5 comments about Learning WCF: A Hands-on Guide.

1. This is an absolutely awesome book for those new to WCF, experienced in WCF development and looking at tuning their skills, or trainers looking for quality material for their students (I used this book to prep for the Instructor Led Lab session I delivered at Tech.Ed Australia 2007 and I know the two attendees I gave copies too were also extremely impressed with its content).
   Every topic discussed in this book is reinforced with hands-on-labs and code examples in both VB.NET and C# and Michele has also delivered a 15 part series titled "Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom" based on the book (see my blog at [...] for a detailed review of each presentation).
   If you're serious about WCF, this is the book to get.



2. You may want to acquire various other WCF books for depth, but if you're just getting started with WCF, this is the book you want. There isn't another book out there that compares to it. It's cleanly written and nicely balances conceptual material on service orientation with the practicalities of Windows Communication Foundation.
   
   Many other books on WCF take the form of a "brain dump" on WCF features, or get bogged down in conceptual discussion of Service Oriented Architecture. Instead, Ms. Bustamante has a very clear, logical path from simple WCF features to more complex. You won't be overwhelmed early, but you will eventually get to most of the advanced features you'll likely need. Other books, such as Juval Lowy's Programming WCF Services (Programming), can pick up at that point for the really advanced topics.
   
   Many of the chapters contain step-by-step labs, and you can get working end results from the author's web site. They start easy and build nicely through more complex concepts.
   
   The sample code in the book is in C#, but if you happen to be a Visual Basic developer (as I am), you're not left out. Many of the labs and samples are also available in VB on the author's web site.
   
   The book was unfortunately published too early to include definite coverage of the Visual Studio 2008 features for automatically generating some of the code you need to use WCF. Those capabilities are in the Visual Studio 2008 beta now and will be released in the next few months. Some of the labs could have been simplified by using those Visual Studio features. But, on the positive side, working through the labs in more detail will give you a more in-depth understanding of the subject and enable you to use the Visual Studio features more effectively.



3. Great tutorials and help on author's website. Definately a book for someone who needs to start from the beginning!



4. This is a very good book to get started quickly with WCF. Specially useful are the setup instructions and the section on hosting, which can be big gotchas with new technologies like this one. The section on security is a nice touch.
   
   Here is the table of contents in case you are wondering:
   
   Chapter 1. Hello Indigo
   Section 1.1. Service Oriented Architecture
   Section 1.2. WCF Services
   Section 1.3. Fundamental WCF Concepts
   Section 1.4. Creating a New Service from Scratch
   Section 1.5. Generating a Service and Client Proxy
   Section 1.6. Hosting a Service in IIS
   Section 1.7. Exposing Multiple Service Endpoints
   Section 1.8. Summary
   Chapter 2. Contracts
   Section 2.1. Messaging Protocols
   Section 2.2. Service Description
   Section 2.3. WCF Contracts and Serialization
   Section 2.4. Service Contracts
   Section 2.5. Data Contracts
   Section 2.6. Message Contracts
   Section 2.7. Approaches to Serialization
   Section 2.8. The Message Type
   Section 2.9. Summary
   Chapter 3. Bindings
   Section 3.1. How Bindings Work
   Section 3.2. Web Service Bindings
   Section 3.3. Connection-Oriented Bindings
   Section 3.4. One-Way and Duplex Communication
   Section 3.5. Large Message Transfers
   Section 3.6. Custom Bindings
   Section 3.7. Summary
   Chapter 4. Hosting
   Section 4.1. Hosting Features
   Section 4.2. ServiceHost
   Section 4.3. Self-Hosting
   Section 4.4. Hosting on the UI Thread
   Section 4.5. Hosting in a Windows Service
   Section 4.6. Hosting in IIS 6.0
   Section 4.7. IIS 7.0 and Windows Activation Service
   Section 4.8. Choosing the Right Hosting Environment
   Section 4.9. Summary
   Chapter 5. Instancing and Concurrency
   Section 5.1. OperationContext
   Section 5.2. Instancing
   Section 5.3. Concurrency
   Section 5.4. Instance Throttling
   Section 5.5. Load Balancing and Failover
   Section 5.6. Summary
   Chapter 6. Reliability
   Section 6.1. Reliable Sessions
   Section 6.2. Transactions
   Section 6.3. Queued Calls
   Section 6.4. Summary
   Chapter 7. Security
   Section 7.1. WCF Security Overview
   Section 7.2. Securing Intranet Services
   Section 7.3. Securing Internet Services
   Section 7.4. Working with Certificates
   Section 7.5. Building a Claims-Based Security Model
   Section 7.6. Exploring Federated Security
   Section 7.7. Summary
   Chapter 8. Exceptions and Faults
   Section 8.1. SOAP Faults
   Section 8.2. WCF Exception Handling
   Section 8.3. Exceptions and Debugging
   Section 8.4. Fault Contracts
   Section 8.5. IErrorHandler
   Section 8.6. Summary
   Appendix A. Setup Instructions
   Section A.1. Database Setup
   Section A.2. ASP.NET Provider Model Setup
   Section A.3. Certificate Setup
   Section A.4. IIS Application Directories
   Appendix B. ASP.NET Meets CardSpace
   Section B.1. Information Cards and CardSpace: A Brief Tour
   Section B.2. Identity Metasystem Participants and Browser Flow
   Section B.3. Let's Log In with CardSpace!
   Section B.4. Processing the Token
   Section B.5. Associating Cards with User Accounts
   Section B.6. Creating a Dual Purpose Login Page
   Section B.7. Conclusion



5. I am very happy with this book: it's easy to read, the structure is very intuitive and logical, and everything you need to know is covered. If you're just starting with WCF and you're looking for an excellent resource on the subject, look no further.

5 comments about Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)).

1. If you take the title of this book as its premise, then there are 2 other books that are better both in commentary, thought and detail. Go deeper.
   
   The Practice of Programming (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)
   Programming Pearls (2nd Edition) (ACM Press)



2. Beautiful Code is a unique book. It is not bound by a particular system, or programming language, or methodology. Instead, it tries to straddle the entire field of programming with the ostensible aim of exploring beauty in computer code.
   
   What we get is a smorgasborg of essays that posits competing definitions of technical beauty in very different pieces of code. As such, the book becomes a dialectical argument between different conceptions of technical beauty. It may even serve as a rorsarch test to your sensibilities as a programmer. In the process, you may discover algorithms that are startling in their beauty and ingenuity.
   
   Given the broad sweep of the book, the quality of the essays is somewhat of a crap-shoot. What I found more interesting was working out why I found some of the essays elegantly persuasive, whilst others, I found to be a turgid sludge to wade through. In the end, it becomes almost impossible to separate the quality of the writing from the definition of beauty defined in the essay.
   
   Technical beauty is a very strange beast. It is different from the kind of beauty that resides in the curve of Scarlet Johanssen's lips. In physics and maths, there is a tradition of invoking beauty in certain equations. Einstein's equations for general relativity surely merits that description, as does Euler's formula. For me, technical beauty refers to that rare fusion of concision, efficiency and surprisingly deep connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena.
   
   I found that the essays that I liked were the ones that focused on very specific pieces of code. These essays would carefully explain the problem that the programmer was trying to solve, articulate the constraints, and show the straightforward (and usually less elegant) alternatives. They would then go through all the blind-alleys before unveiling the final solution, which would be as surprising as it was elegant. After all, the father of the essay, Montaigne, coined the term "essai", which means attempt in french.
   
   The essays that didn't work would try to describe how the software worked, and skip over the details. But these are technical essays, after all, and without a careful consideration of technique, all that is left is flabby writing. Surprisingly, there were quite a number of essays devoted to scientific programming, with contributions from the writers of BioPerl, Numpy, LAPACK, and the NASA Mars module. Most of these I found rather unsatisfactory, the kind of flabby essays that skipped over interesting technical details. They offered no fundamental insight to how the code was implemented other than the fact that these packages have stood the test of time. The exception was Trevor Oliphant's essay on Numpy, which showed how a powerful iterator implementation can dramatically simplify the organization of a linear algebra library.
   
   How detailed were the techniques? In Henry S. Warren Jr's essay, he describes how one might count bits in C. It's a marvelous essay because through the description of such an elementary operation, Warren illuminates just how close to the metal one can go in a low-level language like C. At the other end of the scale, Jeffre Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, engineers at Google, describe the MapReduce algorithm, part of the secret sauce that squeezes out information from Google's gigantic parallel arrays of hard-disks and processors.
   
   There is a the famous dictum attributed to Fred Brooks that if you know the data structure of a program, you will know how the program works. The design of the key data structure reveals the inner workings of a piece of software better than any flow-chart ever could. Greg Kroah-Hartman describes an object-oriented design right in the heart of the Linux kernel driver, written in nothing less than C. Here is found one of the scariest looking C macros that I have ever seen. In one of the most twisted pieces of logic, Kroah-Hartman argues that by not simplifying the macro (including such hand-holding as run-type checking), it keeps away people who don't know what they are doing from touching the code. That, for Kroah-Hartman, is beautiful code. Andrew Kuchling's essay explained how dictionaries are implemented in Python. In the process, I finally understood how dictionaries underpin virtually everything in Python, from objects to locally scoped variables. That's why dictionaries in Python need to be as fast as they are.
   
   Two essays introduced me to some radically different programming techniques. Charles Petzold's essay on writing fast image filters shows how you can do custom compilation on very small pieces of code for incredible speed gains. The essay by Andreas Zeller described perhaps the strangest algorithm in the book. He was working a GNU debugger GUI front-end that got broken after the back-end debugger was upgraded to a newer version. Rather that go through each of the 10000 different patches individually by hand, Zeller came up with a perversely beautiful technique to systematically identify which patch broke the GUI front-end.
   
   Some of the essays flew straight over my head, but such is the nature of such an eclectic collection as this. Beauty, some might argue, is the ability to see hidden patterns in the world, so it seems appropriate to mention Brian Kernighan's essay on a terse 35 line C-program that implements a regular expression matcher. It makes extensive use of recursion, of course.



3. I found the book's concept intriguing. The ability to learn from 33 highly respected members of the programming community is invaluable. I've enjoyed my daily dose of Beautify Code... but one thing caught me by surprise:
   
   Not all samples are beautiful... well in my eyes not all samples/chapters are beautiful.
   
   I'll skip listing the ones I found beautiful, interesting, insightful and educational because I'm sure you will find others that "do it" for you.
   
   All in all I think it's worth giving this book a shot.
   
   PS - I recommend reading Dmitry Dvoinikov's review and the comments associated with it... you'll get a better sense of the book.



4. I'm willing to give this book at most three stars, mostly because I'd be ashamed to give it its first one star after the authors put so much work into this project, and I did enjoy some of the essays. I don't believe in hounding and harassing authors as was done to Herb Schildt (C author harassed for being a good mentor) and Kathy Sierra (Java authority harassed for being female).
   
   The code in this book isn't Beautiful, and the book fosters an illusion about programming.
   
   Rob Pike's 1998 example of a "regular expression" processor in Brian Kernighan's lead article isn't Beautiful. It doesn't process strings, properly understood; it processes arrays of bytes, and it does so with no apology from Kernighan.
   
   It uses a value parameter as a work area without apology or explanation. Because C is a required language at Princeton for computer science majors, Kernighan feels no need to point this out, while pointing out the unusual, but correct, use of single-trip while.
   
   It is correct in C to change a parameter passed by value ... but philosophically and from the standpoint of interlanguage readability, it's a C idiom used in a context not predeclared to be C.
   
   We've come a long way, and a long way down, from the Algol vision of a publication language if programmers are expected to know a language, C, which has so many flaws, to learn computer science and Beauty itself.
   
   Pike's code also repeats a test in two different functions. Brian's general apologia is that it's "efficient" but a roughly equivalent C Sharp version is only five times as slow...before you improve the latter by determining where possible the handle of the regex (the set of characters and/or strings that the regex MUST start with, which can be found using library facilities in C or C Sharp that execute for the most part fast assembler code).
   
   The beauty in the code seems to be constituted for Kernighan in the fact that Pike wrote this flawed program in one hour with no back-talk.
   
   The rest of the book adheres to this pattern; forced marches, vanity projects and the misuse of terminology (for example, structs are referred to as classes).
   
   The illusion fostered by this book is that "programming" is the ideally single author writing in a flash of intuition some gnomically brief, uncommented, unHungarianized code which cleverly exploits idioms and implicitly defies a background of "dull" code written by clueless corporate drones...a sort of Star Wars urban legend in which the pure and good Beuatiful coders confront the Dark Side.
   
   Writing about a manifestation of this urban legend in 1985, Theodore Roszak wrote (in From Satori to Silicon Valley) "how could they [the Apple kids] believe something so unlikely?"
   
   The belief persists in technical circles that "we are Individuals who would write nothing but Beautiful code, and think naught but Beautiful thoughts, were it not first necessary to get Version 1.0 out the door and identify non-contributors and heretics, who in any way question our self-image as Luke Skywalker and Co." It persists because telling this story to yourself allows you to avoid confronting the objective subordination of the real programmer to essentially uncaring corporations with, in American law, the fiduciary responsibility to Screw U.
   
   The fact is that "programming" is almost always collective, either in the sense of a group project, or in the creation of the first edition of an artifact which is then (even in the case of Linux and suchlike legendary products) taken from the author and transformed into a set, a series of editions which as a group solve a problem which is itself an ordered set.
   
   Programmers rage for the fantasy of being a single author of unchanging deathless code and because they work in industry (sometimes as virtual slaves to Open Source projects, willing slavery being different in no fundamental respect from slavery, period) they never get this. The result?
   
   Actual coding is fetishized and mystified in the real world to the point of a cargo cult, where at one and the same time, everybody wants to be the Author, but any moves, in the real world, towards this position, are considered to be disruptive, and the result is the grand fantasy of the enterprise system in which "coding", having become the nightmare inverse of the creative dream/fantasy, and the work of evilduuers, is supposed to disappear, but returns in the "mere" setting of parameters...using a Turing complete programming language which is normally pretty much of a mess.
   
   Romanticising this process as having anything to do at all with artistic Beauty (the beauty of a Poussin, of the Ninth Symphony, of Death of a Salesman) breaks the connection with truth which is Beauty's mainstay. Nearly all code is poorly written in parallel or serial-over-time groups in which the members have been forced by management to compete with each other to the point, in some shops, of insanity, and most code unfairly structures the lives of countless employees and consumers in a way that systematically deprives them of meaningful control over their lives as employees, customers, investors, patients, or stiffs in the morgue.
   
   An alternative way was shown early on in Algol, the product of a genuine partnership between universities, corporations and government. This effort was destroyed by IBM in favor of the infantile disorder (Fortran) and a few years on, most of the good ideas in C came from Algol, and were taken without acknowledgement.
   
   I was somewhat saddened to see Kernighan involved with this vanity project because in his early work he sketched out a true alternative to the insanity, this being just slowing down and writing code, in whatever language (even Fortran) in a literate way. I met Brian when working at Princeton in 1987, and I felt like Garth and Wayne (Wayne's World) when they meet Alice Cooper: "we're not worthy". But it's clear to me from his essay and others that this beauty is too much in the minds of an American-centric programming culture to inspire.
   
   Beauty is the Beast: in this book it means only doing it as fast as possible using in-jokes and idioms. There is no suffering here; suffering is prohibited as is asking questions such as "what is a string" when all you have are bytes; internationalisation is unmentionable in the Kernighan essay for this reason, as is the fact that both Java and C Sharp are international in their treatment of strings despite their *de minimis* "inefficiency" without any nonsense whatsoever. Dijkstra, the only real authority as far as I can tell on the type of elegance you need in programming, isn't even in the index.
   
   Three stars, and that's because I'm a nice guy. I gave my own book only four stars because I didn't have enough time to do a perfect job and was perfectly willing to admit this. I despise Amazon numbers games, as well. So, Greg and Andy, consider yourself to have gotten a lucky break.



5. Ask a number of developers what beautiful code looks like and you'll get different answers. Take those answers and compile them into a book and you'll get this text. I don't particularly find the code in this book beautiful at all, mostly because the code was written years ago when ideas like readability (read Refactoring) were not as important, and where better tools were not available. There are a few chapters where I agree with the author's ideas on beautiful code. However, I find that in these limited cases, the case study that the author presents and the ideas on beautiful code are disjoint. I find it too often that authors re-iterated how short code is beautiful (think Perl), which is not always the case and shouldn't be something that is emphasized too much over readability, maintainability, and extensibility.
   
   My belief is that if you're a college student, this text might give you some ideas on what good code should do (though don't specifically use the code examples, use the ideas). If you work in the industry, your code should look better than the ones presented.

5 comments about Mastering Regular Expressions.

1. Before reading this book, I would have considered myself an intermediate regexer. After the first 2 chapters, I realized how novice I really was. Having only made it through 5 chapters of this book, I can't say enough about it. The detail and step-by-step analysis that Mr. Friedl takes to describe the regex matching process is the best I've ever seen. It's little things that make the analysis easy to follow -- like the brackets he uses to mark the regex, and the small triangle cursor to show where the engine is in the matching process. I continue to look forward to each new chapter. Thank you for a wonderful work of art.



2. I have been in computer software developer over 7 years now and never really used regular expression until a year ago. True, you can live without it. But, with regular expression at hand, you climb up another level of programming. Code will be much concise and code research will be like a breeze.
   
   Anyway, I didn't read this book entirely since later chapters explain intricacies and subtle differences of each specific language, e.g., java, perl, php, etc. It didn't take long to apply the knowledge I gained to real work and benefit. By the time I completed the first chapter, I already started to get rewards. My life is a lot easier now.
   
   Even with only the first 3 chapters, this book is well worth its price. The author did superb job explaining what's going on behind the scene and guide you through the right way of constructing regular expressions for various situations. Of course, he will show you common pitfalls to avoid, too. Very detailed and comprehensive.
   
   Highly recommended.



3. This book is seriously worth the money. I knew just enough regular expressions to get by, then I started reading this book and it has paid off already; saving me time on several long, arduous tasks.
   
   The book is really well written, very interactive w/ quick, quizzing questions mixed throughout the chapters. The authors writing style is very effective and surprisingly entertaining.
   
   If you don't know much about regular expressions or even if you think you do, purchase this book. It will be well worth it.



4. An incredible book. Absolutely incredible. It will take 200 lines of your code and reduce it to 1 or 2 lines. It will open your mind to search and replace possibilities. Your life will change (just kidding). It's a great deep book.
   
   However, I agree with the comment that one should not begin learning regex with this book. it's a little too advanced. Go on the internet, get an introduction. Or else, buy one of the introductory books on the subject first. But definitely get around to buying this book!



5. How deep down the rabbit hole do you really NEED to go? I had a serious need to get on top of regular expressions to solve one particular problem. I looked at several online tutorials which didn't take me where I needed to go, so I ordered Mastering Regular Expressions after reading the Amazon reviews. I always look at the negative reviews first. In spite of the negative reviews I ordered the book with an open mind.
   When the book arrived I began reading it with enthusiasm. In the preface there is a small section on "How to Read This Book". I bought into the author's suggestion to read the book's first six chapters first. I was captivated through the first three chapters, and then somewhere in chapter 4 I began to get very weary with information overload. After putting the book down for a couple of days I decided to skip the rest and use what I needed to write the one regular expression I had need of. The book did successfully help me accomplish this, so I gave it 3 stars. Not only did it give me the information I needed that the online tutorials didn't, it also gave me the confidence I needed. For that, which I am grateful, I would have liked to have given it more stars. I think many of those in need of learning about regular expression could be well served by a "lite-edition" of this book. Perhaps someday when I have the time and the need I may try to wade through the rest of the book, but as it is now Mastering Regular Expressions took me far farther down the rabbit hole than I really needed or wanted to go.
   If you need to get on top of Regular Expressions, I would recommend this book, however just be ready to be taken far deeper than the average coder probably needs to go.

5 comments about Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems.

1. This book is a must own and a must read. Ross Anderson may tweak people's noses on occassion...but usually because they need tweaking. Get this book now. Really.



2. This is certainly a good book for getting introduced to most high-level architectural concepts related to Network security, cryptography, mandatory/multi-level access control etc. From a application development perspective, this book falls short on how to build architecure, design and implement them into your business applications which ultimately meets the end-user. The author justifies the high-level concepts well enough from a generalist perspective, but the industry-standards from OASIS leans towards standards-based application security protocols..which pushes a developer/architect like me to take those suggestions first and how to apply them in real world. The book also does'nt address on how-to build security for emerging application architectures based on Service-oriented architecture (SOA), Identity Management, Net-centric Federated applications. As a developer/architect using Java or Microsoft .NET or open-source based distributed applications, I need guidance on how to implement the recommended concepts (in the book) for example using biometrics or smartcards for building multi-factor access control at my application-level...unfortunately I don't find any answers for real-world implementation.



3. The book is interesting but it's starting to show signs of it's age. I think the last revision of it was 2001, so the examples are good, yet aged. It would be great if they updated it. Still a useful and good book though.



4. The title is maybe misleading. It is not really a guide that will show you a procedure step by step 'how to do' to build secure systems as most engineering books do. It is rather a survey of the different security protocols used in various fields. Of course, you can learn from the success and errors described in the book and use this knowledge for developing a new system but you will have to connect the dots yourself.
   
   The book is very dense in information and at first, its format was making it tedious for me to read. It did take around 3 chapters before I get accustomed to the format. Once, this aspect was out of the way, this book became amazingly interesting. It describes systems used in banking, by diplomats, military, for nuclear weapons, police, set-up box TV decoders smart cards and anti tampering devices in general, spies, biometric authentication, etc.. and focus on the security protocols used by these systems and then highlights the weaknesses of the systems and how people have figured out how to workaround these protocols.
   
   The best quality of the book is that it will help you to better understand the mindset of a secure system designer and a system hacker.



5. I found the book very interesting to read as a textbook becasue it draws many examples from everyday applications. The style of writing is good and it covers broadly all areas of IT security. For those requiring more detailed discussions in specific areas of security, this may not be sufficient.

5 comments about Agile Estimating and Planning (Robert C. Martin Series).

1. I've been doing scrum for quite a while and really appreciated this book as it is *not* specifically scrum and adds other very interesting techniques to use. My favorite is planning poker, which basically all my teams use now with great success.
   
   A must to round out your Agile understanding.



2. I have been acting as the Scrum master for my team for about 6 months. We have gotten pretty good at planning and executing an iteration at a time. Our customers have always wanted to see a longer-term plan. I've read several other books but none of them have come close to this one. It has been invaluable in helping us to prioritize, estimate, plan, and communicate several iterations in advance.



3. This book is a well written synopsis of how an agile methosology should work, with adhering to a hard and fast methodology ( be it XP or SCRUM or Crystal). I would recommend this book to anyone who is using or is planning to implement an Agile setup. This book shows that Agile, does not mean 'no' planning, far from it, but shows that estimating project size is key to delivering on time and what is expected.
   I recommend it to project managers and developers who are mature enough to understand that guess work makes everyone's job harder and that software is developed to support business needs that must lead to profit



4. I've read this book because of the "Planning" in the title. It does cover planning, but not in the depth that I was looking for.
   
   It shows a lot of good concept ideas, like prioritizing based on mandatory, linear and exciting features. Or when it talks about using a story as tracer bullet to provide more info to the team. I really like the idea of the theme parking lot.
   
   For someone that uses scrum on a daily basis, the idea of creating tasks just before comitting to a story sounds silly, but it makes a lot of sense.
   
   The book gets really very good after page 200. It's where most of the "planning" is.
   
   The Case Study on last chapter is really very good.
   
   I would recommend this book to everyone interested in agile development, but it's not a introductory book. It's more for the middle practitioner.



5. Mike takes agile planning to a new level with this one of kind book. Its a pretty simple read, not to high level but enough detail to get you through in the weeds of your day.

5 comments about Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA (Excel Power Programming With Vba).

1. This is the first book I read on the subject (I am proficient in other languages/platforms).
   It is a decent introduction, and it gives you a good overview of various areas of Excel/VBA programming. There are plenty of code examples and lots of opportunities to get your hands dirty modifying and debugging them.
   
   I was very disappointed by its poor structure and lack of rigour. Concepts are introduced by example in seemingly unrelated chapters, therefore scattering language features all over the place. This, combined with an utterly useless index, means that unless you get a digital copy of the book you will have a very hard time using this book as a reference.
   
   Also, in my opinion, the author has not gone out much using other more sophisticated languages, and this lack of discipline/hacking attitude is often noticeable. Not only in the occasional sloppiness of his code (whoever proof-read this book did an awful job too by the way), but also in the poor explanation of higher features of VBA, for instance class modules, relegated to a 10-page chapter towards the end, whose examples are anyway missing the whole point of stateful encapsulation through class objects. Similarly poorly explained (many chapters earlier, incidentally) is the use of class objects for Application-level events, with the mysterious "With Events" qualifier which is never really explained anywhere.
   I often found that the material lacked diagrams and more abstract and general explanations that go beyond the "learn by example" cookbook approach.
   Finally, I was annoyed by the frequent, not-so-subliminal adverts to the author's software package, of which a trial is available on the CD.
   
   Overall, it did the job for me - helping me getting to grips with the language and the object model. But if you are already beyond the basics get yourself a good reference, or perhaps Professional Excel Development: The Definitive Guide to Developing Applications Using Microsoft(R) Excel and VBA(R) (The Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology Series), which I have already started reading with interest and seems to explain much more methodically best practices and more advanced concepts - while still not a VBA reference.



2. It's an excellent an useful book. Personally, It's helped me a lot. I recommend to read it, because it has many simple and difficult examples of macros, codes, programming's techniques and functions. Also it teachs about API of Windows . It'll definitely help to be a successful developer on Excel.



3. Book was helpful in the setup of various 'maintenance' routines. It gave me a fresh look at the use of properties, allowing me to streamline the coding. Unfortunately, company directives have us converting the work to 'active server pages' with a SQL 2005 database server. Since the source data is Oracle, I have been working on DB to DB utilities.



4. Excellent book for anyone looking to quickly get up and programming VBA in Excel. Don't have to be familiar specifically with Visual Basic but a reasonable knowledge of programming a help. Would have given it 5 stars if it had a thorough reference section on VBA.



5. While I had used this for a course in VBA, and noted that it was an extremely concise text, I found it near useless when I was working on my assignments. This book had the information in it, but oftentimes, I simply could not find this information quickly (if at all), and instead Googled much of my information.
   
   On a positive note, this is a well-written book (note: not well-indexed), and therefore useful if you're learning VBA and exploring each chapter one-at-a-time. If you're looking strictly for a reference book for VBA, however, I would strongly advise against getting this particular text.
   
   Also, this text is not written for beginners (a point that the author makes clear), even though some of the material in this book could only be for beginners (for example, the introductory VBA material).

5 comments about User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development (The Addison-Wesley Signature Series).

1. This book has some good stuff in it, especially the INVEST criteria for a good Story. But as far as practical application, Mike's other book, Agile Estimating and Planning, is better.
   
   If you are a business or requirements analyst or a Product Owner, get this one. If you are a ScrumMaster, get both.



2. I work for a consulting company that trains in both agile methods as well as more antiquated lean UP. I was looking for "the" book on user stories. If I wanted to recommend "the" book for use cases, it was "Writing Effective Use Cases" by Alistair Cockburn.
   
   I received this book on Tuesday and had finished reading it by Thursday. It is very well laid out, the chapters are the right length, it has excellent recommendations and it is simply well written.
   
   I'm teaching a class on Agile Requirements Exploration on the 1/22/07 and it will be this book I recommend for further study. It's all someone needs to understand the essence of user stories.
   
   I learned quite a bit reading this book and if you're looking for "the" book on user stories, look no further.



3. Writing usable requirements in Agile spaces. Yet another well crafted message suggesting how to modify the method of eliciting requirements into something that makes sense from the perspective of the customer. Use the customer's language! Mike makes it simple, uses simple examples, and offers a clear path of application should one choose to traverse. The use of user stories moves the focus of customer relationships from filling out documentation .. to creating and managing a relationship and expectations through customer accessible language.



4. Mike does a great job explaining user stories and agile principles. Very readable and even enjoyable. This book concerns itself mainly with the 'ideal' situation: brand new product development, and does not focus on other nuances such as improvements to existing products, customer-reported defects, validated environments. That's not a criticism, as this book isn't supposed to be the unabridged encyclopedia of user stories, but I plan to read some of Mike's other books... where, hopefully, he will cover such topics



5. As you'll read in other reviews this book does a great job of laying the foundation on how to implement XP as a development process using user stories, iterations, and other concepts used in XP.
   
   Where the book goes a little overboard is with some drawn out stories and examples that could be cut down. In reality I think this book could almost have 1/3 less long and been a 5 star book.

5 comments about Excel 2007 Power Programming with VBA (Mr. Spreadsheet's Bookshelf).

1. This book successfully combines a great introduction to both Excel and VBA 2007. In fact, I was going to get a separate source on Excel 2007 but then I saw this book had enough of Excel stuff for me. The book is supplemented with a CD with VBA samples; also, there is the author's website where you can find Excel/VBA developer tips.
   
   It is true that the PDF version is missing on the CD, but I myself didn't have much need for it.



2. Very detailed and thorough. I'm an Excel whiz, or so I thought. I learned a lot about Excel and VB. Best resource I've found for this function. You can't go wrong.



3. I am only on page 250 of 1000 or so, but so far this book is excellent!! I had no VBA experience to speak of, this book is pefect for the beginner who learns fast. It is not a slow paced book, but it is very detailed and easy to follow. The author is clearly an crazy expert on VBA and an excellent writer.
   
   I HIGHLY recommend this book. It came with a CD that is filled with VBA samples, but I have not found them anywhere near as interesting as the book itself.



4. I have this book for more than two months now and I found it very useful especially on my first VBA project. I have a weekly report and I used to do this manually and often get errors because I have to cross reference values in one big spreadsheet with multiple tabs. Not until I got this book and read the basics and go to specific chapters where I need help. I felt so accomplished after I finished the whole macro. What took me 30 minutes to do manual referencing and typing now only takes less than two minutes including sending it through email. This book is very easy to understand especially for those who know Excel and would like to expand their skills in VBA. Mr Spreadsheet has provided good example files to help us better understand VBA. His approach is basic enough for those who doesn't have any experience in creating macros. By the way if your CD doesn't have the source files or example file go to http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-302036.html and select "All Wiley Products" or call Technical Support. Type your request for the e-source files and they will get back to you really fast with a link of the FTP site for the files. Don't bother to call customer support because they will try to sell you the e-book even though you already have the book. It might be a hassle but its all worth it.



5. I've bought every edition of this book going back to Excel 95. The book is written in a format that keeps your interest (sometimes rare for programming books).

5 comments about Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Classroom in a Book.

1. Having been a Go Live user for a while I needed something to help me make the change to Dreamweaver. Usually, the Classroom in a Book series are brilliant, this one not so. As a self-confessed dummy when it comes to technical things like using Dreamweaver, I found there were at least three chapters where I couldn't complete the exercises as shown. Generally very good. I would recommend it but only if you bought a companion book like Dreamweaver CS3 for Windows and Macintosh (Visual QuickStart Guide)to fill in the gaps. It was good, worthwhile, not great.



2. I think its a good book for those how don't have a clue about dreamweaver, It don't go into the deapth of dreamweaver, but is well explaind and will be a quick way to get into html/xtml design. well whorth the money.



3. I had been using Dreamweaver but never had a book or class, so decided to try this book.
   
   On the plus side, I learned many shortcuts from this book, and the CD with all of the examples was a nice addition. The screenshots are good, and the chapter on CSS was detailed enough.
   
   On the downside, there are a lot of misakes in this book. Since many people who use this kind of book will have had no experience at all with the software Adobe (and other computer book publishers) should use extra care while proofreading. Also, the chapter on Spry was kind of light and didn't touch on a lot of the widgets and what could be done with them.



4. Right now I'm giving this book a "C." I've read through at least three other html editor-type manuals, including an Adobe Go Live manual, MX 2004 Hands-on Training, and (going back a ways) Adobe PageMill. The assumptions made in this brief CS3 CIB text are okay with my skill level, but what about the rank beginner? The book also needs a glossary, to help the user understand all the CSS terminology. I'm not through the text yet but I'm disappointed. I remember really liking a Photoshop CIB I had a few years ago but this Dreamweaver tutorial seems thrown together to me.



5. The latest if the popular series of Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Classroom "Classroom in a Book" was for me, still a good purchase. However not a great one.
   
   I have used Dreamweaver in the past, but I am feeling a little rusty after too many years of FrontPage use and i was hoping this would help make the much a easy thing for me. The first editions of the CS3 did have some errors in the which were pointed out and corrected rather fast. One of the nice benefit of working with Adobe Press, they do tend to respond fast and very professionally. That is very appreciated.
   
   I use it as a light weigh training guide, with a good number of hints and good examples. I might be a little tough on the book only giving it a thee star rating, but coming from the awesome job that Abode did on the
   Adobe Photoshop CS3 Classroom, the Dreamweaver version has some very tough standards to live up to as far as books ago.
   
   If I was going this again as a first book on Dreamweaver ? That might be a toss-up, but gut feeling is I might aim for the "Missing Manual Series" of Dreamwear CS3 by David McFarland also.

5 comments about C# 3.0 in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)).

1. Bought this to learn LINQ. Found that it has an excellent treatment of all topics and lots of sample code. Very clear and concise explanations. This is a good technical book I have read in a long time.



2. This book is a hands down winner among the C# books currently in market. Written in a clear and precise manner, it is both a tutorial and a reference. You can get a taste of the book from the authors' website where they have posted tutorials (check out the tutorial on Threading in C#).
   I came to know about this book from a link on Chris Sells' blog where he is all praise for the book.
   Highly recommended.



3. A Quick Way To look up anything that deals with C#
   Terms, Keywords, implementation etc...
   great for both a beginners referanece and a seasoned professional



4. References to this book kept coming up at the top of internet search results while I was trying to figure out how to implement a QBE UI using LINQ.
   
   I finally took the hint and bought the book.
   
   Now that I have the book, after having sifted through it, I can attest that it explains C# clearly and thoroughly and is delightfully insightful. On par with the best O'Reilly nutshell references.
   
   I believe it is currently the best C# 3.0 reference on the market.



5. I'm a professional developer but I have no experience using C#. My current project required learning C# at a highly accelerated pace and this book did it for me.
   
   If you are an experienced developer needing to learn C# quickly and thoroughly without resorting to the "for Dummies" types of books this is an effective tool, use it.