tehgood

Tech junkie reviews

[tehgood]

Memorial Fund - Kenneth Speckman

http://gfwd.at/1jVLqb7 Lost my father in law this morning, he had been battling cancer for months. I've setup this fundraiser to help my family with the final expenses. There were no plans as he was given 6 months to live which turned into a few weeks. Please share and help if you're able.

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PacktPub has a sweet subscription now, $100/yr and access to all their titles! http://bit.ly/1YLFu4z <- Check it out!

[tehgood]

Testing with JUnit

Testing with JUnit - Review

I always appreciate a book that starts off with a 'Getting Started' section that actually get's you started but left out a huge history lesson. The first page clearly explains why unit testing is so important, and how regression occurs in projects. The first graphical depiction of a unit test was displayed around page 4, and was I the only person who spotted the depth of inheritance value of 2? That's superb! As for my favorite chapter it would be 2, and it's simply because it was the 'who, what, when, where, and why' chapter. It really set my expectations of the proceeding chapters, if I can understand what's suppose to occur than I can program for it to occur properly. The quotes throughout the book are neat as well, they break up the huge chunks of information that needs to be digested and are just subtle enough to not annoy you.

By the end of the book you'll understand why unit testing is important, how to get started, and how to get some automated tests going while you sleep over night. The ebook edition has some nice color coded graphics that really speak to the text, I find this to be extremely helpful as well as mandatory. Final note: UML Diagrams.. absolutely satisfied these were used in the book! Highly recommend picking up a copy of this title and getting started with unit testing.

Publisher Link: https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/testing-junit

[tehgood]

JavaScript Domain-Driven Design

JavaScript Domain-Driven Design

It was refreshing to read a new updated title on JavaScript, and this book didn't disappoint. I ABSOLUTELY love the theme of the book, using Orcs was a highlight and spoke to my geeky heart. Sadly, you won't be building a robust prison game; however after you're finished reading this book you may just finish off the prison with your own style and flare. I really appreciated the inclusion of API's and how to manage one, far too often I see library's that grown in size yet the documentation lacks, so starting with good principles is perfectly acceptable to me. Favorite portions include, 'Not so scary UML', and 'Paper programming'. They are both equally important in approaching non-coders to discuss what the application at hand should do and how it should perform actions. By the end of the book you'll have come to the conclusion of an excellent journey, one that will have taught you a lot about Domain-Driven Design in a non boring manner.

Publisher Link: https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/javascript-domain-driven-design

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Data Manipulation with R - 2nd Edition

I used the first edition of this book and the second edition was just as good. If you're looking for the practical uses with examples then this book is perfectly fine, if you want the book to do more complex data manipulation then you'll need to find the expert level R book. I felt the author did a great job with the updates.

Publisher Link: https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and-business-intelligence/data-manipulation-r-second-edition

[tehgood]

Rapid Gulp, don’t choke!

Check out Rapid Gulp here: http://bit.ly/1KrB0JP and see why it's rapidly growing in reputation!

[tehgood]

Learning Android Forensics - Ebook Review

Learning Android Forensics 5/5 Rating! Publisher Link: http://bit.ly/1G5E3WH

This book is packed with so much information simply reading it twice isn't enough, you'll need to make a few pots of coffee in order to digest all the information made available in this book. Rohit takes a unique approach to organizing and presenting material in this book, while the humor lacks in the book it is technically sound and straight forward. Few books have amazed me, and I've probably reviewed 100 books by now, this one has left a mark on my brain that will last for the remainder of my life. Now, that is certainly a bold claim and I certify this book is well worth such a claim.  While I would have liked to seen some work on fingerprint passwords that was simply not covered in the book, but you'll be happy to know that swipe patterns are covered which are still in wide use today.

From the setup of the environment required to do the forensic work, theory behind the work involved, and then applying it in real world examples make this book worth the cost. My favorite part about this book would have to be the use of JTAG to recover data from damaged devices, and why you should smash your phone into a billion pieces if you have something to hide of great importance. This book is an eye opener and should be read by anyone who is paranoid about their security, and probably why you should or shouldn't root your Android device. The author answers everything clearly and concise with litter room for misunderstanding the message behind the learning activity. The frozen device was actually really intriguing, at a certain temperature the memory contained data longer and allowed data extraction, simply brilliant if I do say so myself.

Recovering delete files, application data, and the many methods to do so are covered. I've looked over this book a few dozen times already and still shake my head at the various recovery options available despite the 'security' appliances allowed on the device and how easily they're bypassed. So in short, don't do anything that you'd have to hide or you'll be pretty shocked when they uncover the deleted data you thought was gone forever!

[tehgood]

GameMaker Essentials - Ebook Review

GameMaker Essentials Publisher Link: https://www.packtpub.com/game-development/gamemaker-essentials/?utm_source=RajB&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=1784396125

5/5 - Author has vast experience on the subject matter

This book is laid out very well, has a lot of different sections that pack a punch at just 154 pages. I love how the book starts off with the foundation work with layering the various components of a game and then puts them into use with making an actual game. The book also takes it a step further and goes into promoting your game and making some money at the same time. If you're serious about making a game and want to use a framework that has boiled down the elements of game creation into one tight IDE then grab a copy of this book, brew some coffee, and get into this book. Highly recommended especially for any teens that are looking for a hobby and have a desire in video games and how they work.

[tehgood]

Python for Google App Engine - Reviewed

Python for Google App Engine Publisher Link: https://www.packtpub.com/virtualization-and-cloud/python-google-app-engine

5/5 - Know Python prior to engaging in this book, no need for the Google App Engine experience though.

The book as others mention creates a basic web application, then you learn more and go back over the content to create a more robust expandable application that uses the previous example. The book uses Google SQL Cloud, however I opted to just keep it on my local machine. Still worth checking it out though despite me not wanting Google to have any more of my data. As for the book itself, it's structured, logical, stays on track, and has a lot of up sides. My favorite part would be utilizing memcache and tracking connections, start seeing some strange stuff well you can now act on it or let customers know that you're experiencing issues and are working to resolve it. I'm also a very huge fan of the MVC pattern, so using modular design was also something that made me fall in love with this book even more.

All in all I would highly recommend this book and can't wait to build up on top of what I've already learned.

[tehgood]

Mastering Lumion 3D

Mastering Lumion 3D

Sleek, clean interface, and fun. I've no use for this outside of just building things as a hobby so this is a great way to stage some scenes for 3D rendering quickly and without the need to write an entire framework to do so. Everything in the book was covered rather well and the pace was easy to keep up with. Once you get started and get to clicking it's rather simple and then you're able to let your imagination loose. If you've ever used Blender or Maya 3D then you're probably more then comfortable with using this type of software, Simulate whatever dream home you could imagine and get to building and before you know it you've occupied a good 4 hours of your time and didn't even realize it!

Publisher Link: http://bit.ly/1AeMaxd

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Solr Cookbook - Third Edition

Solr Cookbook - Third Edition

Where to begin with this beast? Well Chapter 1 comes to mind, getting everything configured and ready to toy with is just the start of this adventure. By no means am I an expert on Solr but this has really helped improve my understanding of the technology 10 fold. This framework has been used in a few custom frameworks that I've come across and I felt so alienated because I didn't know the configuration or what interacted with what, this book answered my questions and had me up and running with a test environment in no time flat. For me the SolrCloud clusters was what I really wanted to see in action, and with a few virtual machines setup to mimic a cloud setup, you really get to see the framework in action!

Easily a 5/5 and recommended!

Publisher Link: http://bit.ly/1AhD8ku

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Moodle Gradebook! 5/5

Moodle Gradebook - Second Edition

This book was a really helpful tool with jumping into Moodle Gradebook, the 2nd edition covered practically all the changes made to the framework. I've used this for training and education purposes at home. The author did a rather fine job keeping everything neat and organized which I appreciated. I really enjoyed the flow of the book from customizing grades to the progress tracking features, it really has everything you could need. This book gives you all the information you need to create some practice activities for your child at home to reinforce what they're learning in school, you can engage at their level and also learn with them. This book was tremendously helpful with getting started.

More from the publisher: https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/moodle-gradebook-second-edition

[tehgood]

Packt $5 eBook Bonanza!!!!!

Take advantage of #Packt's awesome eBook bonanza – every eBook and video is $5 http://bit.ly/13f9LQi

[tehgood]

Kali Linux CTF Blueprints - Jaw Dropping & Eye Opening

Kali Linux CTF Blueprints

Author Cameron Buchanan takes you on a journey in the land of penetration testing but more so understanding. There are a few things to point out prior to actually getting into a review for this book, 1) Kali Linux is my favorite version of Linux for this type of work. 2) Don't skip ahead in this book as each chapter builds on the last. Great, now that's out of the way we can look into the actual book. I found the setup easy to follow and getting a test environment was as easy as 1-2-3.

I really liked how the different environments were broken out on there own and given a full chapter, it really kept things in perspective and ultimately helped the learning experience. If you're unfamiliar with Windows you can still learn a lot from the Linux side or the opposite is true. Something new that I really enjoyed with the windows side was the ColdFusion coverage, previous books I've read on Kali Linux testing didn't even mention this so I felt it was rewarding and refreshing to see something new covered.

The book does carry some humor as well, I hope this is a new trend with Packt as it makes for easy reading, sometimes the content in technical books can get quite dull so finding anywhere to place a few punch lines are always welcome. Choosing something from the Linux chapter, I felt the coverage on Samba was pretty decent. Exploiting a network using these types of shares has always been a major concern for me, I'm glad it made it in the book. The Telnet portion was also gladly received, I use it quite frequently to test for open ports and responsiveness on a daily basis in my line of work.

The remainder of the book keeps the momentum and my attention, the projects were fun and very hands on. The mobile coverage is always nice to read, I don't feel it gets it's fair attention. If you're on public WiFi you should really be utilizing some security measures to prevent snooping. I would recommend this book to everyone, being aware of security threats on any level should be a new requirement in schools. Heartbleed was mentioned in the book and covered fairly well, most systems are patched for this but sadly many still go unprotected. Sony was recently hacked and one could wonder how, but this book is rather insightful and you'll walk away feeling confident in your new found abilities.

Publisher Link: http://bit.ly/1ulNQzq

[tehgood]

JavaServer Faces 2.2 - The Future!

Mastering JavaServer Faces 2.2

Author Anghel Leonard really delivers it with this book. I'm new to JavaServer Faces and I found this book to be the comprehensive guide from front to back, covering everything required to get setup and running rather quickly. From states to custom events I found myself unable to put this book down, in fact I'd recommend picking up the "companion" to this book which I plan on ordering as well: JSF 2.0 Cookbook, Packt Publishing. Once you get this book down having a cookbook is really the next step to really drive home the learning experience.

My favorite part about this book was how it tied in AJAX and how it used events, something I love to do when thinking about how to handle data in an application is how will I work with it, keep track of it, and using events is how I typically deal with it. I was quite pleased with the coverage of AJAX in this book. Something very unique which I also enjoyed was the use of a queue to kinda throttle the requests hitting the server, often times I feel like too many requests are going to fire off at once. My test server is rather old now and get's a bit cranky when I throw lots of data at it. I've also been including factories in PHP setups for quick deployment so I was pleased to see JSF offers a similar type setup allowing me to utilize the portions I need and not worry about other underlying components.

I would have liked to seen more visual elements used in the book, while there are a few diagrams I like to see UML flow charts in use, and some visual elements to help reinforce the overall learning experience. I suppose the HeadFirst series spoiled my brain but I do like how they break up large chunks of text with visual elements. Near the end of the book I enjoyed building the Nadal site, however I would have liked to seen a more robust project using some of the techniques discussed in the earlier chapters. Despite my preferences I feel the book still deserves a 5/5 because it delivers on what it set out to achieve, and that's teach me the basics and medium to advanced JSF utilization's.

As of this writing there are some coupons that make this book cheaper at the publishers website below.

Publisher Link: http://goo.gl/HA3FBk

[tehgood]

Learning jqPLot - This book made me a ninja on graphs!

Learning jqPlot

Scott Gottreu did a fine job on this title, it was informative, to the point, and the code worked. The information was detailed and to the point, I felt like I learned something new which was my intentions for reading this title. "This book empowers you to create highly-customized charts and graphs that present your data in a visually appealing and analytic manner." This was taken from the publisher page for this title and it's spot on, I did enjoy starting from a very basic graph and moving on to a more advanced graph.

There isn't really much more to say about this title, I've used other plugins and they are pretty good but I feel leveraging the power of jqPlot opens the door for even better data representation using charts or graphs. I would also like to mention this is probably the first Packt book where the author actually utilized some humor and it was very refreshing. I REALLY REALLY enjoyed the story driven type setup, it actually helps me retain information. There are charts-o-plenty in this book as well, so if you're a visual learner like me you'll really appreciate the number of elements which are represented in full color for the eBook version. I did like the emphasis on limitations and I would have liked to seen more scenarios that require heavy loads or database driven dashboards. The remote loading was a nifty feature, do people still use that word?

All in all I'm very pleased with this book, it will allow you to add some pizzazz to your web application while maintaining a well known and liked framework, no need to re-invent the wheel on this one folks. If you're just wondering if remote datasets are covered, you're in luck because they are. I would say I could have used a few more pages with database driven charts but I'm confident I can fill in the blanks. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone creating a web application that requires visual representation of the data, you'll really enjoy this one.

Publisher Link: http://bit.ly/1Bfdrhe

[tehgood]

Go, it's a language?!?!

Mastering Concurrency in Go

There are really countless pointless reviews for this book on Amazon and it's disheartening to see so many without moderation. The book did explain Concurrency in Go without causing mass hysteria. I didn't know much about Go but quickly discovered it's rather straight forward approach, if anything you might complain that the author gives you so many different points to go off of, or that the UML diagrams in the book are just functional and usable. There are just a few things that I love to see in a book: 1. Usable code, and 2. Diagrams that further visually explain concepts. The portion on shared memory was priceless and something I've seen many programs just look past because of the abundance of memory that's now afforded to powerful servers, this isn't an excuse to get lazy with utilizing resources. I felt the book did an excellent job of explaining concepts, putting them into practice, and while it wasn't all eye candy the core concepts were spot on.

So yes I would recommend this book if you're serious about learning, and there are no books that I purchase where I would take the code and place it into a production environment. That is just asking for trouble, these books are designed to help you learn new programming languages, the logic however is on your part.

Publisher Link: http://bit.ly/1xx1aVT