Sat, 17 Oct 2009
JRuby Cookbook - Short Review
First a disclaimer, I'm not a heavy Ruby or Java guy. Most of my coding
for the last couple of years has been perl and shell - because I write
little things that I need right now and those two languages excel at
that (CPAN is still THE decision clincher).
I recently became involved in a side project that is written in Ruby and Java though and in an excellent timing coincidence a friend returned my previously unread copy of the JRuby Cookbook. The book isn't an introduction to either Java or Ruby (there are already excellent online and dead tree resources for that) but it shows where the two can meet and how to get started at those points. It's not really a book to read back to front but it is a good approach for a cookbook.
If you're curious as to how dynamic languages on static language VMs can complement each other this is a good book to flick through. Score - 6/10 - it's not the book for me right now but it does show a lot of entry points I'll probably come back to later.
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Posted: 2009/10/17 19:08 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 14 Sep 2009
JavaScript: The Good Parts - short review
Considering that JavaScript: The Good
Parts is only 124 pages it took me a lot of attempts to work my way
through it. A combination of the authors attitude and the dry
presentation put me off within the first three chapters every time i
tried to read the book.
However a side project I was helping out on needed some JavaScript reviewed and considering how little of the language I knew I forced myself to work through the book and I'm glad I did - despite its short comings it's an excellent introduction to the language for programmers with a couple of other languages under their belt. The main parts of the language, such as syntax railroad diagrams, objects, inheritance and regular expressions are covered in a very basic, but to the point style with some excellent little code snippets. The examples in this book help you think of the language itself as mutable and just another tool to bend to your needs.
Once I accepted the authors style I liked the book. It would have been better with a little less repetition and maybe even as a pocket reference but it's an excellent book on JavaScript none the less. Score - 7/10
Note - when trying the samples, and experimenting with the language in general, I used the Mozilla Rhino JavaScript interpreter. It was nice to have a non-web playground for getting to grips with the language without needing to work around the idiosyncrasies that come with web browsers.
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Posted: 2009/09/14 22:25 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 13 Sep 2009
Land The Tech Job You Love - Short Review
When it comes to progressing your technical career there are (IMHO) three
main pillars, continuing your technical advancement, networking (with other
people, not just wires) and building up your online presence. Land The Tech Job You Love covers all these critical
points and expands the other parts of the job seeking process -
researching the company, preparing for the interview and how to answer
the more ambiguous questions that often come up.
The book is well written and has lots of action points that can help you along the way. I don't think I'd follow all the advice as given, some of it seems very American, but the book does raise a lot of points you should at least be aware of during your job hunt.
Score - 6/10
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Posted: 2009/09/13 18:29 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 31 Aug 2009
Cloud Application Architectures - Short Review
With all the hype and misdirection around the cloud it's always good to
find a little bit of concrete information. If you're interested in the
general principles of how the cloud (and Amazon Webservices in
particular) could replace some of your existing infrastructure then Cloud Application
Architectures isn't a bad place to start.
The book is a slim tome, it's easy to read in a couple of sittings and covers all the basics. The author felt more than a little biased towards the cloud (IMHO) but what do you expect from someone leading the push? The book is well written, clear in making its points and the worst omission / error are a couple of missing figures, but the text works fine without them.
I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the Berkley Cloud paper (PDF), a great paper for defining terms regarding the cloud, and any of the keynotes by Simon Wardley (especially the one from FrOScon 2009) as other good starting points - both of which are free.
If you're interested in how the cloud could play a part in your environment and want something a little more concrete (and AWS focused) then this book is for you. 7/10.
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Posted: 2009/08/31 20:26 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 30 Aug 2009
Project California: a Data Center Virtualization Server - Short Review
When it comes to sysadmin buzzwords Project California: a Data
Center Virtualization Server ticks a lot of the boxes, which is a
little misleading as half the book is about solid hardware level details
that are actually rarely covered.
While this makes the first half more than a little dry it does introduce concepts that many of us take for granted, such as why DDR3 is faster than DDR2. The second half takes you through the Cisco UCS stack and where the benefits are. It's a good starting point but I'd hoped for some more meat, maybe even a case-study or two. The book answered some of my questions but it's not amazingly comprehensive so expect to do a lot more digging after you've finished reading it.
The book is self-published (Via Lulu) so it's probably worth mentioning the quality - it's the same as any other book I've bought recently. No better and no worse, which is actually pretty impressive.
6/10 - dry, fills a niche but covers a lot of general material not specific to UCS.
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Posted: 2009/08/30 11:05 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 21 Feb 2009
GDB Pocket Reference - (Very) Short Review
If you already know GDB then this book might
be useful. It's full of command summaries and option listings but
lacks an actual introduction or any walk through examples.
A google for GDB tutorials bought back some well written intros with actual sample code I could work through which is probably a more useful approach for most people.
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Posted: 2009/02/21 12:05 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 03 Jan 2009
The Art of Capacity Planning - Short Review
The only books on capacity planning I've ever skimmed my way through have
been dense, dull tomes of long mathematical formulas, advice that's hard to
use in any practical way and page counts in the treble digits. Thankfully
John Allspaw has bucked this trend with The Art of Capacity Planning
and instead written a slender, thought provoking, book.
The main focus of the book is that measurement is good, blind guessing is bad and that capacity planning, like security, is an ongoing process. While a lot of the material is common sense - which is never that common in IT - it's a perfect introduction to capacity planning (and the principles of data collection and graphing) for novice to intermediate system administrators and a handy refresher for the experts in the crowd. I found it oddly reassuring that someone else has a lot of the same thoughts as I do when it comes to these topics.
The Art of Capacity Planning is an easy, engaging read that gets you thinking along the right lines without becoming dull or long winded. Well worth the couple of hours it'll take to read - 8/10
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Posted: 2009/01/03 17:47 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 29 Dec 2008
End of 2008 Very short Book reviews -
Behind every good manager lurks dozens of bad ones. While
Behind Closed Doors
is full of mostly common sense tips it's uncommon to deal with management
that actually apply more than a couple of them. It's an easy, quick read
and an ideal gift for that special manager in your life that you really
wished wasn't. 7/10
The Python Phasebook is a concise, well written set of examples. Each 'phrase' is a short task with some sample code that shows one of the possible solutions. Think of it as an O'Reilly cookbook, but not from O'Reilly. This is a good book but it needs a second edition to cover all the changes to the languages over the last couple of years. It could also do with a chapter on unit testing. 4/10 (because of age) but looking forward to the second edition.
I also read the Ruby Phrasebook but I'm not giving this book a score until I've worked my way through the Ruby Cookbook. Lastly was Practical Ruby for System Administration. I didn't like this book but I've not worked out the exact reasons why so I'll have to wait to post a full review.
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Posted: 2008/12/29 14:02 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 14 Aug 2008
Apache JMeter - Short Review
A short review for a short book.
Apache
JMeter (Packt Publishing) is a good book if you're new to both IT and
testing and want your hand securely held. It introduces you to the basic
ideas behind automated testing, takes you step by step through some
simple GUI test cases and then doesn't go any further.
It's a short book and maintains its beginners focus well but it has a very short lifespan (luckily it's also available as a cheap PDF) and if you're comfortable with GUIs and basic testing, or willing to click around for a while I'd recommend you dive straight in to the JMeter GUI rather than investing half a day to read this book.
On the downside it didn't cover any of the aspects of JMeter I found interesting and wanted to learn about - the access log sampler and distributed load testing spring to mind - which in a beginners book is fine enough but does make it completely the wrong book for me.
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Posted: 2008/08/14 07:23 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 31 Mar 2007
When Sysadmins Ruled the World - Like that'll Happen!
There is something immensely isolating about working alone in a very
secure, huge data centre, at 4am on a Sunday morning in an isolated
"business park" in rural Scotland that only a few people will ever
understand.
The mind wanders, your ears strain to hear things over the quite loud air conditioning and just five minutes in daylight with a can of diet coke and someone to talk to would make the last 48 hours seem tolerable. It's hard to describe and even harder to capture but When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth makes a decent go of it.
Here is to everyone who has played "hunt the vending machine" while swapping hard drives.
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Posted: 2007/03/31 22:57 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 28 Mar 2007
Marooned In Realtime - Short Review
Marooned In
Realtime was the first Vinge book I read and it has prompted me to
start looking for all his others.
A small number of time travellers (that can only go forward) awaken to find out humanity is gone. Amid a plan to gather all the other travellers together and kick start the human race one of the more powerful techs dies in odd circumstances, a 9000 year old traveller returns, aliens might be waiting to finish us off and an ex-detective is ordered to lead a manhunt to find out just what happened to the projects architect and biggest supporter (who may have been murdered by old age). Oh and people of different backgrounds don't get on. So some of it is familiar :)
It's also worth noting that this is actually a sequel to The Peace War (which I've yet to read) but it stands alone as a riveting read. The combination of sci-fi and detective story is a favourite of mine and this one is a top notch example of how to do it right.
Summary: humanity is almost finished, a few of the survivors have all too powerful technology, a possible murder might have been committed and one of the lo-techs is roped in to find it. If I had a checklist this book would tick most of them. 7/10.
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Posted: 2007/03/28 22:32 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
True Names - Short Review
This is more like it, True
Names by Vernor Vinge is a great mix of sci-fi and fantasy.
Technical wizards join forces in cyberspace to oppose the "Great Adversary". When one of them is compromised and turned in the real world a hunt for the most dangerous of the online personas is launched, leading to a great chase and some nicely described online battled. I'm not doing it justice, just click the above link dammit.
Summary: an enjoyable, expertly paced story that was one of the first to introduce some of the most common themes in modern sci-fi. It has aged surprisingly well and is more than worth a read. 7/10.
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Posted: 2007/03/28 22:08 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Blood Music - Short Review
I've been on a sci-fi novel kick again recently and despite its short page
count Blood Music by
Greg Bear was the one I found slowest to finish from my first batch.
A rogue biotechnologist starts his own experiments in to biological computers based on his own lymphocytes while on the company clock. He gets caught, ignores all precautions and injects himself with them. They then become intelligent and start spreading. If you're interested in the genre it's nothing you haven't seen before. Just (probably) slower moving and with less interesting characters. Blood music just never grabbed me.
Summary: an OK story of an Earth changing grey goo incident. Not very exciting, dull characters and the pacing felt very slow. 3/10
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Posted: 2007/03/28 21:53 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 01 Jan 2007
Short Reviews: Cisco Routers for the Desperate and Using Moodle
Cisco Routers for the Desperate (No Starch Press): If you've tech savvy but Cisco
challenged then this books for you. It's not a one stop shop but it covers
almost everything you need to get started. We've just bought an office copy
so I can have mine back. 8/10
-- Cisco Routers for the
Desperate book review
Using Moodle (O'Reilly): Don't bother, read the online docs or the application help pages instead, they contain pretty much the same amount of information.
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Posted: 2007/01/01 11:08 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 24 Sep 2006
Building Scalable Web Sites - Short Review
I really liked Building
Scalable Web Sites, its topic coverage is impressive - the author
obviously knows what he's doing - it's written in a practical, easy to
follow style and the text explains the theory while remaining pragmatic.
There are few books on the market that contain this much useful
information in what has always been an under-documented "niche" and it's
sure to save every admin at least a few scalability related headaches.
If you manage publicly facing web sites, web applications or even an internal site for a large corporation this book is well worth the time. Score: 8/10
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Posted: 2006/09/24 17:35 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 23 Sep 2006
Time Management for System Administrators - Short Review
"What do you think of the Getting Things Done book?"
"I'll worry about time management when a tech publisher has a book on it."
"Have you seen Time Management for System Administrators?"
Queue the sound of Amazon.co.uk being loading in FireFox
I'm happiest when I'm bouncing between lots of different tasks - whether they're all independent or part of a larger project. This is great in an emergency or when I'm working in a small team with a decent workload but not so good when it comes to simultaneously juggling small, quick turn around requests with longer, concentration demanding projects. I need a certain amount of time to pick up where I was - not just to ensure I don't skip a step or make a mistake. Time Management for System Administrators understands why many sysadmins suffer from this and how to remedy (no pun intended) it and some related topics.
The book can be broken up in to three parts, the first, consisting of chapters 1-3, introduces the why of time management, how interruptions play merry hell with our workload and why we devise and stick to routines.
The second chunk of the book, chapters 4-8, explains "The Cycle System" (the capital letters just feel right). This is the authors technique for balancing and controlling your tasks, calendar, priorities and progressing towards your life goals; the last of these is less hokey than it sounds. These chapters were the most interesting part of the book for me and include the topics I'm most likely to dip back in to as I integrate sections of it with my own daily routines.
The closing chapters are a grab-bag of goodies, they cover stress and email management - which may be closely related, eliminating time wasters (unfortunately not a guide to 'removing' your less able co-workers) and the benefits of documentation and automation. This selection of material was the least interesting to me, not just because I'm familiar with the subjects but because they felt a little bolted on. As an example, the sections on using make and processing shell arguments in the automation chapter go on too long in an otherwise technology agnostic book.
Although the title mentions System Administrators there is a lot of useful information in here for other technical staff, developers and QA workers should be able to take a lot away from the book. I found the authors style to be easy going (although I'm not too keen on teaching through repetition in books - if I'm not sure of something I'll reread the paragraph) and the advice seems to make sense. I'm adopting some of the techniques from the book and I'll have to see how they hold up in the field. But that's my part of the deal.
Score: 7/10 - contains some useful techniques, pointers and explanations on why our role has different requirements when it comes to longer term project work and the daily tasks list.
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Posted: 2006/09/23 16:56 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 18 Sep 2006
Perl Testing Developers Notebook - Short Review
The Perl
Testing Developers Notebook (PTDN) is the first of the O'Reilly
Developers Notebook series I've read. The format's good, a mix of the
cookbook and hacks series, but does the substance match the style?
At nine short chapters this book packs a fair amount in. It starts with how to write, run and read tests in chapters 1 and 2. Moving on to using Devel::Cover (a chunk of chapter 3) and, in chapter 4, introducing Test modules that'll help you cover your bases before releasing a module (or depending on your perspective make you jump through cargo coding hoops.) These early chapters provide a well written, nicely paced, introduction to Perl testing. If this is your first exposure to the Test:: Modules then this section will make your day, otherwise you'll probably skim read it and won't come back to this section, and chapter 4 in particular, after your first time through. The points it makes are sound but it lacks re-read value.
Chapters 5 and 6 cover replacing built-ins, mocking functions and objects and testing databases, both your interactions and the datasets. This is one of the best written examples of mocking using Perl that I've seen (although there isn't exactly a surplus of decent perl mocking documentation, there is a lot of documentation mocking perl but that's slightly different :)) and was the highlight of the book for me.
The book closes with chapters on testing websites (which gives some nice pointers to modules) and Apache modules, using Test::Class and using perl to wrap and test 'other things'. I didn't get a huge amount out of this section, beyond some pointers to modules I wasn't aware of, and it felt like the coverage was quite shallow; it shows you what you can do but seems to stop too early.
In general, the books short size and lots of concise labs fit the "this module does this testing task" format nicely, it's got quite a wide coverage for its page count and gives a number of pointers to modules that can make your testing life a lot easier.
Score: 7/10 if you're just starting out in perl testing. 5/10 if you're not (and most of that is for the mocking chapters).
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Posted: 2006/09/18 20:05 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 17 Sep 2006
The Ten Career Commandments - Short Review
The Ten
Career Commandments isn't my usual kind of book, I got stuck in a
friends office waiting for him to finish up for the day and ended up
reading it because it was the only thing on the desk, and they only had
a 2Mb office 'net connection - the barbarians ;)
The Ten Career Commandments is an easy read that will best serve people just starting out in the world of work. I found that it did prompt me to think about bits of my career wants but it's so generic that it can't really provide any useful push or insights. And if I knew what I wanted I wouldn't be reading this kind of book. If you're new to working it might help you know what the questions are though.
If you do want to read it I'd suggest reading it in an in-store coffee house, the book itself took me no more than 30 minutes to read and if I'd have paid full price then it'd get a much lower score. Score: 4/10
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Posted: 2006/09/17 09:52 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 11 Sep 2006
Visible Ops - Short Review
When it comes to system administration, the system part can refer to the
paperwork, processes and procedures as much as actual machines. Among
the modern admins worries are such evil beasties as section 404 of
Sarbanes Oxley, the data protection act, log retention for the lovely
police state powers of our government and, in some industries, ISO17799,
BS15000 and other similar standards. One of the topics I've been interested
in recently is the ITIL approach.
The initial hurdle was actually finding out where to start, and so for my first step I picked up (well, my employer bought) Visible Ops. This slim volume (98 pages) packs a lot of common sense. Most of the points it raises, including - the need for change control, inventory management, measuring and that your staff should look at what happened recently before they start tweaking things in an attempt to stumble across a fix - are all insights that most admins pick up over time. But to have them written down in one place, and in such an accessible style, is a great asset.
Although I'm not sure how useful this book will be on my ITIL road trip (I've got the BS15000 standards to read next) I can happily recommend it to everyone running an IT department who feels that things are slipping or that too much time is spent fighting fires. And let's be honest, 98 pages is about all we've got time to read these days :)
Score: 4/5
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Posted: 2006/09/11 20:23 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 05 Sep 2006
Perl Debugger Pocket Reference - Short Review
A book about a debugging program is never going to be that exciting. At
best it'll be both comprehensive and concise, two things that don't have
to be mutually exclusive, at worst it'll be a dull rehash of the perldoc.
Which type is this one?
The Perl Debugger
Pocket Reference (PDRB) starts with some basic practises to help you avoid
debugging (the usual use strict and use warnings)
before walking through two very basic debugger sessions and then on to
the bulk of the book, the command reference.
It's hard to judge this section of the book, most people will only read through it once (if that) and will probably just dip in when they need to look something up. The commands are broken up by function, not listed alphabetically, which can be annoying but does let you look for better ways to do tasks. The explanations are clear and the examples are mostly useful so it's functional if dull.
PDRB then finishes up with a short introduction to the DB and Devel namespaces, what they do and how you can use them to write your own debugging modules. The coverage of this last bit is well written but very light weight - it shows you what's there, not how to make the most of it.
Down-sides? The biggest example in the book (the linecounter.pl script) is off by two lines in all the examples I tried; which is annoying when you're trying something for the first time and have no idea why it isn't working. I'd also like to see a couple of longer debugging sessions, a couple of pages each, with some of the more advanced functions illustrated.
Score: 6/10. Nicer than the docs but an occasional dip in to rather than an actual read.
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Posted: 2006/09/05 20:11 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
