The books starts with introduction to HTML and CSS and quickly covers some advanced topics in it like Responsive web design, adding audio and video, using CSS3 features to name a few. The chapter on responsive web design is very useful as it covers concepts really relevant in today’s multi screen world.

The book also covers concepts on Javascript and the famous jQuery library including jQuery Mobile. The chapters on designing and deploying websites are very useful for those who have done development but never got it live to the outside world. If the book could include some suggestions for good hosting providers and good domain name service provider then it would have been very useful.

As is the norm with Murach’s books, this book is also a highly practical oriented book with all the concepts explained via examples. Ideally I would use this book as a reference and read those parts of the book as and when necessary. The chapter on Responsive web design is highly recommended as I am not aware of such an elaborate coverage of the topic else where.

Its a completely hands on guide and just mere reading will be of no help. The book also covers concepts and techniques related to secure programming and also some advanced concepts in servlets.

Few among numerous salient features:
Completely hands on guide
Highly suitable for people who are familiar with Java language
Focuses on best practices where ever relevant. For example in the chapters which explains about JSP there is a guideline not to mix java code with JSP and instead make use of JSP Template Library.
Lot of reusable code snippets – useful if someone is looking to implement a subset of the feature explained.

I would highly recommend this book to –
“Any developer familiar with Java programming language looking to learn Web application development using Servlets and JSP”.

One can purchase the latest edition here [though currently only imported edition is available].

PS: I got a copy of the book in return for the review.

The author covers most of the features of dropwizard which includes creating RESTful End points, Database access, Authentication, Creating views by means of developing a sample Phonebook application.

The book is not an exhaustive guide to dropwizard and may not match the documentation provided on the Dropwizard official site. But the approach of developing a sample application adding features in each chapter might appeal to some readers.

If you are kind of person who likes learning a framework by developing a sample application, then you can pick this book. Otherwise I would suggest the documentation would suffice.

Yesterday I got to read the RabbitMQ Essentials by David Dossot. Its a pretty short and totally hands on book. The good things about the book:

• It picks a fictitious company and its requirements to develop a messaging feature. The author builds up the features very elegantly.
• Author explicitly focuses on good practices, performance in the examples presented in the book
• Also touches upon how messaging architecture can integrate heterogenous software systems with software pieces written in Ruby, Python, Java.
• Liberal use of diagrams to explain the architecture and flow of messages

I already had familiarity with communication constructs of RabbitMQ and didn’t find it difficult to understand the content and intent of the author. It also helped me to understand few intricate aspects like Dead letter queue and how to handle them, handling mandatory messages, setting ttl on the messages, different exchange types like direct, topic and fanout.

I feel the book is good read for anyone who has started using RabbitMQ and has worked on integrating with the client API. This book will help you correct your implementation and also understand few gotchas which one would encounter in real life projects.

then, Java Performance is the book you should be picking. This book covers :
– command line tools for OS monitoring.
– JVM overview.
– tools used for monitoring Java applications.
– tuning JVM where majority of it related to GC tuning.
– tuning Java EE applications.

The book has 12 Chapters and not all chapters are required to be read in one go. Its recommended to read all the chapters until chapter 7 as they cover some really interesting and important topics relevant to OS monitoring, JVM basics, JVM monitoring, JVM tuning.

The chapters covering Web Services performance rely on SOAP based services and might not be really relevant to few readers. Also Glassfish is used as the app server for examples in Java EE related monitoring chapters. These few chapters (chapters 8-12) can be read as and when the need arises.

Though the book has been published in 2011, it covers the latest GC algorithm – G1 Algorithm and also calls out any changes/optimisations that can be done in Java 7. So one cannot rule out this book as outdated.

I really benefitted from this book- the chapters related to OS monitoring, JVM overview, JVM monitoring, JVM tuning are the best, resourceful and highly informative. Also the step-by-step approach to JVM tuning described in the book helps a lot in tuning your Java applications.

Anyone reading this book should have good understanding of Java programming and also have at his disposal a Java application which they can tune as they read through the chapters. Mere reading will not be helpful.

Buy the print book from Flipkart.

If you are not a manager yet- you will find some of the chapters/sections of the book interesting and helps you to know how things work at a managerial level. But there are other chapters which make you feel bored like the section on arranging office furniture.

There are lot of one liners through out the book which are really catchy. Few of which I have noted in the first few chapters of the book are:

The main reason we tend to focus on the technical rather than the human side of the work is not because it’s more crucial, but because it’s easier to do.

People under time pressure don’t work better- they just work faster.

Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.

To conclude Peopleware is a MUST read for IT Project Managers and I will recommend this along with another great book: “The Mythical Man month“.

But that’s not all – to mark the transition out of beta stage, the publisher will also be including its Packt Video product range in this limited offer. These practical screencast tutorials give users the working knowledge they need to get the job done, and all videos will be featured in the Columbus Day sale at 50% off – that includes the hugely popular Kali Linux – Backtrack Evolved: A Penetration Tester’s Guide.

The exclusive 50% discount code COL50 will be active on all eBooks and Videos until Monday October 21st.

HTML5 relies more on Javascript and you need not worry if you are not familiar with Javascript as the authors have good 3 chapters covering Javascript. And let me tell you even I was not well versed with Javascript when I started to read the book.

The examples explaning the video and web worker features have used complicated examples which might pose some problems for few but then those examples show the power of those features.

This book is very different from Head First HTML and CSS and the title contains the word “Programming” which is quite a clear indication that HTML5 involves programming using Javascript. And you need not worry about the CSS used in the examples of the book as they can be downloaded from the Book website.

I would recommend anyone who wants to explore HTML5 to pick this book and not get turned off by the number of pages.

Buy this book from Flipkart
Buy this book from O’Reilly site.

This book goes into such depth about nutrition that it explains about different macro-nutrients like Proteins, Fats, Carbs and different micro-nutrients like Vitamins, Minerals. Not only does this book cover about food, it also covers aspects related to how to eat, how much to eat and when to eat. The book then finishes with chapters discussions about working out in gym i.e resistance training http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=experieunlimi-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1449399894&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=FFFFFF&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrand the importance of resistance training.

I did enjoy certain chapters of the book. But at lot of places I was lost trying to process the numerical data thrown at you. So you must be prepared to digest a lot of numbers especially in the chapters dealing with nutrition. I found the chapters covering workouts in gym and resistance training pretty useful. And there are lot of technical terms used so you must keep some reference handy to quickly look through the meaning of the terms.

The bottom line is: apart from the apps listed and a mention of APIs, code here and there this book is not much specific to a geek. I would recommend some books which do tell about nutrition but not in this detail. The other problem with food/nutrition is that its very specific to the region where you are. So from a food/nutrition perspective I would recommend buying a book by the regional expert authors.

Its a relatively small book with short chapters. I would recommend anyone picking this book to read it from end-to-end continuously. If you read some chapters and try to get back after a few days then you might want to do some catching up with the earlier content. The chapters are related, so is the code explained in them. Not all of the code is present in the book, you have to download the source code of the book and work along with it.

The one thing which I did not like about the book is that they have used screenshots of the code which makes the code a bit difficult to read. At times there are two sets of code compared against each other which makes it even more difficult. I was using the eBook so I could zoom into the code and overcome this issue. The other thing you have to be careful about is that the examples used in the book are for Play 2.0 and if you are using Play 2.1 there subtle differences in the API. The source code which comes with the book does provide the source for both Play 2.0 and Play 2.1 and this should help the reader in obtaining the code for Play 2.1.

I would recommend this book as it is focussed and adopts a practical approach without getting too much into the details of behind the framework.