Chapter 4 and 5 examines the concept of authentication, authorization, encryption and decryption of messages in oracle web services manager. The author discusses the various types of cryptography and algorithm methods with the help of screenshots. The book will be of interest for .NET developers as the author examines the usage of web services manager with the help of a .NET client application using Visual Studio.

Chapter 6 helps you to implement digital signatures and message verification in web services. Chapter 7 examines the steps involved with the implementation of a custom policy using Oracle web services manager. While chapter 8 provides a brief outline of the components included with the manager being sued for deployment, chapter 9 examines the various runtime monitoring modules with the help of relevant screenshots.

Chapter 10 and 11 deeply examines the role of XML Encryption and Signature in web services. While chapter 12 discusses the techniques involved with signing and encryption of messages, the final chapter examines the security components and the integration of web services with web access management solution.

The author has written the book in a lucid style with lot of source codes, diagrams and screenshots. The book will be useful for advanced level developers who would like to explore web services using Oracle. I don’t think a beginner will be able to understand the concepts discussed in the book. They should purchase the book after understanding the fundamentals and the various tools which ships with Oracle.

The book is priced at $59.99 and I wonder why the publisher has fixed a higher price taking into account the amount of pages which is below 250. I am not sure whether readers invest a huge amount for a smaller book and I feel that the publisher should fix the price at a reasonable level so that readers of all categories could purchase them and gain knowledge of the discussed topic. As of this writing, the book is available for $53.99 from Amazon.com and BarnesandNobles.com.

Chapter 1 provides a basic overview of Drupal including the various resources available to gain more knowledge about Drupal. Chapter 2 analyzes the installation procedure in detail. The author also provides solution to some of the common problems which occur during installation stage. The chapter ends with the steps required to create a basic page using Drupal. Chapters 3 and 4 provides a detailed overview of the configuration of Modules, Blocks, Menus, Links and Site related functionalities such as Search Engine Friendly URLs, Logging, Reporting, Uploads and much more.

While chapter 5 examines the permission related aspects, Chapters 6 and 7 enables you to work with various content types and also includes a detailed coverage of content related modules, implementation of Taxonomy and Tags. The author also outlines the various features of Content Construction Kit (CCK). Chapter 8 includes a detailed reference to Theming system including configuration and customization of Themes.

The book doesn’t provide the steps required to create a new theme, which I hope will disappoint advanced users of Drupal. The remaining chapters examines some of the advanced concepts such as Open ID, Actions, Triggers, Caching, Throtlling, JQuery, Backups, Management of Cron,  Scheduled Tasks including Search Engine Optimization (SEO), upgradation aspects of Drupal and its modules.

As mentioned in the beginning the book includes an Appendix which helps you to learn the steps involved to display, setup and test your site. The author has written the book in a lucid style and will help those users especially beginners who would like to explore the various features of Drupal. The book will benefit advanced users if it features the creation of Modules and Themes.

I very much liked the way of presentation of the content with lot of screenshots. I would definitely refer David’s book to master the backend of the system, if I ever decide to make use of Drupal in future. As a final note, I would say that this book is mainly oriented for beginners who want to explore the features of Drupal in a minimum amount of time.

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I currently maintain several websites but I never learned SEO. I did not find any need to completely learn the concepts as I mastered some of the techniques through experience. But recently I found that page rank of some of my websites has been dropped. I then made some attempts to master SEO with the help of online articles. To my surprise Andrew King, the author of website optimization from O’Reilly contacted me with a request to review his book, which I gladly accepted.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 examines the benefits of SEO, its techniques, Pay per click and Conversion Rate optimization. The author has provided two case studies which analyzes the implementation of the above discussed concepts in different scenarios.

You will learn optimization techniques involved with web pages, CS and Ajax based sites in Part 2 including speeding up the loading of websites, JavaScript optimization, Minimizing HTTPRequests and much more. The author also examines server side optimization and client side performance techniques. The final chapter delves deep into website optimization metrics, various web analytics software, performance metrics and Search Engine marketing.

The author has presented the content in a lucid style with the help of relevant diagrams and screenshots. I myself learned few tips with the help of Andy’s book. I would prefer to view the coverage of optimizing those websites which are powered with WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke, Community Server and other similar web applications in the next edition of the book.

A key advantage of the book is that you can not only learn SEO but also other optimization techniques to place your sites very well in search engines. I feel that author has outlined his personal experiences in various chapters of the book. If you would like to learn the tricks to optimize a website then Andy’s book is waiting for you in the book store.

Sams Publishing has done it again. Over the last one year they have released many cookbooks on .NET programming languages. Microsoft Visual C# .NET 2003 Cookbook is one of the latest releases of Sams and without any doubt I can say that it is an exhaustive resource for programmers. The book contains around 330 recipes with detailed explanations to each one of them. Each recipe begins with a traditional “You Want” sentence which will describe the purpose of the discussed recipe.

It is followed by the techniques used to achieve the purpose along with the relevant screenshots and source codes. The final section titled comments gives additional information about the relevant recipe. I feel that this book will be useful for both beginners and advanced learners as it contains an array of useful recipes. Beginners can learn advanced concepts after gaining a good knowledge of fundamentals from Part 1 of the book.

This book has been divided into 6 parts. Each part contain in depth and high level explanations to recipes there by providing readers with quality material. Part 1 covers the fundamentals of C# language such as operators, expressions, control structures, classes, collections, delegates, event handling and exceptions. Part 2 begins with a detailed coverage about windows forms controls. It examines some of the interesting controls such as ListView, TreeView, Toolbars and Status bars. It also covers shortly about Visual Inheritance which is new to C#. I think the authors need to explain this concept in a detailed manner with some illustrations. Moreover, this part also examines user controls and localization in an advanced manner. I think readers will not get these kinds of useful recipes elsewhere. Chapter 10 is exclusively devoted to Graphics. An interesting point to note regarding this chapter is that each recipe is followed by source codes and screenshots. This will surely enable readers to have a real look at the output before testing them.

The third part of this book covers file input/output, serialization, XML and ADO.NET. You will learn among other things how to read from and write to a file. One of the recipes teaches you how to verify the existence of a file. Advanced readers will find the recipes about serialization very useful. The remaining chapter on this part covers about XML and ADO.NET. I feel that this part requires a minor rearrangement of chapters. Chapter 13 (XML in .NET) should be placed on the chapter 14 slot. A reader will be interested to learn ADO.NET first before learning about XML.

The first chapter in part 4 covers Network Programming in a detailed way. I think this chapter will be useful for those readers who are interested to learn about the development of Client-Server applications using C#. Chapter 16 and 17 will enable you to learn about ASP.NET and Web Services. Authors should try to include screenshots in chapter 17 (ASP.NET Web Services) to make the content more interactive. The final chapter on this part examines Remoting in detail.

The first chapter in part 5 begins with the basics of assemblies with special reference to reflection. You will learn how to deploy a C# application in chapter 20. This part also teaches you how to enable security for your C# applications. One of the recipes will help you to determine whether the current user is an Administrator or not. The final part delves deep into advanced issues such as Threading, Reflection and COM Interoperability.

The authors have taken tremendous effort to present many complex issues on this cook book in a simplified manner. The cook book also includes two appendixes about Visual Studio .NET IDE and a handy .NET debugging reference. I feel that these appendixes are a real bonus for readers. Unfortunately, the first appendix doesn’t contain any screenshots of the various parts of the IDE.

In part 4 the authors didn’t devoted few recipes to explain about File Uploading and Sending Emails. I think they will include these recipes in the next edition of this wonderful cookbook. It would have been great if the authors had included some recipes about the upcoming features of C# such as Generics, Anonymous Methods, Iterators and Partial Types. The source code for all the recipes can be downloaded from the publisher’s website.

Even though this book is pretty heavy and bulky it is a must read for all C# and Visual C# .NET programmers. I give this book a 5 star rating (*****).

Sams Publishing had brought out a series of programming books under the banner of Teach Yourself in 21 Days, KickStart and Unleashed for all major languages. Over the last two years, Sams had released an unlimited number of books in the area of .NET particularly C# and ASP.NET. Their recent book titled “ASP.NET Developer’s CookBook” is one of the most interesting titles in the field of server side programming using .NET Framework. This book has been written by Steven A. Smith (founder of ASPAlliance.com), Rob Howard (ASP.NET Program Manager at Microsoft) and over a dozen ASPAlliance columnists in a so called ‘recipe’ style. In order to read and understand the recipes contained in this book, you should require a working knowledge of ASP.NET. A good understanding of Visual Basic .NET with .NET Framework 1.0 will be a definite plus. It is better to have a basic idea of ASP 3.0 but I feel that most of the ASP.NET developer’s will have a good knowledge of its previous predecessor.

Unlike traditional computer books, the ASP.NET Developer’s Cookbook provides solutions for solving real world problems. Every chapter is filled with lots of theory and codes. Moreover, the concepts are explained in a user-friendly manner. Some of the chapters on the book teach about interesting ideas such as how to retrieve pop3 emails from an ASP.NET page, DataGrid sorting, and much more. While Part 1 and 2 covers about the fundamentals of ASP.NET and issues like caching, sessions and security, part 3 fully touches about data access except chapter 9 on Error handling. From my point of view, this chapter should be placed in part 2 of the book. The book also gives an overview about the usage of XML in ASP.NET. The chapter 13 on Rendering Data with ASP.NET Web Controls has been explained in an elaborate manner. I think this will be the most useful chapter for all developers. The authors have presented the part 4 in a comprehensive manner. The topics are covered in a capsule form on chapter 16 (Working with Numbers, Dates and Times), chapter 17 (Working with Files and Folders) and chapter 18 (Working with Collections). The one which I most liked is that of validating credit card numbers in chapter 16. No other book has explained these kinds of topics in such a nice tone. No doubt, readers can be able to easily understand the manipulation of strings, date, time and much more complex tasks very quickly with the help of this great book.

The remaining chapters cover advanced topics like web services, networking, reflection and threading. Chapter 22 on generating and manipulating images is indeed a big bonus for all readers. From my point of view, all levels of developers can use this book. It doesn’t matters whether you are a beginner or an intermediate learner since the code samples are given in a mixed fashion. If you are a newbie pick up the easy codes first like sending e-mails from your ASP.NET page, performing validations etc else go deep into the book and try to learn advanced concepts on database access and much more. I suggest you to scan the Table of Contents and pick up the right recipe for your needs because it provides a real glimpse of the whole book in a nutshell.

Even though all concepts have been presented well through out the whole book, there are deficiencies and errors. I noticed unnecessary repetitions of sentences on the comments section in chapter 21. This occurs till the end of the page 348. Instead of repeating the sentences, it should be given commonly at the beginning of the chapter itself. I also came through few other mistakes (typos) when I went deep into the pages of the book. In the comments section of page 108 it is quoted as Customer error screen instead of Custom error screen. In page 64, a reference to section 4.4 has been stated but there is no such explanation on that specific section in page 68. The spelling of outputCache has been incorrectly mentioned as ouptuCache in page 65. I hope the authors will pay attention to rectify these minor defects in the next edition of this book.

Another notable limitation of this book is that there is no CD-ROM containing the code samples and the same has been given only in Visual Basic .NET on the book. But the book’s website provides the samples in C# version. I hope the next edition of this book comes with code samples in J# too. I feel that the publisher should also give a CD along with these kinds of code intensive books so that readers can quickly get the relevant code/codes for use on their projects. The CD should also contain some useful tools and editors for working with ASP.NET.

Except the five figures on pages 124-126, the book doesn’t include a single screenshot of any examples. Moreover, chapter 7 on state management and chapter 19 on web services contain only little recipes. Overall, this book is a must to be on the shelves of all ASP.NET developers’ kitchen — both current and future.