Real World Research Skills: An Introduction to Factual, International, Judicial, Legislative, and Regulatory Research (Research Skills Series) Review

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Real World Research Skills: An Introduction to Factual, International, Judicial, Legislative, and Regulatory Research (Research Skills Series) ReviewJuly, 2009: The Second Edition (expanded and new lower price) is available on Amazon.
Real World Research Skills, Second Edition: An Introduction to Factual, International, Judicial, Legislative, and Regulatory Research (softcover)
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"Peggy Garvin is the 'go-to' Washington expert on how to effectively locate, evaluate and leverage information from federal and state government websites. If you buy one book this year to assist you in researching on the web, make it this one!"
-- Sabrina I. Pacifici, Founder, Editor, Publisher, [...] and Author of the blog on law and technology news, [...], Washington, DC"Real World Research Skills helps web searchers target their research to some of the most reliable information sources -- government statistics, reports and analysis. It's a great pathfinder through the thickets of federal and state government resources, written in a format that makes it an essential desk book for the serious researcher."
-- Mary Ellen Bates, Bates Information Services Inc."This is an excellent basic resource for anyone in need of government information. It's very well-organized, with a good Scope note that clearly lays out the book's objectives. It includes important basics - how to think before you begin your research; how to work on unfamiliar topics; what to search and how to evaluate the results - which are not always included in books of this type. There's good advice on using advanced search options, understanding Boolean logic, and making a FOIA request, as well as a reminder that not everything is available online and print sources are still important. The layout is clear; charts and boxes make the information easy to find and use. The sections on state and international information are brief, but contain all the essentials.
Though this book is aimed at those needing 'basic advice and techniques,' even experienced researchers can find a new resource or a bit of helpful advice. It will prove useful for information professionals, librarians, and anyone who needs to access government information."
-- Kee Malesky, NPR Reference Library

"Ms. Garvin's Real World Research Skills is a real find. As a professional researcher and professor, I found her book to be clear, concise, and supremely easy to use. Her examples of how to use the Internet to scour for accurate information on governmental sources are true gems. This handy little book will enhance the research skills of even old pros."
-- Alphonse Vinh, Adjunct Professor, School of Library & Information Science, The Catholic University of America"This gem will prove its worth in gold for those researching government topics."
-- Deborah Liptak, [...]"While Real World Research Skills is a treasure trove of specific repositories and sites for information, of particular interest to me are the descriptions of the thought processes needed to obtain the information necessary for a research project. Also valuable is the discussion of the mindset needed when talking to an individual source, e.g., qualifying them as being a legitimate source, and making sure the researcher has a working knowledge of the issues so the source doesn't have to give a basic education. A valuable tool for high school and college students."
-- Davis Scott, Chicago, ILReal World Research Skills: An Introduction to Factual, International, Judicial, Legislative, and Regulatory Research (Research Skills Series) Overview

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Building Websites with Joomla A step by step tutorial to getting your Joomla CMS website up fast Review

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Building Websites with Joomla A step by step tutorial to getting your Joomla CMS website up fast ReviewMy hope was that the book would do what the Editorial Review said i.e. walk you through the creation of your own website. It does not. It does walk you one by one through every possible menu item etc, although again not in a particularly useful order. As others have said, most of what is there is already available in the online help. It would have been much better to have gone though the process of building a site to show the user all of the steps involved from planning to implementing to refining...
My other major complaint is one of the legibility of the screenshots - of which there are very many. They are presented at a size where it is very difficult to read the text on them, although this is important to understanding the book.
There are other brief niggles, the language is strange in some portions, and there is one point where the author refers the user to a very good online tutorial in German (can't really think why a professional editor would let that get through.)
Lastly, the price is rather high for a computer book - maybe it would be better value if a real example based tutorial were added.Building Websites with Joomla A step by step tutorial to getting your Joomla CMS website up fast Overview

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Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace (Information Revolution and Global Politics) Review

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Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace (Information Revolution and Global Politics) ReviewSmartly organized and edited, Access Controlled is essential reading for anyone interested in studying the methods governments are using globally to stifle online expression and dissent. There is simply no other resource out there like this; it should be required reading in every cyberlaw or information policy program.
The book, which is a project of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), is divided into two parts. Part 1 of the book includes six chapters on "Theory and Analysis." They are terrifically informative essays. The beefy second part of the book provides a whopping 480 pages(!) of detailed regional and country-by-country overviews of the global state of online speech controls and discuss the long-term ramifications of increasing government meddling with online networks.
The book offers a useful taxonomy to illustrate the three general types of speech and information controls that states are deploying today. Throughout the book, various authors document the increasing movement away from "first generation controls," which are epitomized by "Great Firewall of China"-like filtering methods, and toward second- and third-generation controls, which are more refined and difficult to monitor.
The individual authors seem to adopt a somewhat gloomy outlook toward the long-term prospects for "technologies of freedom" relative to "technologies of control." But I think it's vital to put things in some historical context in this regard. It's important to recall that, as a communications medium, the Net is still quite young. So, is the Net really more susceptible to State control and manipulation than previous communications technologies and platforms? I'm not so sure, although it's hard to find a metric to compare them in an analytically rigorous fashion. It's certainly true that the State has access to more data about its citizens than in the past, but it's also true that we have more information about the State than ever before, too! And, again, we also have access to more of those technologies of freedom than ever before to at least try to fight back. Compare, for example, the plight of a dissident in a Cold War-era Eastern Bloc communist state to a dissident in China or Iran today. Which one had a better chance of getting their words (or audio and video) out to the local or global community?
Despite those small quibbles, Access Controlled is an indispensable resource that belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who covers information technology policy and wants to better understand global Internet regualtion. Highly recommended. [You can find my complete review at the Technology Liberation Front Blog]Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace (Information Revolution and Global Politics) Overview

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Internet Research - Illustrated (Illustrated (Thompson Learning)) Review

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Internet Research - Illustrated (Illustrated (Thompson Learning)) ReviewThe book is very low on information.
If you've used a computer for at least 2 years this will teach you absolutely nothing.
$20 for a paperback book that is thinner than a quarter.
Bought this for a class,
Be better off mooching off someone else or maybe just winging to topicInternet Research - Illustrated (Illustrated (Thompson Learning)) Overview

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J2EE Platform Web Services Review

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J2EE Platform Web Services ReviewThis is clearly not a how-to book for the programmer tasked with the creation of a simple web service that needs to be up within a couple days. There are no long pages of code reprints or on-liner "Hello-world". No, this book is better seen as a concentrate of experience from people involved in designing large scale enterprise class services. Reading this book is akin to peeking into their notes at the end of the project: business cases, use cases, technology overviews and systems diagrams are the type of material the author has assembled.
The book covers Web Services from the perspective of Sun's architecture, tools and technologies in a vendor neutral fashion. Considering the title, this should not be a surprise for anyone. After a review of the notion of services as well as the enabling technologies (XML, UDDI, SOAP, WSDL, ebXML, Service Registries), the author describes some best practices and reference designs that were successful on some large scale projects mixing services, legacy systems and the internet.
The book will particularly appeal to the managers who want to understand why web services should be on their radar screens, and the architects who will design the solutions. I particularly enjoyed the diagrams which give a very good high level view of the problems at hand, as well as list of references at the end of each section. These are usually a good addition to the book's content for people wanting to dig deeper. Altogether this is the type of book I like, where the author clearly exposes the forces and risks of each proposed solution.J2EE Platform Web Services Overview

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PHP Black Book: Comprehensive Problem Solver (Black Book (Paraglyph Press)) Review

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PHP Black Book: Comprehensive Problem Solver (Black Book (Paraglyph Press)) ReviewI read one of the authors articles about PHP and decided
to use PHP instead of ASP. I also decided to buy any book he wrote as the articles are so good. A few chapters on
HTML from another book were enough to start building web pages then I started reading the PHP Black Book. Each chapter seems to be complete so I can pick my way through the chapters I need and skip the ones I do not need. You only need about 5 of the 20 chapters to build a web site with a database and forms.
Windows is covered so I do not need to learn Unix.
MySQL is a useful database that has a whole chapter. I did not know you could use open source software like MySQL on Windows until I read that chapter. The database does what I want so I will skip the chapter on other databases.
Everybody says I need this and that for my web site. All the thises and thats are in the book. He explains SQL, XML, LDAP, IMAP, and and how to draw graphics straight from a web page script. I will use that to make my database results in to pictures.PHP Black Book: Comprehensive Problem Solver (Black Book (Paraglyph Press)) Overview

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Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance Review

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Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance ReviewReading Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance is like attending a five-day conference on web accessibility, featuring almost every master of the subject now writing in English. The authors include a passionate user advocate who helps the W3C craft its internationally recognized accessibility standards; a web developer who guided Macromedia in its efforts to bring accessibility to Flash; and the accessibility expert who lent her name to the leading web service that tests for accessible site development.
The book is deep and vast. It covers aspects of accessibility you might not even have known were possible. There's big-picture stuff, and hands-on, dirty code. There are smart, insightful tips on working with users, and there is detailed information about complying with accessibility laws. It's a concept book and a code book, a book filled with detailed guidelines, and also one that encourages you to think for yourself as you interpret those guidelines.
I bought the first edition of this book and have given it to clients and colleagues. The new edition is even more useful. If you want your site to be accessible, you need this book.Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance 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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Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, 2nd Edition Review

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Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, 2nd Edition ReviewI have just started learning some PHP & MySQL development using "PHP & MySQL Web Development" published by Sams and "Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL" from O'Reilly. Prospective readers might be wondering the difference between the two in deciding which one to buy, so I hope to shed some light on the issue.
Sams: The Welling and Thomson book is more "hands-on" in that it takes the reader step-by-step in developing an e-commerce website. The chapters are organized in a goal-oriented manner: PHP, MySQL, the basics of e-commerce, security, and design of the site.
O'Reilly: The Williams and Lane book is structured in a similar way by showing readers PHP and then MySQL. Examples to reinforce concepts are also provided. While the O'Reilly book also tries to take the reader in developing an e-commerce site, it is a bit more theoretical. Also, there are some differences in focus: the O'Reilly book has a section on using JavaScript while the Sams book has a final chapter on creating PDF files using PHP.
If I had to choose just one book, I would go with the Sams book due to its more gentle learning curve. However, I believe that the O'Reilly book is no slouch, and I will probably come to appreciate it more once I gain more experience in PHP and MySQL development.
One last word about my programming background: I knew a bit of Perl, Java, HTML, and JavaScript before tackling PHP and MySQL. I consider myself to be an "advanced beginner" (an oxymoron, of course). To get the most out of these two books, you should know HTML well enough to read it (you should at least recognize some tags) and it would definitely be helpful if you have some programming experience. You could very well make PHP your first programming language, but I would advise against it. Start with something like Perl (whose syntax is very similar to PHP's).
I highly recommend both books to prospective PHP and MySQL developers who are willing to spend some time and effort.Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, 2nd Edition Overview

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RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity Review

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RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity ReviewAs is common with O'Reilly's Cookbooks, the style of this book is very terse and to the point. There is not much handholding. The intended audience seems to be system architects who already know what they are doing, but who need to know what they should be aiming for when they want to be RESTful. The "recipes" in this Cookbook are more like Best Practices, since figuring out how to implement them is left as an excercise for the reader.
Compared to my previous readings on REST, this book strongly emphasizes the use of consistent XML formats. For me, this was the most important lesson in the book. It is not enough to just use PUT and DELETE: in order to really think in terms of "representations," you need to design meaningful XML. Along these lines, Allamaraju's discussion of the Atom protocol is particularly interesting.RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity Overview

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Learning PHP 5 Review

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Learning PHP 5 ReviewFrom the title I would have expected that the book spend all of it's slim 300 page frame on a soup to nuts language introduction. For the first six chapters it looks that way as it rolls through language basics, variables, conditionals, arrays, etc. But then it veers into the practical for the rest of the book and covers topics such as database access through Pear DB and the use of XML.
There is a lot to like about this book. The chapters are short, focused and practical. And I have no issues recommending the book on a technical level. Especially the database section which advocates simple safe SQL practices. In particular you should follow the advice on page 126 about using the '?' operator in your SQL queries.
There isn't much new for PHP 4 programmers looking to learn about PHP 5. In fact there is little or no emphasis placed on teaching you to write classes. The only information about classes is about their consumption. This is definitely not a book for the experienced PHP developer, but for a beginner this is one of the best.Learning PHP 5 Overview

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The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook: A Guide for the Serious Searcher Review

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The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook: A Guide for the Serious Searcher ReviewRand Hock does it again. This thoroughly updated version (I've had the previous two) is a terrific start to using the web as a research tool. From portals to search engines to listservs to a/v file sources, Hock does a masterful job of not only pointing you in the right direction, but giving you the context for the search so that you can feel more comfortable the next time.The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook: A Guide for the Serious Searcher Overview

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