Intranet Books

Mr. Siyan's book is technical and intended, as advertised, for the intermediate/advanced reader. As a student, studying for Novell's 540 Web server exam, I found chs. 3,4,and 14 the most helpful. These deal the with installation and administration of the Web Server and FTP services respectively. This book really shines though in its coverage of the scripting languages: CGI, PERL and Java. On the downside, you'll wade through alot of material to study for your CNE elective. Those on the CIP track may find the book more helpful. The editors of IDG books should have insisted on keeping Mr. Siyan's Eastern religious beliefs out of the text. It shows up in the screen shots and several long scripting examples. Really, I felt like I was being proselytized at times. Surely the author could have found more neutral material! Aside from these few criticisms, the author has produced a good introduction to scripting which deserves a wide audience.

The book does a good job at putting the "big" picture together; great style of technical writing.

The code presented in the book is very simplistic and not of much use in real life, even though it is appropriate for teaching purposes.

It is very aggresive while trying to cover too much ground in one book, leaving some empty holes at times. It does however accomplish its goal and main purpose of covering all neccesary technologies (at least the very basic ones) to deploy an intranet.

This is a book that can potentially help the person responsible for an intranet start-up or redesign. She/he may be internal responsible or external assisting consultant.

Pros:
A quick read; covers a lot of ground; will introduce you to the major issues and challenges in intranet development.
Cons:
For people who have been involved with IT/www projects, this book offers little new; several writers have contributed, and the result is an inconsistent flow with some redundancy; the text will cover so many topics (technology, project management, intranet concepts, extranets, mobile devices, usability, information architecture, and more), that a we never really get in depth.

Who will really benefit from this book:
Students, absolutely newcomers to the field, and those who, as bedtime reading, need a catch-up overview of the field.

This is one of the best books you can read for your intranet applications, it is a oranised very structurely.

I grabbed this from the company bookshelf to learn more about SharePoint and how I might use it to for simple document collaboration. I forced my self to read on even though things are not really explained and the reading is quite dry. I got to Chapter 6 and I had to quit....I still don't see any light.

I've read enough books to know that it may take another chapter or 2 before you start to 'get it', I never got any of it. The book basically goes right into site design from architecture and site design/layout. Problem is they skipped telling you just what all these things are....Portal(s), Area(s), primary site, sub site, sub area, Topics and many other SharePoint terms.

It's like they assume you know what all of these things are, maybe it's covered later. Problem I have is that I got to know what a 'widget' does before I can think about how to use it. Up through chapter 6 I have only vague ideas of what all these SharePoint things are and how I might use them.

Maybe a simple reordering of chapters could help. SharePoint in itself is confusing as well it consists of 2 things 'SharePoint Services' and SharePointPortal Server'.

I'm a developer going on 20 years of coding experience and quite a few books under the belt. While this book is not a 'coding' book I should be able to learn from it but I didn't. I have given up on very few books in my career and none recently.

When I first started working my current job, I was given this book. I have to say that this is an extremely boring book. It didn't engage me in any shape, form, or fashion. Learning SharePoint is already difficult and this book does not make it any easier. I am glad I didn't buy it.

I have had this book for almost a year now and read almost the whole thing. One aspect of this book which makes it a very worthwhile read is the clear differentiation which the authors maintain between Windows Sharepoint Services (free to implement) and Sharepoint Portal Server (can be VERY expensive.) Most Sharepoint books I have read fail to make this distinction and suffer greatly for it. I very much appreciated the clear differences between the products.

This book is a great primer for someone looking to get a Sharepoint implementation up and running (which I have been.) Understanding scalability, using farms, managing the databases are all covered in sufficient detail to be able to implement it yourself and have it survive use.

I was disappointed that the scope of the book wasn't wider. I would loved to have seen some developer information, or at least a list of resources. I would also liked to have seen more guidance on creating sites, organization of sites and other setup information. Perhaps a better title would have been Sharepoint 2003 Infrastructure Unleashed.

With those comments, I can also say that I'd buy another volume of this and appreciate the authors attention to detail, especially in clearly differentiating between the free and the expensive Sharepoint products.

The book (2nd edition) is good but don't get the eBook version. It's very irritating because you are allowed to print 30 pages in a month. Can you believe it? You will find more security restrictions that won't let you read the information pleasently as it should be.

This book is not worthy of the "Unleashed" series, which typically has stellar books. Mostly just marketing level advice with very little in-depth information. You can get more information out of a Google search.

this book isn't that bad as describe by the others readers who rated 1 star. In fact, it is elaborate some of the in-depth concept pretty well. unfortunately, this book doesn't surve the purpose of designing a real world applications. it's merely teach very fundamental of Asp.Net and doesn't really teach how to design an efficient and scalable asp.net application. I would rate more star if the title is Asp.Net in a nutshell

I got a used one so don't feel that bad. The explanation and the code samples are very poor. I would not recommend buying this one.

I read this book just after reading a really good C# book. This one paled in comparison. The writing is weak and hard to follow. I only made it about half way before I got bored and moved on.

If you're thinking about buying this book, don't. Go with a reputable publisher who puts out quality work like O'Reilly or Wrox. This book is a piece of trash. The only "interesting perspective" it provides is the nearly half of the book that is dedicated to praising the wonderous achievement that the .NET platform is. The author just can't get enough of telling people who already bought the book that .NET is better than Java and actually is an original idea. Well, he does a lot of this and very little of teaching the language. There are very few examples, and those that there are there aren't useful at all. The index is also terrible, making this book also worthless as a reference book. I really can't find any redeeming qualities about this book except that it's printed on fairly high quality paper. Far better than it deserves. If you're completely new to this, it might be useful as an introduction, but there are better books for that as well.

If you're thinking about buying this book, don't. Go with a reputable publisher who puts out quality work like O'Reilly or Wrox. This book is a piece of trash. The only "interesting perspective" it provides is the nearly half of the book that is dedicated to praising what a wonderous achievement the .NET platform is. The author just can't get enough of telling people who already bought the book that .NET is better than Java and actually is an original idea. Well, he does a lot of this and very little of teaching the language. There are very few examples, and those that are there aren't useful at all. The index is also terrible, making this book also worthless as a reference book. I really can't find any redeeming qualities about this book except that it's printed on fairly high quality paper. Far better than it deserves. If you're completely new to this, it might be useful as an introduction, but there are better books for that as well.

This book (especially the beginning) contains lots of unnecessary, story-like and useless text. I have read the first 70 pages and I hope the rest of the book is much better.

This is still the best book out there for developers looking to extend and customize SharePoint Portal Server. It provides detailed step-by-step instructions for customizing the UI and insight into the ways you should and should not use SPS. Highly recommended.

The information provided in this book is too general. I wish I had given up this book early before I spent so much time finishing the whole book. I did not know much about SharePoint Portal Server. After I read this book, I found that I still know little about it.

Don't bother buying the Resource Kit - buy this book instead. It explains the architecture and lets you know upfront what is and is not currently available in the 1.0 release of the product.

Hacks to provide functionality that should have been in the product are covered (although with strong warnings about no support from Microsoft).

If you've suddenly been handed a project involving SharePoint, buy this book! It will save you many hours of grief.

If you want to know how to install and configure the SharePoint out-of-the-box user experience, your expectations won't be met by this book. But, if you want to know the product inside and out (but especially inside!) then don't move an inch - your here!

There's no other place to get this detailed level of information - not even the resource kit! The more tedious parts come with click-by-click instructions. We are a Microsoft SharePoint ISV and have accomplished a number of significant SharePoint and Team Services implementations in both the Federal and commercial market. I wish I had this book before we started.

Yes, the book is technically challenging. It "gives away" a lot of the tips and tricks that it took several years to learn while developing knowledge-based applications over the Exchange storage system. It exposes these secrets so that just about any experienced developer can produce truly flexible, re-deployable knowledge applications and portals.

If you're afraid to skin your knees, stay in the sandbox.

This book contains lots of great pictures of web sites that have been completely re-designed since the writing of the book. Voila. If this is what you're looking for, then you'll be pleased with this book. However, if you're looking for more than that, look elsewhere. This book is a real disappiontment.

It seems that many of the more "flashy" designs described by Andres have given way to more usable designs that actually make sense to real people using / desiging sites today. While that book states that author has web design experience - it doesn't seem like he shares much of that with us. For example, the author will generally state that a particular site uses flash or uses animated gif's but give's little detail about how animated gif's could be best used in site design and site architecture.

The author spends most of his time criticizing sites and pointing out what he likes and doesn't like, which is fine. However, the author's tone is arrogant and self-absorbed. Additionally, the author ends chapters abrubptly, failing to guide the reader to the point that he might have been trying to make in that particular chapter. The only decent chapter in the book quite frankly is the chapter on hierarchical site organization (chapter one) and it's all downhill from there.

This is one of the worst books I've ever read on the subject of web design.

Since any designer wants to keep on top of what's going on in the industry, I thought it good to take a look at this book. I've gone from cover to cover a few times, but not to read it. After beginning I quickly realized the information is pretty basic and can pretty much be found by speaking with other's in the industry.

However, I did like some of the screenshots of various sites considered "great architecture." Often times, I flip through the book to generate a few ideas when putting together suggested views for sites in development.

In all, not much new information, but may be worth it if you're just starting out and just need to know or need information reinforced.

This is quite possibly the worst book I've ever read in my life.

I didn't realize someone could create something so self-congratulatory that they lost any and all vision of contradiction. There are examples of 'great architecture', complete with content hierarchy diagrams, that were obviously poorly thought out, if thought about at all. Common problems like separating support and marketing information, or placing/labeling company wide information have no formal identification or treatment.

Essentially this is a tour of 'sexy' sites made in 1998 - which wasn't really that much of a break through year for usability or architecture. If you want to see what happened when a mass of CDROM designers started making websites - this is the read for you...

Personally, I stole this book from the office just to ensure that some producer wouldn't read it and take it seriously... It's that nonsensical.

I've been reading all the rants about this book, and I only kind of disagree. It's certainly not about "Architecture" of web sites, as the name would have you believe. I bought it for its intended (but mis-named) purpose: I wanted to learn about UI and navigational considerations. It's an excellent book for that. It discusses solutions to different types of web site goals and how the site designers approached these challenges. One particularly useful example was Andres' evaluation of the (pre-redesign) Salon.com site. Andres considers each navigational element on the site (the home page's article layout, the bar navigation along the top, the related article information on the sides, and the base navigation along the bottom) and explains the reasoning behind each choice. Another example that specifically helped me in the design of my own website was the Braun/Gilette example. Andres discussed the virtues of having each sub-brand be in a page-style all its own.

Web UI books are difficult to write well, largely because the information is so timely and becomes outdated so quickly. The book has fantastic, full-color screenshots of each page in discussion so that, even if the page is no longer live on the web, it's still available for discussion.

It's probably the most valuable UI book on my shelves (and there are a lot). People who didn't like it had purchased it under the false pretense that it was an Architecture book. Well, it's *absolutely* not that. It's a Web UI Design book, and a really good one.

This is an incredibly disappointing book - all style no substance. I wonder if the author actually understands the basic concepts of web architecture.

This book provides a tour of some okay sites, and does point out a couple of nice features, but it doesn't go into any real architectural issues, either from an information or infrastructure standpoint.

It's ironic that Mr. Andres recognizes "Content is King" for web sites, but has failed to provide any real content for his book.

This book fails misserably at explaining anything. The examples disuaded me to purchase it only to find out that simple explanations about how it AI works are no where to be found. The examples themselves typically have no comments, even if they are several pages long. Later chapters provide more insight, however when you are looking to learn something, the "simpler" topics are glossed over.

The Java code also leaves a lot to be desired, it doesn't follow standard java naming conventions for variables and the style is so varied and terrible (sometimes instance variables are declared at the top, sometimes at the bottom) that reading the code becomes a chore (and all that without commentary.)

Some web pages on the net provide more useful information.

I never thought a book could cover so much ground on a such complex topic as Artificial Intelligence - and still be hands on and compact. The book is at the same time a great teach in programming with Java. Intelligent Applications for the Internet and Intranet is certainly an enjoyable book that you as a programmer can grow with. //Thomas Westergård

"Intelligent Java Applications" was my first introduction to neural networks and AI in general, when I bought the book a couple of years ago. It took an undergraduate neural modeling class at an Ivy League university before I appreciated what a lousy introduction to neural networks this book actually is. Watson glosses over all of the theoretical basis of neural networks, and does an inadequate job of explaining just what a neural network is and how it works. The author could have easily explained (in a paragraph) what a linear associator is, before launching into the more convoluted, multiple-layer back-prop algorithm that is presented in the book. If you want a real book on neural networks (along with neurophysiological, theoretical, and historical developments), I highly recommend "Introduction to Neural Networks" by James Anderson.

Watson also wastes paper by baby-stepping the reader through some useless GUI and networking packages that makes his code presentable (when run) but much more difficult to decipher. A useful AI tutorial would not be so tied to a specific language. Alas, I have a feeling that the Java reference, as well as the "For the Internet and Intranets" subtitle was a clever bait-and-switch tactic to sell more copies of this book. If you're interested in the function of AI rather than the theory (if, suppose, you're progamming a game), then this book might be useful. But I have a feeling that better resources exist if this is your avenue of interest.

I have not, as of yet, done much course-based or indepenent research on expert systems, genetic algorithms, character recognition, natural language processing, or any of the other topics that are covered in this book. But I have a feeling that, if I do, I'll find the rest of Watson's material similarly lacking.

This book fails miserably at explaining anything. The examples dissuaded me to purchase it only to find out that simple explanations about how it AI works are nowhere to be found (there is however superfluous and distracting commentary on simple Java things like Runnable, Applets, there's even networking code for a POP mail client which really ought to be delegated to support code outside from the book's topic). The examples themselves typically have no comments, even if they are several pages long. Later chapters provide more insight, however when you are looking to learn something, the "simpler" topics are glossed over.

The Java code also leaves a lot to be desired, it doesn't follow standard java naming conventions for instance variables and method names and the style is so varied and terrible (sometimes instance variables are declared at the top, sometimes at the bottom) that reading the code becomes a chore (and all that without commentary.

Some web pages on the net provide more useful information.

a bluff

It shoulnd't take that much plain common sense for the author to understand that he could have done a decent job updating the code contained in the book, and tat its installation work. I wonder what is the big deal about royalties and stuff the author mentioned in relation to it.

Apparently this book was out of press 1997. On page 343 "Using the CD-ROM" the author claims to have tested the code using the JDK 1.0 (really) and JDK 1.1. THe author also claims to keep code updates on his Web site, but then when you go there you find that, as he adjectively specifies, "some" code has been updated for Java 1.2 and Java 1.3, along with some poetic remarks like "code which age will be noticed" or something like that.

I even pondered about cleaning myself the whole code and sending it to the author, but it is not really worthy, you can find better Java code online about almost each of the chapters. There were only some stuff regarding wand writing mapping that you could go over in a Barnes and Nobel session.

If you are into the AI thing, read the procedings and specialized books. I think, and I am highly interested in the topic from a semiotic perspective myself, AI, is sort of science fiction, hype, ..., it hasn't evoled into something sensical yet. Big blue beating Kasparov isn't AI yet. Right on the first page of the introduction the author says that one of the problems AI tries to solve is the generation of " Creative thoughts exemplified by new and remarkable theorems in MAthematics... and novel theories in other sciences ..."

Sir, this is a core semantic problem not a sintactic one, you operate machines, design models, transmit data, etc. on a sintactic level by means of a physical carrier. I wonder what you are talking about there.

I returned the book whithin hours thinking, "If the author would at least have taken care of the code?"

I found this book to be really good and it gives a great overview of Java programming with JDBC. This book really has a lot of condensed material, and quickly covers a lot of areas. I was able to use the first application right off the bat to connect to a PostgreSQL database and do some simple queries. There is a lot to RDBMS accessed through JDBC, so I would suggest that readers prepare to review web servers, TCP/IP ports and client web browser java security problems. Make sure to get a good reference book for SQL, it will be a good investment for the future. The reader should also have a good grasp of programming with java and be ready to sit in the driver's seat. This book gets my thumb of approval.

This book is so poor that I have never got any useful information about JDBC from it. We can not hope one book can cover everything, but at least one thing. This author hopes he can tell the readers more about SQL, JDBC driver, Java. In fact, almost all us do not want to get these from a JDBC book. Just give us some interesting examples and tell us how to us JDBC. If you just want to start to use JDBC, the JDBC tutorial is much more useful than this book.

I just finish studying this book... and want to throw this book out of my window... I own "Inside ODBC" (MS Press). If it is 10, this book is 2..

I suggest author combine part 1, 2, and 5 into one part and condense the content.. Part 3 teach you how to write a JDBC driver, must be useful to driver developer, Part 4 walks through some samples, for general reader, this part is most helpful..

My conclusion is if you are a JDBC driver developer and want to know some about SQL and database programming. Buy this book. Otherwise, buy O'Relly's JDBC book. It is much better than this book!!

I got the 2nd edition after using the middleware chapter of the 1st edition. They repeat the mistakes of the first! On page 13, it states that a combination of ROWS can be used to compose a primary key. It should read a combination of COLUMNS! Half of the book is just a repeat of the 1st edition, word for word! Very little proofreading went into this book. Commented out debugging aids are left in the code.

You would think that a book about JDBC programming would show you how to program using JDBC. Well, in this case, you would be absolutely wrong. It (very poorly) talks about what JDBC is, what SQL is, what a JDBC driver is, but IT NEVER TALKS ABOUT JDBC PROGRAMMING!!!! IT NEVER TELLS YOU HOW TO USE ANY OF THE JDBC CLASSES TO ACTUALLY PROGRAM SOMETHING THAT USES JDBC. It's like driving your wife to the hospital to give birth, but forgetting your wife. And remember, everything it talks about is poorly written.