Book review: Developing Responsive Web Applications with AJAX and jQuery

Developing Responsive Web Applications with AJAX and jQuery

Packt Publishing  

Writer: Sandeep Kumar Patel

Paperback:248

Link to the book page:   
https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/developing-responsive-web-applications-ajax-and-jquery

My rating: 4/5

This book is intended for Java developers wanting to create rich and responsive applications using AJAX.  

This a cool book to start to develop a responsive web application. Reading chapter to chapter you will learn to setup your environment step by step. 

A little bit knowlegge on this technology stack "HTML5, CSS, Javascript" will be a plus to follow this book on a easy way. Together, they are a powerful combinations.

Also, you will find more interesting tips to work with Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Google + integration.

Final chapters cover more advanced tricks to get the best when you are debugging and testing your web application. By the end of this book, you will be able to develop responsive web applications by combining AJAX development techniques with the jQuery JavaScript library.

Book review: The Manager's Guide to Employee Feedback

The Manager's Guide to Employee Feedback  

Impackt Publishing  

Writer: Glen Devey

Paperback: 70

Link to the book page:   
http://www.packtpub.com/managers-guide-to-employee-feedback/book

My rating: 4/5

This book is aimed primarily at new Managers who want to improve their skills to delivering a feedback. Six chapters, six lessons ahead.

* Chapter 1: Feedback Fundamentals 

"Taking a portion of the output and comparing it with the input to decide
whether you are getting what you want out of a system."

Seven key principles: Evidence- based, Activity- focused, Results- orientated, Specific, Honesty, Only positive languaje and Timed well.

* Chapter 2: Delivering Balanced Feedback
WIN model of feedback: What went well, Insteresting aspects of perfomance, Next time...

It's a structure for emphasizing the positive aspects
of someone's performance and also for suggesting areas of improvement.

* Chapter 3: Addressing Specific Performance Issues
BAR model of feedback: Background, Activity, Results.

* Chapter 4: Delivering a Reprimand
In opposite to the WIN model I talked before, here we have the DESC model. 
If you need to have a purely corrective conversation with someone you should use this one.

* Chapter 5: Giving Feedback to Colleagues and Managers
This is the most important chapter on my opinion.
We have to choose our words and techniques depending of people we are talking about.
Some insteresting examples of a softening frame, Mismatch frames and Alternative frames are showed here.

* Chapter 6: Integrating Your New Skills
The four step plan to achieve just about anything:
1. Decide on the outcome you want.
2. Choose a course of action.
3. Pay attention to what happens in the moment.
4. Change course if necessary.

Feedback like in an electronic lesson, as so simple but applied to your company. You should study your environment, people you are going to talk and message you want to communicate. These are the keys, have a good feedback!!

Book Review: Practical Change Management for IT Projects & Attracting IT Graduates to Your Business

Practical Change Management for IT Projects & Attracting IT Graduates to Your Business

Impackt Publishing

Writer: Emily Carr / An Coppens

Paperback: 170 / 54

Link to the books page:   
http://www.packtpub.com/practical-change-management-it-projects/book
http://www.packtpub.com/attracting-it-graduates-to-your-business/book

My rating: 5/5 

Learn to properly manage the changes that occur on an IT project, directly affects project success.

In this book the main roles involved in such projects, which is the best way and when they relate to each, and a set of templates that will be very useful to collect all the process are discussed.

In addition to the 20 templates offered us fill in any project to adequately adapt to changes in IT projects, presents an example that allows us to go through the book very enjoyable and secure.

This book is aimed primarily at IT Project Managers but also can provide guidance to HR staff.

* Chapter 1: What is Change Management?
In this chapter the concept of "Change Management" is introduced and briefly explains the pillars that we should try to have a successful change process. These concepts are discussed in later chapters.

Curiously, according to a study by IBM Global Business Services 2008 called Making Change Work, only 41% of IT projects fully meets its goals.

The main points to cover in each of the pillars of change are:

* Chapter 2: Establishing the Framework for Change

There are several frameworks to manage the changes: “See- Feel- Change” y “Rider, Elephant, Patch”. 

-      The Rider: This is the intellectual side of people and is responsible for maintaining their will power.

-      The Elephant: This is the emotional side of people.

-      The Path: This is the process people have to follow to make the change.

They remind us that although the rider might seem to be in charge and does in fact, hold the reins, the rider is very small and weak compared to the elephant they are trying to control. A person's intellectual side may provide the will power to adopt a change in the short term, but unless they are emotionally driven to make the change as well, they will eventually go back to the old way of doing things.

* Chapter 3: Building Sponsorship for the Change 
In this chapter we will see how to compose our project team. Normally include: Steering committee, executive sponsors, change agents and super-users.

The book explores the role of each in the project, the importance of each and the activities involved.

* Chapter 4: Managing your Stakeholders 
A stakeholder is a user or group that is impacted by the change. There are usually 3 categories: sponsors, end users and project team.

Once the members of these categories are identified, we must establish mechanisms of measurement. Normally, these are join to human feelings.

* Chapter 5: Communicating the Change 
Here the author teaches us to avoid the way we communicate in one direction.

Depending on the status of the project and involved members explains what is the best way and timing to do so.

* Chapter 6: Using Training to Prepare Your Stakeholders 
This chapter is essential because any change requires adaptation on staff and therefore this training.

There are different methods of training available.  We should have a plan to training time, resources and materials.

* Chapter 7: Ready, Set, Change 
This final chapter lists the templates that have completed and summing up the tips for each chapter.

To conclude this review I would like to recommend this great book. In my opinion, the most important is all the templates this book cover. You may find theory in some other books but in the real world you need to know how to deal a real situation on your company. Step by step you have the answers here.

All my greetings to the author, awesome job.

Besides, I propose a good way to mix this book. If we have the best people we will have the triumph. I propose another Impackt book, next one: Attracting IT Graduates to Your Business. This book is aimed at hiring managers and recruiters.

To sum up, the main chapters, are the next:
* Chapter 1: What Do IT Graduates Want?
We have a new group of workers. They have been using mobile phones, laptops, tablet devices, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn since their teens.A person who works as human resources need to know how to deal it and how to adapt the internal practices.

* Chapter 2: Be Clear on What Your Organization Has to Offer
The question is "what makes your organization unique?" You have to know better than nobody how is your company (formal/informal clothes, traditional vs innovative, fun vs serious...)., salary you will pay, benefits if you work here (restaurants, gyms, beauty salons...), training and so on.

* Chapter 3: Creativity Rules in Gaining Graduate Interest
Careers page like this one http://careers.microsoft.com
let us show the people that work in our company and the roles we are looking for. Social media like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter also are a good place to organize games or competition to attract candidates.

* Chapter 4: Getting to "You're Hired"
Telephone calls, skills testing, interviews..different stages we may manage and we must learn.

Book Review: Pentaho Data Integration Cookbook Second Edition

PACKT Publishing

Writers: Alex Meadows, Adrián Sergio Pulvirenti, María Carina Roldán

Paperback: 462

Link to the book page:

http://www.packtpub.com/pentaho-data-integration-cookbook-second-edition/book

My rating: 5/5
Pentaho Data Integration or also called Kettle is one of the best open source tool for tasks as extraction, transformation and loading data between different systems. It is integrated within the Pentaho BI suite and covers all necessary to develop and maintain a data warehouse / data mart functionality. Beyond the scope of BI, allows us to deal with and transform data in multiple ways.

This book explains simply and with numerous examples how to get the most out of this tool Pentaho. It is mainly aimed at both developers who have basic knowledge of Kettle, and advanced users who want to know the new possibilities it brings a new version of the tool.

Some years ago, about 2011, one first edition was published with a lot of useful recipes:

 http://www.packtpub.com/pentaho-data-integration-4-cookbook/book

As a general recommendation and for all chapters, I would add a new tip called such "advance trick" where reference is made to some more advanced features. It will always be useful for the user to keep in mind if you handle this case in the future.

* Chapter 1: Working with Databases

This chapter mentions the simplest thing we can do with Kettle: read data from a database. We have 15 recipes, from how to establish a simple connection to database with JDBC or JNDI to more advance recipes like how to build dynamic SQL query options.

* Chapter 2: Reading and Writing Files

When we work using PDI, the data source can be very different. In this chapter we have 14 recipes. We will see how to collect and write data in different files .Very interesting recipe that tells how to read data from an instance of Amazon Web Services S3.

Knowledge of regular expressions is essential to get the most out of this chapter.

* Chapter 3: Working with Big Data and Cloud Sources

Currently, when we are implementing a data warehouse, we have new possibilities. Depending on the problem to be modeled, we can make use of NOSQL or cloud services like SalesForce.

In this chapter we have 8 recipes on how to get / load data using such technologies.

For those wanting to delve deeper into the world of Big Data and Pentaho, the following book is recommended

http://www.packtpub.com/pentaho-for-big-data-analytics/book

 * Chapter 4: Manipulating XML Structures

It is very common to find XML files. In this chapter, we have 10 recipes, from reading a single file to validate the contents against a DTD or an XSD schema definition. Generating XML files and reading from an RSS feed generation is also discussed.

* Chapter 5: File Management

This may be the most interesting chapter to IT staff profiles as systems management. We found 9 recipes that tell how to upload / download files, compare the contents of these, create ZIP files or encrypted files.

Also, as some previous chapter, knowledge of regular expressions will be critical to get the most out of this chapter.

* Chapter 6: Looking for Data

In this chapter we find in 8 recipes and based on various criteria how we can get data from a database, files or web services using PDI.

* Chapter 7: Understanding and Optimizing Data Flows

When we are dealing with data streams, it is common that we find the problem to synchronize that. In this chapter we have 12 recipes to synchronize or redirect our data flows.

* Chapter 8: Executing and Re-using Jobs and Transformations

On PDI tool there are 2 ways of structuring our action sequence: jobs and transformations. In this chapter we have 9 recipes to deal with transformations considering parameters and for certain cases.

* Chapter 9: Integrating Kettle and the Pentaho Suite

In my opinion, I find this chapter as the most interesting. It allows you to extract the full potential of Pentaho integrating PDI with the different elements of the suite.

The chapter consists of 6 recipes among which are how to create a report using Pentaho PDI, or how to populate a dashboard created with CDE and using PDI.

In addition to knowledge of PDI, to follow this chapter successfully is required a minimum knowledge of the Pentaho suite, the Design Studio tool and CTools of WebDetails also are recommended

http://www.webdetails.pt/ctools.html

* Chapter 10: Getting the Most Out of Kettle

This chapter contains a variety of recipes that do not fit in any of the other chapters. Specifically, there are 9 recipes, from sending mails with attachments files, processing JSON and one interested recipe for tunning about transformations and jobs.

* Chapter 11: Utilizing Visualization Tools in Kettle

In this chapter there are 4 recipes. One is about adding more functionality to PDI, adding plugins from the MarketPlace . As responsible for maintaining the plugin to extract / load data into CiviCRM using PDI, I can not let pass the opportunity to mention that:

• https://civicrm.org/blogs/capo/new-tool-civicrm-data-integration

• https://github.com/amnesty/civicrm-data-integration

Also, in this chapter there are other interested recipes as data profiling using PDI and DataCleaner, or display data from our business using AgileBI on a quick way.

* Chapter 12: Data Analytics

The final chapter of the book consists of three interesting recipes on how to obtain information from our data. We will see how to read data from the analytical suite SAS, obtain statistics using PDI steps, and creating a set of random data to the WEKA data mining tool.