No comments about Applied Software Measurement.

No comments about JAVA Programming With the SAP Web Application Server.

5 comments about Introduction to C# Using .NET (Integrated .NET Series from Object Innovations).

1. Very well written book that will help anyone at any level learn C#. I've read many books on C# and this one is the best - hands down.



2. A good introductory book - if you already have a good background in C/C++. Otherwise, you'd be struggling and may need some other really basic books to complement your reading.
   
   Most books have erratas and this book is no exception. However, it is minimal and acceptable.



3. OK. I am an experienced C/C++ programmer, so you have to keep in mind that this review will be based on my background. The book is OK. That's why I gave it a 3, but it's nothing more. It is very basic. It has good explanation of the basics, but nothing more. And my opinion is that if you are a C/C++ programmer you really don't need the C# basics. They are just so similar. The thing I hate the most about this book is that it doesn't go into depth at all. Some concepts are not explained very well either. I actually wish that I hadn't bought this book. I am yet to see a good C# book.



4. I just opened up the OOP section and noticed that the diagrams that are in the book appear to be photocopied. One diagram shows an inheritance relationship between some banking objects. There are nine objects in the diagram and you CAN NOT see the lines bordering each object, nor the lines between the objects. Most of the other line diagrams are fuzzy and not solid (imagine taking a faint line drawing and photocopying it). Two big thumbs down on printing quality. As for the material, I have read about 3-4 paragraphs, so I can't comment on it. I am seriously considering returning it since some of the diagrams are unreadable.



5. I didn't like this book. It does not go into the individual concepts enough. I found it to be really unhelpful. And sorry, but my desk already has a paperweight. And I have issues about spending any amount of money for what amounts to a bound version of copied paper. The entire book was a very poor zerox copy.

2 comments about Visual Basic .NET All in One Desk Reference for Dummies.

1. hi
   well I have tons of "for dummies" books(from spiritual to graphics and programming and the like) and this is the first that isn't good.

   problems:
   just some i'll like to mention.
   -the author writes code for you to copy and doesnt include the "_" between the lines (other manuals/tutorials/books at least tell u to put "_" , since they dont have space to write the full code in one line), so if you go by his code format you will keep getting errors.
   -on one hand the author seems to write nothing about certain vb.net code and on the other hand he writes tons about the difference between vb6 and vb.net.
   he devotes tons of the book on stuff that is new to vb.net compared to vb6, while not actaully describing vb.net stuff in the first place.

   in conclusion:
   if your coming from vb6, this is a great guide/reference for u. if your not, using the help(references/tutorials/info that u can get on controls/commands) that actaully comes with vb2003.net is far more effective.




2. Please do not torture yourself by buying this book. The title of Visual Basic.Net for Dummies would indicate that this book is appropriate for somebody who wishes to learn this computer language. It is a horrible learning tool.
   
   Twenty-five years after engineering school, I wanted to refresh my computer programming skills which were very good. However much has changed and I needed a guide. The frustration that I encounter with this book is greater than I ever experienced in Engineering school. Remember, engineering school is designed to be very challenging. I told my wife that I thought that I was smart, but my brain must have degenerated since my high honor college days.
   
   Then, I read Murach's Beginning Visual Basic.Net. What was difficult was now clear. Buy Murach's book if you want to learn this subject. Thank goodness for Murach. He showed me that I still had a functioning brain. I was not stupid. Visual Basic.Net for Dummies is very stupid.

No comments about Introduction to Data Multicasting, IP Multicast Streaming for Audio and Video Media Distribution.

1 comments about Integrated Approach to Web Performance Testing: A Practitioner's Guide.

1. This book offers valuable insights and methodologies in the world of performance testing and engineering. Sadly, there aren't many books on the subject in the market. This one fills a much wanted gap.
   
   Author talks about best practices and methodologies and even offers concrete metrics to measure, monitor and tune. A good discussion of all layers (Web -Web Application server and Database) along with all industry leading tools (+some more) is presented. The book is full of tiny bits of useful real-world information that alone are worth the cost. In all, it is a very comprehensive compilation of best practices and methodologies as it relates to the performance testing, engineering and tuning.

No comments about Applying PIC18 Microcontrollers: Architecture, Programming, and Interfacing using C and Assembly.

5 comments about Writing CGI Applications with Perl.

1. This is an extremely useful book for writing web-based applications with Perl. Lots of helpful descriptions and examples. Useful for beginners to familiarize themselves with a wide range of necessary terms and topics. For example, I found the chapters on mod_perl and dbi very helpful. Also useful for more experienced CGI programmers because of the useful examples and techniques presented.



2. I read the raving previous reviews and thought this would be the CGI book for me. It wasn't. I know a bit of perl, but relatively little about cgi (I know a bit, but not much). Here are my comments:

   Good things:
   - I thought most of the example programs in the text were good and illustrated the points being made.
   - I liked the discussion on taint

   Bad points:
   - I thought the examples were somewhat random and did not give me tools to attack general problems.
   - I would have liked a better description of cgi.pm (perhaps I should get Lincoln Stein's book)
   - I did not like the line by line format of the code. I found this very distracting and redundant. I would have preferred seeing the code and then having the authors describe the main points of the code (instead of all the trivial comments inbetween all the lines).
   - I did not like the dependence on databases. Perhaps this is something most serious cgi programmers use, but storing my data in text files is sufficient for most of the applications I might use. I would have preferred a separate chapter on database and cgi (or I could just buy a separate book on this).

   I'm not sure why everyone else raved about the book so much, but I didn't find it so wonderful.




3. I bought this book because the Amazon reviewers loved it so much. I got about 150 pages into it and now I need to buy a different book. This book is good for people who really really like to learn by rote. The authors cover interesting and important topics, but they don't explain them well. They don't even try to outline the purpose of a script before coding it. They also introduce functions that are new to the reader somewhere in the middle of a script. They never write, "This is function x. It can be used like this... Here is an example...."

   They just start coding without any introduction except for some stupid jokes.

   That said, if you already know a buttload of Perl and DBI and CGI programming, you might like this book for the examples.

   Also, there were way too many errors in the text and the code, and that makes it even harder to learn.




4. This is a fantastic book! It is best for people who already know Perl and have written basic CGI scripts and now wish to write full-blown applications.
   
   The attraction of this book is simple: there are countless sources that teach you how to write a CGI "page" -- a single script that has a couple states. But it turns out that writing CGI-based "applications" are much harder.
   
   This is one of the rare books that discusses the architecting of CGI-based *applications* including the full source of a very interesting content management application. As such, this book is virtually unique among the dozens of others books. It is not perfect and I keep hoping that the authors will come out with an updated edition. But for all that, it remains unparalleled.



5. This was a little conplex and not easy to follow, as some reviews said.
   I'd look at another.

5 comments about LINUX Programming for Dummies.

1. I learned that you really don't need to get involved in a programming language such as c and c++ to develop worthwhile applications in Linux. Linux is filled with utilities that do the grunt work of a typical c and c++ program that I've written. This book showed me how to take advantage of these utilities and link them together into a solid application. I also found the shell programming conversion chart in the book a big help because this lets me convert programs written in bash shell into the other popular shells used in Linux.



2. About a year ago I asked my uncle who work at SUN, if he had a good book on shell programming. He lent me a book about the Bash shell from O'Reilly. I was devastated! I felt so dumb reading that book! They begun with a simple script, namely the famous "Hello world", which everyone starts with reagrdless of language. And after that they began with big scripts, with pages of code.
   I felt so stupid, and thought I will never learn this!

   Now recently I decided to make another try, but with a new book. My eyes fell on "Linux Programming for dummies"
   This is a very good book for beginners, because it explains everything from the bottom! (Which is something you can't say about the O'Reilly books!)
   However a word of warning. This book (at least in my edition) contained a number of errors. It could display one thing in the beginning of the book, and then another in the end thus contradicting it self. One good example is this: it says that "true" in shell scripts is 1.

   Then you can imagine my suprise when I asked such a simple question to the shell as "is 100+100=200?"
   The shell replied 0. What? Has the computer gone stupid I thought?
   As it turned out, after searching the net and looking through a number of other books, 0 is true and 1 is false. (This is the opposite to C and Perl programming where 1 is true and 0 is false!!!!)

   I showed this error and more to the "Dummy company" *hehe*, which in return gave me a book for free! (Red Hat Linux Bible)
   I have since that found about fifteen more errors. But don't let that discourage you! You will easily spot them, unless they've corrected this in another issue!

   For example they forget to include "do" in for-loops and they fail to end case-statements with "esac". Don't worry, you'll understand once you read the book.

   I truly recommend this book, and it should be everyones firstbuy!




3. This book was one of my first intros to Bash programming. It made it interesting, but far too many of the script samples didn't work, due to typographical errors. (Such as some of the while loops in chapter 10) It took a bit of researching to figure out why, however, researching the errors was also helpful. (As I am still a rank novice at bash scripting, there might have been other, easier ways to fix them, but for example, the timing loop didn't work until I changed $counter=$counter+1 to counter=$counter+1)
   The book is quick reading and a reasonable introduction to bash programming, with the caveat that the reader will probably have to know how to research deja, linuxdoc.org or other places to figure out why some of the scripts don't work as printed.

   I notice that some other reviewers pointed out errors to IDG. It would be nice if they had an easy to find page listing such errors, ala Sybex's site. There may be one, but when it's not easy to find, I just went to the various linuxdoc.org howtos and guides and found my answers there.

   My only other complaint is a petty one, that sometimes the author could have pointed out alternate syntax that also works. However, as we all develop our own coding habits, that is a fairly meaningless complaint.

   All in all, I would recommend the book to the novice bash scripter, as long as the novice is ready to, at times, search the web a bit to find out why some scripts don't work properly. The trouble is that since the book is aimed towards the novice, scripts that don't work properly due to minor typos might be frustrating at first. Still, this is good practice--for example, after awhile, I could look at one and say, aha, this won't work, he left out a "do". It's an excellent supplement to the online guides at linuxdoc.org and reasonably priced.




4. Granted, most of this book is written on a low enough level that most people could understand it--it made inappropriate assertions and neglected essential information while providing its lessons. It spends much of the early chapters making Microsoft Windows sound like the ideal programming environment while neglecting to mention all the problems of trying to function with thier API's while working with the win32 drive. Excluding using their ".NET Framework" I would never suggest that anyone even try to program using Windows (unless your being paid to do so). Also, Mr. Keogh continuously mentions that Linux does not have all the bells & whistles available to Windows (although, on several occasions he mentions Motifs). I would hope that the average individual looking at this book would simply be loking at this book as a starting place. Hopefully the individual reading this book will move onto other languages (i.e., C, C++, etc.) which would provide the "bells & whistles".

   Also, this book left out simple instructions. When working in "vi" --a simple text editor-- Mr. Keogh mentions various ways to exit "vi", but neglects to explain that you must first hit the escape key to get to the command line to exit "vi".

   I would recommend that individuals looking to learn how to program using a Linux OS start with other books that start off very simply with Linux shell scripts.




5. the book is simple in language and therefore very easy to understand, especially for the very beginner.

5 comments about Ruby In A Nutshell.

1. The first couple of chapters are a good, concise reference to the core language, but the library reference is too stark-- most methods seem to have only one or two lines for description. Since this library reference is the bulk of the book, I don't think it's a good buy.

   The library reference in the Thomas and Hunt book (Programming Ruby: A Pragmatic Programmer's Guide) is much nicer.




2. Forgotten the name of the libarary that does directory listings? Need to know the method of the IMAP libarary? This is the book for that. Full documentation, look elsewhere, but as a handy guide to keep on your desk. Not a beginners learn to code Ruby book, but a beginners and intermediates quick look up the method book. Learning Ruby? Get this _AND_ a beginner tutorial book. It will speed up your learning curve.



3. This book is very much a brief reference for Ruby -- it is consistent with the general philosophy of the nutshell series. Don't expect to learn ruby from this book even if you are already an experienced programmer. It is strictly a reference for those who need a quick reminder of the syntax.
   
   Coverage of semantics is very limited and examples are few and far between.



4. There isn't much in-depth knowledge I can impart based on this book. It fulfills its demanded function as "A Desktop Quick Reference". It provides a quick reference to the core language features and APIs in a succinct way. On the fly, this book is a great reference. If you are going to be carrying around a reference for Ruby, this should be it. Its small size does not deter it from being full of succinct information. Do not buy this if you are looking for a tutorial-style introduction to Ruby. (In that case, see Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas). If you are looking for a quick reference to this fun programming language, however, this book is a great choice!



5. I've lost track of the number of times in the first two chapters where I either read a sentence that had no clear meaning, or where I saw an example that was just plain incorrect.
   
   Page 12: "A symbol is an object corresponding to an identifier or variable." Uh, what? That's the complete explanation for this language construct.
   
   Page 64: "arr.slice(n, len) Deletes the partial string specified and returns it." Followed by an example obviously copied from String::slice on page 54, which has the exact same example code except using 's' instead of 'a'. But page 64 is supposed to be describing arrays, not strings, so the description and example are just plain wrong.
   
   It goes on and on. I had high hopes for this book given my past experience with O'Reilly Nutshell books, but this book is just not ready to go to print yet, and obviously has been very poorly proofread. Sadly it's been printed and it's out there in the world, so your best bet is to just avoid it until O'Reilly publishes a 2nd edition that fixes all of these mistakes.