5 comments about PgMP: Program Management Professional Exam Study Guide.

1. I like Paul's style very much, so it's a good book for me. The major problem with this guide is the practice questions. I have not taken the PgMP exam, but I expect it to be even more scenario based than the PMP exam. Paul's practice questions are way too old style, memory regurgitation types. The CD replicates the questions in the book, and the final exams replicate the chapter questions, in the memory regurgitation style.
   This is a bad sign I think, because to pass the PMP exam, wannabes need to do a lot of good quality practice questions that are scenario based. I am sure this will be true of the PgMP as well.
   The book does include the content needed to pass, and I like his style.
   Jim SLoane, PMP, OPM3CAC, CM



2. To me, this book is an order to a perfect chaos of PGMP material. What I mean that the material required for the PgMP exam is scattered in bits and pieces across several references such as Program Management Standard (full), PgMP Exam Specifications (full), PMBOK 3rd Edition (pieces), Maturity models (pieces), and so on. This book integrates all the pieces seamlessly at one place, and by connecting the different concepts to each other creates a beautiful big picture of program management that makes sense. The author adds tons of value to the standard pieces. I commend the author for that. I personally don't care if the questions are easy or difficult (nothing is going to substitute for our experience); but the book presents the material required for the PgMP exam in an excellent way. I have gone through many program management books; none of those even come close to this remarkable book...Books like this one don't come that often...Exam or no Exam this book is a keep; a must have...
   Recommended highly.



3. This book is not at all readable; very dry kind of book. But most of all, this book does not help at all in preparing you for the exam. The questions in this book are totally different kind that what you will see in the exam. I took the exam and the questions are largely scenario based. Paul's book will help only about 10% at the most. My recommendation would be to read PMI's standard on Program Management and may be refresh your study from a PMP book like Rita Mulcahy. As such PMI's Program Management Standard book is more readable than Paul's book. Good luck in your preparation.



4. Waste of time and money. Too briefly. A lot of processes names, inputs and outputs don't match The Program Management Standard processes.
   This book can't help to pass PgMP exam.
   
   Serge Goncharov, PMP, PgMP



5. I've read this book from cover to cover and the PgMP exam? Tough! Been there, done that. My recommendation: this book is a must to prepare for the exam just like the Program Management Standard is. I'm puzzled at a couple of harshly negative reviews about this book: useless, waste of time, dry? These words do not describe this book....I have read other books from Dr. Paul Sanghera as well, and I love his style that puts life into even dead boring topics and make them interesting. Same is true about this book. All concepts are explained well and woven together, and there is a perfect logical flow...it's almost like reading a story... If the inputs and outputs for a process are re-organized to help you make sense, and explained why they are there, I think it's a feature and not a problem...
   
   I do agree however that the questions in the exam are much more difficult than the one in the book, but the book presents the material that you must know before taking the exam...In the exam, of course, your experience will count..no book can substitute for that...This material can be obtained from different references, scattered around...but the book does an excellent job to put all the pieces together and integrate them seamlessly... The author should be congratulated for that...Another great PLUS of this book is that it"s organized along the official exam specifications.
   Actually I would recommend this book even if you are not planning to take the exam; it's a great program management book, too.. All program managers should have it on their desk. Program Management Standard will make much more sense after reading this book.

5 comments about Programming in Visual Basic.NET 2005 Edition w/ Std CD.

1. This book is one of the best tools any beginning .NET or Visual Basic programmer can have. It teaches a very wide scope of material.
   
   I did every single problem in the book. Most of it out of my own desire to learn. I think this is the reason many people who are required to read this book for a class fail.
   
   The key is to do everything step by step. It is not a book for someone looking to skim over content. It is very in depth and if used properly it will teach you a great deal.



2. This book is filled with errors, incorrect information, and simply improper use of the VB.NET language. If you learn from this book and practice it's teachings at a real job, you would most likely either be fired or warned to learn the proper way. Why would any college ever think about using this book? It's just wrong. I mean the book is not how you use VB.NET it's just not.



3. This book isn't bad, but it would be confusing for people (like me) who had never been exposed to basic programming terminology before.
   
   If you know what an "argument" is (in a programming context), what it means to "call" a process, and are familiar with other similar jargon, this book may be just what you need. Otherwise, this book does not explain terms like this clearly, and you'd be better off with another one.



4. Without the fact that you have to re-write code over the authors to even get some of the "example" projects to work, ("example" projects meaning that they write all of the code and you basically copy it to gain a better understanding of how it all fits together) after chapter one you are expected to be a wizard programmer that needs only hints as to the hows and whys of the functions discussed in the later chapters. The hows and whys are described but in a disjointed fashion and badly explained throughout the book. The chapter on Arrays is horrible and made more sad by the fact that nearly every program a professional programmer will write will have complex Arrays inside of it. My college will no longer be using this book as of next semester thanks to students like me and an overall poor GPA for the programming class. Bottom line....Buy this book at your own risk. There are much better ones out there.



5. How long does it take for me to get refund? I havent received any refund yet from the time i returned it.
   -Gempanix-

5 comments about Mastering VBA (Mastering).

1. Thank you for finally publishing a book that all of us can use to learn VBA!!!



2. I bought this book because I was going to develop some tools to make things a little easier around the office. It has helped me tremendously, the sections on Excel and Word I found especially helpful. However, the access portion has much to be desired. For instance, First paragraph in chapter 29 on Manipulating the Data in an Access Database via VBA: (paraphrased) Data can be modified from either Access or another VBA-enabled application. This chapter shows you how to work from another VBA-enabled application.
   
   Well what if I wanted to learn how to modify an Access db from Access! Ok maybe Access deserves a whole book to itself, but still it would have been nice if the book elaborated a little on Access VB objects.



3. I only had to scan the table of contents to realize that this product is not the "end-all" for VBA programming needs. The few dozen or so pages dedicated the MS Access are clearly nowhere near what is needed to leverage VBA capability for the program where it is most valuable: Access!
   
   Database programmers - look elsewhere.



4. This book is an absolute page turner! Hemingway, Dumas? These witers are hacks compared to the prose of these accomplished writers. A must read!



5. Mastering VBA (Mastering)
   I have only just started to use this book to learn VBA.
   It is clear and concise and structured to lead a novice from basic macros through to more complex VBA scripting.
   The examples and lessons cover Word, Excel and Powerpoint at the same time showing any differences between the programs.
   It is well worth a look for people who use these packages but have not yet dabbled in VBA.

5 comments about sed and awk Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition.

1. I bought this "book" because I am writing a program that deals extensively with strings and text (natural language parsing). I was having some difficulty mastering sed, and understanding how it works. For example, "s/[^A-Za-z]//" was not working (to remove non alpha chars). After five pages in this little gem, I knew what I needed. A trailing "g".

   The book is rich with examples, explanations, and really just cuts straight to the chase.

   This is not a book for the casual user. It is, after all, a reference, not a tutorial. Unix users (and administrators) who already have a basic grasp of regular expressions and just what sed and awk are (and grep/egrep too) will find this most rewarding.

   While I have a hard time paying this much for what amounts to less than toaster oven instructions, it is absolutely invaluable to me, and it doesnt take up space on my desk or bookshelf.




2. I use this pocket reference more then any other reference for sed and awk. This is mostly a syntax guide for folks who already know sed and awk. If you don't know sed and awk, get the Ellen Quigleys 'Unix Shells'(for beginners) followed by O'Reillies 'Sed and Awk' reference. (Big book.) I tend to forget exactly how to do something, so I will just quickly look at my bookmarked pocket reference, and flip quickly to an example of syntax to get that bash code going correctly. If your desk has as many papers and books on it as mine, this is nice for freeing up some elbow room, while keeping the big books on the bookshelf most of the time.



3. Sed and awk are the mainstay for those of you who write shell scripts on unix/linux machines that manipulate text files. It is difficult to overstate the usefulness of these two programs.

   So O'Reilly and Robbins decided to help you by providing this pocketbook reference that encapsulates the online help for the programs. The book is aimed at someone who programs, but still prefers a traditional hardcopy reference as an aid to human memory. It assumes that you basically already know how to use the programs, but just need some reminder as to the exact syntax and all the possible options.




4. This little book is great. I've only had it for about a week. I needed to match some text today with a pattern that was a little bit more involved than my usual simple needs. I flipped through a few pages and found some examples that quickly helped me derive the search pattern I needed in a few minutes.

   I have the full "sed & awk" second edition book, but I went to the pocket reference instead. I would not have been able to find what I needed in the larger book as quickly.

   Some have complained about some of the pocket references lacking indexes. This one doesn't have one, but it's so easy to use that it doesn't need one. Just flip and few pages and you'll find what you need. As far as I'm concerned time is money. This little book has paid for itself in one weeks use.




5. Handy for those who don't use sed and awk every day. I keep it in my cube.

No comments about Beginning iPhone 2 Application Development: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional).

5 comments about Sams Teach Yourself Visual C# 2005 in 24 Hours, Complete Starter Kit (Sams Teach Yourself).

1. I have started learning programming about 6 months ago, reading several books. All the books have been on different programming languages at a beginners level.
   This book is definitely geared towards someone that wants to learn programming with Visual C#. I think this book is one of the best I have ever read. I am finding myself wanting to pick this book up and continue learning.
   
   I would totally suggest this book to anyone.
   Great Book!!



2. I have been programming for a very long time with a lot of VB6 experience. Before that I came from VB3, Delphi 1 and Clipper. I didn't need the programming aspect, I just needed to get acquainted with the C# syntax and the VS2005 IDE.
   
   This book is well organized and easy to follow. It delves deep enough into each main area far enough to show you what to do and where to look for more information. Being a guitar player myself, I also enjoyed the fact that there were guitars, amps and pedals used as .jpg examples!
   
   No complaints here!



3. This product did not deliver after all the good reviews I read on amazon. The book is clearly translated from the visual basic equivalent, as a result certain exercises have hints that are putting you on the wrong foot and dont make any sense at all. The book left me with alot of questions especially on the syntax of the language, and frustrated me with its lack of providing insight on what I was doing.



4. Very good book to get started with VC#
   The book was a little to slow in the first 2 parts



5. This book available in Online Reader form. I don't reccomend it. The viewer gets stuck, skips pages (requires restaring the browser) and even submitting a bug report generates a response from Amazon that "There is an error...".
   
   Biggest problem with this book is the online reader lets you zoom in only 1 time which makes reading the example code impossible.

1 comments about Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007: Comprehensive Concepts and Techniques (Shelly Cashman).

1. My product was just as described and forwarded quickly. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this seller!

5 comments about SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design (Theory in Practice).

1. I found the book to be well written and the content draws on Mrs. Josuttis daily experience as a system architect.
   
   As a developer, I found value in the second half of the book (chapters 10-20) as the discussion revolves around specific aspects of running SOA, in particular Message Exchange Patterns (ch. 10) , Versioning (ch. 12) and Model-Driven Service Development (ch. 18).
   
   I have to agree with one of the quotes on the back-cover, "The book belongs in the hands of every CIO, IT Director and IT planning manager." --Dr. Richard Mark Soley, Chairman and CEO, Object Management Group; Executive Director, SOA Consortium
   
   The optimal audience for this book is most likely IT Management and not the rank-and-file developers of the SOA world.



2. After more than a decade of being the focus of the industry's attention, SOA is still widely misunderstood at all levels, business and technical, and is still being successfully sold as a snake oil. This is why the publication of this book is extremely important.
   
   Being a rare objective survey of the entire SOA landscape, the book touches on numerous dimensions of SOA and services: service classification, lifecycle, management, performance, security, and governance. In the still over-hyped SOA landscape, the author stands out with his reasoning and pragmatism, which he showed in his earlier books (e.g. his excellent book "The C++ Standard Library").
   
   On about 300 pages the author manages not just to cover numerous important topics at a reasonable depth, but to pause at important points and suggest a helpful practical advice from his own experience. The book reads well, the language is simple and straightforward. This book has a lot of thought and value per ounce, which is very unusual for a SOA book.
   
   Whether you are new to SOA or have been sick from reading mountains of nonsense about it for years, you MUST have this book on your bookshelf, next to "Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices" by Dirk Krafzig, Karl Banke, and Dirk Slama, and "Service Orient or Be Doomed" by ZapThink founders Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer.



3. The book starts very well and you become very excited about what the future chapters will hold. I must say that the writer is an excellent writer and knows how to captivate you, but that only lasts as long as what he's talking about entertains. The chapters that a few here seemed to have liked were the best parts of the book, but even they were average at best. I was a little dissapointed that he gave examples of complex objects being returned from service calls, but never addressed methods that used XML instead of complex objects and in turn majority of the versioning section was based on versioning and problems that occur when dealing with complex objects. I did like the opinions he gave on using web services as means of realizing SOA. For those who didn't read the book, he doesn't think much of web services because of the many different standards organizations and the many versions of standards that are used to implement web services - these issues create interoperability problems when you're ultimately looking for high interoperability with SOA.
   
   Overall, this book maybe of interest to a business person or IT manager trying to understand what SOA is, but it's not that great for technologists looking for implementations that may fit their system. Three Stars!!!



4. Service-oriented architecture is more than just another IT buzzword. Most companies, large and small have heard of SOA and have either jumped on the bandwagon or have plans to do so in the near future.
   
   SOA in Practice covers a lot of ground and provides definitions and descriptions of the complex world of SOA. Initially, the book describes the motivation to adapt a service-oriented architecture. It then proceeds into a discussion of the elements of SOA and reiterates that SOA is no silver bullet.
   
   The author makes it clear that SOA is an ideal solution for a specific set of circumstances: "heterogeneous distributed systems with different owners." If that simple definition doesn't fit your organization, SOA may not be for you.
   
   If you are still committed to learning about or implementing SOA after understanding what it is and what it can (and can't) do for your organization, read on! The remainder of the book present an in-depth look at all elements of service-oriented architecture.
   
   I particularly enjoyed the chapters covering the enterprise service bus and message exchange patterns. In a nutshell, they show some of the many possibilities of how SOA can be implemented - indicating that there is no 'one right way' to do it.
   
   Web Services (not a requirement of SOA) is discussed, as well as the management of services, model-driven service development, and advice on establishing SOA in your enterprise.
   
   The book is light on technical details. This is obviously intentional as its core focus is not the nitty-gritty of how to make it work. It is more of a high-level, conceptual view of what SOA is all about and how it can help your enterprise solve difficult challenges when faced with integration of heterogeneous systems.



5. Having experienced my first service based, distributed system beginning around the 2000 - 2001 time frame, I feel well qualified to review this book. Through the years, I've heard and read a lot of SOA fluff and contradictions. This became a huge problem for me in 2005 when I was tasked, for the first time, with the job of designing a large, service-oriented, distributed system for a national observatory.
   
   The challenge was in explaining why all the hype the stakeholders had read about SOA didn't make it any easier to implement it and that, in actual practice, building the system would require hard work and a good understanding of distributed systems. You simply cannot buy this on a disk. In all fairness, you cannot buy this in a book, either, but what you do buy in this book is a way to explain what it is you are doing.
   
   Management and domain experts will read this and understand that there are challenges they had not thought about when they were told how easy it is to just 'wire' together services to build business processes. Developers who are new to distributed systems and/or the SOA paradigm will begin to get a 'feel' for how it differs from other approaches to distributed system design.
   
   If you want to really begin communicating with your stakeholders, point them to this book. I've read many books and articles on SOA and found the clear, complete, and concise approach taken in this one to be most effective.

3 comments about GWT in Practice.

1. GWT In Practice is an essential book for any web developer who works with or wants to work with the GWT toolkit. In addition to covering GWT fundamentals, the book really focuses on real world applications, not just Hello World type apps which are largely useless. The ample code samples throughout the book make applying GWT to solve something in your web application easy. I highly recommend this book.



2. GWT In Practice is well worth having as a reference for any developer who will be using GWT toolkit or is already using the GWT toolkit. The book makes for easy reading and not only covers the key areas of GWT but also the deployment and continuous integration of your GWT applications. The book's code samples are also very helpful in understanding the GWT concepts and usage. I highly recommend GWT In Practice!!!



3. My first thought upon reading the first few chapeters of this book was "Where was this thing when I started to use GWT a few months ago?" The authors have done an excellent job really showing how to use the Google Web Toolkit. My eternal fear when I read these books is that there won't be any content outside of what the product already ships with. Not so in this case at all.
   
   The authors cover the GWT basics, to be sure, but more importantly, they demonstrate a way to really use GWT. They hit upon one of my thoughts when first trying to get my head around GWT: GWT is not a framework; it is a platform at best. They recognize this and help you work with the power and around the limitations of GWT.
   The authors demonstrate common patterns and practices in the "language" of GWT. It was extremely satisfying to finally, with the help of this book, be able to articulate and execute all the patterns that I've been using in other systems, (e.g. MVC, PropertyListeners, etc.)
   
   The authors also demonstrate how to use GWT in a variety of environments and build system. These concepts were useful, but I found myself skimming over pages at a time to get back to the "good stuff." (This was my primary knock in not giving it five stars.)
   
   All in all, I highly recommend and I'll be ensuring that my team each learn the concepts presented.

3 comments about Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More (Pro).

1. This book focuses on some advanced technologies and latest developments related to php. The targeted readers are those who already know php programming but would like to know how to work with php in a way to adopt mainstream software and Internet development technologies.
   
   For example, the book collectively describes about phpdoc, phpunit, xdebug, as well as subversion, phing, and xinc. The examples and steps provided in the book allow the reader to follow through relatively at ease. Nevertheless, the reader may want to know that all install and setup described in the book are based on Linux environment.
   
   In the chapter of Reflection API, the reader will get a chance to study some use cases about this advanced extension that normally only java or C# programmers could enjoy through their build in language features today. The chapters about Standard PHP Library (SPL) give the reader the ideas of how to apply OOP libraries for php programming. For instance, instead of using a set of low-level file manipulative methods, the reader now might think about using SPLFileInfo object to represent and access file info. The book also covers some design techniques on php such as exception handling, MVC paradigm, and a few design patterns, which are informative.
   
   The topics of Zend framework and Web 2.0 including ajax, web services, soap, and certificate authentication, provide a good entry point for those who want to know how to associate php to web design architecture and how php play its role within web deployment.
   
   For about 300 pages, this book covers a lot of info. The topics are explained in a clear and straightforward manner for easier read. Additionally, the reader may find the writing is pretty concise in general and still leaves room for the reader to further investigate the issues outside the book. The companion download-able source code from the website is as expected and helpful.
   
   Needless to say, some sections could be better organized. The Part 1 OOP and Patterns only list a few out of many common regarded patterns and OOP ideas, and other Parts of the book also mention some other patterns along their ways.
   
   Overall, this book deserves a score 8 out 10 and should be as an eye opener and handy for those who like to see some advanced php subjects demonstrated in one place.



2. I have been developing web-based, database-driven applications for 12 years using Perl, Java, and, for the past 3 years, PHP. I was a late-comer to PHP because, quite frankly, its early iterations sucked. The committers finally got it right with 5.2 and 6.0 looks like they are staying on-track.
   
   I went through any number of online tutorials and "Learn PHP in 24 Hours" books in the beginning and they were fine for "Hello World" applications. But as my need for sophistication rapidly grew, I found a distinct lack of good, readable texts that could function not only as tutorial but as reference as well. I went through a disappointing array of O'Reilly, Manning, Osborne, Addison-Wesley, etc. books, each of which lacked that crucial combination of clarity, accuracy, and scope. Then I happened to chance upon Apress' publication of "Pro PHP Development."
   
   I just finished reading "Pro PHP Development," and when I say I "finished reading" it, I mean exactly that - I read it cover-to-cover. Kevin McArthur has the uncommon talent of writing a technical manual in prose. Unassuming vernacular makes reading easy, instead of the more typical struggle with every idea and re-reading sentences and paragraphs after that "HUH???" experience forces wonder at the author's point and intent. Concrete, concise, and useful examples demonstrate the textual subjects in clear unambiguous source code. And where appropriate and useful, McArthur introduces aspects of PHP 6.0. The coverage of some of the most useful objects in the SPL and the extensive treatment of the Zend MVC Framework is worth the price of admission in themselves.
   
   In summary, "Pro PHP Development" is right up there with the finest technical literature I've read and has earned a place on my bookshelf (lesser texts get relegated to eBay). It's a keeper. Until the next edition!
   
   Mark Galbreath
   Annapolis, MD



3. As an experienced PHP developer and author myself I was delighted that Pro PHP showed me a number of new techniques that I can apply to my own every day development tasks. This makes me confident that developers of all levels will gain value out of reading this book. I typically like to keep up with recently released books so I know the material that is available, but as somebody who has been programming PHP for almost 10 years I generally don't find new ideas that can be applied to general PHP programming.
   
   Two such examples of this in Pro PHP that helped me are array overloading with the ArrayAccess SPL class and the observer pattern using SplObserver and SplSubject. Firstly, ArrayAccess allows you to access objects (such as reading and writing) as you would with an array. One such example of this is in the PHP SimpleXMLElement class. Secondly, using the observer pattern allows one object to monitor the state of another object and react to these changes as desired. Kevin describes these to the reader and provides solid examples of using them.
   
   An interesting aspect of this book is the chapter dedicated to PHP 6. Although a stable version has not yet been released, Kevin covers the key features that we can look forward to such as namespaces, late binding and native Unicode support.
   
   The other thing that I like about Kevin's style and methods are that they are fairly similar to my own, meaning for the most part I agree with his methods and therefore recommend them to other users as well.
   
   On the whole I would have two minor complaints with this book. Firstly, there is a lot of "conceptual code" rather than practical real-world examples. Having said that, there are so many different ideas in this book that it would be difficult to fit longer examples for these ideas. Secondly, I would've liked to see some more extensive coverage of the Xdebug module. This is a module that I try to use but I feel like I am under using its potential. It is great that Kevin covers it in Pro PHP, but I would've liked to see some slightly more advanced usage for my own benefit.
   
   In summary, I would definitely recommend reading this book, especially if you have been slow to transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5, or if you use PHP 5 but know you don't take full advantage of its Object Oriented Programming features.