2 comments about SugarCRM Developer's Manual: Customize and extend SugarCRM.

1. There is little here that can't be derived from a review of the online sugar documents and a little self-motivated tinkering. Its hard to believe that this book is the result of something other than just that. Based on how much additional information is available here that's not in the public domain, the $49.99 is a little hard to believe.
   
   While the text goes at 269 pages, there's really about 30-40 pages of actual beef here. I was able to condense all of one chapter into 5 lines on a wiki page. Fully 60 pages of this book are un-annotated schema definitions of the sugar database; a waste of paper that verges on criminal. This information is readily available and in a more usable format through the phpMyAdmin tool that is bundled with the Sugar installer. Reprinting it here seems to serve no other purpose than to increase this books heft; and thereby its saleability.
   
   Completely missing is information on what a sugar customizer might actually find difficult, like debugging sugar when something goes wrong, linking custom modules with existing modules (like notes), or adding custom columns to advanced search screens.



2. Note: this book addresses versions 4.5 and below. I'm finding out that things are a bit different in the version 5 beta, so the utility of this book is greatly reduced.
   
   As a point of reference, I have about 10 years of PHP experience. I have used the PEAR and Smarty libraries extensively. I was drawn to SugarCRM based on my familiarity with those libraries and the fact that SugarCRM uses them, to some extent. I bought this book because it was the only game in town that addressed custom module creation.
   
   The book begins with customizing the interface via SugarCRM Studio. It progresses to the creation of custom modules, with a pretty large section in the middle on database diagrams, as noted above. The meat of this book, in my opinion, was in chapters 8 and 9 (the last 2 chapters). Bain explains how to set up and edit the files to create your own basic module and workflow in them.
   
   My main complaint is that Bain doesn't adequately explain the interaction with other modules, ACL for example, which in my opinion is one of the more important ones.
   
   In Bain's defense, SugarCRM is a very complicated web application. Try doing a print_r($GLOBALS) and you'll see what I mean. On an example page, that one line of code resulted in over 15,000 lines of output.
   
   The newest version of SugarCRM has a Module Builder (MB) component that will automatically create the files for you, as well as the database tables. If you're using v5, you're probably better off using the MB and examining the files.
   
   The only other option is to use the wiki (spotty) and the official documentation (inadequate). I'm hoping the people at Sugar put out their own reference book, and the sooner the better!!!

5 comments about The Sql Guide to Oracle.

1. I have found this book the only useful book on using SQLPlus. In fact, it was the ONLY book on SQLPlus that I have found anywhere. It has exactly what I need. However, the book only covers Oracle 6.x, which is a bit outdated. Are there any plans for new editions of the title?



2. The book contains many examples, more then other SQL books that I have read. The book covers a lot of nested queries, sub-quries and co-related queries using EXISTS, ALL operators. It is a little out-dated but still serve my purpose which is to become proficient in SQL. I would buy a second edition if one exists for Oracle 7 or 8.



3. It is bit of old book but it is best for bingers who need jump start for SQL programming and do not care about new oracle features. It starts from very basics but then it takes you to pretty high level.



4. I had the original, generic SQL version of this book (now out-of-print) and gave it to another developer. I bought this SQL for Oracle edition to replace it.

   When I first got this, I had NO idea how to write even the simplest SQL statement (well, maybe the easiest). But thanks to this book -- and only this book -- I'm a real whiz at it now and did all of my company's database programming for years. How many times can you learn an entire computer language with just ONE BOOK?!?

   The author over-achieves something that most others fail at: he teaches all aspects of the language through sensible examples and straightforward explanations.

   The book is an invaluable resource for beginners through to advanced developers. There is no fluff anywhere in the book...just very efficient examples and explanations. So if you are used to Dummies guides or 21-day guides, you might find this book a bit terse. But I still think it is a fantastic choice for beginners.

   In all, I cannot recommend any computer book more highly than this one.




5. This is the third time I've bought this book. I have used it since I first found it over 10 years ago to teach new DBA's, programmers, and users the basics of SQL as well as advanced topics. While the SQL standard hasn't changed that much since the book was written, I do wish there was an updated version. By the way, in addition to the three copies I've purchased for myself (they end up disappearing), I've had every employer I've ever worked for buy copies. The material is clear and easy to learn and worth the money.

5 comments about Oracle8i Advanced PL/SQL Programming.

1. Hello Oracle users. Oracle 8i pl/sql programming book is a very good reference book but if you have learned pl/sql using the Oracle 8 pl/sql programming book in the past then this book is not a good buy. Poor coverage of Java related programming and implementation in Oracle 8i database version. I would strongly recommend if you are planning on learning Java with Oracle then maybe you want to take a look at "Oracle 8i SQLJ programming book" also published by Oracle press. Most of this book is copy of Oracle 8 pl/sql programming book with few modified examples. Since I like Oracle 8 Pl/Sql programming book I will give this book also 4 stars.



2. I agree with the previous reviewer. If you own a copy of the version 8 book, you can definitely skip this one. The only new info included in this book is a survey of PL/SQL IDE's and their built-in debuggers (this might be the only added value to this edition), summary of Oracle8i PL/SQL new features, and Java external procedures. Other chapters are practically identical to those in the older edition. In fact, the chapter on the DBMS_LOB package has been removed from the printed version.

   If you need to learn Oracle8i's new PL/SQL capabilities, pick up Steven Feuerstein's Guide.




3. Simaply the best reference book for Oracle PL/SQL, I highly recomment this book to new users. Over all this is nice book to read and i recommend this to all my collegues and friends. Paper quality is Good and examples could have been better in terms of more elaboration as this is a new Oracle technologies book.



4. This is a very good book that seems to cover most of the PL/SQL language. There are lots of great examples, but quite a number of the code examples, provided on CD, will not compile due to various errors (bad column names, datatype mismatches, etc). I was able to fix some of the errors, but not all, leaving me with lots of questions.



5. I bought this book just have a reference copy regarding PL/SQL. As oracle has come up with new version 8i and it's quite popular in the market so I wanted to have a book which can cover my PL/SQL concept and keep me up regarding latest update in 8i.
   This book is a disappointment, may be a bad choice for me. It actually validate it title quite closely. It is absolutly an advance book not for beginner or middle level guys. If you are looking for a book which can give you all the concepts and advance then probably this is not the book for you.
   This book really starts in advance mode. Even for the middle level guy like me I really feel to buy oracle 8 book instead of a Advance book like this.

No comments about SQL Server Interview Questions.

5 comments about Instant SQL Programming.

1. Database design and SQL are difficult subjects but a book for beginners should make every effort to accomodate the beginner by simplifying it as much as possible. And, to a degree, this book does that. But there are too many forays into outer space. Consider this passage from page 122: 'You can summarize the rule as follows: if X and Y are columns and X is a key, then for any Z which is a proper subset of X, it can't be the case that Z determines Y.' No matter how elegant, I don't think anyone would argue that this is helpful for a beginner. On the contrary, it tends to make the subject seem as difficult as possible. Hardly a proper goal for a beginner's book. I am about half-way through this book and, increasingly, I am going to MSDN for a clearer explanation to each of the subjects that Celko addresses.



2. The book starts with installation notes telling reader that instead of using password such and such and id such, as it is described in the software's help, you rathre have to use password "sql" and password "dba". I tried to enter "sql" and "dba" into the password-asking dialog box, and it did not work. Then I realized that it is password "sql" and USERID "dba", and not only it is a misprint, they are listed in a reverse order: first you enter "dba", and second - "sql". That's on the very first page. The page 5 states, that supplied version of Watcom SQL engine will not allow to execute commands CREATE, ALTER, DROP, GRANT or REVOKE. That makes impossible to practice anything you read up to the chapter 5. However, in chapter 6 on p. 162 author offers you to execute command ALTER TABLE, and if you already forgot about page 5, that's a lot of frustration. At this time it helps to return to page 8: "The code in this book has been extensively tested ... so if you encounter an error message ... please thoroughly check that you've typed the code in correctly ... if you don't type in all of the examples, then you may encounter problems later with certain structures or features which haven't been created".



3. I had to buy this book for an online class I'm taking. The teacher probably wanted it because of the [very old] software [on floppys] to use with the class. The book itself is basically on the border of terrible for someone like me who is new to SQL (even though I am a senior CS student). Uses a lots of terminology that he doesn't explain. Not very good examples. Cannot skip between chapters without confusion. Overall, this is the worst computer book that I have purchased. I'm looking for a new one to supliment my learning for the class.



4. Probably not the best book ever written for SQL, let alone for beginners.

   However, it is the one I used to learn SQL. It covers the basics in a fairly concise manner, enough so to be able to move on to a more advanced book. I read it cover-to-cover, and didn't agonize over the side-tracking or standards discussions. What I wanted was the details on the syntax of the language and an understanding of what the statements do, and that is what was provided along with some basic examples. By the end of the book, I was able to use SQL at a novice level.

   I'm not sure I'd use this book to teach a class on beginning SQL, but as a quick and dirty read to get a first taste of the language, it fits. P-)




5. Ok, it's 10 years since this book was written and it is still the one I use as my SQL reference.
   
   One note - I'm a programmer, not a DBA. So my SQL needs are pretty simple. But if you want a basic reference that covers all of the basics clearly - this is the book.

5 comments about Informix Unleashed.

1. The book is organised into many topic-specific chapters, written by quite a number of different authors. The quality of the content and prose is therefore rather variable, and some subjects are covered to different depths by different authors, giving a rather disjointed feel. However most people, even Informix professionals, will find some things of value in this book.

   The book comes with a CD-ROM containing a example scripts/SQL etc: these vary from the trivial to the very useful.

   Some sections, noticeably that on Tech Support, are next to useless to non-US readers, containing as they do information only applicable to that country. It leaves the impression the editors were either too ignorant or, more likely, too lazy to consider the fact that this is supposed to be an international publication.




2. For someone who is new to Informix but has experience with other RDBMS's, this book is just what is needed.

   It overviews the Informix product line and gives detailed instructions for various tasks such as using ontape to perform a backup, understanding the onconfig parameters and much more.

   This book lives up to the UNLEASHED! family name.

   Thanks!




3. This book is a great resource. It's not one to read cover to cover, but rather one to turn to when you have a question. It's helped me at work in critical situations.



4. If you have had experience with other relational databases. i.e. SQL Server, Sybase. You may be farmiliar with Unleashed books. This one is nothing like them. The enire books gives a general overview of Informix and 90% of the book covers the Informix-4GL There is little to no examples for SQL and was not worth the $40.00 I spent on it.



5. I'm primarily a developer, but I also do a little bit of DBA stuff. This book has lots of info for developers, and apparently lots for DBAs too -- it's the book our primary DBA recommended to me. If you need to know something about Informix, chances are it's explained in this book.

5 comments about Microsoft SQL Server 2000(TM) Performance Tuning Technical Reference (Pro-Technical Refere).

1. Strong recommendations from others brought me to this book and I feel obliged to give back.
   This is a masterpiece.Well researched and well written
   I Got a hold of a couple of concepts missed in other books because of the lucidity of the examples and explanations.
   Great book If you read it you will understand why....

   Michael Tubuo Ngong




2. Considering the difficulty of the topic, this book is a fairly easy read. The single best thing about the book is that the advice is actionable. You can read this book and immediately begin tuning.

   Coverage is excellent - performance tuning, capacity planning, setting up disk drives, managing cpu, I/O, network, and memory, index tuning, backups, replication, OLTP versus OLAP, etc.

   For each subject area, the authors explain the applicable concepts and SQL Server tools, and then systematically explain their application using practical examples.

   Compared to other performance tuning books, it is an 80/20 book. By this I mean that the authors focus on what is most important and then move on to the next topic. They don't get carried away demonstrating how much they know about each concept or go into the minutia of the options of each SQL Server tool.

   I hope they write more books.




3. I bought this book on the basis of the glowing recommendations here. As I have a number of servers to tune which execute some extremely complex SQL, and I need to be able to look inside with Perfmon and the profiler, I thought this book would be very useful. I particularly wanted help with sysmon.
   This book gave me virtually nothing. Its coverage of tuning was shallow, information was repeated unnecessarily, text was copied almost verbatim from BOL, and it provided little or nothing that couldn't be found elsewhere and easily.
   It tries to cover everything at the cost of giving real value. For example it provides 15 pages on data warehousing of which 12 are a description of data warehousing so cursory that if you don't know the subject you'll only be confused, and 3 pages on actual tuning which basically say that you should find out whether the bottleneck is CPU/disk/memory then add more CPU/disk/memory respectively.
   Sizing and capacity planning are introduced with seven equations without justification. Okay, but completions C is given as the number of transactions that were completed during the observation period, but on the facing page C = 96 seconds [sic]. Did anyone proof-read this? With these and numerous other oddities (trunc. log on chkpt on SQL2000?) I don't know what I can trust.
   The mathematics for this section is done and finished in 6 pages.
   I was particularly looking for a comprehensive description of sysmon counters. Other than a quick rundown of the obvious ones there's a long list in the appendix of others, including such gems as "lock blocks allocated: the total number of allocated lock blocks". The whole point of buying this book was to find out how to use them, or indeed what they mean (Skipped Ghosted Records/Sec - means what?); merely giving me a list of them is redundant. This was the biggest letdown for me - I need this info!
   There are other important omissions. I have spent literally weeks identifying and working round failures in the query plan optimiser. This serious issue is not properly addressed except for a chapter introducing query hints. A taxonomy of optimiser failures and ways of tackling each type might save others from the headaches I've had. Optimiser hints do not always suffice.
   The book is rated on the back for user levels IT Implementer and Corporate Developer. That is far too generous.



4. The `SQL Server 2000 Performance Tuning' provides the reader with an extensive overview of the functionality that MSS2000 has for performance tuning. This book has been written by the manufacturer of MS2000, and has therefore some specific properties a reader has to taken into account. One of them is that every single tuning-feature is mentioned, although their relative impact (hence importance) on performance is not discussed. Another one is the white-book nature of the information presented; very general advice for the entrylevel DBA. For example: in the chapter `Hi-performance Backup and recovery' (it has only 18 pages) is says: "plan full backups for off hours", " use differential backups", "use multiple data files" etc.
   
   This book has the title `Technical Reference' and should be regarded as such. The DBA, working in a company which doesn't consider performance-tuning important enough to dedicate a policy to, who is confronted with a sudden structural diminishing of performance and is to find out where this bottleneck stems from will not benefit from this book. For example, the book dedicates a mere two pages on "interpreting Graphical Execution Plans" and gives only 1 example. For a useful checklist on where to look first when confronted with the so-called `query from hell' one should read other books. But for the novice in tuning, the one who is unfamiliar to concepts like locks, RAID, system monitor, I/O,page vs rowlevel, differential backups, how to log in on queryanalyzer, index tuning wizard, etc this book can serve as an introduction. But once past this introduction, this book has served it's purpose.



5. Had this book for a while and only used it for couple times. I found some scripts that are useful for me in Chapter 17 (Tuning SQL Statements and Stored Procedures). I wrote two scripts which I assigned the jobs on SQL Server Agent and allow the Agent do its work at 3 a.m every day when the average connections between 5 to 10 concurrent users. The book does covered other areas such as system I.O (Hardware & RAID configuration) and SQL Analyzer which I already know. I would recommand other book over this one (Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Administrator's Pocket Consultant-ISBN 0-7356-1129-7). The most useful part of this book is Chapter 17 for me. This is good book for someone who needs to know how to optimized your hardware investment and tune your SQL server. It is a good book to have if you don't mind spending $50.

4 comments about The Official Guide: Sybase ASE 12.5 Performance and Tuning (Jeffrey Garbus' Official Sybase Ase 12.5 Library).

1. Come on guys.... "Each chapter has passed through the hands of at least five experienced database administrators." [in Preface]
   and I only have to get to page 12 to find none of you can explain the true page sizes for 2K APL & DOL pages......

   Could the remaining chapters pass through your hands again after the editors had their chance? Please don't be like the so called Oracle book writers - you are better than that. Sure it is rather picky, but can I trust the rest of the information?




2. This book answers all the really tough questions in very clear and simple ways. Much of the info in this book is the sort of stuff you're only lucky enough to get if you happen to have a Sybase performance expert onsite. If you've ever found yourself with a really tricky performance question you know what a good thing it is to find information about Sybase monitoring tools and performance troubleshooting all in a single book. This book appears to have been written by people with much experience in troubleshooting performance problems and the advice is about the best you're going to get anywhere.



3. This book is an excellent introduction to the subject of how Companion Server, Replication Server and Open Switch work together. It also covers software pros and cons to help you make business decisions on its implementation. This book is very easy to read and has real life practical tips and suggestions at the end. A good overall "how to" book. There should be more technical books out there written like this.



4. Mostly, this book is simply a rehash of material that is presented better in Sybase's own Performance & Tuning guide.
   
   Sybase ASE 12.5 Performance and Tuning presents little if any useful tuning advice. What advice is present ranges from flat out wrong (e.g. "If Cache Search Misses falls below 20%, consider adding physical memory" - page 288) to mystically useless (e.g. "Create and use temp tables outside of each other" - page 228).
   
   Further, the depth of coverage is quite poor. For example, there are only thirteen pages dedicated to locking, four to tempdb, and just one for log management (yes, only one page discussing logs!!).
   
   Finally, Sybase ASE 12.5 Performance and Tuning has many grammatical mistakes. Typically I can look past such a minor annoyance, but with this book's limited utility, this is the final slap in the face.

5 comments about Beginning Oracle Programming.

1. In the usual Wrox style, this is a well-rounded introductory book on Oracle programming, with detailed, reader-friendly discussions on architecture and many "Try it out" exercises.

   That being said, the book concentrates so much on 9i that if you have installed 8i (or perhaps even Personal Oracle 9i) then you might be discouraged by frequent references and exercises for things you won't be able to do. According to Oracle, 9i Enterprise for Win2K requires 512M of RAM (although other sources indicate that it will run in 256M). The OTN download is around 1.5G (approximately 3 CDROMs worth), or you can request the CDs from Oracle at otn.oracle.com.

   I would have preferred to see separate sections and exercises that concentrated on 9i-specific details. There are still plenty of features common with previous Oracle releases to support a general-purpose Beginning Oracle book.

   Recommended, with the above-mentioned caveat.




2. I am a Web Developer (ASP) with an MS SQL background. I got throw into a project that uses an Oracle database for its backend. If not for this book I do not know where I would be. This is the best book I've seen for a newbie to Oracle. BUY THIS BOOK NOW!!!



3. This books isn't bad on PL/SQL, but if you want to write Java programs with Oracle you'll also need a JDBC book.



4. This one is great book for anyone who's beginning to learning oracle programming.
   I bought this book after the T kyte's expert one-on-one so to me I could brush faster thru (some) pages. I guess i'm a sucker when it comes to wrox books.

   But a good starting point for beginners!




5. The book epitomises simple yet detailed coverage of the Oracle 9i programming. The best feature of the book is the methodical illustration of even the smallest and trivial concept by sample program which aides in understanding. Nonetheless I found the coverage of arcane topics like index, objects - which sound simple at the periphery but daunt the programmers once dealth in depth - very nice. The two case studies provided illustrates the concept better. However the book doesnt cover data modelling concept which can be discounted as being out of scope.

No comments about Advanced Oracle SQL Programming: The Expert Guide to Writing Complex Queries (Oracle In-Focus series).