Distributed Computing Books

Some of the chapters are heavily Microsoft biased. I was expecting more of a reference manual so I was disappointed. And even the reference chapters aren't that clearly written--though some are.
For the price, I'd look somewhere else for a BackOffice reference. (P.S. The included CD didn't come with all the books that the cover claimed it came with...)

This book is a great place to start learning about the different products that make up Microsoft Back Office. It is full of Tips that even today (as an MCSE), I find extremely useful

I consider myself lucky that this was clearance priced. . . at my local [computer super-groovy store].

These books are reasonable in content, but they cost far too much to justify their content. I've read other books which cut through the hammy and fluffy text and give me what I need to know. In fact, buying four books on Backoffice ranging from $30 to $50 offers exponentially more information from more diverse sources - and typically come with their own CDs as well. I could care less if they are "Microsoft biased or not" Que has a habit of hyping up products they cover and oddly they cover non-Microsoft products, too.

Lots of padding, and here's one reason why. The TCP/IP section is nice I suppose, but it's not teaching me anything as to how it relates to Backoffice so far. It's going into the history and how the numerology is structured (DNS, subnet mask, et cetera), but if I want to know about TCP/IP protocol theory, lots of books devoted to that [and in greater depth] exist. This book acts as if it wants to be a be-all solution, but has to cut content in some areas to make up for it.

It's no wonder that both books are included on CD in HTML format. I'm hoping that the other reviewer was wrong about his CD not including the goodies for both books. Unfortunately it makes sense as many a company will change a product's content and legally find ways to justify it.

If you're not Richie Rich or Bill Gates, go find and buy up to four books which would effective equal the ridiculous cost of this two-volume set. The Que set is nothing more than a [not quite] cheap attempt to acquire revenue by providing heaps of padding.

Questions+answers are arranged redundantly, information is dated, and there's just not a lot in there. Very amateurish. Bordering absurd. Probably should have given it 1 star when I think about it.

In fact unclear is a better word. I purchased this book as a supliment to "Server+ Certification Bible by Trevor Kay" and yikes!!! First I was mildly disturbed by the fact that the author isn't even Server+ certified. Second the questions are as unclear as Charlie Brown's Teacher in The Peanuts. In my opinion most answers had multiple answers (of which I guessed at what I hoped was the right one) or the questions themselves made no sense at all and being A+, & Network+ certified I would hope that I'm not completely clueless. As a matter of fact the only reason I'm writing this is because I wanted to check this books reveiws before I depended on it for my Server+ exam in a weeks time. Well that's my piece. Good Luck to all and stay away from this book...I hope this helps

The publisher does not hide the fact that this book is just a batch of sample questions and answers related to the Server+ exam. This book might be useful if you've been in the field and have done a lot of work on servers and you want to test you knowledge. However, it is of little use for novices who are trying to learn material for the Server+ exam. The biggest problem with this book is that the CompTIA Server+ exam objectives are not even present in the book. Also watch out for the Exam Watch notes, a high percentage of them are totally wrong. For example: The Exam Watch note that states that only RAID 1 and RAID 5 are fault tolerant (page 25). In fact, RAID 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are all fault tolerant. The book also lacks an index, which makes it difficult to find sample questions on a particular subject.

* Bad index, so I can not use it as a reference book.

* Chapters 1, 2 and 3, whom are they geared to? Not that much useful.

* It is always hard to find answers to simple and basic questions, if exists in the book at all.

* It may be useful to an expert database programmer that is Sybase beginner, as a book to get snippets of information about Sybase. That is on the bases of something better than nothing.

I really liked the book. Most of the Sybase books you see are written for DBA's. This is an excellent guide for the everyday programmer. The author does a great job coving stored procedures and triggers. Very easy to understand and informative. I would give this book 4.8 stars. My only knock on the book is the index. It's a little too small. Overall an excellent book.

The focus of this book is mainly on telling you the names of the parts of Infomaker. While it does have examples of how to use some of the features of Infomaker, they tend to be very basic. If you are looking for information about creating queries, this book isn't for you. The Infomaker 5 documentation is so poor that I did learn some things, but it didn't answer most of my questions.

With out a well-developed back ground in relational databases, I would not have been able to follow the book and tutorials. The tutorials contain errors and misdirection. For instance, the author, in chapter 8, instructs the user to input his/her very first row in a sample table that was just created. When the data is committed to the database, an error occurs because data is missing from a primary table (the primary table must be filled out first). This was one of the many errors I found in the tutorial.

The book is far short of what I experienced a similar tutorial for MS Access published by the MS press.

A reader totally unfamiliar with data warehousing could read this book and come away with a good understanding of the datawarehousing world. The portion that covers the actual Microsoft tools and dialogues is not very detailed, but I guess one could look at a more detailed book for the specifics.

This book is a big waste of time and money. It is lacking the substance and detail needed to understand this important topic. All the book goes into is high level topics and dancing around the substantial issues without handling them.

If you want to really learn about MS OLAP, DTS, MDX, OLE DB for OLAP, ADOMD, etc., then DO NOT buy this book. It will not serve these purposes.

The negative reviews on this book smack of a political witch hunt against the author. This is an excellent starter book for servlets that contains realistic examples that work. Are there some negatives, sure - there are in all books. As a whole, this book is a useful reference and a good read. I have and would recommend it again to folks starting out with Servlets.

Some of example does not have complete source codes. Also, do not expect get any help from author¡¯s forum because almost nobody gets a response from the author since Feb 2000. Good Luck; you really need one!

This book covers less about servlets than you could find in one or two issues of any monthly java periodical, and what it does present is shaky and amatuerish at best. I only wish I had seen these reviews before purchasing it at my local bookstore. What a waste. The author should be held accountable for this garbage, as well as the publisher.

There are plenty of good servlet books. Don't waste your time and effort and money. Too bad the review section doesn't have a rank lower than a "one star". This book is much worse any other book I read that get a "one star".

Most of the reviews are so unreasonably negative that I have decided on 5 stars, although I think 3 1/2 is about right. The examples are not so trivial and are in fact useful. The way each problem is presented is, I think, pretty good. The author covers plenty of popular topics such as online shopping, search engines, chats, RMI and JDBC. I like the way the code is given piece by piece and then finally in its complete form. Why other readers found this approach so awful is a mystery to me. It's certainly far from being a waste of money.

The writing and style were not conducive to effective understanding and assimilation.

Topics covered often did not provide enough supporting information. The parts were not put together in proper order. Many new terms, concepts and other things that were thrown into the discourse were not explained until later in the book.

This was not a well thought out or organized book.

A waste of resources and completely inadequate for the Server+ exam; it does not cover all of the exam objectives. I am surprised and disappointed that Mike Meyers would have anything to do with this prime recycle bin material.

This book is very poor for the content, the exam is based on hardware theory but this book spends more time on the instructions on how to install individual hardware devices which is good if you lost the manual for the device but is not needed for the exam.

I suggest going for the Server+ Bible which is very well written and aimed towards the test not away like this one is.

This text fails to prepare readers for the Server + exam. It contains some misspellings and inconsistencies here and there, but I really began to worry when answers to some of the practice test questions directly contradicted the text, such as the maximum throughput of a ATAPI-4 device. The text says 33MB/sec, but the practice test answer is 66MB/sec. The text also contains pages and pages of codes particular to individual brands of controllers and operating systems. Also, the term ?Windows 98? is mentioned countess times throughout the text, although it is (obviously) not a NOS.

Much of the information in this text appears dated but with just a few words amended here and there to update it. For example, although this book was published in 2001, one sentence reads in part that ?by late 2000, the PC industry will likely move to the Ultra-ATA/100 drives.? This book was poorly edited.

Unlike this book, the actual certification exam made no mention of Windows 98 and rarely focused on specific operating systems. The exam also contained questions about topic mentioned absolutely nowhere in the text. Two examples are Grandfather-Father-Son backup routines and terminology involving server rack measurements, just to name a few.

I could locate no addendums or software updates on the Osborne website prior to and during my study, indicating that neither the publisher nor the author intends to correct these critical discrepancies.

I have successfully self-studied for both Novell and Microsoft certification exams and know the amount of effort required to succeed. But even if I had had this book at my side during the exam, it would not have helped because it simply does not contain vital topics. I hope both the author and the publisher remove this bound snake oil from the market so others don?t make the same expensive mistake as I.

Pro: gives in depth information about subjects. I loved reading about the latency time of UPSses, motherboard and baseboard code details!
Pro: Good for newbies to get a started on server components.
Con: Biased towards Compaq Raid controllers. The exam is neutral.
Con: Mentions and refers to Windows 95 Device manager regularly which is NOT a Server OS!

I'm an HP Hardware 2nd line support qualifier for HP Netservers. With over 2 years of experience troubleshooting all sorts of issues 8 hours a day, Cluster Certified, HP Star Certified, HP Star Troubleshooting Certified. I wanted to get myself vendor neutral certified as well, and I figured I'd buy this book.
In my opinion, I passed the test mostly on work experience.

I believe the book is lacking some in the administering side of Back Ups etc, policies and procedures like disaster recovery. It does not cover enough Non-MS OS troubleshooting.

The scope and feel of Comptia exams (Server+ and Network +) is that they are BROAD (also Netware and Unix questions), mostly not too in depth, but requiring a firm understanding of basics.
Comptia is aiming at work experience, which is the way the test feels. Dont be so hard on this book, other books arent much better! Just dont depend on this book as your one resource, and books are not a substitute for experience. To have everything possibly covered on the exam in a book, you'd need 350 more pages!

Although another reviewer wrote that this book goes too much in depth, this is not my experience. Even if you may not need everything about IDE or SCSI in the depth covered, REAL LIFE regularly goes way deeper than mentioned in this book, and there are even errors for nitpickers like me. The coverage of High availablity and clusters was under par.

My main issue with this book is that it was too much oriented towards hardware technology, whereas the exam is also oriented towards real life OS administration, troubleshooting, and running Back ups, policies etc. The exam is trying to make sure you have your act together as a Server proffesional.

The CD was better than the book, but had some small errors in it.

If you are new to SOAP and you want to get the overall picture, and you don't care for details, this is the book you need.
If you need a reference guide, this is not the book you want.
If you're looking for a book about SOAP on a particular platform (say Java), this is not the book you need.

This book was a disappointment. I got thrown into an XML/SOAP project and had to get up to speed in short order. After struggling on my own for a while I bought this book hoping it would have lots of meat on actually using SOAP::Lite, but it had pretty thin coverage.

I did like the big-picture overview of the various technologies, but it was not very helpful in writing an actual SOAP client to talk to a third party's SOAP server. Considering that the author of SOAP::Lite also wrote this book, it seems to me that there could have been a whole chapter on SOAP::Lite from the client view.

This will stay on my shelf as a reference, but for getting up to speed rapidly on actually writing a SOAP client, it was a bust.

This book is a nice introduction to SOAP. It doesn't get caught in the Software wars and has examples of most existing systems. Another advantage: it is a thin book and not a 1000 pages bible. So you can easily read it in a weekend and then decide where you want to dig deeper (if necessary).

If your pretty new at SOAP, and if you need an overview, then this is the book you want.
If you don't care about interoperability, and you just want a book on SOAP within a particular environment (say Java), then this is not the book you want.
If you need a reference guide, then you don't need this book.

I was so keen to learn from this book, but no matter how hard I tried it had too much nonsense to be readable or usable.

FI/CO is most popular and CO is the key module. In this book, nothing is helpful. I am very disappointed. I do not understand what purpose for the author to publish this book. Perhaps the author is very experienced, but the book is really useless in this field.

helpful to understand the logic of finance and controlling concepts. navigation are clearly explained.

I found this 500-page book completely useless. The book doesn't have any (!) illustrations, it's plain text only, and it basically rephrases standard SAP OnLine Help. I found the standard SAP FI/CO Online Help more readable than this book ...

I have ordered/read 6 books on the FI and CO modules in the last two weeks. My experience is that this book is the most detailed and beneficial of all. For someone who is looking to understand the process side of these SAP modules I would strongly recommend this book. If you are looking to learn more about the config, BUY A CONFIG book, not this one. The negative reviews seem to be related to the fact that people don't understand what this book is trying to accomplish (process understanding). If you have a medium understanding of SAP R/3 and a limited to medium knowledge base of accounting (internal and external) concepts, this book is a winner.

This book is pretty useless and gives you just enough information to really screw things up.

The first exam I flunked on the course of my MCSE+I is this one and because I used this book. I generally obtained good scores with New Riders book, but this one is really bad. The sections are organized per the Microsoft exam, not in a text book fashion. For example, although the exam objective of Planning is first, it makes more sense to put it after you have the understanding of how Exchange works. If you don't have extensive experience with Exchange Server 5.5, this book will not be the one to introduce you to the concepts and certainly not to the exam! I used the book from Sybex (Chellis) to finally succeed in my exam.

I have some experience with Exchange and found this book very useful in preparing for the exam. If you followed the exercises it pretty much touched on all the areas needed for the exam. The layout of the book made it very useful for fast cramming too. It's obviously not a reference guide but a study guide which is what purports to be......and i do think someone with no Exchange experience could gain a lot of knowledge from reading and performing the exercises in this book.

Of the three guides I have referenced, Osborne's, Sybex, and this one {New Rider's}, I found Mr. Wallttingsford coming up short with his effort. The depth is not there in several keys areas that are needed to prepare, in fact, some of the information is actually wrong. For instance, Mr. W. needs to review his concept of the dirsync process and what happens during each time slice. The CD testing contained within is very shallow in most areas concerning the test, and the test items are in most cases very shallow and poorly written when compared to what you actually face on the test. I don't consider myself to be an expert on Exchange 5.5, but I am a professional educator who will not recommend this volume for test preparation.

I have no expirence with MS Exchange Server 5.5 and I'm trying to pass exam 70-081. I have failed to do 2 times now. Don't messure yourself againts the questions in the book and the sample test on the CD because a 100% means 50% in the real test. This book is NOT a training guide! It tells you the facts but it dosn't tell you why it's the fact. This book is more like a Fast Track book or so.

This is the last exam before I will become an MCSE and almost all my other books was Training Guides from Newriders. They were good but this really sucks! IF YOU ARE A NOVICE ON EXCHANGE LIKE ME, DON'T BUY IT!!!

I found this book to be a poorly written study guide. The format used and the order that information is presented in is confusing and awkward. I am an MCSE, MCP+I, and a CNA. I have used Sybex and Exam Cram books for all other tests and plan to use them for this one as well.