Dave Foley Books

Looking at Dave Foley's picture in the back of his book, Ultimate Classroom Control Handbook, one might mistakenly think the man is the normal "veteran teacher" advertised on the book's cover. But after reading the book, no one could continue to believe that. Instead, it becomes clear that Foley is an artist, who brought his creative mind to the color wheel of his classroom every day for each of the 29 years he taught middle school. Or he's a scientist, using classroom laboratory to discover what makes kids tick, five days a week times 29. Or he may be a magician, pulling student success after student success out of the tall black hat he has carefully prepared. For those who, after reading Foley's book, still think he is a "normal veteran teacher," I have only these words: "the love line" (p. 53) and "specimen cup" (p. 195).

Foley's wonderful book of ideas is important for any public school teacher. Ultimate Classroom Control Handbook is more than a set of helpful tips on topics ranging from what to do when students lie to how to help them turn in assignments on time. It shows what a teacher who brings his imagination and deep respect for his students to work every day can do, if he is guided by the two. At its heart, this book is a story about approaching the teaching day with creativity and compassion and an anthem about what such an approach can accomplish.

If I only purchased one book on classroom management, this is the one I'd buy. I teach older students in late adolescence and early adulthood, but I found Dave Foley's book to be packed with great advice and practical tips for classroom control. The guy obviously knows his stuff! The humor, the wisdom and perspective, and most of all, the real understanding of HOW to teach with class control, made this book a winner for me. What a pleasure to read. With topics as varied as 'lost homework' to bullying to attention seeking clowns, no teacher will be disappointed with this book. I will recommend it to my colleagues and give it to recent grads.

There are lots of books out there on classroom management. As a school psychologist I have read the majority of them. This is now the one I recommend to teachers and I do so with complete confidence. Teachers find it readable, amusing, and very insightful. Several reported to me that it not only has good ideas, but it has "personality" in the writing which convinced them it was written by a real teacher rather than an academic. If you are a teacher wondering about how to make your class, and your professional life, more manageable this is the book to read.

I needed to assess whether this application would work for me, and this book did great with getting me this information.

I was very dissappointed with RT Essentials. I had been using and administering an older version of RT for some time, but when I upgraded to the current version I thought I would benefit from reading this book. There are a lot of new features in the later versions and this book just barely mentions them. I had the feeling that it just almost told me what I wanted to know, but not quite. I would very much like to see an expanded, more detailed more comprehensive edition. I think it would take a book twice the size of the current edition to do RT right. I want complete tutorials on writing scrips, using templates, using custom fields, using saved searches, etc.

Request Tracker (RT) is a great product. I am the only sysadmin at a small company, and having an automated tracking system is going to be an immense benefit for me. I bought "RT Essentials" to help me get up to speed on RT3 really quickly. And, since it was written by the programmer who's responsible for RT, the book had lots of detail and tips.

However, when it came down to implementing some of the code in the book, I found that it was already outdated. For example, I tried to set up the Autoreply template with Password by copying the code straight out of the book. It didn't work because the program codebase has changed too much since the book was released.

I was able to fix my template problem by hooking into the great RT user community, where the author contributes frequently.

All in all, I thought the book was really helpful for getting RT installed and getting me up to speed. For the nitty-gritty, I'd rely on the online wiki and great user community.

Are you an end-user, system administrator or developer who interacts with RT on an occasional or regular basis? Authors Jesse Vincent, Robert Spier, Dave Rolsky, Darren Chamberlain and Richard Foley, have written an outstanding book that is for everybody who has to use RT to manage tasks.

Vincent, Spier, Rolsky, Chamberlain and Foley, begin by providing some background about what ticketing systems are and how they can help save your job and your sanity. Then, they walk you through the process of setting up an RT server and configuring sane system defaults. The authors continue by showing you how to get up and running with RT's web interface. In addition, they explain how to interact with RT from your shell or console window. The authors also step you through the basics of turning a virgin RT server into a useful tool for tracking what you need to do inside your organization. Then, the authors show you how to extend RT's standard behavior with custom business logic. Next, they provide a look inside the RT configuration at Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems, a nonexistent company that makes heavy use of RT to manage their internal processes. Next, the authors walk you through RT's files on disk; as well as, the details of its database tables. Then, they describe how DBIx::SearchBuilder works. Finally, they show you how to set up a local sandbox for modifying and extending RT without putting your production server in harm's way.

This excellent book will be considerably more useful to you if you have at least a basic understanding of the Unix command line. Above all, this book will be very useful to you if you also have a basic understanding of Unix systems administration skills, and at least a little bit of experience programming in Perl.

We've been using RT for several years. As one happy customer mentions at Best Practical's site, managing a project or service driven organization without RT is like watching TV without a TiVo. The software is powerful, flexible, and above all, adaptable to many styles of management for more than just technology projects. No question, the software gets 5 stars.

This book, however, is largely a reorganization of the information provided with the software. If you prefer to read printed materials instead of PDFs or HTML, this book will save you money on printer paper. But if you're looking for best practices, recipies, or enhancements such as those you'll find in the RT Wiki, you may be disappointed. In fact, for most of the advanced capabilities, you are referred by the book to other resources. The book does contain the occasional nugget, such as a half dozen lines of code to truly delete a ticket and related data. With some searching, you'd be able to find those, and better, at the RT Wiki, such as the particuarly valuable contributions from the University of Oslo (do an A9 search for "RT prosjektgruppen").

Compared to most O'Reilly books which set the bar for excellence, this one is merely average. However, I do recommend this book as an introduction for those considering whether it's worthwhile to move to RT from some other enterprise ticketing system, and for techs to give to managers who are more comfortable with hard copies than electronic documents. For any RT admin, it's certainly worthwhile to have documentation printed and organized in an easy reference, considering how much you've saved on the excellent software itself.

You will be repeled by some of the subjects in this book and bored by others. This is a collection of essays by different authors, each proceded by a summary. Sometimes the summary would have been enough and the actual essay could have been skipped. I kept "wanting more" for each jerk covered.