Understanding MySQL Internals Review

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Understanding MySQL Internals ReviewMySQL is assuming increased importance as an enterprise database and has become the de-facto standard with web hosting companies. A number of books have appeared in recent years, covering various aspects of MySQL. In Understanding MySQL Internals, Sasha Pachev, a MySQL-focused consultant and former member of the MySQL development team, takes us on a tour of how MySQL works and how it is built.
Starting with an overview of MySQL history and architecture, the book quickly moves us through working with the source code to build and run the product in a debugger. Drawing on his deep experience with the software, Mr. Pachev explains the coding conventions used to develop MySQL and why you should use them when modifying the software yourself.
The author delineates the different functional "modules" (a term he coined himself to better explain the database, technically speaking there are no defined modules in MySQL's architecture) of MySQL and how they interrelate. Herein lies the key to how this book teaches the reader the vast intricacy of such a complex piece of software. The author recognizes the subject is huge and the source code changing. What he does in the book is serve as our tour guide, driving us through the various areas and explaining as much relevant information as he reasonably can. He constantly illustrates key pieces of source code and data structures; but perhaps more importantly he makes reference to the actual source files utilized by each functional component of the system, while encouraging us to explore further on our own. His approach is very much "top down".
As he takes us on this tour, the author explains many of the design decisions behind the various MySQL components, often imparting the historical perspective behind them. I appreciate how, throughout the book, the author shares some of his "inside information" about MySQL's development. There is also a section where he examines the code stability of each module and speculates on what the future may hold for each module. The author's writing style is clear and easy to read. I found Understanding MySQL Internals interesting and fun, and surprisingly easy to read for a book covering such a sophisticated piece of software. The author also does a good job explaining the engineering trade-offs of different MySQL configurations. Speaking of configuration, the book shows you how to add your own configuration option to the mysqld daemon.
Chapter 7, the largest chapter in the book, is 41 pages long. It covers the MySQL storage engine interface. This chapter explains how to integrate your own custom storage engine into MySQL and contains the source code for two custom storage engine examples (one for MySQL 4.1, the other for version 5.1). You can download this source code from O'Reilly's web site. Despite this one long chapter, the book is surprising short, only 234 pages.
I believe this book has value outside of MySQL. It does a good job showing how MySQL is essentially a well designed piece of software: a high-performance, reliable Unix server. The book also touches on the multi-platform aspects of MySQL design. Those of you designing other types of server software may benefit from studying how MySQL is constructed.
This book isn't for everyone, but if you are serious about MySQL in particular or database software design in general then this title certainly deserves a look.Understanding MySQL Internals Overview

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Joomla 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla Powered Website (2nd Edition) Review

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Joomla 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla Powered Website (2nd Edition) ReviewI recommend to every Joomla user who is less than "expert level" -- read this book! I have been working with Joomla 1.0 for about 5 months, so already had a basic understanding of many of the terms: component, module, etc. I purchased this book just before Christmas and took it with me to read on the holiday roadtrip. You know you are reading a great computer-related book when you can read and understand and make copious notes in the book margins...without sitting in front of a computer! Not only did it "fill in the blanks" about much of my understanding re: Joomla (any version), but I felt excited, and much more confident, about using Joomla 1.5. Great overview of Joomla, great details, great tips! A well-written user's guide. Thank you!Joomla 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla Powered Website (2nd Edition) Overview

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Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization (Experimental Futures) Review

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Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization (Experimental Futures) ReviewSince the Internet revolutionized communication technology in the nineties, the concept of the network has become an organizational model to be emulated--a utopian vision even--across vastly different spheres of social life, not the least of which is political activism. The growing importance and prevalence of activist networks, however, has been reflected in only a limited way in the anthropological literature on social movements, and few scholars have approached networks as more than mere abstractions and metaphors at best or, at worst, as static structures. Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization by Jeffrey Juris, on the other hand, provides us with a very necessary and highly successful ethnographic study of the concrete mechanisms, practices, and social relations that constitute the activist networks characteristic of the anti-corporate globalization movements that began with the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. Since those times, the organizational models and utopian imaginaries of activist networks have profoundly reshaped the social movement landscape across the globe--particularly in Western Europe, Latin America, and the United States--making Juris' well-theorized and richly descriptive study relevant for readers across scholarly disciplines and geographical boundaries.
Juris describes activist networks as "locally rooted, but globally connected", and he attempts to make his own research similarly "multi-scalar". Thus, his research is rooted in long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the Movement for Global Resistance (MRG), a Barcelona based activist network, with which he actively participated in numerous meetings, discussions, events, and direct-action protests. While the most engaging chapters in Networking Futures may be the ones dedicated to how networks are "embodied" and made visible during protests, the work's larger aim and greater accomplishment is to study these networks during their "submerged" phases, illuminating how activist networks such as the MRG are not so much rigid organizations, but fluid processes animated as much by "transnational flows of people, ideas, strategies, and tactics" as by Catalan cultural and political landscape and history.
The central argument of Networking Futures, which Juris repeats like a mantra throughout the book, is that "anti-corporate globalization movements involve a growing confluence among networks as computer-supported infrastructure (technology), networks as organizational structure (form), and networks as political model (norm), mediated by concrete activist practice" (p. 11). He is thus concerned with examining how new technologies, and particularly the Internet, not only provide the arena and means of organization for these movements, but also shape its logic and political goals, such that spreading network technologies, forms, and norms outward becomes a political goal itself. Like anarchists of old, these activists practice a "dual politics", attempting to influence dominant politics, but also to create the embryonic foundations of a new society "in the shell of the old" by engaging in autonomous, decentralized networks.
As a self-ascribed "militant ethnographer", Juris is clearly a sympathetic and enthusiastic participant in the movements he studies; however, it is to his credit that he does not romanticize or fetishize networks, instead paying due attention to the limits of network forms and the contradictions of its norms. The chapter on state repression and performative violence during protests is particularly illuminating in this respect. Equally noteworthy is Juris' sober evaluation in the conclusion of what impact these movements have (and have not) concretely effected upon state or corporate policies. However, what makes this book especially dynamic is that it holds appeal not only across scholarly disciplines, but beyond them as well, since the author makes a concerted effort to make it relevant and useful, not only to scholars, but to activists... Juris makes a significant contribution to the field of social movement studies and should hold a broad appeal to readers in various disciplines, as well as general non-academic readers, concerned with politics and political culture.
-- -- -- Bruno Renero-Hannan
This review was originally published in the journal COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN SOCIETY AND HISTORY, Vol. 52, Issue 01, January 2010, pp 210-211.
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Programming Python Review

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Programming Python ReviewWow. I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it's enormous. It took me almost a year to go through the whole thing, although I did stop and work through every single example. On the other hand, like "Learning Python", there are a lot of sidetracks that seem targeted at beginners which I felt could have easily been left out.
This book should be considered volume 2 of "Learning Python". "Learning Python" (or "volume 1") covers the core Python language in quite a bit of detail, but doesn't talk much about the library. "Programming Python", in turn, covers the Python library, but doesn't talk about the syntax of the language (you're expected to know all that already).
Even with 1500 pages, it would be impossible to do justice to the _entire_ Python library, so a useful subset is covered. The book is actually divided into seven subsections, and sections 2 (System Programming), 3 (GUI Programming), 4 (Internet Programming), and 5 (Tools and techniques) could each have legitimately been a book in their own right. Part 6 (Integration) was a bit weak compared to the others - it covered only two chapters, and was the only section of the book that included incomplete examples. Of course, Parts 1 & 7 were an introduction and an epilogue.
In terms of the Python standard library, "String Services", "File and Directory Access", "Data Persistence", "Generic Operating System Services", "Interprocess Communcation and Networking", "Internet Protocols and Support", and "Graphical User Interfaces" were covered indepth. "Internet Data Handling" and "Structured Markup Tools" were both touched on, but not really examined. Other Python-related topics such as Jython, Zope, ZODB and SWIG were discussed as well, along with examples.
The main strength of this book was its examples. I prefer to manually type each source example and run them, rather than downloading them from a web site - although it takes longer to work through the book that way, I end up retaining quite a bit more. For that reason, I'm frustrated by programming books that include incomplete examples (or at least not enough that I can reasonably fill in the blanks). Fortunately, this wasn't such a book - until the very last chapter, all of the examples were complete, although quite a few of them build on previous examples (sometimes a bit pointlessly, such as his GUIMixin "framework"). Chapter 15, for example, is pretty much nothing but a listing of a complete, working e-mail GUI client - I was actually able to use this to check my own e-mail (POP only... but still!)
Section 3 on GUI programming is the best coverage on TKinter available anywhere. This section alone is worth the price of the book, if you're ever going to touch TKinter. He doesn't cover Tix, unfortunately, but I believe that every single TKinter widget is discussed and demonstrated in example code. PMW and wxPython are mentioned, but just as in, "they exist" - this books perspective on GUI programming is TKinter only. Still, that's plenty to fill up 5 chapters.
This _is_ a good, useful, book - I got a lot more out of this than I got out of "Learning Python", but it can be a bit meandering at times - for its volume, I expected it to cover a lot more ground, although what the author does decide to cover, he covers in exquisite detail, including historical perspectives, real-world "war stories" and workable examples.Programming Python Overview

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