Book Review: The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra by Shin Takahashi (Trend-Pro Co Ltd)

To be honest I haven't touched Linear Algebra for 20+ years. I had a gruelling time in high school just trying to keep up with an insane syllabus that I didn't have the time to really understand the purpose of Linear Algebra in real life. To make it worse, my professors didn't bother to explain either as they had a lot of topics to cover in very little time. So it was all mechanical learning trying to solve problems and proofs without understanding why. I always had this feeling in me that my learning of linear algebra was incomplete in spite of scoring well in Math. So 20 years later I picked up this book out of sheer curiosity whether my learning could be completed.

I must say I am very impressed with the approach of this book. The author has made learning delightful using a comic format with two kids - one a math wiz trying to explain it to the other who is struggling. At a steady pace, the book covers a lot of the basic concepts of linear algebra like vectors, matrices, Gaussian elimination, subspaces, dimension, and linear span. The author makes it interesting by explain how they apply in computer graphics, cryptography, and engineering. I finished reading the entire book in 3 hours! It all just came back to me after 20+ years! Thanks to this book, I am glad that my kids will not be struggling to understand math when they go to high school.

Albert Einstein said, "You have really learned something if you can explain it to your grandmother". I can confidently say I have learned the concepts of Linear Algebra thanks to this book and I can teach it to my grandmother (if she is willing to learn!).

Book Review: Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1, 6th Edition (O'Reilly) by Andrew Lee Rubinger and Bill Burke

I was not a big fan of EJBs as the previous versions of the spec left me baffled and frustrated. I kept away from learning EJBs as not one at my work place seemed to care about them either. With EJB 3.1 there has been a renewed interest on this topic and so I started reading "Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1, 6th Edition - O'Reilly".

I think the authors have done a good job starting with the basics in the first section of the book explaining what the purpose of EJBs are and how the container takes care of providing services so we can focus on writing the business logic instead of re-writing plumbing and cross-cutting code.

Section two of the book provides chapters of the book provide a coverage on the various types of beans with practical examples on when each is suitable to use. I really enjoyed this section of the book as I could relate it with my daily life as a programmer.

Section three and four focus on Entity beans and Container services but I read them lightly as I don't have much interest in going too deep into those. Section five of the book wraps up with lots of practical examples (like recipes) on each bean type. I enjoyed reading this section of the book as well.

Overall, I think this book is much better than reading the EJB 3.1 spec online and the authors have done a great job in bringing the spec to life with practical examples and simplified language.

Book Review - Node: Up and Running by Tom Hughes-Croucher and Mike Wilson (O'Reilly)

If you have heard of Node (which true web developer hasn't!) but haven't had the courage to get your feet wet, Node: Up and Running (O'Reilly) is the book to get. In a true "up and running" style, this book assumes zero knowledge of Node, other than a familiarity with JavaScript. This book is well-written with lots of example code snippets generously thrown inside the book.

This book is not the book to learn JavaScript. The authors have provided clear and concise examples on using Node to assist you as much as possible to write robust, scalable, and maintainable Node applications. I haven't seen a better book on Node and the material online just doesn't compare.

Book Review: Just Spring Integration by Madhusudhan Konda (O'Reilly)

This is a concise, well-thoughtout book, with absolutely no fluff. Madhusudhan has done a great job of simplifying the landscape of Spring Integration into seven useful chapters. The first two chapters lay the groundwork of spring integration covering how and why spring makes business-2-business and application-2-application integration simple. I always thought spring integration was complex until I read this book. Chapters 3 and 4 cover message channels and endpoints in more depth. No discussion of spring integration is complete without discussion how to transform data from one format to another and that is covered in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 covers flow components and Chapter 7 finishes the book with a coverage of the various adapters like file, FTP, JMS, and JDBC.

Overall, I must applaud the author for keeping it simple and to the point and not using any fluff or unnecessary words to fill pages in the book. I really enjoy this style of writing as it helps me keep the focus and also use this book as a ready reference in case of emergency.

Video Review: Strata Conference Santa Clara 2012: Complete Video Compilation

Video Review: Strata Conference Santa Clara 2012: Complete Video Compilation
The Business of Data
Alasdair Allan

This is an excellent video compilation by all measurable standards. I had absolutely just a little idea was Hadoop was and very little knowledge about the challenges facing today's world in "Big Data" terms that traditional databases (SQL!) were not able to meet. I absolutely loved watching all of the Hadoop videos. I admit I was totally biased towards Hadoop as that is the next big thing at my work place and everyone wants to jump in. This video series has made me quite competent and confident in speaking about Hadoop, discussing ideas with my superior and peers, and earning tremendous respect with other virtual teams at my work place. I didn't miss being at the conference at all. This video takes you right there. Anyway, I wouldn't have had the time to be at all the sessions unless I cloned myself. This entire compilation let's me watch videos on my time.

I will be watching videos on the other topics like Geo Data visualization, Apache Cassandra, etc, when I am a little bit over the Hadoop fever. This is a priceless collection!

Book Review: 20 Recipes for Programming PhoneGap: Cross-Platform Mobile Development for Android and iPhone by Jamie Munro

This is a small, concise book of about 76 pages containing a variety of recipes using PhoneGap to build device agnostic applications using GPS location, maps, media, accelerometers, and much more. This book assumes you already know the basics of PhoneGap and will point you to the "Getting Started" link if you are not already familiar with using PhoneGap. You will also need to download jQuery and jQuery mobile library and setup your system before trying any of the recipes. It's not that difficult though and you should be doing that before picking this recipe book.

Each of the 20 recipe provides a systematic Problem/Solution/Discussion/Code format. From simple recipes to detect if the device is ready, detecting network status changes, retrieving device information, the book advances to more complicated recipes like using the GPS and displaying a position on a map, using the compass for navigation, using the accelerometer, etc. It also has recipes on saving data to a remote server, capturing audio and video, and extending PhoneGap with plug-ins.

The nice thing about this book is that it is easy to read and recipes can be quickly tried out. I finished reading this book in about an hour. It has found a place in my reference shelf to reach out to when needed.

Book Review: Mobile Design Pattern Gallery by Theresa Neil (O'Reilly)

Mobile apps have become quite the rage. Forget about consumer apps, these days even enterprise IT teams have been asked to develop corporate apps for the tablet. I was quite surprised myself when my project lead took me aside the other day and asked me, "When can we have a lite version of our web app on the iPad?". A lite version! I had no idea what that meant or where to begin. For sure I knew that the web app that looks super cool on the desktop would look like a disaster on the tablet. Think Mobile First! Who does that? Certainly not me. Old UI habits die hard. However, as Darwin said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."

I knew I had to start with my screens. Unfortunately my years of knowledge of desktop browser UI designing was of not much use. I can throw a hundred UI components in the desktop browser and it will just work. Mobile UI design is a totally different ball game. So I got this book!

This book will not teach you mobile programming. There are plenty of other books to do that. This is the ONLY reliable book that has a catalog of all mobile UI design patterns. Do you like the Facebook and LinkedIn apps? Did you know the names of the layouts for each of the screens in those apps? I didn't until I read this book. I learned quite a lot about designing navigation, forms, tables & lists, searching, charts, etc. The chapter on designing Invitations was pretty intuitive. I really hadn't noticed the power of invitations and how useful they are for mobile apps until I read this chapter. The book ends with a powerful chapter on anti-patterns - things not to do in a mobile app should be a part of your strategy in designing your mobile apps. Appendix at the end provide valuable additional resources including the website of this book. Also provided is a summary of all the UI design gallery in this book so you can always go to the end of the book when you are in a hurry.