Software Books

I always start with reading a MCSE for dummies when I am preparing for an exam. This one is the best so far and after taking the exam I can say that this book is all you need.
I used other materials as well because there were some objectives that I did not have experience with.
I scored 790 and that was more than I expected.

I found this book full of information without drowning it's readers in useless jargon. Some of the content was covered only briefly, but with some hands on learning and this book, passing the test was a breaze!

As a Microsoft Instructor, I recommend this book to all of my students. It cuts through the fluff and crud that Microsoft usually tacks on to the courses and gets to the meat and potatoes of what Active Directory is all about. Several students have used this besides my class and have blown the test away. Check out the author's exam tips to save yourself some headaches.

This book does a fantastic job preparing you for the exam 70-217. I am currently an NT 4.0 MCSE aspiring to be a Windows 2000 MCSE and wouldn't of been able to pass this exam with out this book. The author did an wonderful job helping me understand the complex features of Active Directory like group policies and remote install services. Which by the way are hit hard on the exam. I recommend this book to everyone looking to get certified in Windows 2000.

I passed 70-217 today using this book. I scored an 800 and something. This book did a great job of covering the material that MS tests about.

My review may be biased, because I really enjoyed this book.
This book is well written and instead of directly heading to the technical aspects of Sharepoint, it goes and starts with the problems that are most likely to kill a Sharepoint project: change resistance, politics and conflict management.
However it doesn't stop there. The book digs deep into every aspect of a SharePoint project lifecycle from envisioning to deployment. This book is a must read for software architects.
PROS:
1) Full of effective recommendations on how to get the most of SharePoint.
2) Solid advice on how to manage SharePoint projects.
CON:
1)It may be overwhelming to new SharePoint players. If you are new to SharePoint consider reading the chapters relevant in each phase of the project.
2) If you are looking for technical depth and how-to practices, you won't find them here.

My own Sharepoint 2007 book came out recently and so I have been constantly checking the Amazon US "hit parade" to see how it's been doing.

Well it's doing OK, but the book which at the moment seems to be selling in vast quantities is this MOSS 2007 Best Practices book.

Now I'll admit that before I got a copy for myself I was hard put to understand why. After all this was a book by the two people (Bill English and Ben Curry) who had (organised or) written the two existing Sharepoint Administrator Books from Microsoft Press - the massive (and, through the many authors, slightly unbalanced) Administrator's Companion and the small, but full of quality information "Administrator's Pocket Consultant - so what else could there be in this one ?

Actually there's a lot because this is probably a completely different book to any of the - by now almost 100 - SharePoint 2007 books that have gone before.

It's probably the first one that you can **and should** read without having a computer handy.

The book doesn't concentrate on teaching you how to do things - which is naturally what most of the other books do - but instead concentrates on making you THINK. Think, that is, about your options BEFORE you do things.

The other thing I've noticed is that it's the kind of book where you can dive into a topic that's maybe only a part of a section of a chapter and read just that and you will have learned something useful.

My favorite example of that is the few pages in the Document Management chapter that discuss whether or not you should use SharePoint (document libraries) as a replace for a File Server system. First there's the single line with the answer (No) but that's followed by some indication of what could be moved and what not and why. These are inter-spaced with several in-boxes containing examples from the real-world - one of which to my delight (and this IS a Microsoft Press book) actually suggested that in certain circumstances you should keep your non-Microsoft application and NOT move to SharePoint 2007!

In fact the only thing I found to object to in that section of the text was the fact that whereas "SharePoint Server" had been given its "2007" to complete the product name (unnecessary - there isn't any other "SharePoint Server"), Windows SharePoint Services had been left without it's (essential) "3.0". This comment, however, is rather like the car tests of old where the car was highly praised in all essential details but for balance it was mentioned that the ash tray was badly located!

The only other aspect I have a problem with is that it is 800 pages thick. As it's the kind of book that in my opinion you should carry around with you and just read bits of in odd moments, it's a pity that it's not thinner and lighter and is instead the size and weight of book that is more suited to being permanently located on the desk next to the computer.

Microsoft Press France actually did make two volumes out of the 1000 page Administrator's Companion when they created the French language translation of that, so it's possible and it's a pity to my mind that Microsoft Press US didn't make two volumes out of this. It would need those two 400 page volumes because there is good stuff throughout, but to my mind this book cries out to be as easy to carry around as the Pocket Consultant is and it isn't.

Maybe they are planning a Kindle version. That would at least help US readers take this "book" with them everywhere.

This is a Must-read for anyone in a SharePoint role. It is written for both technical personnel and business value reviews. Great strategic advice, insightful use of experience. Way to go, Microsoft Press! If this series continues as well written as this book, it should be awesome.

When deploying SharePoint, it is critical to plan for not only what you need now, but for how it will grow and scale down the road, especially when Document Management is involved. If you don't plan adequately for searchability, scalability, or disaster recovery, you can easily run into problems.

One criticism I have had of many SharePoint books is that they are written from a technical perspective and explain how to install and configure SharePoint, but they gloss over the critical planning stages or the best practices for scalability.

As the name of this book indicates, this is a very thorough guide covering the best practices for planning, deploying, optimizing, and organizing SharePoint. This book is not necessarily intended to give you step-by-step instructions for installing SharePoint, but rather cover the full lifecycle of a SharePoint deployment and give you best practice recommendations. The layout and organization of the book is very logical, making it easy to quickly find what you are looking for. It covers both Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and MOSS 2007. It is written to be accessible by anyone on a team evaluating or implementing SharePoint, or anyone who just wants to learn more about it.

The book is broken into the following sections:

Introduction--includes an overview of the various SharePoint Technologies, how to determine which you need, and how SharePoint will help your business.

Part I--Planning--This is not just about planning for the IT infrastructure, but more about planning for the impact that SharePoint will have on your organization, such as dealing with push-back from users after moving away from shared folders to SharePoint document libraries and breaking down departmental "information kingdoms."

Part II--Building--This section gets into best practices for building your environment, including content management strategies, the role of custom development, and dev and test environments, including replication of content between environments.

Part III--Deploying--This section has a great discussion about organizing your content and search/crawling strategy to optimize searchability for your content, security of content, business intelligence, and intranet/extranet/internet deployment scenarios.

Part IV--Operating--This section has great tips on availability, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and performance monitoring.

What I appreciated most about this book is it is very readable and does not include a lot of "fluff," just straightforward best practices. For example, in Chapter 8, the section on should SharePoint replace file servers is very straightforward about the limitation of SharePoint and when file servers should still be used.

If you are someone new to SharePoint or a System Administrator charged with deploying SharePoint, this book may leave you wanting more--it is not designed to be a how-to book; however, it does include many good recommendations for additional resources.

This is a must-have book for any serious SharePoint administrators. The topics are well laid out and the authors provide excellent explanations. Examples and authors insight into various topics are very valuable. I definitely recommend this book for any SharePoint Administrator during the early phases of any SharePoint implementation. The Best Practices suggested by the authors would definitely help you to deploy a successful SharePoint solution.

The Companion CD contains sample project plan, project charter, DDoc etc that are very useful to SharePoint Administrators.

Excerpt from C# Online.NET Review (wiki.CSharp-Online.NET):
"This book is the authoritative reference to the .NET Framework libraries: Base Class Library (BCL) and Extended Numerics Library. Each type has its own chapter with the following features;

- Header - namespace name, type name, library name.
- Type summary - C# declaration syntax for all members.
- Type description - detailed usage description.
- Annotations - annotations by key Microsoft design team members including Anders Hejlsberg.
- Example - C# source code and program output."

Out of all of the technical books I own, this book is by far one of the best. It covers most of the areas .NET developers will encounter during development. It clearly tells you the information in a easy to understand focused manner.

The other reviewers didn't left too much to say. So I'll remember a credit card TV ad:
SLAR volume 1: $42.89
Shipping & Handling: $12.98
Having BCL authors commenting on types, design decisions, dos and don'ts: priceless.
You can find references about the BCL on innumerous places. For an insiders perspective, SLAR.

Looking for a handy reference for the .NET Framework classes?

If you are looking for a handy reference style book for the .NET Framework BCL (Base Class Library) then look no further. This book is packed to the brim with information, code samples and other goodies. Of coarse you can find this sort of information on MSDN, but wouldn't it be nice to have a well laid out hard-copy on your desk?

This book comes with a couple of really handy tools. First, you get a pretty handy .NET Framework map, which is a pretty large poster that maps out the BCL nicely. Also, you get a really nice CD which includes a .pdf file with almost 4000 pages (it's like a super-detailed version of the book). That's not it - the CD also has a HUGE library of code samples. The CD alone is worth the price in my opinion.

I am very happy with this purchase, I only wish I would have bought it sooner. I am very much looking forward to the next volume!

Having been an avid reader of Brad Abrams blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/brada) for a year and a half, I was eagerly anticipating this book from the moment it was announced; it didn't disappoint. The SLAR provides an extensive description and example of each type, as well as comments from the likes of Anders Hejlsberg, Kit George, Jeffrey Richter and Brad Abrams himself. These comments provide hints and clues into the inner workings of the Base Class Library (BCL) types and why Microsoft chose to implement types in certain ways. This book was an interesting read and like Sean below, I am also left wanting more. However, with Volume 2 on the horizon, I enthusiastically wait...

I bought this book for a class but will definitely keep it afterwards. A lot of well organized information on computer security, from policy to implementation.

This book wasn't required, but suggested for one of my classes. I am so glad that I bought it. I'll be referencing it for years. So much info in it. Why is it so cheap?

Network Security: The Complete Reference is simply an awesome security book.

It has just about everything you need to know when it comes to infosec.

A true bible for network security. Also covered are items on risk management, network security policies etc. The book includes simple to advanced topics on network security

I'm working in Information Security, and I was looking for a good security book, fortunately my decision was the best. This book is very complete and not only explain the concepts of network security but Information Security in the general context. The topics are technical as well as administrative. Explain how the security should be implemented and assessed or audited. I really improved my knowledge and my productivity in my job.

I wanted to write a quick blurb about this little book that has gone a long way towards teaching me proper design.

I've been dabbling seriously in graphic design for about a year now and find it one of the most frustrating things I've ever done and also one of the most satisfying. It's very subjective, hard to describe, very time consuming, very sensitive, and totally maddening. When it works, it really works but when it doesn't work, it shows you the highest level of frustration possible.

Robin explains all the basics very well which puts you in a position to begin to experiment. If you just stick yourself in front of Photoshop and try to bang out a business card or a menu or a technical document (which you really wouldn't do in Photoshop), it's probably not going to work out well unless you've had some experience. If, however, you read this little guide and try it, you're going to have a few more ideas and at least understand the constraint you're working with in terms of color, alignment, etc.

This book is great for people without any experience in design who want to improve the way their documents, webpages, application screens, and printed material looks. You're not going to win any contests with this knowledge (and neither are her examples) but what you produce will immediately look better. The writing style is a bit goofy but I use what I learned every day in everything I produce from graffiti to webpages to technical documents to resumes.

Robin Williams' books are definitely an essential ingredient in any graphic designer's library. Everything is explained clearly and simply in terms that are easy to understand and often humorous. Williams gives excellent examples of the work she is describing. This book is an updated complete collection of her two best books: The Non-Designer's Design Book and The Non-Designer's Type Book. I highly recommend this book in particular, as so many designers do not have even the basic understanding of basic rules of design and page layout, or how to work with type and typography. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

This is one of the best books I have ever purchased in my life. I love reading it and studying the examples.
This book is the marriage of two books in one.

I have an educational background in Visual Communications Technology, however my heart is in graphic design. I bought this book because I learned so much from Robin's earlier book, The Max Is Not a Typewriter. This book is excellent. She goes into detail concerning design principles with excellent examples. The second book is very detailed concerning the art of typography and the many punctuation mark methods used in the past by professional type setters. Lastly, she provides excellent examples to help the beginner designer learn how to become a professional graphic designer.

I have taken as many graphic design classes as I could as an undergraduate student. Yet I could not get admittance into the typography classes. I will say that the information in this second book is educating me in the art of typography so much so, that I do not feel a need to take a course in it. I will now purchase Robins Design Workshop Book, which is written for new graphic designers.

I can honestly say that this book is great. It is so refreshing to purchase a book in which the author not only cares about good design, but is willing to share her knowledge and expertise, as well as the expertise of her her design associates, of which she give credit to in her captions when she used the word, "we".

If you purchase this book, I am sure your will not regret it.

in other words, it makes sense, so you remember the why and therefore the how. i highlighted and dog eared pages, and then didn't even need to look back and reference because it stuck.

I just can't say enough about how much this book has helped me. I've been writing copy for promotional materials as part of my job for years, and I assumed knowing how to put stuff on a brochure or flier and print it out was enough. I had no idea how dull and uninspired my designs were until I picked up this book. This is the third book I've purchased by Robin and I think I learned more from this one than the two on web design. If you're looking for an in depth explanation of what works, why it works, and what DOESN'T work, this is the book for you. It's concise and comprehensive and I'll be using it as the first reference book I pull from the shelf from now on.

As all colleges do, we offer adult evening classes on programs which our advisory board recommends. This semester, we offered our first evening SolidWorks CSWA Certification program. To my surprise, the class was filled in four days with 20 students, some from industry, and some from our engineering program.

I use the SolidWorks CSWA Certification Guide in class. The book is a comprehensive review and practice package for the certification. Every chapter focuses your study and tests your knowledge of the subject through specially designed assessment exercises. What is especially great about this book is that it includes self study sections with the initial and final models.

For anybody starting to prepare for the CSWA exam, this is the book you should be looking at.

Very imformative I learnt something the first time I opened the book, recommend to all.

I've been using Engineering Design with SolidWorks by Planchard and Planchard in my classroom for the past few years. In my opinion, this is one of the finest SolidWorks books on the market today. As an instructor, I can appreciate when an author/s writes a brilliant user friendly book with clear step by step procedures and illustrations to educate the student. This makes my life in the classroom a lot easier....

This fall, my students requested to take the CSWA Certification exam. I had my students purchase this book which we used for the exam preparation. The students enjoyed the book immensely. The book is focused on the exam, by key categories with many examples and exercises. I would not recommend this book for anyone who does not have at least six to eight months of SolidWorks knowledge. The CSWA exam is not an easy exam, but like any industry certification, it provides a tangible measurement to the skill sets of the student in 3D CAD. Well done.

I enjoy the modeling techniques presented in the book which I did not encounter in my Solidworks training; it is always a good practice to learn for any software from different prospective. So this book does not only prepare you to the exam it also teaches you the most effective and smartest modeling techniques.

I pass the exam with 80% mark, but be careful guys, the parts in the exam was NOT easy.

This is a great book for SolidWorks users. I learned many new techniques going though the exersizes. In spite of four years of industrial exprience using SolidWorks, I would have failed the CSWA exam without this book, becasue many of the modleing methods on the test are not used in my industry.

Best off shore book out there... great info...lays it out pretty straight. Easy to understand and follow.

This volume is well-written, lucid and easy to follow. The authors have done an excellent job in providing an explanatory framework for offshoring, as well as giving a realistic look at potential costs and benefits. Their list of suggestions and guidelines is comprehensive. The book avoids the trap of becoming overly technical and steers clear of being specific to any particular country or industry. I was pleasantly surprised to find chapters on such important topics as country-specific legal pitfalls, privacy rights issues, and how to sell the idea of offshoring inside a company resistant to the idea. The authors livened up their material with numerous case studies to illustrate key points. The level of detail they provided on how to write a solid Service Level Agreement (SLA) was also impressive.

Overall this was an excellent volume, and the only two objections that I have are both minor. First, the book could benefit from a small amount of updating; some of the data, especially in Part I of book, dates from 2001-2003. In any other discipline, that would still be considered fairly recent. However in technology, that verges on being stale. In addition, that was the period of the global downturn in IT. The authors' data would be obviously impacted by that global economic event. To be clear: I do not believe that any of the authors' points would be reversed by updating the data. On the contrary, I expect that current data would only strengthen their points, as the trends they identified have only accelerated since the book's first publication. Second, as noted earlier the authors provided several cases of companies who tried offshoring and either failed, or suffered setbacks. Given the fact that offshoring is not the cure-all for every company, it would have also been useful to see a couple of case studies of companies who investigated the offshoring option but decided against it. It is just as important to understand why a company declines to offshore, as it is to understand why they would undertake to do so.

This is a book that I wish I had read before working on several offshoring/outsourcing projects for former employers. It is highly recommended for anyone who is contemplating the offshore option, or who has recently been put in charge of making such an option successful.

This is a rather comprehensive look of why software
development gets offshored and of how to do it right
should you decide to try it yourself. The authors are
an academic and a consultant, making the book an
appealing blend of evidence-based theory and practical
advice. The focus is primarily on software
development, with some attention paid to such
IT-enabled services as call centers.

The two most appealing things about the book are its
maintenance of a practical tone and its
comprehensiveness in identifying the many things you
need to get right to get offshoring to work right. For
example, international projects tend to get into
serious difficulty if the customer is unwilling or
unable to provide sufficiently detailed specifications
to bring task ambiguity down to the level that can
survive the communications problems caused by distance
and cultural differences.

The authors put a lot of effort into explaining why
some countries have been successful at growing an
offshoring business and others not. This insight is
valuable for companies into offshoring for the long
haul, as you need to understand how wage rates and
technology depth wax and wane over time.

The book also has a number of chapters written by
specialists in such important ancillary areas as
international contacts and managing cultural
differences. All in all, a very useful book.

This book does an excellent job of linking offshoring to a company's business strategy. Many companies are pursuing offshoring to take advantage of lower wages in other countries. Chapter 5 shows how cost reduction can be strategic, and the other potential non-cost-based advantages of offshoring. Its treatment is also balanced, showing the downsides, costs, and risks of offshoring as well as the benefits. And it talks about choices companies have in implementing an offshore strategy.

I am Executive Director of a research center on process management, and we have done research in this area. I know and respect Erran Carmel, the author, and Peter Schumacher, who co-authored Chapter 5. Peter's work is grounded in consulting that he has done at the Value Leadership Group, which advises companies on how to think beyond cost cutting and view offshore as an opportunity to build unique competitive advantage.

"All things being equal, any manager would prefer to manage a co-located team rather than a distributed team," how true. Authors Erran Carmel and Paul Tija believe that IT managers need to feel as comfortable with managing distributed teams as they are with co-located teams. They intend their book, Offshoring Information Technology, to act as a primer for IT professionals, students and teachers in business and technology programs as well as policy makers and analysts in and around governments. That is a lot of end parties to satisfy, so does this book hit the mark.

Erran Carmel had previously authored, "Global Software Development Teams", in 1999, and has deeply focused on the topic of developing software with global teams for years. It is obvious that a researcher was one of the co-authors, as very accurate listing of references are made, more than you usually see in many of these books on offshoring. These references provide another list of papers and publications that the reader can use for further research. The book makes excellent use of cross-referencing between topics, which also adds to its usage as a good reference tool.

Right off I like the preface in which the authors define the terms offshoring and outsourcing. Since I agree there are many strange definitions leading everyone to think outsourcing means offshoring, this needed to be included. The offshore stage model, previously defined by one of the authors in a research paper, puts the offshoring numbers in to perspective by dividing it in to stages and the number of Fortune 1000 companies currently using the offshoring model. These numbers may be surprising to some, as the actual usage is much smaller than is played up in the media.

The book is full of case studies, most of them fairly interesting. The case study in chapter 9 is meant to show the difference between working in a low-content country versus a high-context country like India. I, along with I believe many practitioners, will look on this case study and say that Christina (not her real name) was not a good manager, no matter where she was working, if they thought dumping a bunch of new work on a team was not going to impact the schedule. Low-content or high-content country aside, the project manager made too many assumptions and may not be the experienced project manager that she thought she was. I think others will see the same when they read it. Another real life case study gives an example of one company trying to do a comparison between countries; what do we learn from it, price wins out over quality in the end, which in reality is often the case.

The emphasis on knowledge transfer is exceptional. This area is often glossed over in many offshoring books. Chapter 7 which is dedicated to managing the offshore transition defines different ways of undertaking knowledge transfer. One of the ways that they describe is to have the developers work in different positions, i.e. put them in to the user's position, so they understand why the user works the way they do. They state that this is new. I started out in banking twenty years ago and this is how I started out, working the user positions of the applications which I was then to develop and maintain, so I do not think this concept is new. But perhaps the authors mean this is new for offshore outsourcing. In all though this section on knowledge transfer is valuable and looks at all of the different types of transfer: skills, process, domain and work and cultural norms. Good emphasis on the fact that the easiest one to achieve is skills transfer, but the other ones are more difficult to achieve. For example it is more difficult to have someone work on dispute resolutions app for credit card processing, when they do not understand how credit card processing works.

Chapter 8 on overcoming distance and time emphasizes and outlines virtual team management. Much of the information presented is included in many books on virtual team management, but as this book is a primer for IT managers, it has a place in this book. Readers will find the suggestions on iteration development; formalizing the iterations and frequency of iterations particularly helpful in a real situation. I whole heartedly agree that this is what builds trust. If you have frequent deliverables, and the remote team meets those frequent deliverables, i.e. they do what they say they are going to do, trust is built. The authors also define the range of deliverables and that it can be anything: plans, outlines, prototypes, simulations, design reviews, test results, software code reviews, module integration and documents. Again I wholeheartedly agree. This will be an area that many IT managers may have to get used to because at first to some it seems like "make work", when in fact all of what is delivered from the offshore is and should be useful for fulfilling the project.

There are a few situations where puzzling statements are used such as the quote on pg. 28, just before a section on IT-enabled services. The quote refers to E-loan and its well-documented offering to its clients of a couple of years ago. At the time E-loan offered the users of their loan service to Press 1 if they wanted their loan processed in 1 day in an Indian center, or to press 2 if they wanted their loan processed in the US which included the statement that the processing may then take longer. In March of 2004, this was written up by many Indian firms as admittance by a US company that Indians are faster. It seems strange that the authors use this statement with no no explanation; for example was it really an admittance that Indians are faster or did it really mean E-loan had 4 times as many processors in India versus the number in the US, thus accounting for how loans could be processed faster there. Or were they working round the clock in India versus only one shift in the US, another reason for the difference. In other areas the authors go to great lengths to explain issues which are reported in the press, such as how offshore labor rates are reported in detail and what they really mean versus the actual total cost of ownership.

The book contains an excellent discussion on the different types of risk, very detailed, to a level not usually defined. Only one area, contractual risk, seemed to be lacking. The authors state that a buyer can mitigate contractual risk by signing a contract with a US company, if you are a US buyer, or with a UK company if you are a UK buyer, i.e. with a company which is also domiciled in your location versus in the offshore location only. The authors also refer to the chapter on Legal issues of offshoring where contractual risk will be further defined. In that chapter, however, only mention to reduce contractual risk is to work with providers who can provide a combination of onshore/offshore resources, thus enabling a buyer to access the provider's onshore resources if necessary. They seem to fail to mention one of the bigger issues; if the contract does go awry, even if you are dealing with the big Indian players, most of the assets that of that vendor are located in the offshore location. If any case, you will have to bring suit against that vendor in their home country. Large buyers already seem to be aware of this based on both outsourcing and vertical conferences I have attended over the last couple of years.

There were two areas where I thought more emphasis could have been made, if this is a book is really meant to assist IT professionals. One of these areas is helping the IT manager assess their own offshore readiness; how do they feel about the process, are they ready to change how they work, are they ready to manage by not walking around? The second area of missed opportunity is assisting IT professionals in defining what could be a new role for them in the global environment, for example by working in and/or managing the offshore office which is responsible for managing the onshore and offshore outsourcing for a client.

Offshoring Information Technology is an informative and educational book for IT managers looking to define their place in the offshoring world. The details provided on the offshoring process and through the case studies will make it easy for an IT professional to determine where they may need to gain additional knowledge to move their career forward. The book will be most useful and most familiar to those IT professionals currently working in or with large scale enterprises as most case studies and examples such as in total cost of ownership and the governance areas, use examples from large enterprises. This book is highly recommended for IT professionals who are looking at career development as well as those persons who are in a position to help their countries promote their outsourcing capabilities.

This book is a true student service for online learning and is a great step toward online student retention! It covers everything the online student would need to know in order to succeed in a self-paced, self-motivated, and technology dependant environment!!

I compared Online Student Skills and Strategies Handbook (Pearson Longman 2006) to E-Learning Companion A Student's Guide to Online Success (Houghton Mifflin 2005) in order to select a resourse to support distance learning. I found Online Student Skills and Strateiges Handbook much more useful, learner oriented and readily accessible. It includes large, clear screen captures to accompany step by step directions. It handles practical topics like using Rich Text Format (RTF), practicing netiquette, storing lessons in a binder, and submitting assignments. It also includes cross references to other relevant chapters in the handbook, and it includes other Internet resources for each chapter. In comparison, E-Learning seems too textbookish. While E-Learning has a useful glossary and index, Online Student Skills and Strategies has a glossary, index and Webliography.

This is a valuable resource for students interested in a successful on-line learning experience. The straightforward and practical examples should help guide everyone from novice to experienced.

I was very impressed with the format, content, attention to detail, step-by-step approach to help users work through technology, and the success-oriented focus of the text. The first chapter utilized an innovative and unique assessment to help users identify what they already know and what they will need to focus on to learn. The text is a well-designed and non-threatening resource for any online user.

I think this text is a practical and useful guide for both novice and experienced online students. The information is very well organized throughout with a couple great appendices containing websites and computer skill tips. The helpful screenshots and lay flat binding are a plus for use as you are working on the computer.

RMAN is the present and the future of Oracle solution for backup.
It has a simple concept, but a great variety of commands, by this way, as a solution for all the complexity inside the RMAN solution, Oracle Database 10g RMAN Backup & Recovery come as a special "friend" to help us discovering all posibilities inside Oracle RMAN software.

I had no idea about backup and recovery but after reading this book and trying out the examples, I can say with confidence I can recover a RMAN backed database. Written extremly well!!! One of the good technical boooks I have read....

We had to install and configure Oracle10g 4 node RAC with ASM+FLASHBACK and implement backup/recovery procedures using RMAN and Veritas Netbackup. This book covers everything I need to know in depth.

I had bought his book on Oracle 9i RMAN Backup and Recovery...
And very much impressed with the technical details and examples given in the book... Same way, the book on 10g also excels in technical depth and details...

Backup and Recovery is one of the most critical tasks that a DBA has to perform. Sadly, it is also one of the most misunderstood. RMAN should be the tool of choice for backup and recovery for Oracle databases. There is so much that can be done with RMAN.

What Robert and Matthew do is break it down piece by piece. There is a great intro and they build on that in subsequent chapters. If you want to link RMAN directly with your backup software (i.e. Veritas, EMC, Legato, etc..) then the authors show you how. I used the Veritas piece to link RMAN in and it worked flawlessly. They go over the latest features including block changing files (for faster incremental backups), merging level 1 and level 0 backups (for faster recoveries without the overhead of backing up the whole database), and even cover what the flash recovery area is and how to use it. There is so much great material packed in this book. Yeah, you can try and read Oracle's docs, but rather than just show you how to do it, the authors also teach you why to do it.

You can read this book chronologically or use it as a reference. The authors writing style make this book a great joy to read. They also include a lot of great examples in case you like to learn by seeing.

I would highly recommend this book if you are an Oracle DBA, whether you use RMAN or not. Afterall, RMAN is what you should be using :).

The strength of this book is its combination of breadth and completeness: there is working code (well beyond the toy stage) of a large number of different AI systems that cover a large subset of what is commonly considered AI.

The programming itself is rather basic, and very straightforward. In many places an advanced programmer would have avoided a global variable, unified code through the use of higher-order functions, had functions communicate through a shared local environment, created a lazy list, you name it.

The author avoids most of these more advanced approaches in order to present the ideas behind the approaches without being sidetracked into programming technique issues, and that is the correct choice for this book. Even as it is, there is already the duplicity of teaching Common Lisp and teaching AI programming.

That being said, the code in general is not bad at all, even though I wouldn't want my students to learn CL programming from it. The author has simply bent down to the level of, a good C programmer, and worked from there. His main intention being to teach AI programming approaches, he has spent much less time to raise the programming level of his audience.

Knowing the author's level of Lisp programming, I can't wait to see a book by his hand on how to use abstraction as an organising principle in programming.

I have no background in computer science or AI, but found myself needing to use Lisp for various creative and artistic purposes. I've spent a lot of money on books relating to Common Lisp, but I wish I had just gotten this one and Touretzky's "Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation." The particular strengths of this book are its detailed discussion of advanced topics, especially optimization, and the practical overview of current and historical AI topics through programming examples. Very clearly written.

This book is equally excellent regardless of whether you wish to regard it as:

a) A historical study of Artificial Intelligence, with USABLE examples of code, or

b) A book presenting techniques for programming in Common Lisp.

As a reference about Common Lisp, it is certainly lacking, but this is no great problem when both the Common Lisp HyperSpec and Steele's book are readily available in electronic form. It provides something more important: SIGNIFICANT examples, and significant discussions on WHY you would use various Lisp idioms, and, fairly often, discussions on HOW pieces of Common Lisp are likely to be implemented. Its discussion of an implementation of the LOOP macro, for instance, provides a very different point of view than the "references" to LOOP. (Contrast too with Graham's books, which largely deprecate the use of LOOP.)

From an AI perspective, it is also very good, providing WORKING SAMPLES for a whole lot of the historically significant AI problems, including Search, PLANNER, symbolic computation, and the likes.

It would be interesting to see parallel works from the following sorts of perspectives:

- The same sorts of AI problems solved using functional languages (e.g. - ML, Haskell), to allow contrasting the use of those more modern languages. Being more "purely functional" has merits; such languages commonly lack macros, which is something of a disadvantage.

- The use of CL to grapple with some other sorts of applications, notably random access to data [e.g. - databases] and rendition of output in HTML/SGML/XML [e.g. - web server].

This book has been called "The best book on programming ever written". I'd have to agree--it is certainly the best that I've ever read.

William Zinsser said, "The essence of writing is rewriting" and the same can be said for writing computer programs. Norvig's book presents this process--how the limitations of a program are overcome by revision and rewriting. What sets Norvig apart as a writer is that, amazingly enough, he can write about debugging (the most dreaded part of computer programming) and make it a fascinating read!

Lisp has been getting a higher profile lately because of essayists like Paul Graham and Philip Greenspun; in particular, Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming which states: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." So, should this book be read as an exhortation to return to Lisp as the preferred programming language?

Paradoxically, I think not. One third of the way through the book, Norvig shows us how to implement Prolog in Lisp. From then on out, most of the AI techniques he presents either directly use Prolog instead of Lisp (such as his excellent discussion of natural language processing using Prolog) or use Prolog as a base to build on (such as his discussions on knowledge representation).

From this we can abstract what I'd like to call Norvig's Corollary to Greenspun's Tenth Law of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated LISP program is going to contain a slow implementation of half of Prolog". I'm leaving out the "ad hoc", "bug-ridden" part of Greenspuns's law, because Norvig's programs are neither. But it is quite remarkable the degree to which, once having absorbed Prolog, Norvig uses Prolog as the basis for further development, rather than Lisp.

Is this a book about Prolog then? Again, no. What is the take-away message? It is this: as our world becomes more and more complex, and as the problems which programmers are facing become more and more complex, we have to program at a higher and higher level.

Norvig does not stop at just embedding Prolog in Lisp. He also shows us how to embed scheme as well. Excellent discussion on the mysterious call/cc function and on continuations.

In a capsule review, it is impossible to really give an overview of a 1,000 page book like this one. But the scope and heft of the volume really needs to be commented on: the programs presented in this book are like basis vectors, the totality of which nearly span the space of programming itself. In no way should this be considered "just an AI book" or "just a LISP book". This book transcends language, time, and subject matter. It is a programmer's book for the ages.

"Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" is one of the best books of computer science that I have ever read. I put it up there in the pantheon with "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". I have found more useful and mind expanding material in these case studies than I have in many other books on computer science. I highly recommend this book to anyone, even if they have never used Lisp.