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The Unified Software Development Process Review

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The Unified Software Development Process ReviewAfter mastering the Unified Modeling Language, it's a natural progression to apply UML in a documented and time-tested process. That's what the creators of UML set out to describe in this third book of the UML-Big-Three, "The Unified Software Development Process."
Getting through this book will be challenging, though. You'll be thirsty not for more material, but a glass of water by the time you're done. It is bone-dry.
The Unified process has five workflows (requirements, analysis, design, build, test) that repeat within four phases (inception, elaboration, construction, transition). There are unfortunately huge chapters devoted to each of the workflows and each of the phases separately, with only a smaller amount of material focusing on how the process is actually done, which is each workflow occuring in the context of each phase. As a result, the book seems a lot bigger than it needs to be. (I'm not panning the process, though, which does indeed work, just the presentation.)
There's a running example through the text of building an automated teller application. While running examples help unify ideas, they show a narrow view of how the process can work in practice. In applying the process to my projects, it's difficult to translate such a financial application to my work (which is scientific and library-based in nature). I'd like to see a lot more examples that give alternative viewpoints in addition to the running example that demonstrates the process as a whole.
Unlike the other two books of the Big-Three, the diagrams in this one are the best. They're clean, consistent, and easy to read, and there are a lot of them. It's professionally typeset and each page is pretty.
What we need is a book similar to Fowler's "UML Distilled" called "Unified Process Distilled." The process is great---it just shouldn't take 500 pages to describe it.The Unified Software Development Process 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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Web Component Development with Zope 3 Review

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Web Component Development with Zope 3 ReviewEven now with Zope 3 riding into the sunset and newer efforts like Grok and Bluebream taking hold this book mostly remains relevant. Plone, an already well established system for content management, uses many of the ideas explained in this book in its core. The book covers the foundation of the ZCA (Zope Component Architecture) which are essentially a system of patterns developers use. In short, any developer writing an app using a framework in the Zope ecosystem should consider this book.Web Component Development with Zope 3 Overview

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

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DevOps: High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors ReviewThis "book" is really just a bunch of copy-and-pasted articles from Wikipedia strung together, complete with the original pictures, references, 'see also's, etc. I don't mean that they followed the Wikipedia text, I mean it's a *literal* copy and paste. Look up the chapter titles, and then search those phrases on Wikipedia. I've just saved you the purchase price.
Calling this a bad book is insulting to people that actually take the time out of their day to write poorly. This book is a copyright violation, a tragedy to literature, and somehow, a human rights offense.DevOps: High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors Overview

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Web Content Management Systems (WCMS): High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors Review

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Web Content Management Systems (WCMS): High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors ReviewThe opening chapter is a verbatim copy of the main Wikipedia page on "web content management systems". Verbatim as in identical, down to the same formatting.
The rest of the book follows suit, including the tables that list different management systems. All direct from Wikipedia.
The book itself says as much on its very first page:
"Topic relevant selected content from the highest rated entries, typeset, printed and shipped.
Combine the advantages of up-to-date and in-depth knowledge with the convenience of printed books.
...
The content within this book was generated collaboratively by volunteers. Please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate, or reliable information. Some information in this book may be misleading or simply wrong. The publisher does not guarantee the validity of information found here."
There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth so-to-speak.
Now I see value in the idea of taking up-to-date information (Wikipedia), slapping it into a typesetting program and printing it out for people. Some like the tactile feel of flipping the pages--I get that.
My beef with this book is that the disclaimer I have copied for you does not appear anywhere in their description on Amazon. I think this is tremendously misleading. If I knew upfront that the book is just a Wikipedia re-print I would have never purchased it.
For example, here is a snippet of the book description on Amazon:
"This book explains in-depth the real drivers and workings of Web Content Management Systems (WCMS). It reduces the risk of your technology, time and resources investment decisions by enabling you to compare your understanding of Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) with the objectivity of experienced professionals."
Experienced professionals?? Where??!
"Some information in this book may be misleading or simply wrong. The publisher does not guarantee the validity of information found here."
How do I reconcile these two quotes? If I can't trust the content in the book, how does it reduce my risk? Quite the opposite.
If you like your Wikipedia in print format, you might consider buying this book. Otherwise, continue your search. These are not the droids you're looking for.Web Content Management Systems (WCMS): 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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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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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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Java Soa Cookbook Review

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Java Soa Cookbook ReviewThis book is intended for experienced Java developers and architects who need to know the details of SOA development with the Java programming language and associated technologies. It is not a very good big picture book on SOA. For that I recommend Service Oriented Architecture with Java: Using SOA and web services to build powerful Java applications, which was published in 2008, so it is still current in its approach.
To get the most out of this book the author assumes specifically that you are familiar with Java SE 5 or 6, servlets, JSP Enterprise Edition containers such as Glassfish, Enterprise JavaBeans, as well as JDBC, JNDI, EARs and WARs, and XML. In short, the author assumes that you have been involved in enterprise development using the Java technologies and APIs mentioned. If you have used web services but not recently, this book does help you get your feet back in the water. It is those that are complete novices that will get truly lost.
Parts of the book address strategy, design, and patterns, but largely it is a book that stays at a low level. A really good book on SOA design patterns is SOA Design Patterns (The Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl). The author also talks about SOA and Ruby, Python, and .NET. However, it is not necessary to have a background in these languages since Java is specifically the language and environment that the author addresses.
Currently, the table of contents is not included in the product description, so I include that next:
Part 1: SOA Fundamentals
Chapter 1. Introduction to SOA
Chapter 2. XML Schema and the SOA Data Model
Chapter 3. Working with XML and Java
Part 2: Web Services
Chapter 4. Getting Started
Chapter 5. Web Services with SAAJ
Chapter 6. Creating Web Service Applications with JAX-WS
Chapter 7. Providing SOAP-Based Web Services
Chapter 8. RESTful Web Services
Part 3: Business Processes
Chapter 9. Service Orchestrations with BPEL
Chapter 10. Advanced Orchestrations with BPEL
Chapter 11. SOA Governance
Part 4: Interoperability and Quality of Service
Chapter 12. Web Service Interoperability
Chapter 13. Quality of Service
Chapter 14. Enterprise Service Bus
I would say that between this book and the other two that I mentioned, you should have a pretty good starting point on SOA/Java reading material.Java Soa Cookbook 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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Practical Eclipse Rich Client Platform Projects (Expert's Voice in Open Source) Review

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Practical Eclipse Rich Client Platform Projects (Expert's Voice in Open Source) ReviewI've found few RCP or SWT books that are worth much.
ERCP Projects is the perfect kind of book for Java developers who are bootstrapping into RCP work. It doesn't presume a lot of knowledge but isn't dumbed down to the point of inanity. Since the book is based around projects in a cookbook style, it gives great bits of code examples which work as starting points.
This is the kind of book which perfectly compliments the sort of material you can find in the Help, the API and on Google but doesn't replicate that information. The only complaint I have is not with the book itself but with buying it through Amazon for the Kindle. Since I work as a software developer it is common for others to ask if I have any information about some aspect of development. I can't lend the Kindle copy in any fashion.
Even that might be acceptable if I could cut & paste code snippets but the freakin' Amazon desktop book reader will not allow it. Bogus.
In the future I'll buy PDFs from individual publishers or buy paper copies. This one, for example, is directly available from Apress as a PDF book.
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C# 4.0 in a Nutshell: The Definitive Reference Review

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C# 4.0 in a Nutshell: The Definitive Reference ReviewThis book is great. It's no nonsense approach to covering the C# 4.0 language is like a breath of fresh air. It is clean, to the point, and thorough. It makes finding a topic, and learning it, or getting a refresher, a very fast process.
This new version includes new chapters on parallel programming (including PLINQ), and dynamic programming, and new sections on code contracts and COM interoperability.
The authors have a great writing style which makes the book a very enjoyable read. You can read this cover to cover, or use it as a very handy reference. You won't find any case studies, or made up scenarios, to help the authors describe the technology. They stick to writing about the technology, which is nice.
One of my favorite features of the book is the way the authors do their diagramming. They include a lot of diagrams that give a visual representation of the feature they are describing. The diagrams really help with getting a quick understanding of the overall picture of the topic. The authors also demonstrate with code that is always easy to understand and within the scope of the topic at hand. You don't have 2 pages of code with 3 lines highlighted.
Another part of this book I love is the way the authors deliver the code samples using LINQPad. I own the full auto completion version of LINQPad and it rocks. I have been using it since its first release and it has become my favorite tool when working with databases.
My only complaint about the book is the construction. The gluing job they did is horrible. It has big clumps of glue embedded in the pages which cause the binder to really bend. It will probably fall apart within a month of heavy use. I won't ding the book for that. It is a publisher issue, not an author issue.
All in all I highly recommend this book. It belongs on the shelf of any serious developer.
Review Update-
The editor of C# 4.0 in a Nutshell Book read my blog and suggested I contact O'Reilly Media for a new copy since my binder was a mess.
They made good on the request for a new copy of the C# 4.0 in a Nutshell Book and I received it today with the binder in perfect condition. No glue blobs in between any pages. Hats off to O'Reilly Media!!!!!
C# 4.0 in a Nutshell: The Definitive Reference Overview

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Gray Hat Hacking The Ethical Hackers Handbook, 3rd Edition Review

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Gray Hat Hacking The Ethical Hackers Handbook, 3rd Edition ReviewCritical reviews are my least favorite aspect of my Amazon experience, but I believe readers expect me to be honest with them. Gray Hat Hacking, 3rd Ed (GHH3E) has a lot of potential, but it needs a reboot and a ruthless editor. I read and reviewed the original edition 6 1/2 years ago but skipped the 2nd Ed. This 3rd Ed (published in Jan 2011) features several exceptionally talented authors (such as Allen Harper and Chris Eagle), so my expectations remained high. Unfortunately, after finishing the book I had collected a pile of notes that I will try to transform into constructive commentary for a 4th Ed, which I would enjoy seeing!
The GHH team needs to revisit first principles and decide just what it is trying to accomplish. I recommend the authors ditch the first three chapters, or radically concentrate on the ethical disclosure debate. The rest of the so-called legal material reads like a brain dump, almost like a blog post that never finishes. In some cases the authors of the sections stray from their topic, such as the "Vendors Paying More Attention" section on p 71. Cut it out! Be ruthless! Similarly, the section on social engineering (ch 4) needs a major overhaul if it is to survive into the next edition.
Other chapters have issues. Ch 7, on BackTrack, is basically just installation instructions. Ch 17 only devotes 17 pages to Web app security; either remove it or add substantially to the material. Ch 18 is supposed to be about VoIP, but it's mainly a discussion of the VoIPER tool. Ch 19 is supposed to be about SCADA attacks, but it's really just talk of the Autodafe and TFTPFuzz tools. In ch 28, the author doesn't explain how Nepenthes acquires a malware sample, besides letting it run on a cable network for a few weeks. Having deployed Nepenthes I know how it works, but I expect a reader who wants to learn about Nepenthes would want to understand it based on the text he or she bought.
The organization of the book needs an overhaul too. It seems to promote a progress of less complicated to more complicated, but at this point it needs to be reconstructed in a fourth edition. Why does Part IV, Vulnerability Analysis, follow Part III, Exploiting? Doesn't exploiting require doing vulnerability analysis? In other cases, material seems redundant. Ch 28 and ch 29 cover similar material but are likely by different authors; I recommend combining them and dropping duplicate material.
For me, some of the chapters are on the right track and could lead the fourth edition to a more solid foundation. I recommend expanding Ch 16 (featuring nice coverage of a .pdf exploit). I would really like to see a chapter or more on Javascript for malicious purposes. Overall, I think the GHH team could be very successful if they looked for topics not covered in other books, and addressed those issues in GHH4E. Why try to summarize coding in C, assembly, Python, etc., into a chapter, when other subjects (like Javascript for the hacker/analyst) aren't really explained in any other book? Similarly, it's probably not necessary to cover social engineering, BackTrack, or Metasploit now that individual books are devoted to those concepts.
There's a lot of good technical information in GHH3E, but I don't see myself recommending it to analysts in a CIRT or similar group. I think if the book rebooted with a focus on specialized material not found elsewhere, leveraging the talents of people like Harper and Allen, GHH4E would be THE book to buy on those topics.Gray Hat Hacking The Ethical Hackers Handbook, 3rd Edition Overview

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