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Product: Book - Paperback
Title: Effective Software Testing: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Testing Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Authors: Elfriede Dustin Rating: 5/5  A rarity in the testing world, here is a book I can wholeheartedly recommend for your average test practitioner or the QA Manager or QA Lead who feels they might be in over their head or who is not sure if they are missing something in their overall test effort. Having worked in the field of quality assurance and testing for more than ten years, I can say that the author hits on many elements that I often see not practiced in various organizations and that should be. The "Item"-focused nature of the chapters (providing the fifty steps) are a great way to present this material and bring in mind, to this reader, Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development", which did the same thing for development-related concerns. I had always wondered why the testing field did not have a book like that and now it does. If I had to pick one nitpick (and in the grand scheme of things it is probably a relatively small one), one thing I could probably do without was the use of the word "nonfunctional testing". That is, unfortunately, a term all too often used in the discipline of testing and it should not be. For example, performance testing in the book is placed under the "nonfunctional" category and yet it is all about functionality: how quickly the functionality performs! The same thing with security: this is about how secure the application/site functions! (In other words, how secure the functionality is.) So this term is, I feel, incorrectly applied and as such will be used by more and more testers and this is often the stumbling block because usage of the term "non-functional" really often covers up what are, in effect, quality requirements and cost constraints. With that said, however, the material under the section on non-functional testing is well laid-out and is accurate in every respect, as far as I was concerned. The breakdown of the book in terms of chapters and then items within the chapters is right on the money. And some of the items are wonderful kernels of knowledge that all testers should keep in mind. For example, Item 17 is "Verify that the System Supports Testability". This is a key concept that way too many testers seem to forget about early on and then have to deal with the ramifications of explaining why they cannot adequately test something later on. Yet another excellent element is Item 22, "Derive Effective Test Cases from Requirements". My immediate thought is: okay, but what if there are no requirements? Well, the author covers that very point in an excellent manner. In fact that is what all the items do: they provide a solid reference point for a variety of topics that can be researched by the conscientious tester or analyst. This book is a distillation of a broad array of concepts, from requirements analysis to automated testing tools to evaluating how effective a tester is. This wide scope will, I think, give the book a broad appeal and it serves to make it clear that there is quite a bit going on in the world of testing. Overall, I think this is an excellent reference book for the average test group within an organization and is certainly worth having in your library if you in any way deal with the world of quality assurance or quality testing. It is rare that I give any book five stars (much less a testing book) but this one deserves it. Will you be an effective tester with this book? That all depends on how you apply what it talks about. But I can almost guarantee you will be an ineffective tester if you do not take much of what this book has to say seriously. Highly recommended.
Product: Book - Hardcover
Title: Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms (3rd Edition) Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Authors: Donald E. Knuth Rating: 5/5 This was one of the first computer books I read 20 years ago (the selection in our office was limited). It remains one of the best in its field. There is just so much information in this series of books that you be hard pushed to ever to think of a fundamental computing problem that hasn't been covered. The books are more geared towards computer scientists than application programmers like myself but nevertheless are really worth reading. Modern high level languages do so much for you these days that it is easy to forget what is going on under the bonnet (or 'hood' for US readers) but even if you don't need to know the details, familiarity with the principles will greatly benefit your work. There are a lot of programmers who can write code that works but don't have any great feel for what they are doing. The best programmers understand not only what they are doing but why they are doing it that way. These are the ones who deliver the best results and this series of books can place you firmly in this camp. The only weakness of the book isits over reliance on the author's MIX language. Certainly there are reasons for him using it but it is still a barrier for many people.
Product: Book - Hardcover
Title: Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Authors: Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber Rating: 5/5 This book was essencial for me to dig deeper into data mining techniqes and methonds. It is a good guidance book for beginners and also for advanced practictioners and researchers. It covers systematically all major themes on data mining and provides additional references for briefly covered topics. My subject area is web mining. I found this book as an overview book. I could get a wide view of the field. I got good hints for my specific field. It is very strictly written book not preferring this or other products as several comercial books of today do. The book is very up to date. I would say it is a current bible of data mining science, though there could be some similar or even better books on the subject in last month but maybe I'm not up to date.
Product: Book - Paperback
Title: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites Publisher: O'Reilly Authors: Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville Rating: 5/5 Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large Scale Web Sites, 2nd Edition, (the Polar Bear book) was written by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville and this second edition came out in August of 2002. It is a book about web site development from two pioneers in the field of information architecture whose backgrounds are in the fields of library studies and information systems. Both are published authors and experienced in web site development. Mr. Rosenfeld and Mr. Morville use architecture as a base of understanding for readers to comprehend the essential elements of developing a web site project focusing on the design of the organization and managing the information effectively within a web site in order for users (consumers) to find and manage the information more effectively and efficiently. The authors talk about broad concepts and principles of web site design which allow readers to think about applying these concepts creatively to their own site development. The authors target some specific areas of web site development. For example, the authors want readers to think about the goals and intended audience of the potential web site, the content that will be placed in the site, and also the structure of the site. All of these elements could be considered universal to web development. Yet, the authors explain in such a way that allows readers (or designers) to apply these concepts individually to their own area of development. Other topics covered include user interaction, and navigation and search systems that allow users to access, retrieve, and manage information from the web site more appropriately. This book, although extremely technical in some chapters, explains the importance of web site development comparing it to architecture, specifically information architecture, emphasizing the importance of successful information retrieval from a collaborative view point. Overall, I consider this book to be a highly valuable reference material on any web designers desk. However, frankly, some chapters were just way over my head. The material was very technical in some chapters and spoke to business professionals in other chapters, doing exactly what it was intended to do. I welcome the opportunity to review it more throughly from a course development stand point and I consider it to be a very well written and researched and very valuable book on web development
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