Archive for book review
Book Review: Learning Perl
Posted by: | CommentsPerl is one of those languages I probably don’t care if I ever master, but I have to deal with it from time to time both in web applications and in shell scripting, that I wanted to gain a better understanding of it. For that reason I passed up on getting the highly acclaimed “camel book” and got Learning Perl, 5th edition, by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy, which is a slim 328 pages. I also found the subtitle encouraging, “Making Easy Things Easy & Hard Things Possible”– my early experiences with Perl have not been pleasant ones.
I enjoyed the book more than I expected, and have found it equal to the tasks I need to perform with Perl. It reads much like any “beginning” programming book (without all of the ‘what is a computer?’ nonsense you’d find in a Deitel&Deitel beginner book). My depth of experience with PHP helped me to be a little more comfortable with the syntax, and allowed me to ponder some of the trickier concepts a little more deeply. Like the default variable $_… I’m still thinking about that.
The book has a good introduction to modules, and covers both using cpan to install, and installing from source. Both of which I’ve had to do recently. The chapter on Regular Expressions was especially helpful, and probably one of the best short-tutorials on regular expressions I’ve ever read. Someday I’m going to have to read a book about those, maybe I’ll remember it better, but until then brief explanations like these will be my regex life blood.
The book offers exercises at the end of each chapter, in fact the authors claim this book is the product of their curriculum taught over a number of years. I didn’t work through all of them, but I did a few and I found them helpful. They also include possible solutions to each of them. As a student of computer science, I appreciated their preface to each solution “Here’s one way to do it:”.
All things considered, I enjoyed my experience with this book. If your goal is to become a hard core Perl wizard, you might want to go with the camel book. If your intentions for Perl are more casual, then you probably want this book.
Book Review: MySQL Stored Procedure Programming
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been using MySQL for almost 7 years now without realizing it had stored procedure capabilities. So when I saw MySQL Stored Procedure Programming, by Guy Harrison with Steven Feurerstein, I decided to take the opportunity to advance my skills with MySQL. It’s a pretty good sized book, and it took me a while to get through it because it’s just one of those books you have to keep putting down.
That’s a good thing in my opinion, because it means the material is so interesting that I can’t read for more than a chapter without getting on the computer and trying it out. The first chapter was a tutorial, I thought I knew everything after I had gone through it and it took quite a bit of discipline (as well as a few error messages) for me to get back to the book and go through the topics.
There are three things I especially like about the book.
First was the additional coverage on triggers and transactions. After reading this I feel like I haven’t really used MySQL at all– having never used stored procedures, OR transactions, OR triggers. They were all topics that have been immediately applicable to my projects, because they were needed somewhere I just didn’t realize I could do them.
Second was the discussion of the material in the context of sound software engineering principles. I always enjoy a refresher in those, and when I’m learning a new technology that’s usually when I need it most because I’m ready to hack everything together in my excitement. For example, there’s an entire chapter on “Creating and Maintaining Stored Programs” as well as som optimization material and a discussion of best practices.
Third was their treatment on using stored procedures with specific programming languages. These may some day go out of date, but they had chapters devoted to showing how to use stored procedures from PHP, Java, Perl, Python, and .NET. All of which are relevant 4 years after publishing.
This book was an excellent choice for someone who has database experience, and some stored procedure experience (Oracle). Even if you’re only familiar with the basics of MySQL, you will benefit from this book. And it isn’t at all over the head of anybody with some database programming experience. My only regret is that I didn’t find this book 4 years ago when it came out.
Book Review: Apache Cookbook
Posted by: | CommentsI was expecting to learn a little about Native American cuisine when I ordered Apache Cookbook, 2nd ed., by Ken Coar and Rich Bowen. I was disappointed in that respect, but I still found ample material to digest…
On a more serious note, I enjoyed reading this book and I learn a lot of new information about the Apache web server. I usually enjoy reading code cookbooks because their layout and organization facilitates skipping what you already know and getting onto things you don’t. I would consider myself an intermediate level Apache administrator, and I was able to get through the entire book in a single evening. I made notes on some of the recipes I found most interesting, and that I’m actually going to try implementing. I’ll list some of them here so you can get an idea what kinds of things you might learn if you read this book:
- Recipe 3.19 – Logging activity to a MySQL database
- Recipe 5.16 – Redirecting all- or part- of your server to SSL
- Recipe 5.17 – Turning Directories in to Hostnames
- Recipe 5.22 – Turning URL segments into Query Arguments
- Recipe 6.21 – Protecting files with a wrapper
- Recipe 6.33 – Using permanent redirects to obscure forbidden URLs
- Recipe 10.9 – Load balancing with mod_proxy_balancer
- Recipe 11.2 – Benchmarking Apache with ab
These were the topics that interested me most, but there are quite a few others that I’d like to play around with when I’ve got more time. Intermediate users can definitely skip the first 2 chapters which covers installing Apache on a number of platforms, and enabling certain mods. I highly recommend chapter 5: Aliases, Redirecting and Rewriting, that was one area I am particularly weak in and was able to get a lot of information out of it. Also helpful was Appendix A, which gives a concise refresher on regular expressions for those of you like me, who re-learn regular expressions every time you need one.
Overall I highly recommend this book. It’s not as comprehensive or as in depth as others I’ve browsed, but it is definitely dense with useful information about stuff you either didn’t know you could do with Apache, or weren’t quite sure how to do it.
Book Review: Learning Flex 3
Posted by: | CommentsI enjoyed reading Learning Flex 3, by Alaric Cole… which is saying something, because there aren’t very many “Flex for beginner”-type books I can stand to read these days. Aside from being very easy to read as far as technical books go, here are a few things that really stood out:
First, the book is very well organized, and the content is good. The breadth and depth of material covered is perfect for a beginning level. He even goes over several different deployment scenarios toward the end. Off the top of my head I don’t consider deployment as a “Flex-related topic”, but as I read through it I thought about how many times I’ve answered questions on this very topic to people just starting on the journey. It was a nice touch.
Second, tutorial based approaches are very effective for beginners. Maybe I shouldn’t speak for everyone, but when I first start learning a new language or framework, I find tutorials to be very helpful. Once the developer has the confidence and basic understanding (that can be obtained through tutorials) then they can apply their own style and develop their skills further. Learning Flex 3 reads almost like the Flex tutorials on steroids. If you’ve done the tutorials on the Flex Builder 2 startup page (which is how I started out with Flex) then you’ll know what I mean. Just picture how those build on each other, and then stuff in about 5 times as much information, and you’ve got this book.
Third, the syntax highlighting. Anyone who has ever read a book full of code will appreciate how much easier the syntax highlighting is on your eyes, allowing you to focus on other things. As a side note, the Deitel & Deitel books started becoming intolerable for me when they started rushing books to press without syntax highlighting… it was hard enough to get through those books with the code highlighting and color breakouts, but without them it was just torture.
Fourth, there are color diagrams. Simon and Garfunkel are right. Though I definitely wouldn’t base my decision to purchase this book on the basis of color pictures, it adds a very nice touch and makes the book easier to read than an identical book with only black and white diagrams. I didn’t do the tutorials as I read the book, I wouldn’t recommend that to a pure beginner. Even in color, reading the code and looking at the pictures is not the same as typing it out and running it.
I highly recommend Learning Flex 3 for beginners who want to get their feet wet with Flex. I don’t recommend it to more advanced Flex developers, unless they just want to look at the color pictures.
