Desicritics Author: Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay

Book Review: Database in Depth

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 00:32:13 EDT

One of the most critical components of the IT framework in any organization is unarguably the database. With the consolidation of relational database management systems of different brands, there is a correspondingly demand for knowledgeable Database Administrators of good caliber at the administration end of such a critical component. This book comes as a theoretical shot in the arm for people aiming for such a profile.

For almost all the database products in use today, the foundational paper remains E.F. Codd's Derivability, Redundancy, and Consistency of Relations Stored in Large Data Banks. One of the important objectives of this book is to clarify the relational theory to practitioners. The author of the present book was one of the colleagues of E.F. Codd and has a much clearer understanding of the original paper as well as developments on it through to the present day. The author of this book along with Hugh Darwen has a formal proposal for the basics of future DBMS.

In the book under review, there is a very clear explanation of the theoretical concepts and their working without getting convoluted with particular implementations of the theory. Based on the components of the relational model throughout the beginning chapters, the eighth chapter gives the full-fledged definition of the relational model. It is defined in terms of five components that are discussed in the preceding chapters.

A must read portion of the book is the foreword by Jonathan Gennick giving the key reasons why any database practitioner should have this book in their collection. There is a warning for the reader though that they approach the book with the intent of learning, as the prose sometimes gets difficult to understand and needs multiple readings to get the point.

One of the only curiosities that the reviewer has is how the author of the present book would analyze the various branded implementations currently in the market in a sort of comparative study. Any such article would make a very interesting read indeed.

Book Review: The Book of IMAP

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sun, 6 Jul 2008 03:56:10 EDT

IMAP is one of the most common protocols for e-mail servers on the Internet. Web-based e-mail services like Gmail and Hotmail use IMAP to retrieve and display e-mails in the browser, and e-mail clients like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird support the protocol. In The Book of IMAP, there is a thorough practical explanation for setting up e-mail servers with courier IMAP or cyrus IMAP. By default, these include the POP3 server. IMAP is a more mature version of POP3 allowing users to manipulate operations on their mailboxes stored on the mail server.

The book is divided into three main parts - the first deals with the generic set up and maintenance of IMAP servers, Courier-IMAP and Cyrus-IMAP implementations are covered in the second and third parts.

For large scale implementations of IMAP mail servers, there is a requirement to efficiently handle the mail requests in real-time. For this purpose, there is the requirement of load-balancing among servers connected to a common storage at the backend via SAN/NAS. An alternative way is to split the mail database access across several servers based on some ordering of the mail accounts. Both of these implementations are explained in detail. Again, for very large environments there is the possibility to have a IMAP proxy arrangement in place which can each lead to the load balancing arrangement of IMAP servers connected to the fast storage backend.

Other important topics covered include setting up webmail clients for these mail servers such as Squirrelmail and Horde/IMP, migration of IMAP servers due to reasons such as new IMAP server software or migration from POP3, in-depth discussion for the cyrus and courier IMAP mailserver configurations and features.

To summarize, the book is a useful and thoroughly technical read for the mailserver administrator working on IMAP or related professionals wanting to know more about this opensource mailserver technology.

Book Review: Making Things Happen

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sat, 7 Jun 2008 09:33:34 EDT

In Making Things Happen we have an “in-your-face” text from Scott Berkun. While case studies are an integral part of any (project) management handbook, the author had used anecdotes and virtualized examples from his extensive experience in the IT giant Microsoft to good effect as a continuous logic and before you know it you have finished reading the book.

The idea that project management is an art is a powerful one and in spite of the availability of many tools and techniques like XP (Extreme Programming) and Agile project management, hard-pressed Project Managers would definitely like the sage advice of people in as much or more difficult situations they face on a daily basis as part of the job responsibilities.

One of the impressive treatments is in the way that the author has brought focus to the various technical terms used in project management on a regular basis. Consider then that the author has explained the differences between the term vision (referring to defining of high-level goals) to team goals (which is the subset of vision and requires a greater explanation) and individual goals (the responsibilities of an individual in the team). While all project managers may have felt the need to jot down their thoughts and share it with others of their species, this is a very practical way to look at the definitions.

One more phrase that I found very interesting is “analysis paralysis”. This is interpreted as the phenomenon where people are analyzing obsessively, in the desperate belief that if one there was enough data, the decision would resolve itself. In real-time this could be due to the inability of a project manager to confront the issue due to possibly lack of enough authority, team-members could exit and hence a better data is required for more options. The delay in this case is something most of us would have seen sometime or the other from people in responsibility in the organizations.

To summarize, the book would make for a pleasant read to the project manager. The exercises at end of each chapter are very useful and going through them almost gives the feeling of being in a real-time management class.

Book Review: Hacking - The Art of Exploitation

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sun, 1 Jun 2008 10:35:55 EDT

Experience is the best teacher, goes the old saying. Students and learners of C and assembly are often stuck with the seemingly abstract implementations of these programming languages. Being the closest to the execution on the machine is also requiring an intimate knowledge of the way that the 0s and 1s are getting manipulated within all the circuitry.

In Hacking - The Art of Exploitation, starting with each and every basic of the programming from control structure, pointers, typecasting to file access and permissions, function pointers, etc., the discussion is moving on to the various scenarios and examples of general exploitation techniques, networking exploitation, countermeasures and cryptology. The main thing about the treatment of the subject matter is that the clarity of thinking of the author is very prominent. As it is, the large number of domains that a hacker has to encompass do sometimes put to stretch the understanding required. Understanding the basics provided in the step-by step manner is really the implementation of a divide and conquer strategy.

There is also an extensive portion dedicated to cryptology. Quite a few of the texts dedicated to cryptology require the reader to go across for some other book dedicated to information theory for a back-and-forth approach across the two to gather the concept. In this topic especially, the positioning of the examples seamlessly with the concept explanation is a big plus point.

Hacking as a word is very different in different contexts. Thus we have the derivative words cracker and script kiddie. For those looking to have a beginning to the world of optimum coding and extensive knowledge about the nook and crannies of the system, here is a book that does justice. There is a very practical accompaniment of a bootable Live CD to learn the code and examples as well as experiment without risking corruption for the stable OS on a typical desktop.

The book is really recommended not only to the experts looking to have a addition of ways to solve the problems but to the beginner programmers and computer science students who are faced with the problem to imagine real-life problems to understand the various programming techniques.

Book Review: Head First Software Development

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:42:47 EDT

Head First Software Development is targeted at developers and project managers who have to reach for the elusive perfect project. This book spread over 12 chapters and 2 appendices, brings a bunch of tips and a whole new approach to doing the software development.

Many of the ideas in this book seem to be derived from singed and weather beaten experiences to evolve a set of useful best-practices. Example is the preference to use the iterative approach throughout the development, breaking user requirements into do-able tasks,keeping an efficient version control, using a build tool for a team to convert source code into a running application, a continuous integration tool that performs a repeatable process including the version control, compilation and testing phases.

At the start of the discussion, there is a difference made between a big-bang approach and a iterative approach of software development. This a guiding principle throughout the book. The basic concept in the iterative software development is to make the end-user a participant in the development-to-delivery process as well as using small steps to reach the end-user requirements. The detailed way in which the authors have explained the iteration way to reach the software development goal would be an asset to many a “big-bang” developer who has seen the long faces of a frustrated end-user.

Sometimes the entire package of concepts could overwhelm a novice, even though the Head First approach is used . The book is a good one for the experienced software developer who has had a few half-baked/burnt project experiences under the belt before reading this book to get a feel of what is being discussed here.

Book Review: 1858

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 06:00:08 EDT

It is very interesting that the period 1857-1861 was witnessing violent times in America and British East India Company's India simultaneously. The violent event in British India is unmistakably the 1857 War of Independence. 29th March was the day that Mangal Pandey fired the defiant shots.

The book is focused on important and to-be-important personalities in 1858 as America is plunged into the civil war by 1861. The list in the book's subtitle is just a summary of the people tracked inside. As an outsider to American history, it is very revealing about the workings of democracy when we read about the rise of Abraham Lincoln to the White House. The extraordinary situations indeed had some extraordinary actors party to it.

What is very striking is that the main reason for the future war gets no attention from then President James Buchanan. The busy bee nature with which he spent his years in misguided plans and trying to pull the rug out of his former friends and supporters makes for a very saddening read. The book does convince that war is one of the avoidable human tragedies as it traces the rise and fall of the reasons causing the friction among the Southern and Northern states.

An admirable research work on historical facts does bring the quality of the book to a high level. While the author already describes the book as seven stories, linked by the chronology of the presidency, sometimes it gets difficult to go back and forth across the dates as the events start pouring into the reader's mind. This might be more true for the non-U.S. readers. One of the useful additions to this book can be a sort of comparative timeline for the events across different stories.

From a South Asian perspective, subtle parallels can be drawn with the American Civil War, with respect to the situation within pre-1947 British India and later pre-1971 Pakistan as new countries came into being.

Book Review: The Book of Wireless

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sat, 1 Mar 2008 00:51:28 EST

The Book of Wireless is a reference version of the user manuals that a person seeking to set-up, from the wireless LAN components like routers and access points, might require. In seventeen short and utility chapters, the author has done a good job of helping out the confused user of this still hotly researched technology.

One of the discussions revolves around the possibilities of Wi-Fi networks and broadband wireless vis-a-vis the 3G and various mobile telephony technologies. The large advantage of high-speed provided by the wireless broadband and Wi-Fi highlights the risks faced by the mobile operators when they pay astronomical sums to gather the renewable licenses. The basic disadvantage is that the mobile networks are developed for the voice communication and data communications are an add-on to the voice facility whereas Wi-Fi and wireless broadband are developed keeping high-speed data communication over wireless in mind.

There is also an interesting discussion of pulling down costs of wireless Internet access by setting up neighborhood wireless networks by sharing a single link from the ISP via a router/modem and spreading it across a private network. Maybe this is one way how the technologies evolve to bring down costs.

Summing up, the discussions are lively and text-matter useful for the end-users. This is a recommended add-on giving a big picture to the user manuals that users will have to read anyway. On a critical note, the book could have done with a little more number of illustrations and figures.

Book Review: Oracle Essentials, Oracle Database 11g

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 13:57:44 EST

This book is intended for the widest possible audience of people who will be in contact with an Oracle database. This can be an Oracle DBA in charge of the Oracle database on a day-to-day basis ,the Data center manager in charge of reviewing the yearly contracts, the IT head from the non-database side who wants to have a functional knowledge of Oracle DB, and finally the application developers and end-users.

The topics under discussion start from an introduction to Oracle and take the reader through the instance and database architecture for a basic installation, moving on to advanced topics such as Oracle security, auditing and compliance, Oracle performance and a discussion on Oracle methods for satisfying the ACID test by means of undo segments and redo logs and a very powerful locking mechanism.

Oracle hardware architecture is an eminently practical topic in that it discusses the implementation details for an Oracle database as well as the much publicized grid feature. Some of the 11g features that have been relevantly discussed include the Automatic Memory Management and the possibility for extracting reports from a standby database while redo log is still being applied via the Active Data Guard Option.

The discussion is fairly widespread and a good account for the Oracle database without going into the technical depth. Honestly, this can hardly be expected from a single book. This is an ideal first book for a person wishing to have a knowledge of the much popular database, though by no means should be the last one.

Book Review: Head First JavaScript

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 12:04:25 EST

An addition to the Head First series, the present book does an admirable job of describing the basics of JavaScript in twelve chapters. With imaginative examples and people as well as JavaScript components talking to the reader, the work of learning is made simple and easy.

One of the most impressive chapters in this book is the eleventh chapter dedicated to debugging. One can almost sense "bugs" getting killed as the author goes about the discussions. One of the most complicated topics is the discussion on JavaScript objects. The reader is requested to keep thoroughly with the author in carrying out the examples and other hints. A reading without practicing the examples can leave one very confused.

The discussions throughout the book are in a very friendly format. They make the difficult job of learning JavaScript seem very simple for the reader compared to going through some of the wordy textbooks. By no means is this however an advanced level book . At the end of reading and going through the book, the reader should feel enthused to take up the more abstract or reference books on JavaScript even without the prodding of a very persuasive Computer Languages Professor.

Book Review: Beautiful Code

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 01:06:25 EST

A collection of thirty three chapters from experts in their fields, Beautiful Code comes as a whiff of fresh air into the book shelf of the programmer. The contributing authors include illustrious names such as Brian Kernighan, Karl Fogel, Ashish Gulhati and Yukihiro Matsumoto amongst the many.

Going a step beyond the lecture mode of many computer programming books, the authors give their contrasting and very interesting ways of reaching the programming goals.

The chapter dedicated to an analysis of the elegant quick sort algorithm by Jon Bentley, is impressive as the author has involved the relevant quotations and used them for implementing the quick sort algorithm using three different approaches.

Among the many gems in this book is a discussion by Ronald Mak on design and development of a Collaborative Information Portal related to NASA's Mars Rover Mission and used by large number of users worldwide. The beauty of this enterprise application is that this is in three-tiered SOA and provides the functionality, reliability and robustness required from such type of application.

Some of the discussed codes include code generation for image processing, population count, three libraries as levels of Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms, eLocutor and Emacspeak.

The book will give color to imagination of programmers used to reading bland text-book type documentation and programming manuals. One interesting aspect of this book is that all the royalties from this book would be given for donation to Amnesty International.

Beautiful Code
Edited by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson
O'Reilly