Software Books

You should not try reading this book from start to finish - that may be a little too much. As a reference, it is the best HTTP book I was able to find. Clear and concise information compiled from multiple sources.

I,as a university student with great interest to HTTP,borrow this book from school library. This book gives me basic and clear concept about http operations between client and server and stuff behind the scene. a list of explanation of http message and header is heleful too. later, the author writes very detail about proxy server,caching server and how the webserver are build for serious commercial use.
I am able to finish 2/3 of this book in 3 days. it's so interesting and keeps me reading on.

This is definitely a book to get you start with all kind of term for HTTP and a grasp for HTTP/Webserver concept.

for ppl with solid backgroud on HTTP, i would recommend the "HTTP: The Definitive Guide".

If you work in web development you can't miss this book. Two words: complete and clear. Buy IT!

Get this book. It reads a whole lot better than the spec. The language is so straightforward that your grandmother might enjoy reading it too. It comes with a dictionary of exception codes too, so you'll never be left scratching your head if a few important message packets begin to burp on their way to Paris via Kuala Lumpur.

An excellent book for learning HTTP and much more about how web servers work at the protocol level. What you can learn in a few hours from this book is amazing because it is organized so well, the author is a gifted teacher with an excellent roadmap of what he wants to present, and the hierarchy of overview and detail is so well designed. The book covers the context in which the HTTP protocol resides, the details of HTTP itself, and then branches into important usages of HTTP for creating secure, reliable and scalable web sites.

Must have for reference. Great shop manual. I hope author keeps writing good Illustrator manuals. Well done.

For some reason, books on Adobe Illustrator are always terrible: they either pander to new users, recycle out-of-date content, or rehash the same boring techniques as every other book. Steve Kurth's Illustrator 10 Shop Manual puts the competition to shame, digging deeper in a single page than the other hacks do in a whole chapter.

Kurth has actually documented EVERY LAST feature in the program, down to the tiniest checkmark in each dialog box. He understands how I need to use the software, and offers the most specific and helpful advice I've ever seen.

A perfect example: a designer in my company needed to convert all the shapes of an expanded gradient from CMYK values to a single spot ink. If you think you know the answer, guess again -- it's not as easy as it sounds, and I've used Illustrator professionally for 8 years. The Shop Manual gave me an answer in less than five minutes.

And that's the key -- notice how I said "it gave me the answer," and not "I found the answer." No book could ever predict the above scenario and give clear-cut steps to the reader -- and that's why the others fail. Because it covers so much so well, the Shop Manual actually LEADS you to the connections you need, using Kurth's experience and a surprisingly intelligent layout.

I bought two copies: one for work, and one for home.

There's not much to say: I picked it up off the shelf, everything I needed to know is in there and it's easy to use. Simple praise, but rare praise indeed for today's often obtuse computer manuals.

This book is very good. I read it and learned a lot about the program. No nonsense. Later, I ask him questoin from his web site and he knew the answer right away. I look forward to other books by the author

I find these shop manual books amongst the most useful in my bookshelf. For an experinced user most often all that you need is to quickly look up the features and settings of a particuliar tool or dialog box.
This is a complete reference manual to the whole package, forgotten how to do something it will be in here somewhere. There is also a useful how-to section at the back covering common techniques.
These books make a designers life soo much easier.

This book it's a must have. Really interesting most of the things it contains, other are rather basic.

I felt I was reading a rather old book. It'd better talk about new J2EE technologies. Great book anyway.

What can I say:"WOW".
This book is well structured into different aspects of J2EE(example: servlets, JSPs, webservices, EJBs etc). Each of the sections are given detailed coverage with regards to design and architectural decisions that can go wrong.
This is not a start to end read. This book is better usable as a reference while we execute or plan during technical development cycle.
For each anti-pattern, a detailed background, symptoms, refactorings and example are provided. At the end of the book we are provided a Anti-pattern and Refactorings catalog.
The book also covers capacity planning type of antipatterns at the beginning. This will help give broader perspective about making design and possible implementation decisions on a enterprise scale.
A must read for enthusiastic J2EE practitioners who strive for quality output.

Why should you read this book?... I mean you've read the J2EE Blueprints and that's supposed to be the best practices and you've followed all it's advice... didn't you? You should read this book because it gives you a way to see what you "didn't" do and how to fix it.

In this book the Antipatterns (APs) are grouped by J2EE topical area, several are identified for the area and then solutions proposed for each AP. Not only do they expose issues with designs that are common mistakes, but they then go on to not only tell you a possible solution(s) and also impart good principles on why.

Each AP has the following sections: Background, General Form, Symptoms and Consequences, Typical Causes, Known Exceptions, Refactorings, Varations, Example(s) and Related Solutions. The catalog of AP's in the appendix of the book provide a quick summary of each AP also, so you can see if your Symptoms are listed quickly.

One example is from the "Distribution and Scaling" chapter. The just of it is that in an enterprise system you use layering, workflow and the idea that the network is the computer to model and solve your problems. If you haven't you'll notice all of your code linking into libraries of many different types when library access should be localized to one workflow point that other workflow tasks utilize. By doing what they suggest you'll end up with a highly distributable solution and a weakly coupled system that will be flexible to change.

So save yourself some future troubles, or help yourself fix your current ones, read this book! It imparts knowledge you can't get from a Blueprint!!

Did you ever have the feeling that there was something wrong with your application design but you just couldn't put your finger on the problem? The authors of this book have taken their own experience developing J2EE applications and produced a book that will help you avoid many mistakes in application design. The book is geared toward helping the experienced designer/developer produce robust, maintainable applications and fixing applications that are not robust and not easily maintained.

The book covers most of the J2EE spectrum. There are sections on JSPs, Servlets, Entity and Session Beans, JMS, and Web Services. There are also sections on general J2EE architecture including distribution, scaling, and persistence. Each chapter gives a background on a specific antipattern, discusses the typical symptoms of the antipattern, and then covers various refactorings that can be used to correct the antipattern. Some of the antipatterns discussed may sound familiar ("too much code in JSPs") but the list of refactorings will provide useful information for even these obvious coding errors if you happen to be supporting an application that suffers from that antipattern.

The authors have done a great job of clearly explaining each antipattern, both explaining why it is an antipattern and what you can do to fix the problem. Each refactoring is demonstrated with code samples as well as with UML diagrams where appropriate. Overall, this is an excellent book that should be on the shelf of anyone involved in designing J2EE applications.

Often, managers of medium to large scale software projects do not have the time (or inclination) to learn the technical nuances of the development environment they're managing. This lack of understanding can quickly give birth to worry and stress. "If only I knew the right questions to ask..." is a common lament among project managers as they wonder "why is module X so brittle?" and "why can't we ever meet the performance spec for subsystem Y?"

"J2EE AntiPatterns" is a useful guide for helping project managers with technical (but not necessarily J2EE) backgrounds zero-in on the major pitfalls the development team must circumvent. The Background, General Form, Symptoms and Consequences, and Typical Causes sections of most AntiPatterns provide the manager with sufficient information to recognize, understand, and (hopefully) avoid technical problems. (The exceptions are the AntiPatterns for entity, session and message-driven beans - the book assumes a basic understanding of J2EE beans.) Project managers do not need to fully comprehend the code examples (the book has many) to employ the lessons described in "J2EE AntiPatterns" - simply recognizing and understanding the AntiPatterns will be valuable to the team.

If I had read this book before (or during) my last project, I would have been able to recognize some significant problems by simply observing and listening to the engineers discuss their challenges, including the following AntiPatterns:

"Too Much Code" - our LOC metrics would have fleshed this one out quickly;
"Using Strings for Content Generation" - we spent many hours debugging HTML that rendered properly in IE but not Mozilla;
"When In Doubt Make it a Web Service" - it can be expensive mistake to implement something purely for technology's sake.

Coupled with a book or two describing J2EE at a high level, "J2EE AntiPatterns" is essential reading for technical project managers. This book will undoubtedly increase the project manager's effectiveness and help him/her better communicate with the team. A little knowledge for project managers is NOT always dangerous!

Excellent Book. Who said an old dog can't learn new tricks. Found several little tid-bits that have trimmed a number of my scripts or changed the way I've implemented services! A great desktop companion for advanced and intermediate admins.

This is a very good book. These remarks are for Linux users on the way up. If you are already an über-üser, well, you will probably like this book anyway.

If you don't have the first volume, you might want to start with it. It has some simple but very useful things that apply to just about anyone with their own Linux box and a command line.

This volume is much more advanced, and most of the tricks and techniques deal with much more specialized problem domains, ie. things you might not have run into yet. One advantage of this book over the first is that it is very up to date in its recommendations of existing software to use.

'Linux Server Hacks Volume Two' by William von Hagen is an outstanding companion guide for ALL Linux users and administrators. Packed with over 450 pages and 100 new hacks not in Volume 1, these aren't just known by everybody things that you can do with Linux, these are hot tips and tricks that most any Linux freak can excel from learning about.

Chapters Covered:

01. Linux Authentication
02. Remote GUI Connectivity
03. System Services
04. Cool Sysadmin Tools and Tips
05. Storage Management and Backups
06. Standardizing, Sharing, and Synchronizing Resources
07. Security
08. Troubleshooting and Performance
09. Logfiles and Monitoring
10. System Rescue, Recovery, and Repair

Pick this book up now, you will NOT be disappointed in this delcious Linux FEAST!!

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I can't say enough about the work done in Linux Server Hacks vII by the two Bs. Bill and Brian have hit the ball out of the ballpark with this one.

Just the section on LVM (Logical Volume Management) have saved my bacon!

Every single "hack" (read tip) is extremely practical, applicable and relevant to managing and administering Linux systems whether "servers" or not!

The absolute best part of this book is that you get really useful, insightful views into the experiences of seasoned veterans of Unix systems. If you sit in a NOC or if you're the 24x7 guy/gal on a server farm, this book is an occupational requirement! Everyone else will appreciate it if they're running Linux. In my modest network of perhaps 30 Linux systems, I can tell you that I saved hours of effort with just two of the hacks included in this volume. Considering the time savings, buying this book saved my company more than 300% on the cover price.

Are you a system administrator? If you are, then this book is for you! Authors Bill Von Hagen and Brian K Jones, have done an outstanding job of writing volume two of a book that focuses on cool hacks they developed or used in their server and system administration careers.

Von Hagen and Jones, begin by exploring the authentication options that are available to you in heterogeneous networked computing environments and simplify administering user accounts and passwords. Then, the authors explore ways of connecting to remote systems. Next, the authors explain how to set up central servers that do things like synchronize the time on all the systems in your environment, deliver IP addresses to newly connected hosts, and integrate these services with existing ones. The authors then present a variety of cool sysadmin tips and techniques that they've accumulated over the years, including how to keep processes running without writing a daemon or staying logged in, how to use PXE to netboot Linux, how to share information with fellow sysadmins in a centralized fashion, how to get the most out of classic but incredibly useful terminal-oriented applications, and so on. They continue to explore some cool ways of making it easier for you to manage storage, deploy new systems, do backups of today's huge disks, and even reduce the need for some of the restore requests that occasionally clog every sysadmin's inbox. Then, the authors provide some tips and tricks for managing distributed storage and making sure the administrative environments on your servers are synchronized. They then discuss a wide range of security tools and techniques that can help you sleep at night and protect your systems at the same time. Next, they provide techniques for optimizing system performance, whether by figuring out who's hogging the entire CPU and shooting down that user's network sessions or by using cool knobs in the /proc filesystem to tweak system performance or using journaling filesystems to minimize system restart time. Then, they include hacks that enable you to centralize log information in a variety of ways, be warned when problems arise, and get the most out of system status information, whether it's log information, internal disk controller status data, or remote hardware status information that you can collect via SNMP. Finally, the authors show you how to boot crippled systems so that you can diagnose problems, repair munged filesystems, and even recover deleted files of data that was stored on disks that have gone belly up.

This most excellent book has presented hacks that are techniques that the authors have used at various times. More importantly, they view these techniques as time- and hassle-savers that are usually downright fun and cool.

This book gives you a broad scope of the to be used topics when creating elearning sites. You will get a quick tutorial of the most important Macromedia features to get the process done. In a clear way building up from using templates, attaching stylesheets, showing and hiding layers with Dreamweaver and using Flash for simulation and user-interactivity the book introduces the interaction with databases by using Coldfusion.

I thought Coldfusion was rather difficult to learn, because the tips of the week by Macromedia were a little to quick for me. But Jeffrey Bardzell proved it is easy. In a straight-forward way you are taken by the hand to take all the basic steps for building a data-driven website.

I'm an assoc. prof. of New Testament currently working to produce an interactive web workbook for teaching/learning skills for New Testament interpretation. I want to give students practice developing close reading skills rather than ask them simply to drill content. For a couple of years, I have had a dream for such a site, and I felt sure it was buildable, but didn't know how. I care enough about how the interactions work and the relationship of content to design that I wanted to design the interactions myself if possible. Yet I didn't know anything but a little Dreamweaver and its CourseBuilder extension.

Working my way through a copy of Macromedia MX eLearning is changing all that. Wow! The book teaches how to develop interactions in Dreamweaver and Flash as well as offering several chapters on putting ColdFusion to work in eLearning. Each chapter includes a fine combination of hands-on work and explanation for why we are being asked to do what we're doing, especially at those places where some task is counter-intuitive. The book is also free of mistakes, typos and muddled language, a welcome plus when so many computer books seem to have been rushed to press without having been edited or proofed.

Bardzell's book is giving me two things: (1) hands on work with the software that introduces and reinforces learning without devolving into busywork and (2) a model for developing materials (like the book itself) that teach effectively from a distance. A+

I am a trainer and instructional designer at a university. I thought this book was very useful in helping me to use Flash MX for education. You would likely need some introductory training in Flash and Dreamweaver basics before using this book.

This is an excellent book where you learn how to integrate ColdFusion MX, Dreamweaver MX, and Flash MX by building interactive learning applications. The exercises are explained in great details and contain many tips and techniques especially for Dreamweaver and Flash. The newer aspects of interacting ColdFusion MX with Flash MX are not covered, but for those of us still using ColdFusion 5 there is a good coverage of LoadVars. I recommend this book without any reservation as it is one of the best technical books I have read so far.

Jeffrey Bardzell's book is intelligently written with plenty easy-to-understand examples. He engages, inspires, and motivates learners throughout. His Dante's Inferno project makes learning fun. He breaks subject matter down into comprehendible pieces, using Aristotelian logic in places. This guy knows what he's doing. Of several computer books that I have purchased over the years, this is the first time I have written a review. You can learn eLearning and website design, and this book will teach you how-even if you are a motivated beginner, technical type, or humanities person-this book is suited for most everyone.

This book is well written and layed out. It follows an easy to follow format that allows the reader to view screenshots with instruction, allowing interactive use of the book if you have the software installed. Business Contact Manager can be a little overwhelming for novices or those new to outlook. The author bridges this gap by keeping things very simple for the novice but offering more advanced insights to the power users. This is a great reference book to have for BCM until you become proficient with daily use. Highly recommend.

This is without question the best book available for Outlook Business Contact Manager. We had previously purchased two other books on the subject, however they were both difficult to read and reference.

I am so thankful that I found this book. I keep it right on my desk and if I ever have a question, I can quickly and easily find the answer.

It's easy to use, read and extremely easy to reference. It has become the must have resource for everyone in our office. If you are using Outlook Business Contact Manager this book is a must.

Even though I wasn't sold on using MS BCM, my IT department didn't provide my choice. After reading through a list of books, I settled on this one. It is my first one with these authors and I cannot recommend it enough.

It was well written and comes more from the business perspective, which makes it a real value for me. My IT folks could never have explained to our department as clearly as this book. I found it easy to use and it even inspired me to dig a little deeper into the software.

Thanks for the great text! I am much further along now than I could have imagined. Will be sure to look for more by these folks.

This is definitely one of the best book on the market for Outlook Business Contact Manager. It's easy to use and easy to reference. It has become a resource for everyone in our office. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone working with Business Contact Manager!

I bought this book because we wanted to see if Outlook BCM would work with our business. We also got the Dummies book, and this book was hands-down more useful than Outlook BCM for Dummies. This book was clear, and I really liked the fact that there was only one task on each page. This made the book really easy to reference, and since I wasn't reading the book from front to back - like a novel - this is exactly what I was looking for. I highly encourage everyone to buy this book!

Mark Kistler's books are wonderful, entertaining books that canteach anyone (of any age) how to draw! I bought his books for my sons,and I quickly became a devoted fan and an avid drawing maniac myself! The book is packed with pages of fun drawings, as well as 'story starters' in which kids are asked to complete the story. Mark's enthusiasm for drawing and story-telling just bubbles up out of the pages of this book. As a mom, I appreciate his encouragement for kids to watch less tv, say NO to violent video games and drugs, and to expand their brain power by getting involved in art. This book is a 'must have' for all teachers and parents who would like to see their kids motivated to express their creativity and feel good about their drawing ability.

While aimed at kids, this is a great place to start at any age. If you have been looking at other drawing books, and the books you have seen before only make it harder, your search is over. Mark makes it easy for anyone at any age to get basic drawing skills, the building blocks you need to get started. He teaches the skills that other books make seem complex, without the stress or making it go over your head. His way of teaching is simply the easiest method a person can have to start drawing. And if the books are good, his old show on PBS and his videos are even better. Mark makes drawing so fun kids beg to use the book again and again. He does not start by intimidating you with the completed project, in fact you don't always know what you are drawing until you are done. He takes you one line, circle, or square at a time and before you know it you have a fun drawing. I also reccommend you try the books from Ed Emberly, or check my lists on Amazon for kids that want to learn to draw, or be a cartoonist or animator.

If you think you stink at drawing, think again! Mark Kistler shows you how, step by step, to draw pictures that really look like something and tell a story besides!

I bought this book to relearn how to draw properly. While the book is directed at a young audience, adults-at-heart like me will benefit from the drawing principles such as foreshortening, placement, size, overlapping, shading and shadowing, contour and horizon (plus 1 and 2 point perspectives). My disappointments were that a few later lessons repeat previous lessons and that it uses blank pages after each lesson for you to practice on. I suggest you use a separate sheet of paper to do this so you can pass this book to your kids and their kids and so on and so forth. Despite these, I still rate it 5 stars.

I can now draw simple everyday objects both as cartoons and as realistically as I can. They're not professional quality yet, the book recommends daily practice until they are and that's exactly what I'm doing.

This isn't the only book you should buy though if you want to draw artistically. In my case, I'd like to draw comics-style characters and objects so I can move on to animating them later. I got Tom Alvarez's "How to Create Action, Fantasy and Adventure Comics" (separately reviewed) which is also an excellent how-to book.

Mark Kistler's books are EXCELLENT for anyone who want to learn to draw. The layout of the book is fun easy to follow. Although it is geared toward children it is appropriate for a beginner adult. It starts with simple concepts and gradually builds on what you've already learned. Anyone at any age will be impressed by what you will be drawing in a short amount of time. I bought this book for my children and was so impressed , I started drawing myself. My children love this book and so do I.

All needed I to become MCP and start getting benefits. Exam now questions 15 with adaptive format. Know the material here well and you pass first time out.

If you've ever seen a large sponge that someone has sucked all the water from and seen how small it can get and still be a sponge, then you understand the premise of what is here. All the other NT Workstation books have had the fluff sucked from them to make this book - what is left has no wasted space/thoughts/text.

I spent a lot of looking over the coverage of key topics in half-a-dozen Workstation books. This one covered them in as much or more detail than any other. The small size comes from the fact that the non-critical nonsense has been removed, which saves me from having to jump over a dozen pages here and there.

I found the book to be easy to read, easy to understand, and all that it was advertised to be, and then some.

After years of struggle, NT Workstation won the client war in my workplace and it was decided that 1000 users had to be changed over from every other thinkable operating system to NTW.

I knew some about the OS, but not much. I also knew that someone would have to become an MCP in order to convince corporate that IT knew what is was doing and to leave us alone. In order to accomplish those goals, I needed a quick solution, and the Fast Track seemed like it.

To make a long story short, I learned more about the OS from this book that I ever imagined, and passed the new adaptive exam (much less questions) with flying colors.

Not only is this an excellent book for certification study, but it is one of the best technical books I've ever read on NT Workstation. I typically buy three or four books on a topic when studying for an exam to avoid wasting time if I get a junk one. In this case, I read only the one and intend to buy only one now for any study topic the fast track is available for.

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.

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.

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."

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...