October 07, 2005
Dr. Dobb's Programmer's Bookshelf NewsletterReviewed by Gregory V. Wilson
Book Reviews: Java Testing and Design, Designing Effective Database Systems; Jerry Pournelle Recommends...: Degunking Windows, Degunking your Email, Spam, and Viruses; Recent Releases
Book Reviews
What Were They Thinking?
The older I get, the more often I ask, "What were they thinking!?" Take The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for example: The books are among the funniest ever written, but somehow, Hollywood managed to turn them into a movie that makes a parlimantary debate on export duties for raw cabbage look like The Life of Brian. Didn't anyone read the script before they started shooting? More importantly, didn't anyone watch it the whole way through before they sent it to theaters? Sigh. Unfortunately, it isn't just Hollywood. The same thing sometimes happens to books. Buffer Overflow Attacks, by James Foster et al., is a case in point. I was really looking forward to it, both because I'm interested in computer security and because I think that showing students how malware works is a great way to teach them the nitty-gritty of systems programming. The book itself, though, was a disappointment. The authors seem to have no idea who they're writing for: Anyone who needs to be told what a compiler is (page 13) isn't going to understand the fragments of assembly code that are presented just a few pages later. The material is also badly organized. Concepts are used before they're explained, then explained several times in quick succession. (Yes, I get it. You can't have a null byte in an instruction sequence if you want to smuggle it into a program as a string...) There's a lot of important material here, but it's too raw to be a cost-effective read. Frank Cohen's Java Testing and Design is a much better book, although it's still one that I'd borrow rather than buy. The book gets off to a slow start, as ideas about testing are interrupted by apparent nonsequiturs on things like management style. After a while, though, the author settles into a fairly technical description of a web-testing tool called "TestMaker." There's plenty of example code (much of it written in the JVM-based dialect of Python called "Jython"), and some discussion of interoperating with .NET. It isn't the "web-testing bible" so many programmers have been looking for, but it is proof by example that automated testing of web-based applications doesn't have to be any harder than any other kind of testing. Like Java Testing and Design, Mike Gunderloy's Painless Project Management with FogBugz focuses on a single product. Unlike JT&D, this book is brief, to the point, lavishly illustrated, and has an introduction by Joel Spolsky (whose company builds the bug-tracking product the book describes). This book is a user guide, but it is to user guides what Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language is to language manuals. Every question I had was answered within a paragraph or two of being raised; every explanation made sense, and the only thing that was missing was a glossary. I think we'll all be better off if this book will become the standard against which other end-user documentation is measured. Finally, Rebecca Riordan's Designing Effective Database Systems is just as well written as Gunderloy's book and just as useful. I came to database programming late--I managed to program for a living for almost 15 years before writing my first SQL query--and it's been difficult to find a book for someone with that kind of background. Riordan's is a good fit. She writes for intelligent grownups, rather than dummies, without making too many assumptions about background knowledge. She starts with basic concepts, such as relations and normal forms, then moves on to database design, and finally talks about user-interface issues. Her examples are all Microsoft specific, but almost all apply equally well to PostgreSQL on Linux (which is my target platform). It's a good book and I hope it's as widely read as it deserves to be.
Buffer Overflow Attacks: Detect, Exploit, Prevent
Java Testing and Design:
From Unit Testing to Automated Web Tests
Painless Project Management With FogBugz
Designing Effective Database Systems
Greg is a DDJ contributing editor and can be contacted at gvwilson@ddj.com. His most recent book is Data Crunching: Solve Everyday Problems Using Java, Python, and More.
Jerry Pournelle Recommends...There are two series of computer books well worth your notice. First, there is the O'Reilly & Associates "Annoyances" series, of which the best is PC Annoyances by Steve Bass, now in its second edition. The second set is the "Degunking" series from Paraglyph Press. These include Degunking Windows, by Joli Ballew and Jeff Duntemann; and Degunking your Email, Spam, and Viruses, by Jeff Duntemann. Every one of these books is worth going through. In each case, you'll find a bunch of stuff you already knew, and other stuff of no interest to you, but in every book, there will be a couple of gems.
PC Annoyances, Second Edition
Degunking Windows
Degunking your Email, Spam, and Viruses
Jerry is a science-fiction writer and senior contributing editor to BYTE.com. You can contact him at jerryp@jerrypournelle.com.
Recent Releases
OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 2, 5th Edition This fifth edition has been extensively updated to include the newest features of OpenGL Versions 1.5 and 2.0, including storage of vertex arrays in buffer objects for faster rendering, occlusion queries for course-grain visibility testing, point sprites, separate stencil operations for RGB and alpha, rendering to multiple color buffers using GLSL, and the OpenGL Shading Language .(GLSL)
Hexagonal Image Processing: A Practical Approach
This book provides an introduction to the processing of hexagonally sampled images, includes a survey of the work done in the field, and presents a novel framework for hexagonal image processing (HIP) based on hierarchical aggregates.
Classic Shell Scripting
Classic Shell Scripting introduces readers to the common tools that come with a UNIX or Linux system, and shows them how to combine the tools with the shell programming language. The book covers oftware tool design concepts and principals, the core set of UNIX tools used with shell scripting, popular extensions to standard tools, and indispensable nonstandard tools.
AI Application Programming; Second Edition In the second edition, the author continues to demystify the techniques associated with the field of artificial intelligence, both the theory and the practical applications, to teach developers how to apply AI techniques in their own designs.
A Pratical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming To be truly productive with Linux, you need to thoroughly master the shells and the command line. Mark Sobell offers guidance on the tools system administrators, developers, and power users need most. The book also contains a comprehensive command reference section.
Contact Us
To contact Dr. Dobb's Programmer's Bookshelf Newsletter, send e-mail to Deirdre Blake, DDJ Managing Editor, at dblake@cmp.com. All content copyright 2005, CMP Media LLC.
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