Book Review: Professional ASP.NET MVC

Reviewed by Adnan Masood

Review date 01/22/2010

Professional ASP.NET MVC

I am not quite sure about the Pro part in the Wrox's Professional ASP.NET MVC but it's definitely a good introductory to intermediate hands-on starting book if you are interested in learning ASP.NET MVC framework. Starting with a `real world' sample of Nerd-Dinner, the book is organized to facilitate the `learn by example' method of training. Common problems, pitfalls and tips are neatly highlighted in the concise text filled with examples and sample code; not one of those overwhelming printed code books when authors decide to print the entire listing of their source code. Here, code is brief and in snippet forms; a balanced annotated mix and shown only when needed with screenshots of outputs. The text covers the core topics of ASP.NET MVC architecture and design including but not limited to models, routing, controllers, views, actions, filters and extended items such as TDD with MVC, Security Ajax and web forms hybrid approaches.

With a star studded line up of Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack and Scott Guthrie, I found the book to be well written and non-encyclopedic (it's a good thing). From what I can see, it's not written to target a web forms developer trying to `upgrade' to MVC but more of an introduction to MVC as a design pattern and how to build web applications using MVC in ASP.NET; this was a very good approach. Authors even provided introduction to platforms implementing MVC (Ruby on Rails, Django, Spring, Struts, Zend, MonoRail etc) when discussing state of MVC on the web which is quite informative for those new to the concept. What I liked most about the book was that it addresses practical problems such as modifying the existing lookup routes (url's for views), aspect oriented features, error handling, discussion on view and domain models, url rewriting etc. All I can say is that along with Jeffrey Palmero's "ASP.Net MVC in Action" for a more in-depth look, Professional ASP.NET MVC is going to stay on my desk as a reference for some time.

Book Review: Pro SQL Server 2008 Service Broker

Reviewed by Sudheer K Maharana

Review date 01/12/2010

Pro SQL Server 2008 Replication

Message based programming and asynchronous programming were new concepts in SQL Server world. There was always needs to process database transactions asynchronously. Microsoft dealt with this short coming in SQL Server 2005 in the form of Service Broker. It is a powerful technology and has started becoming more popular in companies dealing with SQL Server and distributed infrastructure with asynchronous programming. There are very few reference books out there in the market on the subject besides Books Online and internet references. Pro SQL Server 2008 Service Broker from Apress is one of the outstanding books on the subject as far as I know of. As the subject is new to the DBA and developer world, the book is organized in such a way that it gradually takes anyone from the basics of Service Broker objects to Service Broker implementation in real world scenario. It covers in a detailed manner on more advanced topics such as transaction management, encryption, high availability and most importantly the administration of Service Broker.

As soon as I got this book and having some background on Service Broker, I glanced the book and went straight to Real-World Application Scenarios chapter which has few examples on how Service Broker can be implemented. I also enjoyed reading the Administration chapter which describes on System Monitor and Troubleshooting. I guess anyone having a little experience with Service Broker such as DBAs will be benefitted with this chapter.

The chapters are well organized and contain enough information to give a beginner a jump start on Service Broker. The book has also example throughout the book that could be used to understand the concept. As I prefer reading books over reading internet, this book is a God sent. I will definitely suggest anyone in SQL Server world to refer to this book just to see how clear and concise the chapters are laid out with.

Book Review: Knight's 24-Hour Trainer: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services

Reviewed by Sudheer K Maharana

Review date 01/12/2010

Pro SQL Server 2008 Replication

It is one of the finest books I have ever referred in SSIS. In our company, we are going in a big way using SSIS starting from OLTP to DW. I was tasked to train application developers on SSIS. But this book made my job way simpler. In fact I don't have to spend much time as this book does everything. It is a very good book. Any company wants to empower the developers with developing SSIS in no time, this is the book. Even though I have been doing SSIS for a long time, I read this book from back to back in one shot. It is well known fact that Brian Knight is a well known name in the SQL Server SSIS world. And this book is a great contribution from him to the SQL Server community on the subject. This book definitely gives a jump start on SSIS to a beginner to medium developers. The accompanying DVD is really amazing.

I especially enjoyed reading couple of lessons, describing the Sort transform, aggregate Transform, Cleansing Data, and Making a task dynamic using expressions.

I am definitely going to refer this book to anyone asking me to learn SSIS and be confident about it. I give this book a 5 star.

Book Review: Pro SQL Server 2008 Replication

Reviewed by Sudheer K Maharana

Review date 01/12/2010

Pro SQL Server 2008 Replication

Are you new to SQL Server replication in SQL Server 2008? Or are you experienced enough in SQL Server replication? If so..this is the book for you. The book is organized very well. It first gives you the basics of each type of replication, goes on to describe on how to configure replication in 2 different ways: GUI and T-SQL. I always preferred to use T-SQL for various reasons. It is easily deployable in different database environments and the scripts can be backed up as normal SQL scripts.

I liked all the "internal" and "optimization" chapters on each type of replication. The author has described these chapters well. The book also gives a step by step approach to configure the replication which helps. However, I expected some more details on replication monitoring, replication security/permissions and providing some real world scenarios on replication troubleshooting. I guess there are so many books out there on SQL Server replication but these advanced topics would have made the quality of this book even better.

I will give this book a 4 star and would highly recommend DBAs to refer this book when they are in need of configuring replication.

Book Review: SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled

Reviewed by Rajkumar Ramasamy

Review date 12/21/2009

SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled

A very good reference book on SQL server performance tuning on diverse directions.

On the initial chapters, you can find a good introduction on Performance tuning, Performance analysis and on the Database Engine Tuning Advisor. There are various analysis and optimization techniques explained in later chapters. There is comprehensive information about most common performance issues that occurs due to Query designs and deadlocks.

We can find more information on tuning indexes like when and where to apply what type of index. Later, the workload optimization techniques explains ways to identify and research expensive queries and jobs and "What not" to do to avoid performance issues. This book helps not only to write individual queries without any performance flaws, it also helps to find where the flaws are in existing queries. I would like to mention that there are good of examples of queries (which everyone look for) which make the reader to understand where performance issues or bottlenecks occur and what to do with it.

One good sense I had when I started reading the book is it isn't that hard to read through the book even you are new to performance tuning in SQL server. I would strongly recommend this book for all database performance professionals (Even the beginners in Performance Tuning).

Book Review: Expert .NET 2.0 IL Assembler

Reviewed by Jeff Bergman

Review date 12/08/2009

Expert .NET 2.0 IL Assembler

As an engineer, I like to understand how things work, part of this was a curiosity about the semantics of IL. This book satisfied me by clarifying the details and instructions of IL. In addition, there is detailed coverage of the assembly file format and metadata. The book is well written and after the first few chapters, I had a clear picture of the basics of IL. The rest of the information is mostly specific details that is likely to be valuable only to people who will actually build tools that need to process or generate IL.

Overall, I am not sure how valuable the information is to the average programmer. I can think of few cases where I will need the information in here. But, for a hacker with a curiosity to know what's happening one level closer to the machine this book makes for an interesting read.

The book is the only one that I have found on this topic and it is clearly written, and it may inspire you to take on a new project in IL.

Book Review: Agile Retrospectives

Reviewed by Kevin Au

Review date 12/03/2009

Agile Retrospectives

This book isn't just for Agile development...there's a lot of good practical things anybody can use. Plus it's easy to read, has lots of examples and includes many "hints". A lot of the activities I've heard at one time or another such as Five Why's, SMART goals, +/Delta, but this book does a good job of putting them together in one place.

Book Review: Professional SQL Server 2008 Programming

Reviewed by Sudheer Maharana

Review date 11/23/2009

Professional SQL Server 2008 Programming

Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Programming from Wrox is a well formatted programming reference book for medium to advanced SQL Developers. The chapters are laid out well with useful examples. Especially, I liked the chapters on XML Integration, Advanced Queries, Index structure and Transaction & Locks. I will suggest this book to anyone who is from other RDBMS background to get up and running with programming in SQL Server. However, I was looking for information in Service Broker in detail as this is one of the programming areas which scales SQL Server to different level. Chapters such as Replication, Performance Tuning, Data Warehousing and Reporting were not explained in great detail. However the book solves it’s purpose to provide a general guideline on SQL Server 2008 programming.

I will recommend this book for other SQL Server professionals who want to understand the new programming features in SQL Server 2008 and also keep this book as reference in their SQL Server library

Book Review: Professional SQL Server 2008 Reporting Service

Reviewed by Sudheer Maharana

Review date 11/20/2009

Professional SQL Server 2008 Reporting Service

I had the 2005 version of this book and found this version of the book to be very helpful. The book covers both administration and programming aspects of SSRS. Honestly speaking, it is very good for reference. I found some chapters have gone too detail in explaining and some chapters are laid out with basic information. I am currently working on a proof of concept project to integrate reporting services with .Net application to render all the reporting type of information via.Net Applications. Chapter 15 gave me a jump start in this along with publishing reports on sharepoint. I am sure SSRS has come a long way to stay in the reporting arena and this book provides very good information for developers in SSRS or who are transitioning to SSRS from other reporting tools.

This book has explained well on installation and configuration of SSRS which provides the report designers and developers, information on the internal architecture of SSRS.

Book Review: SQL Server Query Performance Tuning Distilled

Reviewed by Sudheer Maharana

Review date 11/18/2009

SQL Server Query Performance Tuning Distilled

A great reference book on SQL Tuning.

One of the finest book on SQL Server Perf Tuning. To be honest I used to have the SQL Server performance tuning book by Ken England on SQL 2000 and looking for it’s sequel on 2005. I went to the book store and ordered the book but it was disappointing. Then this book was given to me by one of my friends. A great reference book as I was expecting. Lot of theories and matching examples make this book stand out from the rest. SQL Server is just not SQL Tuning. It includes Database System tuning. This book has given a dedicated chapter in making you understand the same. It gives you a perspective on how to approach to a performance tuning from identification of the performance bottleneck to troubleshooting the problem. I enjoyed reading chapters on indexing and Index, Statistics and Execution Cache Analysis. However, I wanted to see more detail on tuning XML and Service Broker.

I will suggest this book for other DBAs and SQL Programmers who want to know the theories behind Index and Statistics, Blocking and Deadlocking, Fragmentation.

Book Review: Pro SQL Server 2008 Analytics

Reviewed by Sudheer Maharana

Review date 11/15/2009

Pro SQL Server 2008 Analytics

A book to give Jump Start on SQL Server Analytics

I referred to this book while doing a prototype in building a Sales dashboard for a company. It gave me a jump start in using Microsoft technologies to come up with a dashboard in a short time. To be honest this is the first book I am referring to on this task. Especially I liked the case studies chapter at the end of the book to be very helpful. The chapters provide covers well on details around SQL Server analytics but I was looking for examples in each chapter to get me though. But this book solved it's purpose for me.

I will recommend this book to other like me who want to start working on dashboards and analytics using SQL Server tools.

Book Review: Professional ASP.NET MVC

Reviewed by Jesuraj Innacimuthu

Review date 11/12/2009

Professional ASP.NET MVC

Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 by Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, and Scott Guthrie is a very good selection to read if someone is new to ASP.NET MVC Framework.

All the concepts are explained with simple code samples in this book. This gives beginners a good start on the ASP.NET MVC Framework.

• NerdDinner.com walkthrough gives better understanding on MVC concepts.
• Gray boxed hints are really useful tips.
• The following concepts also explained enough in this book: AJAX, Validations, Application Security, Test-Driven Development with ASP.NET MVC, Testable Design Patterns

Book Review: SQL and Relational Theory

Reviewed by Sudheer Maharana

Review date 11/10/2009

SQL and Relational Theory

I have been a SQL guy for a long time especially specializing in writing better sql code. This notion was with me until I read this book. However, after reading this book, I felt that so many things I was missing behind my working on SQL. The book well covers the theory behind relational database management. I have read few books of the same author who can be arguably called as one of the pioneers in Relational Theory in database management. Anytime, I ventured to read any of books authored by him, I get fascinated by his way of explaining the SQL in relation to mathematics, set theory etc.

Initially, while reading the book I struggled to concentrate and relate the information to my daily working on SQL. The book really related the theory behind of working of various concepts in SQL such as constraints, views, operators, joins etc. The author has particularly stressed upon the reason behind various theories in SQL in various database platforms.

I was impressed on the topic on using logic to formulate sql expressions. It opens up the idea in readers mind on how to approach to a sql deduction.

I suggest this book to all the database professionals who want to know the why’s of database theories. Trust me, it really helps and you will be amazed to know how much more you will know on SQL.

Book Review: C# 3.0 Cookbook

Reviewed by Karen Ngo

Review date 11/08/2009

C# 3.0 Cookbook

There are parts of this book for all levels of developers. Error handling and logging for new ones, and LINQ and Lamda expressions for others. This is a solid reference book, but I don't think it is absolutely necessary to have in one's library because you can get similar and relevant examples from MSDN. If you find that it takes more time than it should for you to search MSDN for reference information, then you probably should get this book. If you are a non-developer with a basic understanding of programming constructs, this book also may provide some value to you, as topics such as strings, characters,and collections are all covered.

Book Review: Expert .NET 2.0 IL Assembler

Reviewed by Naveen Razdhan

Review date 10/22/2009

Expert .NET 2.0 IL Assembler

Coding in assembly language requires a little different way of thinking, and being aware of lot more low level details, compared to writing the code in a high level language like C# or VB.NET. Since I have not written an assembly language program in a very long time, it was quite a challenge to follow this book. But I must say that, the author has done a good job of laying out the concepts in a way a novice assembly programmer like me can benefit a lot from it. I can’t claim that, after reading this book, I have become very good at IL, but I am quite confident that a second run through this book and more practice in IL coding will take me closer to being there.

First three chapters of this book dive straight into an IL program and compare it with a C# program. I thought it was great way to open the book by getting your feet wet quickly without overwhelming you. From fourth chapter onwards the book goes into details of windows PE file and arrangement of Metadata into modules and assemblies. I have not found this kind of detailed information about Metadata layout anywhere else. It is tons of information and still does not overwhelm you. This information is useful even for a high level language programmer and therefore I would recommend this book to all .NET developers.

As author says, .NET universe is like a great pyramid turned upside down and CLR is the tip on which this pyramid stands. ILAsm is the language that describes every feature of the CLR and therefore learning ILAsm language will help all .NET developers build a strong foundation, and that is where this book comes very handy

Book Review: .NET Domain-Driven Design with C#

Reviewed by Vu Tran

Review date 10/16/2009

Expert .NET 2.0 IL Assembler

This book was entirely describing the design and implementation of SmartCA application using domain-driven design pattern. The author put every detail of steps in building this application from class design classes, creating solution, configuration, writing unit test... I did not run sample code so I did not know if it actually worked. My focus was the design. The author also provides detail of MVC model for SmartCA application

About the topic, the design was very interesting to me. I used this approach in my past company ( about 10 years ago). However, the design in this book was much cleaner with the favor of .Net 3.5. I like the concept of "the domain model is ignorant of how its data is saved or retrieved from its underlying data store or stores” . The introduction of unitOfWork and Repository objects for each aggregate was good in the design. I think chapter 2 was most important chapter. This described the architecture design of the application, what layer needed, how they interacts with each other. This must be understood completely before moving down to the detail. Once the design pattern was clear, the later chapters provided detail implementations. The structure was similar except each chapter focus on a particular aggregate entity.

I think this book is definitely not for C# beginner. It can be a good reference for higher level.

Book Review: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Bible

Reviewed by Sudheer K. Maharana

Review date 10/06/2009

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Bible

I was introduced to this huge informative book by one of my friends at work place. This is a great reference book for almost everyone starting from beginners to advanced database programmers/admins. It is very difficult to cover all aspects of SQL Server in a single book. However, the author(s) have done a good job in covering almost all the features of SQL Servers. This book helps developers who want to know one and everything in SQL Server. However, certain chapers such as "Service Broker" could have been detailed out more considering that these are more advanced. I especially liked the Partitioning, LINQ, Change Data Capture. It has touched upon the Business intelligence and it could have been done better. However, as I said it is already a huge book and adding more materials would have been even more. Rather this solves the purpose to a great deal as a reference book for almost all domains DBAs and developers to jump start in SQL Server.

Book Review: Expert F#

Reviewed by Jeff Bergman

Review date 10/05/2009

Expert F#

As someone who currently works with C# and .net, I was excited to learn about F# and functional programming.

Looking for a book to get started with the language, I chose Expert F#. I found this book to be well written and concepts clearly explained.

One thing you find is that as a mixed-paradigm language, there are many different ways to attack a problem in F#. Expert F# helps guide you through these decisions by giving suggestions on where to use functional techniques and where to use imperative programming techniques.

It also does a great job of showing how to use the existing .net libraries from F#.

My only complaint is that the book doesn't quite emphasize functional programming strongly enough. So, if you aren't familiar with functional algorithms and such you may need to supplement this text with an additional book.

Book Review: Programming WCF Services

Reviewed by Vu Tran

Review date 09/28/2009

Programming WCF Services

I was trying to learn WCF for a few months. I was looking for a book that could provides me the detail of WCF framework from ground up, then I would move to WCF advance later - well might be from other book. I picked this book based on recommendation from my co-workers. I also owned "Pro WCF" from Apress publisher. This book has turned into great resource for me. It covered every detail of WCF from the basic concept of service contracts, hosting, addresses, and binding to higher level such as concurrency, or security. The author provided a lots of examples in depth explanations. It was great guide for WCF starter and good resource for advance programmer. It was much better than "Pro WCF"

Book Review: Learning C# 3.0

Reviewed by Bala Dharmarajan

Review date 09/21/2009

Learning C# 3.0

This is really a very good book to begin C# and takes up to the intermediate level.

The way in which the chapters of the book are organized is excellent.

It extensively covers:

• .NET Framework
• Object-oriented programming basics
• Debugging
• Exception handling
• Strings
• Interfaces
• Lists and iterations
• Generics and collections.

• Lacks more examples & explanations in ADO.NET
• Less exposure to WPF

Book Review: Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework

Reviewed by Sean Xiao

Review date 09/03/2009

Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework

I highly recommend this book. The book not only helps you understand what ASP.NET MVC is, but also explains how ASP.NET MVC framework works in detail.

The first part of the book gives reader a clear idea of what MVC is and why MVC is needed in current ASP.NET development. Chapter 1 to 3 helps reader established fundamental knowledge base of ASP.NET MVC. Particularly, the author emphasizes Domain Model is not the entity classes simply generated from LINQ to SQL. The author introduces Domain-Driven Design (DDD) in this chapter, which helps developer to fully understand what is `Model' in MVC. Following the well organized example from chapter 4 to 6, you should have enough knowledge to start your own practical ASP.NET MVC application at work.

The second part of the book will help developers to get in-depth knowledge of ASP.NET MVC framework. With the ASP.NET MVC source code provided by Microsoft, readers can take a more systematic look at each aspect of the MVC framework and fully understand how Routing, Controller and View work, and learn how to implement AJAX and classic web forms with MVC framework as well. No matter you are a new starter or advanced developer of MVC, you will find it is very helpful for your MVC web development.

Book Review: Professional SQL Server 2008 Integration

Reviewed by Sudheer K. Maharana

Review date 08/29/2009

Professional SQL Server 2008 Integration

I have been working with SQL Server Data Transformation Services (DTS) for the past 12 years and now in SSIS for the past 4 years. Normally, my experience during SSIS 2008 development is to get some reference in internet which was a limited one. This book is very informative to an extent that I can say this is by far the best book I have referred in SSIS. It gives a jump start to a DTS developer to the world of SSIS development in SQL Server 2008 using C# or VB.Net and covers widely in all the Control Flow and Data Flow tasks. The authors have provided due attention in providing example code in both the languages for the reader to try where ever necessary. In this book I especially liked the chapters Using Expression and variables, scripting in SSIS, Accessing Heterogeneous Data, Tuning SSIS, WMI integration. Coming to WMI, the book could have covered a little more in this particular chapter but it definitely helps extending the imagination of readers on the power of WMI using SSIS.

I will definitely recommend this book to my peers out there who plan to extend their ETL development skill using SSIS.

Book Review: Advanced Software Testing - Vol. 1

Reviewed by Ketan Patel

Review date 08/27/2009

Advanced Software Testing - Vol. 1 Guide to the ISTQB Advanced Certification as an Advanced Test Analyst

Rex Black's `Advanced Software Testing Vol. 1' book starts off with brief overview of testing in SDLC process and different type of test, and how to plan, implement, execute and do reporting on the test result. Risk based testing has been covered in detail displaying how to analyze the risk in project and plan the testing based on the identified risk. Lot of examples has been used throughout the book explaining each topic. Good half of the book is used to explain specification based testing or black-box testing and structure-based technique or white-box test design technique.

As a senior tester I felt that the book title didn't reflect the book and personally didn't feel like reading the book added to the testing knowledge that I already have.

Although I would definitely recommend this book to junior and mid-level tester since it does a good job explaining everything with lot of examples.

Book Review: Professional WCF Programming

Reviewed by Hyung Lee

Review date 08/04/2009

Professional WCF Programming: .NET Development with the Windows Communication Foundation

This book is hard to follow.

It could be useful as quick reference for API details but I would not recommend this book to new learners.

You can find definitions on lots of classes and methods but it does not provide realistic code examples or diagrams that help visualize conceptual frame works.

Book Review: Beginning C# 2008: From Novice to Professional

Reviewed by Balagopalan Dharmarajan

Review date 08/02/2009

Beginning C# 2008: From Novice to Professional

Beginning C# 2008 From Novice to Professional by Christian Gross is a good choice to learn C# for any programmer with no or less .NET background. The way the book is organized is excellent and the very good part is, it has lot of samples with description. This book gives a diligent exposure to Types, Exception handling, OOP basics, .NET generics and Multi threading.

My personal opinion on the harder part of this book is, the analogies used, which are confusing and sometimes I have to read it twice or thrice to understand the idea behind the analogy.

Overall, it’s a good book for any beginner in C#.

Book Review: Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework

Reviewed by Richard Trinh

Review date 07/27/2009

Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework

Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework by Steven Sanderson is THE go to book for ASP.NET MVC. Not knowing a lot about ASP .NET, with the help of this book, I was able to get most of the answers I needed for my project. Sanderson keeps the reader captivated with his sense of humor while delivering a lot of content to the reader.

After reading this book, and comparing it to the free chapters from NerdDinner. I felt that this book did a better job on introducing MVC, and seemed to flow better. Instead of going over each topic one by one, we start building a simple e-commerce site and slowly added other features.

I would highly recommend this book to other developers, and even though this is a "Pro" book, developers from every level can benefit from this. I look forward to reading Sanderson's other books.

Book Review: C# In Depth

Reviewed by Naveen Razdhan

Review date 06/16/2009

C# In Depth

This is one of the best computer books that I have ever read. Reading this book was like reading a fast paced action packed thriller, where each chapter opens you to new mysteries and then everything culminates together into an interesting climax in chapter 11, 12 and 13. This book is written for people who already have fairly good understanding of core language concepts and want to get deeper understanding of those concepts and also understand the evolution of those concepts from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0 with a historical perspective. This book is for people who want to, as author always likes say, "improve their relation with their language".

This book has razor sharp focus on the advanced concepts of C# only, starting from 1.0 to 3.0. It does not waste time and pages in explaining CLS and CTS and such. It dives straight into things like Delegates, boxing/unboxing, Parameterized typing, nullable types, iterators, static classes, anonymous/implicit typing, expression trees/lambda expression and extension methods. It then uses all these concepts to explain LINQ to Objects, LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML. In the process it also explains functional way of thinking and programming.

Book Review: C# Design and Development

Reviewed by Vu Tran

Review date 06/15/2009

C# Design and Development

The book cover a deep and clear overview useful strategies for design and implement software solutions. The author starts from high-level on the subject, showing the different design aspects that need to be considered including application lifecycle models. In many chapters, the author give example to emphasize the topic. This is a plus that is hard to find in other books.

In my opinion, this book is well written for mid level or below. Specially, Part III in this book which cover application speed, reliability, security is pretty good for those, also chapter 5,6, and 7. I rate this 3 stars for the efforts that the author put in this book. In general, the book definitely help at some level. If anyone wants to review the basic concepts in design and development then this cover pretty much complete. Otherwise, look somewhere else.

Book Review: Professional SQL Server 2005 Performance Tuning

Reviewed by Sudheer K. Maharana

Review date 06/08/2009

Professional SQL Server 2005 Performance Tuning

From my experience with SQL Server and Oracle for the last 15 years of my IT experience, Database Performance tuning is more of an art and science (even though the book says it is more of a science). As SQL Server transformed into different versions, the information to gather performance related data matrix improved. Hence, the quest for ways to get information on how to troubleshoot performance problems in SQL Server grew.

I have referred many books on SQL Server Performance Tuning, but most of the books I have referred provided generic information and go on describing mundane performance tuning methods such as SQL Profiler, Execution Plan and Performance Logs without any examples to refer or try with. I did not find many books that deal with performance tuning concepts from ground up. This book defines the performance tuning concepts from ground up and also describes the "how and what" data point to gather, measure and analyze to troubleshoot the performance problems.

Book starts with good introduction to the basic concepts of Performance Tuning in a methodical approach. It defines how to understand a problem statement, how to go about solving those problems and how to prevent it from occurring. The book goes about all facets of performance tuning such as Server and database tuning, SQL tuning, creating a workload for creating a performance benchmark, system tuning for memory, processor and storage.

I liked the chapters dealing with SQL Server Wait types, Tuning Indexes, Tuning Schema and Capturing, Measuring and Replying workloads.

Like any other book, it has some shortcomings too. For instance there are some typos and which can easily be caught if you understand the subject in the chapter.

So I will suggest if you are an experience DBA or a DBA who wants to get into Performance Tuning (a good line to be in!!), please add this book to your cart!!!!(no.. I was not paid to write this!!)

Book Review: Programming WCF Services

Reviewed by Arul Arokia Sagayaraj

Review date 05/29/2009

Programming WCF Services

Programming WCF Services by Juval Lowy is a good book for people who would like to migrate from conventional web service / windows service to the new paradigm. It is also good handbook for programmers who are well versed with the technology. The book covers everything from Design, Development to maintaining. The book is structured well. It starts with explanation on configuration and explains how to handle configuration programmatically. Even though I find it too detailed at some point, the good thing about the author/book is in a nutshell flow diagrams and tables have been effectively used.

Starting from the basics of Address, Contract, Bindings and End Points the book has everything in it for a SOA based implementations. Have details about various hosting methods, in depth details on Service and Data contracts. Instance Management is another good example of meaningful explanation. I liked the topic throttling under Instance management pretty much. The next chapter is my all time favorite. Then the author goes on to explain exception handling and transaction management for various kinds of calls, very important aspect of programming. A separate chapter for concurrency management is the need of the time, in this chapter handling threads and managing asynchronous calls in particular is real good one.

All the most important in a heterogeneous based SOA architecture are queuing and security. Talking about a send and forget (one-way calls), it becomes important to best understand where to use; Queued service is the chapter which is for it. Whether intranet / internet based, any service is open for malicious attacks and the author has explained various scenarios of attack and goes on to explain the various suggested security implementation, to make the book complete. Last but not the least the very good thing about this book is it explains beyond what to do? How to do? It details about where to do? And what not to do? In chapter 5 Configuring One-Way operations is one good example for it. This book has taught me the integrities of WCF and would remain my handbook whenever I write a WCF service.”

Book Review: Real World Haskell

Reviewed by Jeff Bergman

Review date 05/28/2009

Real World Haskell

Real World Haskell is very ambitious in its scope. It tries to gradually introduce the Haskell way of doing things such that even someone coming from an imperative programming background can follow.

As a consequence some concepts are not formally explained until later in the book, like Monads. Instead the book shows you how to use Haskell's I/O facilities, without an understanding of Monads, first.

For some this approach is probably very practical but I found myself at times wanting the material to be presented in a different order.

However, I am still giving this book 5 stars because of the sheer breadth and quality of the content and examples. And the later chapters really do tie all the concepts together with some non-trivial examples.

The first four chapters and chapter six lay the foundation for the rest of the book. I found that a good understanding of this material was crucial for later chapters, where they combine different features of the language in more complicated ways.

After that I was particularly fond of chapters 10, 13,14, 15, 16, 18, and 26, as these chapters explained some of the more advanced concepts I was interested in like Monads, Parsing, and Functional Data Structures.

Overall, I learned a ton of new things from reading this book even thought the material is quite challenging in places,and found myself wondering why more people don't use Haskell.

Book Review: C# 3.0 Design Patterns

Reviewed by Sean Xiao

Review date 05/17/2009

C# 3.0 Design Patterns

Starting with Structural Patterns, the author tries to give programmers a different way to review known design patterns of GoF with .NET C# 3.0. However, this makes new starter hard to understand the usage of design patterns and get the overview pictures of it. Other patterns, such as Creational or Behavioral Patterns are better beginning for new design pattern learner.

New features of C# 3.0 are used to implement in patterns, for example, Generic Constraints in Abstract Factory, LINQ in Iterator. Implemented design patterns with these new features can help C# developers learn C# 3.0 in a practical way. It will be better to explain these new features in detail besides codes.

Two pages UML review in this book is not enough to help new starters understand all diagrams and notes in each pattern.

In all, the book gives advanced programmers a rehashed GoF design patterns review with C# 3.0.

Book Review: Software Engineering: Principles and Practice

Reviewed by Richard Trinh

Review date 04/27/2009

Software Engineering: Principles and Practice

Software Engineering Principles and Practice by Hans van Vliet is a good textbook which delves into the WHAT of software development, and takes a user through the normal Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) from requirements gathering to deployment in a production environment. And like good software, each chapter is loosely coupled allowing the reader to get more information on the topic of interest.

This book however does not go into details on the HOW, and was left me a little unsatisfied on best practices, and how to improve my skills as a software engineer.

This book is great for students as well as professionals involved in Software Engineering. It gives students an overview of what to expect in a software shop, but is more of a reference book for professionals to give a little further insight into the different aspects of the SDLC.

Book Review: Programming WCF Services

Reviewed by Naveen Razdhan

Review date 04/19/2009

Programming WCF Services

I have read WCF concepts from other books and from MSDN before, but they all seemed more like documentation rather than well knit set of concepts. This book nicely dwells into the philosophy of Service Oriented Applications, from the standpoint of WCF.

I started reading the book by first reading the Appendix about "Introduction to Service Orientation". The Appendix really built foundation for everything that was to come by starting with assembly programming and leading up to component oriented programming using COM, and laying the foundation for the need for SOA. This was followed by explanation of how WCF is a great platform for building SOA.

Book starts with good introduction to the basic concepts like Service Execution Boundaries, Addresses, Contracts, Hosting, Bindings, Endpoints and WCF Architecture. The following chapters cover Contracts and Instance Management in a great detail.

The chapters I think really made fall in love with this book are chapter 7 and chapter 8, Transactions and Concurrency management. I was never really able to get well beyond basic understanding of WCF and grasp these complex concepts from other sources the way this book helped me grasp them. The book starts with some simple scenarios of Transactions and Concurrency and leads up to some very complicated scenarios and it’s not hard to follow, although sometimes you may have read concepts more than once.

Book Review: C# Cookbook

Reviewed by Rob Walling

Review date 02/07/2006

C# Cookbook

Jay Hilyard and Stephen Teilhet have put together an outstanding collection of C# sample code. Newly revised and updated for C# 2.0 (it covers generics), the book is aimed at intermediate and advanced developers who wants a slew of sample code at their fingertips (all is downloadable, of course).

With 20 chapters, each consisting of between 10 and 30 "recipes," C# Cookbook extends to the level of detail not seen in tutorial books or standard references. This book provides completed, debugged code snippets ready to use in your applications. From simple tasks like "Determining if a File Exists" to more advanced ones like "Using Event Logs in Your Application," I expect to use this book extensively.

Book Review: Accidental Empires

Reviewed by Rob Walling

Review date 12/8/2005

Accidental Empires is subtitled How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date. The book, written by Bob Cringley of PBS fame talks from an insider's perspective on the advent of semiconductors, the first days of Apple and Microsoft, the first killer app, and so much more.

As geeky as it sounds, this book is a real page turner. Cringely (pronounced Krinj-lee) educates, informs, and entertains as he revels in the history of the PC from the 1950s to 1992, when the book was published. At around 300 pages it's quick read, and was later adapted into a PBS mini-series called Triumph of the Nerds, which I will review in the near future.  But the book offers so much more in terms of commentary, insight, and the sheer volume of tales.

This book is for anyone who's ever wanted to know who really invented the mouse, the GUI, laser printers, and ethernet.

Hint: it wasn't Apple or Microsoft. Not even close.

Reviewed by: Adnan Masood
Review date: 11/16/2005

Reviewed by: Adnan Masood
Review date: 11/04/2004