Practical Use Cases with the Leading NoSQL Database
Hernan's rating:
 5.0
On Mar 11, 2014 Hernan Garcia wrote: Should be a mandatory read before using Mongo
There is a common mistake newcomers to mongoDB made and is treat it as a relational database when designing the schema and operating against it.
This book deals with common design patterns of document stores specifically tailored for MongoDB. Full Review >
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Hernan's rating:
 4.0
On Feb 16, 2014 Hernan Garcia wrote: Good book to build your first iOS app
A very well thought out book that will guide the new comer to iOS on creating a first application.
The book covers pretty much everything you will need to get your first App in the app-store.
iOS 7 Programming Cookbook - book cover
I enjoyed how well the book is structured and how the recipes build on each other or evolve in complexity on a very natural way.
It’s a very practical book, so I would recommend to read it with a computer at hand and Xcode open to follow along. Full Review >
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Patterns and Best Practices
Hernan's rating:
5.0
On Oct 19, 2013 Hernan Garcia wrote: Highly recommend for anybody involved on designing or developing distribute applications
Jamie Allen tackles the problems of writing concurrent/distribute applications and expose some patterns that can help to found solutions to those problems.
All the examples in the book are written on top of the Akka framework (as is obvious in the title of the book), but the patterns can be easily extrapolate to other frameworks and languages. Full Review >
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Bring Behavior-Driven Development to Infrastructure as Code
Hernan's rating:
3.0
On Sep 7, 2013 Hernan Garcia wrote: Good introductory book to Chef
The material on the book is great and I will highly recommend to anybody that is using Chef or plan to use Chef to get a copy.
Somehow I found the parts on testing (that I was the most interested in) not as good as the introductory chapters on using Chef. I think this is not a problem with the book/content but mostly an issue on how new (and by extension immature) is this field (infrastructure testing). Full Review >
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Introducing Functional Programming with Underscore.js
Hernan's rating:
5.0
On Jul 10, 2013 Hernan Garcia wrote: Great book to write clean and composable JS applications
This book has something for every body. If you are a functional person you may learn the way of JavaScript and how to achieve most of the functional idioms with the language.
Functional JavaScript - book cover
If you are a JavaScript person you will learn how to use your tool of choice in a functional way.
Even if you are familiar with JavaScript and functional programming, the book serves as a good resource to refresh and update your knowledge on both fields. Full Review >
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Designing with Details
Hernan's rating:
5.0
On Jun 5, 2013 Hernan Garcia wrote: Recommended to anybody working on any type of UI
Microinteractions are all those little things we deal with in a daily basic. Every piece of software and hardware have a good number of them.
You should read Dan Saffer book if you want to understand how to make your users life and your applications significantly better.
Sometimes as developers we glance over those little things that will make our application much better.
We can spend great amounts of time writing the perfect code, making that function elegant, concise and readable while at the same time we burden the end user with ridiculous flows, unhelpful error messages and obscure settings.
The book brings an understanding of these interactions and provide a framework to work with them. From using the appropriate control to enter data on a form to displaying the correct message in context after something important happened and hundreds of other little details that actually “make†our application. Full Review >
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Rapid and Secure Web Development
Hernan's rating:
4.0
On May 11, 2013 Hernan Garcia wrote: A new framework (and language) that try to shake things up in the web development world
You will learn about how to work with Opa “the framework†and about some of the language features.
The book achieves this with several hands on projects of varies and increasing complexity.
There are only a few chapters that are not practical, ex: explaining the opa type system (chapter 7) and a few short introductory chapters at the beginning of the book. Read those chapters because they are packed with good information on some of Opa’s strong points. Full Review >
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For Web Operations
Hernan's rating:
4.0
On Apr 10, 2013 Hernan Garcia wrote: Good book to learn how to interpreted all those graphics in the ops room
The author is clearly knowledgeable and experienced and the book is well written.
If you are new to metrics, this book is a good primer that goes deep into some of the practices and tools to use to capture and interpret those metrics.
So, if you are looking for a good and deep book on time series analysis that can help you to read and understand all those metrics you are capturing, this is the book.
There are extensive case studies of different scenarios that will show you how to interpret those time series and find the problem in that stubborn web server that (should) be working well. Full Review >
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The Complete Guide to Scripting Microsoft's Command Shell
Hernan's rating:
4.0
On Jan 23, 2013 Hernan Garcia wrote: Great reference to automate your workflow
You will learn about some of the conventions and common commands available to you and how to explore them.
How it integrates with .NET, using it for rapid prototyping or as a REPL and much more.
After the introduction, the book takes the form of multiple recipes for common tasks. The tasks grow in difficulty.
The fundamentals section contains a series of recipes that will help you to get comfortable with the shell, customize the command prompt, invoke commands, get to know your session history, learn about aliases, etc. Full Review >
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Get Up to Speed With CoffeeScript in a Weekend
Hernan's rating:
5.0
On Jan 4, 2013 Hernan Garcia wrote: An incredible entertaining way to learn CoffeeScript
The author paints the picture of a somehow dysfunctional team set to build a 2D game as part of a coding competition where the developer decides to write the game using CoffeeScript even when he has little knowledge of the language.
This setup works very well to show case all the features of the language in the frame of a non trivial application.
The narrative is great and keep the pace very well. Full Review >
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Hernan's rating:
5.0
On Dec 31, 2012 Hernan Garcia wrote: Getting up and running with Arduino
In less than 3 hours Philip Lindsay will get show you the basics on working and programming Arduino.
The video is organized in 23 little segments that can be watched independently.
It starts with the basics on what is Arduino the components and the layout of the circuit, what tools and components you will need to complete the tutorial and how to install the development environment in your computer. Full Review >
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Create Scalable Apps with ASP.NET MVC 4, Azure, Web Sockets, and More
Hernan's rating:
5.0
On Dec 21, 2012 Hernan Garcia wrote: Making F# approachable for every day development
There are multiple examples on writing services with different technologies, not just Microsoft products but also open source frameworks. You will learn about a number of F# libraries that will make your life easier in a day to day use in real world projects.
The author makes an effort to show different ways to solve similar problems, ex: using records and classes to interact with databases and queues, while at the same time indicating what is the preferred way in F#. Full Review >
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Functional Programming for the Web
Hernan's rating:
4.0
On Dec 2, 2012 Hernan Garcia wrote: It gets you going from the start
The book will be very helpful for anybody that is considering ClojureScript to decide if it’s the right choice.
There are lots of little nuggets of information that deal with internals and caveats that I found very informative. Full Review >
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Unleash the Power of Async
Hernan's rating:
4.0
On Nov 22, 2012 Hernan Garcia wrote: A good short reference for Async
This short book (139 pages in the ePub version) serves as a good introduction and quick reference on how to utilize the new async and await features in C# 5.0
It also explains in detail how asynchronous programming works in .NET when using these features and some of the consideration to have when designing an asynchronous API. Full Review >
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Learn to Program By Making Cool Games
Hernan's rating:
5.0
On Oct 29, 2012 Hernan Garcia wrote: And enjoyable and fun way to introduce kids to programming
I got a copy of this book and I sat with it with my 5 year old son.
He got immediately into it. He enjoys the format of the book with the full color illustrations and the overarching story.
I found that is a good way to combine reading, comics and programming in a fun and educative way. Full Review >
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A JavaScript and jQuery Developer's Guide
Hernan's rating:
5.0
On Sep 27, 2012 Hernan Garcia wrote: Must read for any programmer working with JavaScript
I like to think about this book as 3 books in one. The first 8 chapters are dedicated to explore and explain patterns, their creation process. their utility and an insight into the pattern community.
The design patterns exploration start on chapter 9 while dedicating chapter 10 exclusively to the different flavors of Model View patterns.
If the book was only that I will be very happy, but (like in a Sunday morning infomercial, there is more!) Full Review >
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Tools and algorithms for analyzing images
Hernan's rating:
4.0
On Aug 6, 2012 Hernan Garcia wrote: In depth book for a very deep subject
If you ever wondered how to analyze and image to recognize shapes and objects, how to search on them or how to build a panoramic view from a series of pictures (among other things) this is the book for you.
The author takes the challenge and with the help of a bunch of Python modules show you how to solve those and other problems. Full Review >
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Taking REST Ideas to the Next Level
Hernan's rating:
4.0
On Jul 8, 2012 Hernan Garcia wrote: A very different approach to programming
This book was my first exposure to Resource Oriented Computing and NetKernel.
Tom Geudens does a good job introducing a very different way to approach programming.
If you want to learn ROC or you are interested in different approaches to computing programmers this book is for you.
The author has a very entertainment style that makes for an easier read on a subject that could be very dense otherwise. Full Review >
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Working with REST and Web Sockets on Yaws
Hernan's rating:
5.0
On Jul 1, 2012 Hernan Garcia wrote: Web applications from 0 to 100 with Erlang and Yaws in no time.
This book will show you how to leverage the yaws web server to write web applications using the Erlang language.
The author Zachary Kessin will show how to build RESTful web services on top of yaws and how to use WebSockets with it.
Upon reading this book you should be able to start working on your own solutions since the book touch pretty much all major aspects of web development.
You won’t need to be an Erlang expert to follow along with the book, just having an understanding of the syntax and the basics behind Erlang will be enough. Full Review >
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Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps
Hernan's rating:
4.0
On Jun 24, 2012 Hernan Garcia wrote: A good primer on gamification for web applications
After reading it I bet you will start finding places where you can implement some of these techniques to make your application more enjoyable and engaging.
A very meaty book. Lots of content packed in 336 pages (e-book version for iPad). I have been intrigue by the subject for the last two years, so when I saw this book I jump into it with renovated interest. Full Review >
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Cross-Platform Mobile Development for Android and iPhone
Hernan's rating:
4.0
On May 9, 2012 Hernan Garcia wrote: You will learn the basics and some more to get you started on mobile development.
The book doesn’t waste any time and after a brief introduction and some setup instructions, it gets right into it.
Jamie Munro not only uses Phone Gap but JQuery mobile to build the UI. So, the book serves as a good beginner reference for that library as well.
It’s very well organized and each recipe builds on the previous one while keeping them fairly independent at the same time. Full Review >
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A new language for building structured web apps
Hernan's rating:
3.0
On Apr 20, 2012 Hernan Garcia wrote: Good overview of the language
This is a very short book that serves as a general introduction to Dart, the new language introduced by Google. The book explain the rationality behind Dart and the use cases for it.
The book is mostly an overview of the main features of Dart and some of the tools you have available today. Full Review >
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UI Patterns for Mobile Applications
Hernan's rating:
4.0
On Apr 5, 2012 Hernan Garcia wrote: Great book to make sure your mobile applications offer a great UX
This book by Theresa Neil covers pretty much any common need you will have while creating a mobile application.
It covers a large variety of platforms, clearly illustrating the differences of each one and how to implement a given pattern efficiently and properly due to those differences. Full Review >
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