The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering Review

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(More customer reviews)There really are very few software engineering books written in 1975 that are worth reading today. Brooks remains powerful stuff because large system projects are still often disastrous. We are not often bothered by the flowcharts that Brooks dislikes, but the disorganized projects, endless meetings, problems of scaling, unhelpful documentation and inflexible systems are certainly still with us.
I was struck recently by the parallels with Kent Beck's Extreme Programming: Brooks had in his way foreseen much of what this recent movement has been urging.
Brooks' classic book underlies much systems engineering thinking, and his example along with the frightening story of OS/360, enlivened with Brooks' inimitable anecdotes and illustrations, remains essential reading.

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XNA Game Studio 4.0 Programming: Developing for Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360 (Developer's Library) Review

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(More customer reviews)This isn't just an XNA manual with half-baked examples that cover the API: this is an aircraft carrier linear catapult to get you off the ground and making games.
I've been doing graphics programming since the DOS era, and have seen a lot of bad tutorials, and a lot of over-eager underachievers who write a "game programming" book to satisfy their need to accomplish something on a platform.
This is not one of those books: this is an accessible, clear, and purpose-driven course in games programming. It assumes only that you have a basic understanding of C#, and have at least seen a Dictionary declaration before, but doesn't assume that you're a veteran D3D coder.
The coding examples are clear, thoroughly-explained, and ramp up quickly. Lots of best practices and gentle introduction of xna/winpho concepts, like game Components. The elements that are repeated are repeated in order to train you into them, and not just to pad out the book. This book doesn't fall into the Petzold trap of making an example for every member of every Enum, just to have one. There are a few typos here and there, but you'll catch them when you compile.
TL/DR; This book is worth purchasing for the skeletal animation code alone.

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Administration Unleashed Review

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(More customer reviews)I have read about 3/4th of this book so far,most of it is mainly just review for me since the RHEL 5 release. I have noticed so far a few issues mainly with grammar, spelling, and multiple misguided instructions such as the PXE installation method, LDAP setup, and a few other minor things. Overall the book is my favorite linux related book since it gets right to the point and doesnt have all the boring history lessons about 15 years ago when service such and such was developed and how it is completely different etc etc. Any one who's read a linux related book knows what im talking about.
In regards to the misguided instructions, for instance the PXE setup. I have gone through the chapter about 5 times now and slowly stepped through the documentation as it explains but still have yet to be able to get the correct outcome.(a working PXE installation). I have previous experience with PXE so I was able to figure this out on my own with no issue but worry that some new admins to RHEL will have a hard time getting this particular method of installation setup. I'm unfortunetly human so I still may have gotten the steps down wrong and other may find that the instructions are infact correct. If so ... cool. :)
- runlevel -

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This comprehensive guide can help youadminister Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 effectively in any productionenvironment, no matter how complex or challenging.

Long-timeRed Hat insider Tammy Fox brings together today's best practices forthe entire system lifecycle, from planning and deployment throughmaintenance and troubleshooting. Fox shows how to maximize yourefficiency and effectiveness by automating day-to-day maintenancethrough scripting, deploying security updates via Red Hat Network,implementing central identity management services, and providing shareddata with NFS and Samba.

RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 Administration Unleashed contains extensivecoverage of network and web services, from the Apache HTTP server andSendmail email services to remote login with OpenSSH. Fox alsodescribes Red Hat's most valuable tools for monitoring and optimizationand presents thorough coverage of security—including a detailedintroduction to Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux).


Streamline deployment with Kickstart
Find, install, update, remove, and verify software
Detect, analyze, and manage hardware
Manage storage with LVM, RAID, ACLs, and quotas
Use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on 64-bit and multi-core systems
Administer users and groups more efficiently and securely
Ensure trustworthy backup and rapid recovery
Script and schedule tasks to run automatically
Provide unified identity management services
Configure Apache, BIND, Samba, and Sendmail
Monitor and tune the kernel and individual applications
Protect against intruders with SELinux and ExecShield
Set up firewalls with iptables
Enable the Linux Auditing System
Use virtualization to run multiple operating systems concurrently

Part I Installation and Configuration
Chapter 1 Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Chapter 2 Post-Installation Configuration
Chapter 3 Operating System Updates

Part II Operating System Core Concepts
Chapter 4 Understanding Linux Concepts
Chapter 5 Working with RPM Software
Chapter 6 Analyzing Hardware
Chapter 7 Managing Storage
Chapter 8 64-Bit, Multi-Core, and Hyper-Threading Technology Processors

Part III System Administration
Chapter 9 Managing Users and Groups
Chapter 10 Techniques for Backup and Recovery
Chapter 11 Automating Tasks with Scripts

Part IV Network Services
Chapter 12 Identity Management
Chapter 13 Network File Sharing
Chapter 14 Granting Network Connectivity with DHCP
Chapter 15 Creating a Web Server with the Apache HTTP Server
Chapter 16 Hostname Resolution with BIND
Chapter 17 Securing Remote Logins with OpenSSH
Chapter 18 Setting Up an Email Server with Sendmail
Chapter 19 Explaining Other Common Network Services
Part V Monitoring and Tuning
Chapter 20 Monitoring System Resources
Chapter 21 Monitoring and Tuning the Kernel
Chapter 22 Monitoring and Tuning Applications
Chapter 23 Protecting Against Intruders with Security-Enhanced Linux
Chapter 24 Configuring a Firewall
Chapter 25 Linux Auditing System
Appendixes
Appendix A Installing Proprietary Kernel Modules
Appendix B Creating Virtual Machines
Appendix C Preventing Security Breaches with ExecShield
Appendix D Troubleshooting


TammyFox served as technical leader of Red Hat's documentation group, whereshe wrote and revised The Red Hat Enterprise Linux SystemAdministration Guide. She was founding editor of Red Hat Magazine, nowan online publication reaching more than 800,000 system administratorsand others interested in Linux and open source. She wrote Red Hat'sLogViewer tool and has written and contributed to several Red Hatconfiguration tools. Fox is also the founding leader of the Fedora DocsProject.

Registeryour book at www.samspublishing.com/register for convenient access toupdates and to download example scripts presented in this book.

Category:Linux/Networking
Covers:Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
User Level:Intermediate–Advanced

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The Ruby Way, Second Edition: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming (2nd Edition) Review

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(More customer reviews)People in the Ruby development community know me because I started several of the most popular open source Ruby projects (I have been active in Ruby since 2001). If you are serious programming in Ruby then there are two must-have books to keep within reach as you program: Dave Thomas' Programming Ruby; and this book: Hal Fulton's The Ruby Way.
This is really two books in the guise of one. One the surface, The Ruby Way appears to be a cookbook of Ruby recipes, and a very thorough one at that. But The Ruby Way also manages to capture the gestalt of Ruby, that intangible, indefinable philosophy behind the Ruby idioms that old-timers now take for granted.
Every programming language has its own "way" of doing things. You don't want to write Java code in Ruby, or VB code in Ruby, you should be writing *real* Ruby code. If you want to see Ruby code the way it was "meant" to be written, this is your book.


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Ruby is an agile object-oriented language, borrowing some of the best features from LISP, Smalltalk, Perl, CLU, and other languages. Its popularity has grown tremendously in the five years since the first edition of this book.The Ruby Way takes a "how-to" approach to Ruby programming with the bulk of the material consisting of more than 400 examples arranged by topic. Each example answers the question "How do I do this in Ruby?" Working along with the author, you are presented with the task description and a discussion of the technical constraints. This is followed by a step-by-step presentation of one good solution. Along the way, the author provides detailed commentary and explanations to aid your understanding.Coverage includes• An overview of Ruby, explaining terminology and basic principles• Operations on low-level data types (numbers, strings, regular expressions, dates)• The new regular expression engine (Oniguruma)• Internationalization (I18N) and message catalogs in Ruby• Operations on hashes, arrays, and other data structures such as stacks, trees, and graphs• Working with general I/O, files, and persistent objects• Database coverage including MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, DBI, and more• Ruby-specific techniques in OOP and dynamic programming• Graphical interfaces in Ruby (Tk, GTK+, Fox, and Qt)• Working with Ruby threads for lightweight multitasking• Everyday scripting and system administration in Ruby• Working with image files, PDFs, YAML, XML, RSS, and Atom• Testing, debugging, profiling, and packaging Ruby code• Low-level network programming and client-server interaction• Web development tools including Rails, Nitro, Wee, IOWA, and more• Working with distributed Ruby, Rinda, and Ring• Ruby development tools such as IDEs, documentation tools, and moreThe source code for the book can be downloaded from www.rubyhacker.comHal Fulton has worked for over 15 years with variousforms of Unix, including AIX, Solaris, and Linux. He was first exposed to Ruby in 1999, and in 2001 he began work on the first edition of this book–the second Ruby book published in the English language. He has attendednumerous Ruby conferences and has given presentations at several of those, including the first European Ruby Conference. He has two degrees in computer science from the University of Mississippi and taught computer science for four years before moving to Austin, Texas to work as a contractor for variouscompanies, including IBM Austin. Hal currently works at Broadwing Communications in Austin, Texas, maintaining a large data warehouse and related telecom applications, working daily with C++, Oracle, and, of course, Ruby.

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Essential LINQ Review

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(More customer reviews)Well, I'd have to say stuff the Entity Framework. Those of us who have spent many years watching Microsoft change its data access APIs more frequently than many people change their underpants are hardly likely to instantly jump as soon as Microsoft announces that the API they are currently using is now so last week.
The fact that this book has excellent coverage of Linq to SQL is all in its favour, in my opinion. However, the book also has a very clear explanation of the basic concepts, is the first book on Linq that I have seen which clearly explains why we have query expressions as well as query methods, and has excellent Linq to XML coverage if you absolutely can't avoid using the filthy bloated abomination that is XML.
All in all, a most excellent book, a pleasure to read, and highly recommended.

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Writing Secure Code, Second Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)The title of the book is misleading to begin with. The book is not about writing secure code. It's about (1) not writing non-secure code and (2) using Windows specific security APIs.
(1) Not writing non-secure code. Covers several issues, some more obvious, like buffer overruns and validating user input, some more complex, like escaping URLs and socket security. I thought the book would teach me best practices about organizing code, as in "do like I do". Instead it goes like "don't do like I'm telling you".
(2) Using Windows security APIs. This is THE BEST part of the book. Gives you a very good overview about several different APIs, including ACLs, protecting sensitive data, securing DCOM and .NET code, excellent tips on installing programs etc. etc.
Keep in mind that this book is said to be used internally within Microsoft with "security pushes", with the audience of 8000 people, including not only developers of all levels, but managers as well, therefore the book is by definition a high level overview.
Sometimes the book feels like MS educational course. Ex. (tip on p.77) "I created the ... diagrams ... using ... Microsoft Visio Professional 2002". That's cool, but what does it have to do with security ?
Some topics should never be there. How about 3 pages of tips for a kernel driver writer ? It's a huge topic in itself and how many readers outside MS do this anyway ? Privacy issues are covered idealistically. Yeah, sure, if you put a specially crafted XML to the special place on your site, the users magically start trusting you... I'd better read about real situation with privacy, not how the government rules it to be. Oh, and how about 40 pages about cryptography ? Please...
The book tries to show you the security process with development and testing. I can easily see they use this process in Microsoft, with 8000 people. For a small team it's completely useless. How about using 4 (!) people for a code review ? Sure, upon reading this book you will know that security code review is a must (if you have enough resources). Didn't you know that before ?
The code samples are ugly. How about this: "... X is cool ... several pages of Perl (!) ... see what I mean ?". Ok, one of the authors admits to be a Perl fan, but how am I supposed to read through all this gibberish ? C(++) samples are not much better. May be they are fully functional and compilable and all, but please, they are huge and inconsistent in themselves.
All in all, 5 stars for Microsoft, 3 stars for the rest of the world.

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RHCE Red Hat Certified Engineer Linux Study Guide (Exam RH302) (Certification Press) Review

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(More customer reviews)The Red Hat Certified Engineer is one of the most respected of the Linux certifications. Part of the reason is because of the difficulty of the exam. "Red Hat Certified Engineer Linux Study Guide, 4th Edition" covers all the points of the exam very well and includes the information you need to work with Red Hat in the real world. In addition to all the information you need to pass the exam, the book contains over 50 lab exercises and two complete RHCE exams and the entire book on CD. If you plan on taking the exam do the labs, don't just read over them.
Michael Jang has consistently produced high quality books and this is one of his best. The book is strongly slanted toward passing the exam, which is okay since that is exactly what it purports to be. Throughout the book there are short comments marked off from the rest of the test which points to tips for real world items (called "on the job") and tips for the exam (called "exam watch"). Each chapter ends with a short summary, a "two-minute drill", self-test questions, and lab questions. The "two-minute drill" is great for exam preparation the day of the exam since it is pretty much the type of thing that you would put on note cards for a quick review anyway.
This is real-life advice and is full or tips and troubleshooting problems. In the installation section it covers disk partitioning, swap space, bios limits, multiple controllers, and RAID. Some good solid advice and information about things like problems with a computer with both a SCSI drive controller and IDE drive controller in the same system. The installation troubleshooting section includes boot loaders, RAID, logical volumes, kickstart automated installation and pretty much everything you might run across. It even includes how to boot up into single user mode, a very important ability for some administrative tasks and gaining root level access (full access to everything) to the system. For some reason, although this is used in real-life for a lot of reasons, it seems to be left out of most books. They will tell you to switch to single user mode to fix a problem or gain root access, but don't tell you how to do it. This book tells you everything you need to know. It includes not only the graphical and utility methods to do things but also includes the information for how it changes the configuration. The information is so detailed that you can hand add the lines and/or configuration files and do it all by hand if you would prefer. This way you understand exactly what each item does and it is much easier to troubleshoot problems.
The authors have included everything you need to know to install, troubleshoot, and administer a real-world server - shell configuration, kernel information, automation, X Windows installation and configuration, GNOME and KDE desktops, Apache server including security and virtual hosts, Squid proxy server configuration, secure FTP server, mail services including SMTP, sendmail, postfix, POP, and IMAP, Samba installation and configuration, printing services, DNS, BIND, DHCP, LDAP client configuration, firewall policies, network address translation, and the Linux rescue environment are examples of the breadth of coverage.
It even includes how to work with the automounter, another item that is left out of most other books. The only error I found was on page 11, Table 1-2, where it has "First IDE drive = /dev/had" when it should be "/dev/hda". For that to be the only problem I found in a book of this size shows the care with which it was edited.
This is simply the best book I have seen if you want to become a general Linux "guru". Not only does it have everything you need to pass the exam, it has everything you need to install and administer a Linux network. There are better books available on specific areas of Linux, for example a single chapter on Apache obviously cannot compete with a 600 page book on Apache server. Then again, this the best book around if you want an understanding of Linux that is general enough to provide a complete overview of how Linux works in the real world and is also detailed enough to provide everything you need to get everything you want up and running. "Red Hat Certified Engineer Linux Study Guide, 4th Edition" gets the highest recommendation I can give.

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Facebook Application Development (Programmer to Programmer) Review

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(More customer reviews)I'm relatively new to Facebook development, and not nearly as fluent with PHP as I'm sure many of the folks considering this book must be. So, you should probably read this review with that in mind.
I bought this and FBML Essentials at the same time, hoping that the two together would provide a sufficient understanding of the api and mark-up language. This book, as described by the other reviewers, has many typographical errors, which of course can be a nightmare if you're relatively low on the learning curve (as I am/was). If you choose to buy this book, you should most certainly download the source code from the wrox site to accompany your reading (as it seems it to be error free and because the code snippets in the book often leave critical methods and files out.)
The greatest shortcoming of this book is its lack of applied examples... many of the more advanced features in later chapters are listed in almost dictionary-style format, with no illustration or example code to explain how the methods and such are actually written and how they might be applied. Again, if you're well acquainted with php, you may be less in the dark than I and thus able to conceptualize how everything fits together. This is definitely NOT a book for novices (I found the O'Reilly book, although short, to be a more effective introduction to development via FBML in this respect (though it doesn't touch much upon the api and other more sophisticated techniques broached in this text.)
That said, the fact that there is such scant information available for Facebook development make this book worth your consideration; but I would definitely consider supplementing it with a book like O'Reilly's, and couple it with a pretty thorough acquaintance with the developer's wiki on Facebook. Even downloading and stepping line-by-line through the footprints application from Facebook will help you get the sense of how this stuff works.
Also be forewarned that this, and most of the books presently available, are not written for the new Facebook API written this summer (2008)... so methods like require_add() are no longer recognized and throw errors... this of course can be quite confusing if you're new to all of this.
Using this book, the wiki, and O'Reilly text, I was able to make my first Facebook App that lets users feature a particular video pertaining to a charitable cause from a small library in their profile boxes and application tabs. If you're trying to do something basic like that, you should be able to do so with these resources. Good luck!

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The wildly popular Facebook social networking platform has published an open Application Programming Interface (API) and developers are eating it up--60,000 signed up to use it in the first few days; with this API, any programmer can create applications and new features for Facebook
Explores and explains the components available to programmers, including working with Facebook Markup Language (FBML), querying Facebook with FQL, application layout and flow, advanced configuration and performance tuning, and more
Businesses such as NBC, Yahoo!, Red Bull, Forbes, and the Washington Post are building branded applications to reach the growing Facebook community

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How to Build a Million Dollar Technology Consulting Practice Review

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(More customer reviews)The title is about sucessful technology consulting. The text is a list of stuff that has been used in numerous other books. There is nothing new or inspiring. This book is written specifically for the CPA (not mentioned in the title) and is not for the IT professional or general consultant. I am returning mine today - not something even useful enough for the bookcase.

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Internet Multimedia Communications Using SIP: A Modern Approach Including Java® Practice (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Networking) Review

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(More customer reviews)FYI
This book helped me passed my Convergence+ and Security+ exam.
On with the quick review:
This is a must-have book for network engineers dedicated to improving their craft in IP Multimedia Communication, specifically working on SIP-based Softphones. This book has taught a non-programmer like me to deconstruct and analyze the internals of a Softphone, i.e the most famous Counterpath X-Ten Lite Softphone. Being a security guy, the chapter for Securing Multimedia Communications is an excellent introduction as well on how to implement SIP-VoIP Security starting from the network layer, the transport layer all the way to the application layer.
Obviously Rogelio's experience in the field is as wide as you can imagine which he was able to effectively discuss and present in this book in my humble opinion.
Note:
I am still using this book as reference on my desk when I deal with customers who would liked to integrate their sofphones or CRM with our proprietary predictive dialer.
Thanks Rogelio!
Ron
[...]

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Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) was conceived in 1996 as a signaling protocol for inviting users to multimedia conferences. With this development, the next big Internet revolution silently started. That was the revolution which would end up converting the Internet into a total communication system which would allow people to talk to each other, see each other, work collaboratively or send messages in real time. Internet telephony and, in general, Internet multimedia, is the new revolution today and SIP is the key protocol which allows this revolution to grow.The book explains, in tutorial fashion, the underlying technologies that enable real-time IP multimedia communication services in the Internet (voice, video, presence, instant messaging, online picture sharing, white-boarding, etc). Focus is on session initiation protocol (SIP) but also covers session description protocol (SDP), Real-time transport protocol (RTP), and message session relay protocol (MSRP).In addition, it will also touch on other application-related protocols and refer to the latest research work in IETF and 3GPP about these topics. (3GPP stands for "third-generation partnership project" which is a collaboration agreement between ETSI (Europe), ARIB/TTC (Japan), CCSA (China), ATIS (North America) and TTA (South Korea).) The book includes discussion of leading edge theory (which is key to really understanding the technology) accompanied by Java examples that illustrate the theoretical concepts. Throughout the book, in addition to the code snippets, the reader is guided to build a simple but functional IP soft-phone therefore demonstrating the theory with practical examples.This book covers IP multimedia from both a theoretical and practical point of view focusing on letting the reader understand the concepts and put them into practice using Java. It includes lots of drawings, protocol diagrams, UML sequence diagrams and code snippets that allow the reader to rapidly understand the concepts. KEY FEATURES* Focus on HOW multimedia communications over the Internet works to allow readers to really understand and implement the technology * Explains how SIP works, including many programming examples so the reader can understand abstract concepts like SIP dialogs, SIP transactions, etc. * It is not focused on just VoIP. It looks At a wide array of enhanced communication services related to SIP enabling the reader put this technology into practice.* Includes nearly 100 references to the latest standards and working group activities in the IETF, bringing the reader completely up to date. * Provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a basic, though functional, IP soft-phone allowing the reader to put concepts into practice. * For advanced readers, the book also explains how to build a SIP proxy and a SIP registrar to enhance one's expertise and marketability in this fast moving area.

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The IC Bus: From Theory to Practice Review

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(More customer reviews)Regretfully, I have to say that "The I2C Bus from Theory to Practice" book is a bit of a disappointment for me. I've been reading these past 2 months the Philip's I2C related documents in PDF format, which I downloaded from the Internet. It seemed to me at the time that apart from the description of the protocol, there are some notes and maybe "hidden" facts, which are not described in the formal description of the protocol and so, I started to look for a book on the subject. Luckily I found one book (the only book) and hoped that it would elaborate on the I2C subject. I discovered that indeed this book justified its title and gave the required theory description, and practical examples as promised. But the theory is mostly copied/pasted out of the Philip's I2C bus protocol description with some additional notes added to it, and the overall description is nicely divided into chapters and chapter-parts which is maybe more readable for the 1'st time reader. As for the I2C practice, or practical information, again I was disappointed to find that some parts of the Philip's PDF's were inserted again ( as the PCF8584) which is almost fully described in the book. I think it would have been more appropriate to point out pointers for these PDF's (although it was mentioned once in the book that some material is taken from these documents) on the Philip's Internet site. I think the authors meant to give some practical examples by that, but I felt that it was just for filling out some more pages on the book (like an LP record's last 3 or 4 song tracks.) The appendix of the book was very disappointing and I didn't understand why I need these "printed circuits" low quality prints at the end of the book (pages 287-294) or maybe it was just to fill some blanks. The SW examples given out with the floppy disk were not so well documented and also some of it was in French anyways. All in all, this book was not what I thought it would be and that is a shame because it is the only book, which I found on the I2C subject on the Web. Maybe the authors wrote most of the documents in the Philip's PDF's and wanted to publish it in hard copy... (see title of this letter.) But, if you did purchase this book, you can always put it on the bookshelf because it has a nice respectable hard cover.

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J2EE Best Practices: Java Design Patterns, Automation, and Performance (Wiley Application Development Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is the best J2EE helper book period. I've been developing J2EE based applications for 2 years now and have read many books on the subject. Most of the J2EE books just repackage the specifications and write about common sense approaches.
J2EE Best Practices, will give you concrete information on how to use EJB 2.0 for the "real" world now!. You can and will use this book to ensure the success of your current EJB 2.0 project.
The material on CMR Entity beans is extremely valuable for anyone trying to implement Business Objects based on J2EE.
I use Cocoon for my Web Interface, but this book has some good info for Struts users as well.
Go to your nearest book store and get that edge you've been looking for. While your buddies are reading "Core J2EE', "Bitter EJB', "Expert One on One J2EE Design..", "Mastering J2EE..", etc...

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GWT in Practice Review

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(More customer reviews)I am surprised to hear so much lofty praise for this book. It is mediocre at best, and the editing is quite horrible. Here the advice I would give the authors and in particular the editors:
- I hate having to flip from one chapter to the previous one in order to find a particular snippet being referenced. If you are starting a project, all the source for that needs to be close to each other. I dislike being told 'Go find table 1.1, (with no page number given) and use the code from there.
- The code examples given clearly have NEVER been through the compiler. There are missing methods in examples, and silly typos that are quite unacceptable since it leads me to question the effort put into creating the book. (see page 52, listing 2.12 for example, - Private is NOT the same as private. setInitDisplay is never defined. )
- My preference - and probably for a number of other people - is to use the well defined hello world approach, rather than a discourse on how configuration is to be set up. Eclipse should be introduced earlier. I'm sure others would disagree, but getting a HelloWorld going gets my blood flowing
- The section on design patterns is a TOTAL waste. Please dont introduce examples that focus on MVC, not GWT. I am not reading GWT to understand how MVC works. Make simpler examples that gets rid of this fluff, and focusses on GWT.
- How exactly does showing what StringBuffer looks like in pretty & obfuscated mode help the user? It looks like an attempt to pad the size of the book
Manning books are always a hit and miss. THis is a clear miss. Really, the editors need to pull up their socks and get things out right, not get it out quick.

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Agile Software Development: Best Practices for Large Software Development Projects Review

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(More customer reviews)A great book, which makes one thing clear: complex software projects cannot be described and managed by THE perfect plan. The authors encourage to adopt agility and give useful guidelines/best practices how to be prepared for the unexpected.


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Software Development is moving towards a more agile and more flexible approach. It turns out that the traditional "waterfall" model is not supportive in an environment where technical, financial and strategic constraints are changing almost every day. But what is agility? What are today's major approaches? And especially: What is the impact of agile development principles on the development teams, on project management and on software architects? How can large enterprises become more agile and improve their business processes, which have been existing since many, many years? What are the limitations of Agility? And what is the right balance between reliable structures and flexibility? This book will give answers to these questions. A strong emphasis will be on real life project examples, which describe how development teams have moved from a waterfall model towards an Agile Software Development approach.

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