Software Books

Citrix MetaFrame XP: Advanced Technical Design Guide, Second Edition was a decent general read. In depth technical detail seemed to be lacking and was replaced by repetitive best practice lectures. However, I enjoyed the authors side comments and general personality that was interwoven into the reading. Overall the book is informative and well written.

We had 2 other books on Citrix Metaframe but the books didn't give us much detail so we started looking for a better resource. I found this book and recommended it to my Network Adminsitrator. I thought I won't get much from it because I don't work with Citrix everyday but when time permits, I read the book and 70% of the time I got the answers from this book.

Not a book for beginners. This is written for engineers and people who already have a good grasp of the basics of Terminal Servers and Citrix. No "how to" install in this book, but rather how to design, implement, identify and resolve your own problems, with a lot of real-life examples.

The style of the book (way it is written) makes a pleasant change from the usual technical books, as it addresses you like you know what you're talking about. You will come out with a clear understading of the issues you're facing and how to resolve them.

This book is self-published, which makes it all the more remarkable.

The book covers up to Windows 2000 and Mataframe XP FR2. I'm keen to see when the next edition comes out, and hpoefully it will concentrate on Windows 2003 + Metaframe 3.0

I had a real tough time searching the Internet and all other places to get some real stuff on Citrix and my search ended with "this" book by "Brain" Madden.

Citrix will notice a sizeable improvement in their sales if they include this book with their product. Everything is explained clearly with visuals and no filler material.

One of the best Tech Books to hit the market in recent times.

In my opinion, this book is the ONLY interesting published book about Citrix until now. I have read most of the available books about Citrix and Terminal Services and this is the only one I would buy again.

If you are a Citrix Certified Administrator, you will find this book very helpful. Personally speaking, I prefer it to most of the Citrix official documentation.

Take into account that it is a book for people who already has a deep knowledge about Citrix. It is not a guide for begginers. It gives you hints to improve your own Citrix project methodology.

Amazon guys, let me suggest this, please: If you are looking for a step-by-step begginers guide, have a look at Methodology in a Box (freely available at http://www.dabcc.com)

The others have said it all. This is truly a five star book, full of useful content. By now you should be in no doubt - buy it!

I just read this book on 04/2001, and considering that this book was published on 99 it feels a bit old, but although it treats Flash on its version 3, is gives you an amazing background information, also the optimization section for animated gifs is amazing. I just wish i read this book on 99' I would be Hillman Curtis 2, i would've save me lots of learning. Great for Flash foundations. This for sure was the THE HIT back on 99'.

J.Scott Hamlin is on the cutting edge of Web graphics design and his book Effective Web Animation offers a new look and fresh approach to incorporating animated imagery. According to Hamlin serious Web graphics design goes far beyond the simple GIF animations of poorer quality and performance that just about anyone can create. Image size, color quality, interactivity, accompanying audio, and faster delivery over the Internet are factors that have led to new Web animation technologies. Are we ready to face them?

Hamlin lays a foundation for Web animation on the professional level for serious minded Web designers who must face new graphic design consideration demands. Hamlin offers detailed instruction involving the use of JavaScript, Photoshop, and Macromedia Flash and the results are phenomenal. This book contains many well-planned and beautifully designed graphic images and the tips and advanced techniques necessary to create comparable results. The accompanying CD features sample code, animations, demoware, and tutorials for further instruction opportunities.

Web animation is making a comeback and Web graphics design has become serious business. Hamlin's contribution in the form of this book is essential for those designers who want to graduate to a higher level of Web design mastery and income. Clients are wising up to the many Web technologies available to them and are becoming more discerning about how they spend their advertising dollars. Don't be left behind. Consider animating your Web creations today. This is must reading!

Having already worked for a number of years with the Internet I was hoping this book would provide me with such information as "Advanced Techniques for the Web" (as the books sub-title states). What I found though was the book is a fantastic resource for anyone who is a complete beginner right up to intermediate web developer.

I was expecting detailed information on java scripting and Flash scripting however found that the book goes not much further than, for example, the handbooks and tutorials of Flash 4 and Dreamweaver 2.

If you are an experienced web designer/developer with a solid grounding in the internet and are looking for more than basic java scripting and flash scripting, this book may prove to be too basic. With this all said, this is a valuable book and many colleagues who newer to the web are gaining much benefit from information in this book.

5 stars for beginner - intermediate skill level

3 stars for advanced skill level

This is one great book! Picking it up and setting down in my usual lazy chair to read I quickly got a feel for how easy this book was to read. With beautiful pictures and easy to follow examples I quickly found it to be one of my favorite graphics books. This book covers almost everything you need to know about web animation, and best of all, it grows with you! As your skills get better the book explains more. From Gif89 animations to all out power house Flash animations that will make your site to die for! I loved every bit!

This book is a bargain for FSX users. Very detailed with over 700 pages of information. I am a private pilot and throughly enjoyed reading through this manual, especially when flying my FSX program. In addition the extra missions, charts & challanges, are certainly worth the book. The extras are free off the internet, and you'll probably have to wait until the web site is "free" as I suspect it is very busy. The book is great for learning a "new" aircraft, and best of all it gets you in the air quickly if you have never flown before. The internet stuff comes up inside the FSX program itself, and it quite complete with charts etc. for each mission. This book is certainly worth the money for what you get.

This book is a fantastic guide to flight sim and flying. It has loads of details without being boring. A great reference item to keep on your desktop cockpit.

This is a good book for real pilots who would like to improve their MS Flight Simulator experience, as well as for non-pilots who would like to become pilots. The book is written in simple terms so the new student will understand, but there is clearly enough there to benefit the accomplished pilot both from a aviation knowledge and simulation point of view. I am an ATP and CFI and have found nuggets of wisdom that I will use in flying and teaching. Mostly I am making my flight simulator experience richer and more fun by getting to know the software and online world better. My simulator is complete with yoke, multi-engine throttle quadrant, rudder pedals, multi-function panel, and three monitors. The only disappointment so far in the book is the recommendation that you open multiple views on one screen, without recommending adding another monitor and opening the view there. I have found that with multiple monitors I can effectively fly VFR by looking out the left window (left monitor), placing the instrument panel and forward looking screen on the middle monitor, and radio equipment on the right monitor. This is also ideal for IFR practice, which I do every day. I also use FS2004 (not FSX) and still find the book germane, even though it is not specific to my older version.

Even though I own two airplanes, I still fly MS Flight Simulator because I can practice to perfection procedures that make my real world flying much better. This book helps me reach that goal. I am looking forward to continually expanding my sim experience, and maybe I'll see you online!

I got this book and was amazed! It is a huge book and has everything in it. I have only started and this book has all the details and covers pretty much everything you need.

I think based on the reviews below - you get the drift. Those reviews speak for themselves (and the book). I don't need to repeat every thing noted by the other reviewers. It's a great book and I learned more than I would have ever thought.

Don't let the 800 pages scare you off. The diagrams and the tutorial flights are just awesome. I have been flying MSFS since way back in the early days. The interest over the years has come and gone and I would skip a version here and there... then FSX hit the market. I since have turned this interest into a full fledged hobby. Everything from a TrackIR, Matrox (3 screens), Rudder pedals, yokes,good PC and a full set of navigational charts and IAPs - I thought I had it all together and knew everything there was to learn. What I found out from this book, I had barely scratched the surface. What I was missing was real world knowledge. This book has tied it all together and has made my hobby seem almost as authentic as the real deal. Now I can go any place at anytime in any aircraft.

Great great book! Do yourself a favor and invest the tiny expense (relative to the rest of this hobby) and enjoy. Remember, it's all about the journey and not the finish line. Soak up the knowledge that these authors have penned for your simming pleasure!

If you would like more information or would like to discuss simming in general feel free to contact me at fly-bman2006@hotmail.com

Bman.

Very good book, lots of useful info that goes beyond the normal documentation.

The content reveals a lot of details of RS. However, I had a hard time to make the samples running.

I found this book to have lots of information, but if you learn best by hands on examples, this is not the book for you. The author shows you a report already done and gives a quick explanation of how he got there. It is not a step-by-step type of book. As a lot of the examples shown do not have a how-to to go with it, I found this book not a good place to start. There are others that are more hands-on and step-by-step which are easier to learn from.

Having said that, if you've had some Reporting Services experience and are just looking to brush up on techniques and/or learn additional techniques, then this book will probably save you the tediousness of having to go through a step-by-step example that you have already done in the past.

Being a Microsoft trainer, and needing to get up to speed in a hurry, I found this book - luckily. This book was able to give me the answers to the "how do I do..." questions I had, and then enabled me to explain these concepts to my students.

Teo's style is easy to read, and he makes it easy to see how you can apply his examples to your reporting needs.

If you need to get up to speed on Reporting Services in a hurry, and need a book you can refer to in the future, this is the one.

The project: create a secure, distributed, Internet-facing, interactive ASP.Net reporting application for a Very Large Customer. The schedule: short. The budget: low. Amazingly, we got it done, and I credit Teo and this book with helping us meet our requirements.

The Microsoft Reporting Services 1.0 documentation is not very useful to the newcomer, and with 7 months' experience now, I can also say it's not very useful to the rising journeyman. The product is quirky, with surprising gaps and baroque security features. Without expert guidance from someone who has worked with the RS dev team I don't see how anybody would get much done with Reporting Services 1.0.

Teo Lachev worked intensively with the Microsoft dev team and the book shows it. Perhaps one of the reasons other reviews here gripe about the examples is that the most useful examples are the non-trivial ones in the second half of the book. Report authoring is the easy part! Delivering your reports to your users in the ways they demand is the hard part, and in my opinion this is where Teo's book shines.

It is no exaggeration to state that without Teo's book, and in particular his discussion of custom security extensions for Reporting Services, we would have failed to deliver the goods. But we succeeded... thanks Teo.

Until Mac OS X came out this book helped me with _every_ hardware and software problem that ever turned up!
Only once one of my Macs was actually beyond repair, but ever since 1999 this book really saved the day.

The iMac I purchased in July 2001 is my first home computer. I found this book at the library, then discovered it contained so much good information, that I purchased it. It sometimes has too much info for a newbie, but still it is an excellent reference. This book is the "bible of troubleshooting", and a great way to learn how your computer works. I'd say it is a "must purchase"!

The iMac I purchased in July 2001 is my first home computer. I found this book at the library, then discovered it contained so much good information, that I purchased it. It sometimes has too much info for a newbie, but still it is an excellent reference. I use 2 other books along with this one, to trouble shoot and confirm resolutions to any computer problem. This book is like the "bible of troubleshooting". I'd say it is a "must purchase"!

One of the few technical books in my library that I feel has really paid for itself, and then some. Technical books are so expensive, and most of mine sit in the bookcase collecting dust within a month or two after purchasing them. This book had saved me more money than I spent on it within the first month, and I continue to use it on a regular basis. In addition to having real and practical advice on fixing problems, Mr Landau provides advice on preventative maintenance and must-have troublshooting aids, and background on how Macs work when thre aren't any problems. I would say that this book is the most essential of those aforementioned must-have tools.

I have a lot of respect for Landau .. and he knows what he's writing about ... but this was written pre-OS X.

It's time for another edition, since OS X has a whole NEW set of problems ... including the occasional "kernel panic" (read "crash"). There is also a whole new group of compatibility issues with peripherals: printers and scanners among them.

I think most of the information is pretty straightforward for those who have modeled objects and component packages. Anyone familiar with test driven design and other extreme programming practices probably have come to most of the same conclusions that this book shows examples of.

While it is very thorough, it is not very concise.

In the end i gave it 5 stars because it's the ONLY book that i've ever seen that gives this type of information in ANY format. I applaud the author for taking such a hard topic and putting it in writing. Sometimes I have to have examples like this to show to other developers when they 'cry' about not being able to unit test.

If your job is working with Legacy Code, then you need to pick up this book. If you follow his line of reasoning, you can pick up solid habits to systematically revitalize legacy code. The main emphasis of the book is applying unit testing to legacy code for in the authors opinion, legacy code is simply "code without unit tests." You may or may not agree with this statement, but the techniques he presents to find "seams" as he calls them in the code to allow you to break dependencies are vital to working with legacy code even if you choose not to apply unit testing to your projects. Some developers may attack the simplicity of the examples presented, saying they don't represent real-world examples, but if you "read" the text accompanying them you learn the techniques to tackle legacy code issues. Although I noted many publishing glitches - places where sentences to entire paragraphs are repeated from one page to another, the content is solid.

[...]

This is a must-read for software developers, I think. It's up there with Code Complete as a must-have, and I think does a better job than Refactoring by Fowler of explaining Refactoring. I started using some of the techniques in this book immediately and found that coding was higher quality and more enjoyable. It also helps to understand that the author's definition of "legacy code" is "code without tests".

If you're working on a project that lacks unit tests, but want to add them, you have to read this book. It has advice and strategies for refactoring untested code so it CAN be tested. Whatever language you're working this, this book has the help you need.

This book is decent but it doesn't break much new ground. The author has the Fowler-esque affectation of naming very simple things to create a shared and clear vocabulary (ie making a change and seeing what it breaks when you compile is now the LeaningOnTheCompiler pattern) which feels a little overdone in places.

There was some good material here, but generally the best parts were where he would tie an example into a well known design principal which would be explained in a sidebar (SRP, etc). Of course, that kind of stuff could be found elsewhere in a more concise format.

The book is nice in that it makes you think through the samples, I just wish there were more moments after doing that where I went "oh hey, cool" (there were a couple, don't get me wrong) instead of "yeah, thats pretty much how we do it now".

This book is a really great combination between a tutorial and a reference book. What I like the most about it is that it not only explains you how to use the different elements of the C# language and the .NET Framework core namespaces, but it also explains to you how they work in the inside. This gives you a notable insight when you try to understand a strange side-effect in your code.

All explanations are made very clearly and it is very easy to read. The different chapters of the book are arranged by topic, so it is easy to use it as a reference when you can't exactly remember something. It can also be read from cover to cover.

It is, however, not recommended for beginners (as it is stated in the introduction); if you are looking for a programming tutorial this book is not a very good idea.

great book, a must have! if you do not have this book you are not a C# developer! =)

The "In a Nutshell" series has long been my favorite's. I am glad they did C# again with .NET 3.0. The format of the book changed quite a bit with a much better format and lenghthy explainations and demonstrations. I truly hope they redo ADO.NET in a nutshell as that was my favorite as well.

This book is all you really need on C# and .NET framework. [I have many others, but always find myself coming back to this, and for good reason]

Pure awesome - if you're a good programmer already and want the skinny on what's new (or even great explanations on what you already think you know), spend the $10-$15 and buy this book. I love it and I buy every version they put out. There just aren't enough people like Joseph and Ben writing tech books!

For those who has experience with object-oriented programming, this is an excellent book both for learning C# and for being used as a reference book on the desk. The examples are carefully designed in general but can be made better in a couple of places.

This book is a must if you are learning BSD Unix. All the commands you'll ever use are covered in this book. This book is easy to read and explains important topics without being exhaustive (a skill some authors never learn). A great book for newbies to BSD Unix!

If you're looking for a place to start with FreeBSD (or with open soruce in general), this is really the book to get. I knew a little UNIX before I picked this up, but essentially I was a babe in the woods. This book helped me get my system up and running with clear, task-oriented discussions of all of the essentials. This doesn't go as deep as some of the other FreeBSD books out there (for that you'll probably want "Absolute BSD" by Michael Lucas), but it does tell you what you need to know to get started.

I bought the book after I had installed a broken FreeBSD 4.7 on my old AMD K6-II. Despite the few typos here and there, the book helped me figure out what mistakes I had made during my previous installation ! I thus re-installed from scratch, following page by page. In no time, the system was up and running, I was customizing my shell behavior, connecting to the internet through my cable modem (Roadrunner/Earthlink), etc...

With some extra hardware, my old AMD K6-II is now a router/firewall between my cable modem and my WinXP/Red Hat 8.0 dual-boot box without a glitch, and am planning to add a second box to my LAN and use it as a printer server too.

For those who still hesitate, this book is written in english, not in nerdish. That itself makes it stand out from all the computer litterature I've read. This book is very valuable.

Annelise: your book made my hardware firewall project feel like a walk in the park. Thank you so much !

I first tried to install FreeBSD 4.8 on my K6-2 500mhz machine using the FreeBSD Handbook as a guide. While this book (the Handbook) is the standard for reference on the subject, it doesn't really explain it to a newbie's needs (even someone coming from Linux). My first attempts failed. I bought Annelise's book and was able to get 4.8 up and running following her suggestions. Though my copy came with a CD of FreeBSD 4.7, I had already burned ISO images of 4.8. The processes detailed in the book applied equally well. My only complaint would be that the book needs updating to reflect areas that a lot of people (most people) are interested in these days: burning music to CD - especially ATAPI CD devices, and USB mass storage devices. Both could be covered by a chapter on how to use SCSI emulation. I still give it 5 stars.

I had been getting fed up with using Windows and wanted to learn a new operating system. I bought Anderson's book and installed FreeBSD 4.6 on an extra hard drive in my computer. The book covers a broad range of topics and I found it very helpful during the installation process. The first 10 chapters are great. I started to get annoyed with Chapter 12 on connecting to the internet. I used PPP and something kept going wrong. I still do not know what it was but the errors I got were endless. The chapters little sidenotes on troubeshooting were of no help and I eventually gave up. Then I tried to install the printer daemon and also recieved errors. I followed the book as best I could and eventually gave up and moved on. Chapter 14 on the X window system is great. Other than the printer and PPP problems (which could have just been my misunderstanding of the book), I would recommend this book to someone else

I bought three books to teach myself how to produce DVDs. The Erica Sadun book is for advanced users and was not helpful to me. The Bob LeVitus "Little iDVD Book" is probably one of the most poorly organized and edited books I've ever come across on any subject.

Pogue's "Missing Manual", on the other hand, is comprehensive, clear and well-organized. I've produced about half a dozen DVDs since reading (and re-reading) Pogue's book and it clearly made a huge difference in what I was able to construct using iDVD.

In my opinion, this is the only book you need to read to learn how to produce movies using iDVD.

Beyond teaching readers to work with iDVD, Pogue also offers loads of helpful suggestions about editing in general. This book is outstanding.

I love this book! I was ready to give up trying to use iMovie because of a small glitch that was incurring. After browsing thru the book the very first time I opened it, I came across the trouble I was having with iMovie. Mr. Pogue directed me to the correct settings and I am now having a great time editing my DV movies.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone attempting to use iMovie. There is so much more to this program than Apple addresses in the help file. Mr. Pogue's writing is concise but not out of reach for the average Mac user.

I have many books by Mr. Pogue and I would recommend any of them if you are stumped and need a well explained how-to-manuel.

Can it get any simpler !! ha ha ha ha ha
I found this book to be extremely informative and easy to understand (especially since i am yet to purchace a mac and digital video cammera ).. I will have no hesitation now to go out and purchase a Mac and a Digital cammera .. and feel confident making my first feature film or "Home Movie " LOL

It's OK. It has about the same amount of material as the "iMovie 2 for Macintosh Visual Quickstart Guide" - The missing manual is fatter because it contains additional stories and things that a reader might find amusing, but that are not particular relevant to the topic. The section on movie making basics is very good. For an expanded view see "The Five C's of Cinematography". I thought I would find more information in this book since it is fatter than in the VQG, but it ended up that they are about even in content.

First I have to give props to David Pogue and his Missing Manual series. As a bookseller and computer geek I've long favored the Dummies books as the best entry-level source for third-party information on software. However, O'Reilly made a smart move when they turned their attention on that market and grabbed Dummies standby Pogue to headline the new series. The Missing Manuals (and their mutant-dogcow mascot) are a credit to O'Reilly and a must-have... assuming, that is, that they cover the program you need. The series is still too small, but I'm sure it won't stay that way.

Now, to the book itself. If you need to do something with iMovie, it's in there. That pretty much covers what I need to say in this review, but it doesn't cover everything the book has to offer. Remember back in the 80s when the Mac made desktop publishing a reality, only to unleash a torrent of wretchedly amateurish graphic design? Well, Pogue spends much of the first couple of chapters attempting to prevent that from happening. This book starts off with a very basic primer on video production and how to use your equipment -- assumed to be a typical consumer-grade MiniDV camcorder, but it covers other options as well, particularly video bridges and the like.

The meat of the book discusses iMovie 2's capabilities, including discussions of its weaknesses and how to work around them. Effects, titles, and transitions are discussed in detail, including some useful information on crossfades (never fade straight to black -- instead, you want a black stillframe). Conversion to other formats is also an issue, and a significant part of the book discusses postproduction using QuickTime Pro. Directions are given for converting your work for DVD or VCD as well.

The issue I have with the book is largely its focus on iMovie in MacOS Classic, and the bugs that are present in that version that might not be in the OS X version. Screenshots all come from 9.x, with the only Aqua material being the interface of iMovie itself. I don't mark down for this since the program operates more or less the same, but an inexperienced user may have trouble. (I might note as well that the book works just as well for iMovie 3, which has a superficially different interface but handles more or less identically.)

So, yeah. If you're doing video production on iMovie, this is the book to get, hands down.

This in-depth look into transaction processing provides a wonderful place to start when considering implementation in your application(s). Cover-to-cover, this is an EXTREMELY easy read and doesn't try to be "fancy" or use complicated wording as many other books on the topic do.

Before reading any other transaction books or jumping into API document, this is a MUST MUST MUST MUST read. When developing an application that has transaction support, this is wonderful as a reference in order to include data in presentations, summaries, position papers, internal documentation, etc.

No only will this benefit a general developer, but also benefit people not in the development environment. This allows for clarification of communication between departments without going into API-specific implementation details.

This book is excelent for who want to deep his knowledge in TP. Is very practical with many examples and tips. Funthermore include examples of of transacctions for commercials TP like a MTS (COM + today), Tuxedo, CICS, etc.
Is a book very very recommendable.
bye.

The title of this review is a quote from the book and it summarizes it very nicely. Indeed, the book provides a great deal of information in such a small volume, but many of the things that would have been nice to have are missing and many are just skimmed over.

The best chapters of the book explain in very simple words the principles of transaction logging (along with recovery from a failure), two-phase locking and two-phase commit.

The chapter on transactional communications is not as thorough as the just mentioned ones and pays most attention to transactional message queueing rather than synchronous RPC and peer-to-peer. On top of that, message queues are just transactional, period. No attention is paid to the message queues specifics.

The chapter on transaction processing monitors considers only the three-tier environment with presentation, workflow and transaction tiers.

Other problems ?

The whole chapter with an overview of the existing transaction processing software was useless. You see, product Foo has features A and B, and product Bar has features C and D, so what ? As you read it, certain architecture similarities show through, but it's up to you to analyze it, the book gives no cross-product comparison, no analysis, just a list of acronyms.

Samples in Cobol (duh !) or tangled C-like code. The pictures are less than perfect.

But the biggest problem to me was certainly the lack of real-life information. Specifically, I would better be interested in interaction between transactional and non-transactional systems. An acknowledgement of databases and message queues being the only transactional systems (or not) and the implications of that. Two-phase commit in heterogeneous environment. And so on.

A great introductory book.

Transaction processing is a daunting topic, and this is one of the few books that provides the basics in a clear, understandable manner without overwhelming the reader. Most of the book is focused solely on transaction processing, but it touches on queuing as well, which makes it the ideal first book for anyone who is seeking details that extend beyond pure TP.

I like the way that the authors use real products to reinforce key points made throughout the book. While some of the products are no longer mainstream (indeed, some were never mainstream), the fact that real world implementations are used makes the information realistic. If you are using CICS, MQSeries, Tuxedo or similar products this book will have even more value. I also like the way difficult topics, such as locking, high availability and database recovery are given entire chapters because these topics need to be thoroughly understood in order to completely understand transaction processing.

After reading this book you will be armed with sufficient knowledge to make intelligent choices in selecting the right approach for transaction processing in a system design, or to understand the nuts and bolts of any TPM that you are supporting. I also agree with Cem Kaner's earlier comments that this book is an ideal resource for software test professionals who need to understand the entire environment that they will be testing. If you want to go deeper into TP, I recommend "Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and the Practice of Concurrency Control" by Gerhard Weikum and Gottfried Vossen, which drills much further down into the details of both transaction processing and queuing systems.

This book was written in 1997 which is often considered ancient in "Internet-years" but it is still very relevant because it focuses on fundamental principles of transaction processing (TP) rather than the latest whiz-bang technologies that optimize TP.

For those of you who aren't TP experts, a transaction is a computer operation that meets the ACID test. ACID here stands for:

Atomic - the steps that comprise transaction succeed or fail as one, there is no partial success.

Consistent - the internal data structures of the system(s) remain consistent with business rules.

Isolated - the data read or manipulated by the transaction is not altered during the duration of the transaction's execution.

Durable - the results of the transaction are persisted

Why does this matter to the system user or stakeholder? The canonical example is that of the ATM machine (or the "handy bank" if you're Australian). When you withdrawl money from an ATM, it has to go out and validate you have enough funds to meet the withdrawl, reserve those funds, and dispense cash - all within the same transaction. If the ATM failed after your bank account had been debited but before you'd gotten your money, you'd be very upset; conversely if the cash was dispensed but the debit procedure failed, the bank would be very upset. Ted provides very amusing analogy for this using a wedding ceremony but you can read that in his book.

There's a whole lot more to transaction processing beyond ACID and the ATM example, including two-phase commit (TPC), high-availability, massive concurrency, and crash recovery. To find out about all of these topics, read the book. One thing to remember though is that most application developers will never have to deal with the extremely complex details of providing a working and robust transaction management implementation, but like any technology it's important to understand the technology's fundamental principles and mechanics to effectively use it.

The book itself is extremely dense. The content of the book is "only" 324 pages long but covers a large amount of ground in a good amount of detail. Definitely read in a quiet place free of interruptions with a strong cup of coffee.

One shortcoming of the book is that it was written in 1997 so it doesn't cover TP implementations in Java (e.g. JTA, EJBs, etc.) but it was nice to finally find out what the heck IBM's CICS and IMS products are.

Interestingly enough, I have never had to deal with complex transaction processing (i.e. two-phase commit) in my short IBM career. This is probably because I've worked on business-to-consumer (B2C) applications where only one data source is involved rather than a business-to-business system where multiple data sources are involved. I'll have to ask the B2B guys if they get heavy into two-phase commit or if it's not an issue.

The reason I read this book is because I've always been a bit mystified by Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs). When I joined IBM, I knew the word, but I was not familiar with such topics as object-relational persistence, object remoting, and transaction processing, so to me EJBs were simply things that took four classes/interfaces to do what I could do in one simple POJO. Ted Neward, in a very interesting web interview on the Serverside.com mentioned that he used to think EJBs were completely worthless, but during the process of writing Effective Enterprise Java came to realize that they were not worthless but rather over-marketed. He said that they should have been called Transactional JavaBeans rather than Enterprise JavaBeans because transactions are what EJBs did very well. So, hearing this from Ted I decided to read a book on fundamentals of transaction processing, so that I could understand EJBs better. Now that I've read all about TP principles, I pick Richard Monson-Haefel's book again, and all of a sudden EJBs start to make a lot more sense.