No comments about Visual C# 2008 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Recipes: a Problem-Solution Approach).

3 comments about Foundations of PEAR: Rapid PHP Development (Foundations).

1. The first thing I should address with Foundations of PEAR (PHP Extensions and Applications Repository) is the appropriate audience for this book. Since it is a book on PHP extensions and applications repositories the authors assume that the reader already has a basic understanding of PHP5. If you already know the rules of basic syntax, using variables, creating objects and similar items then you will probably be interested in looking at this book.
   
   After a brief introduction to PEAR including how to install and configure it the rest of the book is a compendium of PEAR packages, their content, and how to use them. For each package it includes information on common usages, related packages, dependencies, the API, and examples. The book is broadly divided into ten topical sections - Authentication, Utilities and Tools, Dates and Numbers, HTML, Images and Text, Database, Files and Formats, HTTP, XML, and Mail. Each of these sections contains several packages that fall under that category.
   
   The index is complete and detailed and makes the book a great resource. A solid reference book that is sure to be on the shelf of most PHP5 programmers Foundations of PEAR is highly recommended.



2. This book is lacking in both breadth and depth. Here is an example of each:
   
   1. In the XML section, only three of the 13 classes in the XML package are discussed. In fact, only ten of the nearly three dozen PEAR packages are covered.
   
   2. In the discussion of the File class, the third parameter is the file lock mode. The text reads, "The type of file lock to use," but fails to explain what those lock modes are.
   
   Considering this, I consider the book overpriced and of value only to the beginner who is having difficulty getting started with PEAR. If this is the your situation, I recommend looking for a used copy.



3. After spending about a half a day with this book and working on trying to get a simple exercise in the book to work on mime email, I've just about given up. This book reads like a dictionary giving very little explaination and leaving you to the Internet to find the answers.
   
   The book does have a lot of information, but if the examples don't work, then you're stuck. A little help from the authors on how to overcome common problems would have been great. Instead, it just goes on to the next definition of functions.
   
   I guess it's worth the $6 in the used category, but not $45 which is list.

5 comments about Sams Teach Yourself CSS in 24 Hours (Sams Teach Yourself in 24 Hours).

1. Having read TY HTML and CSS in 24 Hours, I have a good grasp on XHTML, and thought I had a decent grasp on CSS, but needed to learn more. I was very pleased with TY HTML and CSS in 24 Hours, so I decided to buy this book since it was another SAMS TY in 24 hours book. I should have read the reviews. The book totally put me to sleep (literally) and I couldn't follow it at all. I was thinking either I am an idiot, or this guy's writing style is horrendous. From what I've read the book is full of some serious errors, fortunately I didn't make it that far.
   I have now ordered Beginning CSS Web Development: From Novice to Professional by Simon Collison, which came highly recommended and looks quite good, and Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook by Dan Cederholm, which looks like it is right up my alley, since I am very concerned with learning things the right way and following standards, and from what I've heard, the book sounds good.
   I really wish I had read the reviews on this before wasting money, but hey, at least now I have a really great doorstop!



2. I took this book from the library with two other CSS books. This one has absolutely no pictures, I further browsed through the book looking for hidden gems. However, it did not seem to cover any topic better than the other books.
   
   So, why would I torture myself reading a book on "style and design" if there are no pictures?



3. You open the book, start reading paragraphs, write a snippet of code, read another paragraph, write a block of code (that doesn't pertain to the snippet of code you just wrote) and repeat. The other author does not add and build on the previous code you wrote and doesn't build upwards. You don't gradually move upward in this book. It's all side-stepping and more reading then typing. I'm talking a page and half on a single line of code. The author sometimes confuses me by repeating a couple of words in the same sentence. Long, drawn-out, boring read, with minimal code, that doesn't get built up.



4. It is an excellent book on learning Cascading Style Sheets for a web design class that I am taking. It was delivered on time and I liked that fact that I could track the progress of the delivery.



5. I already knew CSS and was looking for something a little more in-depth. To its credit the book starts at an intro level but was thorough enough for me to gain a more critical understanding of certain things.
   
   I didn't like that it made the usual mistake of not really going in-depth about the natural flow of HTML elements before talking about the display property and I'd really like a more thorough explanation of the float property from somebody out there and this book didn't step up to the plate.
   
   I was also somewhat underwhelmed by the graphics provided. They looked kind of dated and lacked the wow factor that you get from modern CSS techniques.
   
   If you're new to CSS but want a reasonably comprehensive walkthrough of all the standard properties, this isn't such a bad buy but I'm still looking for something better than this and I'm glad I got this one from the library.
   
   One pissy bit of review crossfire: of freaking course it's assumed you know HTML. If you don't know HTML, you have no business building websites regardless of what Adobe would like you to believe. Learn HTML. Then learn CSS. Then call yourself a web designer.

2 comments about Visual Modeling with Rational Rose 2002 and UML (3rd Edition) (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series).

1. I found this book disappointing and wondered why I would ever need to use Rational Rose. For a start, the examples in the appendices of code generation are for C++ and Visual Basic. Whatever happened to Java? Second, probably the most important design technique in use today, Design Patterns, hardly gets a mention on p175, with a reference to read the GoF book.

   So what are we left with? Old-fashioned programming languages and techniques. Buy a book on Java design patterns instead, of which Amazon sells several.




2. Rational Rose is a powerful tool, but like most such tools, it can be intimidating. The Unified Modeling Language or UML is also complex, so the combination can pose a problem for even the bravest of developers. Fortunately, this book is available to step you through the initial phases of beginning a project using the combination of UML with Rational Rose.
   The form of the explanations is demonstrated by the example on page 136.

   Creating Start States in Rational Rose
   1. Click to select the Start icon from the toolbar.
   2. Click on the statechart diagram to draw the Start icon.
   3. Click to select the State Transition icon from the toolbar.
   4. Click on the Start icon and drag the arrow to the desired state.

   And there is a diagram following it that is an example of what the result should look like. Since all of the major areas of design are covered, with this book, some knowledge of the UML and a copy of Rational Rose, even the visual modeling beginner can begin creating their designs with almost no preparation.
   There are those who will say that this book is too simplistic in tone. My response is to commend them for their abilities and to recommend another book. However, for all who are just beginning their relationship with Rational Rose, I strongly recommend this one.

5 comments about Oracle Performance Tuning (Nutshell Handbooks).

1. I have been using a copy of this book for a couple of years now, and I have still kept it as my 'good tricks' bible since becoming being a certified Oracle dba. Ok, so not all the queries run first time as given, and the book is really about Oracle 7, but this is still the first reference book I turn to whenever another dba comes up with a 'I've tried everything to do this, but nothing works' type question. A very good book to read if you want to know how to make Oracle work for you.



2. This is the best overall book on Oracle Tuning but the editors were sloppy in weeding out the typos--no excuse for a second edition book. The index is one of the worst that I've ever seen in a technical book; sometimes you practically have to look at every page to find what you're looking for because of the way the book is organized.



3. Many of the tricks and approaches offered in here can enable you to perform some impressive rescuing of slow applications. Management tends to like this quite a bit. Having had this book from way back, there were many tips in there that were not available from the standard Oracle documentation such as making a query return unique records by using the rowid in the where clause. If you're in a database-centric development or DBA position, I wholeheartedly recommend this book.



4. The first edition, or as we affectionately called it, the "Bee" book was the bible. I recently bought the 2nd edition for old times sake. It still has a lot of good info but sorely needs to be updated. There are many Oracle8i performance features such as tempfile for temporary files that are not mentioned. Instead, I am turning to more recent text like Oracle8i & Unix Perf Tuning by Ahmed Alomari and Oracle Perf Tuning Tips by Richard Niemiec. Mark, loved your books. Can't wait for the updates.



5. This book has a lot of Oracle tuning tips and advise about some certain plattforms and technologies. Although there's a lot of considerable information about almost anything related with Oracle tuning (including OPS), it doesn't provide with a concise method or guide.

   The book is structured to help you at different stages of your Oracle implementation (design phase, production, proactive and reactive tuning, capacity planning, etc). But that good schema looks very confuse when the author starts to make suggestions or tips that aren't sorted by any kind of category (and they often takes a lot of pages)... Those comments are very good, so it needs a bit of more organization.

   I recommend this book for instance and database tuning, but not for SQL tuning (the author has another excellent book on this subject). There aren't too many advices regarding the plattform (unix or nt), so, keep in mind you'll need more support.

1 comments about Measures For Excellence: Reliable Software On Time, Within Budget (Yourdon Press Series).

1. This book is somewhat mistitled -- it is more about software project estimation and management than about quality or metrics. But as the estimation practice lead for our software development group I found it insightful and valuable.

   The heart of the book is an empirical function relating effort (cost), schedule, and system size, based on thousands of actual software projects. The projects cover a huge range of sizes and come from a variety of problem domains. This equation, together with a Rayleigh-distribution model of staff build-up during the construction phase of a software project, allows prediction of schedule and effort for a given system size, normalized productivity, and staffing pattern.

   The value of this model is that it is shown by the authors to be applicable over a very broad range of problem domains and system sizes. It at least has a chance of modeling nonlinear effects such as the "mythical man-month" (total effort goes up fast as you increase the size of the team). And with only two free parameters (process productivity and staff-up rate) it is simple enough to be fitted to your own historical project data without a lot of re-analysis.

   A lot of the book is devoted to graphical and pencil-and-paper application of the model, which is not really necessary since an implementation of the model ("Construx Estimate").

   The only reason that I did not give the book five stars is that it is a bit dated -- it describes a waterfall lifecycle model, as was probably used by most of the projects in the calibration set. But I think it is still valuable as a source of quantitative guidance for software project estimation.

1 comments about Logic Programming with Prolog.

1. Prolog is one of these languages that has struggled for decades to achieve wide usage. As Bramer explains, it is a logic language, as opposed to procedural languages like C, Java or C#. In its space, it competes mostly with Lisp, which also has failed to garner broad acceptance.
   
   Anyhow, Bramer's book is a little different from most other texts on Prolog. No prior programming expertise in any language is needed. Alternative books often assume an already sophisticated background in computer science.
   
   Certainly, if you have programmed in something like Fortran or C, you'll find the mindset and syntax here to be very different. Which may well be one advantage to learning Prolog, even if you plan not to take it very far. It exposes you to a different mode of programming logic. That might even help you in your "regular" coding.
   
   Now if you have coded in SQL, then there are conceptual similarities with Prolog. Both are declarative languages, and SQL is essentially an instantiation of set theory. Turns out in Prolog, much of it also amounts to set manipulation.

5 comments about A Programmer's Guide to Sound.

1. This is the only book that I've come across that covers any of the trivialities of cross-platform sound programming. Sure there are better books on the various platform APIs, but they don't cover the differences between playing sound on Windows vs Mac. Small things like signed and unsigned data and byte swapping for 16 bit data are covered here. You won't find these things in Petzold's book. I did find a few small problems in the example code, but if you actually read the book, they're easy to spot. If you're writing cross-platform sound code, this book will be very helpful.



2. This book can be used as a reference toward file formats as applied to sounds. However, I found the software and code examples within the book to be unnecessarily complicated. For instance, the author has a clear obsession to add unnecessary functions toward the API, such as "negotiation" and various levels of abstraction. Under normal circumstances, all parameters (sampling frequency, bits per sample, etc) are known in advance and hence "negotiation" among various sound objects is absurd. I have also found numerious inconsistencies and omissions in the code provided. In Page 42 - Listing 4.6, the author suggests a recursive way to read bytes; nonetheless, if the previous pointer is NULL the code will get into real trouble. In the CD-ROM provided, in order to compile the window player, a key header file is missing: "audiolib.h", I couldn't find it after searching several times. My recommendation is that the material can be used for a quick browse of file formats, but do not get serious in the software solutions because they are not useful.



3. This book is pretty decent, pretty much what I was expecting, except the publisher, Addison-Wesley, has stopped shipping the book with a CD. Instead there is a note in the book instructing you to go to their website for a downloadable version of the CD.
   
   Surpise! No downloads available for this title!
   
   The CD contains all of the code from the book, project files, sample sounds, and code that is not in the book, so in my opinion, the CD contents are pretty necessary.
   
   So far I have written them several times (very politely) with no response and I've spent hours on the phone trying to get this problem resolved, only to get transferred to four or five people and eventually transferred to a recorded message saying that they "cannot take my call at this time" and to call back.
   
   So... do not buy this book unless you don't mind not getting the CD.



4. I bought this book mainly because it has some examples in C++ for various platforms including Mac. It's outdated and doesn't include anything for Mac OS X (or core audio obviously) but it does describe the principles very well, and the source code is pretty easy to grasp. I like the book, but I'm still looking for another that will show me some more modern examples using .Net in windows and core audio on Mac OS X.



5. Since this book was written almost ten years ago, you really have to ignor it when it talks about platform-specific code. However, this book is still valuable because it includes the details of many audio-specific algorithms you can't find in other books.
   
   Part one is an overview of audio basics, and is a worthwhile overview if you are a novice. Part two, on system specifics, can be skipped since it is completely out of date. It mainly talks about audio on specific computing platforms. Part three, on compression, does a good job of explaining and implementing various basic compression algorithms such as uLaw and PCM. Even the chapter on MPEG compression is pretty good, with a pretty complete description of MPEG-1 audio coding and decoding. Likewise, part 4 on General File Formats is very complete for the file formats that are described. Again, the age of the book comes into play since the file formats covered are AU, Creative Labs' VOC format, Microsoft Windows' WAVE format, Apple's AIFF and AIFF-C formats, and Electronic Arts' IFF format that was primarily used on the long defunct Commodore Amiga. The coverage is complete, it is just, unfortunately, covering mainly dated formats.
   
   Part five covers the musical file formats of the MIDI event-based format and the more obscure MOD beat-based format. I especially liked the section on MIDI, since it has a software-based explanation rather than an electronic device interconnection explanation that you find in so many books. Part six, Audio Processing, is less thorough than other sections. The algorithms in the code do work, but if you've never seen filtering and signal processing concepts explained before, you'll likely get lost as to what is going on in this section. Also, don't expect to see special effects such as chorus explained here either. Part seven, which consists of the appendices is helpful for understanding what is on the accompanying CD, but the section on C++ should have been omitted. It is too short to help a novice and pretty much useless for the experienced programmer.
   
   If you are looking for the specific audio algorithms I've mentioned, you already know C++ and something about audio, and you don't mind digging into the accompanying code to get to the heart of the algorithms included, this is the book for you. If you just want code you can drag and drop into either a Mac or a Windows based machine, you should look elsewhere.

No comments about Fundamentals of Audio and Video Programming for Games (Pro-Developer).

5 comments about Squeak: Object-Oriented Design with Multimedia Applications.

1. If you do not yet know Squeak or Smalltalk:

   1. Download the current version of Squeak from squeak.org (the version on the CDROM is not the latest and greatest)!

   2. Buy this book, read it and learn to Squeak!

   3. Order the other book (not yet published) about Squeak edited by Mark Guzdial!

   otherwise: do the same!

   In both cases try to ignore the problems with the reproduction of some of the screenshots.




2. Good books for people wanting to get started in Smalltalk are hard to find. Particularly, those that are connected to a viable programming environment. This book is excellent on both counts. The associated Squeak programming environment is a solid Smalltalk-80 implementation that is being moved in new directions by a team at Squeak Central, now at Disney, led by Dr. Alan Kay whose team contains several of the early developers of Smalltalk. Dr. Kay also invented the concept of the DynaBook. Mark Guzdial's team is also working on a Collaborative DynaBook at Georgia Tech. Thus, this book is also a entry point into two hotbeds of R&D in leading-edge computing technology. Welcome to the future! Note: Squeak is free on a number of popular platforms.



3. As the author of several Smalltalk books myself, I tend to be a bit skeptical of new books about Smalltalk. But Mark Guzdial's excellent first book on the best Smalltalk implementation on the planet, Squeak, earns my highest respect. It is organized the way I suspect most people trying to learn a new language like such books organized. Rather than beginning with abstract concepts and then hoping you will be able to use those concepts to solve specific problems, Guzdial takes a practical, project-based approach.

   This book does not purport to cover basic object-oriented design and programming paradigms but in fact it does at least an adequate job even for a relative beginner. It is clearly aimed at someone who has at least a smattering of programming training or experience, but you don't really need much to derive great value from the book.

   It is true that since the book was released there is a newer version of Squeak, but the good news is that the author had the foresight to include on the accompanying CD-ROM the version of the language on which he relied to make the book examples work. I've been working with the newer version for some time but reverting to the older version for the purpose of the book wasn't difficult or painful.

   I believe that Squeak IS the future of all kinds of computing and development, including the Internet/Web world, and it will behoove you to learn this wonderful language sooner than later. There is simply no better way to do that than to start with Guzdial's work. He's the prototypical teacher and the book is marvelous.




4. This book is one of the early signs of the real computer revolution that is about to start, according to Alan Kay, a visionary from Disney, who, in essence, invented a computer world as we see it now. The book is about the language that is 3 times more productive than Java, and ported to 22 platforms. The language which domination is as inevitable as the dot-com crash. Mark is a member of the inner circle of Squeak development, so his knowledge of Squeak is superior. You will save yourself dozens of hours if you read this book. And this book just a pure fun to read. Get this book, it will change your thinking about computer programming forever.



5. The book is outdated, unclear in its focus, and makes assumptions for the reader. This book provides only a poor intro to Squeak and poorly touches up on OO principles. Liu's Smalltalk book is probably where one would want to start to get both worlds. Worst, this book is used at Ga Tech for a class titled "Objects and Design."

   Also, all the previous book reviews on this page were reviews of Squeak and Alan Kay as opposed the book. So their 5 stars are misplaced.