Book Reviews

With twenty-two chapters spanning a variety of topics, the Perl Cookbook is enough to satiate any Perl programmer. Although not my top recommendation for a beginner, the book does an excellent job of teaching the basics for those who need it. For a more seasoned programmer this book does not disappoint; the topics covered in later chapters are sure to pique your interest. More importantly, however, it ensures that whatever your task may be, it is done with equal weight placed on both speed and practicality.

The book begins by discussing the various ways to manipulate strings, numbers, arrays and hashes. It conveys various examples of many common tasks that serve as a strong base for future Perl programs. The book then shifts attention to the all-powerful regular expressions, providing numerous commonly used (and often forgotten) examples, not to mention the all-encompassing Regular Expression Grab Bag, a three-page spread of expressions that often sit on the tip of your tongue. From here the book begins to pick up pace and diagram proper programming etiquette and design for subroutines, packages, libraries, modules, classes and objects.

My favorite part of the book comes near the end in the form of sockets and client/server communication. The book quickly gave me the answers I needed on how to establish a proper client and server as well as several options and explanations along the way. Instead of simply telling me what I needed to do, the book gave me several options and explained the pros and cons of each (a common theme I enjoyed throughout the book).

In short, this book allowed me to learn the ins and outs of Perl at my own pace, making this a wonderful cookbook for any Perl chef.

Published by acclaimed authors Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson, The Ruby Cookbook is an excellent learning tool and reference manual. It is organized into 23 chapters delineating all capabilities of the object-oriented scripting language. Each chapter is broken down into numerous subcategories describing operations, tips and tricks, common problems and their solutions, and other concepts pertaining to the topic of the chapter. Finding what you are looking for is not an issue since all topics are structured seamlessly.

Unlike many other programming books I have read, this one does not cut corners and overlook the menial steps experts, such as the authors themselves, would assume the reader to know intuitively. I find this aspect to be exceedingly beneficial in learning how the language behaves and what discrepancies may present themselves as a result of coding between a number of programming languages. While reading this book and learning the language, I had never been confused as a result of missing or vague information. The writing style is captivating, concise, and understandable. I enjoyed reading this book.

What I like most about this manual is that it is suited for newbies as well as experts. The introductory topics include the common data structures and how they are implemented, while the later chapters specify advanced functionality and extensions to the language. I recommend this book for all of those who have had some object-oriented programming experience as well as to those who have not but are interested in learning a computing language.

Network Security Hacks by Andrew Lockhart was a very fun and interesting read. While I do not recommend it for those that are just getting into the System Administration and Networking field, I do believe this book should not only sit on the shelves of System Administrators, but should be used frequently for reference. The book promises 100 industrial strength tips and tools, and it delivers that and more. The book is basically a learn-by-example book, which works best for me when studying this field. The examples are very well-written, and provide many example text outputs and screenshots. The book is divided into UNIX, Windows, and network security.

The first chapter covers UNIX security, which I already had a good background in, and taught me some lower-level kernel and file system security. The second chapter covers Windows security: The basics of encrypting folders, restricting users and checking for patches, and monitoring log files. In my opinion, this chapter was the weakest in the entire book. If you are looking for more in-depth Windows security, I suggest looking elsewhere. The rest of the book covers network security and its related components. This section is where the book really shines, covering everything from intrusion detection to logging and monitoring.

My favorite feature of this book is that it will present you with a potential security problem and then a possible solution, but then the book will ask: what if a hacker did this or that? Asking questions in this manner gives you the proper mindset you need to start securing your systems.

I started reading through the Python Cookbook as a beginner with very little experience in Python but fluent in several other languages ranging from Object Oriented to Functional languages. I found the book was very good to learn from by example. I would recommend it to anyone who has had programming experience before and is just starting out on Python to quickly grasp new areas of the language. I would also recommend this to intermediate Python programmers as a resource for being able to quickly identify common problems and elegant solutions to them. I found the book very easy to understand, despite my lack of prior exposure to the language and I felt like it was a very good learning experience. I'm looking forward to using Python more for my day to day tasks now that I have been introduced to many examples of how powerful a language it can really be.

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan is probably the best reference possible for this extremely useful, but complex language. I came to this book with absolutely no knowledge of Javascript, and so this book was my first real taste of the language. The first part of the book deals specifically with syntax and foundations of Javascript, so anyone with programming experience can read the first part of this book and be comfortable with programming in Javascript. This section is integral for understanding the nuanced complexities of a language without having to struggle with hard to find errors. Simple distinctions of types and values were very helpful to me.

The second part of the book is a by-examples tour through the intermingled worlds of Javascript and web browsers. Here you’ll learn DOM scripting, AJAX, DHTML events, and more to make appealing interactive webpages. Personally, I found this section a little harder to use, and I would have preferred a, perhaps simpler, or at least more atomic explanation of AJAX as I am still confused by the whole concept. In either case, this section covers everything you need to know about Web 2.0.

The last two sections of the book are straight reference about everything in the core of Javascript and in client-side Javascript. This is a very well organized section of the book and it helps when you need to know exactly how a certain method or class works and this section alone is worth the cost of the book.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to get a taste of Javascript or for anyone who is looking towards Javascript as a way to access web programming. The book is not for everyone, but I would argue that Javascript is a very important language to learn in this web-centric age.