Distributed

There is a saying that some people are too heavy for light work and too light for heavy work. In that sense, Distributed Unix System Administration: Team Procedures for the Enterprise is a book that parallels that saying.

The book is fact, really two books. The first 9 of the books 11 chapters deal with Unix fundamentals. The basics of file and block structure, shells, scheduling, processes, security and more are discussed. While Wetsch does give a good overview of these topics, it is hard to justify spending $50.00 for those topics alone, when similar information is available free on the net. If you do not want to spend a lot of money, check out the Unix FAQ at www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/unix-faq/faq/contents/faq.html for answers to nearly every Unix question. Also, subscribing to the Usenet comp.unix.questions newsgroup is another good way to inexpensively get well informed about Unix.

The final two chapters of the book detail a program Wetsch wrote called SAmatrix. SAmatrix is an expert analysis tool designed to manage systems with the goal of bringing order, reliability and exception reporting to distributed systems. The outgrowth is SAmatrix is an Enterprise System Assessment that accesses an organization's environment and determines if the organization is at risk, and if so, what action to take.

SAmatrix breaks down systems into 5 modules: software, hardware, network, security and operations. Within the program, there are about a hundred questions. After answering all of the questions, the program provides module risk assessments and levels of risk.

While SAmatrix has a lot of potential, the problem with it is that it in its current incarnation, is way too light of a program to do anything meaningful for complex environments. The fact that it can not really be customized or its entries weighted, make the program for the most part unusable. As an example, the fact that you can not weigh the SAmatrix entry of: are major system crashes less than 6 per year, is a problem since 6 major system crashes a year can be catastrophic for some environments (factory floor, hospitals, etc.) or a minor inconvenience for others (library, home use, etc.) The main issue it that systems management is a very complex science. Taming such a beast requires rather advanced tools, not the type that you will find in a $49.95 book limited to only two chapters.

Because I was going to have little time behind the console of an Exchange 2000 server while preparing for my exam, I opted for this eTrainer. I must admit that I am very disappointed with it.

If you just want to gain a basic overall knowledge of the product, it's fine. And, if you won't have access to an Exchange 2000 server, the interactive exercises will help familiarize you with the Exchange interface. But this is marketed as a comprehensive exam prep tool and, in that respect, I believe it fails. In my opinion, this product WILL NOT prepare you for the Microsoft exam. I firmly believe that if I had relied on this tool alone, I would not have come close to passing the exam.

The course spends a lot of time on areas that are only lightly covered by the actual exam, and it glosses over some real key areas that were heavily covered on the exam (e.g. backup and restore).

Throughout the course of using the eTrainer, I found numerous errors. The testing engine is a joke. Most of its 500 questions tend to be of a simple multiple choice or fill in the blanks nature. The Microsoft exam uses all complex scenario-based questions of a far more difficult nature than you what will see with the eTrainer. Some of the answers to the questions were just plain wrong (e.g. open port 993 on a fire wall for secure POP3). There was another case where the explanation provided for an answer was a direct contradiction to the answer itself. Gosh, you'd think a respectable publisher like Sybex would have put a little more effort into proof reading this.

All in all I came away with the sense that this product represents a poor execution of a good idea. In the past, I've used numerous Sybex exam prep books and usually found them to be excellent. In fact, I used James Chellis' Exchange 5.5 book for that certification. I'm a little surprised that he put his name on this one.

One more point; the description provided by Amazon.com states that the CD includes a searchable PDF of the Sybex Exchange 2000 Adminstration book. I did not find this on my CD, and there is no mention of it on the retail packaging or on Sybex's website. I think this is an error.

In summation, if you're looking for a quick way to get some Exchange 2000 knowledge, this will be fine. If you're looking for a tool to help you pass the test, I suggest you look elsewhere.

This book starts out with some good overview chapters of Windows DNA-- relating all the various technologies (SQL Server, Visual Basic COM, MTS, ADO, ASP, and DHTML) in an easy-to-read way. It also promises to guide the reader through creating a DNA application (a simple online banking application) through examples and exercises in each chapter (This walkthrough approach was the main reason I chose this title over the Wrox book).

While the early chapters on system design and data stayed well-focused on relating each new concept to the online bank example, the remaining chapters did not. Instead, the authors presented only very basic code snippets, unrelated to the sample application, and many of which contained typos or were otherwise non-working (as of this date, the publisher's website still does not offer errata or fixed code samples for this book). For this reason, I cannot recommend this title to a beginner or intermediate programmer/analyst. Since the content is focused towards these groups, advanced programmers will likely pass up this book in favor of the Wrox title. I sure wish I had!

I'm not sure of the market for this book. It's too general to be of use to technical staff and provides too much detail for management or an end-user. Seeing as this is the author's second SAP book - I was expecting more.

Mikhail M. Gilula, The Set Model for Database and Information Systems (Addison-Wesley, 1994)

Gilula, at one point in this book, says "As far as possible, we have attempted to simplify the presentation in order to make it intelligible to readers who have had no special training in the field of mathematical logic." Could have fooled me. It's possible for the bachelor's earner to grasp, but just barely and after multiple readings. You're probably better off not trying to tackle this one unless your bachelor's is in math, or you've earned an advanced degree.

That said, is there really any reason to tackle it at all? A number of websearches on set theory as it applies to current database technology (and specifically Starset, the language proposed and outlined herein) turns up precious little, leading this reviewer to believe that the relational model, which is what Gilula and co. are trying to overthrow, has won this battle without too much effort. This book is, at this point in time, going to appeal at most to a niche market. Gilula mentions that the original Starset interpreters were written in C, and the appendix has more than enough info for the hobbyist or vertical-market software developer to reverse-engineer Starset and program a home version of it. And Gilula certainly does make an interesting case for set-model databases, and he does so with just enough clarity to make the average DBA wonder if, perhaps, a set-model database might be of more use than a relational database for any given purpose. However, unless that DBA has unlimited time and resources, this is probably going to remain no more than an interesting artifact. **

Jeff does a great job describing Uniface Six, even to the layperson. Indeed even a seasoned Uniface Professional such as myself learned much about the product.

Yet, the book is now hopelessly out of date for Uniface Seven and beyond. Still, if you are interested in the history of Uniface functionality, this is worth a read.

In its time, this book was five stars.

If you need a technical reference for Developer/2000 tasks this is not the book. The documentation provided by Oracle Education in Developer/2000 classes contain more real-world examples and provides more guidance in actual forms and reports development. If you need to educate a business analyst on RDBMS application development fundamentals, this might be a good book for you.

This book covers the process of building forms and reports from start to finish, and at the same time includes workarounds to some of the more sticky technical problems you'll find in these products. The products themselves have a pretty high learning curve, but I think Mr. Muller does a pretty good job of explaining them.

Its and Excellent book for oracle developers who use Develeoper 2000. Its a must read for those who are using Developer 200 to develop web applications. Overall a must read for all developers

The title of this book should be; "How to use IONA's COMet." This book is very vendor specific. From experience, IONA's COM-CORBA bridge is very slow due to all of it's dynamic implementation. This book tells very little about how the different IDL's map to each other.

I bought the book and read it twice and found it was not what I expected. I easily get lost in the chapters and example. But it did give some useful and helpful data

The book is ok, but it doesn't leave you with enough information to sit down and write code with a COM/CORBA bridge. The other poster that said this book is biased to IONA's COMet product is incorrect though - I don't think COMet is even mentioned in the text, which is a shame, since COMet is the most popular COM/CORBA bridge around.

I found this 500-page book completely useless. The book doesn't have any (!) illustrations, it's plain text only, and it basically rephrases standard SAP OnLine Help. I found the standard SAP FI/CO Online Help more readable than this book ...

This book is pretty useless and gives you just enough information to really screw things up.

helpful to understand the logic of finance and controlling concepts. navigation are clearly explained.

This book was a waste of time and money. This is the worst technical book I have ever read. The second bullet on the the cover states, "Learn how to develop and intergrate the SD module with your existing SAP R/3 system.". This is very misleading as this book is nothing more than a high-level overview of SD and goes into no detail on "how" to develop anything. I also have the MM book by the same name and it also is worthless.

I should have paid more attention to the title. It's called "Administering" SAP R/3 and not "Customising". It explains how to use the different SD functions not how to implement them. Unfortunately, it cannot be recommended to users either because it is too technical and does not explain things in a comprehensive manner. There are some books that emphasise the business process and help you decide how to implement this in SAP. This is not one of them. This book is smack in the middle of a no-mans land. It's no good for customising, no good for users and no good for planning business processes.

I totally agree with some of the other reviewers. Your better off with the online documentation.

Save your bucks. Don't waste them on this book.

Incidently, if your looking for a book on SD customising, I can recommend "Implementing SAP Sales and Distribution": 5 stars!

This book offers no help at all in configuring the SD module.

It basically just explains all the functionality that is available in the SD module, without explaining how you can configure SAP to use the functionality.

If you are buying the book to see what SAP SD can do, fine. But if you want to configure the module, try another book! I recommend the SD book by Glynn Williams from McGraw Hill.

I have also read the MM and FI-CO books in the ASAP series, and they are the same! - they cover the functionality and not the configuration.

And even though these books cover the functionality, they don't explain how to use it effectively, they just tell you what functionality is available.

You may as well spend some time using the SAP online help.

I suppose these books were great when SAP was new and not many people understood it, but now the market is more intelligent and aware of what SAP can do the market expects quality information on configuring the SAP system and using it to solve business situations.