5 comments about Programming Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange 2003, Third Edition (Pro-Developer).

1. After purchasing this book and skimming through all of it while reading the sections I was interested in more thoroughly (VBScript and Custom Forms), and then going through everything a 2nd time, I was extremely disappointed.
   
   I found the Author was not thorough at all when going over the Outlook Library objects, methods, and properties. I was constantly going to the MSDN site to fill in the gaps. The sample code was also quite limited I thought.
   
   In my entire life, this book is the only book I have ever taken back to the store for a refund. I instead purchased the QUE book written by Patricia Cardoza, which I have found to be far more to my liking.



2. This is a good example of a book written by an author who just wanted to "write" and finish a book. I doubt if the author really knows the subject.
   
   For example, in page 745,the section titled "What About Tasks?", the code example does not include task assignement, and he writes "You can attempt to code task recurrence and assignement, but this is much harder and can easily break Outlook if done incorrectly. For this reason, these functions are not shown in the following code because they are complex and prone to breaking Outlook". Funny. The author should attempt to explain how to do it correctly.
   
   Outlook object properties, methods and events. The author enumerates all of them, no explanation. For example, page 170, about UserProperties and UserProperty, I saw a lot of these properties in his sample codes, but there are never any explanation what are these!
   
   When he explained things, most are self-explanatory. For example in page 82 about "Setting the Actions for a Rule", he wrote"
   Return to Sender - This action sends an item e-mailed to a folder back to a sender....
   Delete - This action deletes an item...
   Reply - With This action sends an automatic reply...
   Forward - This action forwards all messages...
   
   He shows how to create custom field (it's easy) but never explained how to access them programmatically.
   
   It will take a whole book as big as this one to comment how disappointing this book is. It is much better to search msdn than read this book.



3. I have to disagree with the reviewer who says there is not a lot of depth in this book. Sure, the author does leave out some topics but he clearly states that they can either really mess up Outlook or that they are not supported by Microsoft which can get you into trouble down the road. Otherwise, this book is the bible for Exchang and Outlook development bar none. I origianlly got it to learn how to integrate our corporate CRM system with Outlook (our sales reps live in Outlook!). The book is well written, has lots of samples and gave me the kick start I needed to get my job done.



4. I have been disappointed by this book. I wanted it mostly to learn how to program Outlook. When I started reading it, I have realized that only a small portion of it was dedicated to Outlook. Perhaps that I am harsh against the book value because I am not part of the intended readers but I guess that even readers interested to programming Exchange would not find much value of this book. I am saying so because the book is huge close to a thousand pages but it sounds like a cut and paste of the Exchange programmer user manual. When I purchase a book like this one, I expect it to be a complement to the product documentation, to give a better insight of how and why a given software works like it does. This book does not deliver up to these expectations. The best Outlook programming book that I have found is: Microsoft Outlook Programming, Jumpstart for Administrators, Developers, and Power Users. Skip this one.



5. I have always been interested in Computer Science and I picked up this book to better understand email -- which these days is Outlook and Exchange.
   
   It is an awesome resource for me to learn about the applications and it actually got me hired on as an unpaid intern to help out my dad's company put out an Outlook/Exchange application

No comments about An Introduction to Mathematical Cryptography (Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics).

1 comments about Google Apps Administrator Guide: A Private-Label Web Workspace (Google Apps).

1. I thought there would be move about getting Google Apps setup to run in my web site (not just Google's). I also thought the negative tone about Google and their services was just a little out of place. Sure, somethings don't work quite right yet, but I bought the book in hopes that the author knew the magic answers. Instead I felt despair. But most of the book was a good reference and well presented

5 comments about About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design.

1. This follow up to About Face is a good overview of the critical concepts to improve software usability. Cooper and Reiman know their stuff. Reading this certainly provides you with the grounding you need to make good decisions. At a tactical level, the book could certainly do more to help with real-world examples.
   For that, you may want to take a look instead at Jenifer Tidwell's Designing Interfaces : Patterns for Effective Interaction Design. Where About Face is strong on theory, Designing Interfaces is all about practical ideas, demonstrated through graphical examples.
   If UI is an important part of your world, buy them both.



2. I have 7 years experience and I wasn't able to get any value out of this book. Based on some of the reviews on this site I thought that the book would be worth buying but unless you are in school or right out of school then your $35 is better spent elsewhere.
   
   I suggest that you put your $35 towards "The Usability Engineering Lifecycle" by Deborah J. Mayhew. Don't let the $64.95 price tag scare you away. This book is worth $100.



3. I think this guy has a book about how the inmates are running the asylum...well this book suffers from what happens when the subject matter experts (SME) are allowed to write books. BORING!!! SME's always seem to forget to include compelling examples. Yes there are little screen shots, but IMO in order for a book to be compelling that has to do with design...it needs to show LOTS of examples of good design. The bulk of the book should be about breaking down those designs. I need to hear why a specific design is effective. Take a hint from Steve Krugs book "Don't Make me Think". That book is extremely effective without inundating the reader with jargon. Lots of examples with meaningful visual breakdowns. Afterall...isnt UI design a VISUAL communication form?



4. How to design a application from a designers perspective. Cannot say I agree with everything, but the writers are probably right.



5. This book not only defines a "layman user" but also answers the question of how your application can educate a layman user step by step.

3 comments about Practical Ruby for System Administration (Expert's Voice in Open Source).

1. If you've encountered Ruby primarily through Rails and know it chiefly as an elegant tool for writing web applications it's easy to miss its longer history as a tool for systems administration. Before Rails made Ruby the language-du-jour sysadmins bore much of the responsibility for keeping it alive, with the result that it has a suite of libraries helpful for server monitoring and a range of other administrative tasks.
   
   Author André Ben Hamou is clear that his book is not an exhaustive guide to using Ruby for systems administration. Rather than try to cover every possible context he provides an introduction to the language and some of its key libraries intended to give a feel for how it might be used and why it leads to succinct and expressive solutions. A number of the more important libraries for working with network protocols and files are covered, and there's a good introduction to rubygems and how they can be used and created.
   
   Having not done much work with Ruby on the command line I found the first couple of chapters, which cover command-line switches that can help with one-liners for file processing, particularly informative, though I suspect I'll be referring back to them for a while until the different options take hold. As with the book as a whole those chapters are clear and to-the-point, helped by a presumption that the reader has a good understanding of the problem space and some experience with using scripting languages to simplify their life.
   
   Don't go into this book expecting to come away ready to work as a sysadmin. That's not its intention. Nor is it a comprehensive guide to ruby, and you'll probably still want a good language reference to go with it. But it provides a number of helpful hints and a good sense of how robust scripts can be built quickly and simply with ruby, and there are likely to be a few helpful tricks for most readers.
   
   Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.



2. I thought this book would be great for me since I am a Unix administrator still relatively new to Ruby. I was right. This book covers a wide variety of topics, from ActiveRecord, to parsing XML and several other normal administration tasks. (network programming, ssh, monitoring) The depth of the coverage is more than adequate in most places. I learned quite a bit about using Ruby to automate some tasks, and of equal importance, I learned about the infrastructure behind ruby. He reviews performance, documentation, rake, rdoc, gems and more.
   
   The book is a great length for system admins who are not hard-core developers, but looking to expand their skillset and get some real benefit quickly. The coverage of XML-RPC, and ActiveLDAP, I have already put to use.
   
   Besides having some really strong content, the delivery in this book is great. The author commonly sounds like a system admin just talking to his buddies at a bar. The quotes and fun sayings are numerous throughout, but this was my favorite.
   
   When talking about the confusing terminology use with ldap, (cn, ou, dc etc) he takes a two step approach.
   1. Use Wikipedia
   2. (Direct Quote) "Whenever anyone suggests continuing use/support/deployment of LDAP solutions, laugh in their face with such explosive force that your response may be easily interpreted as an act of war. "
   
   Disclaimer, the author thoroughly covers LDAP, and clearly understands it, it was just funny.
   
   I laughed out loud reading this book no less than a dozen times, which is rare with a technical book. If your interested in Ruby, check it out. You won't walk away an expert, but you will have a better understanding of Ruby and its usage.



3. This isn't a bad book! There is coverage of LDAP, database processing with ActiveRecord, XML parsing and a number of tools that sys admins and developers who administer their own dev environment routinely use. The section on network monitoring as well as the Chapter on single liners for Ruby Sys Admins are worth the cover price for the book. However, I was a bit disappointed with the lack of coverage in some areas where the author introduced a basic concept at a level too basic for experienced users and then palmed off the user to a reference site for some more reading. There isn't a problem with this approach it is just that it happens a bit too much throughout the book. Perhaps the coverage was a bit ambitious and some of the more in-depth material was left out?
   
   Anyway, that's pretty much the reason for me not giving it 4 stars. However, do take a look at the one-liners, they are definitely going to save you time!
   
   Oh, the actual writing style is quite fresh and informative. You are not likely to get bored with this one... Overall I am still happy to have got my hands on it, but it wasn't exactly what I was led to believe from reading the other reviews.

5 comments about Yahoo! SiteBuilder For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)).

1. Ever since Yahoo acquired Geocities, it has aspired to be a major web hosting site. To this ends, it has striven to help users make web sites. Wagner describes how Yahoo's SiteBuilder simplifies a lot of messy details and, hopefully, lets you concentrate on the actual design.
   
   Maybe the most important aid is the numerous templates. For such subjects as a birthday, education, electronics or music. If you are new to HTML, these can greatly help you put up pages. More experienced users might want to start from scratch, however. While the site's templates are well done, the sheer fact that each is used by many hosted sites means that inevitably if your site does likewise, there will be an element of cookie-cutter-ness.
   
   Along the way to describing what SiteBuilder can do for you, Wagner also offers useful and quite general guidelines for site design. These are independent of actually using SiteBuilder. An added advantage of the book.
   
   The advanced section of the book, that deals with using JavaScript in your pages, gives a synopsis of that language. If you are serious about using JavaScript, consider also getting another book, devoted to it. (Like "JavaScript for Dummies".)



2. I needed to set up a web site faster than it was going to take me to learn Dreamweaver. Yahoo! SiteBuilder for Dummies successfully walked me through the process of setting up a site at Yahoo! in less than half a days time. It's well written, clear and broken down into distinct components so you can go directly to the material you need without wading through all sorts of stuff that's not relevant to you.
   
   It did the trick for me, I hope it does for you.



3. I would not recommend this book. It was really not helpful for us. We currently have a yahoo store with over 6000+ items and this book is really geared for stores with 50 or less items. The attached software was not useful. However, I would recommend another book: "Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies", by Richard Snell. The Snell book is much more useful and full of informative advance stuff for starting and improving your Yahoo store. David Mark, Cmdstore



4. I read the book in sections because I just couldn't stay focused. My mind was racing. The book is really helpful. I am using sitebuilder so half the stuff wasn't as useful, but the other half was really worth it. He really knows what he's talking about.



5. I really appreciate anyone who takes the time to attempt to bring an old fool like me into the world of computers. I enjoy my machine and am trying to learn as much as I can about how to use it, so getting a book like this is very helpful. Thanks for putting this material at my disposal.

5 comments about Debugging the Development Process: Practical Strategies for Staying Focused, Hitting Ship Dates, and Building Solid Teams.

1. When I read this book, the information seemed simple and obvious. However, I also realized that there were a number of things mentioned that I wasn't doing. That begs the question: Is the material that simple and obvious? Maybe not.

   Maguire gives some simple, practicle advice for improving the development environment that a manager is responsible for. For example, he recommends starting each day by asking, "What can I do today that will help keep the project on track for the next few months?"

   I also found the section on feedback loops to be interesting. The suggestion that you have a person stop feature work to fix a bug that they created as soon as it is found is a way to emphasize quality and make it in the best interest of developers to produce high quality code.

   The chapter on attitudes is also very good. Much of the time, there isn't a lot knowledge wise that separtes good and bad developers. The difference comes in attitude. Attitudes such as, "We can't do that!", "The users won't care!", "Bugs are going to happen!" need to be rooted out.

   This book gives good insight as to what you as a manager can do and help your developers do in order to have smoother projects that are high quality and on time.




2. This book makes lots of good points about the software development process. Steve's ideas ring true based on my past experience with more companies than I like to think about. Although the ideas are somewhat obvious if one thinks about them, I found it amazing how many companies ignore these 'obvious' ideas. The most impressive ideas I found in this book pertain to meeting schedules without brow beating to the point where people with hard earned experience leave the organization simply because they're driven into the ground.



3. Maguire's book is a very gentle handbook to guiding software projects. Relatively light and fast-paced, it can be read in just a few hours. His insights and tips about team management are definitely helpful, but my feeling is that he never attacks the difficult problems of management.
   
   In a nutshell, his advice is to 1) free up the engineers' time by reducing unnecessary paperwork, 2) eliminate any unnecessary features, 3) slip ship dates to ensure quality, and 4) increasing training for under-performing engineers. He advises against 1) adding extra engineers when the project looks to be in trouble, 2) forcing engineers to work long hours to hit ship dates, 3) schedule development activities without a clear milestone plan in mind, and 4) holding on to superstar engineers who need room to grow.
   
   These ideas are very good, of course. It's important to keep engineers from being overworked and to keep product quality as high as possible. But there is a limit to how far Maguire's tips can take you.
   
   Schedule slips and dropped features seem like an easy thing to do when you're just talking about it, but what can you do when the command comes down from the upper echelons of management that you must ship or die trying? Maguire does get one thing right on this count, he describes teams where a third of the engineers (the best ones, of course) quit the company after the project completes.
   
   What happens when an engineer is severely underperfoming and is holding the team back? Continue providing that person training? Maguire's teams, luckily for him, are made up of well-trained, highly focused engineers who, given the chance, can work on a product for 8 hours a day. Unfortunately, Maguire does not even approach the topic of terminating bad employees for the good of the team. A discussion of this, including how the team benefits overall from the firing, as well as how it may have unintended psychological effects on the rest of the team, would have been appreciated.
   
   After reading this book, you'll come away with a new energy towards leading your team. You will see every problem as something easily conquered with just the right amount of finesse and encouragement. Maguire gives valuable tips to help overcome many problems that plague projects, and many of these work well. But this isn't the book to end all management books.
   
   In a sense, it is a "Tony Robbins" guide for managers. It gets you pumped up, gives you some tools, and puts you in the right right frame of mind. I like to reread Debugging the Development Process when I need that recharge, but it is not the book I go to when I need to deal with real problems.



4. This book is great if you are managing software engineers (or are one being led).
   
   I highly recommend it!



5. A co-worker recommended the book so I pick up a used copy from a 3rd party vendor here on the Amazon site. Been reading the book and it is absolutely as good as my co-worker suggested.
   
   Great ideas on how to lead software development teams. Lots of practical advice from someone who has been leading teams at Microsoft for years.
   
   I find the ideas useful, refreshing, and focused on making the best of your software developer resources. So much of what we end up doing in todays corporate world takes away valuable time and creates an less than idea environment for productive work.
   
   If you're buried in the development process at you're company this is a _must_ read to inspire you to take a look at you're teams, how to motivate them, and keep them focused on developing and improving the product.

5 comments about Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress.

1. This is basically an outline for beginners ONLY. If you expect to be able to move on past simple installation and configuration, save your money! The software Drupal, phpBB and wordpress are all excellent programs. This book is an introduction to each and has nothing to do with building online communities. Way to simple. SORRY!!!



2. This is a great introduction, at least to Drupal version 4.
   
   Note that the administration menus are significantly different for the current Drupal 5 release. I wonder if a revision is in the works?



3. Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and Wordpress was very helpful. I found the sections very helpful and easy to understand.



4. I bought this book hoping to get up to speed quickly on the very exciting Drupal platform. Unfortunately, this book was targeted at Drupal 4.7 Users. I started using 5.5 (as of today they have a version 6 release candidate), and quickly discovered that half the information in the book did not match up. There has been a major reorganization of the administrative pages, leaving the information given you more likely to confuse than inform.
   
   My other major objection is that the information is cursory, and does not really provide you with the skills needed to build a real site. If they had done this book well, you would have been walked through building a basic real site, so you could understand everything in context. There is nothing like that here. It is basically piecemeal information that is available online, though a bit more thorough with some exercises scattered throughout to demonstrate concepts.
   
   Unless you intend to use Version 4 of Drupal for some reason, save yourself some money and frustration and wait for an updated version.



5. Carefully designed and clearly written, this book is an effective introduction to PHP for anyone who has at least a little experience with web design. It is built around simple step-by-step examples which illustrate the principles being explained. These are clearly designed to minimize the trauma of learning a programming language for the code-phobic. The reader can follow along on the keyboard and build confidence by experimenting with variations.
   
   For programmers, who already understand most of PHP's basic concepts, this approach can be frustrating. The book spends pages demonstrating things that could be explained in a paragraph or two.
   
   You can learn PHP from this book whatever your background, but if you have already mastered another programming language, you'll be better off with a book that teaches PHP from that point of view.

No comments about Problem Solving and Programming Concepts (8th Edition).

5 comments about Microsoft .NET for Programmers.

1. This is one of the best technical books I have read. It takes a very large subject and distills it down to a concise and manageable text.
   Each chapter takes you further into .Net in a fast paced yet very well-explained way. The poker game developed in the book is also fun to play with and enhance.
   This is a must-read text. However, read an introductory book first.



2. I've been through many of the C# books, some from Microsoft Press, and some from O'Reilly, and on and on.
   For beginners there is no clear winner. However, for experienced programmers looking to expand their knowledge into many of the more advanced areas of C#, I recommended Grimes book, Microsoft .NET for Programmers.

   It's for intermediate to advanced, and it's quite a bit of fun working through the example that builds and builds upon an engine, adding many interfaces, where each interface exploits a particular area of .Net. Plus he throws in his years of programming expertise to add in lots of programming tricks that also highlight .Net's flexibility and ease of programming.

   Do svidanija - moi tovarischi!




3. Cover all the what and how-to about .NET in a simple and clear way. Can't believe the author does that so nicely in 300 pages. Great for experience programmer get started with .NET



4. Thank You Fergal, for a "steady pen" in writing "Microsoft .NET for Programmers". The use of a FUN case study (Poker client-server) to synergize understanding of .NET principles in a "real-life" application is a boon to communicating such a vast subject.

   Though this book seems geared to other than beginners (in both C# and .NET), starting at page 1, reading and doing the examples, and maintaining a steady course until the last page, is sure to "enlighten" the .NET inquiring mind. A more global perspective and understanding of this large subject is pretty much guaranteed.

   One foot in front of the other, put yourself through the paces: Buy the book, download the files, read the prolific and responsive author participation list on Manning, read and practice from cover to cover. Your programming skills in .NET will be enhanced enjoyably for all future .NET ventures. As a bonus, you'll go to sleep at night without that large and uneasy .NET question mark look on your face.




5. Ok, this book means business. 2 chapters intro about .NET then right into the code. The problem is that IF you don't have a background in C, C++ or C# you are hosed. I had my geeky .NET Microsoft head brother help me with it. Otherwise, excellent book. For 4GL, COBOL and VB programmers like me not familiar with any of the C flavors, I recommend Microsoft Visual C# .Net step-by-step from Microsoft Press written John Sharp and Jon Jagger.