Software Development Books

Where Brook's The Mythical Man Month documents the lessons learned during the development of IBM's OS/360, this 15-year-old book documents the lessons learned during the development of a betting system. The Mythical Man Month focused on project failures (making it probably the first book of anti-patterns), while this book focuses on success. Despite its age this book is probably more valid today than when it was first published, and remains one of the best books on IT project management.

Key points:
(1) Heavy emphasis on getting business requirements and ensuring that the solution that unfolds is aligned to those requirements. This also incorporates scope management from the beginning of the project, which, with requirements, is a make-or-break factor for project success.
(2)How to deal with team issues. One of the recurring challenges that the author faced during the project was how to manage the people part of the equation - his approach epitomizes best practices for controlling meetings, coordinating resources and facilitating trade-offs and managing team and customer expectations. What makes this aspect of the book so powerful is the fact that the project was initiated in 'crunch mode' from the beginning. Leadership and management are key themes throughout this book - something that seems to be often left out in more modern books on IT project management.
(3) Estimating and controlling a dynamic project on the fly are two strong points in this book. Although the project is approached as a traditional waterfall development life cycle, and the technical environment described is archaic, the author's approach is as valid using modern techniques and iterative development life cycles that are currently popular.

What I like: the book is structured around a case study that runs throughout the book. The case study is a real "crunch mode" project that was tossed in the author's lap, and the book is a chronicle of how the project was successfully completed within a compressed timeframe with a hastily thrown together team. This adds credibility to the methods that are presented, all of which still remain as best practices in IT project management. It also makes this slim, 192-page book highly readable (you can read it in an evening). The chapter on Dealing with Disaster should be required reading for all IT project managers. If the appendix, Brief Description of Design Tools, was updated to show mapping to contemporary tools this book would be as fresh today as when it was first published. In addition to this book I recommend Managing a Programming Project: People and Processes, which contains contributions by the author.

This is a wonderful book for anyone looking to integrate web technology into their classrooms. It is well-written and clear.

A useful, easy to read guide for setting up and using OpenDoc and Cyberdog. Takes you from starting out to some pretty advanced uses of Cyberdog and available plugins. Covers home and business use with examples and some ideas most of us would not have thought of, if we worked alone

This should be required reading for anyone who designs interfaces. If users are having a hard time using your software then you need this book. Great conversational style with well thought out content and screen shots. I wish I had this book earlier in my career.

This book is very good. It will help you on any aspect of the development cycle. It provide very good and concise example on how to build an ER diagram and how to develop the forms and reports. I would recommend this book to anybody that really wants to know how to program in Access 2.0.

This is an excellent book for learning and referencing database usage. It has a wide breath of knowledge covering client server, transactions, SQL, physical and logical database design. There are numerous practical examples for implementing SQL for a large variety of applications. I thoroughly recommend for anyone learning databases for the first time as well as seasoned professionals who need an SQL reference. This book also servers as an excellent introduction to the more theoretical book Fundamentals of Database Systems.

Why waste your time reading 600+ pages to learn how to create a database? You can read this book and it is less than 300 pages! It covers everything. I recommend this book to anyone that wants to know what makes a great relational database work regardless of the DBMS. This is for beginners wanting to learn for the first time to those with DB experience that want a refresher on the fundamentals!

This book is amazing! . As a DBA , I keep on referring this book again & again . It has very useful information & can be used by anyone who wants a really good understanding of DB2

Cheers to the author for writing such a wonderful book!

While most existing JSF books focus on teaching readers how to use the Faces framework, this book instead looks specifically at Facelets and the component libraries within the Apache MyFaces project, viz. Tomahawk, Trinidad, Orchestra, and Tobago.

After spending a weekend with this book, here are my impressions:

* The book is fairly short, and so seems very diminutive when stacked up against other books on JSF. You can imagine reading this from cover to cover over a long weekend.

* With four main authors, and six contributing authors, this book reads like a series of articles on JSF. Fortunately, the articles are well written for the most part, and you can read the chapters out of order without loss of continuity.


MyFaces Core:
=============
The chapter on MyFaces Core (the actual JSF implementation) is only about 20 pages long. So while it works as a decent refresher, it is absolutely not a first introduction to JSF. I suspect newcomers to JSF will find this book rather daunting unless they've already read some of the other excellent books on Faces (see my review for Kito Mann's JSF in Action.)

Tomahawk:
=========
This chapter is very well written and focuses on some important components (like tree2, schedule, inputCalendar, etc.) The explanations are clear enough to make you feel you should be able to get these working after a reading. However, I was disappointed to find marginal treatment of the t:saveState component - especially as there are multiple references to it in other chapters (as in the discussion of Orchestra, and in JSF pitfalls).
. . . . . .
As an aside, this book's index is the gold standard for tech books - about 30 pages for a 285 page book. When I went looking for saveState, for example, I was able to quickly zero in on all its references.
. . . . . .

Facelets:
=========
I got a strange sense of deja vu when I read the chapter on Facelets - turns out it is lifted almost verbatim from APress's Facelets Essentials - along with the surreal Bird Store example. If you have read that book, you won't find many surprises here. This chapter and its Facelets appendix take up 58 pages which turns out to be over two thirds of the content of that other book. Fortunately its the best two thirds - so you really get two books in one here.
. . . . . .
What really bothered me is that most of the examples in this book use JSP as the presentation technology. If Facelets is really worthy of having a mention on the title, I'd have expected to see more real world usage throughout the book.

So why not drink the KoolAid?
. . . . . .
Misc projects:
==============
A common problem I had with the other chapters was that the examples were too short to be of much use.

For instance, the example for pageFlowScope is too trivial to convincingly demonstrate why it is useful. It provides nothing more than a description of the mechanical aspects of using this scope. I'd have loved to see a working example that exemplified how it avoided the weaknesses of the request and session scopes.

[To fully grasp the actual meat of this particular topic, I highly recommend reading about Tomahawk's saveState, Trinidad's pageFlowScope, and Orchestra's conversation scope - all in one sitting. These are all different solutions to the same core issue - so they're best read together. The discussion in Orchestra's chapter is by far the best - esp. see Page 175 - Managing Independent Windows, and page 194 - Orchestra's Architecture.]


Antipatterns:
=============
The chapter on JSF Antipatterns is a very interesting read. A few of these antipatterns seem like spectacularly bad ideas to begin with and you wonder how they passed design reviews in the first place. However, there are a lot of practical usage tips here (such as thread safety issues with custom validators and converters) that made it worth my time.


Appendices:
===========
The information on dependency injection with Spring is confined to about a paragraph - so a better choice is Spring Recipes by Gary Mak. The appendix on view state encryption is also a useful addition.

Conclusion:
===========
This book was long overdue - and is well worth your time if you are into using the MyFaces sub-projects. Throw in Facelets and you have a winning combination.


Damodar Chetty
swengsol.com

WOW! I was reluctant to buy a cover-all-bases kind of administration book on the assumption that not enough detail would resolve through each chapter to be of any real value. Was I wrong!!!

As a novice systems administrator trying to migrate a Windows SBS 2003 system to Linux, the only feasible option (for me - a newbie to Linux) seemed to be SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, and a quick search of Amazon only revealed one generic administration book targeted at SLES. Not sure of just how detailed the chapters would be on Samba & LDAP (the topics most relevant to me), I acquired this book along side the purchase of some other books which dealt with those topics specifically.

Assuming that I needed hardcore LDAP and Samba books to help with Windows XP authentication and folder redirection over a Linux server network was a mistake. After reading most of this book already, I think I can safely resell my Samba and LDAP specific titles on the premise that I don't need them to facilitate the aforementioned resources. The only other MUST-HAVE book which has been made use of extensively in my transition is, Windows and Linux Integration: Hands-on Solutions for a Mixed Environment Check it out...

Obviously not a book that goes into reams of details about any certain event of course, however, there is a balance of screenshots and line-by-line walkthroughs that fill this book with a practical value I have not seen in other Linux guides. Chapters are ordered and versed so well that I read this book from front to back in chapter order as easy as reading a good novel, and I still felt like I was making educational progress from every page.

In conclusion, I must recommend this book for those with limited Linux experience who have decided to give SuSE a try on the assumption that this may well be the most user-friendly introduction to Linux server administration. You won't be disappointed with this combination. Some of the features of YaST are self-explanatory as they are, but with this book as a guide, one just can't go wrong.

Do yourself a favour and purchase this book BEFORE investing money on others (like I did), THEN-AND-ONLY-THEN should you assess whether you need more detail/less spending money. For a generic administration book, this is a must have.