JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, The Complete Reference (Osborne ORACLE Press Series) Review

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JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, The Complete Reference (Osborne ORACLE Press Series) ReviewWhen I purchased this book, I was expecting a little more reference, and a little less "Here's how you do this from the GUI." If you are looking for a guide to the DDL, or likely places to insert your external data, or likely locations for data useful for reporting, this isn't your book. If you are looking for a guide to using the interface to do some simple admin tasks, then this is the right $80.00 overpriced reference for you.JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, The Complete Reference (Osborne ORACLE Press Series) Overview
Your definitive guide to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne

Implement and maintain a fully integrated, SOA-based ERP framework across your entire corporation. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne: The Complete Reference explains how to install and administer JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, store BI information in data marts and warehouses, manage servers and portals, and develop customized applications and kernel processes. You'll also learn how to create and distribute packages, use the security workbench, optimize performance, and apply the latest JD Edwards EnterpriseOne updates and tools releases.

Set up and configure the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications suite
Work with Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, MSDE, and SSE data sources
Define JD Edwards EnterpriseOne path codes, task views, and environments
Deploy the object configuration manager and solution explorer
Build client and server packages, media objects, and data warehouses
Secure JD Edwards EnterpriseOne using LDAP, single sign-on, and third-party tools
Administer portals and Web sites using JD Edwards EnterpriseOne's HTML server and server manager
Troubleshoot and tune your system using the performance workbench

Covers Release 8.12


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Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications Review

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Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications ReviewFirst the good:
It is an _excellent_ tutorial on modern xHTML for those that have used HTML from its tag-soup beginnings. He methodically gives examples on why we, as web programmers, need to utilize a particular technology (CSS, Accessibility, etc). For example, he doesn't just say "Use CSS" because its the new way of doing things. He gives no-nonsense specific examples in bandwidth savings, alternate devices, etc.
His writing style is easy to read for computer geeks: a signature trait of any Martin Fowler signature series book.
He also provides a series of regular expressions that you can use to search through your HTML code to find problem areas and does a good introduction to the program "tidy". Since I am definitely _NOT_ a Regex geek, these are highly appreciated.
And finally, he shows usage of some xHTML tags and attributes of which I was not aware: such as proper usage of and tags.
Onto the downsides:
Originally I purchased this book thinking that I would be able to use it to get some tools under my belt to better transform the lousy auto-generated HTML that most graphics tools export and update them to decent, modern xHTML. However, the author is definitely NOT a "graphics design guy." And because of that, I know that several of the solutions he provided in his CSS sections would NOT fly with the designers where I work.
If I had seen his website, I probably would have realized that he was an XML expert instead of a design expert and wouldn't have gotten my hopes up. So far, I've found that websites like "A list apart" are much better for working with CSS-based design.
So for those looking to refactor your HTML code from ancient "Tag Soup" to modern sleek xHTML, this is a great book. If you're looking for how to best refactor from table-designs to table-less while maintaining a similar Look and Feel that you've been given by your designers, I find this book highly lacking.
Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications OverviewLike any other software system, Web sites gradually accumulate "cruft" over time. They slow down. Links break. Security and compatibility problems mysteriously appear. New features don't integrate seamlessly. Things just don't work as well. In an ideal world, you'd rebuild from scratch. But you can't: there's no time or money for that. Fortunately, there's a solution: You can refactor your Web code using easy, proven techniques, tools, and recipes adapted from the world of software development. In Refactoring HTML, Elliotte Rusty Harold explains how to use refactoring to improve virtually any Web site or application. Writing for programmers and non-programmers alike, Harold shows how to refactor for better reliability, performance, usability, security, accessibility, compatibility, and even search engine placement. Step by step, he shows how to migrate obsolete code to today's stable Web standards, including XHTML, CSS, and REST—and eliminate chronic problems like presentation-based markup, stateful applications, and "tag soup." The book's extensive catalog of detailed refactorings and practical "recipes for success" are organized to help you find specific solutions fast, and get maximum benefit for minimum effort. Using this book, you can quickly improve site performance now—and make your site far easier to enhance, maintain, and scale for years to come.Topics covered include• Recognizing the "smells" of Web code that should be refactored• Transforming old HTML into well-formed, valid XHTML, one step at a time• Modernizing existing layouts with CSS• Updating old Web applications: replacing POST with GET, replacing old contact forms, and refactoring JavaScript• Systematically refactoring content and links• Restructuring sites without changing the URLs your users rely uponThis book will be an indispensable resource for Web designers, developers, project managers, and anyone who maintains or updates existing sites. It will be especially helpful to Web professionals who learned HTML years ago, and want to refresh their knowledge with today's standards-compliant best practices. This book will be an indispensable resource for Web designers, developers, project managers, and anyone who maintains or updates existing sites. It will be especially helpful to Web professionals who learned HTML years ago, and want to refresh their knowledge with today's standards-compliant best practices.

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CMMI for Acquisition: Guidelines for Improving the Acquisition of Products and Services (2nd Edition) (SEI Series in Software Engineering) Review

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CMMI for Acquisition: Guidelines for Improving the Acquisition of Products and Services (2nd Edition) (SEI Series in Software Engineering) ReviewThis is the official guide to the ACQ constellation so it's a must.
Beyond that, it include very useful comments and tips, although do not forget it, it's a reference book which the authors tried to make easier to read and practical.
If you are going to work with Project Management Offices on environments where the projects are usually outsourced, a formal or unformal CMMI-ACQ implementation is a very good idea.
Alex Ballarin Latre / BarcelonaCMMI for Acquisition: Guidelines for Improving the Acquisition of Products and Services (2nd Edition) (SEI Series in Software Engineering) OverviewCMMI® for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ) describes best practices for the successful acquisition of products and services. Providing a practical framework for improving acquisition processes, CMMI-ACQ addresses the growing trend in business and government for organizations to purchase or outsource required products and services as an alternative to in-house development or resource allocation. Changes in CMMI-ACQ Version 1.3 include improvements to high maturity process areas, improvements to the model architecture to simplify use of multiple models, and added guidance about using preferred suppliers.CMMI® for Acquisition, Second Edition, is the definitive reference for CMMI-ACQ Version 1.3. In addition to the entire revised CMMI-ACQ model, the book includes updated tips, hints, cross-references, and other author notes to help you understand, apply, and quickly find information about the content of the acquisition process areas. The book now includes more than a dozen contributed essays to help guide the adoption and use of CMMI-ACQ in industry and government. Whether you are new to CMMI models or are already familiar with one or more of them, you will find this book an essential resource for managing your acquisition processes and improving your overall performance.The book is divided into three parts.Part One introduces CMMI-ACQ in the broad context of CMMI models, including essential concepts and useful background. It then describes and shows the relationships among all the components of the CMMI-ACQ process areas, and explains paths to the adoption and use of the model for process improvement and benchmarking. Several original essays share insights and real experiences with CMMI-ACQ in both industry and government environments.Part Two first describes generic goals and generic practices, and then details the twenty-two CMMI-ACQ process areas, including specific goals, specific practices, and examples. These process areas are organized alphabetically and are tabbed by process area acronym to facilitate quick reference.Part Three provides several useful resources, including sources of further information about CMMI and CMMI-ACQ, acronym definitions, a glossary of terms, and an index.

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Software Systems Architecture: Working With Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives Review

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Software Systems Architecture: Working With Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives ReviewWhen it comes to the systems or software architecture, I subscribe to Tom Demarco's definition: "An architecture is a framework for the disciplined introduction of change." (http://www.systemsguild.com/GuildSite/TDM/Architecture.html). And while most of the job postings matching "architect" these days talk about the need for writing and testing code, there is a growing awareness in the industry that in order to build a resilient enterprise system an organization must look beyond design patterns and coding idioms. In addition to the technical challenges, building large enterprise system requires effort of many professionals during an extended period of time. This brings other non-technical risks into the picture.
This is one of the better books covering many issues that comprise System Architecture discipline in the light of their personal experience. The authors introduce us to an approach for partitioning architecture using Viewpoints (behavioral characteristics, e.g. Functional, Information, Concurrency, Development, Deployment, Operational) and Perspectives (nonfunctional aspects, e.g. Security, Performance and Scalability, Availability and Resilience, Evolution).
The first half of the book describes the discipline of Application Software Architecture, the second half contains two catalogs, one for Viewpoints and the other for Perspectives. Both catalogs describe concerns, artifacts (models), problems and pitfalls when focusing on a viewpoint or perspective.
I would qualify this book as a companion and reference for a beginner through intermediate level. It gives an excellent overview of what a system architect has to go through day in and day out to achieve success. The book contains a wealth of advice on what to pay and not pay attention to in any particular stage of the architectural development. The authors clearly speak from personal experience. Their examples are always to the point, although a bit sketchy with respect to details on techniques and artifacts and how to develop and use them. Considering the site of the volume, the authors did an excellent job balancing width and depth of coverage: trying to cover such a vast discipline in detail in a 500+-page book is not possible.Software Systems Architecture: Working With Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives Overview
Software Systems Architecture is a practitioner-oriented guide to designing and implementing effective architectures for information systems. It is both a readily accessible introduction to software architecture and an invaluable handbook of well-established best practices. It shows why the role of the architect is central to any successful information-systems development project, and, by presenting a set of architectural viewpoints and perspectives, provides specific direction for improving your own and your organization's approach to software systems architecture.

With this book you will learn how to

Design an architecture that reflects and balances the different needs of its stakeholders
Communicate the architecture to stakeholders and demonstrate that it has met their requirements
Focus on architecturally significant aspects of design, including frequently overlooked areas such as performance,resilience, and location
Use scenarios and patterns to drive the creation and validation of your architecture
Document your architecture as a set of related views
Use perspectives to ensure that your architecture exhibits important qualities such as performance, scalability, and security

The architectural viewpoints and perspectives presented in the book also provide a valuable long-term reference source for new and experienced architects alike.

Whether you are an aspiring or practicing software architect, you will find yourself referring repeatedly to the practical advice in this book throughout the lifecycle of your projects.

A supporting Web site containing further information can be found at www.viewpoints-and-perspectives.info


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Glitch: The Hidden Impact of Faulty Software Review

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Glitch: The Hidden Impact of Faulty Software ReviewGiven my (and many others') increasing frustration with consequences of buggy software, I was really hoping for this book to be useful at identifying the issues and proposing some solutions. Not only did the book come up short on both of these, but much of the book has nothing to with glitches. Further there were numerous errors in much of the material, and most of the "solutions" proposed amounted to suggesting increased regulation, as if the government can demand bug-free software (when that isn't even defined) or "certified" software engineers, again not showing what kind of certification (or even training) can reduce bugs.
Some examples of wrong, if not downright dangerous, advice:
He points to Bernie Madoff as an example of the need for more government regulation (in general), ignoring the fact that preventing situations like Bernie Madoff was EXACTLY what the SEC was set up to, and even after 75 years was unable to do so.
He also aims to expand government's consumption of technology - "without ... Web 2.0 capabilities on government websites, e-government initiatives will deliver diminishing returns. ... when ... [Web 2.0 capabilities are] unavailable on government sites, citizens will not return." This completely misses several major points - most notably, that government does not have competitors (for true government functions), and that as long as an electronic solution is easier than the alternative, it will succeed. Will anyone really choose to go in to the DMV for a renewal that can be done on the web, just because the website doesn't offer flashy graphics or collaboration features?
In suggesting not to understand, much less upgrade mission-critical systems- "Know when to leave well enough alone. Given fluctuations in staffing and long-term investments in technology, the reality is that you simply won't fully understand certain applications. ... you will not always know exactly what makes them tick ...If it's a business-critical application, ... you may not need to know every line of code ... In this case, the risk of compromising the infrastructure by opening the application far outweighs the need to sate curiosity." One would think that if a system were business-critical, understanding every line would be business-critical. Or else one glitch could bring down the company, because no one will understand enough to repair it in a timely manner. Also, even the most green developer knows that "opening the application" (i.e. reviewing source code) does not entail ANY risk. Ignorance, however, that's risk.
In proposing more attention being paid to cloud applications - "Should faulty software practices make their way into a cloud, they might impact a wider audience than a more traditional on-premises model of software ownership. Therefore we need to be that much more diligent when it comes to developing [cloud applications]" This is particularly disturbing as he earlier pointed out software bugs that killed people in a (not widely used) radiology application. "Diligence" should be a function of potential impact, not where an application is hosted, or even how many users it has.
Even his definition of a software problem is questionable - "When I buy a flat-panel TV and it takes me four hours to make it work with the components, that's a software lifecycle problem. When I wait for three hours for what was supposed to be a one-hour brake pad replacement, that's a software life cycle failure."
Speaking of definitions, he continually talks about "transparency" and "governance" without ever clearly defining those terms.
In summary, while the author may have been CEO of Lotus Development Corp, it sounds like he was never actually a developer or even a tester, and hence appears to be a PHB (pointy haired boss) right out of Dilbert, spouting off dictates with no understanding of the real problems, much less solutions. What a shame.
Glitch: The Hidden Impact of Faulty Software OverviewDon't Let Software Failures Destroy Your BusinessThe growing impact of software failures on brands, customers, and business performance

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In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters Review

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In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters ReviewIn 1982, Tom Peters told the world about how excellent companies were turning around the US economy. What Peters failed to recognize was that many of the companies that he was looking at weren't actually "excellent" but were in fact huge clunking dinosaurs that were producing buggy whips in the age of the automobile. New, smaller companies came around and ate the lunch of the big "excellent" guys and then proceeded to make either the exact same stupid mistakes as the big guys or new and more innovative stupid mistakes.
This book basically deals with the stupidity found in high tech companies of the 1980's and 1990's. Why is Microsoft such a huge company today? It isn't because their products were better or because they cheated other companies out of their rightful place in the market. It's because they weren't as stupid as their competition. Merrill Chapman takes us through the comedy of errors that companies like Digital Research, WordStar, Lotus, and Ashton-Tate went through as they tossed their market leads aside in fits of stupidity. You can't help but laugh (or cry) at the amazing levels of stupidity that these companies exhibited. Examples: WordStar was once one of the finest word processing programs in the world. But somehow the company ended up owning two competing mediocre products. Lotus was the leader in spreadsheets but ignored the rise of Windows and allowed themselves to be knocked out of first place by Excel. These and many more examples are well documented in this book.
The book is not an in-depth study of the business world. You won't find very much analysis of why a particular company made such obviously fatal errors. Why did Borland pay an outrageous sum to buy Ashton-Tate at a time when Ashton-Tate had virtually nothing that Borland needed? You won't find the answer here. What you will find is an amusing, well-written (without being vicious) examination of the collapse of perfectly good companies under the weight of their own serious errors of judgment.
There is a moral to be learned from this book. It isn't necessary to be excellent. In fact, excellence can be expensive and drive up your costs so much that they make your products uncompetitive. The secret is not to be excellent, in fact you don't even have to be very smart. All you need to be is less stupid that your competitors. Just ask Microsoft.In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters OverviewIn Search of Stupidity is National Lampoon meets Peter Drucker. In Search of Stupidity is a funny and well written business book that takes a look at some of the most influential marketing and business philosophies of the last twenty years and, through the dark glass of hindsight, provides a educational and vastly entertaining examination of why they didn't work. And make no mistake, most of them did not work. Richly illustrated with cartoons and reproductions of many of the actual campaigns used at the time marketing wizard Richard Chapman takes readers on a hilarious ride through the last twenty years. Filled with personal anecdotes spanning Chapman's remarkable career (he was present at many now famous meetings and events) In Search of Stupidity takes a no holds barred look at the uncreative and hopeless marketing ideas surrounding the technology industry. It offers clear, detailed analysis of what happened, why, and what you can do to avoid acting stupidly in the future. This book offers unique insights into the avoidable mistakes made by some of the country's largest and best known high tech companies as well as succinct, to-the-point advice on how companies can avoid acting stupidly. It is aimed at people in the high tech industries, both software and hardware sides of the business. The software side is more heavily represented since software is more glamorous and highly covered than the hardware. Because it is a business book, I believe it also has appeal to the general business book market and the title should attract anyone interested in the various marketing disciplines.

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Graphics Gems V (IBM Version) (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics) (No. 5) Review

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Graphics Gems V (IBM Version) (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics) (No. 5) ReviewI'm the archivist for the free Graphics Gems code base on the web. I do it for free, because this code is so valuable. Others think so, too: there is an average of 100 hits a day on the site. Go look at the online list of what's in this volume to see if it's for you.
Highlights (for me) include polygon/cube intersection testing, a good polygon triangulator, and an entire z-buffering library.Graphics Gems V (IBM Version) (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics) (No. 5) OverviewGraphics Gems V is the newest volume in The Graphics Gems Series.It is intended to provide the graphics community with a set of practical tools for implementing new ideas and techniques, and to offer working solutions to real programming problems.These tools are written by a wide variety of graphics programmers from industry, academia, and research.The books in the series have become essential, time-saving tools for many programmers.Key Features* Latest collection of graphics tips in The Graphics Gems Series written by the leading programmers in the field* Contains over 50 new gems displaying some of the most recent and innovative techniques in graphics programming* Includes gems covering ellipses, splines, Bezier curves, and ray tracing* Disk included containing source code from the gems available in both IBM and Macintosh versions

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Ontological Engineering: with examples from the areas of Knowledge Management, e-Commerce and the Semantic Web. First Edition (Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing) Review

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Ontological Engineering: with examples from the areas of Knowledge Management, e-Commerce and the Semantic Web. First Edition (Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing) ReviewThe word `ontology' is usually associated with philosophical speculation on the reality of things, and if one checks the literature on philosophy one will find a diverse number of opinions on this reality. Engineers and scientists typically view philosophical musings on any topic as being impractical, and indulging oneself in these musings will cause one to lose sight of the topic or problem at hand. Rather than simplify the problem and make it understandable, philosophy tends in most cases to complicate it by endless debate on definitions and the use of sophisticated rhetoric that seems to have no bearing on the problem at hand. The conceptual spaces generated by these debates can become gigantic and therefore unwieldy, thus making the problem appear more complex than it actually is.
In the information age however, ontology has become a word that has taken on enormous practical significance. Business and scientific research are both areas that have increasingly relied on information technology not only to organize information but also to analyze data and make accurate predictions. In addition, financial constraints have forced many businesses to automate most of their internal processes, and this automation has brought about its own unique challenges. This push to automation usually involves being able to differentiate one thing from another, or one collection of data from another, or one concept from another. Thus one needs to think about questions of ontology, and this (very practical) need has brought about the rise of the field of `ontological engineering', which is the topic of this book.
The authors have given a good general overview of the different approaches to the creation of ontologies. There are many of them, some of which seem "natural", while others seem more esoteric. The reader though will obtain an objective discussion of the ontologies that the authors chose to include in the book. Discussions of the ones that are not included can readily be found on the Internet.
Given the plethora of ontologies that have been invented, it would be of interest to the ontological engineer to find common ground between them. The re-use of a particular ontology may be stymied by the different ontological commitments it is adhering to or it's actual content. In order to use it, it must therefore be "re-engineered". The authors discuss this prospect in the book, and define `ontological re-engineering' as the process where a conceptual model of an implemented ontology is transformed into one that is more suitable. The code in which the ontology is written is first reverse engineered, and then the conceptual model is reorganized into the new one. The new conceptual model is then implemented.
Also discussed in the book, and of enormous practical interest, is the automation of the ontology building process. Called `ontology learning' by the authors, they discuss a few of the ways in which this could take place. One of these methods concerns ontology learning using a `corpus of texts', and involves being able to distinguish between the `linguistic' and `conceptual' levels. Knowledge at the linguistic level is described in linguistic terms, while at the conceptual level in terms of concepts and the relations between them. Ontology learning is thus dependent on how the linguistic structures are exemplified in the conceptual level. Relations at the conceptual level for example could be extracted from sequences of words in the text that conform to a certain pattern. Another method comes from data mining and involves the use of association rules to find relations between concepts. The authors discuss two well-known methods for ontology learning from texts. Both of these methods are interesting in that they can apparently learn in contexts or environments that are not domain-specific. Being able to learn over different domains is very important from the standpoint of the artificial intelligence community and these methods are a step in that direction. The processes of `alignment', `merging', and `cooperative construction' of ontologies that are discussed in the book are also of great interest in artificial intelligence, since they too will be of assistance in the attempt to design a machine that can reason over multiple domains.
The ontologies that are actually built are of course not unique. This results in a kind of semantic or cognitive relativism between the environments that might be built on different ontologies, even in the same domain. Merging and alignment both address this relativism, along with other techniques that are discussed in the book. The selection of the actual language that is used to create an ontology is also somewhat arbitrary. The authors devote a fair amount of space in the book to the different languages that have been used to build ontologies. Through an elementary example, they discuss eleven different languages, namely KIF, Ontolingua, LOOM, OCML, Flogic, SHOE, XOL, RDF(S), OIL, DAML+OIL, and OWL. The choice of a language is dictated by what one is seeking in terms of `expressiveness' and what kind of reasoning patterns are to be deployed when using the ontology. The authors point to a tradeoff between the expressive power of the language and the reasoning patterns that are attached to the language. The expressiveness of a language is directly proportional to the complexity of the reasoning patterns that are used.
Ontological engineering as it presently exists is still carried out by a human engineer. To create an ontology every time from scratch would be tedious, and so it is no surprise that tools were invented to make ontology creation more straightforward. Some of these tools are discussed in the book, such as KAON, OilEd, Ontolingua, OntoSaurus, Protege-2000, WebODE, and WebOnto, along with assessments as to their utility. The discussion is helpful for newcomers to ontological engineering who need guidance as to what direction to take. The automation of ontology building would of course be a major advance. To accomplish this however would require that the machine be able to simultaneously and recursively construct the knowledge base and reason over it effectively. This is a formidable challenge indeed.Ontological Engineering: with examples from the areas of Knowledge Management, e-Commerce and the Semantic Web. First Edition (Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing) OverviewOntologies provide a common vocabulary of an area and define, with different levels of formality, the meaning of the terms and the relationships between them. Ontological engineering refers to the set of activities concerning the ontology development process, the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them. During the last decade, increasing attention has been focused on ontologies. Ontologies are now widely used in knowledge engineering, artificial intelligence and computer science; in applications related to areas such as knowledge management, natural language processing, e-commerce, intelligent information integration, bio-informatics, education; and in new emerging fields like the semantic web. The book presents the major issues of ontological engineering and describes the most outstanding ontologies currently available. It covers the practical aspects of selecting and applying methodologies, languages, and tools for building ontologies. "Ontological Engineering" will be of great value to students and researchers, and to developers who want to integrate ontologies in their information systems.

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Patterns-Based Engineering: Successfully Delivering Solutions via Patterns Review

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Patterns-Based Engineering: Successfully Delivering Solutions via Patterns Review"Patterns-Based Engineering is a big thick hardcover book with three parts. The audience is mainly architects/designers with OO, UML and patterns experience. The reader should also be comfortable dealing with abstract thought.
I had different reactions to each part so reviewing separately:
Part 1
The parts on how to generalize and look for patterns in what we do was interesting. It was approachable and I found myself scribbling in the margins.
Part 1a
There was a case study to walk you through how patterns based engineering works in practice. This was the least abstract part of the book, but it had one major problem - too much exposition on the dev team along with their names. Two pages later I was already backflipping to recall who these people are and by the next day/chapter I had no idea. Felt like I was missing something important.
Part 2
The patterns themselves are very reference like and dry. Nothing wrong with it, but didn't hold my attention. Maybe they aren't meant to be read straight through.
Part 3
I was back to being engaged and writing in the margins for the costs and benefits chapters. I think the misconceptions chapter could have been fleshed out more. Parts of it read like "X is a myth because X is not true" and could have used more examples.
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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.Patterns-Based Engineering: Successfully Delivering Solutions via Patterns OverviewSuccessfully delivering Solutions via Patterns In Patterns-Based Engineering, two leading experts bring together true best practices for developing and deploying successful software-intensive systems. Drawing on their extensive enterprise development experience, the authors clearly show how to deliver on the promise of a patterns-based approach—and consistently create higher-quality solutions faster, with fewer resources.Lee Ackerman and Celso Gonzalez demonstrate how Patterns-Based Engineering (PBE) can help you systematically overcome common obstacles to success with patterns. By bringing discipline and clarity to patterns usage, their techniques enable you to replicate your success broadly and scale patterns to even the largest projects.The authors introduce powerful ways to discover, design, create, package, and consume patterns based on your organization's experience and best practices. They also present extensive coverage of the nontechnical aspects of making patterns work, including a full chapter of guidance on clearing up misconceptions that stand in your way. Coverage includesUsing patterns to optimize the entire development lifecycle, including design, coding, testing, and deployment Systematically managing the risks and economic returns associated with patterns Effectively implementing PBE roles, tasks, work products, and tools Integrating PBE with existing development processes, including eXtreme Programming, Scrum, and OpenUP Using Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) with patternsWhether you're an architect, designer, developer, analyst, project manager, or process engineer, Patterns-Based Engineering will help you to consistently derive greater business value and agility from patterns.

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Fuzzing for Software Security Testing and Quality Assurance (Artech House Information Security and Privacy) Review

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Fuzzing for Software Security Testing and Quality Assurance (Artech House Information Security and Privacy) ReviewThe introduction to this book mentions its broken up history, being picked up and abandoned a couple times. It definitely shows in the writing, which is unfocused, choppy, and repetitive. Most of the first half is taken up with repetitive descriptions of the general software testing process. The second half contains a summary of one author's thesis on using evolutionary algorithms for fuzzing and the final author's use of various fuzzing tools to try to find hand-inserted vulnerabilities. While the latter half is better than the first, each topic is worthy of a single blog post. Given this book's price and the authors' reputations, I expected more.
At the same time, I read "Gray Hat Python" and it was enjoyable. Even though it had a much broader focus on other topics, it contained more hands-on info on fuzzing tools. I'm also interested in "Fuzzing: Brute Force Vulnerability Discovery", although I have not read it yet.
Don't waste your time on this book. Download the Sulley manual, read the slides from a few Blackhat talks, and you'll be at the state of the art for current fuzzing knowledge.Fuzzing for Software Security Testing and Quality Assurance (Artech House Information Security and Privacy) Overview"Fuzzing for Software Security Testing and Quality Assurance" gives software developers a powerful new tool to build secure, high-quality software, and takes a weapon from the malicious hackers' arsenal. This practical resource helps developers think like a software cracker, so they can find and patch flaws in software before harmful viruses, worms, and Trojans can use these vulnerabilities to rampage systems. Traditional software programmers and testers learn how to make fuzzing a standard practice that integrates seamlessly with all development activities. The book progresses through each phase of software development and points out where testing and auditing can tighten security. It surveys all popular commercial fuzzing tools and explains how to select the right one for a software development project. The book also covers those cases where commercial tools fall short and developers need to build their own custom fuzzing tools.

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.NET Test Automation Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Expert's Voice in .NET) Review

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.NET Test Automation Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Expert's Voice in .NET) ReviewMy roommate loaned me this book because I was trying do do some UI automation where I work. This book had just what I needed and I had my automation running in 1 day when I was trying to get it to work for nearly a month before the book. If you want to know how to write reflection UI automation this book will help you a lot..NET Test Automation Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Expert's Voice in .NET) OverviewThis book presents practical techniques for writing lightweight software test automation in a .NET environment. If you develop, test, or manage .NET software, you should find this book very useful. Before .NET, writing test automation was often as difficult as writing the code for the application under test itself. With .NET, it is possible to write lightweight, custom test automation (small, dedicated test harness programs which are two pages of source code or less in length and take less than two hours to write) in a tiny fraction of the time it used to take. The emphasis of this book is on practical techniques that you can use immediately.This book is intended for software developers, testers, and managers who work with .NET technology who have a basic familiarity with .NET programming but does not make any particular assumptions about your skill level. The examples in this book have been successfully used in seminars and teaching environments where it has proven highly effective as a platform for students who are learning intermediate level .NET programming.

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A Developer's Guide to the Semantic Web Review

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A Developer's Guide to the Semantic Web ReviewNot only does A Developer's Guide to Semantic Web offer an excellent introduction to "what is" Semantic Web, but it also guides the readers onto the "how to" stage with assiduously, almost mind-numbingly easy to understand, step by step coding examples. Needless to say, the author has an amazing grasp of the Semantic web technology himself. Unlike some quite complicated and mind-boggling books on Semantic Web, A Developer's Guide to Semantic Web is easy to comprehend, therefore an outstanding tool. Concepts such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and well-known applications such as FOAF, Wiki, DBpedi and LOD are brilliantly illustrated with ample coding examples. The last section of the book weaves all of them together with raw examples of running applications, which are readily available for use. This is a must-read for students, researchers, software engineers and developers who are interested in the Semantic Web technology. Highly recommended.A Developer's Guide to the Semantic Web OverviewCovering the theory, technical components and applications of the Semantic Web, this book's unrivalled coverage includes the latest on W3C standards such as OWL 2, and discusses new projects such as DBpedia. It also shows how to put theory into practice.

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Practical Risk Assessment for Project Management Review

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Practical Risk Assessment for Project Management ReviewThe ideal audience for this book is relatively narrow, consisting of readers who meet the following two criteria: (1) new to risk management techniques, and (2) using Palisade @Risk. In fact, this book comes close to being a tutorial on using @Risk, which is a popular commercial product that works within Microsoft Excel and project management programs.
If you are new to advanced techniques in project risk management you'll like the way the author succinctly covers all of the key elements of project risk assessment, project finance forecasting, and simulation and modeling. Considering the complexity of the subject area, and the fact that both probability and simulation techniques are covered, the author does a remarkable job of conveying the wide range of topics in a scant 134 pages. I especially liked the generous use of graphs and examples, and the way each topic was broken down into easy-to-grasp facts and steps.
However, even without @Risk you can learn much about risk assessment from this book, including a refresher on probability distributions, how to perform an assessment using manual techniques, and modeling and simulation with an emphasis on Monte Carlo simulation.
The only problem I have with this book is that it's out of date with respect to @Risk, which has evolved into a much more capable tool since this book was first published 7 years ago. Since one of the this book's strengths is the way it teaches how to apply @Risk to real world project risk assessment, the fact that it's out of date with respect to the software version diminishes its value.Practical Risk Assessment for Project Management OverviewIn the estimating, planning and management of any project, large or small, an understanding of the impact of risk is critical. This book explains how the growing number of people choosing to or forced to organise their work as projects can make realistic assessments of the uncertainty affecting costs, timescale and revenue, before commitments are made. A clear analysis of the role of uncertainty is combined in this concise and practical handbook with simple, cost-effective techniques for measuring and modelling the overall risk to a project's budget and schedule. There is advice and help here for the whole project team, including project managers; bid managers; project sales professionals; planners; estimators; managers running a project-based business; and consultants and auditors advising a projects business. Drawn from the author's extensive experience on projects ranging in scale from a few man-months to hundreds of man-years, the book will beelevant to anyone involved in a project-based business. Examples are presented as simple models, built in spreadsheets using the @Risk software package. No more than basic knowledge of Lotus 1-2-3?? or Excel?? will be required by the reader.

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Software without Borders: A Step-By-Step Guide to Outsourcing Your Software Development Review

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Software without Borders: A Step-By-Step Guide to Outsourcing Your Software Development ReviewAs someone who has managed hundreds of technology projects, I can say that I wish I had this resource years ago. This book clearly spells out everything you need to know about successfully outsourcing software development. This is a step-by-step guide that helps you navigate though the complexities of choosing the right vendor, staying on schedule and within budget, as well as protecting your intellectual property rights. This is a must read for CIOs, IT Managers, Product Development Professionals and Outsourcing Executives.Software without Borders: A Step-By-Step Guide to Outsourcing Your Software Development OverviewWhen everything goes right, you end up with high-quality software in half the time for a fraction of the cost. But over 50% of offshore outsourcing projects do not achieve their cost-saving goals or timelines . . . or just fail completely. The mistakes and missteps are costly and painful, but NOW you don't have to go there. This book shows you step-by-step how to make software development outsourcing work, from concept to completion.
You'll discover how to: * Choose the right vendor quickly and confidently * Stay in control of your outsourced software development projects * Achieve on-time, on-scope, and on-budget results * Fiercely protect your intellectual property * Decide when to create a subsidiary for even greater savings
SPECIAL BONUS: Take the FREE online Outsourcing Readiness Test (Plus many other free goodies, tools, and downloads on the book's website)
Join the thousands already outsourcing offshore. This book will help you every step of the way.
Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1 : Deciding to Outsource Chapter 2 : Where to Outsource Chapter 3 : How to Select your Outsourcing Vendor Chapter 4 : Offshoring, or Creating your Own Offshore Subsidiary Chapter 5 : Describing your Software for Outsourcing Chapter 6 : Controlling your Outsourced Software Development Chapter 7 : Software Outsourcing Metrics Chapter 8 : Protecting your Intellectual Property Chapter 9 : Outsourcing your Quality Assurance Chapter 10 : Five Situations Right for Outsourcing Chapter 11 : The Future of Global Software Development Appendix A : The Outsourcing Strategy Decision Matrix Appendix B : The Outsourcing Readiness Test Appendix C : Avoiding the Seven Deadly Dangers of Outsourcing
Inside-flaps: Ready to Do It Right? Whether the drive to outsource comes from the top-down or bottom-up, it s up to you to make it work. So if it s your first time, or you just want to get it right this time, look no further. This book is packed with a fantastic wealth of insight, resources, and actionable know-how waiting to help you succeed, starting now. Ask yourself: Have I done what it takes to prepare for offshoring? If you re not sure, see Chapter 1. Am I ready to select a vendor? Before you do, check out Chapters 2 and 3, and then review 3 Steps to Selecting a Vendor. Is my software design ready for outsourcing? What, precisely, will your software do? Have you done the architecting required? What about schedules and a reliable roadmap for releases? Get it all together in Chapter 5. Am I in control of this process? Is the development process you re using capable and mature? Got tabs on your team and vendors? Is your code secure? See Chapter 6. Can I measure my results? Check out the metrics used by experts in Chapter 7. And the answers keep coming. Whether you re looking for technical guidelines, financial justification, or a development process that will stand up under pressure, Software without Borders will save you valuable time.

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Software Fault Injection with CDROM Review

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Software Fault Injection with CDROM ReviewVoas and McGraw make the case that, to produce reliable software, validation (usually applied as dynamic - or run-time -- testing), is more effective than process. That alone is nothing new -- many software development organizations invest much more in testing than in process improvement. But Software Fault Injection goes further: instead of more and more testing which always seems to miss the failures that the end user seems to find so easily, create those failures. Even (temporarily) create the defects that will cause those failures to happen. Sound strange? It is, but no stranger than what this book explains how to do -- as in the subtitle -- Inoculating Programs Against Errors. The idea is to produce modified, selectively defective copies of the software under test and see how the rest of the system handles the failures that now happen "in the lab" rather than in the field. It works with medical research and produces vaccines. If you're tired of the cycle of code, test, launch, surprise crash in the field, consider whether software failure injection might help.
--
Full disclosure: I only had time to read the first 10% of the book before I had to move on to other topics. But if and when I come back to software reliability improvement, this is a book I'll pick up again.Software Fault Injection with CDROM OverviewThe benefits and challenges associated with fault injection methods are described in this book. The authors seek to explain injection methodology by extensive use of applications data and real-world case studies. The book covers: how to predict where faults are most likely to hide; how failures in the software environment should impact software performance; how to use normal beta testing to uncover potential security problems; what fault injection reveals about maintenance and reuse; and how to introduce fault injection methods into your organization.

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MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework Application Development Foundation, Second edition Review

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MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework Application Development Foundation, Second edition ReviewOverall, if you're considering taking the 70-536 exam, I recommend getting this book (not that there are a lot of alternatives). It may contain a few errors (honestly, I don't recall anything significant, right off hand), but the 2nd edition definitely alleviates at least most of the scores of pages of errors found in the first edition. Don't get the cheaper old edition: it's worth it to pay for the updated version, if only to avoid having to go through the 50+ pages of errata with the first edition.
This book does not cover everything in the same depth as the test, so if this is your only study tool, don't expect to feel completely comfortable when taking the exam or expect to "ace" it. As other posters have stated, you will need to do some of your own research if getting every question right is your goal. However, using ONLY this book as a study tool you CAN pass. Passing was my goal, and to that effect, this book accomplished its purpose effectively.
The tests provided on the CD did not seem much easier than the questions on the exam. Others may have had a different experience, but that was mine. I did notice that I "memorized" the answers rather quickly, and am glad I saved the tests on the CD until after I had already worked through the book, and could still use them to help polish my knowledge.
MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework Application Development Foundation, Second edition Overview
Your 2-in-1 Self-Paced Training Kit. Fully updated and revised! Ace your preparation for the skills measured by MCTS Exam 70-536—and on the job. With this official Microsoft study guide, you'll work at your own pace through a series of lessons and reviews that fully cover each exam objective. Then reinforce and apply what you've learned through real-world case scenarios and practice exercises.

Maximize your performance on the exam by learning to:

Develop applications that use system types and collections
Validate input, reformat text, and extract data with regular expressions
Create services and multi-threaded applications
Implement code-access security and role-based security
Implement serialization to read and write complex objects
Leverage legacy code using interoperability
Monitor and troubleshoot applications
Create applications for a global audience

Practice Tests assess your skills with practice tests on CD. You can work through hundreds of questions using multiple testing modes to meet your specific learning needs. You get detailed explanations for right and wrong answers?including a customized learning path that describes how and where to focus your studies.

Your kit includes:

15% exam discount from Microsoft. Offer expires 12/31/13.
Official self-paced study guide.
Practice tests with multiple, customizable testing options and a learning plan based on your results.
300+ practice and review questions.
Code samples in Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C# on CD.
Case scenarios, exercises, and best practices.
90-day evaluation of Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2008.
Fully searchable eBook of this guide.

A Note Regarding the CD or DVD:

The print version of this book ships with a CD or DVD. For those customers purchasing one of the digital formats in which this book is available, we are pleased to offer the CD/DVD content as a free download via O'Reilly Media's Digital Distribution services. To download this content, please visit O'Reilly's web site, search for the title of this book to find its catalog page, and click on the link below the cover image (Examples, Companion Content, or Practice Files). Note that while we provide as much of the media content as we are able via free download, we are sometimes limited by licensing restrictions. Please direct any questions or concerns to booktech@oreilly.com.


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Manage Software Testing Review

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Manage Software Testing ReviewI have read many testing books and this book surely has lots of material which is not covered elsewhere. However, the book frustrates you when you try out the examples or try to figure out what to do and what to leave out (theoretical). Those trying to learn things not offered in regular books can find this insightful.
Be warned that many ideas are not practically implementable - for example 18.10.6 - Bug seeding model where we deliberately insert bugs in code to estimate the # of defects. This is NEVER done in real life (my experience) since we have difficult time doing the actual project and eliminating the real bugs. The author does not warn you of this. There are many other cases where the author should warn you if its theoretical or practical some examples -
(1) Section 18.2.1 (Revised) Propagation Analysis Algorithm - Not possible in real software development with deadlines.
(2) 18.2.5 Revised Execution Analysis Algorithm
The author should have given the data and XLS in his blog (very difficult to locate) so that the readers can use the information. I vainly tried the example in 18.3.1 How to Calculate Influences on Performance and was so frustrated thathe changed the columns between figure 18.2 and 18.3 and gives so much data in 6th decimal (making it useless for the readers when we are not able to follow).
On the positive side - there are a lot of insight in terms of reliability covered here. The references are very good and useful. It should have more stars if the XLS were provided or examples made more understandable.Manage Software Testing OverviewWhether you are inheriting a test team or starting one up, Manage Software Testing is a must-have resource that covers all aspects of test management. It guides you through the business and organizational issues that you are confronted with on a daily basis, explaining what you need to focus on strategically, tactically, and operationally. Using a risk-based approach, the author addresses a range of questions about software product development. The book covers unit, system, and non-functional tests and includes examples on how to estimate the number of bugs expected to be found, the time required for testing, and the date when a release is ready. It weighs the cost of finding bugs against the risks of missing release dates or letting bugs appear in the final released product. It is imperative to determine if bugs do exist and then be able to metric how quickly they can be identified, the cost they incur, and how many remain in the product when it is released. With this book, test managers can effectively and accurately establish these parameters.

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CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET Review

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CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET ReviewHas this ever happened to you... There's this new technology or programming language that you're dying to learn, but there are no books. Finally, someone writes a book, you get the book from the bookseller (Amazon), you open the book, and you thumb through the pages. Well, that's the way I felt about learning Microsoft IL for .NET. I really was keen about learning .NET's "assembly language" because throughout my career I found that having low level knowledge about how a system is put together is very, very useful. Now, I'm not suggesting that you stop everything you're doing and run out to learn CIL programming. However, I believe that if you want to be a serious .NET professional, learning CIL should definitely be on your To-Do list.
So what about Bock's Book: "CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET"? In a word - disappointing. Bock spends most of the book's first chapter entitled "Language Interoperability" on detailed discussion of programs written in a variety of languages. He's trying to make the point that the CLR allows programs written in different languages to freely interoperate. Duh? Why spend the better part of the book's opening talking about everything but CIL. There's even an Oberon (?) programming sample here.
The second and third chapters on ILASM Directives, and, CIL Opcodes, respectively, read like my weekend shopping lists. While it is true that programming books have to regurgitate all the nasty details of the programming language, the good books tell its readers how to internalize the information and describe useful ways of summarizing the information in one's mind. That is, the authors of the better books have figured out some rhyme and reason to the language and they share these insights with their readers. On the other hand, this is what I found in these two most important chapters of Bock's book: the more I read, the more questions I had. I wound up spending significant time on the NET trying to resolve questions that were raised in the material in these two chapters. Clearly, the author did not anticipate these questions.
The fourth chapter, "ILASM and CIL in Practice" is a decent discussion of a typical sample program in IL. It demonstrates some of the IL constructs and programming concerns discussed in the previous chapters.
Chapter 6 is interesting. Here the author talks about and contrasts the IL generated by various programming languages. Some of the VB.NET and C# exposés were eye-opening, but then Bock goes back to Oberon again.
The author ends off the book in chapters 7 and 8 with some very long and tedious samples. I got nothing from this. Chapter 9, the last in the book, is a two-pager on "CIL Tips".
So why do I give this book 3 stars?
1) The book includes Chapter 5, a well-written and interesting discussion about CIL Debugging.
2) Right now, Bock's book is one of three books that talk about CIL. It is the only book that is targeted directly at programming. Although John Gough's "Compiling for the .NET Common Language Runtime" is an excellent book, it is very specialized and targets would-be compiler authors. I didn't read the third book in the IL arena, Serge Lidin's "Inside Microsoft .NET IL Assembler", but I did thumb through it several times (you know what little that is worth): this book strikes me as being very difficult.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
If you need to learn IL Programming right now, buy Bock's book - read the second half of chapter 1, and read Chapters 2-5, maybe Chapter 6. If you have the time, money, and inclination, then buy and read Gough's book. You'll need a lot of time for Gough, but you will definitely learn.
If learning IL is not that pressing right now, I would wait to see if someone else releases a better book.CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET OverviewFor the most part, .NET developers use a high-level language, such as C# or VB .NET, to develop their systems. However, the core language of .NET is the Common Intermediate Language, or CIL. This language is the language of .NETdevelopers can use CIL to do whatever is allowed by the .NET specifications, which is not the case for C# and VB .NET. Although it is unlikely that the majority of .NET developers will create their assemblies in CIL, understanding how CIL works will give them a deep, language-independent insight into the core parts of .NET. Furthermore, such knowledge is essential for creating dynamic types, a powerful part of the .NET Framework.In CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET, Jason Bock covers the essentials of programming the CIL. First, Bock discusses the basics of what .NET assemblies are and how manifests fit into the picture. He then shows how to create assemblies in .NETincluding the ilasm directives and CIL opcodes, and how these are used to define assemblies, classes, field, methods, and method definitions. Bock also covers how C# and VB .NET and other non-MS languages emit CIL and how they differ. Finally, he reveals how developers can create dynamic assemblies at runtime via the Emitter classes.After reading CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET, developers will have a better understanding of the CIL and how to program directly into it. A must-have on every .NET developers desk!Jason Bock is consultant and instructor for Intertech-Inc. (a company devoted to delivering hands-on workshops for enterprise web developers and whose focus is the professional Java, XML, and .NET enterprise developer).He has worked on a number of business applications using a diverse set of substrates and languages such as C#, .NET, and Java. He is the author of ".NET Security" by Apress, and "Visual Basic 6 Win32 API Tutorial, and has written numerous articles on technical development issues associated with both VB and Java.Jason holds a B.A. and a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University.You can find out more about him at http://www.jasonbock.net

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Testing and Quality Assurance for Component-Based Software (Artech House Computing Library) Review

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Testing and Quality Assurance for Component-Based Software (Artech House Computing Library) ReviewThis book provides a thorough and detailed discussion of the key differences between testing and QA for 'monolithic' or integrated software, and component-based software engineering.
The distinction is important because while the reason to go with a component-based approach is reusability and leveraging developer efforts across a number of applications or products can also introduce widespread problems across a range of systems. This book shows how to approach testing and QA in a manner that eliminates this problem. The approach itself includes validation methods that need to be rigorously applied, and a detailed quality assurance approach that includes testing, certification and verification after the validation layer is completed.
In addition to a coherent approach, the authors discuss specific methods, automated testing tools, testing frameworks, and specifics about test cycles that apply to component-based software. Overall, this book provides a complete picture of the differences between conventional and component-based software, challenges and solutions to meet those challenges.
While the value of this book will be readily apparent to anyone who is working in a component-based software engineering environment, it is also invaluable to the growing number of project teams and shops developing and implementing web services. There is much commonality shared between component-based software and web services, and the principles and approach given in this book will apply equally to both.Testing and Quality Assurance for Component-Based Software (Artech House Computing Library) OverviewPresenting the state of the art in component-based software testing, this cutting-edge resource offers you an in-depth understanding of the current issues, challenges, needs and solutions in this critical area. The book discusses the very latest advances in component-based testing and quality assurance in an accessible tutorial format, making the material easy to comprehend and benefit from no matter what your professional level. The book clearly explains what component-based software testing is, why it is important, and how it differs from traditional software testing. From an introduction to software components, testing component-based software and validation methods for software components, to performance testing and measurement, standards and certification and verification of quality for component-based systems, you get a revealing snapshot of the key developments in this area, including important research findings. This volume also serves as a textbook for related courses at the advanced undergraduate or graduate level.

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Modeling Software with Finite State Machines: A Practical Approach Review

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Modeling Software with Finite State Machines: A Practical Approach ReviewThis book is excellent for making the reader understand how a complete software application can be easily controlled using state machines, simplifying the architecture. The writing can be hard to follow sometimes and the authors make claims about areas they are not expert in that are clearly false but when it comes to state machines and developing applications using them, they clearly know what they are talking about. Just skip the non-state machine parts of the book.Modeling Software with Finite State Machines: A Practical Approach OverviewModeling Software with Finite State Machines: A Practical Approach explains how to apply finite state machines to software development. It provides a critical analysis of using finite state machines as a foundation for executable specifications to reduce software development effort and improve quality. This book discusses the design of a state machine and of a system of state machines. It also presents a detailed analysis of development issues relating to behavior modeling with design examples and design rules for using finite state machines. This volume describes a coherent and well-tested framework for generating reliable software for even the most complex tasks. The authors demonstrate that the established practice of using a specification as a basis for coding is wrong. Divided into three parts, this book opens by delivering the authors' expert opinions on software, covering the evolution of development as well as costs, methods, programmers, and the development cycle. The remaining two parts encourage the use of state machines: promoting the virtual finite state machine (Vfsm) method and the StateWORKS development tools.

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