Introduction
A tip: if you’re going to read this book, don’t flip through to the back and read the ‘Authors note.’ It doesn’t actually give away the story, but there are clues that you won’t want to know. I should know, that’s what I did.
Fortunately, although you can predict the tone of the end of the book, there are more than a few surprises in store.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Introduction
I work in the IT services industry. What this means is that I work for various clients using my technical skills to solve their problems.
One thing that no-one mentions while you’re at university, planning to go into this industry, is that most of the problems you come across are not technical in nature. Problems with computers are usually fairly tractable and can be solved, even if not elegantly, by anyone who is interested enough to have a go. It’s the other, people problems that are tricky.
Introduction
This is a book that I bought and read some time ago. I posted a brief review on the discussion forms that used to grace this site with every intention of writing something more complete, but I never got around to doing it. Perhaps that’s because there’s not a lot else to say!
The good: there’s a lot of information in here, everything from the creation of FORTRAN and COBOL to Java and the Internet. It’s all discussed in a friendly, easy manner and rarely gets technical enough to scare off people without a computer science degree. The bad: despite the amount of research the author clearly put in, there’s not a lot new in here. It’s nice having it all in one place but it does, kind of, make the whole book unnecessary. The ugly: they really could have done with some more proof-reading. There are many typos and clumsy sentences that could easily have been improved with some light editing.
It took me over a year to decide to buy a SliMP3 player. I am not normally that indecisive but I just couldn’t figure out why it cost so much. I mean, what does it do? It streams MP3 music across an Ethernet network and connects to the phono sockets on your hi-fi system. How hard can that be? There must be something cheaper or better than the Slim Devices machine! It took me all that time to research the subject and come to the conclusion that there wasn’t. I still think it’s a lot of money for what it does, but I also still think that it’s pretty much unique.
Introduction
It sounded like just the kind of book that I was looking for. I wanted a refresher on C since I’d not used it for a while, and some pointers on ‘advanced techniques.’ The blurb on the back looked about right and the fact that O’Reilly published it clinched the sale.
“Practical C Programming” not only plans to teach you C, but also about style, debugging and the software life-cycle.
Introduction
The first point to note is that this book is published by O’Reilly. The second point would be that Steven Feuerstein is generally regarded to be one of the worlds leading PL/SQL experts.
Those two point, on their own, were enough to clinch the purchase just over eighteen months ago.
Content
The book is, to say the least, comprehensive. When I first started to use PL/SQL I would never have guessed that there was enough there to write a thousand page book, but there is.
Introduction
For many people here, writing software is, if not a job, then a hobby. Our enthusiasm is a double-edged sword. Our technical knowledge is usually much greater than people who just develop software for a living. This sounds like a big advantage, but it’s not as large as you would have thought.
Let’s have a look in ‘Software Project Survival Guide’ (SPSG) to see what Steve McConnell, famed author of ‘Code Complete’ and ‘Rapid Development,’ has to say on the subject.
Introduction
This is neither a new book nor a new purchase for me, so why am I reviewing it? Bottom line: it’s a book that I’ve enjoyed a lot over the years and one that I feel the need to recommend to as many people as possible.
What’s in it?
The obvious format for a book on the personal computer industry would be chronological, but as he points out early on in the book, things just aren’t that simple. Instead he uses what, on paper, might look to be a random arrangment of anecdotes, jumping from Apple to Xerox Parc to Microsoft and IBM in the matter of a few pages. But that’s just the nature of the beast.
Introduction
This is a very strange book by almost any criteria. Firstly, much of the content is available on the web in one form or another. This includes an appendix which is literally a Usenet discussion printed. Secondly, most of the writers are techies first and writers second. You don’t get that kind of admission from most writers, even when it’s obviously true.
Content
There are fifteen essays by eighteen writers. I’m not going to go through all of them, but I shall note some of the highlights.
Introduction
Steven Feuerstein’s ‘Oracle PL/SQL Programming‘ book has, over the last couple of years, become my bible on the subject of writing sizable Oracle PL/SQL programs. As I said in my review, it’s useful because it covers just about everything, including the things that don’t work.
So if that book covers just about everything, why would anyone want to buy ‘Oracle Builtin Packages’?
Content
In fact, as the first chapter of the book explains, this entire book was origianlly chapter 15 of ‘PL/SQL Programming’ but Oracle complicated things by adding more to the PL/SQL programming language (all the pseudo-object oriented stuff in version 8 ) and many more new or enhanced packages. The result: either a single two thousand page monster, or two more reasonably sized tomes.