5 comments about Developing Windows NT Device Drivers: A Programmer's Handbook (Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology Series).

1. I'm a high school intern and I knew nothing about drivers (other than installing them) 3 months ago. Now I have completed 2, an ISA and Parallel port driver. This book is really great for people new to the DDK and need a good foundation. The examples are clear, and the pace of the book is pretty slow (but steady). Once you get past the first 9-10 chapters you can pretty much skim for parts you need. The tips are especially helpful, as to why C++ OOP isn't suitable, to why 2 computers are absolutely necessary. Even if you plan on making WDM drivers, this book will be helpful. Oney's WDM book is really useless for beginners, and the DDK almost has no redeeming value, other than being very very heavy (oh, wait thats not good either). The net is surprisingly lacking of driver programming pages. Get this book.



2. No good for windows 2000 or XP, otherwise very good and informative. Code available from authors sites, but buggy (on XP anyway). Shame it's out of date, if a legacy driver will do you then this book is very good.



3. I received the book on time.Only request to Amazon is to provide tracking option for the shipped item even if the product is not from their store. If they can provide that customer can have some kind of relaxation.
   
   Thank you for the service.



4. This book gives near complete coverage of developing Windows NT drivers and towards the end of the book covers Windows 2000 driver development. A beginning driver developer, I found this book somewhat hard to follow, as it reads very much like a product manual. It does however relay alot of valuable information. I found this book The Windows 2000 Device Driver Book: A Guide for Programmers (2nd Edition) to be much easier to follow.



5. Lets face it, Microsoft could not sell a dieing man a glass of water. Reading the wdk docs is the most jumbled pile of words aimed at nice short web pages than getting ideas across. This book was written in the NT 4 era and looks on Win2k as the future, but Windows driver writing is complex enough and has not changed in its base ideas so that with this book, along with the wdk you can write a driver! Others have noted that the book skips over exciting things like writing a file system, but nobody is going to ask you to write a file system but a nice filter driver is still a possibility. It gives the basic view of drivers and the relationship of the objects needed to build one. You will have to read the book, then use the knowledge to unravel the wdk to get the changes and extra commands since added to drivers for valid up to date work, but the data presented is well written and builds you knowledge in layers. Couple this book with "Advanced Windows Debugging" and you could build a career, if the clowns had not shipped the jobs overseas. The trick with drivers is learning the layout without falling asleep, this book does a much better job than most, but as usual, you will probably need all the books you can get to actually write a comercial quality driver, even on a simple level and driver writing still pays fantastic, so get on with it!

No comments about Introduction to Operating Systems and Networks.

5 comments about Delphi COM Programming.

1. This book has already added several nuclear warheads to my programming arsenal. It explained many concepts I have struggled with in a very explicit manner. There is a severe problem with this book however. I have already found errors in the code examples that have hindered my learning. The top code example on page 24, and on page 26 are good examples. On page 24, TObject was not typecasted as a TFormattedInteger and thus could not be casted "AS" an IFormattedNumber. It generated the compiler error described on page 25 even though I had a GUID declared in the IFormattedNumber interface. On page 26, MyInteger is incorrectly declared as a IFormattedInteger, even though no such Interface is declared in any of his other examples. I do not want to belittle this excellent book however. I just simply cannot give a book with these types of errors 5 stars when the writer obviously did not test every example he presents. It is definately still worth buying. I even suggest buying this in tandem with "Delphi4 Unleashed" by Charley Calvert because that book explains COM/Interfaces a little differently and can help you get the concepts faster by filling in some of the gaps. Hope this helps. Curtis S. Lead Programmer/Analyst Insurance Technologies Corp.



2. Um livro importantíssimo para aqueles que querem utilizar todas as potencialidades da programação baseada em COM/DCOM. A introdução ao ADO é bem feita, e com um exemplo muito prático e elucidativo. Apesar dos poucos erros em alguns códigos, o livro é muito bem escrito, sintético e didático. Eu o recomendo. Programadores em Delphi do Brasil, leiam este livro!



3. Just a quick note to say this is a super book. A great, lucid introduction to COM. The section on Istreams and structured files was super useful. If you are ever going to use COM at all, this book is a must



4. I think this book is not worth buying, because there are too many features that was just left off by the author, using always the same excuse: "Well, this feature is not commonly used, so I won't disscuss it any further in this book". Besides that, it gives you a big averall coverage of COM. If you want to go to the inners of COM, this book is not for you. It was not for me.



5. I thought this book gives the programmer all of the tools to write COM/DCOM apps. It is a must if you are planning to go with COM/Delphi. I still think that COM is safer than .NET at the present time. The only drawback with the book is that there is no way to contact the author and the code for the book cannot be downloaded from the web site shown on the back cover.

5 comments about COM and .NET Component Services (O'Reilly Windows).

1. This is one of the best technical books, I have read. It assumes knowledge of COM and object-oriented technologies. The clarity in the areas COM+ interception, threading, security, transaction handling is exceptional.



2. I have read several books now on COM+ and MTS before it, and I have never quite understood how everything ties together and works together. So I have been stumbling in the dark on this for years. My components work, but I never knew if they worked optimally.

   This book changed all that. Finally, it all makes sense. This is by far the best book on this subject that I have read. Every piece of COM+ is explained clearly and with enough detail to get the point across without bogging down the reader. It even answered some difficult mysteries for me such as "Why is the JITA checkbox greyed out for my transactional components?" I couldn't even find an answer for that one on the newsgroups.

   The .NET coverage is brief and was probably an afterthought (in that it appears in a chapter at the end rather than integrated throughout the book), but it is enough to get started. I am looking forward to a second edition of this book that focuses on .NET and has all the code examples in C#. Juval, please write that!




3. The book was in excellent condition and looks like new. Although the shipping was 2 days late but based on the book condition its worth waiting.
   I can rate A++.



4. Don't get me wrong!! It's a great book, for understanding COM+ and use it, without all the headache of learning "why".
   But i think many people would believe is a good about .NET and how to use COM Services, but you will get only a few pages about implementing both technologies together.
   But, like i've said, it's a good book about COM Services.



5. Don't worry about the slight .Net presence in the book; there is no "new generation" of COM+ in .Net, .Net simply includes COM+ (of course there is a new name for it: Enterprise Services, but this is just pure marketing matter)!
   I haven't finished the book yet, but I can say Juval found the right way in explaining most of the COM+ features and why are they indispensable in building enterprise apps by focusing on the business logic and not on the plumbing (object pooling for supporting scalability, transaction management, synchronization etc). The writing style is clear, the content is exhaustive enough for covering all the aspects of COM+/.Net Enterprise Services and, the last but not the least, the book has less than 400 pages.
   Other recommended books about COM+:
   -Transactional COM+, by Tim Ewald: if you need to know more COM+ internals about contexts, apartments etc.
   -Programming Distributed Apps with COM+ and VB6, by Ted Pattison: excellent lecture, easy and explains very well the "why"s.
   - Visual Basic and COM+ Programming: by Peishu Li. Very similar style with Juval's book, except that the code is VB instead of C++.

5 comments about LINUX & UNIX Shell Programming.

1. Well. I normally don't review books.

   But this one is a constant on my bookshelf when I do any shell programming and I find it very useful.

   It has lots of examples, is well organised and Mr. Tansley's way of putting things make it a pleasant read.

   I highly recommend this book.




2. I own no less than ten books on shell programming and this one has helped me more than the rest combined. The author has the talent for condescending to my level to explain concepts that I have had a great deal of trouble understanding. I was able to write a menu driven script to simplify the loading and unloading of a tape library after reading just two chapters from the middle of the book. I even created my first shell function in the process. Yes there are a few typos. I'm not sure why some of the more sophisticated reviewers had a problem with this. I still found the book very useful and was able to catch the intended meaning in spite of the typos. If you are a genius this book may not be for you. If you are trying to learn how to write scripts quickly I highly recommend it. I would have traded all my other scripting books for this one had I known how useful it is.



3. I don't think this is a good book. I have compared this book with other shell programming books and and found this book is not good at all. So when I need to refer a shell script book I would not use this one. Besieds, the author is really careless, this book contains a lot of errors.
   when I wrote this review, I found there are altogether 14 reviews already. Seems some of the reviewers had the same feeling toward this book as me.



4. First, it's clear that often a reviewer will give a good book a bad rating because they don't understand the material of the book and are frustrated. I want to assure you that I am NOT one of those people. I am frustrated for far different reasons.
   
   I bought this book because it seemed to cover many topics which are just obscure enough that other shell programming books for beginners leave them out. I'm not a beginniner, but I'm not an expert, and simply want to read about some commands I'm not already familiar with to broaden my horizons.
   
   However, I do have enough experience to soon realize that the book had far too many errors to be useful. These aren't just typos either. For example, on page 66 the author states, "To run a list of commands in the current shell, seperate each command with a command seperator, and enclose the list with round brackets." and then goes on to give an example:
   
   $ comet month_end || (echo "Hello, guess what! Comet did not work"|mail dave; exit)
   
   Well, if one didn't know better, one might actually believe this was correct. Of course, he also states that, "To run...in the subshell...use {} instead of ()." and then I quote:
   
   The general format is:
   {command1; command2;..)
   
   (Yes, that is his unmatched parenthesis, not mine.) The typo is rather harmless, but giving the exact opposite meaning to something, than it actually has is not. I quickly lost my confidence in the accuracy of the book, which makes it virtually useless as a reference manual. It may still be useful to get the general idea of a command, but I wouldn't dare copy the examples in the book without reading the man pages first to make sure they are correct.
   
   There seems to be a typo on every page, often two or three, the index is also awful, and some of the examples are dirt-dumb. Here is an example from the section on the null statement (:):
   
   if [ "`ls -A $DIRECTORY`" = "" ]
   then
   echo "$DIRECTORY is indeed empty"
   else : # do nothing
   fi
   
   I'm sure this is a very useful, non-trivial example of the null statement...the profoundness just hasn't sunken in yet.
   
   In sum, I believe that the editor position at Addison-Wesley is just a figurehead job, and that those 1000 monkeys trying to type Hamlet produced this as one of their early drafts.



5. Like many other reviewers, I have found numerous typos, oddly worded sentences, saying one thing in prose and then writing the opposite in code, and other unprofessional, but understandable errors in the text.
   
   What I can't forgive are the conceptual errors which really begin appearing in the sections on shell programming. For instance, to demonstrate an until loop, he presents the following script (paraphrased here:)
   
   IS_ROOT=`who | grep root`
   until [ $IS_ROOT ]
   do
   sleep 5
   done
   echo "ROOT IS LOGGED ON"
   
   which is supposed to, once run, check every 5 seconds if user 'root' is logged on. But there is a real error here - the command in backquotes is only evaluated once, when the line is evaluated. From that point on, $IS_ROOT will always have the same value (empty, if root is not logged on when the script is run), and the until loop will either run forever, or never run at all.
   
   That same conceptual error is repeated more than once, and other similar errors appear in the section on flow control (which is where I decided to stop reading).
   
   My background is fairly advanced - I've been using bash for over a decade, but have always turned to python or perl for any of my scripting needs. However, I know that is often much faster to write one-off shell scripts than python scripts, so I decided to read up on it. With my experience, I was able to detect and mentally correct a lot of the errors (which may confuse or mislead novices) and still get something out of the first part book. But I'm not willing to read a programming book - even if it's just shell programming - where the author is making such fundamental conceptual errors. Also, it seems like he has not tested his code, which is a necessity for any book on programming.
   
   I do think this book could be very useful if it were corrected, tested, and the programs rethought - it has a nice mix of topics and fairly readable prose (in most places). But as it stands, it can not be recommended, especially to novices who may not be able to recognize the errors.

No comments about Unix Applications Programming: Mastering the Shell.

4 comments about Novell's Guide to Troubleshooting NDS.

1. Peter Kuo and Jim Henderson are awesome! If you liked their NDS Troubleshooting book, you'll love this Guide to Troubleshooting NDS. An easy read, this book provides background information on the NDS and how it actually works...in plain English. It builds upon this background information to include troubleshooting techniques to help you successfully manage and repair a NetWare network. It also includes easy to read tables with NDS Error codes, as well as DSTRACE and DSREPAIR switches with explanations in one convenient manual. As a side benefit, it includes a significant amount of information to help prepare for Novell's Certified Directory Engineer tests. Thanks for my new Bible guys!



2. If you are responsible for a production NDS environment, READ THIS BOOK! It is fully updated for the latest NDS changes, and provides a thorough understading of NDS processes and troubleshooting methods. The only resource on NDS that is more comprehensive is Novell's Logic Source for NDS II.



3. This book is the best I have read on this subject. Its biggest asset is the fact it starts from the basics of NDS and builds on this information. It includes real world examples (which I found invaluable in both solving and understanding the problem) and all solutions are explained in "straight talking English". Can't wait for the next release !



4. This book is the best I have read on this subject. Its biggest asset is the fact it starts from the basics of NDS and builds on this information. It includes real world examples (which I found invaluable in both solving and understanding the problem) and all solutions are explained in "straight talking English". Can't wait for the next release !

5 comments about Conducting the Programmer Job Interview: The IT Manager Guide with Java, J2EE, C, C++, UNIX, PHP and Oracle interview questions! (IT Job Interview series).

1. This is another good book in the Job Interview series from Rampant. As with the other books, this book gives both the employer and the candidate guidance in areas such as work experience, personal appearance and education.
   
   The questions that are provided in the book give a good base for the employer to ask the candidate. Of course, each company will need to modify or use only the questions that they will need.
   
   I would recommended this book to any employer or candidate seeking a programming job in one of the languages covered.



2. This book certainly helps managers interviewing programmers who claim expertise with many languages. If you own a J2EE shop and looking for Oracle and C++ expertise and need tough questions to ask....the questions prescribed in this book is good. Also note, this book does'nt help you as a reference for any other practical use of those languages.



3. I often interview programmer candidates, so I bought this book to calibrate my interviewing style and skills. I am appalled at the advice in the book -- I guess I should hope other firms do interview this way, so they'll gather the programmers I definitely don't want and leave the good ones for me.
   
   Besides the defects other reviews have already mentioned (in this day and age, if you only hire candidates who show up in suit&tie as this book recommends, you'll end up missing many of the best techies!), some parts are positively creepy -- e.g., under "Gleaning Demographics" it claims that, while some questions are illegal, you should still slily ask questions to hiddenly gather that kind of information, since aspects such as whether the candidate has small kids (illegal to ask about that) should "factor strongly into a hiring decisions" -- so, ask what the candidate does to relax, that will dupe them into revealing whether they have a family.
   
   Disgusting, really, and I find myself hoping somebody ends up in lots of trouble for practicing such weaselly duplicity -- meanwhile, all I can recommend to anybody but outright weasels is to carefully avoid this horrible book.



4. This narrow minded, interrogation oriented guide is simply horrible. The only person to recommend this to is the job seeker -- to prepare you for the more mean spirited interviews. My advice would be to walk away, but if you really want the job, then awareness of this sort of interview practice might help you get hired.
   
   As another reviewer observed, if companies really do follow this sort of advice, then they deserve the people they hire. Now, some companies may want a team of willing white shirts with heads full of programming language details. If you're one of those, buy the book. However, note that ascertaining real competence, creativity and aptitude take a back seat here; it's form over substance.
   
   When I think about the very best "techies" I've hired and worked with over the past 30 years, many would not successfully pass an interview process modelled after the advice in this book. Unbelievable. The credentials for the author to write this book, as far as I can tell, are these: IT executive and horse trainer. I rest my case.



5. This is supposedly a book about hiring top-notch engineers. Instead it's a really great way to scare away talent. Do not use the technical content from this book; if you have to do a technical interview and you're not up on the technology in question, use another resource.
   
   The questions in this book are terrible, ranging from trivial ("How do you end a comment in C"), to mildly wrong (regarding the correct declaration of the main function in C). And then we have the hilariously and incredibly confused:
   
   Q: What would you say someone is doing if they are calling "mmap()" followed by "sizeof()"
   A: They are trying to get the size of a file.
   
   Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Make it stop hurting, please.
   
   Q: (something about a hunk of code that the author claims is broken)
   A: That code works just fine.
   
   Glancing at the other questions, they look about the same (plus a lot of stuff like "What variable should be set to turn on TTFT mode in order to configure XMLG in WebGronk 7.61 for IETF compatibility with mode 3 client access?" -- things that someone competent should be able to find quickly, and that I would never expect anyone to have available in an interview). It's really clear that the author had no expertise in the areas covered, but simply skimmed some books and made up questions with little or no research or technical review.
   
   If you think your next candidate is smart, you might want to hand them a copy of this book and ask them what they think of it.

5 comments about MCDST 70-271 Exam Cram 2: Supporting Users & Troubleshooting a Windows XP Operating System (Exam Cram 2).

1. There's a lot of unnecessary info in this book that you won't even see on the exam. The practice questions in the book are way too wordy and confusing. Exam Cram has helped me in the past, but not this time.



2. I just passed my 70-271 exam and I do believe this book was an important factor in my score. However this book is problematic.
   
   1.) The MeasureUp practice exam questions are 50 of the same questions found in the Microsoft Press book for the same exam. But that book has 261 more questions than this one.
   2.) The questions in the book are far more difficult than necessary and many are more appropriate for the MCSA/MCSE exam 70-270.
   3.) There are too many typographic errors to name. The major ones have been mentioned by other reviewers.
   4.) There is no information on service pack 2.
   
   I intend on using my MCDST credentials as an elective exam for the MCSA, so I appreciate the difficulty of the questions but by attempting to attain an 85% to 90% on the practice exams in the back of this book I had thoroughly convinced myself that I would fail the test and was very close to rescheduling it. I did not, and I passed my test with more than 200 point over the minimum score.
   
   To this books credit I have found the information very useful in my job. I have received several calls from users with processor affinity problems or with 16 bit program errors that I know how to solve immediately because of the high standards set by the questions in this book. I am, therefore, very satisfied with my purchase.



3. I passed the test so I guess that means the book worked. It was actually supplemental material. My first choice is always Sybex. This is a decent book, it went too much into the Remote Installation for what I had on the test but the test may be different for you.



4. For those of us looking to fill in our varied real-life technical support experience with some actual honest-to-goodness certifications, this book is a useful cram. I was looking for more of the experience of the test, and I found the difficulty of the questions to be appropriately challenging. I'm pleased to find that they are actually geared towards a higher level exam, since that is my ultimate goal. I also skimmed the book a lot, and did not even try to read it chapter by chapter (I don't study for exams that way). I ended up absorbing a lot more information from this book than I thought I would have, and I must confess I'm extremely desensitized to spelling mistakes in computer software, and didn't notice them in this book. I certainly didn't come across anything that would have stopped me from picking up the sense of the information offered. I definitely picked up new things from this book that I didn't know before, and I appreciated that. Learning more about the innards of Windows XP is never a bad thing, and at least one piece of information I was able to immediately use at work.



5. This book was very helpful in passing my Microsoft 70-271 exam. It provided much relevant material from a users standpoint that prepared me for my certification. It also is a good Book to keep around as a reference.

2 comments about Developing Software for Symbian OS: An Introduction to Creating Smartphone Applications in C++ (Symbian Press).

1. If you are a proficient C++ programmer, this book is perfect for you as a introduction to writing C++ on Symbian OS. It describes how Symbian OS works and show what differences exist between normal C++ and the one used while writing applications for Symbian OS.
   
   However this is a mostly OS and C++ book. So it won't teach you how you can do specific things except the information it gives about socket usage to communicate via TCP/IP & GUI Design & Programming. It will teach you the OS and language specification so you'll understand when you see a code excerpt somewhere. Later you can read additional books or SDK documentation to learn about special classes os provides to do specific things. Also it point out the differences between different platforms (S60, S80, UIQ) where applicable by giving individual explanations & examples for each platform.
   
   I strongly recommend reading this book before trying to write anything for Symbian OS. It'll help you greatly in the beginning.



2. I'm an absolute beginner into Symbian OS programming and I find this book very perfect in order to let you start writing applications for Symbian Devices (there are many examples that make concepts intelligible).
   It explains how Symbian OS architecture works and give many tips you can found only by search on newsgroups.