Like a 10 year old heading to the dentist, the design review stage of a project is one of those areas that will drive a series of heebie-jeebies in even the most iron stomached software engineer or designer. You’ve spent time with your users and business analysts. You’ve diagramed all of the ins and outs…
In this world of cost cutting and temporary resourcing, the importance of looking at the long term strategy when defining a solution’s design can get lost with the pressures of implementation deadlines. How many times has a team been asked to shorten their design time in order to “get on” with the development effort and…
I wanted to take a look at a computer-based topic not normally in my programming domain and chose Placing the Suspect Behind the Keyboard: Using Digital Forensics and Investigative Techniques to Identify Cybercrime Suspects by Brett Shavers (O’Reilly Media). As a former police officer, I found some of the discussions around generic evidence preservation to be…
Metasploit: The Penetration Tester’s Guide by David Kennedy, Jim O’Gorman, Devon Kearns, and Mati Aharoni (O’Reilly Media) is very detailed and extremely valuable in demonstrating how penetration testing can be done using Metasploit along with having the great side-benefit of being able to learn about general methods and processes a pentester will go through during the…
After reading Managing for People Who Hate Managing: Be a Success by Being Yourself by Devora Zack, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the author had found a way to convince me to look differently at my “management” role. In this relatively short book (133 e-book pages on my Nook) Zack guides the reader…
MongoDB Applied Design Patterns by Rick Copeland (O’Reilly Media) is another in a series of patterns books that I would highly recommend for the implementer that knows the technology but is trying to discover if a previous solution (via a pattern) has been found for their problem. As to the reader, MongoDB Applied Design Patterns…
In reviewing Developing with Couchbase Server by MC Brown (O’Reilly Media), I was impressed with how the author was able to turn the complex topic of NoSQL databases into graspable units of learning. The book is relatively short for a technical title (88 pages). However, it is clear that the book strives to get the reader…
I picked up MapReduce Design Patterns: Building Effective Algorithms and Analytics for Hadoop and Other Systems by Donald Miner and Adam Shook (O’Reilly) to explore the deeper analytics that were possible in using Hadoop and MapReduce. This book definitely did not disappoint in covering many of the more advanced challenges that engineers working with Hadoop datasets…
Hadoop Operations by Eric Sammer (O’Reilly Media) is a thoughtfully organized book that guides the operational and architectural reader into a viable Hadoop-centric solution. In his book, Sammer spends a reasonable amount of time providing the reader with enough Hadoop background to be able to move onto the more complex considerations and actions needed to…
Learning Rails 3 by Simon St. Laurent, Edd Dumbill, and Eric J Gruber (O’Reilly Media) is a great opening guide for developers that are new to Ruby on Rails development. The book does assume some basic background from the reader (as stated in the preface). The reader should know HTML development (not just HTML via…
In his post regarding “Version Control Your API Documentation with Github”, Kin Lane discusses an approach for using Github to version API documentation. The post references using a single public repository to store and version the API documents with the APIs. I agree with his thoughts and position. However, I’d like to extend Kin’s thoughts…
Already having a background in advanced usage of ClearCase, CVS, and SVN, I picked up Version Control with Git by Jon Loeliger and Matthew McCullough (O’Reilly publisher) to understand how Git could help me solve some of the feature challenges I have been working through with other VCSs. This book certainly was able to deliver…
I read Introducing Regular Expressions by Michael Fitzgerald (O’Reilly Media) to gather deeper insights into the details behind regular expressions. Fitzgerald does not disappoint. The reader should sit back and prepare to drink from the fire hose as Fitzgerald drives through regular expressions in many of their entry level flavors and styles. Introducing Regular Expressions is…
I picked up Head First Design Patterns by Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Robson, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra while working through some particularly difficult design/code reviews. In these reviews, I found that very few developers actually knowingly use design patterns beyond the most simplistic of forms. In fact, during several interviews, I asked candidates what design patterns…
With the growing number of implementations in the development community based on the SOA (Services Oriented Architecture) paradigm, I see many different governance mechanisms stated in terms of “must”, “shall”, and “only” when someone has begun an implementation of SOA. In this post, I will discuss some of the observations I have seen in my…
