Independent developer book reviews by and for practitioners

This may be the shortest review in the history of TechBookReport and really it could be summed up with the advice to ignore this book until a new edition comes out. This edition is so riddled with errors that it's impossible for a beginner to make sense of the content. For example the reaction equations throughout the text are missing the arrows - you have to guess where they are by looking at the gaps between terms. The text mentions the double arrows often enough, so you know they ought to be in there somewhere… But these aren't the only errors, there are others scattered through the text. It destroys any trust you might have in the content. What's worse is that the publishers haven't bothered to put corrections on a web page where we can at least check out what the text is supposed to say.

Lots of books have typos and the occasional mistake, but such fundamental errors are unforgiveable. Where was the quality control? What kind of proofing process is in place? It just doesn't make sense that nobody noticed that all of the equations were lacking. The publishers have done the two authors a grave disservice. It's hard to say how good the content is because of it.

So, until there's a new edition with these errors corrected this is a book to avoid at all costs. [Continued]

Billed as a desktop quick reference on statistics, this is a book that is geared to developing statistical reasoning rather than simply listing statistical techniques or tables of figures. Aimed at students taking introductory stats courses, adults learning stats in a work-environment or those who are just interested in learning more about the subject. That's a fairly wide remit, and as we'll see it succeeds more in some areas than others.

The book is organised into four sections: introductory (which starts with basic concepts of measurement, introductory probability, descriptive statistics, research design, critiquing statistical analyses and data management); basic inferential statistics (introduction to sampling and hypothesis testing, the t-test, correlation, categorical data and non-parametric statistics); advanced techniques (the general linear model, analysis of variance, multiple linear and other regression techniques, principal components and other advanced techniques); and finally a section that looks at statistical analysis in different domains (business and quality improvement, medicine and epidemiology, education and psychology). The book rounds off with a series of appendices, including a chapter that looks at the main statistical software tools - from SPSS to SAS, R and even Excel. [Continued]

In addition to authoring a number of best-selling Java and XML books (including Processing XML With Java, Java I/O and Effective XML), Elliote Rusty Harold is also the seasoned webmaster of the Cafe au Lait and Cafe con Leche websites (specialising in Java and XML respectively). As such the day to day reality of having to maintain and update page upon page of HTML code is one that he is intimately familiar with. The sad fact is that web sites accrue cruft in the same way that software does. And how do you tackle de-crufting software? You refactor it. And, in the same way Harold suggests that web sites need refactoring too.

The approach that Harold outlines in this book is well-structured and can be implemented incrementally rather than requiring a big-bang approach. At the heart of it is the need to move towards standards based web sites. Specifically this means moving to XHTML and CSS, with a clear separation between structure and layout. And, as with software refactoring, the emphasis is on discrete steps that make changes without breaking the application (or web site).

Like other books on refactoring this one focuses very much on the concrete rather than the purely theoretical. [Continued]

While not quite as numerous as the books on Ruby, the Groovy titles are certainly starting to accumulate. This one, by Venkat Subramaniam, co-author of Practices of an Agile Developer, is a single volume introduction that is pitched at Java programmers interested in picking up a dynamic language. It's that point about Groovy being a dynamic language that is the main focus of the book, and it's a message that is explored pretty much from the first page.

The opening section of the book introduces Groovy, and explains what it is, why it's interesting and how it uses the underlying Java platform to do all kinds of clever things that are hard to do with Java but easy to do with a dynamic language. The benefits of dynamic typing, reflection and closures are clearly explained along the way. By the end of the first section you would have picked up the core ideas and seen some simple but effective Groovy code.

Part two moves on to look at how Groovy can be used to tackle specific areas: the Groovy Development Kit (GDK), XML, databases and inter-operating with the Java language. The emphasis is on using short snippets of code to achieve things that take reams of Java code - it's not just that Groovy is less verbose, it's also the fact that you can concentrate on the problem you're solving and not the scaffolding that Java code often requires. [Continued]

I had thought that we had whelped enough and shown how much we love the planet. But no, suddenly it's back on the agenda again. The Boss has been spoken to by his Boss, who had word from his Boss that we need to do more. Apparently the wife of the CEO is very concerned that our code is melting the ice caps, killing Polar bears and penguins and causing all-round catastrophic climate change. All this from a few time recording systems…

'But there is no consensus,' I tell the Boss.

'Look, Joe,' he tells me, 'I know you mean well and all that, but the science is settled.'

'To be honest, it's not. Even the warmists are back-tracking. The science is anything but settled.'

'You'd argue with a Nobel Prize winning scientist?'

'Which Nobel Prize winning scientist?'

He looks at me like I'm an escaped lunatic. 'Al Gore of course. Christ, Joe, the man invented the internet and you still don't take him seriously…' [Continued]

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