Book Reviews

Book Review – The Rational Guide to SQL Server Notification Services

Lou Vega — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 18:19:00 GMT

The Rational Guide to SQL Server Notification Services

By Joe Webb

Published by Rational Press 2004

ISBN: 0-9726888-1-1

I recently received the task to get myself familiar with SQL Notification Services for a project I’m working on…basically our customer requested that we use SQL-NS and nobody on the team had experience with it so I got the task. I was kind of looking forward to it because it seems like cool technology but was kind of hesitant because there seems to be so little information out there about it.

To assist me with the task, the company ordered me a SQL-NS book (I’ll cover that one in another post) which was a nice resource, but oh my gosh was it a HUGE book to go through…and I was allotted 1 week to get up to speed on this. Thankfully I discovered Joe Webb’s book by Rational Press – because Rational Press (in my opinion) puts out quality books that are manageable, i.e., I was able to sit down and read this through in one night to become familiar and then refer back to it as needed.

I really enjoyed the no-nonsense way in which the book was written. It covers the bare essentials you need to get the job done and gives enough supporting material without overwhelming you. This book was split into three sections.

Section 1 is a quick and helpful overview/introduction to SQL Notification Services followed by a high level architectural overview and a look at the core framework upon which SQL-NS is built. Definitions are provided for key terms related to SQL-NS, diagrams are drawn which provide a good overview of how all the pieces fit together and it’s written in such a concise manner that I found it easy to read and digest for a topic I had thought was going to be much more complicated…don’t get me wrong, I still don’t think SQL-NS is *easy* but it’s much more manageable to me now ;)

Section 2 gets to the heart of the matter – walking the reader though the development of a Notification Services application. The instructions provided are very clear and easy to understand and are augmented by diagrams, code samples and even screen shots which make it easy to follow along.

Section 3 sees the reader building the application and testing it. You have an added bonus if you register your copy of the book online to download the test application itself. I personally haven’t gotten to the point where I’m ready to test my own applications but I’m looking forward to it once I iron out a few things with the project I’m working on.

Now – all in all this is a great resource if you are looking for a quick and relatively painless introduction to SQL-NS…but I will warn you (as Joe Webb warned me) that this book is slightly dated because it targets SQL-NS 2.0 versus SQL-NS 2005 which just shipped with SQL Server 2005. For example, in Section 3 where the focus is on NSControl to manage SQL-NS instances, you can now do that via SQL Management Studio instead of just using the NSControl command line utility (though you still have the option to use the command line). Additionally with SQL-NS 2005 you have support for 64 bit and .NET Framework 2.0. There are other changes but overall as I stated before the book remains an excellent intro to the subject especially since the book is such a quick and enjoyable read.

Book Review – Eric Sink on the Business of Software

Lou Vega — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 02:09:00 GMT

Eric Sink on the Business of Software

By Eric Sink

Published by Apress 2006

ISBN: 1-59059-623-4

It’s been said that writing software well is a complex task and running a business well is equally complex (at least in my eyes). For someone to span both realms and speak about them with authority and experience is a pretty sweet deal…and Eric Sink does just that.

Two things I’ve enjoyed since my younger days were programming and the idea of running a business. In my youthful days mixing the two were never considered. I always stuck to “hobbyist” programming and in my DECA competitions and courses in high school always focused on more traditional business ideas including some that were ahead of their time but that’s a different story and so back to our book review!

Eric Sink is a man who’s succeeded at both – not only in developing pretty cool software, but also creating and maintaining a successful business. This book gives you insight into how he’s done it – with plenty of experience and “notes from the field” which I found highly useful and timely considering I’m reading this book as I’m trying to launch my own software business venture.

For the “more frugal” among you, note that this book is basically a collection of his writings which can be found on his blog at http://software.ericsink.com/ ,but I for one enjoyed having the book to read since the book organizes things nicely and besides as much as I enjoy computers, it’s nice to get away from them for a time (ducks!).

Part One of the book is an introductory text on Entrepreneurship in general. He explores the concept of starting your own company, financing your small company and introduces his concept of a Micro-ISV. If you’re purely a tech person looking to get started in the business of software, this is a good place to start to see if you should even consider making such a move…you may decide differently after reading some things.

Part Two focuses on People…that is the people making up your company whether it’s just you in the beginning or as you grow and decide to hire additional people to work with your company. I particularly enjoyed the essays about hiring developers over programmers and Great Hacker != Great Hire. Since the right people can easily make or break a young company, this section was filled with some very thought provoking material…even for say a department head or lead developer who is looking to grow their team versus growing a business outright.

Parts Three and Four get to the more meaty parts of running your business, Marketing and Sales which incidentally can be some of the scarier parts of running a business – after all you’ve *got* the technology side down, right? ;)

There were many sections here where I found myself thinking I needed to revisit my own business plan and update accordingly, particularly in Choosing my Competition (Ch. 16), and Geek Gauntlets (Ch. 18). The Product Pricing Primer in Chapter 24 also highlighted some areas where I need to re-evaluate things.

All in all I’m glad to have discovered this book. It came to me at a time when my business is still young enough to learn from and incorporate some changes based on my readings in this book which will hopefully put me in a position one day to pass on lessons learned to others looking to make that leap into the business of software.

Book Review – Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System

Lou Vega — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:19:00 GMT

Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System

By Sam Guckenheimer with Juan J. Perez

Published by Addison-Wesley 2006

ISBN: 0-321-27872-0

This book stands out among Visual Studio Team System books because it’s not so much a “cook book” or “how to use” manual for VSTS as much as it is a book about how to engineer software using VSTS. That may sound confusing at first, but let’s read on.

When a friend first referred me to this book, he gave me the same disclaimer – “Lou, this isn’t going to show you how to use VSTS, it’s going to show you how the software can fit into your engineering process”. Now, at the time that was a pretty bold statement because he knew exactly what kind of process orientation we were coming from and knew where we wanted to head (that's a whole different discussion!). That said, I dug into the book and found loads of useful information.

The book begins with an introduction to the Value-Up paradigm in software development and how VSTS can help you adopt this approach by describing some of the ways Team System allows for the collection of vast amounts of metric data concerning your software project. The bonus here is that it presents it in a way that should be relevant reading not only for the developers themselves but also the program managers (I know our team ordered several copies of the book to pass on to project and senior management and it was well received at all levels).

Speaking of project managers, the section of the book on Project Management provides a wealth of information PM’s will find useful including several charts which Team System produces as well as how to “read” those charts. This section alone seemed to make our PM pretty happy knowing he could get this data out of the system without having to ask someone to generate it.

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 cover Architectural issues, Development and Testing each geared toward those editions of Team Suite including a good discussion on Test Driven Development. While I’m not quite a full fledged convert to TDD, I can certainly see its value.

The book ends with chapters on both bug reporting and post-project analysis. All chapters start with an icon which identifies which role might most benefit from this chapter (PM, Developer, Architect, etc.) and usually includes very descriptive charts and explanations of the data Team System is collecting about the project as you build it and how to best make use of that data.

This is a book well worth keeping on your desk at work – and one well worth buying for your PM if you think they need convincing to get Team System.

Book Review – Professional Software Development

Lou Vega — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 23:44:00 GMT

Professional Software Development

By Stephen McConnell

Published by Addison-Wesley 2004

ISBN: 0-321-19367-9

The best “short attention span” summary I can think of is actually a quote from the back cover of the book:

“If you are a programmer, software developer, engineer, or work in software development, you should READ THIS BOOK” (caps are in the original quote!)

This book is a very easy and enjoyable read. McConnell’s writing style flows very smoothly and he engages you with relevant anecdotes based on his many years of experience in the field.

Part One of the book starts with a kind of “Where we are” in the software development arena and exposes some of the common pitfalls one must have encountered if you’ve been in this business any length of time. I particularly enjoyed the section in Chapter Three on “process-oriented” development versus “commitment-oriented” (Hero) development. Having been on both sides of that coin it was interesting to see that my viewpoints were shared by others (without making judgments about one being better than the other).

Part Two of the book digs deeper into the software developer as an individual and here again I found McConnell’s writings to be “right-on” with regards to everything from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to the personality characteristics and demographics. The rest of Part Two is equally well read with sections on raising your own professionalism and community building.

Parts Three and Four step further away from the software developer as an individual and focus on organizational and industry characteristics covering topics such as licensing and certification, code of ethics, as well as CMMI, and of course Contstrux’s Professional Development Program.

The first time I picked up this book I finished it the same evening. I have since re-read it several times and continue to refer to it with each new project.

A Trip down memory lane...

Lou Vega — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 20:39:00 GMT

I recently finished Steve Wozniak's iWoz and it was a real treat to get into the mind of the guy who basically built the device responsible for so many hours spent doing things other than homework as a kid. I still remember the day my dad came home when I was a kid and brought me a big ol' box and said it was a computer. I said “What's that” and he said “Well, open it and find out”. So my journey began. Of course he already knew what it was and what it could do and had been working with computers for the department of defense for years but he wanted me to learn on my own.

I still have that Apple IIe and it still works. Complete with it's color monitor (I did use the monochrome one for a few years), an Apple Mouse, a “double-decker” 5.25 floppy drive, and an ImageWriter printer. Oh and I've got hundreds of 5.25 floppies with everything from the original Ultima Series games (I, II, III, IV, and V - since V was the last one published for the Apple IIe series), Sid Meir's Pirates, Hacker (remember that one with the remote control robot?) and who knows what else packed in boxes in the office upstairs.

Anyways if you're of the generation that got their start on those old Apple's, I'm sure you'll like the book too.

Book Review – Pro .NET 2.0 Extreme Programming

Lou Vega — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 20:37:00 GMT

Pro .NET 2.0 Extreme Programming

By Greg Pearman and James Goodwill

Published by Apress 2006

ISBN: 1-59059-480-0

I know there’s mixed feelings out there about Extreme Programming, especially in the defense industry where I work and everything seems to be the exact opposite of XP, but here’s a book worth looking at if you’re at all curious about the subject.

I was especially pleased to find that Part I was so short since based on the title alone I had expectations the book would focus more on practicality than foundational information…and it does. If you’re looking for a quick intro to XP, Part I is great. The book’s real value lays in the practical application of the knowledge in Part III.

Part III of the book is aptly named “XP in Action” and gets to the point of providing the reader a “ride-a-long” if you will of an XP project. One nice touch with this section was the use of scanned in handwritten story cards. Another thing that stood out as a rather nice touch was the source code was written in one language only…now don’t go getting all crazy on me and starting religious wars about one .NET language being better than the other because I’m not gonna go there, but on a personal note I’ve often found it distracting when a code snippet is displayed in both languages side by side or one after the other. Seeing it in only one language certainly made it more readable to me, even if the language (C# for the record) was not my “primary language”.

Part II of the book (yeah I know I went out of order, but it’s my review!) focuses on tools most of developers probably use to one degree or another, NUnit, NAnt, NMock and CruiseControl.NET with a small section thrown in on Refactoring in VS 2005.

All in all a quick and easy read and certainly will spend some time on my reference shelf. Enjoy!

Book Review: Honeypots for Windows

Lou Vega — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 19:33:00 GMT

Title: Honeypots for Windows – Configure and Manage Windows Honeypots

Author: Roger A. Grimes

Publisher: Apress

ISBN: 1-59059-535-9

This book provides immediate and useful information whether you have previous experience with Honeypots or hadn’t even heard of one until you picked up the book. I would recommend this book to anyone who has ever been interested in network and systems security as it pertains to a Microsoft Windows environment, especially in light of the fact that most previous books and articles with information about Honeypots were geared toward *nix systems.

Those who have no previous experience with Honeypots and would like a background lesson can jump right into Chapters 1 and 2 which should give them a fair basic understanding of what’s involved. Those persons who want to get right to work…start browsing between chapters 3 and 8 for hands on information including screenshots and installation/configuration information. Later chapters cover more advanced information concerning the monitoring and analysis of the traffic captured using your Honeypot.

The author doesn’t leave you stranded with just setting up a Honeypot either. The chapters on Network Analysis, Honeypot Monitoring and alerting, and Honeypot data analysis give you a chance to begin to make real use of the Honeypot and the data gathered while using it. The walkthroughs for setting these analysis and monitoring tools seem easy enough and the author makes good use of available open source tools out there for those who don’t have the budget for some of the commercial applications available.

An added bonus for any networking security person is the wealth of information concerning how to harden a Windows Server, common ports used in malware and numerous configuration demonstrations make this a handy book to keep as a general security reference.

This book will make a fine addition to any IT professional’s reference collection.