Best Windows Server Guides
Learn how to use PowerShell on Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 Tour PowerShell's core features, including the command model, object-based pipeline, and ubiquitous scripting Master fundamentals such as the interactive shell, pipeline, and object concepts Perform common tasks that involve working with files, Internet-connected scripts, user interaction, and more Solve tasks in systems and enterprise management, such as working with Active Directory and the filesystem. Q&A with Lee Holmes, author of "The Windows PowerShell Cookbook". With the release of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, Windows PowerShell has added many significant features to address the realities of modern, multi-machine environments. PowerShell has also made many changes to simplify and improve its fundamentals (scripting and built-in commands.). By breaking the "PowerShell Cookbook" into a series of simple, isolated recipes, I hope that they see evidence that you don't need to be an expert in PowerShell to start using it or improving your day-to-day tasks.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Has a decent set up to powershell at the beginning that explains some basics but then it jumps right into it."
"This book is probably not for a programming novice, but it makes an excellent reference book that's full of examples."
"Essentially there are many different problems and solutions given for those problems. It addresses many things that are better handled with a fully working example."
"Decent book, excellent reference when learning posh."
"Great!"
"Well written but I would not call it complete."
The definitive guide–fully updated for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. Delve inside Windows architecture and internals, and see how core components work behind the scenes. Pavel Yosifovich is a software developer and trainer, specializing in Microsoft technologies and tools.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"It is extremely well written and introduces a number of tools that allow you to experiment and actually follow along with the information presented. What I truly enjoyed about the kindle edition is that it comes with highlighted reference links that allow you to click to the reference and then click to go back to where you left off reading."
"A good book in a series of great books."
"I own past copies of this book."
"Really well written and updated."
"Wonderful book."
"Excellent edition of the Windows Internals series."
Summarize data with PivotTables and Descriptive Statistics Explore new trends in predictive and prescriptive analytics Use Excel Trend Curves, multiple regression, and exponential smoothing Master advanced Excel functions such as OFFSET and INDIRECT Delve into key financial, statistical, and time functions Make your charts more effective with the Power View tool Tame complex optimization problems with Excel Solver Run Monte Carlo simulations on stock prices and bidding models Apply important modeling tools such as the Inquire add-in. Wayne L. Winston is a professor of Decision Sciences at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business and has earned numerous MBA teaching awards.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Now that I am finishing up the MBA program (final semester), I have started a consulting company using the exact methods out of this book that I learned in Dr. Winston's class. In other words, if you wanted to build a model to help a company maximize profit by determining which limited resources to put into play (labor, materials, $$) based on the revenue of each product, this book teaches you. So you get to learn a ton of the really cool functions in excel, how they work together in nested formulas, and how they could directly benefit a company/organization (just from one chapter). UPDATE 8/1/2015: I have recently spoken with Dr. Winston and he mentioned that he was in the process of putting his courses up online. I'm jealous because I just paid a ton of money to take his classes when I could have just watched his videos.I am only posting this here because some of the reviews said that they would like to see the videos if possible."
"I've bought almost every book there is on powerpivot and this is the best."
"I have used excel for very long time but this book just takes your excel skills to whole another level. The best thing about the book are the exercises. TIME COMMITMENT REQUIRED : Since this is "exercise driven" book, expect to spend few hours to few days ( yes, in a real world, you will be pulled into other things) every chapter and move to the next.I will not strictly call this book as a "reference" book since you need to know which formula or tool to use at which time without looking at a book. SUMMARY: If you work in an office, you need to know Excel .. Period and this book takes you to next level that 95% of your colleagues would not know."
Best Business Software Guides
Design for minimum complexity and maximum creativity Reap the benefits of collaborative development Apply defensive programming techniques to reduce and flush out errors Exploit opportunities to refactor—or evolve—code, and do it safely Use construction practices that are right-weight for your project Debug problems quickly and effectively Resolve critical construction issues early and correctly Build quality into the beginning, middle, and end of your project. He is the author of several books, including Code Complete and Rapid Development, both honored with Software Development magazine's Jolt Award.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"readable encyclopedia of best practices on software quality, covering topics such as how to build classes, use data and control structures, debug, refactor, and code-tune. Yes, it would be nice if the book was updated to include substantive material on languages like Ruby or Python (cf. p. 65, Python "also contains some support for creating larger programs") but, in the words of Gertrude Stein, "Not everything can be about everything" -- though Code Complete does come pretty close. McConnell also sprinkles the text with classic words of wisdom, e.g. "The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull" (Edsger Dijkstra), "Never debug standing up" (Gerald Weinberg), "Copy and paste is a design error" (David Parnas), "Any fool can defend his or her mistakes -- and most fools do." It is important to point out that even though this volume is encyclopedia-like, it does have both a sense of humor (e.g. "the encryption algorithm is so convoluted that it seems like it's been used on itself") and a clear authorial voice (e.g. "Though sometimes tempting, that's dumb."). 33, after quoting Edward Yourdon at length, McConnell adds "This lusty tribute to programming machismo is pure B.S. I found this to be bizarre, given that in the 1995 edition of "The Mythical Man-Month" Brooks states in no uncertain terms that he has changed his mind on this: "This I now perceive to be wrong" (p. 265). On a different note, although some of the on-line accompanying material is fascinating (e.g. the links to the original Dijkstra and Lawrence articles in ch."
"Very readable, excellent real-world examples and case studies, and many valuable insights."
"I'm a self taught programmer going on 5 years now doing it full time, and I have learned a lot of techniques that have filled in some holes in my skills."
"The Microsoft code way."
"Bad humor, takes a long time to convey information, but is useful."
"I'd also recommend the more recent Clean Code, especially for Java programmers, as it goes into more depth, even providing actual case studies in which code is dramatically cleaned up."
"I make all of my new programmers at least read selections from it (in fact that is part of our training program.)."
"Great book on software development."
Best SharePoint Guides
Experience learning made easy—and quickly teach yourself how to boost team collaboration with SharePoint 2013. Olga M. Londer , MCSE, MCT, is a technology evangelist for Microsoft Corporation and has served as a technical lead on numerous projects for major clients.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Good step by step guide and easy to following."
"This book will take through the basics, from an end user/site owners perspective, and show you how to do most things that end users regularly do in SharePoint like create lists, export lists to a spreadsheet, adding webparts to a page or removing them etc. The book is split into 15 chapters with each chapter covering a different topic from the very basic navigating around SharePoint (how to get to site settings, view all site contents etc) through to a basic overview of content management (document sets, creating page layouts etc.)."
"Excellent book and very helpful when learning SharePoint 2013."
"Seems thorough and understandable, though I have not gotten into it a lot, Let me know what can be done in Sharepoint, which I want to pursue further, especially project management features."
"Very helpful."
"Want to learn about SharePoint 2013?"
"Want to learn about SharePoint 2013?"
Best Microsoft Project Guides
Includes information on AtTask, a leading web-based project management tool, and a guide for using this powerful software for portfolio optimization. in mathematics at the University of Notre Dame while on an Air Force ROTC scholarship.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I feel like this book does what it can to simplify things while still giving tons of detail but doesn't fully succeed in giving you a clear checklist or flowchart to take away."
"I like the level of detail about each topic and the examples provided, The only issue that I had was I purchase the digital version for my Samsung tablet, which meant I had to install the KIndle product."
"Needed for a class, but kept after."
"It doesn't go into mind numbing detail but topics are addressed multiple times throughout the text."
"Class would have been better with a different instructor, but thank god this book is well laid out and easy to follow."
"lol But it's my fault for waiting till the last minute to get it, which resulted in it not being in the local book stores with just 3 business days left before the class was scheduled to start."
"This book came in very good condition nearly new with all the CDS intact, thanks very much needed it because I am a little loss in my class!"
"Locations force you to search for figures mentioned in a assignment instead of being able to find a specific page."
Best Social Media for Business
Liar’s Poker meets The Social Network in an irreverent exposé of life inside the tech bubble, from industry provocateur Antonio García Martínez, a former Twitter advisor, Facebook product manager and startup founder/CEO. He also fathered two children with a woman he barely knew, committed lewd acts and brewed illegal beer on the Facebook campus (accidentally flooding Zuckerberg's desk), lived on a sailboat, raced sport cars on the 101, and enthusiastically pursued the life of an overpaid Silicon Valley wastrel. Weighing in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization and digital “privacy,” García Martínez shares his scathing observations and outrageous antics, taking us on a humorous, subversive tour of the fascinatingly insular tech industry. Chaos Monkeys lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Facebook very carefully maintains a public relations campaign (almost more internally focused than external) to convince the world it is the best place to work… ever. It is all here… the creepy propaganda, the failed high-profile projects, the surreal manager/staff relationships, the cultivated cult-like atmosphere, the sharp divide between the have-it-all, and the "hope to have enough to escape" staff. Best of all it describes how the advertising media really operates, going back to the dawn of it, and how Facebook, Google, et al are merely extensions of a system that has existed for two centuries. For myself, having lived through much of the same experience at Facebook (from onboarding, the devotion, the cynicism, to the inglorious, frustrated exit bungled by one of the legion of Facebook's incompetent and narcissistic manager corps) I found myself going from laughter, to nodding agreement, to gut-wrenching bouts of PTSD as I turned the pages of 'Chaos Monkeys'. Now I no longer have to justify myself to people who ask me why I left Facebook - I can just tell them to read this book, since it explains it better than I ever could."
"If anything, the vivid metaphors he uses to describe the otherwise dull and esoteric details of identity matching and attribution will serve you well anytime you must summon a complete picture of this complex web in your head. Even non-specialists will find fascinating the descriptions of how private data is collected and sold, not to mention probably realizing they have been worried about the wrong kind of privacy violations. His detailed accounts of many of these meetings (confrontations) offer a unique behind-the-scenes vantage which many manuals for silicon valley success avoid, so the authors can remain in good stead with the figures involved. In reality, the unspoken “hard” part of any startup is not the actual hours involved, or the idea, or execution, but rather the unwavering conviction you must have to keep at it when things are totally falling apart. Every entrepreneur will immediately recognize what Antonio unabashedly portrays: the dreadful gulf between the inward awareness of all the chaos and flux at the startup, while preserving the outward image of polish, order and optimism. While I wouldn’t necessarily advocate “praying for Antonio’s soul,” as a previous reviewer stated, his relentless self-deprecation and raw honesty balance out some of the selfish decisions he makes in the book. He is extremely well read, and I suspect this background informs a somewhat tragic theme of the book— for a certain type of person, the only hope that can lift the cynicism and misanthropy of early life disappointment is to undergo a meaningful quest with loyal companions."
"I'm sure a lot of people are going to get hung up on some offhand sexist comments or the dirt thrown at Facebook's execs (and I'm sure that Martinez could have avoided both while keeping the book interesting)."
"I highly recommend this book if you have ever worked with or for a startup, are thinking of founding your own startup, or are simply curious about life in the Silicon Valley."
Best Management Information Systems
Enterprise Integration Patterns provides an invaluable catalog of sixty-five patterns, with real-world solutions that demonstrate the formidable of messaging and help you to design effective messaging solutions for your enterprise. Do you want to understand how a system designed using integration patterns can be implemented using Java Web services, .NET message queuing, and a TIBCO-based publish-subscribe architecture? Utilizing years of practical experience, seasoned experts Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf show how asynchronous messaging has proven to be the best strategy for enterprise integration success. The authors also include examples covering a variety of different integration technologies, such as JMS, MSMQ, TIBCO ActiveEnterprise, Microsoft BizTalk, SOAP, and XSL. A case study describing a bond trading system illustrates the patterns in practice, and the book offers a look at emerging standards, as well as insights into what the future of enterprise integration might hold.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Arrived on time, used , but in very good and clean condition, almost like new."
"Going further, when you consider that an application can coordinate its own interaction with internal subsystems using Enterprise Integration Patterns, this design philosophy truly applies everywhere."
"Excelente."
"In the present resurgence of functional languages, this book should be highly regarded for its depth of focus on messaging patterns and their proper use."
"We were trying to explain the problems with passing a large file up and down a messaging bus to our bioinformatics users, when I ran across Enterprise Integration Patterns."
"This is the third pattern book in my collection (the other two are Analysis Patterns by Martin Fowler and the definitive Design Patterns by the Gang of Four) and IMHO this is the best example yet of where patterns can really improve the development process."
"This book is a must for any developer, manager, or systems architect engaged in designing, developing, or deploying distributed systems based on messaging patterns."
"great book, must read for everyone looking at Enterprise Integration. However I feel that this book needs a upgrade by referencing new technologies."