5 comments about Pulling Strings with Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy.

1. Mr. Turnbull has done an excellent job introducing Puppet beginning and advanced concepts. As an experienced UNIX professional and Puppet user, I learned new things from his examples regarding modules and creating custom facts & providers which I intend to experiment with shortly.



2. Pulling Strings with Puppet is my third book from James Turnbull, and much like the others, this delivered.
   
   Writing a book on puppet at this stage is certainly a challenge. Puppet is growing and changing much faster than even the online documentation can keep up with. The author decided to worry about concepts and include future directions where possible. It was a good decision. The book gives a give overview of the puppet configuration tool and a few in-depth reviews of some concepts. I learned a number of things to improve my setup, even though I had been using puppet for over 6 months.
   
   Best practices and use cases are the areas I was most interested in. There are several small use-cases which build a nice foundation for using puppet including, using a version control system, using mongrel as the web server, writing your own modules, and external node storage. I would have liked to have then seen a wrap-up use case incorporating all of these ideas into an enterprise-type deployment, but it may have meant a lot of repeated material.
   
   If you're looking into puppet, I would recommend this book. It's rather inexpensive and gives a rookie a decent handle on where and how to start. The book also does a good job at providing links and direction toward the puppet community, which is needed, due to the speed at which puppet is currently changing.



3. This book is definitely a vital reference for anyone who's working with puppet; I picked it up after becoming frustrated with the current state of available information on puppet, and it turned my perspective around completely.
   
   I'm not sure that I would have managed to learn everything I needed to about puppet using only the docs on the website; often I got the familiar feeling when reading through the wiki that some crucial bit of information was being assumed, but this book always backed up its information with examples that I could use to grasp the idea being presented.
   
   On thing to note about the book -- It's really not structured to be a quick-start guide, but rather each chapter lays a foundation of knowledge that the next chapter builds upon. As such, I'd recommend setting aside a couple of afternoons to read through the book, ideally before you even begin to set up your puppet environment.



4. I just began using Puppet about 3 weeks ago to administer 20 systems. Although the online docs are good, it is always hit or miss. I found the book and ordered it immediately. I got it 2 days ago and spent all day going through it. I have already picked up more tips than I could have from all the online docs and examples - it is HUGELY worth the money just from that! One thing that I have learned, that is going to be a huge win - is the customization capabilities. We use ESM to manage/monitor security aspects of systems, and being able to write recipes with Puppet to match ESM security rules is going to be a huge plus for us.
   
   Thanks for a great resource and I am hoping that as Puppet matures, that the 2nd Edition is not far off.



5. Well.. I have been using cfengine (Yet another configuration management engine) for number of years and we have decided to check out "the puppet". The author (James T) is clearly intelligent and smart sysadmin and he knows Puppet inside out: BUT! The biggest problem of this book is that he jumps from place to place and forgets to put his thoughts clearly for new users or for people transitioning from cfengine. In other words, we really want to see the big picture explanation like: here is a car it has engine, body,wheels. Let's look at the engine - the engine has .... Instead, he may start describing the "automatic transmission" (If I may use my example), then 20 pages later - oh, the "transmission" is connected here and here. I am sure that the second edition will be much better

5 comments about Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development: Creating Modules, Components, and Plugins with PHP.

1. I certainly agree with those who said this book is way too sparse, weighing in at 176 non-packed pages. For the same audience this book is intended for I would instead recommend "Professional Joomla" by Dan Rahmel. It covers the same material plus a great deal more and it costs less money. It even gives more explanation and examples of building components, modules, and plugins, things "Learning Joomla" is supposed to focus on.



2. Since you can probably count the books written for Joomla on both hands, this book is the best one because its the ONLY ONE dealing on Beginners extension development, (ergo the high price and few pages). That being said, it is a good book to have in your library if you are planning on becomming a joomla developer. For those of us who are reverse engineering hackers (learn from seeing examples), this book is a must.



3. As the publish date shows, this book was brought to market quite a while before J!1.5 was code complete. I don't know if it's that or if the developer was too used to 1.0 development (there is a dramatic difference) but either way, this book co-mingled 1.0 and 1.5 development practices too much, and just basically glanced over the entire MVC architecture that was built into the 1.5 release of J! I'm a little disappointed as I was expecting more, being a fan of Leblanc, his knowledge and helpfulness in Joomla related things.
   
   For your money, you are much better off purchasing 'Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development' by James Kennard. It has helped me immensly in understanding the new J! framework and APIs.



4. I think this book is an excellent start to learning about J!1.5 extensions development. It has real examples that are easy to follow and adapt to suit a variety of purposes.
   Please note that the book is much thinner than you would think - about 170 pages cover to cover - so initally I was somewhat disappointed, but the book covers the topics you need to get started and I can still heartily recommend it!



5. At first sight this book looks great. It is concise and gives a good introduction from the start to build Joomla extensions. It does not waste pages explaining how to program in SQL and PHP. You are supposed to have mastered that. The book has a major weak point. For the main part it just shows lots of code, but does not explain anything about the API classes and how they relate. After reading the book and trying to create your own extension, it feels like you have not understood anything really.
   
   A second drawback is that the author seems not to bother about testing the sample code. It contains several very obvious bugs, eg using a functou JOutputFilter instead of JFilterOutput. This is annoying.
   
   Summarized, the book may give you a small start but is insufficient for seriuous development. The sad thing is that the official Joomla documentation is in a very alpha stage of development.

5 comments about PHP in a Nutshell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)).

1. I bought this book after studying PHP with the author's online tutorials. They covered quite a bit of what was in the book but I enjoyed the online version so much, I decided to thank him for putting a free online version out on the net by buying his book. In addition, I like to have the hard copy for a reference. Excellently written and one of the clearest and easiest programming books I've every read. It is also one of the few programming books I have read without any programming errors in it.



2. I am pretty familiar with PHP and worked with it some time ago, but I needed a book to quickly refresh my knowledge of it for a project, and this book did a pretty good job of that. It gets to the point on the right topics (including chapters on OOP, Cookies and Sessions, and Databases) and has a short, useful function reference instead of listing every function under the sun.
   
   Nonetheless, there are many errors both in the code and in the writing. If you don't have a solid foundation in PHP and programming, these errors can really throw you off. Sometimes I would get confused as I tried to figure out why a line of code does what the author says it does only to realize it was an error that made it into print. If the editing had been better and caught these errors, the book would have received a four-star rating from me.
   
   Bottom line, if you know PHP and need a good reference book or a book to quickly review concepts and functions, this book is for you. Don't buy this book if you are new to PHP.



3. The O'Reilly "in a Nuthsell" series is the best reference to standard libraries and language features available. PHP in a Nutshell sullies the name, however, with what amounts to an introductory survey in the course and little, if any, analysis of standard libraries. Certain tips, such as those on flash and pdf handling are interesting, but irrelevant to most programmers. This goes doubly for the discussion of PHP's 2D drawing API; it seems as though the authors decided they would provide a schizophrenic volume which is on the one hand a beginner's tutorial and on the other hand a survey of the more esoteric, unused portions of the language.



4. Regarding the Oct 2005 - First edition. I sure hope O'Reilly hires a better proof-reader, and re-issues this book with some basic corrections, and 100% more attention to the index problems.
   
   I think the author did a poor job. A dedicated proofreader should have caught all the errors I have listed. I am only 20% through this book. At this point, this author has built zero confidence in the accuracy of anything he has to present in the rest of the book. I will now proceed to prove where my 'poor' evaluation comes from.
   
   
   (My background: 25 years of programming, including skills with various machine languages,
   assembly languages, Fortran, Pascal, PL/1, C, C++, Java, PHP, and Regular Expressions. )
   
   Stated by the author: "This book assumes you are familiar with variables, lops, and other basic programming concepts [period]." This is incorrect, as other reviewers have noted. The author quickly drifts into examples of arrays, objects, advanced operators, etc. with no explanation, or even a reference to the section of the book that covers these new concepts.
   
   Starting with "The PHP Language" section, I am finding an error or obvious omission, on an average of every three pages. This book has been poorly proof-read, and should not have made it past the publisher in this form. I expect far more accurate text that this, for an O'Reilly publication.
   
   As for the six people whom the author lists as standing out particularly,
   with regards to contributing corrections, improvements, and comments . . . I couldn't imagine how bad this work would be without their efforts.
   
   Page 32: Using complex data forms and concepts in examples, without providing page references.
   Here, arrays are introduced. Would it be so hard to add a footnote
   "See the extensive Arrays section, starting on page 61."?
   
   page 32: Same comment, applied to 'Objects'
   
   Page 32: Same comment, applied to the '->' object operator.
   
   ( Page 132: "use the special -> operator". Other PHP documentation calls this the 'object operator', but this author does not use this literal phrase. There is also no index entry for this phrase, or any reference to it under 'operator' or 'object'. )
   
   Page 42: 'Returning by Reference'. This obscure concept really needs an explanation of what is happening in the 5-line example. According to the 'Variable Scope' explanation (ten pages later),
   the variable in this function is local, and is therefore not reference-able outside the function.
   Yet the description of "Returning by Reference' indicate that the value of the variable is accessible.
   
   Page 45: Introducing the capability of the GLOBALS array, with no caveats, for the purpose of overriding
   scope. Ten pages later, in a different topic (Superglobals), we find the warning: "two superglobals that you should avoid ... $GLOBALS...". The warning should be on page 45, where you first start describing this superglobal. Again, has this author never heard of the literary construct called a footnote?
   
   Page 51: In an example, '(int)' is used to typecast a bool into an integer. At the top of the next page, the typecast operation is written in another example as '(integer)'. If both syntaxes are supported, this sure would be a good place to note that.
   
   Page 64: In the example, function_load_member. A $ID parameter is passed, but not used. Probably the "Bob" literal should be $ID.
   
   Page 64: Same code example as above. This two line function has one assignment, and one return statement ('return true;'). The calling code evaluates the completion of this function as if there are multiple
   methods of return; i.e. true or false. The text ahead of his example loosely implies that if the function was not 'successful' (whatever that means), the returned boolean will be 'false'.
   
   Page 66: Array_intersect() with multiple arrays parameters. There is no indication if this is an AND or an OR operation, with multiple secondary arrays. That is, will an array1 entry be returned if it is in array2 *OR* array3, or must it be in array2 *AND* array3?
   
   - - -
   
   One thing the author did get correct is in his list of web-sites. The TOP entry is www.php.net/manual , and it consistently clears up the errors the author makes. I recommend it.



5. It's not only a quite good reference book, but for the people with a good programming skill it's actually anything you need to learn PHP.
   
   Definitely a must in the bookshelf of everybody involved in working with the WWW. from webmasters to developers and support workers, but also for the geek who just enjoys playing with a programming language like this.

5 comments about The Microsoft Expression Web Developer's Guide to ASP.NET 3.5: Learn to create ASP.NET applications using Visual Web Developer 2008.

1. The title of this book is a little misleading. It deals with Visual Web Developer Express Edition 2008 and does an excellent job of addressing the new features in the 2008 release as well as a valid tool for someone just starting with Visual Web Developer. It takes you through the development of a sample ASP.NET website using Access databases along with user security. It is an excellent reference as well as a tutorial approach for a begginner to intermediate web site creation.



2. Although this book is not as well written as his book on Expression Web it is still a very good training book for Expression Web Developer.



3. I must have purchased 10 books on how to develope a website from the ground up. Within the first 5 chapters, without fail, something integral to the entire website that they take for granted working, wouldn't work for me, and after a week or two of trying to fix the issue, I would normally give up. I repeated this process for about the past 6 months.
   
   Some background on me, I'm 28, I have a BS in computer science, but generally learned nothing in college, of business value anyway. I am lightly familiar with coding/designing, if given enough time I could read the code and tell you about what most things do in C++ or VB, (And their .net equivalents), but ask me to program something, and I wouldn't even know where to start. This is why I am heavily dependant on any programing examples in a book working...
   
   This book is definitely more a designers guide to building a website, but by that, I mean it shows you how to create a website from the ground up, and every short cut possible where you can have Visual Web Developer (VWD) button, or option do the work of coding. This is like a god send for people like me, that want to learn coding, but not as badly as we want to learn how to create .NET websites. I didn't get stuck for more than a few minutes anywhere.
   
   There are no "stories from the trenches" that many books put in just to fill in space and bore you inbetween what you actually want to know. This book is VERY concisely written telling you what you need to know. This book does not go into great depth in any great part, it briefly touches on just about everything you could need to run your own website though and makes recommendations for either websites or books to purchase to get additional information.
   
   In conclusion, this book is great for beginners, and I would, and have recommended it to everyone I know who, similar to me, wants to create a professional looking website, that doesn't have the programing skills to make it happen. I'd imagine though, if you are above beginner level, this book would not be for you.



4. I have been doing ASP.NET for a few years now and still find introductory books helpful...this book was the exception. I found the chapters that are suppose to cover a facet of ASP.NET lacked much meat at all. Many of the chapters were under 10 pages and I found that instead of offering anything concrete the author went overboard with the external links to articles, help pages, or other books!
   
   In the books defense it will give you a limited working knowledge in topics like the ASP.NET provider model introduced in ASP.NET 2.0, as well as data enabling your web app. However this still isn't enough for me to rate it any higher. The book may be sufficent for someone with a very limited knowledge in ASP.NET however you'll find there is no depth in this book and after you are done you probably will need to continue searching for more. Leave this book alone.
   
   my-2-cents



5. I have never built a web form. Using this book, I built a simple site that includes a contact form and a registration form. I happened to find
   JimCo books and tutorials on this website [...]. The tutorials in conjuntion with the book, solved my problem. I am not a web developer, but I am cheap and these tools were the best I could find anywhere on the web.

5 comments about MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-299): Implementing and Administering Security in a Microsoft® Windows Server(TM) 2003 Network (Pro-Certification).

1. This book offers good coverage in some areas and fairly weak coverage in others. I agree with some of the other reviewers that this book should have been marketed as a study guide and not a training kit. It does contain some good to know nuggets of info, however it is far from being a complete guide on security, or preperation for the exam. I bought the book based on the reviews I read on this site and will be returning it. I can only guess that the previous reviewers work for MS Press.
   
   On the 13th page of this book the author mentions how important the steps of kerberos authentication are, after giving an incorrect explanation of them and telling you to memorize them for the exam. (steps 1-3 are incorrect. check pg.245 of the Active Directory Technical Reference for an accurate description) Like most of the self-paced training kits from MS Press there is a certain lack of depth to the information in this book. There is alot of pertinent security information missing from this book both for the exam, and more importantly for securing a network in real life. The book seemed more like a conglomeration of useful facts for the exam than a "training guide".
   
   A much better book in this arena is "Microsoft Windows Server 2003 PKI and Certificate Security" by Brian Komar with the Microsoft PKI Team -MS Press
   
   I would also recommend the Windows Server 2003 Active Directory technical Reference. -MS Press
   
   The two of these books combined will give you a complete and accurate base of information to pass this exam, and several others.
   
   RT
   MCT, MCSE, MCDBA, MCSA, Master Instructor MS Office



2. This book is an excellent resource and preparation for the 70-299 exam. I've read through a lot of exam books over the years and this is the one that prepared me the best. Upon finishing this book, you feel as though you really understand the material, rather than feeling that you still have holes in your understanding, as you often do with other books. This book is comprehensive, well-laid out, and has a lot of good practice questions in the book and on CD. Microsoft Training Kit CDs are often quite meaty, and this is no exception. I highly recommend this book.



3. Any book from Tony is probably going to be good. This book is no exception. It is very well written and organized. It covers all aspects of Windows Server 2003 security. It is not quite comprehensive as you'll need the earlier 2003 Server books (or know those topics well enough) to fully cover the test. It includes good chapter summaries and practice labs. This book will also be useful to you as a reference after you have passed the exam.



4. I haven't read this yet. I'm still going through the XP book, but if this one is even close, this book is a must. An easy read and well laid out. The accompanying CDs are very beneficial also.



5. People interested in buying this book must know it is out of date. It was released in the age of Windows Server 2003, without service pack one. So it does not cover WSUS, but SUS. It also does not contain information about SP1 improvements and now SP2, however, it is a book about planning and implementing security strategies, which makes it a book above the time.
   If you have money and are interest in security, or if you are intended to pass the exam, buy this book.
   The text is clear and comprehensive. The content is pretty amazing which demonstrates de knowledgement of the author about what he writes. Such knowledgement is provenient from his experience working with Windows in exposed environments.
   This is not only a theoretical guide of security, but also a practical one. The excercises hep you to understand and record it in your mind.
   Finally, buy this book.

3 comments about Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises (PRO-best Practices) (Best Practices (Microsoft)).

1. I have managed to talk to quite a few good software/enterprise architects over the years. When I do, the issues that we often talk about most are simplicity of design and how to manage complexity. In general, understanding that the management of complexity is the fundamental task of architecture is what defines a good architect. This book indicates that Roger really gets this issue. He also seems to get the business alignment issues that are sometimes lacking from architecture texts.
   
   From Roger's advice on partitioning a solution to his advice on implementing a system using an incremental approach everything here is sound and well articulated. This book is a short read but almost definitely worth your time if you are building anything in software from an enterprise down. Much of the principles he professes are the same principles that are important in regular software architecture. Components and object oriented design are merely methods of figuring out internal equivalence classes and appropriately partitioning solutions. Iterative development and some of the new agile principles are based on the same idea he advocates for the enterprise, incremental delivery.
   
   If for nothing else, this book is useful because Sessions is very successful in mathematically proving that many of his ideas should work. Most texts advocating incremental methodologies or problem decomposition can sound evangelical. This book does not.
   
   Overall, SIP sounds like it is a very good foundation for a company's enterprise architecture.
   
   That said, I am sure my advice would mean more if I did enterprise architecture. I hope that it is merely enough to say this.. I am in software development. I have helped provide or provided the technical architecure on quite a few projects. I feel that in general Roger has the core concerns nailed with his book.



2. Effective architecture books are difficult to find. The subject is not trivial. And disagreements are prevalent in this space, even on the definition of architecture itself. It seems that more texts on architecture are being written than in the past, but most of the emphasis seems to be on design. While design is important, architectural decisions have far reaching effects on software systems (such as maintainability and scalability) if and when they are ever actually successfully constructed and deployed. Of course, most technology professionals rightly recognize that there exist different types of architecture. Roger Sessions defines enterprise architecture as "a description of the goals of an organization, how these goals are realized by business processes, and how these business processes can be better served through technology". Sessions later offers a simplified definition that it is "the art of maximizing the value of IT investments", and reducing complexity in the enterprise helps achieve these investment returns. To explain how this might be accomplished, the author discusses mathematical concepts, enterprise architecture concepts, and Simple Iterative Partitions (SIP) concepts. Part I of this book discusses the current state of enterprise architecture and presents a look at complexity and the mathematics of complexity. Part II discusses ABCs (Autonomous Business Capabilities) and the SIP process that the author created. While the chapters on complexity start out strong, these tend to get a bit tiresome due to the lengthy explanations of basic mathematical concepts centered around partitions (although the chapter entitled "Enterprise Architecture Today" in which the author discusses the current space alongside succinct presentations of the Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architectures, the Open Group Architecture Framework, and the Federal Enterprise Architecture is very well written). The second part of the book starts a bit slow as well, but chapters 5, 6, and 8 are strong, and if one does not have time to read the rest of the book it is recommended that focus is placed on these chapters. While brief, the pages on project prioritization are especially worth consideration by the reader. Eight default factors are included in the author's typical Value Graph Analysis when determining project prioritization: market drivers, cost, organizational risk, technical risk, financial value, organizational preparedness, team readiness, and status quo. The radar graphs are used in a similar manner to those used in "Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed" (see my review). It is very unfortunate that while the author provides input to the market driver factor, input to the other factors is not divulged. Although this prioritization is not an exact science, the inclusion of this information by the author would have been helpful to make sure the reader is on the same page of understanding. The case study presented in chapter 6 is interesting. While a lot of such material is freely available on the internet, in my opinion more book authors need to start including similar substantive real-world content. The National Program for Information Technology (NPfIT) is the case study. The basic goal of NPfIT is to automate and centralize the massive record keeping that is the backbone of its national health care system run by the British government's National Health Service (NHS). The author discusses how his SIP process could have avoided much of the complexity to the project (that has resulted in failure) by vendors such as Accenture and Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). Sessions includes some well-worded closing thoughts in chapter 8: "We frequently hear that IT systems are getting more complex, as if this is a natural consequence of living in the 21st century. In reality, however, it is not systems that are getting more complex but system requirements that are getting more complex. It is not the job of the enterprise architect to design ever more complex systems. It is the job of the enterprise architect to resist the temptation to build complex systems." Also: "The paradox about complexity is that it is simple to make systems complex; it is complex to make systems simple. Many people think that it takes a lot of talent to create a highly complicated architecture. That isn't true. It takes a lot of talent to take complicated ideas and realize them in a simple architecture. Anybody can create a complex architecture. It takes no skill at all. Architectures naturally seek the maximum possible level of complexity all on their own. If it is a complex architecture you are after, you don't even need architects. You might as well just fire them all and let the developers work on their own."



3. When building software it is often difficult to step back from the complexity of the solution and consider the big picture -- how the software will fit into the real world. Managing this complexity is a major challenge for the industry.
   
   Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises addresses how to manage complexity in IT systems at the top level of design, Enterprise Architecture (EA). EA describes how software and processes fit together to provide value to users. Whether EA is more about "design", "requirements", or something else is less important than the idea that the highest leverage place to manage complexity is in the big-picture "systems" perspective that transcends software details.(e.g., what software pieces should be built/bought and what should they do?)
   
   The book lays out some context and history for EA in chapter 1 (35 pages), and then spends chapters 2-4 (70 pages) laying the foundation for complexity management techniques. The author's core EA process (called SIP) is described in chapter 5 (20 pages). Chapter 6 (15 pages) is a detailed case study of a troubled reengineering of the UK's health care IT systems. Chapter 7 (10 pages) is a mapping of the complexity management ideas onto an SOA model from the author's previous work, described as the "software fortress" approach.
   
   Depending on your background and experience level, some parts may be slow or of limited value. However the book's structure allows you to skip over areas that are bogging down without missing value later on. In particular:
   
   - You don't need to immerse yourself in the descriptions of existing EA models in the second half of chapter 1.
   
   - If you are comfortable with probability, equivalency sets, and partitioning, you can skim and skip over much of chapters 2, 3, and 4. There is good primer material in these sections, although the prose is a bit drawn out in places.
   
   - The SIP process can come across as a prescriptive sliver-bullet. The author does caveat the importance of artistic application, but this can seem drowned out at times.
   
   Ultimately the book wins by providing starting points for practitioners to keep business systems simple and partitioned at the highest points of leverage. Although many of the underlying ideas are not new, they are packaged in an accessible, logical way. The case studies, references to current industry debacles, and the authors personal experiences are valuable on their own and make the work an engaging read.

5 comments about Systems Analysis and Design with UML Version 2.0: An Object-Oriented Approach.

1. Item recived as presented



2. The UML writing style of this book is very easy to follow, and a great way to gradually introduce the whole concept of object-oriented analysis and design methodologies to the readers, especially the beginners. The authors did a great job illustrating the entire system development life cycle with a coherent and realistic example using the latest UML notations, practical methodologies, and various analytical artifacts. The only criticism I have is that sometimes the description of a particular topic spans over multiple pages without sub-leveling or sub-topics or highlights, making it very difficult for user to go back and perhaps mine certain important concepts embedded in the discussion. Perhaps more generalization relationship and diagrams can be helpful. Overall, it is a very good source of reference for object-oriented design in layman's term. I will strongly recommend it to my colleagues.



3. This book is just majorly confusing and really for the major eggheads. I'm using it because I have to for class but I'd rather go to another approach for learning this stuff. I'm using Learn to Program with C# by Smiley and it discusses some of the topics, from the early stages in the reading, as to the phases of development and because of that it helped me to understand this better. However, this stuff is really hard to grasp without the egghead mentality.



4. After reading a couple of 'classic' system analysis texts I felt I needed to read about system analysis and UML. This title had some good reviews so I purchased a copy.
   
   This book did cover both system analysis and UML, but I felt that it did not cover either well. I had a hard time engaging with the content and linking it with my existing knowledge of UML and systems analysis.
   
   If you are interested in UML and systems analysis I would recommend reading "Modern Structured Analysis" (Yourdon Press Computing Series) by Edward Yourdon, and finding a good UML 2 text (I'm lookging for one now).
   
   For the price, I was expecting a much better book.



5. The book is serivicable...professor loved certain sections but hated others. There is no perfect textbook on this topic.

4 comments about Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide (Facets of Ruby).

1. I buy a lot of books, mostly Ruby and Rails books. Most of them are follow-me guides that don't explain anything. Sure, ya did it, but you don't know why. Not this one. Ezra Zygmuntowicz actually explains how it works, why you need to do it and then, how to do it. And few people know as much about deployment.
   This is an extremely well written, "must have" reference.
   
   TW Scannell



2. This is a superb book, the best compact writeups i've seen on setting up Apache load balancing and proxies, nginx, mongrel, SVN server and repos, DNS, MySql caching, capistrano, rake, profiling apps (and there's a lot of blogs, books on these subjects. Entire mailing lists, in fact). Compact means they don't go into every option or configuration conceivable, you get everything (to almost 2 sigma) you need to know to get it going reliably, scalably, loggably, plus a lot of hard-won knowledge about what can go wrong. Just not quite the detail they go into, in, say the Frisch and Nemeth/Snyder/Hein unix admin books. I think for a lot of people (many java or PHP devs don't have to worry about the infrastructure of their production boxes, they had STDIFT (somebody to do it for them), this is a must have.
   
   This book isn't perfect. What it covers it covers beautifully, what it doesn't cover, well, it kinda slows down to 30 MPH for a red light. Witness pp 234-5: covers nested sets, STI, indexes and normalization, AR duck typing, polymorphic associations. Geez, that's a lotta topics for slightly less than 1 page. Well, they're outside the scope of this treatment and there aren't a lot of references given. What about all the Yslow stuff that everybody's talking about: JS /CSS compression/lazy loading, CDN, reduce DNS lookups. Some topics are here, some aren't. Basically, that's what you worry about after you've dug thru logfiles and profiled, topics this book covers in excellent depth.
   
   There are a few editing/editorial slips. 3 authors flip-flop between debian/ubuntu & RH/centOS/FC families (and don't talk about FreeBSD /solaris). Page 92 seems to suggest the default Leopard ruby install is fine. p 212: they're comparing a ubuntu, single CPU machine against a 2-cpu, windows machine running ??. I figure the editor should have said "huh?". and p 172 they write a lot about mySQL clustering limitations, when they could've talked about postgres instead of/in addition to.
   
   But really with stuff they could've written about, we're talking about a 600 page book, not this 250 page book with nice margins, easy to read fonts. So that' s my story and i'm sticking to it.



3. I guess because this book was anticipated for so long, the expectation were a bit high. In the mean time I've read loads of information to setup a server on the internet.
   
   Best chapters for me were 8. Scaling out (MySQL clustering was new and interesting) and 9. Performance where you go from a solid base line to the best number of mongrels for your server.



4. Ezra's book delivers precious info to every developer interested into Rails applications deployment. Staring from an hardcore-developer point of view maybe the book might had been condensed by eliminating some not-so-useful topics, such as the first chapters about hosting options. Furthermore cloud-computing it's never mentioned. Anyway it remains the only authorative reference about one of the Achilles' heel of the Rails framework.

5 comments about TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac (Pragmatic Programmers).

1. Books on editors are tricky things... I'm (still) a big fan and user of vi, but textmate is my tool of choice for more project level work for its capabilties. This book has brought me closer to to the keyboard level of productivity that vi allows for with its two modes.



2. For anyone that tells you that you can't so solid code and script development on a Mac, they haven't been introduced to the application TextMate. There are several good options for doing power editing on the Macintosh and TextMate is one of those POWER options.
   
   'TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac' by James Gray is a perfect companion manual for all TextMate users that want to lift the hood off of this power app and get to the nuts and bolts. If you develop on a Macintosh on a daily basis for work or fun and want to learn more about what you can do to make your life easier, pick up this book and you won't be disappointed. Written well and coming in at ~200 pages, there are 12 chapters which will teach you goodies in TextMate like how to create and use Macros, using Find & Replace to quickly edit text, and much, much more!!
   
   The Mac is a great tool for developing code and TextMate is a great app for writing it, make yourself a more efficient coder today!!
   
   ***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED



3. This book is the perfect primer for what I have found to be one of the most indispensible Mac OS X applications - TextMate. If you are a software developer or web designer or anyone else that edits text on a frequent basis and you have not already discovered TextMate, stop right now and visit http://www.macromates.com.
   
   The Pragmatic Programmers' book, TextMate Power Editing for the Mac is a thorough introduction to TextMate. Edward Gray II has written a very accessible book, that covers the product very well.
   
   The first third of the book is devoted to the basics - things you do every day in your text editor. The second third of the book dives into the details of some really sweet features of TextMate that you'll find yourself using all the time: bundles, snippets, macros and UNIX shell commands.
   
   TextMate ships with over thirty 'bundles'. Each bundle is a directory of related files that provide additional functionality to TextMate. Let's say you're working on an HTML file. The HTML bundle will help you with loads of things related to your document: validate the syntax of the document, open the document in the default browser, refresh the document in the current browser session, insert open/close tags for the current word, strip all HTML tags from the document - just to name a few. Each bundle provides functionality that applies not only to the syntax of the language you're currently working with, but repetitive tasks that would apply as well.
   
   As I mentioned, a couple dozen bundles ship with TextMate and many more are available for free download from various websites. You can even create your own bundles to extend the product in ways that only you can imagine. Here are a few of the bundles that ship with TextMate: Blogging, CSS, HTML, Java, Markdown, Objective-C, Python, Rails, Ruby, SQL, Subversion, Text, Textile, Xcode and XML. Bundles provide you with lots of help editing files and performing related tasks.
   
   Snippets are a smart completion mechanism that go way beyond the simple concept of 'finish this word'. For example, if you are editing a Ruby file and you type array_object.ea followed by the TAB key (where 'array_object' is an arbitrary Array object), the snippet feature will automatically fill in the skeleton of the 'each' iterator, including the opening and closing curly braces, the text '|e|' with the letter 'e' highlighted. You simply type the name of the variable you want to represent the next element (or simply leave it as it is), hit the TAB key again and the cursor will be placed between the closing '|' character and the closing '}' character, ready for you to type in an expression. Very cool. This same trick works for dozens of different scenarios in your Ruby code. And that's just the snippets that apply to Ruby code. There are snippets that apply to a large number of file types.
   
   You've probably seen macros in other editors and TextMate's macro facility works as you might expect: you start recording a macro, perform some actions and save the macro. TextMate saves the macros as XML files, so it's a snap to edit a macro after recording if you need to tweak it a bit.
   
   The ability to fire off UNIX shell commands from within TextMate gives you another powerful tool to use while editing files. You can fire off one-liner shell commands by simply pressing the ^R key on a line containing a shell command. You can also use shell commands to act on all or part of the current document.
   
   For the advanced TextMate user, the tail end of the book shows you how to create your own language syntax for use in TextMate, including how to describe the grammar of the language in terms TextMate will understand. So, if you program in some far out funky language that TextMate doesn't support out of the box, you can add the language grammar to TextMate and program away!
   
   Overall, I found this book extremely useful and easy to read. TextMate ships with an excellent help system that will answer many of your questions. The TextMate Power Editing for the Mac book will take you beyond the built-in help and give you an in-depth guide for this great Mac application.



4. "TextMate is actually a thin shell over a personalized team of robot ninjas ready to do your bidding."
   
   The funny thing is, to people who have never used TextMate for more than a few minutes the above phrase sounds like an exaggeration. It's not. (As long as you can accept the analogy of "really awesome code running on a Mac" = "robot ninjas"...)
   
   Anyway, this book targets a pretty specific market: 1) Humans, 2) who own Macs, 3) and use TextMate. I'm here to tell you that, if you're human you should have a Mac; and if you have a Mac you should buy TextMate; and if you have TextMate you should buy this book. So there, now it covers everyone.
   
   As with all of the Pragmatic Programmer books, I found this book to be concise without missing anything important. You may be thinking, "200 pages about a text editor!? That's crazy talk!" But you would be wrong, my friend. The amount of functionality built into TextMate is incredible, but I didn't even know the half of it until I started reading this book!
   
   I don't want to give away the ending, but:
   
   Three of my favorite simple features I didn't know about until I read this book:
   - Pressing [ESC] to complete the word you're typing.
   - The built in TODO list functionality (so crucial!!)
   - [Cmd-Enter] to add a new line below this one and go to the beginning of it.
   
   Things I wouldn't have been able to do without TextMate and this book:
   - Edit some of my Bundles to make TextMate work even more how *I* like
   - Complete an after-hours Web Site project *way* under time and budget
   
   Seriously. TextMate is the One True Editor for Mac (it makes me loath using any other editor on any platform) and this is a great book for learning how to *really* take hold of its power.



5. Visuals:
   The font size in the Pragmatic Programmers books is a little larger than say the O'Reilly books, which I personally like. Easy on the eyes. Screenshots are clearly printed.
   
   Readability:
   I found the reading style conversational and easy to follow. Of course, with this type of book which includes many keyboard short-cuts you really need to be at your computer and using them to commit them to memory. Even a reading of the book will give you insights into the power available at your finger tips with Textmate.
   
   Practicality:
   If you spend any amount of time in Textmate, this is really a no-brainer. This book will help you be more productive and get more out of your chosen text editing tool.
   
   Audience:
   The book does not list an intended target audience, but if you use Textmate at all I would say you have a bulls-eye right on you.
   
   Overall:
   If you use Textmate get this book.

5 comments about CCNP BCMSN Official Exam Certification Guide (4th Edition) (Exam Certification Guide).

1. This was the only source I used for the exam. While it did a pretty good job at covering everything, I did notice questions on the exam that I know for a fact were not covered in the book. I'm not sure if those questions counted toward my score, but I do believe I answered them correctly anyhow. The CD that came with the book was a waste of time. The quiz chapters were out of order and had some content that wasn't even in the book (Multicasting amongst other things.) I am hoping for better quality out of the BCSI book I'm about to read.



2. Haven't finished the book yet, but so far not that great. The writting does not keep your attention, but maybe it will get better. Have only gone through 2 chapters so far.



3. Covered most of the content I encountered on the exam and wasn't as verbose and dry as some other Cisco Press titles I've read. I was glad that I had first hand experience with the ADU and ASTU since this was on the exam but not in the book.



4. The actual exam and the content depth of this book are in completely different worlds. The exam questions are very deep and complex while the book only superficially covers each topic and spends a great deal of time on commands which make only a minimal appearance on the actual exam.
   
   The test "simulator" questions on the included CD-ROM are simplistic and way to easy compared to the actual test which gives you a false sense of security. You will know it when you are hit on the side of the head by the real test and it will be like wow, what happened, I scored 95% or higher on the CD-ROM simulations.
   
   In addition, many of the questions on the actual test aren't even covered in the book. Believe me, I went back to the book after taking the test and the topic detail WAS NOT IN THIS BOOK.
   
   I would not waste my money on this book if you are going to use it to prep for the real test. Save your money and buy real test study material online.
   
   You will be extremely disappointed with this "study" guide.



5. This is an excellent material for those who want to get Cisco CCNP certification. Also contain a very useful and update topics of networking.