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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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. This is very important since - even if it’s possible - it’s rare that this kind of book is read cover-to-cover.
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April 2, 2013
As the name suggests, this set of videos is for developers.
HTML 4 and Javascript are often used without much explaination about the JS code it self but only about the HTML5 Canvas part.
I felt to point this out immediately since I’ve not found it on the O’Reilly page, but I believe that is really important to specify.
Another thing that I’d like to point out is that (as it is easy to imagine, but not obvious) these videos only speak about 2D graphics in HTML (therefore there will no WebGL topics).
After these two notes (that will not influence in any way my judgement about the videos), let’s start talking about the videos.
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March 26, 2013
Ganglia is the most robust and scalable tool for performance monitor I’ve tried or heard of.
This book, written by some of the top contributor of the project, is an awesome guide to Ganglia.
Due to its organization and the authors writing style, the book is easy to understand and can be read as a “full-guide” reading it from the first page to the last one, or a reference book reading only the parts that are relevant to you in that specific moment.
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February 19, 2013
It’s Make! I think Make is one of the greatest, if not the greatest magazine available worldwide.
I think that this is a really cool number of Make.
As it usually happens to me, the part I like the most i the “Projects part”, in which I always find awesome ideas.
The article I liked the most is “Growing the Ghost” by Gabriel Nagmay.
This article speaks about the growing of the Bhut Jolokia, one of the world most powerful chili flavour.
I really liked it since I really like peppers and the author gave me a lot of ideas and tips on how to feed the peppers properly.
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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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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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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog