Computer Books Reviewed
Webdesign, Coding, Blogging & Internet Culture
The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition
Jul 12th
This is the second edition of Randall Hyde’s 1996 book on high-level assembler. It provides an introduction to writing assembler programs using the High Level Assembler (HLA) that incorporates many features found in higher-level languages.
The book originally started off in 1989 as a book for students of a course on assembler language the author was teaching and evolved into the first edition in 2003. This updated version was released in 2010. While assembler language is mostly used in the lower reaches of computer platforms in areas such as device drivers, it remains a fact that everything else in modern operating More >
Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software
Mar 16th
First published in 2002, Free as in Freedom is the story of free software activist Richard Stallman. Stallman is best know for created the Free Software movement that led to the General Public License (GPL) which today under-pins today’s open-source movement. While his rigid stance on issues and use of wording related to free software have certainly earned him his share of detractors both inside and outside the community, without him, the modern software industry might be a lot different.
The book goes back and forth between his present work and Stallman’s life growing up in New York, later working at More >
Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours
Feb 24th
A while back a friend asked me for some advice on getting into web-design. Now that’s a pretty broad question, kind of like saying you want to “get into cars”, but besides taking a course, which I usually suggest recommend for someone totally new to a subject, there are a few books around, so I suggested he pick up this one.
The reasons I liked this book are mainly that it’s focused on HTML, doesn’t try and teach PHP or another server language, yet still covers things people need to know like how to organize a website, choose an ISP and More >
Network Know-How: An Essential Guide for the Accidental Admin
Apr 16th
Broadly, Network Know-How: An Essential Guide for the Accidental Admin covers what exactly a network is and the hardware involved, planning and installing a network, and connecting devices to it. The 17 chapters that make up this book can be broken into the first four that explain what a network is and some of the physical parts that make up a network. The next four chapters cover designing a network and the actual process of building the network and finally the rest of the book covers how to use your network and add various devices, including game consoles, to it.
The More >
Designing Web Interfaces
Mar 29th
The Problem: For most of the history of the web, just getting something up on the screen that resembles your original design — in two or more web browsers — has been a challenge on it’s own. Today, browsers have become more standardized, and libraries like jQuery UI and the Dojo Toolkit are bringing desk-top-style interface widgets to websites. However while designers have the ability to create sophisticated interfaces, designing sites that are easy to use is still a challenge because the challenge is only partly technical.
Public websites (as opposed to those for internal use by an organization) often have More >
Adobe AIR Programming Unleashed
Feb 9th
Adobe AIR Programming Unleashed teaches readers how to create applications using the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). Readers will learn three things: what AIR is and what it offers to developers, the process of creating an application and some good practises for developing your applications.
In a nutshell AIR lets developers write cross-platform applications in ActionScript or JavaScript- though ActionScript is given most of the coverage in the book. If this sounds a bit like Java’s “write once, run (or test) anywhere,” the comparison is a valid one– in fact, with the new 3D animation support and UI toolkit, AIR could be More >
MySQL
Dec 8th
If you include, as the author does, the beginnings with mSQL, then MySQL’s origins can be traced to the late 1970s, though the database we now know as MySQL was released in 1996 so users can probably guess there are a few arcane corners to this open-source poster child– fortunately this book does an excellent job shining a light in all those corners you knew where there– and a bunch you probably didn’t.
The book is written for the 5.x version of MySQL and so there’s coverage of 5.x features like stored procedures, triggers, views, the archive storage engine and a More >
Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6
Aug 11th
The name Drupal is Dutch for ‘droplet’, hence the water droplet icon found on hundreds of websites. Behind that icon is a content management system that has evolved over the years from a basic content management system into what has been called a “Swiss-army knife of web software”. As that statement might lead you to think, Drupal does have a reputation for having a steep learning curve, but probably not that much more than other content management systems become when you step outside the defaults.
Like many such systems it employs some kind of system of blocks of content that are More >
Taking your iPhone to the Max
Jul 27th
At the start, this book does cover a lot of material that can be found in the iPhone’s manual. This means that the phone itself and each software application is given a pretty thorough coverage over the approximately 180 pages in the book. Apart from the software, the workings of the iPhone’s hardware features are also covered in some depth. As a manual supplement, the book does a good job, taking the reader right from unpacking, activation and to using the built-in applications.
However once your past that, Taking your iPhone to the Max has a lot of coverage of other software More >
The Principles of Project Management
Jun 9th
So that is what the first section of the book does: provides a definition that can be summed up as applying tools and skills to complete a project. That then leads to what exactly is a “project”: a set of tasks with a time-frame and goal of somehow adding value. So yes, the introduction does involve a fair bit of terminology that isn’t going to be familiar to many readers coming from a coder’s background, but there’s a helpful appendix that lays out many of the terms. Just as important, the introduction explains what project management is not, some of More >
