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Don't click on the above Amazon link either. Amazon is well known for their abusive business practices, and the link is for the poster's affiliate program. Instead, use Bookpool - $36.50 there.

And bookpool has it even cheaper ($36.50). I don't work for them, just a very happy customer. For any IT/CS type books, bookpool is cheapest probably 90% of the time...

-Gabe

And bookpool has it even cheaper ($36.50). I don't work for them, just a very happy customer. For any IT/CS type books, bookpool is cheapest probably 90% of the time...

-Gabe

$21.95 at bookpool

$24.50 plus shipping, as of 16 October, 2002

Bookpool is even cheaper

Bookpool : $32.50

bookpool almost always has the cheapest programming books.

sorry about that. BookPool has it for $29

T

If you want to buy the book, go to the Bookpool site, much cheaper. Here is the link.

If you want to buy the book, go to the Bookpool site, much cheaper. Here is the link.

I can't say I've used SAP-DB. However, a quick check of its online documentation reveals that it does NOT do multiversion concurrency control. Oracle does. PostgreSQL does. I believe Interbase/Firebird does. Without it, writing a scalable application is MUCH, MUCH harder because locking keeps getting in the way. Real databases need transactions, but without MVCC, the locking to support them will seriously limit concurrency (and, hence, scalability) in a transactional environment.

If you don't know what MVCC is, read the early chapters in Tom Kyte's book or visit his site. Or read Oracle documentation (search the page for "Data Concurrency and Consistency").

O'Reilly does have a book upgrade program where they give you 30% off if you send them the title page. (More Info Here). Although, Bookpool has it on sale for 39% off.

I guess the term "regular expression" is pretty vague/useless these days. You have to identify the language _and_ its revision to get an accurate idea of the regexp feature set you're dealing with

I've played the stupid game with RS employees for years. We refer to it as the "Shack Attack". In fact when I used to be on the road as a slave^H^H^H^HConsultant, every time I'd be sent to a new town, I'd seek out the local mall and seek out the shack and prey on unsuspecting salespeople trying to play Joe average as a chump. Sweet retrobution for the little guy is the way I see it.

This is, of course, not to be confused with going into B. Dalton, Waldenbooks or other such over priced chains, walking into the computer book section and telling everyone in sight about the 30-40% discounts on computer books at Bookpool.com. Yes. I am a bastard.

The book is a little sparse, though. It's about the same thickness as Using csh and tcsh, so don't expect more than an overview of anything. In fact, it might be a little small for US$35.00 (although Bookpool has it for US$21.50). Another small gripe was that it covered parsing XML in far greater detail than generating XML (which was my task at the time I bought the book). Admittedly, parsing XML is typically what most people tend to do and is far more difficult that creating new XML, but I thought a little more coverage was warranted.

If you are faced with doing something involving XML and you're not sure what software bits are up to the task, then this is a good place to find out where to start. You could wind up looking elsewhere if you need lots of nitty-gritty details, but getting off on the right foot is a hard enough task and might be worth the price of the book.

-B

There are currently few passport accounts because no one really needs them. The passports accounts that do exist were likely ones forced onto users. This is how it has been, and this is how it will be. The day will come when using windows will require a passport account, getting support will require a passport account, and dowloading p0rn will require a passport account. MS will bundle passport connectivity into front page, and developers will use the connectivity as mindlessly as they use other MS profit centers. It will appear free to the all areas of end users, and therefore it will be used. We will again be in the same situation as we are with IE, where getting the 3% of customer who refuse to conform requires more effort than it is worth.

Furthermore, one would think that users would not like credit card information linked directly to a password, and have that password be the only thing needed to use the credit card. However, there are examples to the contrary of vendors doing exactly this.

Once again, bookpool has the cheapest price in town. $27.50

Kernighan and Pike's The Practice of Programming is an excellent book on general issues like style, algorithms, testing and portability. They emphasize simplicity, clarity and generality as the keys to writing better programs, regardless of the language or the application. Examples are in many languages -- C, C++, Java and Perl at least.
Brief Table of Contents (extended TOC)
Style
1 Algorithms and Data Structures
2 Design and Implementation
3 Interfaces
4 Debugging
5 Testing
6 Performance
7 Portability
8 Notation

Another good place to get them is bookpool usually good prices on O'Reilly as well as others

You've got a couple choices -- finding yourself a good regular expression library seems like a good start ;-) If you're looking to do something a little more interesting than just lexical analysis, check out the red dragon book (better known as Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Aho, Sethi & Ullman. I used it in my compiler course and I can tell you that they hit all the various parsing techniques (recursive descent, LA, LALR, SLR, etc.) very well, along with some other stuff. They concentrate on Lex/Yacc as tools -- you may prefer to check out ANTLR -- Terrence Parr's parser generator. It can be targeted at a bunch of languages and can also produce tree walkers for when it comes time to use your parsed data.

Bookpool has the cheapest/best selection of tech books period. I don't work for them, but have used them on many an occasion. They can really make a training budget go a long way.

If we're going down that path, Bookpool has it for 21.50.

Everyone knows Bookpool is the cheapest place in town.

Bookpool is even cheaper at $21.50 although the book is currently out of stock.

Bookpool will give you between 30% and 40% off almost all O'Reilly books, no defacing required.

If you want to save a few bucks ($24.50 vs. $31.99 at bn) go to bookpool.

Anyhow, what you've got to get through your mind is that XSLT is a functional language; it's not procedural. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. Functional languages are a different beast than what you're used to, i.e. procedural languages.

If you've taken a CS course on programming languages and they covered functional languages well than you don't have to learn anything, just realize that XSLT is functional and program accordingly.

If you haven't taken a CS programming languages course or didn't cover functional languages then you need to learn the functional paradigm. Think transformation, not variable assignment. Think functional composition, not a row of statements. Think recursion, not looping.

To learn it yourself, you're going to need a good book on functional programming, such as Haskell or Erlang. Both have open-source implementations available. This is not something you're going to learn in a day, it will take you a month of diligent study before you understand what you're doing. If you know rigorous logic well and are adept in discrete math and set theory you'll advance more readily.

In addition to learning functional programming, you'll have to learn the quirks of XSLT. For one, you need to have mastery of the specs for XML, XPath, and of course XSLT. Al these specs are quite readable: read them through, try out examples. You also need to be aware of the limitation of XSLT, especially in these early days of the 1.0 version (2.0 should be more useful). Often you'll need to either do processing before/after XSLT with Perl or something else, or directly incorporate JavaScript into your XSLT document. Be sure to understand inclusions and use XSLT library documents with useful functions.

Once you understand functional languages in general and XSLT in particular you'll be on your way to mastery of XSLT. You'll also learn alot along the way that will be useful even if you never touch XSLT again. In addition, you'll have experience in the maxim uttered by other posters that you must use the right tool for the right job. XSLT is superb for most common XML transformations (such as XML to HTML) and is far better than any other languages for doing this. But sometimes you need something else like Perl or Java for direct manipulation. Use the right tool for the right job.

Anyhow, what you've got to get through your mind is that XSLT is a functional language; it's not procedural. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. Functional languages are a different beast than what you're used to, i.e. procedural languages.

If you've taken a CS course on programming languages and they covered functional languages well than you don't have to learn anything, just realize that XSLT is functional and program accordingly.

If you haven't taken a CS programming languages course or didn't cover functional languages then you need to learn the functional paradigm. Think transformation, not variable assignment. Think functional composition, not a row of statements. Think recursion, not looping.

To learn it yourself, you're going to need a good book on functional programming, such as Haskell or Erlang. Both have open-source implementations available. This is not something you're going to learn in a day, it will take you a month of diligent study before you understand what you're doing. If you know rigorous logic well and are adept in discrete math and set theory you'll advance more readily.

In addition to learning functional programming, you'll have to learn the quirks of XSLT. For one, you need to have mastery of the specs for XML, XPath, and of course XSLT. Al these specs are quite readable: read them through, try out examples. You also need to be aware of the limitation of XSLT, especially in these early days of the 1.0 version (2.0 should be more useful). Often you'll need to either do processing before/after XSLT with Perl or something else, or directly incorporate JavaScript into your XSLT document. Be sure to understand inclusions and use XSLT library documents with useful functions.

Once you understand functional languages in general and XSLT in particular you'll be on your way to mastery of XSLT. You'll also learn alot along the way that will be useful even if you never touch XSLT again. In addition, you'll have experience in the maxim uttered by other posters that you must use the right tool for the right job. XSLT is superb for most common XML transformations (such as XML to HTML) and is far better than any other languages for doing this. But sometimes you need something else like Perl or Java for direct manipulation. Use the right tool for the right job.

Certainly lots of sites link to Amazon. Amazon knows about more titles (and other merchandise) than any other single site, with the possible exception of Barnes & Noble. They've got LOTS more reader reviews than any other site including B&N. Their return policy is favorable to purchasers (that is, it's comparable to most brick and mortar bookstores). They frequently reduce shipping and offer coupons. What's not to like? Assertion of the one-click patent and their privacy policy changes (claiming they own the records of what you've purchased) are about it. Yeah, the privacy policy thing stinks, but even the brick and mortar stores track what you're buying. If you want privacy, pay cash.

Personally, if Bookpool has what I want in stock, I'll buy it from them. The prices are nearly always less than Amazon's. BUT, Bookpool only sells technical books, and nothing in the way of Christian theology (my other big reading interest). Barnes and Noble throws in free shipping with two or more books in an order, but the prices are usually higher.

People flock to Amazon because it's simply a valuable service.

Then again, I've had my book available for free online since I wrote the first 30 pages or so. And I intend to keep the free version available after it is printed by No Starch in a couple of months. I guess I'm one of them weirdos who thinks content creators shouldn't extract money from their customers at every possible opportunity. I like musicians who sell their records for reasonable prices (Dischord records, That Dog before they split, etc.) and authors who don't really think everyone should have to pay $45 for their books (Bruce Eckel). I'm all for getting paid, and paying folks who have done the work, but I'm also for letting people decide if a work is worth shelling out the dough for.

I guess this Open Source thing has gotten to me. Or maybe it was the punk rock thing ("give the kids their moneys worth"). Regardless, prices on new books are probably higher than they ought to be, and if I often buy used ones if I can't get it new for a reasonable price--the new price always dictates whether I get it at my local Half Price Books or at BookPool.

That's my take on the issue anyway.

If you can wait a bit for them to get it in stock, you can order it from bookpool and save yourself a bit of cash.

And here's Slashdotty, who one might guess was a Barnes and Noble affiliate, sending their customers to the B&N web site at the bottom of a review that, in context, is de facto an advertisement. (all good reviews are, although the thoughful placement of the link right there at the end makes that more than a pro forma observation in this case.) So how come why you do your readers such a disservice, oh Great and All-Self-Congratulatory Slashdotty? Why not send them to a good deal - Bookpool, say - where they could buy the book and save a good bit of their hard-earned money?

Slashdot: send B&N $50 (presumably getting a pittance for His Slashiness's toy fund)

/me: send Bookpool $40 - it's your money, after all.

Get it at Bookpool for $39.95....seems to be the best price out there.

http://www.bookpool.com/.x/k9wrskqsu1/ss/1?qs=0201 702711

Seems to be ~$40 at www.bookpool.com, compared to ~$50 list and at most other places.

Amazon charges full price ($49.95), bookpool has it for 20% off ($39.95).

21% off at bookpool

BSS

bookpool.com also has a very cheap copy.

bookpool.com also has a very cheap copy.

I'm in sort of the same boat. I have had some formal training in CS but not a lot (the bulk of my school time has been spent making things go boom or turn pretty colors (chemistry)). I hack perl for a living, here's two books (one perl specific, one not) that have helped me out a lot:

1. The Practice of Programming by Kernhigan and Pike (ISBN 020161586X)
2. Mastering Algorithms with Perl by Jon Orwant, Jarkko Hietaniemi, and John MacDonald (ISBN 1565923987)

I agree that a book on the formal aspect of Computer Science (possibly including software engineering) for practicing programmers from other educational backgrounds would be absolutely cool. Before the CS degree holders turn their noses up too high about liberal arts major web bums, I'd like to remind them that many scientists become "Accidental Programmers" these days... We have the desire and skill to absorb the formal underpinnings of this craft, but we may not have the resources (time, money) to do so.

The book ideally would give each topic enough detail to bring the reader from unfamiliarity up to moderate skill, enough to comprehend the titles listed in the (ideally) well-populated Further Reading section... What topics? Um, dunno. Hire a couple of respected CS profs to talk it out. Look at a good uni's core CS curricula. What language? Um, dunno. I'd say pseudocode first with perhaps an implementation src repository (cd, web) in something rather universal like C. Heck, if you want to appeal to the Open Source community, give people the ability to contribute implementations ("click here to download the lisp implementations, here for the C ones, here for befunge, ..." ;-) ).

I'm in sort of the same boat. I have had some formal training in CS but not a lot (the bulk of my school time has been spent making things go boom or turn pretty colors (chemistry)). I hack perl for a living, here's two books (one perl specific, one not) that have helped me out a lot:

1. The Practice of Programming by Kernhigan and Pike (ISBN 020161586X)
2. Mastering Algorithms with Perl by Jon Orwant, Jarkko Hietaniemi, and John MacDonald (ISBN 1565923987)

I agree that a book on the formal aspect of Computer Science (possibly including software engineering) for practicing programmers from other educational backgrounds would be absolutely cool. Before the CS degree holders turn their noses up too high about liberal arts major web bums, I'd like to remind them that many scientists become "Accidental Programmers" these days... We have the desire and skill to absorb the formal underpinnings of this craft, but we may not have the resources (time, money) to do so.

The book ideally would give each topic enough detail to bring the reader from unfamiliarity up to moderate skill, enough to comprehend the titles listed in the (ideally) well-populated Further Reading section... What topics? Um, dunno. Hire a couple of respected CS profs to talk it out. Look at a good uni's core CS curricula. What language? Um, dunno. I'd say pseudocode first with perhaps an implementation src repository (cd, web) in something rather universal like C. Heck, if you want to appeal to the Open Source community, give people the ability to contribute implementations ("click here to download the lisp implementations, here for the C ones, here for befunge, ..." ;-) ).

Bookpool is invariably the cheapest source for Computer books (I recently bought Effective STL by Scott Myers for 20% off list, and Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu, also for 20% off list.

You might also check out MyCheapBook.com for effective price comparison (although it doesn't examine bookpool).

As nice as it is to have Provider Independant IP Space, as you've found out it's virtually impossible to get without paying through the nose (you can just BS how many hosts you have, if you want to fork over the cash to pay US$2,500/year for a /20 block from ARIN here in the USA). Then there are less clueful orginizations that don't even know they have some, because the current IT staff didn't get along with their predecesor (for instance this block I found for my own local City).

However, it's not required to multihome. Really what you require to multihome is an Autonomous System Number (ASN) and a /24 block from either traditional Class C space, or the 63/8 or 64/8 Class A blocks that were returned a bit ago. No one with a clue should be filtering a /24 from either location.

The biggest downside to using your upstream providers IP space is that it pins you to a single ISP as you must use their IP space, and leaving them requires renumbering (but can be done without downtime within a reasonable transition timeframe of a few days). What we did was pick the largest ISP out there (UUNET), and then one of the top 10 (Sprint) and use both IP space (although we could have chosen to only use UUNET's). We use both provider's IP space on any important box (email, mainly) so that if we were to disconnect from one ISP (not likely), we only have to remove their IPs from our DNS, and the other IPS's IPs are already there and live (plus it gets around odd local routing problems outside of our control, where one remote site can reach one ISP but not the other).

We announce both blocks out both ISPs (to announce UUNET's blocks out Sprint and have them come back the shortest route, we had to get UUNET to "punch a hole" in their larger block and announce the smaller block we had so that both UUNET and Sprint would be announcing equally specific blocks for us... same is true of Sprint announcing their own assignment to us more specifically so they'll route to Sprint or UUNET, as if we only announcing the smaller block out UUNET, then all traffic would go that way unless our UUNET connection was down).

Anyway, not to write a HOW-TO (see Halibi's Internet Routing Architectures ISBN: 157870233X), but that's how to do it.

You don't need a huge router to be multihomed. Even a 2501 would work (as you just take default routes announcements from both ISPs, with the point being to advertise out your own blocks). If you want to take full routes from two ISPs, a 2650 with 128mb of RAM will work fine. If you want to take defaults + ISP-direct-customers, a 2610 with 64mb of RAM will work (it handles ISP-direct-customers from Sprint and UUNET just fine for us).

Lastly, never forget that site redundancy is just as important as internet redundancy. If a backhoe takes out the fiber or copper pairs going to your neck of the woods, more than likely it'll be both ISPs.

Normally I'd never mention my certs, but here they're relevent:
I'm a CCNP (next step past CCNA) and CCDP (next step past CCDA). I've been working for an IT Consulting/Integrater firm for 4 years (help desk positions 3 years before), and we also have our own little ISP on the side. I've worked with all the top 10 ISPs (and plenty of the Tier2/Tier3 folks), and set up a couple hundred of multihomed sites, so I'm not just quoting what I read in a book somewhere.

Fatbrain is also owned by the evil megacorp Barnes and Noble.

Even if Bookpool isn't the cheapest store on the block (though it often is - and in this case, a buck less than Fatbrain), i do almost all my technical book shopping there.

Take a look at Bookpool, this book is going for $24.95 there, rather than the $31.95 from Fatbrain.

I am not associated with Bookpool. I like to save money. So do others. Bookpool is cheaper. Their service is also excellent.

Check out Bookpool for 40% off cover price. They always have great prices. No, IANAS (I Am Not A Spokesperson).

The specific problems I had with the book that I can remember were:

• I can use man-pages (or foobar -h) to get listing of command switches, I don't need the book. It would be more useful to explain the actual operation of the command bit more (instead of 2-liners), than to give command line switches with equally brief descriptions.
  
• The author apparently has never heard of ssh? Even though he did warn about telnet's problems, it's a crying shame no secure alternative was presented. Especially since ssh appears to be installed on Solaris 8 by default?
  
• Related to previous; there was no mention of the fact that ftp is equally dangerous as telnet.
  Scp fixes this nicely, too, but at least book should definitely warn about using ftp for file transfer (minus public ftp-sites with anon. login), so that people wouldn't have mistaken feel of safety ("it asks for password... how can it be totally insecure?")
  

I'd also point out that Knuth's books provides all of the equations and the mathematical basis needed to write the code - that's the point of the books. MIX is simply used to provide illustrative examples. Thinking that all you need to do is to recode MIX to another language misses the point - you need to really understand what it is that you are doing when writing such code. And you are right - it takes time to write good code. Which is why you and the vast majority of programmers use and rely upon pre-written ("canned") routines and components. There is certainly nothing wrong with this - just as long the implications are understood. This is why "low-level" references such as the Knuth books are becoming less and less relevant to most working programmers today (not irrelevant, just less needed).

A great database theory book is the classic text by C. J. Date, An Introduction to Database Systems. I also love the Sun Microsystems Core Java series.

Chuck

I disagree in one, and only one, case. The book entitled Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques is the ultimate book on it's topic. And Jim Gray, author, just happens to work for Microsoft Research. Sucks for him, but this is an absolutely essential book for anyone doing transaction processing work on a large-scale. But, we can rest assured that anything that comes out of MS Press is a piece of s*** and not worth the paper that it's printed on, so at least we'll always have that ;-)