Once again I received a review-copy of a book from Packt, for which I'm again really grateful :-) This time it was Django 1.2 E-Commerce by Jesse Legg. The book tries to introduce you in a tutorial style to how to write a simple e-commerce store using Django core components and some selected 3rd-party reusable apps.
Read more about "Django 1.2 E-Commerce" ...Archive for book
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Django 1.2 E-Commerce
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Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server
If you've read my post about the latest rewrite of this site, you know that the search engine working in the background here is Solr, an opensource search server originally developed by CNet. During that migration I kind of learnt the basics of working with it on its own (without some of the fancy wrappers that do the whole configuration for you by looking at your model layer) but the schema.xml still was kind of scary to me. So when Packt gave me with "Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server" by David Smiley and Eric Pugh - once again - the chance to review a book about something that I wanted to learn, I couldn't resist :-)
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Book review: Hacking Vim 7.2
First a short disclaimer : I received a review copy of this book by Packt, which is really nice of them.
For the last couple of years I've been using Vim more or less constantly without actually getting all that deep into it. My whole configuration is a collection of (a) stuff I found on the web and (b) what I could hack together myself after looking at some examples and the documentation for less than an hour. For some reason I simply never could find the time to actually read the documentation.
So when Swati Viswanathan of Packt Publishing asked if I'd like to review a book about hacking up Vim, at first I was pretty undecided. I have virtually no knowledge about the extensibility of that awesome piece of software except for what is in my configuration. But then I read the description of Hacking Vim 7.2 by Kim Schulz and thought this might be finally the right time for getting into it for real ;-)
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Deep Space Nine: The Never-Ending Sacrifice
The summer is finally over and autumn is on its way in. And with it comes a ton of new Star Trek books in more or less every series. Even though Simon & Schuster's new website makes it really hard to find new books, I managed to find one before the new Enterprise finds its way into my hands next week: The Never-Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack.
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Star Trek: DS9 - The Soul Key
Once again Amazon.de outdid themselves and delivered a book that shouldn't have been out for at least 2 weeks, but I don't complain ;-) At least now I had another Star Trek book to get into and it's even a DS9 book. Fearful Symmetry, the second book (or first depending on how you count them) in the current mini-series/crossover between the Mirror Universe-timeline and the DS9-relaunch didn't impress me all that much, but I was still kind of looking forward to a continuation of that story. So here it finally is.
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Star Trek: Titan - Over a Torrent Sea
It's been quite a while since the last book out of the Titan series has been released and I've been really looking forward to the next installment -- especially after the fairly big role the crew of the Luna-class vessel had during the resolution of the latest Borg crisis. Now, nearly one and a half year after Sword of Damocles Titan has finally continued its mission of exploration with Christopher L. Bennett's Over a Torrent Sea.
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Enjoying learning Haskell with the right book
Since last September I've been thinking again and again about giving Haskell a try. I don't really know why but I simply always had fun playing around with languages like Lisp and Prolog but never actually gave them a try outside of the classroom. And for now Haskell and Erlang seem to be the most prominent functional languages out there, so why not?! :-)
Back then I looked at some of the larger free books about Haskell and while the first few chapters were always still understandable and, more important, enjoyable for some reason the descriptions and examples mostly around parametrised types or guards kind of lost me. Also, some of the tutorials I read wanted to explain to you the different between the popular Haskell compilers out there right in the intro chapter, which felt kind of weird. Real World Haskell by Bryan O'Sullivan, Don Stewart, and John Goerzen on the other hand is different there. I guess, part of it is that the comments by other readers are really helping and some sections of the book (I'm only in chapter 4 so far) are written like "this is how you do it in Java, Python, etc. and this is how you do it in Haskell and why you're doing it that way". This makes it very approachable for people coming from different languages.
As already indicated, this book isn't targeted at people who've never programmed. That's stated quite explicitly in the intro of the book and also the whole book mostly works on the basis that you know some common procedural or object oriented language like Java, C++ or Python.
So for now I'm really enjoying it and definitely more than any other intro-to-haskell ebook/tutorial I've read so far :D Just too bad, that Amazon.de doesn't have it :-( Thankfully the online edition of the book is very well formated so reading it on my iPod touch works quite well so far :-)
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Enterprise: Kobayashi Maru
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The adventures of the crew of the NX-01 continue with Kobayahi Maru) as the first novell set after the final episode of the TV-show. Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin tell the story of Archer trying to proof for Romulan attacks on Coalition Freighters, Trip still playing spy-games and T'Pol and Reed going totally nuts. But is it worth all the madness?
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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Fearful Symmetry
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I will try not to spend too much time on this book here since I'm rather
pissed right now. When "Warpath",
which was released in March 2006, ended it
was quite clear in what direction the next book would go: the mirror universe
and the whole story behind Iliana Ghemor.
This book does at least the later,
but leaves the first one open to the next books ... and that's my problem with
"Fearful Symmetry" by
Olivia Woods. The book doesn't really progress the story. It answers basically
all questions you could have had about Illiah, but the actual timeline
progression is veeery minimal. I guess I couldn't even spoil anything here
even if I tried.
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Star Trek: Mirror Universe - Glass Empires
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If you remember how the TOS episode "Mirror, Mirror" ended it had introduced a whole new universe to the world of Star Trek: The mirror universe, where everyone was more or less the evil counterpart of the universe Star Trek fans were used to. When 30 years later the Deep Space Nine episode Crossover) continued the plot, it just gave small hints of what happened in between and between the Enterprise double-episode In a Mirror, Darkly and "Mirror, Mirror". And this is exactly where the two "Mirror Universe" books, Glass Empires [OL] and Obsidian Alliances come in.
