tracer and learn more about computer image synthesis.Physically Based Rendering, Second Edition: From Theory To Implementation Overview

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Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) Review

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Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) ReviewI have a confession to make. Over more than twenty years as a programmer I'd never really had my head around object-oriented programming. I started out using C and then tried PHP and Perl and treated both as purely procedural languages (indeed, one Perl guru looked at my code and said "you were a C programmer weren't you"; humbling). Java, JavaScript, C++ and even Objective C had their turn at getting me to convert but none took (though I do code JavaScript under sufferance) until Ruby. A few month ago I started using Rails and became hooked on it and the underlying language. My Rails and Ruby skills have progressed in leaps and bounds. I've already had a good read of "Programming Ruby" and "Agile Web Development with Rails" and enjoyed and learnt from both.
I also have to admit to loving the O'Reilly "Cookbook" series. Several, particularly the "Perl Cookbook", have pride of place on the bookshelf closest to my computer. So the "Ruby Cookbook" by Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson was eagerly awaited. The "Cookbook" series are designed to provide you with a plethora of code examples to guide you in writing your own code. I'm definitely a hands-on style of learner and the Cookbook series suits my style - I can start getting my hands dirty with complex problems knowing I have help to code my way of out of the tight spots. This one covers a wide range of tasks from simple, such as walking a directory tree or manipulating text and numbers, through to more complex such as working with AJAX in Ruby on Rails. If you have't previously come across a book in this style then each chapter is broken up into a number of 'recipes' with a problem, a solution and then discussion of the solution.
This sort of book lives and dies by two criteria - the quality of the code and the usefulness of the recipe selection. "Ruby Cookbook" wins on both. The topics covered are wide and leave little, if any, part of the language unexplained. They start with data and structures such as strings and hashes before moving on to code blocks, objects, classes and modules. There is then an intriguing chapter on reflection and metaprogramming that I am still puzzling through before the book moves on to more internet based topics such as XML, HTML, web and internet services and, of course, Rails. The book then proceeds with chapters on the necessary housekeeping of development such as testing, packaging and automating tasks with Rake before finishing with extending Ruby with other languages and system administration tasks. The code is well written; clear and well commented, easily understandable by a virtual newb like me. The discussion is fairly clear, seemingly concise while allowing you to understand the code and how it might be changed for particular purposes.
I'm not going to go into more details as to the contents but instead point you to the book's page at O'Reilly which includes a link to the contents, listnig all the recipes in the book, and two example chapters; Chapter 7 on code blocks and iteration and Chapter 15 devoted to Rails. Together they will give you a good feel for the style and contents of the book.
The book is well written and well edited. I've already tried over a dozen of the recipes and haven't found a single code error, so my faith in the other 300 or so has risen considerably. The discussion that accompanies each recipe is a marvelous way of learning just that little bit more about the language. I found them quite good, though the odd one could do with further explanation if the book is to stand on its own - for example the discussion accompanying the recipe to iterate over a hash was not perfectly clear on the difference between Hash#each and Hash#each_pair.
At more than 800 pages this is a large and extensive volume, though the price may make you wince. Usually programming books this large have at least part of their size dedicated to something I refer to as pseudo-padding, some sort of reference or simple language explanation - this one has neither, all of it is devoted to the recipes.
With Ruby use, thanks in no part to the popularity of Rails, growing by leaps and bounds I'm sure this volume will be a well deserved bestseller. I give it four stars and recommend it to all but the most expert Ruby programmers. For beginners who, like me, appreciate hands on learning it is a must.Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) Overview

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