Unix Systems Books

This book is an in-depth reference to the StarOffice functionality. The book is huge, fine print; and still the book does not touch on the new database capability of Adabas.

The StarBasic programming section is particularly instructive. The book's programming tutorial nicely complements the SO Online Help system and the SO SDK downloadable from the internet.

For old hacks, like me, this material (and Linux) is the best of times for computing.

I agree that this is the most comprehensive review of 5.1. I use both 5.1 and 5.2, and this is in the main, applicable for 5.2 users. The included Adabas makes the database much better. Staroffice is not the only suite for Linux/FreeBSD, there is also Applixware. I like both. I only give it 4 stars because of the lack of the coverage of the new database.

I'm a technical writer who writes regular book reviews about computer and programming books. I can say without a doubt that this is one of the nicest, most user-friendly app guides that I've seen. It's a hefty book with lots of screen shots, and they cover a lot of material here, including a lot on installation for linux. They present a lot of materials in boxes and give "tips," and the great index makes me confident that I can find anything I want in seconds. Unlike most user guides for office apps, this book describes pretty thoroughly the limitations in star office (such as the fact that its database is not relational). I bought this book in late 1999, and undoubtedly other books have been published on star office, and more will be published as star office gains mindshare. But it really is amazing how thoroughly this application has been described by this book. This is the sort of book you'd expect for an app that is several years old, not for one new to the market. The group of writers must have spent forever not only studying the program inside and out, but presenting it in a form that is interesting and easy to wade through. Recently Star Office 5.2 has been released, and it's possible that the functionality will have changed. But this version or later versions of this book will still be the easiest to understand. It's not glamorous to write a book about office apps, but it's nice when a publisher has done such an excellent job.

Unfortunatly this was the third Star Office Help Book that I bought - I wished there was a review that discussed the book, instead of the progam - prior to my two other purchases.

The Special Edition book is a volumous tome of information that every skill level can use. The book is written in a manner that appeals to both the computer expert and the newbie user.

Each section of the book discusses the basic techniques that are used on a regular basis and then it progresses to more powerful techniques. Examples and illustrations are plentiful - which many people find helpful.

The index and table of contents is written is plain english - so it is not difficult to find the answer to any question you may have. The book also discusses the compatibility of StarOffice and other major office suites.

For expert level user tasks - macro designing, the book offers very little information on this area. But to find the answers on building the macros - I simply went to the Sun Microsystem's (The Makers of StarOffice) website and did some poking around until I found my answer.

Sadly, StarOffice 5.2 will debut this year and this book may be obsolete by teh time you read it - but if you plan to use or continue to use StarOffice 5.1 - then consider buying this book.

The price may be a bit higher then some of the "thinner" books - but in this case - you get what you pay for. Don't be a "Dummy." Purchase this book!

I bought this book because it definitely wasn't for Dummies, and I thought it would cover all of StarOffice's features. And by golly, it does. But darned if I can find what I need without wading through it for a half hour.

I was very confused by the organization; each product has a 60-some page *introductory* section. I couldn't figure out where to look for just a simple procedure that tells me what I needed. When you can find a procedure, it's often a series of long, dense paragraphs; the information doesn't exactly leap out at you. And the illustrations, while very professional-looking, really aren't that helpful--the callouts are just the tooltips, which are built into the program.

This book has a lot of potential and a lot of information but it needs an industrial-strength organizational makeover. before it can be really helpful. It's better than the quickie 400-page books, but I guess I'm still looking for the book I need.

(It's also outdated, on version 5.1...sigh.)

I agree with other reviewers that not everything on the exam is covered in this book, but since it claims to be the OFFICIAL CSA exam prep guide, I take a harsher stand. The label "official" raises the expectations on what to expect from this book, and at a minimum one expects an overview of exam contents.

However, knowing well the informational content of this, the official guide to the CSA exam, is insufficient for passing the CSA exam, and I find that inexcusable. There is substantial content covered by the exam that is outright missing from the Rehman book. You will find NOTHING on the subjects of partitioning, server hardware offerings, high availability, or Ignite, and you WILL be tested on them. If you bought the Rehman book expecting to know what's on the exam, you have been misled and will probably fail.

The book desperately needs a revision, and if the omissions are not corrected, the misleading label "official" needs to be removed.

If you want to purchase a CSA exam guide with the intentions of passing the CSA exam, I recommend the "HP-UX Certified Systems Administrator Training Guide and Administrator's Reference", 2nd edition, by Asghar Ghori, ISBN 978-1-4243-4231-0. The content closely tracks the overview of CSA exam contents that is found on the HP Education site. The book is current up to HP-UX 11iv3 and the Integrity servers.

Book arrived in a timely fashion, however, 90% of the book has the pages printed on an angle. It appears none of the data was cut off, but it does make reading akward.

Excellent Book, Complete reference, From Beginners to Intermediate,

Thanks Rafeeq UR Rehman

This is great product. The ordering process as well as well as the delivery was great.

I found this book to be very informative and helpful with the quizzes and study break exercises. However, I believe you will be disappointed if you want this to be a "show me what's on the exam" book. You'll learn a lot more from this book than is asked on the exam, IMHO.

I passed the exam today and honestly believe that there was so much more that could have been tested. The book explains how things work; the exam doesn't really seem to care. That's about as much detail as I can get into.

I will definitely use this book as a desk reference for the forseeable future. Be sure to check the website for error corrections if you plan to take the exam.

This book has many useful articles in it and will be useful to any linux users at any ability. It includes a lot of things that other books leave out like gcc and teTEX. This book also includes an excellent discussion of how the linux file system works --essential if you want to work with files effectively. The Network administration section is excellent as is the section on being a SysAdmin. The book would be helped by a better organized table of contents and perhaps by grouping similar HOWTO's together. As it happens, it looks like Mr. Purcell has glombed a bunch of stuff together and then slapped together a quick index and table of contents and then sent it off to Walnut Creek. Also, the pages are too thin. I think I am going to tear the book when I turn a page. Havoing said that, this will be a cherished possession for many years and I will read it often.

If you miss all your "not there anymore" How-TO's from the TLDP .... this one has them all (1997 and prior) so ... i beleive the cost of the printer INK is far more costly than the price than the 2000 pages this provides ..... even if you don't need it all .... Sometimes its better to get away from the box to read the info .... :-)

I would say that sales of this book should be left to the stores dealing in obsolete computer merchandise. Most (if not all) of the applications mentioned in this book are obsolete, having been upgraded to the point where a great deal of the advice given is no longer valid.

This is not, however, to say that this book would only be useful as a boat anchor. It still has a good deal of useful information in it, and can still be quite helpful, ...

My only burning question is, where ... is the 8th edition?

My comment to that person who only gave it one star would be; Sure, it's the HOW TO pages. All neatly bound and printed. Do YOU want to sit down and print out all that ...? I have better things to do, and I, for one, prefer hard copy. Easier to read.

The book contains a complete walkthroug of the installation and a lot of howto's. It has all the answers.

What a dissapointment - this book is just a collection of the Linux Documentation Project's "how-to's." Back that up with a horrible index (a measly 7 page-index covers 2000 pages of text), and these guys get an F for effort. The installation-guide wasn't any help for me because I bought a specific guide for that. What I needed was a comprehensive and well indexed reference.

The 'Mac OS X Leopard Pocket Guide' is a good enough resource for those looking for a quick guide to useful Mac OS X abilities and ways to do things, but honestly I feel that this book is a bit light. I think a heavy base of users would be Windows switchers who have come to the Mac and want to learn more about how to do things in this environment versus where they came from. While this 200 page book does as advertised, it is very light on content and no color. With such a vibrant operating system and one that is very dense, I feel that this book is useful but readers will quickly hit a brick wall and be yearning for something more. If all you want is a quick reference this is good to have in your back pocket, but to get more from Mac OS X, make sure to add the 'Missing Manual' book to your collection as well.

****

the best "in hand" tool for the switcher, simple yet direct to the point in assisting you in dealing with MAC BOOK. Highly recommend this for the beginner and the long-term user.

This book is a waste of time. I bought it on the basis of O'Reilly's reputation. Won't do that again. Essentially, its someone going through all the menu and telling you what they are. You can figure that out without a manual. It doesn't cover things not apparent in the menus e.g. how program installation works on osx. I'm trying a David Pogue book next, based on the good Palm manuals he did a few years back. Lets hope that's better. Geez O'Reilly, what were you thinking?

This book is really good for anyone with a Mac. You can learn the basics if you are a new Mac user, and you can learn the important functions of the new Leopard operating system without all of the unnecessary technical details.

Great little book for reference when you are on the road...It packs snugly with your laptop...

I think the book is a good source for the first things you need to know when turning to the Unix features of Mac OS X. It's kind of a collection of everything you would use valuable time to look for elsewere.

This book is a disjointed collection of largely irrelevant information. Here are some examples that reflect the general spirit of the book:

A quote from chapter 1, "Inside the terminal":
> iTerm's contextual menu consists of the following items: New Tab (which
> allows you to choose a session from the bookmarks), Browser (which opens
> the selected URL in your default web browser), Mail (which opens a
> compose mail window with the selected email address as the recipient),
> Copy, Paste, Save, Print, Print Selection, Select All, Clear Buffer, Close, and
> Configure.

You'd hope O'Reilly fired the editor.

Chapter 1 also teaches us how to use the backslash to escape spaces within filenames, and how to use escape sequences to set the title of the terminal window.

Chapter 2, "Startup", explains the OS X boot process. The impression I got from this chapter was that the authors don't understand said boot process and instead regurgitated a list of steps the computer goes through while booting. This chapter also teaches us how to use cron to schedule tasks.

Chapter 3, "Directory Services", gives us (of all things) example C code for retrieving a user's encrypted password, alongside information on managing users and their home directories.

It doesn't really get any better in the following chapters. If I was forced to say something positive about this book, I'd say that it touches many topics briefly to give you an idea of the things you can tinker with in OS X. [...] Or skip the part where you look at the table of contents -- I mean, you already know you can run X11 on OS X, right? So google for "os x x11", and you'll get much more comprehensive and concise information.

I like easy to read book and I also had assumed that learning UNIX is not necessarily has to a struggle. This book stood up to my expectations almost perfectly. It does not overwhelm with technical details and does not press too much. I also followed someone's review advice and purchased Linux and UNIX for a beginner training suite, 4DVDs + 2CDs includes 4 Unix Academy Certifications ed.2008. These two nicely complement one another. You watch it and you read it. If you didn't catch it from the first try you watch it again and read it again. In two months I found myself confident to that extend that gave advises to our system administrator and he accepted them because there were subjects that he wasn't completely sure. I can't overstate how much I have learned from them. Don't be naive, though. You will have to learn and memorize many things. The fact of owning neither book nor DVD will not make you knowledgeable, but if you will work it trough, trust me, you will surprise many people around!

I really enjoyed this book, it's a treasure trove of information throughout. Generally speaking Mac's goal is to keep things simple and the majority Mac user's are perfectly content with that. I would even say that most Mac users I've met don't care to learn UNIX. That's a shame, they don't know what they are missing! The only reason that I became interested in Mac is that it now has the power of a stable, mature and secure operating system, UNIX! Apple has the best of both worlds, the power of the UNIX OS and the beauty of the Mac interface.

With Mac's simple approach, sometimes it can be difficult to get techinical details. For a technical person, this book is welcome. But I wouldn't consider this book to be overly "geeky." Anyone with some experience with UNIX could find useful information in these pages. For example, did you know that you can use GIMP (a very powerful free image editor program) as your default image editor for iPhoto? You can use a lot of cool, free, open source software with Mac OS X. That's another good reason to learn alittle UNIX! This book goes into a lot of detail on how to install GNU free software and other packages.

The book is divided into 4 Parts: Part I. Getting Around, Part II. Building Applications Part III. Working with Packages Part IV. Serving and System Management. Then there's a lengthy Appendix on the file system, command line tools and missing manpages. In a nutshell the book starts with general information, then covers Networking and Programming topics. A good place to start is to find the Terminal Application in the Utilites folder and drag it to the Dock for quick access. I'm more of a network guy than a programmer, so naturally I gravitated to the networking chapters. But to tap into the full power of UNIX one must be able to edit and write some scripts too. This book has some practical scripting examples. It also touches on using your Mac OS X client as a server. I'm sure that I'll be refering back to this book, it's a good one to have in the library.

Having recently bought a Powerbook 17" I wanted to indeed bridge the UNIX and Windows world. How better to do that than going Apple? I've got MS programs, pretty GUI and, the best, based on UNIX. So... Going from FreeBSD to a Mac I needed a manual and this book does it best IMHO. It's has a plethora of links to open source and some shareware, howto's, links to more info and is fairly broad. It does presuppose a working knowledge of UNIX and is targeted to an audience who is switching from a Linux/BSD OS to a Mac. While the transition is somewhat seamless, the Apple folks did some things a bit differently and that's where this book can, and does, help. Anywho, enough rambling. It's a great little book/help and should be on a UNIX person's desktop if converting from, say, Linux/FreeBSD to a Mac.

Wow! Mastering Red Hat Linux 9 is a huge and very complete guide to Red Hat Linux 9. It's over 900 pages, and includes the "Publisher's Edition" of RH9 on 2 CD's. It is written in a style which should accomodate Linux newcomers and more experienced users alike. There are a LOT of examples, code snippets, and screenshots throughout the book. In fact sometimes the abundance of these tend to make the material a little long to wade through. Experts should have no trouble skipping over the sections they don't need though.

The book starts out with in an introduction to Linux, and has a good chapter on preparing to install, including hardware checklists. This is followed by a very detailed step by step explanation of installing Red Hat, both locally and via network. A nice part of this is a troubleshooting chapter for solving installation problems. Part Two explains the basics of using the command line, how filesystems work in Linux, and using the shell for various tasks.

Part Three includes chapters for administering users and groups on your new system, and how the RPM software package management process works. Other chapters in this part explain the bootup process and how to configure it, various ways to perform system backups, and other common adminstration tasks such as cron jobs and logs. Especially useful should be Chapter 12 which explains how to update/compile your own kernel. There are very good examples of the myriad kernel options, mostly by using the xconfig utility.

The next several chapters go over how to configure and use the XWindows display system, including good examples from the XF86Config file. This is followed by detailed explanations of configuring and using the Gnome and KDE desktop environments. The KDE discussion is very good, considering Red Hat is more known for it's use of Gnome as the default desktop. Chapter 18 introduces many of the more commonly used graphical applications in Linux, such as OpenOffice, Gnome Office, and the KOffice suite. Chapter 19 should be very handy for Linux/RH new users, as it outlines the Red Hat graphical configuration utilities which allow customization of the desktop look-and-feel and other system preferences.

Chapters 20-22 cover basic Linux networking. The first part of this section gives a very understandable primer on TCP/IP and network terminology. This is followed up by excellent discussions on how to setup and manage networking on your Linux computer, including security recommendations and firewall/masquerading methods. Once you've got your network running safely, there are additional chapters which cover topics such as remote access and xinetd services, and various server applications installation and operation. These include DNS, DHCP, CUPS printing operations, FTP servers (and clients), NFS and NIS, and mail servers (sendmail). Some of these services are probably more than most home users would need, and the sendmail operation in particular is a little difficult to understand.

Chapter 29 (using Samba) will probably be a great help for people desiring to integrate a Linux system with existing Windows computers on a network. It offers an excellent tutorial on how to share files and resources across the LAN, and includes an explanation of the SWAT configuration utility which greatly simplifies initial setup for newcomers. The final chapter in the book explains how to install and setup a basic webserver using the Apache sofware. The Appendix of the book is a relatively short section called the Linux Command Reference. There is some handy information in this, although it seems to be organized somewhat haphazardly. The book's Index seems to be very complete.

Overall I found this book to be a very useful reference tool. It is basic enough for most beginners to get all the help they need, and has a good amount of usable knowledge for more advanced Linux users. One thing I have realized is that much of the information here is not necessarily RedHat-specific, so can be helpful to users of other Linux distributions as well. I would highly recommend this as a valuable addition to your bookshelf.

Michael Jang's Mastering Red Hat Linux 9 is bar-none, simply the best of the BIG books on RH 9. Beginners through advanced users alike will find it invaluable as a reference.

It's obvious this book was written from scratch -- so many books suffer from over revision with errors and sentences stuck in here and there that don't make sense, but not this book.

Jang is an excellent author -- thank you, Michael, for putting so much effort into your writing. It's clear you have the reader's needs in mind and that you understand the challenges Linux users face, and the questions we will inevitably come up with. In the perfect world, Red Hat would give authors like Michael some of the profits, since his book will most definitely help their company sell more product.

I needed a reference to make the transition from Windows to Linux easy and less painful. This book pretty much covered everything from installing Linux to using the command line and the Redhat GUI. The book contained great screen shots to give you a good visual step by step guide to working within the Redhat GUI. Good book that I would recommend to anyone interested in dabbling in linux.

I had great expectations when I first opened the book, expecting a tutorial format leading me from novice to accomplished. I'm pretty disappointed... On the surface, the book appears to head in that direction, but I soon found myself being "exampled" to death with commands that had not been previously introduced or explained. I got the distinct impression that Mr. Jang was trying to show us readers just how knowledgeable he is on the subject. I'll grant him that, but that's not what I needed.

The book has lists of "things" in many places, but I'd much rather have an explanation of the relevant items before I'm tossed the entire set of "things" with no way to discern what's most important from what's less so. I've learned more from the online RedHat documentation than I've learned from this book; if I had the chance to learn Linux all over again, I'd spend my money elsewhere. Caveat emptor, as always....

The book is pretty comprehensive and generous with examples. It serves well as a guided instruction on those who are just starting with linux. This is book is also a good refernce material, however, there are certain topics I was hoping would be included, like OpenLDAP, mySQL, TACACS+ and how these tools integrate with Linux for it to become more rounded.

Overall, Mastering RH9 is still book worth having on our shelves.

This book is now classified by the publisher as "out of print" and this is a reprint. I just got off the phone with Prentice Hall, and the CD-ROM does NOT come with the book, regardless what the Amazon listing says.

My lowered rating does not reflect the quality or content of the book, rather a gaping omission on the part of the publisher. The CD is integral to the material in the book.

Luckily - it is rather easy to download most of the tools that the book references.

Title: Open Source Security Tools
Author: Tony Howlett
Pages: 578
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Rating: 9/10
Reviewer: Gary Smith
Summary: Great book on tools of the trade

Today's security analyst/administrator is confronted not only with constant attacks from within and without his organization but also the twin demons of No Money and No Time. Who's he/she going to call to get out of this dilemma? Ghostbusters? A better resource is Tony Howlett's
book, "Open Source Security Tools."

The book start off with an introduction to information security and OSS (Open Source Software). If you're new to being a security analyst and you need to know some basic things about information security and threats this is a good introduction. If you're a seasoned security veteran with the battle scars to prove it, it's still a useful section as a quick reference for hitting up management (pointy-haired or otherwise) when they ask questions.

The book starts with tools that are readily usable by the security admin, tools for the operating system. These simple tools in the first chapter can go a long way to improving the security of the operating systems. From there, the chapters go through increasingly more complex tools and the problems that they are designed to confront. These include firewalls, port scanners, vulnerability scanners, network sniffers, IDS (Intrusion Detection Systems), analysis and management tools, encryption tools, wireless tools, and forensic tools.

The book gives a good discussion of why you need a particular tool, how to get it, set it up, use it, and make the most of it. Each chapter is peppered with tips and traps about the tools, a very useful thing for the harried security admin. I found Chapter 8, "Analysis and Management Tools" particularly good. Snort is a great tool but sometimes, using it is like trying to drink from a fire hose. What you need is a way to archive all that data and review it in some comprehensible manner. Chapter 8 describes how to due this using several OSS tools including ACID and MySQL. Following Mr. Howlett's steps, you'll have a management console that will aid you analysis and get the notice of your management.

I also liked Chapter 10, "Wireless Tools." Let's face it, wireless networks are hot and show no signs of cooling down anytime soon. They are also a squeaky wheel when it comes to needing oil to keep things quiet. Management can get very nervous about wireless networks and what you don't know can really hurt you. This chapter gives the security admin the tools to make sure that any wireless network in the company is secure and that there aren't any wireless networks you don't know about.

And then there's the CDROM included with the book. You could spend hours burning up the bandwidth searching the 'net to get all the tools in the book. Prentice Hall has made it easy for you by including a CDROM of all the tools described in the book right at your finger tips.

At 578 pages, "Open Source Security Tools" is chocked full of tools, tips, and techniques that any security admin can use to solve the types of problems he/she may face. The choice of tools is excellent, the organizational structure of the book is good and the Mr Howlett's writing style is easy to follow and quite humorous at times. I can offer only two suggestions about the book for future editions. One is if the CDROM were a live distro like Knoppix that you could pop into a system and run the tools straight away. The other is if the book were bound in a "lie flat" format for easier reading and use at the desk.

Get the book, use the tools, make your systems more secure, and your job easier.

This book provides a good overview of security tools. It could help readers get started by explaining security concepts and stepping the reader through installation of useful tools. (The book includes a CD containing the utilities covered in the text.) It doesn't however, give good coverage to interpreting the results of scans and monitoring.

About 1/4 to 1/3 of the book is wasted on appendices of readily available information. GPL and BSD licenses, well-known port numbers, and a huge list of Nessus plug-ins. The space might have been better utilized by providing coverage of virus scanners or even common application alternatives that are more resistant to attack. On the positive side, the information is there so you won't need to look for it on the Web.

I like the fact that the book covers utilities for both Linux and Windows. And the fact that the utilities are free and Open Source, of course. Just using one of the utilities covered in the book would save you many times the cost of the book.

I learned a few new tricks from this book even though I was already familiar with many of the utilities and concepts.

This book is an excellent resource to help readers understand what open source tools are available to address every dimension of securing a computing infrastructure.

What I liked best about this book is that it did not assume an already-existing base of knowledge in the reader. Other books present information that assumes the reader already understands the topic, and therefor only needs the details of how to use the tool being discussed. Howlett's book provides a graduated discussion of every area, enabling a beginner to start from scratch and an experienced reader to glean the important details.

Also outstanding about this book is the fact that it covers pretty much all the areas of security an admin will need to address. If you work through this book, you can be pretty sure that you've covered all your bases.

Because of that, the book is like a survey, rather than an exhaustive discussion of any one area. However, the author always provides pointers to other places the reader can go for deeper material. I think this is a great way to organize material and really enjoyed the book because of it.

Overall, this is a great contribution to a critical area of computing.

I consider myself a developer rather than system admin. But I enjoyed and learned quite a bit. I read this book in one 7 hours bus journey. It is very good on introducing new topics. It teaches you how to use programs and give recommandations.
I think my money is well spent.

Think it, this way. When you start to learn something new, you are bombarded with a lot of buzzwords and jargon. This book will teach you most of this buzzwords and you will learn quite a lot in reading this book. A internet search about tools will bring you more similar tools and new learning points.

As I said in the title, this books is about beginners. If you are a expert, I do not think you will gain a lot from this book.

Use this book once you have Pence's basic HTML book down. It will provide many new tools to spruce up your exist web programming.

It is a great hands on textbook. The author did a great job conveying concepts. Easy to understand especially talking about codes. However a lot of typing error and project data or instructional errors. Misspelled in a lot of places. Information inconsistency. Requires professional editing services. I think the author should continue to write these book. Pence is a good writer but need to make sure information, data or examples are consistent. It hinders the student when trying to do the projects.

This book teaches what it claims to teach. It teaches CSS 1 for everyday tasks you would perform. It also teaches you how to create entire layouts using CSS. I strongly recommend this book to those who have just learned HTML and want to go ahead. This book also gives overview of very basics of CSS 2.

The book is well structured and includes hints, tips and other similar helpful stuff along the way.

Of course reading a book does not really make you a master unless you think and work hard yourself as well. So if you know HTML then this shud be your next step.

This book covers basic CSS. It succeeds in offering a very gentle and fairly comprehensive overview of CSS1 features, with some CSS2. However, his constant warning about the lack of robust support for CSS in browsers is somewhat dated and tiring. The book is also full of annoying typos that at times prevent examples from working--a missing period here, a misplaced semi-colon there. Perhaps to make the chapters (called "Modules" here) independent, there is quite a bit of repetition of the same ideas in many chapters. The gradual introduction of CSS syntax and techniques also seems to incourage the author to use examples that mix CSS and traditional html in ways that are not good CSS practice, just apparantely oversimplified examples to make simple points about transitioning from HTML to specific CSS features. That distinction could be lost on a lot beginners who don't get a more solid understanding of how to use CSS to build more complete and consistent pages and websites. I therefore wish the author would have included more comprehensive examples, rather than lots of smaller out-of-context and disconnected ones. This book is not terrible. I just think you could probably do better now. I would give it 2 1/2 stars if I could.

I swear the author of this book goes out of his way to make its readers feel incompetent. While full of useful information, this book is also just as full of typos and inconsistancies.

Do you want to know how frustrating it is to try and re-create a page using the code given to you in a book, have the page come out looking nothing like the example in said book, then finding out the reason for the discrepency is because the author actually coded their example differently? Well there's plenty of opportunities in this book!

I now have to learn inline CSS which I believe might have been covered to some extent in this book. I can't remember. That's how badly I want to forget this book! I'm sticking with CSS for Dummies!

I have the Developers Guide for D2,D4 and D6. D2 Guide was the most imformative. Since then the books have been only for newbies. For someone writing an application, the book doesn't do anything to help resolve a coding problem. The only help I have gotten from it was the usage of bookmarks. I have jumped into it a number of time, but came out everytime with a zero.

This is an excellent book, covers the entire Delphi 6 product about as well as any single book could. The chapters on the COM related technologies are very helpful. The New Internet features of Delphi 6 are also given in depth treatment. If you do Delphi 6, this book should be within reach at all times.

I am only a third of the way through this huge tome; but my opinion is confirmed. This is the book that Borland should be shipping instead of their Developer's Guide. This covers much of the same information with clearer examples and much better organization. It even has the same cover colors!

This book is neither exciting or wonderful. But for intermediate to advanced software instruction it does a more than adequate job.

I took away a rating star for getting too densely into some esoteric aspects of Threads and Component creation while skipping over some of the necessary basics. Neither the Borland Developer's Guide, nor this book, have much to say about graphical Form design or development.
I would think that many more developers are using Delphi to create user interfaces and displaying database information than create multi-threaded components.

The Borland Developer's Guide is very inconsistent. It is obviously written by a committee. Some parts have apparently been revised many times but have never been rewritten (sort of like a lot of corporate code). Some parts are excellent and some parts are terrible. The Devloper's Guide should be sold as a sleep inducer.

I love Delphi and have used every version from 1 to 6. I am studying for Borland Certification. But Borland does a lackluster job with documentation and examples. In the on-line help the examples given are usually extremely short and often irrelevant to the task at hand. I suspect that the on-line help and the Developer's Guide are written by the same people.

Simply put, if you want to not only learn Delphi, but learn some professional development tricks that can take you a long time to learn on your own or you want to learn how to be a better Delphi developer, you have to read this book. If you just want to learn Delphi in-and-of-its-own, then the Borland developer's guide is enough.

Pacheco, et al have included a lot of important, "real-world" and useable knowledge in this book and I know many people that overlook the breadth of knowledege imparted in its pages.

Read this if you want to be more than just a "Delphi" developer.

~ Michael Nigohosian, author - "The Secret Path to Contract Programming Riches: An Expert Consultant's Step-by-Step Guide That..."

As I read through the pages in "Delphi 6 Developers Guide", I simply learned more than I expected (about Delphi 6). It compares with other programming languages, it has a CD included which contains All of the examples used in the book, and it covers everything you can do in Delphi 6.

Chapter 2 in the book gives you a nice review of the what you need to now to continue the book (I am happy that they included it); The Object Pascal Language.

In other words: I love the book, and I always use it as a reference book, if I forget what something is or how to use it. I highly recommend this book to everyone who wants to become a better Delphi programmer or just to those who want to know Delphi 6 better!

Very well written; Easy to understand; Excellent book! Get it!

Uselfull for experienced people in the field. You are expected to know the subject early on. the book mostly provied an example for each of the subjects and explains them tersly. This wasen't what i expected

This is a good book if you know statistical analysis. Do you know what to use, when and where? If you do, this book is good because if you are going to use SAS for analysis you have got to know your statistics. What good would FORTRAN be if you didn't know Algebra? You need both.

The authors covered many topics in applied statistics, but they didn't mention anything about time series analysis. I am disappointed after reading this book. The biggest problem with this book is that it's overly simplistic - typically only one technique is illustrated for each topic - for example, in cluster analysis, only hierarchical clustering was mentioned and there was nothing about partitional algorithm. The authors only used very small datasets, which ignored the biggest power of SAS, the ability to handle large datasets. The authors also printed all raw datasets in the book, which took quite a bit of space.

The authors should read Venables and Ripley's Modern Applied Statistics with SPlus first. Venables/Ripley made a great example on how to write an applied statistics book using a specific software.

Brian Everitt is the author of several very well-written statistical texts. Among them he has written a number that show how to implement statistical analyses usimg statistical software packages. This second edition of "A Handbook of Statistical Analyses using SAS" he has coauthored with Geoff Der.
As a SAS user, I find this book very handy along with other similar texts that I have on the use of SAS. What is particularly good about this book is that it serves as a guide to the use of various SAS procedures and also as an illustration of appropriate statistical approaches to real applications using SAS.

It starts out with a nice introduction to the SAS prrogramming language and its syntax and progresses through simple descriptive statistics to categorical data analysis to regression and analysis of variance and then on to more advanced topics, including survival analysis, logistic regression, generalized linear models,longitudinal data analysis, principle components, factor analysis and cluster analysis. Appendices provide SAS MACROs and SAS solutions to exercises in the text.

What is particularly good about this book, that may set it apart from some of the others, is the expert statistical advice about the implementation and interpretation of results in SAS. They provide excellent scholarly references to the statistical literature to support their advice. As an example, I particularly liked their discussion of Type I and Type III sum of squares in the analysis of variance. They give a clear explanation of what each means and when they are equivalent and when they are different. In addition, they present their own view as to which is the appropriate one to use in given situations and support their view with quotes from other researchers. Opposing positions are also mentioned and referenced.

This is a nice book if you know the subject from another book ! - otherwise the explanation is limited.