Computing Internet Books

Although dated, this book still has useful information. It is an expose' on social aspects of the web and the author's opinion of why, how and when things occur. Also, the author discusses how to benefit.

In this book, the author introduces results of research that shows there are surprising strong global regularities present on the web resulting from the local browsing behavior of agents. He explains in simple terms and well-chosen familiar examples, key ideas to understand how these regularities come about. The ideas and the regularities described in every chapter are backed by refereed papers from the author and his associates that have appeared over the years (in Science, Nature, ...) and that I would recommend the technically inclined reader to look into. As the author takes the reader through the different chapters, he introduces in simple terms the methodology of study and analysis borrowed from the physical sciences (to study the dynamics of large number of interacting particles) which in my case it was very helpful as I am trained in computer science where we do not get exposed to those techniques. The regularities are explained by way of interesting models (e.g., social dilemmas, six-degrees of separation, Brownian motion, etc.) that make for a refreshing reading.

The author goes further than just presenting and explaining the results as he gives very practical applications where knowing these regularities can help the design of better algorithms, web sites and systems. Among some of the results presented are: a law that can predict how far users will go on clicking on pages of a given site, the existence of `internet storms' where the net becomes very slow even though there is no obvious event that caused it (like when sometimes in a highway you slowdown to a halt even though there does not seem to be any accident), a law that predicts the distribution of the sizes (in pages) of web sites and several other regularities. Among one of the clever applications described is an algorithm that figures out when to wait or request again for a web page so that the user on average downloads it faster.

This is a really good book and is underappreciated in the community. It is one of the first - before Barabasi - that noted the commonality of laws guiding the organization of large emergent systems.

The title promises much. One had hoped that with so few pages a concise outline would be the product. Alas no. One has 95 pages of vaguery, allusion to supposed meaningful research which is never explained, and trite examinations of the substantial observations that have been borowed from other authors. His reference to the power law does not result in anything applicable to understanding the Web. His reference "tragedy of the commons" a la Peter Senge, suggests he undestands neither the metaphor nor its relationship to the Web or the information that exists there. Unfortunately this takes up one of the five pages of anything containing potential substance. The discussion of nodes begins vaguely and ends with no law. Another page down. The power law suggests an upper level of tolerance, but in its lack of conclusion loses another page. Social dilemma leaves the reader with the abiding question: So? With the final page ostensibly dealing with a critical number of clicks the reader is left to infer that reading this book is too many clicks (pages turned) and with the end we are left with no code, no guidelines, no greater understanding of the growth of the Web, and appreciation that while the reader is left no wiser, at least the book was short. There is great pretension here, but no delivery.

brief book is very interesting... full of intersting obervations about human-computer interaction and information seeking via the web.

Save your money. This book, and its companion, are both written in editorial style, each chapter by a (potentially) different author who each feel that they must fill in the space with more history than substance.

Get the online documentation from Sybase for free and learn something without wasting your time. That is unless you like history.

The best resourse for PB programmers who want migrate to web platform. The only resourse available to discover concepts in the steps of PB (User Objects) deploy to EAServer for web use.

Great distributed application concepts and evolution of infrastructures.

Good J2EE reference concerning to EAServer components.

If you're working with EAServer 4 you must have this book

PowerBuilder 9: Internet and Distributed Application Development is the collaborative effort of computer expters William Green and John D. Olson and comprehensively presents the new capabilities of PowerBuilder 9 along with the architecture and patterns required to create distributed systems in PowerBuilder. Recommended for intermediate to advanced users, PowerBuilder 9: Internet and Distributed Application Development deftly addresses development Web and Intranet-based systems, including Web Services, Portals, Application-Servers, XML, and Mobile Access.

For newbiew like me, this is the bible for entering the n-tier world with EAServer. Gives me a very good comparison with other options too.

After having bought this book for my work, I have found my colleagues who take this book for reference often appreciating it's contents, especially for the tips & tricks and well laid out examples.

I recommend all the PowerBuilder/Internet developers to invest in this book. Very affordable with good quality.

I have worked with PB since its inception about 12 years ago. During that time I have purchased everything written about it. This is the worst effort put into print. It is simply a rehash of articles on xml, soap, and internet theory. There is no relationship between PB 9 and this text other than the mention of it by the authors. Save yourself some money and wait or something that actually shows you how to develop internet and distributed applications -- this one does not!!!

When we learn and start programming we're attempted to write code to solve any problem without find to know if that is the best way. No matter if the code is about 3,000 or 300 lines, which matter is if you could solve the customer's problem. But a lot of problems were solved by experienced programmers and software architects and they have documented these problems for us. So, if somebody wrote tested-good-code, why we'll "reinvent the wheel"? My opinion is: study the progrmming language, try to write and solve a lot of problemns, and than study this book. After read you'll have much more skills to solve problems in shorter time. I recommend for intermediate through advenced programmers.

This book should be on the desk of every J2EE architect. Not sure if some of the design patterns still apply for JEE5. We'll just have to see in the next edition.

I bought this book for preparing for SUn Certfied Enterprise Architect assignment( part II). I am very happy with this book. It gives examples for all J2EE patterns in a very lucid way and this book has helped me a lot.

Do you know GoF ? Do you know basic 14 design patterns ? Do you know Java ? Do you know J2EE ? Do you know EJB ? Are you an architect of Java based applications ? OK. But if you do not know the book Core J2EE Patterns you are not taking designing and implementation of J2EE applications seriously. The book describes all the details, consequences and other aspects of J2EE design patterns. I recommend to read book sequentially and to make a lot of bookmarks and lot of skips into related links in the book.
You get clear picture of overall architecture possibilities in J2EE world. Also thanks to this book I became a certified architect.

It is a MUST-HAVE J2EE architect/developer book. It provides the most important and relevant patterns in J2EE design and development based on Gang of Four. The architecture guidance and best practices described are very valuable.

This book needs an update for Java EE 5. Not sure, those updates are posted on their web site.

This book is a detailed primer for anyone who needs to know what is involved in designing and developing instructionally sound Web-based training. The authors weave the requirements of Web design and instructional design into a clearly presented process. This design methodology is grounded in good instructional practice and it demonstrates a wealth of practical experience with design and development projects. If you want to know practical things, like the difference between writing for text and writing for a Web-based training product, or how to include usability and summative evaluation in your testing plan, this is a good source of information.

This book comes with a CD containing electronic versions of the large number of design and development forms presented in the book. Instructional Design for Web-based Training is a must-read for anyone contemplating designing custom Web-based instruction. The most compelling reason for reading the book is that the authors realize that the basics of good design are no different whether intended for any instruction-delivery medium or for the Web. While means of delivering instruction are constantly changing, what makes for sound instruction remains basically unchanged. By paying close attention and following the processes presented in this book, you can successfully initiate and execute your own eLearning project.

Ken Myers is Director of Research and Development for Thomson/NETg.

This book combines all the necessary elements, remoting, coding to interfaces, reusable code, to create a real world enterprise level application. The book takes difficult topics and applies them to the Northwind database which all developers are familiar with. This book is by no means a book for beginners. However, if you have a good understanding of Object Oriented application design then you should be okay. I took off one star because I felt there should be a little more background information on remoting to make using the sample application less frustrating. However, the author replied within a few hours and helped me troubleshoot my issue. All in all, a great, well-thought out book.

Wow!

Thank you Mr.Levinson. Finally, a programming text that is easy to understand and relevant to modern application development.

This book is my new bible. I highly recommend it to anyone interested and capable of this level of programming.

I especially appreciated the examples, which were not only easy to implement, but presented a logical step-wise approach to the client/server model under .Net.

Where is the big picture? It would have been nice if the Author would have mentioned what the sample application is supposed to do rather than just use a 'here, type this code in' approach. I can only assume he passed the 70-300 certification exam because it certainly does not show in his writing. I understood this book only because I have already written client/server applications myself. Woe to the reader who tries to use this book as a tutorial.

The book is really well written, covering even more topics (i.e. Networking) than the first edition. Considering the advanced nature of the book, it's surprisingly easy to understand.

However, i would recommend reading Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (3rd edition) by Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Albert S. Woodhull before this one if you're not familiar with Operating Systems, as this book covers advanced topics which are not for begginers.

Reading this book, I think it helps to know UNIX and some C already, but is ok if you don't... This book gives great details and examples. Must have for anyone working on/with solaris 10.
Yes.. it explains how zones and things like that work...

Do you want to know how the Solaris kernel works? This is the book for you!

If you've read any of the other titles by these authors you'll know how clear and succinctly written this book is. The book is not your normal 2nd edition "nip and tuck", it's a rewrite!

One of the things I really like about this book is that it describes the internal theory and implementation of many kernel subsystems, but is not a code walk through or reiteration of other books / manuals.

The book covers many of the new and recent features of Solaris, so it's also valuable for long time Solaris engineers that need to keep updated. People that are new to UNIX internals will also like this book as it starts with the assumption of some UNIX principles (but not too much), and takes you a *lot* further.

There are pointers to other material for the truely adventurous, and small examples with sample output that keep the subject material relevent and enable to reader to make the connection between the theory and their system.

Very highly recommended!

The book "Solaris (TM) Internals and OpenSolaris
Kernel Architecture (2nd Edition)"
is one of the best
books (perhaps the best one) that I own on
the Operating Systems related field.

I study also the Linux Kernel which is also
technically elegant, and I recommend to anyone
interested in Operating Systems design and
implementation, to study the
OpenSolaris Kernel also,
since is very well designed and
in my opinion is technically
the best design that I know until now.

The book is excellent, it has clear presentation of the
advanced algorithms used at the Solaris internally,
and the reader has a lot to gain by elaborating
the internals of perhaps the most
advanced modern operating system.

Well written and detailed. If you wish or need to know about the internals of Solaris this book is the source. This is a second edition and covers 10 and updates information on 8 and 9. The first edition covered 2.5.1, 2.6, and 7. I liked the first edition and waited for this edition based on the books/authors web site and have not be disappointed. Highly recommended, a reasonable background in OS theory is helpful with the type of material covered here - but not required - it will aid in understanding however. Recommended more general OS books would include "Operating System Concepts" by A. Silberschutz, J. Peterson, P. Galvin, "Operating Sytstems" by A. Tanenbaum, A. Woodhull, and "Unix Internals" by Uresh Vahalia among others.

I think of this book as answering three questions:
* what do developers need to know to work as professionals?
* how does quality coding and design play into unfolding designs?
* what is the proper way to integrate refactoring, test-driven development and design patterns in the real world?

All too long this industry has allowed individuals to do what they like instead of what their teams and businesses need. Programming is not just about individual people's opinion of approach and quality, but about real issues that have been long identified.

This book weaves the tale of what is known and how to use it in a real environment. I didn't react to this book the way Mr. Vodde did as an advertisement for Net Objectives. I like the anecdotal story telling of how this knowledge is conveyed to realy people in real situations.

Developers often talk about their problems in getting others convinced of better approaches. What better way than to hear how Mr. Bain has done this himself - something good to learn.

While this book is probably thought of as being for agile developers (those who write code in iterations) it'd be highly useful for anyone. Everybody's code needs to morph over time - even if the first release is done in a classic waterfall.

EMERGENT DESIGN: THE EVOLUTIONARY NATURE OF PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT is for college-level libraries strong in software engineering, and discusses the foundations of systems development, helping developers work with the flow of ideas inherent in emergent design principles. From tips on how to produce more professional software designs to testing designs throughout the process and learning when to stop, EMERGENT DESIGN is a fine choice for software engineers who would streamline their efforts to produce quality designs early in the process.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

As the cover implies, this book is the basis of a revolution. It is a tour of everything required to become a professional software developer. I believe this book to be distinguished from other technical books in the way that great works of fiction are different from genre books. It defines a category rather than just being a part of one.

It is a call to arms for all of us who consider ourselves professionals to band together into a true profession. Simultaneously, it is a tour of all those things that we as a proto-profession have identified as important and valuable. Practices, patterns, principles, disciplines, tools... Bain shows how all of these things work together. He goes one step further, though: he shows how they can coalesce into the basis for our occupation's transcendence into a profession.

If you have not been introduced to these concepts - if you work in a heavily waterfall environment with brittle code and death-marches at the end of long release cycles - this book is your way out. Read it. The most you will have lost is the time it takes you to read a three hundred page book and you have everything to gain. Emergent Design will show you that there is a better way. A way to make software that gets easier to maintain over time, not the other way around.

If you are familiar with these concepts, as I believed myself to be, then you will enjoy seeing everything come together in one book. You will probably gain some valuable insights along the way. I certainly did. You will also find that it is powerful recommended reading for those around you. Scott Bain's writing is clear, concise, friendly, funny... oh yeah: and very persuasive. Having read this book will give you and those whom you coach, teach, or work-with a common frame of reference; even more-so than Design Patterns.

I truly believe that this book is going to be at the center of a series of discussions, debates, and decisions which will ultimately lead to the formalization of software development as a real profession. It would be easy to characterize your choice as "buy it or don't buy it" but that would not be accurate. The real choice before you is this one:

You can either be an informed participant in the formation of our profession or you can just be governed by it.

I trust you to do the math from there.

This book is a gold mine of wisdom.

This book contains a ton of wisdom that has come out of the software engineering field over the years. It brings together a lot of software development best practices that can be found in other resources and puts them together under the umbrella of Emergent Design.

He covers patterns, principles, processes, and practices by presenting the best of each that has been proven to work again and again. The common sense communicated out of this book is priceless.

The author has a presentation that touches on a lot of the content found in the book. It can be viewed by Googling for "EmergentDesign_12_11_2007".

Forward thinking is something that I find lacking in a lot of the environments I am exposed too, especially development environments. This book nails how to do forward thinking when it comes to software design and development. You will end up making your solutions more valuable with each change, instead of degrading them with each change if you follow the advice in this book.

If you do development, this is a must read. I would advise all team leads to get rid of anyone who has not read this book by the end of the year.

Emergent Design by Scott Bain is a interesting book. The title is very promising, when I first heard about it, I got very excited! Finally a book about how designs emerge, how designs emerge from multiple people and how designs evolve over time compared to specifying. After reading the book, I felt the book was good, but disappointing. It did not cover the topics I would like to have seen.

The general idea of the book is that software should grow better over time instead of decay over time and that the optimal design will emerge. An idea I strongly agree with. The author links this to software development needing to change to become a profession. If SW development is a profession, then people will use proper practices and design will emerge. The practices (in a broad sense) are principles of design, patterns and disciplines. After the first couple of chapters the book was having a good start, though I started wondering if the author didn't bite of more than he could chew. Those are huge topics by themselves!

From chapter 7 to chapter 14 the author just describes good practices. He starts with qualities of code and qualities of designs. He moves to unit-testing, refactoring and then Test-Driven-Development. He ends with the pattern chapter. The last chapter puts all things together in a case study. Scott does a reasonable job in describing all practices. There are a couple of weird things, like the recommendation that every class has exactly one test class. The TDD chapter also seems to have very little TDD in it :)

As a catalog of best practices, this book perhaps does the best of all the current agile related books. Great job by the author.

However, there are some things that personally bothered me. The book seems to be very pattern focused. Scott seems to be of the opinion that patterns is what hold everything together (probably everything in the world). Though, I agree that patterns are an important concept in modern software development, I wouldn't put so much pattern focus in e.g. a chapter on test-driven development. Maybe the title of the book would better be "Scott on SW design and patterns".

That brings me to another issue with the book, the title. Emergent design is an immensely important topic. How does a design start with the first requirement. How does it evolve. How do multiple people work with the design. How can the overall architecture evolve. What about items that evolve difficult, like different programming language usage etc. So much to talk about and the book doesn't do this. It misses a huge opportunity to talk about emergent design & architecture and instead (although important) decides to talk about design principles, patterns and practices. (in that sense, the book is similar to Bob Martin's "Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns and Practices", which I would recommend over this book).

But again, the content of the book is good and useful and normally I would go for a 4 star rating, but I decided to go for 3 stars. This is because the book IMHO contains things that really turned me off.
One of the examples is the talk about professionalism. Don't get me wrong, I do agree with the author on this subject. The point is, we are not alone. In fact, IEEE has been working on certification for many years. In 1999, Steven McConnell wrote a book called "After the Gold Rush" with the subtitle "Creating a True Profession of Software Engineering". Scott talks about finally making a profession out of SW development, but he seems to have not done any research on this topic and seems to not be involved in other attempts to make it a profession. It would have increased his credibility a lot if he would have said "the earlier attempts are different because ..." or something similar.

Another item that was a huge turn-off was the constant promotion of Net Objectives. The book, at times, almost felt like a commercial. Personally, I didn't need to know about what courses Net Objectives teaches, I want to know about Emergent Design!

Anyhow, all these negative points aside, Emergent Design is a good introduction to modern agile development practices. Especially if you are not yet familiar with topics like Refactoring, TDD and patterns, this book is certainly worth reading. Next to that, Scott's writing style is funny and easy to read. So, if you belong to that group of people, recommended! Otherwise, skip it.

Greg Smith has done a very good job of providing a comprehensive and comprehensible resource. While Greg's approach to parenting might sound autocratic to some parents, but the fact is that it is ultimately a parent's responsibility to protect his kid (not that school and society at large are not responsible to protect our kids). While it educates technically non-savvy parents with the innards of the technology, it also provides a clear strategy to adopt the technical tools, corresponding to each age group. It is not a high level book, rather a hands-on approach book. He mentions many tools for monitoring, filtering and blocking purposes and one such tool is familyarmor.com.

Excellent Job!

The Internet and Web have so much to offer for both adults and children. I use it everyday and my children are also online daily. I check the news, email, and do research. I even met my spouse online. Also, my kids play games, chat with friends and explore. It's a great learning tool and allows them some freedoms to explore their interests. However, as the Web and Internet continue to impact our lives, there are very real dangers that I want to know about so that I can be sure my kids are safe when they are online.

What Greg Smith has been able to provide in his book are the specifics of how you can take the necessary steps to make sure that the Internet and Web is a safe place for your kids. Many books and guides speak in terms of general rules and ideas, but what Mr. Smith provides is real details and tools that you can put into action. He identifies the risks and issues being exploited and provides the leading tools, his experiences, and recommendations to protect you and your children. Even experienced technology professionals will find the comprehensive list of tools and technologies in his book a huge help. I have been using the Internet and Web for a long time and there are several things in his book that I did not know about, and that I want to keep my kids from knowing about.

Excellent book.

Greg Smith has written an important book for parents. Using his experience as a senior IT leader and a parent, he lets parents know the risks of children being connected and how to protect them.

The author makes the reader aware of the many dangers of connected electronic devices, not only computers but also cell phones. At a very young age, children are using computers and the age when children have their own cell phones seems to creep down every year. Many parents are not as technically sophisticated as their children, especially parents of teenagers. He urges parents to take control by learning about technology, using the tools available to safeguard and monitor children's activities on-line, and talking with your kids. His easy to understand recommendations let parents know what they need to do, going as far as recommending specific products and providing "How-to" instructions, customized for the age of your child.

As Mr. Smith states in his book, "You're just two clicks away from just about anything." Make sure your children are safe.

This book provides useful and easily understandable information for parents regarding protecting their children on the Internet. Even if you think your kids aren't using the Internet, they are. Statistics show that 96% of 13 yr olds use the Internet on a regular basis. So as parents, and as a teacher, it's important to know and understand how to keep your child safe.

I highly recommend this book for all parents. Even if you think your child is safe or that you know all there is to know, you can never be to safe when it comes to your children.

This book goes into great detail of what you, as a parent, need to do to keep your kids safe on the Internet.

I highly recommend this book to anyone that has children on the Internet.