Computing Internet Books

I've had my Palm TX for almost a year and knew I wasn't using it anywhere close to it potential. This book is a wonderful source of information that is delivered with a good sense of humor, making it an easy read. I recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about their Palm device and how to get better use out of your investment.

I have recently upgraded to the Palm TX. Having exclusively used the Microsoft OS before using the Palm OS (and being totally unhappy with the Microsoft approach which is why I switched to the Palm), I wanted something that went way beyond the normal manual to explain in great detail why certain operations were done and in what order, etc. This excellent and very thorough and very readable book does a very thorough job of explaining the Palm OS development history and consistently presents some well known and even many little known facts about the day to day operations of the fine Palm devices in all possible categories that may be of interest to users (word processing, spreadsheets, creating slides, games, storage cards, batteries, etc.). It is the newest, but hopefully not the last edition of a fine book going back to the 1990's. I highly recommend it.

well written (little too much "sidenote" jokes for my taste). Explains the basics very well. I really they covered using a Palm with a Mac a little more. The authors did not cover using a palm for GTD though...

"How to Do Everything with Your Palm Powered Device" Sixth Edition has been a big help to me with my palm TX. After owning the palm TX for about a year I thought I knew most of it's capabilities. Boy was I wrong! When I purchased the book I quickly learned many additional things my palm could do and how to use it more efficiently. I refer to it often and would highly recommend it to all Palm users. If I lost my copy I would immediately purchase another one!

I think this is a great book.

Just recently got to the point in my life where I need to get and use a PDA and decided to buy this book to go along with it. As someone "new" to this, it was exactly what I needed to hit the ground running with using my new Palm gizmo. I found it extremely well written and easy to read.

Before buying this book, I read over a lot of the reviews here on Amazon, and noticed that some of them are less than positive, and I'd like to address that in light of my own experience with this book. Most of the complaints seem to fall in the area of being, "Most of this stuff I already know.....". And that is probably going to be true for most people who have been using a Palm PDA for awhile. This book mainly covers the "Basics", stuff that someone who has used one of these devices has already figured out. There might be just a few bits here or there that an experience user might find new or interesting. With a title of, "How to Do Everything with Your Palm Powered Device" - I expected the book to cover just what it did - "Everything", which to me basically means the entry level stuff, the intermediately level stuff, and a smattering of advance user stuff. As a new user, there was a lot of basic information that I needed to know, and which this book covered in detail - the bulk of the book is dedicated to doing that. As I gain more experience with using the device, I imagine that I'm going to appreciate more of the intermediate stuff as well.

So my advice, if you need to know "Everything" as I did - this is the book for you. I'm guessing it knocked more than a year off my learning curve for using my new PDA. If you are familiar with the basic operation of one of these devices, there may be some stuff that you might find interesting too - but most likely not a whole book worth.

Passed the Cisco security exam using only this book. Has just the right combination of theory, backed by solid examples and explanations.

I use this book to prepare the exam MCNS, it meets what I need. It can give a good overview of network security, and enough information on the FireWall, VPN, AAA, Intrusion Detection. It provides enough examples to illustrate the idea, especially for those commands usage. Don't expect this book can give you much in-depth information on all areas, such as network security design, but still can give you an overview and enough information for beginner to intermediate level.

The Syngress publication "Managing Cisco Network Security" provides a decent collection of concepts pertaining to architecting secured information systems. However, I found the book lacking in examples of creative applications and substantially less comprehensive than documentation available on Cisco System's web site. In this respect, I was disappointed with the publication contents.

I would recommend the book to those seeking foundation knowledge in the art of network security while cautioning that expectations of specific Cisco guidance might be better satisfied through research of Cisco repositories.

Extremely informative. Much better than the "Cisco Press" technically written version.

This book is an excellent start point for learning Rails. I suppose that all the Rails for ... Developers, if they follow the same line of the Java one, would be a better way on learning Rails for experienced developers.

The Good: This was an interesting book for me because it uses AppFuse for many of its Java-based examples. Unfortunately, it uses the Struts 1.x version which is cumbersome and verbose as far as Java web frameworks go. The most impressive part of this book is how Justin and Stu do an excellent job of walking the line and not insulting Java nor developers using it. They provide an easy to understand view of Rails from a Java Developer's perspective. There's detailed chapters on ActiveRecord (as it compares to Hibernate), ActiveController (compared to Struts) and ActiveView (compared to JSP). This book has excellent chapters on Testing, Automating the Development Process and Security.

The Bad: This book was published over a year ago, so it uses an older version of Rails. This means some commands don't work if you're using Rails 2.0. It's also a little light on Ruby, so I didn't feel I learned as much about the language as I was hoping to. That's understandable as it's more of a Rails book than a Ruby book.

Sorry, the idea is nice and this book could be useful if not missing some very fundamental pieces of ruby language. Thus for example you will see variables prefixed with : coming into hash tables example with no explanation on what is symbols in Ruby when it's an important part of the paradigm. Worst you cannot find any reference on what are ruby symbols in index and there is no way to understand what you are reading.
Made me loosing some time, which is not what I expect from such a book.

I had started this book awhile ago, but then got distracted with various things and left it. I recently started reading it again and just finished it.
I have been puzzled by the relatively lower ranking of this book in the Amazon sales rankings compared to other Ruby/Ruby on Rails books. What is even more puzzling is the fact that amlost everyone who has bothered to write a review has given it full five starts including myself. Here is my guess on why is it so (I may be wrong):
This book assumes certain experience, skill set, knowledge, and sophistication on the reader's part. This means that the person should have a good deal of Java and more importantly J2EE knowledge and real-world experience both as a developer and architect. Unless one has suffered through the baggage that goes with "Enterprise Java", it is very hard to understand and appreciate what the authors are trying to say. Merely having played with J2EE/Java is not sufficient to enjoy this book and get something out of it. You have to lived through at least one complete life-cycle of a typical J2EE project to appreciate the fine points that the authors are making in this book.
One thing is clear to me: even though they try very hard to maintain a neutral posture throughout the book, given a choice, they would rather code Ruby and RoR than Java and J2EE (who wouldn't?).
If you have the necessary experience, knowledge, and skills; then the book becomes very useful. I have particularly enjoyed the later chapters of the book dealing with Testing, Rake, Web Services, and Security.
I hope that they continue to "push" the boundaries of Ruby on Rails knowledge and share it with the rest of us in their excellent writing style.

In "Rails for Java Developers", Stuart Halloway and Justin Gehtland provide an introduction to Ruby and the Rails web application framework aimed at the Java developer more familiar with frameworks such as Struts and Hibernate. There's a lot of buzz in the Java community surrounding Ruby and Ruby on Rails so this title is quite timely.

Halloway and Gehtland provide a tutorial to learning Ruby and Rails by examining similarities with Java. The tutorial progresses by providing examples in both Ruby and Java using popular Java frameworks. The introduction of Ruby and Rails concepts by juxtaposing them with similar concepts implemented in Java is comforting for the developer who may feel a little intimidated by the differences between the languages. Working through the book, the Java developer will learn the basics about creating and deploying Ruby on Rails applications, picking up an exciting new language along the way.

The first three chapters introduce the Ruby programming language. This is the best Java-centric Ruby introduction that I've seen and it's something I wish I had available to me when I was first learning the language. The rest of the material covers the basics of Rails applications as well as web services and security issues. I found the chapters on testing and automating the development process to be particularly good.

The approach this book takes may not be suitable for everyone. After a certain point, I found that the constant juxtaposition of the Java way of accomplishing a task with the Ruby on Rails way of accomplishing a task wore a bit thin. I found myself just trying to skip past the Java bits to get on with the Ruby. Still, I found the book to be quite good overall. If you are an experienced Java developer seeking a gentle introduction to Ruby on Rails, you can't do better than "Rails for Java Developers".

The book assumed that the reader has some exposure to SharePoint. I liked the straight forward step by step instruction to achieve functionality in my sites. It works great as a reference tool but not so much as a learning tool. However, I did pick this book up as a complete SharePoint virgin and learned to build some sweet sites in a very short amount of time with this book as my only reference.

This was a difficult book to wade through and was not user friendly. The last several chapters were useful.

Ordinarily, a computer book starts by introducing what the topic is, in this case SharePoint. However, Chapter 1 of this book did it insufficiently. Past Chapter 2, I still did not know exactly what Sharepoint was. The authors mumbled something about collaboration, discussion, HTML pages, etc. Funnily, the last chapter covers SharePoint installation. Shouldn't be in Chapter 1 so the reader can easily follow?

I had to do my own research, and found this from Microsoft website:

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Windows SharePoint Services is a collection of services for Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 that you can use to create team-oriented Web sites to share information and foster collaboration with other users on documents. You can also use Windows SharePoint Services as a development platform for creating collaboration and information-sharing applications.
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Which I think is more useful than chapter 1 of this book.

I am going to try to put this as delicately and professionally as possible. Do not waste your money. Sure it is only $10 plus shipping but it is still $10. If I could give this book a rating of lower than one star, I would.

The book is very small in size and contains about 130 pages. It claims to be for end users, but wastes almost 20% of those pages (at the end of the book) telling you how to setup SharePoint.

The barely legible examples in the book are based on the authors writing of the book. Most contain very little of substance causing me to wonder how much real world experience the authors have with SharePoint.

The help system is free and there is another end user book (which I reviewed positively) available in the same price range.

Microsoft's SharePoint software is currently attracting a lot of attention, so I thought it would be interesting to do some reviews of books touching on that subject. SharePoint User's Guide by Infusion Development Corporation was one of my early choices for review, and it's a book with a somewhat confusing target audience.

Contents: Working with Sites and Workspaces; Basic Web Parts; Extending Site Pages; Securing SharePoint Sites; Integrating with Office 2003; Setting Up Windows SharePoint Services; Index

This book is targeted for SharePoint users looking to do the most common tasks within the package. As such, I would think that I could theoretically give this to my end users as a guide to the software. But there's far too many references to other software packages like IIS, SQL Server 2000, etc. There's also an entire chapter on how to install SharePoint, which is really outside the capabilities (or interests) of that end user base. OK, so perhaps this is better for a technical user audience. But in my experience, that audience wants a lot of details on the guts of the software, not just a guide that says "do this, this, and this..." So if that's the case, what group *does* this book hit? I really don't know...

The information in the book isn't bad, it's just that it's difficult to determine who best would benefit from the material without an inordinate amount of inappropriate stuff thrown in...

The trouble with this book can be summed up in the Introduction:

This book is aimed at two groups of people: Apache administrators of all levels and Apache module authors. This range of readers means that the book must cover concepts both having to do with programming and with basic configuration. I hope I have accomplished that task in a way the book is useful to both sets of people.

That's a monumental task to take on! Writing a book for each group separately would each take a tome the size of this book. Instead, we cram two subjects into one book without increasing size and get this -- a book that covers everything but in missing detail.

The first the sections start off on the right foot -- an introduction to Apache and how the web works; a comparison of Apache 1.3 and 2.0 with other web servers; configuring, compiling, and installing Apache; and a module overviews, including the MPM modules that handle pre-forking and threading.

After that, the details begin to slip. Sure, you can get Apache up and running with this book. Heck, you can even get it to pull off some nice tricks with this book. It's not until you start dabbling in these "nice tricks," though, that the incompleteness of this book shows through.

For example, while explaining virtual hosting, the author goes over two ways to go about it -- the one-by-one method and mass virtual hosting using mod_vhost_alias. However, he only briefly mentions using a third method, mod_rewite, which is admittedly more complex. The author also spends some time going over security and logging issues with virtual hosting, but at 21 pages, the chapter covering virtual hosting leaves a lot to be desired.

The same goes if you're interested in programming for Apache. Actually, I'm taken aback as to the amount of coverage the author devotes to the programming of Apache. Not because the author goes into greater detail on how the Apache code works than I care to indulge in (which is to say, any). It's because of it's interspersal throughout the book. In the end, this upsets both sets of people -- the administrators that don't want to program and the programmers that don't want to administer.

I guess one could say that this is a "complete reference" in that it covers every aspect of Apache. However, I'd rather have a "complete reference" that covers its subjects in full detail.

If you are familiar with Apache 1.3 and want to learn about all the great new features of 2.0 this book may be for you. Bloom does not hold your hand with step by step instructions. The Complete Reference is exactly what this is but all this information can be found in the free documentation that comes with Apache.

Wow I was lost in the first 50 pages. Threw that book away. Might be good for programers that know some of the stuff. Very hard to follow book. Never going to buy another book without Amazon.

This is an odd book. It does not really teach you how to do anything with the Apache software you just downloaded. It just tells you all about the modules, protocols, and so on in a reference type manner. So if you think you're going to learn how to setup a webserver and begin practicing with PHP, XML, HTML and other facets of Web development from this book you would be disappointed. There is nothing practical in here either for an beginner or an expert.

Going to the source means primary research, and primary research includes telephone and in-person interviewing, direct observation and the use of public records and source documents.

Author Risa Sacks has found 12 researchers to explain the process, and thanks to Risa's own interviewing skills, the reader has almost 400 pages of examples, case studies, strategies, and stories. Readers will have the opportunity to learn from journalists, reporters, writers, private investigators, educators, an independent research company, a large reserach firm, a competitive intelligence specialist, and a librarian at a large corporation. Each interview ends with a list of Super Searcher Tips, and the appendix includes helpful references to websites, databases, books and articles.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in developing or improving interviewing and research skills.

by Crystal Sharp, Owner/Director, InformAction, CD Sharp Information Systems, Ltd. Canada.

This is a wonderful book -- a fascinating and entertaining look at primary research through the experience, stories and advice of twelve practioners. While most of us think of primary research as being the domain of private detectives and investigative journalists, current circumstances make it possible and often necessary, for any researcher to seek out or to verify information through consulting primary sources. Skillful use of the Internet can access a goldmine of competitive intelligence information; proper investigative techniques can lead to information not available in the best indexed databases; and knowledge of what information is collected, stored and available publicly is an asset when tracking elusive data. Most of this is learned only through experience - by doing and trying different methods. The value in this book comes from the experience shared by researchers, journalists, telephone researchers, and private investigators presented in a very readable way. The advice is practical and some of the stories are hilarious!

The book itself serves as an excellent example of the use of primary research. Risa Sacks has skillfully conducted and presented the interviews which touched on the following themes: the difficulties of engaging in primary research, the use of the internet for primary research, techniques for approaching people, interviewing techniques, methods for locating documents, legal issues and use of the phone in primary research.

This is a very useful book - I highly recommend it.

This book does contain the information it claims to; however, it is difficult to find what you want when you want. I would assume most people using this book are looking for sources of information. Since the book is layed out in a Q&A format, the sources are only mentioned within a jumble of text. Then, the sources are LISTED, but not described, in a reference at the back. So what you end up with is a list of sources at the end that have no meaning unless you look up their page number and read the whole context within which the source was related to. Now, this could have been easily remedied if the reference section in the back contained all the sources plus a brief description of what the source is...! It seems like a very basic mistake and would have been so easy to add to the book. It's quite annoying that they did not choose to do so. If anyone involved in the Super Searchers series reads this, I suggest you add this feature to your future books, as it would greatly enhance their value.

This book is just a little more than a piecing together of the RFC's. Comparing with Richard Stevens' book about TCP/IP protocols, this book can be scaled to only one star. I gave this book two stars only because this is the only book I can find about PPP.

PPP Design is a great technical reference for anyone who has to deal with ppp on an intimate level. I picked up this book while I was writing an embedded PPP implementation. The information contained in the book is complete, precise and if you need to implement PPP, this book is a must! On the down side I did not find the CD-ROM very useful, but the book is a definite five stars.