Domain: samspublishing.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to samspublishing.com.
Comments · 13
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In 21 Days?
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Re:VB book titles.
Those titles you just mentioned are from book series that cover tons of different topics.
Unleashed is one of Sams' major series. 48 books total -
Re:real progress
On the producer/consumer gap, companies like Amazon aren't as useless as you make them out to be. What Amazon is is an aggregator. Amazon buys in bulk from the authors/publishers. That lets the author deal with one buyer rather than having to maintain a full-blown e-commerce site for the relatively low volume of books that any one author sells. Then Amazon turns around and runs a full-blown e-commerce site for all the authors/publishers they stock, which lets them spread the fixed costs out over a much larger volume than any one author/publisher could manage.
They provide another value: they allow me to browse titles from many different publishers - and compare and contrast them, and review comments on them - at one central, easily searchable location. Eg, I got to Amazon.com and search for 'Java' and get a big list of java books, as opposed to going to www.awprofessional.com, www.samspublishing.com, www.mkp.com, www.wiley.com, etc., etc. and doing many different searches, etc.
I don't mind buying direct from the publisher, but in practice I rarely do, for that exact reason. Often I don't know - ahead of time - *who* publishes the book I'm looking for, because I often don't even know the title of the book I'm looking for. -
Re:Yay!
Is it easy to program for these days?
Yes. Here's a good place to start. All your regular C and C++ programming stuff should apply since the typical compiler for the Mac is gcc and the commmand line environment is BSD Unix. Also, for native Mac OS X GUI stuff, here's where you can find out about some books. For learning how to program the GUI, you can check into Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillgass. For an introduction to the language used for programming with the Cocoa libraries you can try Peogramming in Objective C by Stephen Kochan. You might want to buy the Objective C book first. You can also learn Objective C on anything with gcc, but the libraries will be different from the Mac's. -
Re:What the?
except Sybase maybe, which it apparently is based off of
There is no apparently about it. MS SQL Server is a direct branch from the Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (formerly Sybase SQL Server) code, the result of a partnership gone differently than hoped for by one of the two parties involved. -
Ignorance, learning curve.I don't really know how to do things in Windows very well. I've used Mac OS since 7.1 and Linux since Red Hat 7. I've had to use Microsoft at work off and on over the last 5 years. I do have to troubleshoot my parents Windows machines and it's a huge pain in the ass: Ad-aware, Spybot, Windows Messaging, etc. I've had to wrangle all of those. Nevermind the virus software that pops up and irritates my mother-in-law for more money every 15 days. I'm sure there's some savvy way of clamping down all the ports that are default open for no reason, but why would I want to bother to learn?
I have a Powerbook that kicked ass out of the box; both in terms of security and UI. I don't have the urge to play games on my PC's beyond MAME. (I have a PS2 for that). I got the OS for my Linux box from the library. It also installed without a hitch, and is loaded with help and man pages that are actually helpful and serve as manuals. Also, that book mentioned above is great.
I don't see the point in using Windows beyond the access to games--which doesn't interest me enough to risk trojans, zombification, worms, an obnoxious and backwards default browser that requires an act of Congress to remove, etc.
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I recommend a book actually.I'm also a Mac user that dabbles in Linux.
Personally I went with Fedora Core 1 and installed from the CD in Red Hat and Fedora Core Unleashed. (Amazon. ) I got mine at the library.
The book walks you through some trouble spots you might encounter and nudges you towards some options that may not be obvious from the Fedora literature, like having yum look at freshrpms.net instead of Red Hat (for packages that Red Hat might regard with disdain.) It even walks through installs of the UT2004 Demo and Enemy Territory.
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Re:Also try Learning Cocoa, an updated NeXT book
Very true; I actually learnt the OpenStep API by using that NeXT book you mention and some GNUstep tutorials. My Obj-C experience is only on GNUstep (not Cocoa), but the information needed is the same.
On that note my next buy will be Programming in Objective-C; the reviews seem to indicate that it's a good book *and* ina rather unusual fashion as examples for both Cocoa and GNUstep. -
Sacriledge!?!?!?!That seems like an awful thing to do to such useful reference books.
Why can't they make a power plant that is powered by the "Pick your new technology" Unleashed books. There are more pages in them... so at least they would last longer, though we all know that they don't burn any brighter.
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Re:For idiots like me -Good Books.
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Get the 3rd edition!The link above points to the 2nd edition, which was published about a year ago (almost excatly a year ago, actually). Go to Sams' website and get the 3rd edition. It's a bit more up to date.
-B
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Aardvark cuts the cheese, books tell story.Nobody should be required to pick up a manual and read through hundreds of pages before they're able to use something. That's the main difference between products that fail and products that succeed.
Twitter scanns his bookshelf and sees feet of useless M$ books, and a few inches of very useful Linux books and a foot or two that span both, C, FORTRAN, tcl refernce books. My oldest book on Emacs is still useful. Most stuff between that and my first Linux books refer to stuff that no longer works. That's the beauty of free code, new stuff is added and older tools just get better. Nothing seems to ever go away, despite the wonderful work to make new and very easy to use tools. The older and more powerful interfaces stay the same and are there for those who need or want them. Books are useful when you want to learn from the experiences and mistakes of others and not waste time running down misconceptions.
Best starting books for me were Linux Unleashed by Sams Publishing and Linux in a Nutshell by O`Reilly. Linux Unleashed tries to cover everything and gives good references. Older versions were Red Hat centric and gave more space to things like vi. Newer versions cover different distros and GUI stuff and may appeal to more general users for that reason. It also walks you through the install. Linux in a Nutshell is the reference I use most often. Both have common examples to help you out.
Best screen shot movies: Multi-layered Gimp image manipulation. Simple multitabed Mozilla browsing shot. Mail notification from multiple sources. Any big task started by X forwarding on another computer followed by clicking trough to another virtual machine where another big task move along on another computer, and so on. You don't need a beowulf cluster to get lots of work done with more than one machine, thanks to the beautiful X window system and OpenSSH.
Windows just works. To get a Linux install to my satisfaction took over 100 hours.
No Windows install will ever meet my expectation for what software should be ever again.
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Another great SQL book
A book that I found very helpful for learning SQL is Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes. When I first started learning SQL I mostly got everything from the early Slashcode sources and the MySQL manual as I needed it - not the best way to learn
:-). I was a bit skeptical about the "10 minutes" approach, but each of the chapters actually did work out to about 10 minutes and the information was easy to understand (may have helped that I already knew some about SQL) and was fairly thorough. Another point that I really liked about it is that for the most part it only talked about the SQL standard, not just how one vendor implemented it. However, if an important vendor differed in their implementation, they would talk about it. This worked out great for me because I just wanted to know SQL basics and "best practices" and could figure out vendor specifics from their manuals.