February 12, 2013
This book initially shocked me. When I downloaded it, it was a 140 Mb so I thought it was full of drawings and comics. As soon as I opened the file I saw it was nothing I thought it would have been.
The book is mainly written (it can seem tautological but I think that’s right to point it out) with a lot of photos. I think the reason of the “hugeness” of the file is given by the photos. Speaking of them, I think that some of them are really useful to understand the concepts that are being explained in the text, while others can be removed without removing any value from the book.
Speaking of the authors, it’s really interesting to spend a few words on their biography. James H. Carrott is really interested in history, while Brian David Johnson is a futurist at Intel. Two people with such a different background have been able to create a very high-level book.
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February 5, 2013
When I read the first lines of the description “Ready to give your design skills a real boost? This eye-opening book helps you explore the design structure behind most of today’s hit video games. You’ll learn principles and practices for crafting games that generate emotionally charged experiences—a combination of elegant game mechanics, compelling fiction, and pace that fully immerses players.” on the O’Reilly website I thought it was a very well thought eye-catcher phrase to sell more books. Reading the book I understand that the phrase is 100% truthful.
This is a must-have book to anyone interested in the Theory of Games and in designing a game of any kind (not only computer game).
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January 29, 2013
I come to this book less than a month after reviewing the 70-410 Exam Ref.
As the title may suggest, this book is tailored to the preparation of the Microsoft 70-413 exam.
Speaking of the exam, I have to advice that the book does cover any exam objective, but does not cover every exam question.
The book is split into an introduction, 5 chapters and the index.
The first chapter helps to understand how to plan and deploy a server infrastructure. The other four are focused on the designing and implementation of the various components: network infrastructure services (chapter 2), network access services (chapter 3), Active Directory logical infrastructure (chapter 4) and Active Directory physical infrastructure (chapter 5).
A thing I liked about this book is the presence of questions (with detailed answers).
What is improvable for these question is the number.
I think they should put way more questions.
So, the questions, are a good idea not well implemented.
The only thing I hoped to see on this book but is missing is the emphasis on the security.
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January 22, 2013
When I’ve seen this book I had no idea about what I was going to find inside it.
As the title suggests, the book is pretty short (the PDF version count 161 pages) and so it’s really a few reading hours.
The book is divided in 5 chapters:
- Planning: this chapter covers the Business Plan and all the accessories planning. From my experience (and the author too) a good plan is mandatory if you don’t want see your great idea failing.
- Getting Financed: this short chapter (only 12 pages long) gives you some information and advice about the financial part of the company.
- Getting started: here you can find a lot of good advice and general information about marketing, patenting, copyright and other important things you should know.
- Staying alive: here you’ll find information and advice on taxes, press releases and other things that will keep your company going.
- When tomorrow becomes today: in this short chapter (only 5 pages long) are highlighted some differences between ordinary business and web business.
The book is written with no specific sector in mind. This book can be read and found useful to a person that wants to open a pub or a person that wants to open an IT start-up. If this is good because anyone will find something for him, is bad because no one will find all information she needs.
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January 15, 2013
Reading this book has helped me a lot understanding better how the A+ exam works. This book is tailored for the CompTIA A+ certification (and this led me to this book instead of another one, since I’m looking forward to take this certification).
I really liked the fact that every chapter does cover conclusively an argument. In this way, you can choose which arguments read based on your interests and your needs.
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January 8, 2013
This book is pretty short (258 pages long) but is very dense. It is divided into 6 chapters + one appendix.
For each atomic argument, the author does propose 1 to 3 True-or-False questions, their answer and the explanation. I did like the question-answer approach, since you understand immediately which is your level, therefore you can understand which parts you have to cover more and which less. What I did not liked at all about this structure is the layout. Every question is answered right below the question itself. I think this is a very bad approach, since is really hard to answer to a True-or-False question without looking at the answer that you know is there. I think they should have putted all the chapter questions and after all the chapter answers.
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January 3, 2013
Have you ever had to develop a script in UNIX that has to send an email?
If you have, probably you have used the “mail” function since this program is the standard program to send e-mails in UNIX environments if you are using the CLI (Command Line Interface).
The manual for mail reports this as mail usage prototype:
mail -r [sender] -s [subject] receiver-1[,receiver-2,...,receiver-n] > [File with the body]
I think all the parameters are pretty straightforward except the “File with the body” one. This has to be an ASCII file (ie: .txt) with the e-mail body content in the text-only mode.
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January 1, 2013
Reading this book has helped me a lot understanding better how the networking works.
This book is tailored for the CompTIA Network+ certification (and this led me to this book instead of another one, since I’m looking forward to take this certification.
I really liked the “structureness” of this book.
After a brief introduction (Chapter 1) the book author analyzes the whole networking stack starting from ground up. The first chapters, in fact, are about Physical layer (Chapter 2), Data-Link Layer (Chapter 4) and Network Layer (Chapter 6). Then we find the Transportation Layer (Chapter 8) and the Application Layer (Chapter 9). We also find some really interested chapters like Network Devices (Chapter 3), Wireless Networking (Chapter 5), Network Security (Chapter 11) and Network Management (Chapter 12).
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December 28, 2012
When I’ve been selected to review, I was shocked by the amount of material that is hidden in this product.
This is more than 100 hours of videos of the Strata and Hadoop World conference.
The material is divided in three sections: Keynotes (14 videos), Tutorials (64 videos) and Sessions (81 videos).
The Keynotes are really short video (7~15 minutes each) that tend to be some sort of advertise of the companies that are sponsors (I guess) of the event.
This is nice, but I would not waste time on these, if a person has really small amount of time.
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December 21, 2012
This in not an O’Reilly book, even if you have found it on the O’Reilly website.
In fact this book has been published by the Microsoft Press.
Maybe this is a good thing, since we are talking about Windows Server, one of the main Microsoft products.
Who can speak about Windows better than its creator?
As the title may suggest, this book is tailored to the preparation of the Microsoft 70-410 exam.
On the exam topic, I have to advice that the book does cover any exam objective, but does not cover every exam question.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog