2 comments about The Art of Rails (Programmer to Programmer).
I really enjoyed this book. (Of course, I enjoy most tech books because you can always pick up new information or a different/better slant on something you thought you already knew.)
It is obvious Edward knows his stuff, and he has a knack for describing and explaining difficult concepts.
I especially liked his coverage of AJAX, Methods and Messages, Procs and Blocks, and Mixins.
Good book, Edward. Thanks for writing it!
The Art of Rails not only a great Rails book, but it is a great web development book. It's first chapter should be read by every web developer. It clearly explains how the web started, the choices that were made, and where it is today.
These types of broad insights are what you'd expect from a top CS curriculum. The kind of insights that explain why you are doing what you doing, instead of just how.
I just wish I read this book when I first started programming for the web.
Written by David Schultz and Craig Cook. By Apress.
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5 comments about Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML: Modern Guide and Reference (Beginning: from Novice to Professional).
Found this book to be a concise guide to learning html, css, and xhtml conforming to the latest standards. I had dabbled with web pages before, and though I could eventually hack something together, I knew it wasn't the way the pros did it. This book provided a good conceptual framework on how to separate presentation from content, the key reason to use CSS.
I ordered this book along with Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML. I was worried based on reviews that this might be a little over my head. My only program experience is with VBA macro writing. I wanted Head First's book to protect myself from getting lost.
What I found is there was no problem understanding this well-presented and clear text. In fact, I much prefer it to the "dummy downed" Head First book. Had I to do it over, this would have been my only purchase.
Despite the "Beginning HTML" in the title, this small horror is a densely packed text of incomprehensible jargon.
This book is only useful for balancing wobbly table legs and for teaching writers how NOT to write a reference work / tutorial.
I bought it based on the title, not the contents. (It was shrink-wrapped at a brick-and-mortar bookstore) Had I seen a sample of the text, I would have reshelved it hurriedly or offered a dime to buy it for firewood.
As a reference work for web designers, or a tutorial for beginners, it ranks below any other book I've seen on the subject.
APPENDICES:
1) The promised CSS is scattered throughout the book, with no CSS reference guide in the appendices.
2) The appendices for HTML and XHTML describe each tag's parameters in such a way as to leave one wondering how to use them, and what each tag and parameter does.
EXAMPLES:
The authors clearly did not proofread the version that reached the printers, or the editors made unexpected, inexcusable last-minute cutbacks. This is most obvious in photo captions that ask us (unbelievably) to find the differently colored text in identical B&W screenshots (p. 143), and in examples of JPEG artifacts/compression (p. 108) and pixelating (p. 106) that are unnoticeable because the example photographs have been shrunken far too much or carelessly created.
INDEX:
Carelessly assembled, neglecting common terms like "mouseover".
LANGUAGE:
Professorial pointification and obfuscation rather than real advice to beginners or helpful reference for experts. Reads like a fillibuster performed by a student defending his masters' dissertation.
For example, what beginner could make use of this entry in the appendices?
(p. 353)
"The param element allows you to set run-time values for objects that have been inserted into a document. Required attributes: type: specifies the MIME type of the resource specified in the value attribute when the valuetype attribute is set to ref; value: specifies the actual value associated with the parameter"
...and so on.
Sentences are needlessly wordy, overly technical, and filled with passive verbs. In short, the writing bores and frustrates more than an afternoon spent with an enthusiastic life insurance salesman.
For example, from page 352:
Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML: Modern Guide and Reference by David Schultz and Craig Cook is an excellent beginners introduction to HTML and CSS. Through each of the eleven chapters the authors walk through the basics and foundation of HTML. For those who are just treading in the waters of HTML and CSS, this book will help you understand the tools available to you as you craft your markup. You will learn about the tags available, their available attributes and purposes, and how to finely tune these into a semantic layout that ultimately gives your content more meaning.
Chapter 1 is our quick history lesson and introduction to HTML. They give background and insight into the goals and purposes of HTML, and how these were shifted during the browser wars and the battle for browser dominance and market share. They introduce the different versions of HTML available, and what they mean for your markup and the rendering inside of the browser. As CSS is discussed, there is also a discussion on keeping a clean separation of content and presentation. Chapter 1 lets us see the big picture and evolution of HTML.
Chapter 2 builds the foundation for the rest of the chapters. This chapter discusses the basics of XHTML and CSS. The building blocks discussed here will be addressed in each and every subsequent chapter of the book. Things such as tags, elements, attributes, and formatting. We are also given a snapshot view of what comprises an XHTML document, the doctype, the HTML element, and the document tree. All of this plays into understanding the fundamentals of CSS, cascade, and inheritance. We now have our history lesson and basic constructs in place, it's time to take a look at the rest of the pieces to the puzzle.
Chapters 3 and 4 cover a large territory. From constructing a useable head section, to walking step by step through many of the available HTML elements available to you as you put your content together. With discussion of each element, you are given detailed instructions of how and when it should be used, with an exhaustive list of its available attributes. CSS is briefly discussed, but will be re-introduced in a later chapter after we have our content constructed.
Chapter 5 is all about images. This chapter gives a brief primer on how digital images work, and what are the formats you can use within your content. Images can serve different purposes: icons, decoration, background, or context. Each of these are discussed with information on how to place them accordingly with CSS or the img tag.
Chapter 6 is all about linking. You are introduced to the a tag, its available attributes, and how you can create different types of links. Textual links, anchor links, and linking an image are all discussed.
Chapter 7 is all about tables. Despite what you may hear from others, tables have a very good semantic use in regards to tabular data (who would have thought?). However, tables are also misunderstood in relation to the tags and attributes. It is important to build tables with accessibility in mind, and this chapter goes over some of the elements that haven't received as much exposure. These include, but are not limited to: caption, colgroup, and tbody. This chapter will give you the information necessary to build a powerful and semantically rich table.
Chapter 8 discusses all of the little details to building a usable and accessible form. Just as with tables, there are some elements that are often forgotten about when building forms. This chapter does a great job of covering all of the necessary components for a form, and how to structure them. Form elements are rendered with the underlying operating system, so the end of this chapter discusses CSS and some of the ways you can spruce up the look of your forms. This is to be used with caution, as forms are rendered differently in each browser.
Chapters 9 and 10 discuss the other 2 pieces of the trinity of the front end: CSS and JavaScript. These chapters are meant to be brief primers, and will most likely whet your appetite to learn more about each aspect. They are also placed here to give you a good foundation as the final chapter will roll everything up into a case study.
Chapter 11 is the end of the journey. What good would the book be if you couldn't put what you have learned into practice? This chapter creates the fictional Spaghetti & Cruft website (you have to read the book to find out the meaning of the name). This chapter starts with the design process, moves to the building process, and then polishes it off by adding enhancements with CSS and JavaScript. The humorous name aside, this chapter is one of the most valuable chapters of the entire book. This final chapter brings the book to a close, and with it leaves you a solid foundation as you continue your journey of building other sites.
Conclusion
Many would argue that they don't need to learn HTML, that is what a WYSIWYG is for. This book shows you the value of understanding the history, the basics, and the semantics of HTML. It is important to note that nothing found in this book is earth-shattering, however, if you are a beginner and new to HTML, this book will give you the proper start you need to begin developing right away. If you are moving away from the reliance of a WYSIWYG, you may be surprised at many of the elements available to you that are covered in this book.
Every master was once an apprentice; the beginner must start at the beginning. For the author of an introductory text on a technical subject, the challenge is to adopt the "beginner's mind," which is characterized in Zen practice as "is the mind that is innocent of preconceptions and expectations, judgments and prejudices." The teacher of novices must clear his mind and place himself in the mind of the student who knows little or nothing about a subject. He must be able to transmit complex concepts in clear, non-technical language and provide enough information to make the subject understandable, yet not overwhelm the student with too much information or information that is not pertinent.
The first two chapters of "Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML: Modern Guide and Reference" satisfies the requirements of a beginner's book quite well. The language is clear, concise, and devoid of jargon. The remainder of the book is quite uneven, probably due to the publisher's decision to employ two authors for the book. Craig Cook (the author of chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 8 and 11) is more than capable of communicating technical information using plain language. His prose is concise and accurate, yet he maintains a gentle, witty tone that is ideal for making the neophyte feel at ease with new material. David Schultz is much less adept at maintaining the `beginner's mind.' His prose is often convoluted and awkward, making it difficult to decipher the terms he attempts to explain.
Chapter 4 is an excellent overview of the basic structure of a semantically structured web document. For someone looking for an introduction to HTML and CSS fundamentals, the book is worth buying for this chapter alone. It would also serve a more experienced hand as a concise guide to the proper use of HTML elements.
Chapters 3, 6, and 7 all have a common weakness: the author fails to provide clear definitions and explanations for terms. An example, from p. 164: "charoff: Specifies in pixels or as a percentage how far the alignment should be adjusted to the first character to align on. This requires the use of the align attribute with the value set as char." Contrast this definition with one penned by Cook, p.211: "disabled='disabled': When present, disables the control so that it cannot receive focus and its value cannot be modified. Many browsers will display disabled controls a `grayed-out' state. The value of a disabled control is not submitted."
It appears that Mr. Cook devoted a considerable amount of thought to writing his definitions, while Mr. Schultz was content to restate the official specifications. Cook takes the time to carefully explain a term, giving examples of how it is used in the real world. His definitions & explanations indicate a deep and nuanced understanding of the subject material.
Chapter 10 presents an introduction to JavaScript. Appearing out of place in a book on beginning HTML and CSS, one chapter on JavaScript is simply inadequate to explain even the rudiments of this powerful (but often misused) tool. This space could have been better used in covering CSS positioning in more detail and providing more visual examples.
Chapter 11 is a solid walkthrough in putting together a basic website, from the design process through to final markup. This chapter pulls together what has been presented in the rest of the book and would certainly enable a beginner to create an attractive & functional website from scratch.
Finally, the book provides four appendices. The usefulness of these appendices varies widely. Appendix A is an XHTML 1.o Strict reference: it would be useful but for a complete lack of examples. Appendix B covers color names and hex values: does anyone actually use these? HTML colors are notoriously hideous and their use should be avoided. Appendix C covers special characters: this is a good reference to have. Appendix D covers CSS browser support: again, a useful reference.
But why is there no glossary? A glossary of terms is ESSENTIAL in a beginner's book. Please, leave out the scary HTML colors and give us a glossary!
Despite its shortcomings, "Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML: Modern Guide and Reference" is a useful book for a person needing to understand the fundamental concepts and application of HTML and CSS. The publishers would have served their readers better by providing a consistent authorial voice throughout the book, including more thorough coverage of CSS positioning and layout, and providing more high-quality graphical examples. This book is a good bet for the beginner who wants to learn the fundamentals of HTML and CSS to create well-structured and usable websites.
Written by Steve McConnell. By Microsoft Press.
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5 comments about Code Complete (Microsoft Programming).
Most programmers cannot create reliable software. Most programmers do not construct computer programs correctly, regardless of methodology, language, platform, etc. For those who don't have a formal education in computer programming (e.g., Computer Science), or for those who don't want to forget the important concepts they did learn, Steve McConnell presents a classic text that drives all of these concepts home. McConnell covers everything involved in the process of constructing code, from methods of decomposition, to methods for prioritizing code comments. This book should be read by anyone who wants to improve the software they create.
This is an outstandingly good book about software construction techniques that lead to a sound, robust product. It starts with simple things like naming conventions, function layout and commenting methods, but covers the whole software development cycle of design, programming and quality assurance. Although it gives plenty of source code examples in several different programming languages, these are always short and easy to follow even for 'language foreigners'. Source code examples are only used to illustrate more general, important points, rather than specific implementation details. The author is careful not to force his personal style on you - which would be rather foolish considering the many 'religious' issues covered (naming conventions anyone? ;) ) - but presents his opinions supported by sound arguments that'll make even skeptics reconsider. The text is an easy read compared to more technical books and is covered with lots of very amusing short stories that highlight key points.
This book will be a great aid in keeping your and your coworkers' mental health while programming in a team under a merciless deadline.
If you are at all serious about programming - buy this book!
This book is extremely practical. Why more people have not read it is a mystery to me. I read this early on in my career, and it has helped me identify problems early on, work around potential pitfalls, and deliver projects on time or close to on time. It has given me the courage to speak up early and often.
If you want to be a software professional, I strongly recommend you throroughly study this book and apply its principals. Sure, all of the concepts are not applicable nowadays, but the vast majority are. This will help you understand what to do to avoid and mitigate the potential disasters you will inevitably face.
McConnell does just an excellent job explaining much of the rationale behind some Good Things when writing procedural code. I'm an RPG programmer and learnt many good things.
Recommended!
There's not much I can add that other reviewers haven't already written. I asked another programmer what book he would recommend and he said "Code Complete". I bought it and I say it's fantastic. I've been programming for over 10 years and I wish the other developers I'm working with would all read it and apply it's principles.
5 comments about Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 10 Minutes (Sams Teach Yourself).
Chris Newman's Sams Teach Yourself PHP In 10 Minutes is Enthusiastically recommended as a thoroughly "user friendly", no-fluff, just-the-answers, step-by-step working guide to building dynamic websites using PHP. Broken down into 10-minute lessons, the novice will gain a rapid working knowledge of PHP 5 and be able to immediately put that knowledge to use in practical applications.
I'm still trying to learn PHP after going through this book. I have HTML, XHTML, actionscript, and CSS experience. It teaches interesting points about the language, but it's difficult to put the language into use with this book.
This book was written in clear language with small examples of code that are perfect for a beginner to make learning PHP easy. The best thing is that the author chose an excellent set of topics to cover in an introductory book: programming concepts ( arrays, variables, functions, etc. ), web concepts ( forms, connecting to MySQL database, cookies and sessions, etc. ), and a smattering of installation and configuration information ( ... just enough, not boring ). Moreover, I really liked the smaller size of the book so that I could easily hold it while typing up the examples at my keyboard.
I recently found a need to do a little PHP programming on a website. When I went looking for books what I found were any number of two to six hundred page texts. Then I found this little gem. It fitted my purposes perfectly as it explained the basics of PHP with examples for things I was trying to accomplish.
I will say that I that the treatment of classes was too brief and was the major reason that I didn't give five stars. The important things is that it provided a basis for me to experiment with the examples, accomplish what I needed to do, and allowed me to gain enough knowledge in a few short evenings that I'll be able to get another book on the subject without being totally lost from the first page. That is all I can ask from a cheap book.
I started with a good computer background but limited coding experience and no knowledge of PHP. I got this book. I looked at it for an hour. I started writing a php test site. I worked my way through the rest of the book in four hours. I worked on the site for the next two days. I got the Sam's PHP in 24 hours book. At the end of a week I had my own online photo management / backup / sharing application up and running.
For high yield learning I've never seen anything that can rival this book. It both told me how to do what I wanted, why to do it that way, and what not to do. Simply, this book is a wonderful starting point for someone who is tech savvy and wants to learn by doing.
Advice:
Buy it so it arrives on a Friday before a free weekend, you are going to kill the weekend. Go on and buy the Sam's teach yourself PHP in 24 hours now and save yourself the frustration of waiting for it to ship.
About Sam's
I was so happy with this Sam's book that I got PHP in 24 hours and the MySQL in 10 mins books to help with the same project. MySQL in 10 mins is also a great book. I didn't find it as good as PHP in 10 mins, but it's hard to say if that is a difference in the books of a difference in the two topics. (PHP in 24 is great, as I said earlier.)
Unfortunately those are really my only success stories with Sam's. I got both JavaScript in 24hrs and Ajax in 10 mins from Sam's and neither lived up to the PHP books. They were both much more of a cookbook feeling and less of an introduction to a topic.
Written by Eric A. Meyer. By O'Reilly Media, Inc..
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5 comments about Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition.
I had done some work with style sheets, but was confused bythe terms and had no idea what they can do. This book completely changed what I can do when I design web sites. It'sa real eye-opener and a great reference.
Probably a bit out of date at this point. For me, this book wasn't that useful, since I generally refer to the W3C site for information about CSS. But it's a nice desk reference, and a standard tool for almost all CSS developers. There's probably a new version out by now to address all the developments that have happened in the past couple of years, I would look for that (or wait until one comes out, it won't be long).
This is the 'go-to' reference for me. The truly ultimate guide to CSS from one of the construct's primary innovators and authors. Mr. Meyer is the most knowledgeable person in the field of CSS, browser compatibility and all around HTML design.
This book is not an explanation or tutorial of how to make beautiful pages with CSS. I think the people who give it below 3 stars may have been looking for that, and instead they should try CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions. This book IS, however, a complete reference to all CSS properties and values, and also contains some valuable tips on browser behavior and bugs. If I'm coding along and forget what all the possible values are for list-style-type, this is the book I reach for.
Note that there are at least 3 editions of this book. Check for the latest edition if you want the latest.
5 comments about Professional Joomla! (Programmer to Programmer).
I read this book yesterday in about 1/2 hour while sitting at the cafe in B0rd3rs. It could be a useful intro to Joomla for a novice or non-technical business user. It scratches the surface of about every topic related to Joomla and building or running a web site, but it has very little detailed information. The chapter on Joomla's weaknesses was interesting, but other than that, most of the information is available on the Joomla, PHP, Apache and MySql sites.
Well, I have to say that this is a good book. I has very good examples and gives you more than you could ever find surfing the web, for hours, trying to find relevant info by yourself.
Most of all, it covers security issues that you don't hear about very often. It takes you from the basics of installation, to advanced levels in terms of management and best practices, among other things. I can't expect to have the author reinvent the wheel.
This book is not called "The unknown practices" nor " The Secrets of Joomla". You wont find Joomla "top secret information here", but the author delivers what he promises and you can see the table of contents before you buy.
I bought it, I have been using Joomla for a year, I am a PHP coder and found it very useful. My sites are much better now because of this book.
this book is ver clear and well done, it explains all the covered topics with simple but effective examples. The topics are all about Joomla 1.5 so don't buy it if you're interested in Joomla 1.0
Although I have been involved in many forms of application development (including 20 years of various Oracle products) over the years I haven't used PHP or MySQL before begining to develop a Joomla website. To me this book has been exactly what I've been looking for! I'm not looking to make a career of Joomla development but I want to add functionality to the JSN Epic Pro template I've been using and this is answering my questions nicely.
I haven't experienced a problem with the way things are described. To me it has seemed very clear and has guided me through one topic after another very well. I went through several resources on the Internet and I'm still glad I picked this up. I am experimenting with MySQL database modifications and creation of new Joomla extensions. So far it's been very smooth. I had picked up "Mastering Joomla 1.5" by James Kennard and found it inaccessable because it assumed more PHP background than I have. I can imagine that would be a good guide for someone who has used these technologies but I'm very content starting with this.
For someone in my category I would definitely recommend purchasing it.
This is a light read containing a reasonable amount of guidance on editing templates and a regurgitation of the stuff you can get by googling joomla 1.5 (with many edit errors).
However, there is very little meat with almost nothing covering any of the underlying principles and a terrible guide to writing a component (that ignores MVC entirely).
Written by Patrick Carey. By Course Technology.
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1 comments about New Perspectives on XML, Second Edition, Comprehensive (New Pespectives).
To be fair, I am not a fan of the Thompson Course Technology books in general. But this is the first one that actually drove me to write a negative review to spare some innocent XML programmer-to-be the confusion this book will likely cause.
Our local community college unfortunately requires this text (a fair percentage of the classes seem to use Course Technology books because of the pre-fab quizzes, Powerpoints, and online supplements available to the instructors who can't be bothered to make their own).
The good: The Chapters are called "Tutorials" and in general, if you can read and copy the tutorials line for line, you will be able to get them to validate. However, you probably won't understand why in many cases.
The ugly: Like most of the Course Technology textbooks I've seen, there are significant typos and the explanations are very poor and awkward. There is little or no rigor in defining terms, the author often uses a tangential example as an adequate explanation for the entire concept.
Many explanations are as clear as mud. Case in point p. 199 (which is only partially understandable to me because I've taken a few computer classes (including C++ object oriented programming) and the concept of scope is familiar to me, even if the word is never mentioned here):
"In XML Schema, any element or attribute that is declared globally has to be entered as a qualified name in the instance document. The reason is that global elements and attributes are added to the target namespace, while local objects are not. Local objects are interpreted based on the namespace affiliation of the object in which they're nested. Because global objects are attached to the namespace, they have to be qualified in the instance document with a namespace prefix. The target namespace applies the document validation through the qualified elements in the instance document using them as the starting points for the validation process. You can't go down the hierarchy and validate only the local elements and attributes."
And that was a relatively clear passage. Even if you understand the concept, you are unlikely to get the syntax exactly correct. This book has singlehandedly caused me to consider a campaign to our department dean to stop using Course Technology books, and search for a decent textbook substitute. This book is of little use in class, and will be even less useful as a handy reference.
Written by Jay Hilyard and Stephen Teilhet. By O'Reilly Media, Inc..
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5 comments about C# Cookbook, 2nd Edition (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)).
If you are just coming into C# or have been doing it for a while - it doesn't matter - BUY THIS BOOK!!! Oreilly as we all know, makes very good tech/programming books and this one is one of the best I've had so far. This will be a book that will spend much less time on my shelf and much more time next to me on my desk.
I came across a project that had to do with XML, and I came to love this book. It has a lot of suggestions that helped me jump start my project.
I wouldn't recommend this book to learn C#- (pick up John Sharp C# step by step for that.)
I'm an intermediate coder, familiar with programming and I have about 1.5 years programming C#. I've already used this book(C# Cookbook 2nd edition) to write C# code navigating in and around directories and files. The examples in the book regarding "Directory Info" and "File Info" were so clear and concise, I was able to complete my programming task with almost no lost time to the learning process. What I like most was that there was not one example, but many examples for the most used functionalities. This book has already paid for itself when I consider the time it saved me the first time I needed it!
This is a good intro book that eliminates the need for some of the first books I bought on C#. When compared to other "cookbooks", however, this book is incredibly weak (see: XSLT Cookbook, SQL Cookbook). If you have used C# for more than 6 months, you will know how to iterate over an array, to use String.IsNullOrEmpty, get the index of a value within a string, and use a generic arraylist. These are just some of the junior "recipes" you'll see in this book. The "recipes" just exercise the fundamentals (i.e. how to boil water) rather than how the fundamentals work together to solve complex problems in elegant ways. The easier the concept, the more information. There isn't really any analysis or best-practice justification present. I'd like to see some performance analysis of generics or at least some depth on partial methods. Nothing to see here for mid-level developers. Not written or organized poorly, just simple. If it were titled "Intro to C# by example", I'd give it a higher score.
[Reviewed by XPSD member Steve Grubbs]
Summary
I wanted to check out a C# cookbook after developing in C# for almost a year. I figured I should get a basic understanding of the language and the .NET framework by using it for awhile before I buy such a book. That said, I wish I could go back in time and tell myself to get the C# Cookbook the day I started developing in C#.
Overall Review
I see two main criteria for reviewing a programming language cookbook.
1. The quality of each "recipe"
2. The recipes chosen for the book
The C# Cookbook handles each recipe very well, which we should definitely demand of a cookbook. It has a very simple 4-section format, Problem-Solution-Discussion-See Also. The problem is briefly stated first. The solution is almost entirely code samples, with minimal commentary. The discussion is usually short and sweet, with a few exceptions. The "see also" points to reference topics in the MSDN help, which is of questionable usefulness, since you can search the topics yourself; but, is short enough to skim over easily.
The recipes chosen for the C# Cookbook range from very useful to trivial. One of the trivial examples would be something like, converting degrees to radians. The only language specific feature here is Math.PI, which I don't think is worth the page it's printed on. What I found surprisingly useful were some code samples that I spent time coming up with on my own before reading this book, like a custom trace class that outputs in XML. Fortunately, most of the examples were in the useful category.
A few glaring topic omissions are remoting, ADO, and advanced object serialization.
Per-Chapter Review
* Numbers - somewhat trivial
* Strings and Characters - good introduction to the C# string
* Classes and Structures - good stuff on interfaces, casting, converting, COM interop
* Enumerations - simple, but short and useful
* Exception Handling - an underrated topic that I'm happy to see covered
* Diagnostics - a surprisingly useful set of tools to help with debugging
* Delegates and Events - very good intro for the new C# programmer
* Regular Expressions - very good intro for the new C# programmer
* Collections - a little simple, could have more useful samples
* Data Structures and Algorithms - simple, but good if more advanced types are required
* Filesystem I/O - very good examples of file I/O in C#
* Reflection - a necessary intro to reflection, but a bit simple
* Networking - biggest complaint: Why is there no remoting?
* Security - a good survey of various security issues in C#
* Threading - a good intro to threads and basic synchronization in C#
* Unsafe Code - I tore out and burned this section
* XML - good intro to reading/writing XML in C#
5 comments about Beginning Ubuntu Linux, Second Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional).
Ubuntu Linux is the easiest Linux distribution yet. I'm a computer programmer by trade and I have played with Linux in the past and felt it just wasn't ready for the mainstream public. Linux has come a long way in the last couple of years and Ubuntu proves that Linux IS a mature O/S that can be learned and loved by anyone.
Beginning Ubuntu Linux is one of the best books I have ever read about any Linux distribution. It introduces you to this foreign O/S called Linux. It helps you with the install and then it leads you on a journey of installing software that you will really use every day. The best part of all is you don't have to pay anyone for the use of the software this book shows you because it's almost all free. That's right I said free. The author has went to great lengths to find free software that the everyday Jane or Joe will use and then he takes it a step farther and gives you information about the software and he also provides links to other software that may be of use to you.
This book is so easy that even my wife (a non-technical person) could pick it up and start working with Ubuntu.
I wish Ubuntu and this book would have been around 2 or 3 years ago.
To start off this is a great book for beginners Much better 100 times than the Dummy book Great Reccommend, Good Reference & training book
The title says it all: "BEGINNING Ubuntu Linux". It really is about using Ubuntu Linux as a substitute for Microsoft Windows. There are advantages to doing so, namely cost. Ubuntu Linux is free.
Ubuntu has gained popularity because it is a straight-forward installation, a welcome relief to many people who have previously tried to install Linux or are simply accustomed to the sort of hand-holding insallation of Microsoft products (when nothing goes wrong).
Keir Thomas tries to cover a lot of territory and therein is the major weakness of the book. Linux, the operating system, by itself is a huge subject. Add to that sections on the BASH Shell, running various forms of multimedia, OpenOffice and a few other subjects and guess what? Nothing is covered in great depth. Usable, yes. But not great depth.
Also, Thomas has a slightly idiosyncratic style. This is particularly bothersome in chapters where he is dipping into more or less pure Linux, such as using the BASH Shell. The examples can occasionally be a bit hard to follow, though they all eventually do make sense.
Overall, for the inexperienced Linux user who is seeking a replacement for Microsoft Windows and Office, "Beginning Ubuntu Linux" is worthwhile. For the person seeking a more extensive knowledge of Linux, per se, there are better books available.
Jerry
I purchased this book to get a better understanding of how Linux, and especially Ubuntu, works - I got exactly that. This book offers a broad basic introduction and a fairly in-depth insight into not just Ubuntu, but also to Linux as a hole.
It describes the differences between Linux and windows, and gives some insight into why Linux does things a little different.
If you a looking for a beginners guide into Ubuntu, this will do the trick!
Jesper
Denmark
I have been an enthusiastic Unbuntu user for almost a year and a half now and find that Beginning Ubuntu Linux to be the most comprehensive and informative book that I have read so far even though I am only read a third of it so far. I feel that book is a must for anyone using Ubuntu who wishes to get the most out it.
Ubuntu is a superior and easier system than any Windows system and Beginning Ubuntu Linux makes even easier. There is an adjustment coming form Windows or Mac and this book smooths it out considerably.
Read it and enjoy the best system available today.
Written by chromatic and Damian Conway and Curtis "Ovid" Poe. By O'Reilly Media, Inc..
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5 comments about Perl Hacks: Tips & Tools for Programming, Debugging, and Surviving (Hacks).
In a time when new computer languages are dime a dozen, perl unquestionably retains its beauty. Keeping with the philosophy of perl - there is more than one way to do it - the book shows you ingenious ways to work with this powerful language. This is a true hacks book and meant mostly for the advanced user. Before reading this book, I didn't even realize what I didn't know and I rate myself just short of contributing to CPAN. Even if you have read all the popular books - Perl Programming, Perl Best Practices etc. you'll still find a lot of gems.
Simply put if you like perl, you'll love this book. Welcome to the next level...
To be completely honest, this isn't the book I thought it was going to be. Most O'Reilly Hacks books start off pretty simply and in a few chapters take you to the further reaches of their subject area. Whilst this is a great way to quickly get a good taste of a particular topic, it has the occasional disadvantage that for subjects that you know well, the first couple of chapters can seem a bit basic. As I know Perl pretty well, I thought I would be on familiar ground for at least half of the book.
I was wrong.
Oh, it started off easily enough. Making use of various browser and command line tools to get easy access to Perl documentation, creating some useful shell aliases to cut down typing for your most common tasks. "Oh yes", I thought smugly to myself, "I know all that". But by about Hack 5 I was reading about little tweaks that I didn't know about. I'd start a hack thinking that I knew everything that the authors were going to cover and end up frustrated that I was on the tube and couldn't immediately try out the new trick I had just learnt.
It's really that kind of book. Pretty much everyone who reads it will pick up something that will it easier for them to get their job done (well, assuming that their job involves writing Perl code!) And, of course, looking at the list of authors, that's only to be expected. The three authors listed on the cover are three of the Perl communities most respected members. And the list of other contributers reads like a who's who of people who are doing interesting things with Perl - people whose use.perl journals are always interesting or whose posts on Perl Monks are worth reading before other people's. Luckily, it turns out that all these excellent programmers can also explain what they are doing (and why they are doing it) very clearly.
Like all books in the Hacks series, it's a little bitty. The hacks are organised into nine broad chapters, but the connections between hacks in the same chapter can sometimes be a bit hard to see. But I enjoyed that. In places it made the book a bit of a rollercoaster ride. You're never quite sure what is coming next, but you know it's going to be fun.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more apt the fairground analogy seems. When you ask Perl programmers what they like about Perl, you'll often hear "fun" mentioned near the top of the list. People use Perl because they enjoy it. And the authors' enjoyment of Perl really comes through in the book. It's obvious that they really wanted to show people the things that they thought were really cool.
Although I did learn useful tips from the earlier part of the book, it was really the last three chapters that were the most useful for me. Chapter 7, Developer Tricks, had a lot of useful things to say about testing, Chapter 8, Know Thy Code, contains a lot of information on using Perl to examine your Perl code and Chapter 9, Expand Your Perl Foo was a grab-bag of obscure (but still useful) Perl tricks.
So where does this book fit in to O'Reilly's Perl canon? I can't recommend it for beginners. But if you're a working Perl programmer with a couple of years' experience then I'd be very surprised if you didn't pick up something that will be useful to you. And don't worry about it overlapping with other books in your Perl library - offhand I can't think of anything in the book that has been covered in any previous Perl book.
All in all, this would make a very useful addition to your Perl library.
I received this book as a token of appreciation for my contributions to
the 2006 Perl Advent Calendar. It's the first book I read as part of the
O'Reilly Hacks' series of books, and it proved to be a light yet informative and entertaining
read.
The book covers various useful "hacks" or small tricks that allow one to
achieve a lot of cool tasks when working with Perl. These tricks are unorthodox
and stretch the limit of one's Perl knowledge. Since they require an advanced
knowledge and understanding of Perl, I would recommend this book only for Perl
experts. Some of the B:: using modules were even too high-level for me to
understand how they worked internally. However, I understood the purpose of the
code in all cases, even if I didn't understand the code itself.
So it is a recommended read for people who've worked with Perl a lot,
and wish to learn many new and useful tricks. Perl Hacks for Perl hackers,
indeed!
From the title, I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Perl Hacks. Was it going to be about rummaging around in Perl's internals? Making Perl do clever, yet ultimately dumb and pointless tricks? It turns out that, while there is some fairly voodooish material here, some of it quite playful, on the whole it's a very practical book. Aimed firmly at the advanced Perl programmer who knows when it's appropriate to mess about with the symbol table, temporarily turn off warnings, or crack out one of the B:: modules, this is a collection of 101 suggestions to improve your productivity, boggle your mind about what Perl can do, or both.
The content reminds me a little of the likes of Exceptional C++ Style, a mixture of advanced best practices, and things which you may not need to know, but you'll probably still be interested in finding out how it works. For instance, have you ever considered tieing an array or hash variable to a function? Ever wanted to name a supposed anonymous subroutine? Print out the source code as well as the line number of a syntax error? Nor me, but Perl Hacks shows how it could be useful. These are illustrative of the spirit of the book.
My favourite material was probably the chapter on modules. Included are how-tos for outputting all the modules used in a package, automatically reloading modules in running code, shortening long package names with the CPAN 'aliased' module, and making up your own bundle of modules for easy installation. There's also an interesting object chapter with subjects such as: inside out objects, using YAML for serialisation, using traits and autogeneration of accessors.
Additionally, there's a little on using those scary B:: packages, using modules which use the B:: packages or other dark magic (e.g. peeking inside closures), some fairly hardcore tracing and profiling, that touches on some Perl VM internals. Also worth mentioning is the hack that hijacks the angle bracket glob operator to create Haskell/Python-style list comprehensions.
You are going to have to be one scarily gifted Perl hacker not to find something useful or at least thought-provoking at regular intervals throughout this book. My only complaint is that the hack format, which the blurb on the back of the book describes as a "short lesson", does not lend itself equally well to all hacks. While I liked the chapter on objects, some of the hacks (in particular the traits hack, some of the testing material) were too short.
If you like the sound of a book that's somewhere between Perl Cookbook, Perl Best Practices and the second edition of Advanced Perl Programming, you're going to love this.
Perl is my workhorse language. I've written more Perl code, both personally and professionally, than any other language I've learned. Whenever I receive a new project, I immediately think of how I would accomplish it quickly in Perl. I've also been a fan of O'Reilly's "Hacks" series of books. When I heard of the marriage of Perl and O'Reilly's "Hacks" series in the book Perl Hacks, I knew I had to pick up a copy. It was a match made in heaven. The nature of Perl for terse, yet powerful constructs, and the hackish nature of the "Hacks" series makes for one of my favorite books in this series. The collection of articles in Perl Hacks are great for putting more productivity into your programming experience.
Those of you not familiar with O'Reilly's "Hacks" Series may need an introduction. The "Hacks" Series is an ever-growing set of books with focused attention on a particular topic, like Astronomy, Mental Improvement, or even Halo 2. The books are generally short, and contain article-length "hacks" of varying difficulty, noted by a thermometer next to the hack number and description. These "hacks" fall into several categories; the non-obvious solution to a problem, the performance improvement, and the "gee, I didn't know it could do that" oddity. What makes this series special compared with other books is the willingness to "void the warranty" on a particular product, and get straight to the internals, whether they lay in hardware or software. If something can be made better by opening the covers, or twiddling with the program layout, then its eligible for inclusion in these books. The series lends itself to a wide range of topics, and the format is great for a quick read, or for (my favorite) just randomly opening the book and reading what's there.
Perl Hacks is not a book that you'd find yourself reading straight through (although you do want to make sure you visit every hack in the book at least once). The book is divided into nine chapters: Productivity Hacks, User Interaction, Data Munging, Working with Modules, Object Hacks, Debugging, Developer Tricks, Know Thy Code, and Expand Your Perl Foo. There are 101 hacks in this book, ranging from the simple (Reading files backward, or managing your module paths) to the truly perverse (Replacing bad code without touching it by substituting the system-wide exit call with your own[...]. Each hack title is listed in the table of contents, with both the page number and the hack number. Each hack contains a graphic of a thermometer next to the number to show the relative difficulty of the hack (higher temperatures = more difficult hacks). There quite a variety of hacks placed throughout the book. Not once did I feel that the book was padded with something that really didn't belong in the book. If anything Perl Hacks opened my eyes to things that I would never have thought to do, but could easily see as being useful. I wouldn't have thought to create my own personal module bundles for moving my Perl programs between machines (I've always done it the old fashioned way: run, cpan install, repeat), but hack #31 makes it so "of course" that I'm thinking of including this in all of my Perl code that I ship. Hack #74 shows how to trace all of the modules your program uses (and all of their modules, too). Hack #52 is a simple hack ("Make Invisible Characters Apparent") but I can see this saving a developer or two some time when figuring out why their code isn't behaving properly. Of course, not all hacks in the book are productive (at least, not while you're programming). Hack #37, "Drink to the CPAN" is a drinking game you and your Perl buddies may want to try.
Perl Hacks is a short book, at less than 300 pages, but it's loaded with incredibly useful information. Much like the "Perl Cookbook" (also from O'Reilly) you'll find lots of useful items hidden in their pages. Many times I started with one hack, and finished the chapter reading the rest of the hacks because there were just that interesting. Perl Hacks is highly recommended for any Perl programmer to have on their programmer book shelf. Sure, you might be able to find some of the hacks out there on the net, but I think you'll find as I have that this is more of a go-to reference for finding out some of the more interesting corners of Perl.