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]

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide has well been known as the bible of JavaScript Development. As a professional JavaScript Developer and leader of JavaScript Developers, I had to grab an updated copy (we’ve got various old editions around the office). It was great to get opportunity to review it as a part of the O’Reilly Blogger Review program.

The book has been updated for HTML 5 and ECMAScript 5, and has heaps of useful information about both. Even as an experienced JavaScript developer, I found a significant number of insights, making it well worth the list price. My only criticism is that the code formatting technique in the examples didn’t work very well on n iPad. Unfortunately the width of lines including the copious explanatory comments was just too long.

David Flanagan recently caused a stir by announcing that piracy of his books may end his full time writing career, which would be a sad loss. http://www.davidflanagan.com/2011/04/javascript-the-1.html. Please consider buying this well written JavaScript book, which is useful for beginners and experts.

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

The idea of using games and such to help engage people with learning a product or idea appeals to me. On of my favourite apps on my iPhone is Mind Snacks (http://mindsnacks.com/), a fun application that aids learning Spanish through a series of games.

It was interesting that the blogger review program is it’s own game. Completing a level in this game is doing a review. I have to complete levels to be able to do more reviews.

Gamification by Design is well written and easy to understand. It does a good job of presenting the key ideas of Gamification. The use of real world examples showing what people have done is great. There’s even some real code showing how a forum being enhanced with Gamification. The code examples and examples of interactions with gamification services complete a good book. It was an exciting eye opening read that I thoroughly enjoyed. I was able to get a good introduction to the theories and principles behind gamification, and ground these in reality with the code and examples.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the book to someone technical wanting to learn about gamification.

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

The Book Data Mashups in R gives a short tutorial using R to pull data from the web and analyse it. The specific presentation is looking at foreclosure auctions in Philadelphia. I used this book to get some practical hands on exposure to R.  It happily fulfilled this use case for me, exposing packages in R, and helping me gain an idea of how R can be used. It also provided a good idea as to what R does well, helping me know when to pull the R tool out of the shed.

I recommend the book to experienced developers who want to get their heads around what is possible with R and how R works by trying it out.

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

The Data Source Handbook is a short eye opening book on the data and apis that are freely available on the web.

It gives a good quick introduction to what’s out there, helping to feed the ideas on kind of data is easily accessible. This kind of information may be easily available at google, but it’s well worth the price to have it easily accessible in one spot for easy reference.

With an increasingly social and mashupable web, being able to pull in data from a wide range of sources is essential. The Data Source Handbook provides a good starting point for getting some of the public data off the web.

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

The iOS 4 Programming Cookbook is an interesting book. When reading it my emotions ranged excited, happy, pleasantly surprised to puzzled. One of the things I often try and do when reviewing technical books is to try and understand who the target audience is, put myself in their place, and do what they would do. With iOS 4 Programming Cookbook style seemed to vary greatly in who it was targeting. The beginning covered many very basic topics, while later stages required more understanding. Overall it seemed to be aiming at someone without extensive programming experience, and was focused on making it possible for most people to follow the recipes.

I’ve not read that many programming cookbooks in the past, preferring to aim at getting a deeper understanding of topics than finding the “repeatable recipes” covered in programming cookbooks. That said, the cookbook format seems useful in an iOS and ObjectiveC environment, where there are many areas that require the kind of boilerplate code that can be found in cookbooks.

One of the best uses that I found for the iOS 4 Programming Cookbook, has been to quickly identify device features for iOS that can easily be used, and the APIs for working with them. I’ve used it a couple of times when thinking through device options, and how to leverage the functionality of iOS.

Overall I’d recommend the book to someone who is looking at building something for the iOS that utilises the hardware and software provided by Apple.

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

Conversion Optimisation is an interesting book for me to review. I found it a good read, helping me to think about and understand some of the the ideas and concepts around helping people to give you money for a product or service on your website.

I read Conversion Optimisation after having been influenced by Seth Godin. I understand Seth to say, “build really good stuff and do an excellent job, and build a community around this”. So when I was reading “Conversion Optimisation” I was consistently thinking that I had a great product, and that Conversion Optimisation is helping me to ensure that the right people get to use it.

With this type of thinking in mind, I found it a very interesting read. The thinking about communication was very helpful, and some of the decisions and analysis of data in the book also helped give some good ideas of how to analyse data when doing conversion optimisation. I’m not sure how the book would hit a marketing type, but for someone like me, it was a good read.

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

jQuery Pocket Reference provides a very useful coverage of jQuery and the functionality it provides. It presents the key concepts and how to work with jQuery. This makes it sound like a book for beginners to jQuery (which to some extent it is), but it is also excellent for people with much more experience, who want to review what they know, and also have a good reference.

I’ve been using JQuery in one form or another for a number of years now. I can remember clearly the days in which jQuery was coming up and overtaking prototype.js as the premier browser DOM abstraction platform. This almost makes it seem like this book would be useless for me to read. Instead it makes it all the more worthwhile, helping plug in some gaps and giving some additional grounding to what I know.

I would definitely recommend reading this book to anyone who wants to use jQuery well. There is a wealth of knowledge captured in the book, and it is presented in a way that makes for both easy reading and a good reference. My electronic version has been well highlighted and marked up for future reference.

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