Codermertrics provides an interesting idea, measuring software development with a goal of trying to find things to improve. I found it interesting having seen bad metrics used and talked about in past. Codermetrics goes beyond the classically missed “LOC” (Lines of Code) metric that developers rightfully loath, and presents a variety of different metrics to measure. It bases the ideas around Sabermetrics, the analysis of baseball through metrics.

I found the ideas presented in the book interesting, and pretty well presented. While I can’t see myself using them directly at the current point in time, I can see that measuring what is being doing can be useful for getting feedback, and helping to improve behaviours and techniques. The metrics presented in the book are interesting, and there are good ideas and tools for thinking about how to develop your own metrics, and refine those presented.

I’d recommend the book to people thinking about how to improve the performance of a software development team.

[This book was reviewed as a part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program]

I’m more and more enjoying the O’Reilly Getting Started guides. They provide a good introduction to cutting edge topics, and this one is no exception. I’ve been interested in learning about noSQL datastores, and learning more about CouchDB is always good. The book starts by introducing each of the topics in it’s title, giving a short informative chapter to each. Informative enough to be useful if you don’t know much about the tool, but not too long as to bore someone who knows a lot about it. The book then includes hooking them all together walking through a couple of practical examples.

I’d highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about the topics in the title. Essentially it does what it says on the tin.

I’ve been interested in redis having seen it recently in a couple of rails based systems, and heard it described as the magic caching data structure. I grabbed a copy of the Redis Cookbook in order to get a better understanding of Redis to use it with existing systems and to see how it might fit into new systems.

The Cookbook format gave some good insights into how to use red is in different situations, and I learnt how to use the APIs by seeing how they are used in the examples. Depending on your point of view the thin size of the book can be a strength or a weakness. I was able to get through it in a few hours while traveling. For a technical reader with some exposure to key value systems the Redis Cookbook makes for a good educational read that I’d highly recommend.

It was with eagerness and anticipation that I picked up a copy of “Functional Programming for Java Developers”. I’d heard about it on twitter, and conversations with my resident functional guru (Tony Morris) got me excited about the potential for this book.

In the end it made for a quick read. Having spent many hours working through functional exercises with Tony meant that I’d already been introduced to the majority of the ideas covered in the book, and so I fell outside the main target audience of java developers who haven’t done functional programming, but are interested. I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone who hasn’t done functional programming, and is interested, but not to people who’ve already had exposure.

As the target audience for the book is for that group of people, I think it gets it spot on, and anyone in that group should grab a copy.  The coverage of functional programming using Java is good, and the bibliography and list of next steps is great.

The Book of Ruby constantly had me torn. I love the simple and clear examples. The explanation of the core of the ruby language is very solid and well done. It’s a readable book…. but the code isn’t as clear as I would hope. In trying to point the reader to what the author views as the important things to learn, he often deliberately goes against the normal ruby coding style.

The code is simple and clear,yet there are too many times where it grates against me. There is perhaps a case to saying that it is simply my own personal biases that are getting in the way, and I can live with that, but I like to think that I’ve built up these biases and thought from experience, and that they count for something.

So in reviewing this book, I am, as I said torn. It is quite clear. It’s well written with quite good coding examples. I did manage to read it from end to end, which speaks of it’s readability. It’s sold as a gentler introduction than the classic pick-axe, but I don’t know who I’d recommend it to over the pick-axe. I give this book a 3 out of 5. It’s faults won’t let me rate it higher, but aren’t significant enough to rate it any lower.

I picked up a copy of “Virtualization: A Manager’s Guide” as a part of the O’Reilly blogger review program. It was little questionable as while I’m technically a manager, I am also still very technical, so am on the border of the books audience.

At Ephox we make heavy use of virtualization in our development environments. We are running VMWare images for testing servers and clients, using these images to replicate client issues that are often can only be reproduced on specific platforms. I’ve also experimented with amazon ec2 and s3, running an internally built wiki on that architecture. With this in mind I had a decent understanding of virtualization before starting to read the book, but wanted to fill out my understanding and ensure that I had thought through the management level issues.

I picked up the book hoping for a well written book, instead finding a very light read that was a bit too formulaic. Each chapter followed a very set pattern and style, which basically conveyed some information, without gripping the reader. I’m not sure that it would hit the mark for someone that has no experience with virtualization, and it’s one of the few O’Reilly books I’d be reluctant to recommend? That said I’d still just rate it at 3 out of 5, as it’s contents are factual, and there might be some managers entering into virtualization that it might be useful for.

[This book was reviewed as a part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program]

Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef is a good little book. I grabbed a copy, having heard much about Chef, and Puppet, tools for automating machine and systems integration. The book did a good idea of introducing many of the foundational ideas and concepts behind devops, automating infrastructure deployment, chef, TDD, BDD, and test driving infrastructure. The key foundational information provides a good grounding for the book, and is one of the big reasons to read it. These foundations fill in any gaps in understanding, and provide a great basis for doing the test driven infrastructure development talked about in the book.

The sections in the book showing actual test driven infrastructure ended up being quite short. If you’ve already up to speed with Chef but just want to skill up on TDI, then this might not be the book for you. If however, you’re like me, and just starting the journey on OpsCode and chef, this book makes for great little read, and I’d recommend it to you.

[This book was reviewed as a part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program]

Getting to Meaningful Use and Beyond Is a book about the meaningful use standards for electronic health records in the united states. I grabbed a preview copy of this book having implemented a simple database for a patient record reporting for a small therapy group many moons ago. I was expecting a dry boring book, but was pleasantly surprised to find it engaging and well written.

Health IT systems provide great promise for improving the efficiency and quality of health services, with the cautious guard that IT implementations for large organizations carry huge risk of failure. Queensland Health have been an example of what can go wrong, particularly with their spectacular payroll system failures after a recent upgrade.

Getting to Meaningful Use and Beyond presents many of the opportunities with health IT, informing of some of the great successes, while informing of the risks and challenges.

A quote in the book says “When you’ve seen one medical practice, you’ve seen one medical practice.” which forms a basis for one of the key challenges in Health IT systems. The book continues the point out some of the differences, and considerations to include. It highlights the requirements and value for helping to follow the processes for health it systems, but also the need for flexibility and customization. It cries out for techniques like those used by FlexaData(http://flexadata.com/) for modeling and working with data.

I was reviewing an early access version of the book, which was well worth reading on it’s own right, even with some typos and a couple of chapters missing. It will be interesting to see how the book evolves with a changing landscape. In particular I look forward to seeing the authors comments on the pending demise of Google Health (google health was referenced in the book, but the comments predate knowledge of it’s pending close in 2012).

I’d definitely recommend the book to anyone considering HealthIT, or an IT professional interested in health. There is also some great pointers and ideas useful for computer literate people who are dealing with health issues.

[This book was reviewed as a part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program]

As on of the contributors to TinyMCE, it’s important for me to be well on top of CSS for two reasons, first to ensure that we support CSS well for our customers, and second to ensure that we leverage it well for the product.

The book of CSS3 presents the new features included in CSS3 in a readable, well written style.  I found interesting and noteworthy points in almost every chapter. Some of the particularly valuable topics follow. The coverage of media queries and web fonts particularly interesting, particularly since I was recently talking with a customer about cross platform friendly fonts. The chapters on selectors and pseudo elements were also interesting and add some more useful tools to the shed. The CSS appearance attribute has very exciting implications for accessibility (expect a blog post soon with some more thoughts and an example). The collection of tools and resources tucked away in the appendices at the end are well worth a looks well, as is the books companion website (http://thebookofcss3.com/).

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in what’s possible now with CSS3 or what’s coming soon. Take a look through the table of contents to get a quick idea then dive deep to really learn. I’d almost go as far as to say that anyone who is doing front end development must read this book.

[This book was reviewed as a part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program]

I’ve been learning the world of MongoDB for a little while now, building up my understanding of how it works, and Trade-offs to be considered when entering into the world of noSQL. With the query support and other interesting properties Mongo has been the system I’ve been diving deep into, and getting some real experience with. As an ex Oracle DBA, working through the strengths and weaknesses of Document based databases has been interesting. The book 50 Tips and Tricks for MongoDB Developers, provides some good food for thought relating to the tradeoffs when working with document stores in general and MongoDB in particular. The end of the book also delves into advanced configuration and production topics such as replication and restoring from backups. I’ll admit that I let these topics was over me without fully grokking them.

The book is a pretty quick and easy read, and leads you through how to model and work with documents in MongoDB. I’d recommend it to people who understand the basics of MongoDB and want to dive deeper.

[this book was reviewed as a part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program]