Avatar (Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog

Implementing Cloud Design Patterns for AWS by Marcus Young (Packt Publishing)

July 19, 2015

Today the IT world is moving very quickly from the classic infrastructure with servers, switches, hard disks and so on to virtual infrastructures, where all those things are simple pieces of software faking to be real objects. This has huge benefits, and this is why so many companies are doing this. Along with the advantages, this new way of doing IT has it’s criticality that the administrators have to know to prevent possible problems to happen.

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The Wireshark Field Guide by Robert J. Shimonski (Elsevier)

April 2, 2014

I usually don’t start with this, but lately I had some time constraints that made me wondering if is right to use so much time reading books. The Wireshark Field Guide Analyzing and Troubleshooting Network Traffic by Robert J. Shimonski is only 149 pages long (if we cut the introduction, indexes, etc. it boils down to 128 pages). This is a really short book and I have really appreciated this fact.

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RESTful Web APIs by Leonard Richardson, Mike Amundsen, Sam Ruby (O'Reilly Media)

May 28, 2013

The API are now becoming more used every day. Today every major website provides it’s own set of API and often the company websites and services are chosen (or not chosen) based on the availability of API and their design. In this huge world that is getting bigger every day, RESTful API plays a huge role, in fact a lot of companies are moving their API to RESTful API since it’s easier to use, therefore more attractive for potential clients.

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Zero to Maker: Learn (Just Enough) to Make (Just About) Anything by David Lang (Maker Media)

May 21, 2013

When I opened this book I was impressed on the image/text ratio. Being a Maker Media product, I thought it was somehow similar to the Make magazine. I was very wrong: in the whole book there are less then 10 images/photos. This is a good thing, if you like to read because allows the author to put way more contents than if he had to put more images and it keeps the file size small (~23Mb).

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Principles of Big Data: Preparing, Sharing, and Analyzing Complex Information by Jules J Berman (Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann)

May 14, 2013

As you probably know, I usually do not comment the books layout, being more focused on the contents of a book instead of it’s layout. This time I will start this review speaking about the layout of this book since it’s REALLY peculiar. The Introduction is written in a two-columns layout, very similar to the Science magazine layout. The book itself is written in a single column layout, still with a “Science like” look.

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Practical Anonymity, by Peter Loshin (Elsevier/Syngress)

May 7, 2013

The anonymity on the web is probably one of the most debated topics on the web. Is possible to be completely anonymous? The short answer is no. This book tries to help the read to improve its anonymity, staying is the “real world”, as the “Practical” world in the title suggests. In this book you will not find anything that is too complex for an average user. Whether this is good or bad, depends on you expectations.

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CompTIA Security+ Training Kit (Exam SY0-301) by David Seidl, Mike Chapple, James Michael Stewart (Microsoft Press)

April 30, 2013

After few months after the review of CompTIA Security+ Rapid Review, I’m now here to speak about it’s bigger brother: the Training kit. With its 569 pages, this book is more than twice the length of the Rapid Review one. Even if someone can think that they did a better summary in the Rapid Review one, I have to say that this is not the case for these two books. While the Rapid Review allows you to pass the exam if you already know the certification contents and you only need to evaluate your level and to refresh some contents, the Training Kit will teach you the certification contents.

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Hadoop: The Definitive Guide by Tom White (O'Reilly Media)

April 23, 2013

Hadoop is today a industry-standard software for the Big Data and this book it’s the industry-standard book for Hadoop. his book is able to bring you from no knowledge about Hadoop and the Big Data to a full knowledge of Hadoop and it’s usage. The book is split in 16 chapters and 3 appendix for a total of 628 pages of contents. This make ~33 pages for chapter so it’s easy to read and to find what you need.

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Hacking Web Apps by Mike Shema (Elsevier/Syngress)

April 16, 2013

Mike Shema speaks about a lot of different kind of attacks in his book in a real deep way, at the point that sometimes I wondered if he was planning to instruct people how to hack websites or only how to secure own websites. The book has often some code samples that allow a faster understanding of what the author is saying. Even if a coding knowledge is not required, the ability to understand HTML, JS, SQL, PHP, Python and C++ speeds up the reading.

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Logging and Log Management by Anton Chuvakin, Kevin Schmidt, Chris Phillips (Elsevier/Syngress)

April 9, 2013

Logs are one of the most powerful tools in the sysadmin hands, and probably of all kind of IT roles. This book does deep into the logs and their management. One of the aspects that I really liked about this book is the division of the text in chapters. The book is “only” 420 pages long, but is well split in 22 chapter, so they are (on average) 21 pages long.

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