Summary:

BizTalk Server 2004 Unleashed is a deep exploration into Microsoft's flagship orchestration and integration product.

This book covers a lot of ground. In 680 pages it covers everything from the basics of building schemas and maps all the way up to Business Activity Services and Human Workflow Services. In between, it spends time on Pipelines, Orchestrations, Adapters, the Business Rule Engine, and even Single Sign-On. For the developer, it goes into detail on debugging as well as the creation of all BizTalk elements. For the Architect, it outlines the various messaging and orchestration patterns, and how they are normally handled in a BizTalk implementation. For the Administrator, it explains deployment as well as ongoing monitoring, instrumentation and management. It takes an especially deep look at scaling up/out of BizTalk deployments at all four tiers of the product's architecture.

In all, this book does a good job of dealing with the details of BizTalk development and administration. It caters to those who already have a grasp of the product, definately not a beginner's book. In fact, even for those familiar with BizTalk, the chapters on HWS, BAS, and BAM might be a little too difficult. One thing the book does an outstanding job of is describing the scale-out strategies available in large deployment situations.

This book is most useful to:

• Messaging Architects
• Messaging Developers
• Messaging Administrators

Recommendation:

4 out of 5 stars

I am holding back on a 5-star rating on this one. While it does a great job at handling the details, and leaves no stone unturned in many areas, the treatment of the advanced services such as BAS, BAM, HWS, and HAT is a bit too dry - even for a reader like myself who normally can make it through such material. Unless you are actually using these features in your day-to-day work, these chapters will likely not make much sense. They come off more as a "user manual" than as a reference-class book. In other words, lots of "how" and "when", but rarely does it answer the more important question of "why".

The remainder (and bulk) of the book however is top-notch. And since it is effectively the only book available today for BizTalk 2004, it would not be right to give this one any less than a 4 out of 5.

Summary:

Speed Reading is a no-nonsense educational trip that sets out to teach the reader how to vastly improve their reading speed and comprehension.

I normally would not pick up a book of this nature. I always thought my reading speed was adequate, and the claims made by the author seemed pretty far-fetched. However, I have been having trouble keeping up with the level of reading I feel is necessary to keep ahead in my industry (about 2 major IT books a month seems about what is needed). I figured it couldn't hurt, so I gave this one a shot.

While I was extremely skeptical of the author's claims, I must say that I am now a true believer. In the second chapter, you go through a "baseline" test to establish your starting speed. I came in right at 300 words per minute, which is actually slightly above the average person's speed of 250 WPM. The author's first claim was that your speed will increase by 50% by simply incorporating the first set of reading techniques that he presents. This first set of techniques is referred to as "linear subvocal", a method of reading that overall tops out at 900 WPM or so. After being introduced to these first techniques, my speed jumped instantly to 550 WPM!! That was with absolutely NO practice... a dead-on 50% improvement.... amazing.

But it gets even better. After introducing the linear subvocal techniques, the author then moves on to explain the more advanced "layering" methods. These are essentially a way to better organize your reading time, and then apply a turbocharged reading pattern where your mind is actually able to comprehend groups of words at once - instead of relying on the steady verbalized stream that most of us are used to.

After learning the faster layering techniques, and then applying them to the remainder of the book (which covers note-taking, test-taking, and essay-writing skills), I went back and revisited the original test where I scored 300 WPM. I was quite amazed to find that this time my reading speed was right at 1400 WPM. Wow.

The remainder of the book is focused on the high school or college student, so it was not of much use to me, except as practicing fodder for my newfound skills. The note-taking techniques could come in handy though during heavy instructor-led training, or while pulling together research for presentations.

This book is most useful to:

• Anyone who is having a tough time keeping up with the reading they would like to be doing
• Students
• Educators

Recommendation:

5 out of 5 stars

This book delivers on it's promises of a minimal 50% improvement in reading speed along with greater comprehension through increased mental focus. The book is also very short - only 200 pages in total. But don't be fooled, those 200 pages are packed solid with incredibly useful techniques and tips.

Another huge plus - this book is phenomenally cheap. I paid only $3.00 from the "used and new" alternate sellers on BN.Com. The shipping costed more than the book.

The only downside to these methods is that they do not translate all too well to online reading. Well - I suppose it could be done - but there will be an awful lot of finger smudges on the screen afterwards!

Summary:

Cascading Style Sheets is targetted at the web designer / developer who is looking to break the chains that bind them to old "browser hacks" and to the experienced designers who want to simply take their web presentation designs up to the next level.

The book is very down-to-earth and begins by discussing the history of web browsers, and explains why we have the wide range of presentation behaviors (aka, quirks) that we see today across the various platforms. It discusses important concepts such as document semantics, typography, layout, and application of visual styling. These concepts will seem elementary to anyone who has had a formal education in Art Design or Publishing, but the vast majority of web designers and developers are lacking in such a background - and should derive great value from the material.

After explaining CSS's role in the web, the book then dives in to cover the gritty details. A very good explanation of class selectors is followed by discussions on Typography Control, the Box Model, Relative Sizing, and Layouts. Attention is given to various flaws in the different browsers that must be considered in the CSS design, and in nearly all cases, workarounds are presented in order to deal with the flaws. Finally, the book covers a nice set of "example" sites, and how to go about designing the layout and CSS for them. Some of the example sites are fairly simple, but the last few are indeed quite complex visually. It is also worth noting that all example markup is presented as XHTML.

Some immediately useful information that this books covers clearly and concisely:

1. How to center using CSS.
2. How to plan and organize CSS styles into linked stylesheets to make maintenance easier.
3. What "float" and "clear" do, and how to use them.
4. The difference between "inline" and "block" elements.
5. How to use the Box Model effectively.
6. How to use relative sizing of text to make global changes much simpler.
7. How to effectively use CSS selectors.
8. How to structure content so that it will "degrade gracefully" on downlevel browsers.

This book is most useful to:

• Web Designers / Developers who still (mis)use the TABLE tag to control layout or the FONT tag to control typography.
• Web Designers that wish to make their layouts more accessible to readers.
• Web Designers that wish to make their layouts appear correctly in modern browsers as well as downlevel browsers.
• Anyone that simply wishes to learn more about CSS and how to properly implement it.

Recommendation:

5 out of 5 stars

If you are using TABLE tags for positioning/centering, transparent GIFS to occupy whitespace, or the FONT tag for typography, then you NEED this book - ESPECIALLY if you build web sites or applications in your day-to-day employment.

The concepts covered will do wonders for your website design skills - you will wonder how you ever managed to get a site layout done before!

I do a fair amount of reading these days... averaging about one to two books per month ("computer" books). Most of the time, I actually do read them... I don't just skim through. I have gotten through a number of books in the past two years, including but not limited to:

• Introducing ASP.NET 2.0
• Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET
• Advanced .NET Remoting
• Service-Oriented Architecture in C#
• Professional SQL Server Reporting Services
• The Rational Guide to SQL Server Reporting Services
• UML with Visual Studio .NET
• Expert C# Business Objects
• Inside C#
• Writing Secure Code 2nd Edition
• Pragmatic ADO.NET
• Design Patterns (GoF)
• + a half dozen MSPRESS books on ASP.NET, Windows Forms, etc while studying for MCSD tests

I also read through about a half dozen "liesure reading" books, mostly science fiction.

So I am going to start blogging a short review of books as I finish them. I will tag all of these entries with the RSS Category of "Book Review" to ease later searching (or ignoring, I suppose).