Sun, 27 Jun 2010
The ThoughtWorks Anthology - Short Review
The ThoughtWorks
Anthology is a collection of short articles and essays written by a
number of their employees (some of who are now ex-employees) about
software development with a heavily agile slant. The topics range from
the very high level "Lush Landscape of Languages" and "What is an
Iteration manager anyway" to the more technical and technique focused
"Refactoring Ant Build Files" and "Object Calisthenics".
While the general quality of the writing is very good, especially my favourite - 'Object Calisthenics', the biggest problem with a book like this is that a lot of the essays authors, and some of their also knowledgeable co-workers, have personal blogs where this quality of information is available on a (near) daily basis, in both greater depth and more a conversational nature.
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Posted: 2010/06/27 08:37 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Tue, 25 May 2010
Hardening Apache - Short Review
I've had Hardening Apache sitting on my shelves for over five years (Sep 2004
or so Amazon tells me). While I can remember dipping in to it for the
Apache chroot chapter it never seemed to progress to the top of the
pile, and now I'm cleaning out a lot of my old books I decided
to finally give it a chance.
The book is very well written, covers a good range of subjects from building apache from source to adding extra security modules and checking its running state. Those are all good points and if I'd read the book when it came out I'd give it a very decent score, unfortunately I waited to read it.
This is a book that hasn't aged well. The version numbers of apache mentioned, the last update times of the modules (and how many of them have fallen in to the pit of being unmaintained) and the general style of the shell scripts all just come across as very dated and prevent me from recommending this book
Well written but ravaged by time - where's the second edition?
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Posted: 2010/05/25 21:00 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Mon, 24 May 2010
Refactoring Databases - Short Review
Considering the deadlines most of us have to work to it's not surprising
how much the idea of refactoring, which by continuously improving the
design of code, we make it easier and easier to work with. appeals
to us. But why should developers have all the 'fun'? Databases need some
love and care too!
It's easier to review this book if we look at it as two smaller books. In the first book, chapters 1 to 5, the authors take you through the details of Refactoring Databases.
I think this is the most useful section of the book for most people, and the only part they'll read start to finish. It covers how the agile development and defensive data worlds can be combined (and has some slightly harsh DBA stereotypes), possible processes to follow and miscellaneous details such as transition periods, how to have two versions of a schema in production (triggers, lots of triggers!) and covers all the basics you'll need to be able to make informed decisions about how refactoring databases can fit in to your work flow.
The rest of the book is filled with the explicit, and quite dry refactorings (and a chapter of transformations). They go in to a surprising level of depth but are mostly common sense and easily understandable from the refactorings name.
The best advice I can give it to have a look at the inside front and back covers. If the refactoring names look interesting but you have no idea how they'd work then the books a good read and you'll come away with some insights in to hands on database refactoring. If you can think of two situations when to use, and just as importantly, not use, each refactoring then the book's too basic for you.
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Posted: 2010/05/24 20:20 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Tue, 30 Mar 2010
HTML & CSS - The Good Parts - Short Review
I'm guessing that if you're reading this then you've seen my very basic
website at some point. I learned some HTML and CSS back when Netscape 4
and HTML 3.2 roamed the earth and while some of my very front end gifted
co-workers have bought bits of my knowledge up to date I still don't
understand how to properly lay out a CSS only multicolumn page without
cheating.
I'm not sure if it's because i had vague expectations on what this book would cover or just if I'm not the target market for HTML & CSS The Good Parts but I've read the thing from cover to cover and nothing really stands out to me. All the right words are spoken, content vs style separation is good etc. but none of it feels new to me, the material is not explained in any new way that really gets the message across where other methods have failed and I very nearly gave up on the book half a dozen times. It's not a bad or horribly written book but it's also not one I could pick three best bits out of.
Make sure you have a skim through before you buy. Score 3/10
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Posted: 2010/03/30 21:55 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sun, 21 Mar 2010
I'd never even heard of this book until Bob used its name in the same sentence as the excellent "Cisco Routers for the Desperate". However while that book is about hands on practical Cisco advice Network Ninja is all about the theory - from IP addressing to routing protocols.
While no one's ever going to confuse 200 easy to read pages with the Stevens books this slender volume is an excellent refresher for the experienced admin who doesn't do too much to the network on a day-to-day basis or for the less experienced admin who wants to know some of the why instead of just the command lines.
An enjoyable and opinionated book that covers a lot of ground in a low page count. Only let down by some bad editing - 7/10
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Posted: 2010/03/21 18:58 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
The Book of Xen - Short Review
Although I've been a big fan of virtualization for many years I've
mostly been a VMWare man. UML
was good for the time but VMWare workstation and GSX always seemed to be
better solutions - and they had the benefits of dealing with Windows. At
$WORK we looked at using Xen for our new development environment but it
never felt very finished, little things like needing to compile your own
dhcp client in order to get PXE booting working always felt very wrong.
But now we're looking to move away from VMWare server for certain parts of our infrastructure everything's back on the table so I went looking for a guide through the lands of Xen in the modern world - and I think I found an excellent one in The Book of Xen.
The book takes you through all the aspects of using Xen that you'd expect, from installing it, configuring the guests (DomU in Xen terminology) to making the most out of the networking options and local storage possibilities. Where it goes that extra mile is in sections like 'Beyond Linux', which guides you through using NetBSD and Solaris with Xen, Profiling and benchmarking under Xen and Lessons from the trenches, in which the authors (who run a Xen hosting service) tell you about their real-world aches and pains.
Apart from the chapter on the commercial Citrix XenServer, which I can understand the inclusion of but isn't useful to me, there was something interesting in every chapter. After working through the book I have a good understanding of what needs attention in a Xen hosting setup and what might be weaknesses. All I need now is a similar book for KVM so I can avoid doing all my own research!.
An excellent guide to Xen that brings a lot of useful material into one place - 7/10
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Posted: 2010/03/21 18:01 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sat, 17 Oct 2009
JRuby Cookbook - Short Review
First a disclaimer, I'm not a heavy Ruby or Java guy. Most of my coding
for the last couple of years has been perl and shell - because I write
little things that I need right now and those two languages excel at
that (CPAN is still THE decision clincher).
I recently became involved in a side project that is written in Ruby and Java though and in an excellent timing coincidence a friend returned my previously unread copy of the JRuby Cookbook. The book isn't an introduction to either Java or Ruby (there are already excellent online and dead tree resources for that) but it shows where the two can meet and how to get started at those points. It's not really a book to read back to front but it is a good approach for a cookbook.
If you're curious as to how dynamic languages on static language VMs can complement each other this is a good book to flick through. Score - 6/10 - it's not the book for me right now but it does show a lot of entry points I'll probably come back to later.
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Posted: 2009/10/17 19:08 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Mon, 14 Sep 2009
JavaScript: The Good Parts - short review
Considering that JavaScript: The Good
Parts is only 124 pages it took me a lot of attempts to work my way
through it. A combination of the authors attitude and the dry
presentation put me off within the first three chapters every time i
tried to read the book.
However a side project I was helping out on needed some JavaScript reviewed and considering how little of the language I knew I forced myself to work through the book and I'm glad I did - despite its short comings it's an excellent introduction to the language for programmers with a couple of other languages under their belt. The main parts of the language, such as syntax railroad diagrams, objects, inheritance and regular expressions are covered in a very basic, but to the point style with some excellent little code snippets. The examples in this book help you think of the language itself as mutable and just another tool to bend to your needs.
Once I accepted the authors style I liked the book. It would have been better with a little less repetition and maybe even as a pocket reference but it's an excellent book on JavaScript none the less. Score - 7/10
Note - when trying the samples, and experimenting with the language in general, I used the Mozilla Rhino JavaScript interpreter. It was nice to have a non-web playground for getting to grips with the language without needing to work around the idiosyncrasies that come with web browsers.
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Posted: 2009/09/14 22:25 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sun, 13 Sep 2009
Land The Tech Job You Love - Short Review
When it comes to progressing your technical career there are (IMHO) three
main pillars, continuing your technical advancement, networking (with other
people, not just wires) and building up your online presence. Land The Tech Job You Love covers all these critical
points and expands the other parts of the job seeking process -
researching the company, preparing for the interview and how to answer
the more ambiguous questions that often come up.
The book is well written and has lots of action points that can help you along the way. I don't think I'd follow all the advice as given, some of it seems very American, but the book does raise a lot of points you should at least be aware of during your job hunt.
Score - 6/10
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Posted: 2009/09/13 18:29 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Mon, 31 Aug 2009
Cloud Application Architectures - Short Review
With all the hype and misdirection around the cloud it's always good to
find a little bit of concrete information. If you're interested in the
general principles of how the cloud (and Amazon Webservices in
particular) could replace some of your existing infrastructure then Cloud Application
Architectures isn't a bad place to start.
The book is a slim tome, it's easy to read in a couple of sittings and covers all the basics. The author felt more than a little biased towards the cloud (IMHO) but what do you expect from someone leading the push? The book is well written, clear in making its points and the worst omission / error are a couple of missing figures, but the text works fine without them.
I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the Berkley Cloud paper (PDF), a great paper for defining terms regarding the cloud, and any of the keynotes by Simon Wardley (especially the one from FrOScon 2009) as other good starting points - both of which are free.
If you're interested in how the cloud could play a part in your environment and want something a little more concrete (and AWS focused) then this book is for you. 7/10.
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Posted: 2009/08/31 20:26 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sun, 30 Aug 2009
Project California: a Data Center Virtualization Server - Short Review
When it comes to sysadmin buzzwords Project California: a Data
Center Virtualization Server ticks a lot of the boxes, which is a
little misleading as half the book is about solid hardware level details
that are actually rarely covered.
While this makes the first half more than a little dry it does introduce concepts that many of us take for granted, such as why DDR3 is faster than DDR2. The second half takes you through the Cisco UCS stack and where the benefits are. It's a good starting point but I'd hoped for some more meat, maybe even a case-study or two. The book answered some of my questions but it's not amazingly comprehensive so expect to do a lot more digging after you've finished reading it.
The book is self-published (Via Lulu) so it's probably worth mentioning the quality - it's the same as any other book I've bought recently. No better and no worse, which is actually pretty impressive.
6/10 - dry, fills a niche but covers a lot of general material not specific to UCS.
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Posted: 2009/08/30 11:05 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sat, 21 Feb 2009
GDB Pocket Reference - (Very) Short Review
If you already know GDB then this book might
be useful. It's full of command summaries and option listings but
lacks an actual introduction or any walk through examples.
A google for GDB tutorials bought back some well written intros with actual sample code I could work through which is probably a more useful approach for most people.
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Posted: 2009/02/21 12:05 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sat, 03 Jan 2009
The Art of Capacity Planning - Short Review
The only books on capacity planning I've ever skimmed my way through have
been dense, dull tomes of long mathematical formulas, advice that's hard to
use in any practical way and page counts in the treble digits. Thankfully
John Allspaw has bucked this trend with The Art of Capacity Planning
and instead written a slender, thought provoking, book.
The main focus of the book is that measurement is good, blind guessing is bad and that capacity planning, like security, is an ongoing process. While a lot of the material is common sense - which is never that common in IT - it's a perfect introduction to capacity planning (and the principles of data collection and graphing) for novice to intermediate system administrators and a handy refresher for the experts in the crowd. I found it oddly reassuring that someone else has a lot of the same thoughts as I do when it comes to these topics.
The Art of Capacity Planning is an easy, engaging read that gets you thinking along the right lines without becoming dull or long winded. Well worth the couple of hours it'll take to read - 8/10
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Posted: 2009/01/03 17:47 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Mon, 29 Dec 2008
End of 2008 Very short Book reviews -
Behind every good manager lurks dozens of bad ones. While
Behind Closed Doors
is full of mostly common sense tips it's uncommon to deal with management
that actually apply more than a couple of them. It's an easy, quick read
and an ideal gift for that special manager in your life that you really
wished wasn't. 7/10
The Python Phasebook is a concise, well written set of examples. Each 'phrase' is a short task with some sample code that shows one of the possible solutions. Think of it as an O'Reilly cookbook, but not from O'Reilly. This is a good book but it needs a second edition to cover all the changes to the languages over the last couple of years. It could also do with a chapter on unit testing. 4/10 (because of age) but looking forward to the second edition.
I also read the Ruby Phrasebook but I'm not giving this book a score until I've worked my way through the Ruby Cookbook. Lastly was Practical Ruby for System Administration. I didn't like this book but I've not worked out the exact reasons why so I'll have to wait to post a full review.
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Posted: 2008/12/29 14:02 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Thu, 14 Aug 2008
Apache JMeter - Short Review
A short review for a short book.
Apache
JMeter (Packt Publishing) is a good book if you're new to both IT and
testing and want your hand securely held. It introduces you to the basic
ideas behind automated testing, takes you step by step through some
simple GUI test cases and then doesn't go any further.
It's a short book and maintains its beginners focus well but it has a very short lifespan (luckily it's also available as a cheap PDF) and if you're comfortable with GUIs and basic testing, or willing to click around for a while I'd recommend you dive straight in to the JMeter GUI rather than investing half a day to read this book.
On the downside it didn't cover any of the aspects of JMeter I found interesting and wanted to learn about - the access log sampler and distributed load testing spring to mind - which in a beginners book is fine enough but does make it completely the wrong book for me.
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Posted: 2008/08/14 07:23 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sat, 31 Mar 2007
When Sysadmins Ruled the World - Like that'll Happen!
There is something immensely isolating about working alone in a very
secure, huge data centre, at 4am on a Sunday morning in an isolated
"business park" in rural Scotland that only a few people will ever
understand.
The mind wanders, your ears strain to hear things over the quite loud air conditioning and just five minutes in daylight with a can of diet coke and someone to talk to would make the last 48 hours seem tolerable. It's hard to describe and even harder to capture but When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth makes a decent go of it.
Here is to everyone who has played "hunt the vending machine" while swapping hard drives.
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Posted: 2007/03/31 22:57 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Wed, 28 Mar 2007
Marooned In Realtime - Short Review
Marooned In
Realtime was the first Vinge book I read and it has prompted me to
start looking for all his others.
A small number of time travellers (that can only go forward) awaken to find out humanity is gone. Amid a plan to gather all the other travellers together and kick start the human race one of the more powerful techs dies in odd circumstances, a 9000 year old traveller returns, aliens might be waiting to finish us off and an ex-detective is ordered to lead a manhunt to find out just what happened to the projects architect and biggest supporter (who may have been murdered by old age). Oh and people of different backgrounds don't get on. So some of it is familiar :)
It's also worth noting that this is actually a sequel to The Peace War (which I've yet to read) but it stands alone as a riveting read. The combination of sci-fi and detective story is a favourite of mine and this one is a top notch example of how to do it right.
Summary: humanity is almost finished, a few of the survivors have all too powerful technology, a possible murder might have been committed and one of the lo-techs is roped in to find it. If I had a checklist this book would tick most of them. 7/10.
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Posted: 2007/03/28 22:32 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
True Names - Short Review
This is more like it, True
Names by Vernor Vinge is a great mix of sci-fi and fantasy.
Technical wizards join forces in cyberspace to oppose the "Great Adversary". When one of them is compromised and turned in the real world a hunt for the most dangerous of the online personas is launched, leading to a great chase and some nicely described online battled. I'm not doing it justice, just click the above link dammit.
Summary: an enjoyable, expertly paced story that was one of the first to introduce some of the most common themes in modern sci-fi. It has aged surprisingly well and is more than worth a read. 7/10.
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Posted: 2007/03/28 22:08 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Blood Music - Short Review
I've been on a sci-fi novel kick again recently and despite its short page
count Blood Music by
Greg Bear was the one I found slowest to finish from my first batch.
A rogue biotechnologist starts his own experiments in to biological computers based on his own lymphocytes while on the company clock. He gets caught, ignores all precautions and injects himself with them. They then become intelligent and start spreading. If you're interested in the genre it's nothing you haven't seen before. Just (probably) slower moving and with less interesting characters. Blood music just never grabbed me.
Summary: an OK story of an Earth changing grey goo incident. Not very exciting, dull characters and the pacing felt very slow. 3/10
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Posted: 2007/03/28 21:53 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Mon, 01 Jan 2007
Short Reviews: Cisco Routers for the Desperate and Using Moodle
Cisco Routers for the Desperate (No Starch Press): If you've tech savvy but Cisco
challenged then this books for you. It's not a one stop shop but it covers
almost everything you need to get started. We've just bought an office copy
so I can have mine back. 8/10
-- Cisco Routers for the
Desperate book review
Using Moodle (O'Reilly): Don't bother, read the online docs or the application help pages instead, they contain pretty much the same amount of information.
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Posted: 2007/01/01 11:08 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Copyright © 2000-2010 Dean Wilson
