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Product: Book - Paperback
Title: C++ Coding Standards : 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices (C++ in Depth Series) Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Authors: Herb Sutter, Andrei Alexandrescu Rating: 5/5  Herb and Andrei have done an outstanding job of collecting, condensing and organizing many man years of hard won pearls of wisdom into a concise collection of brief notes. This is a very readable book with a broad range of applicability to all C++ programmers. It is organized such that after the first read, it makes an excellent reference, complete with a dozen page "Summary of Summaries" which should not be overlooked at the end of the book. One of the features I like best about this book is that not only does each item have a rationale, but most items also have a section describing when the item should be disregarded. This book is not a substitute for thinking. Rather it is a tool to help the reader think more clearly. Therefore it has earned a prominent place on my bookshelf (I can use all the help I can get).
Product: Book - Paperback
Title: Python Essential Reference (2nd Edition) Publisher: Sams Authors: David Beazley Rating: 5/5 Beazly has written the perfect reference for Python. This book has every important function *concisely* described and with excellent real code examples (as opposed to the ubiquitous `desktop calculator' ones that many books use). Whether you are experienced with Python or are just starting out, this is THE python reference. I'd put it up with Kernighan and Ritchie's "The C Programming Language" and Guy Steele's "Commmon Lisp: The Language (1st ed)". There's no higher praise than that. --Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Product: Book - Paperback
Title: Oracle9i Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media Authors: Richard J. Niemiec Rating: 4/5  I like two things in this book, first is an old photo of the "Larry the Geek" at the beginning of the book ;-) and second, a well balanced coverage of all the different tuning pieces of the mosaic known as Oracle tuning. This book is a classic Oracle tuning book in a sense that Rich doesn't hesitate to write about ALL the important tuning pieces. Yes, he even recommend "proactive" monitoring of instance efficiency with various hit ratios as opposed to today popular mantra of focusing solely on wait event interface (reactive tuning, according to Niemiec). In my opinion the correct approach is really somewhere in between (the fact is that monitoring hit ratios alone actually doesn't guarantee proactive approach in all cases - your instance can crawl, while at the same time hit ratios are all green), this is why I appreciate author approach, he recognizes that many DBAs nowadays doesn't care much about hit ratios and instead focus completely on wait event interface but at the same time he points out that hit ratios should not be carelessly overlooked. However, no matter how complete this book appears to be, you should not rely solely on information from it, nor believe everything you read (for example, the definition of paging on page 648: "....paging occurs when users not currently active are moved from memory to disk....", yeah right :-)I would recommend that you combine information from this book with some other good resources, like the "Oracle Performance Tuning 101" (even if it's a little bit outdated) or a recent book from Thomas Kyte. One final question to the Rich (if you're reading this review); "No offence, but what have you thinking about, when you included spool of the results from some queries in appendixes B and C (over 120 pages!) ? What's next, spool of select * from dba_objects? Total waste of paper! Please, don't do that in the next edition, think about all those saved trees (hmm... perhaps a little forest!), and let us spool the results for ourselves, after all, we all have access to SQL*Plus ;-).
Product: Book - Hardcover
Title: Design Patterns Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Authors: Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides Rating: 5/5 First of all let me qualify my critique by saying that I use this book heavily and am grateful for it - every programmer should digest and drink in the material in this seminal and valuable book. However one must understand the boundaries of Design Patterns. Object Oriented Programming has been the New Wave of the 80's and 90's.The initial rah-rah over encapsulation-inheritance-polymorphism faded when their benefits were hard to extract.The design patterns are one step above O-O. Heavily founded in the the main "tricks" behind the design patterns, are also the facets of O-O1. interface2. dynamic binding (or polymorphism)2. inheritance3. aggregation (or composition) So in the future when there is the next new wave in software, I expect our paradigms to shift to something else. In short, it is a great book, but it is not in the same league as (say) a Mathematics book which will stay current for a very, very long time. (As a Christian myself, I liked John Vlissides unashamed quotes from the Bible on the first pageJoshua 24:15 "As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD") How to read the book rapidly if you are a visually oriented person. I am a slow learner but was able to read this book in two hours:1. First, understand intimately how the four "tricks" work, mentioned above. 2. Do not read in serial fashion from page 1 till end. Instead look at the structure diagram for a design pattern; meditate on it until you are blocked whereupon read the text to find the answer.
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