“I must say first, I don’t get many computing manuscripts that make me laugh out loud. Between the laughs, Dave Platt delivers some very interesting insight and perspective, all in a lucid and engaging style. I don’t get much of that either!”
—Henry Leitner, assistant dean for information technology andsenior lecturer on computer science, Harvard University
“A riotous book for all of us downtrodden computer users, written in language that we understand.”
—Stacy Baratelli, author’s barber
“David’s unique take on the problems that bedevil software creation made me think about the process in new ways. If you care about the quality of the software you create or use, read this book.”
—Dave Chappell, principal, Chappell & Associates
“I began to read it in my office but stopped before I reached the bottom of the first page. I couldn’t keep a grin off my face! I’ll enjoy it after I go back home and find a safe place to read.”
—Tsukasa Makino, IT manager
“David explains, in terms that my mother-in-law can understand, why the software we use today can be so frustrating, even dangerous at times, and gives us some real ideas on what we can do about it.”A Book for Anyone Who Uses a Computer Today...and Just Wants to Scream!
—Jim Brosseau, Clarrus Consulting Group, Inc.
Today’s software sucks. There’s no other good way to say it. It’s unsafe, allowing criminal programs to creep through the Internet wires into our very bedrooms. It’s unreliable, crashing when we need it most, wiping out hours or days of work with no way to get it back. And it’s hard to use, requiring large amounts of head-banging to figure out the simplest operations.
It’s no secret that software sucks. You know that from personal experience, whether you use computers for work or personal tasks. In this book, programming insider David Platt explains why that’s the case and, more importantly, why it doesn’t have to be that way. And he explains it in plain, jargon-free English that’s a joy to read, using real-world examples with which you’re already familiar. In the end, he suggests what you, as a typical user, without a technical background, can do about this sad state of our software—how you, as an informed consumer, don’t have to take the abuse that bad software dishes out.
As you might expect from the book’s title, Dave’s expose is laced with humor—sometimes outrageous, but always dead on. You’ll laugh out loud as you recall incidents with your own software that made you cry. You’ll slap your thigh with the same hand that so often pounded your computer desk and wished it was a bad programmer’s face. But Dave hasn’t written this book just for laughs. He’s written it to give long-overdue voice to your own discovery—that software does, indeed, suck, but it shouldn’t.
]]>Though it provides a good deal of technical detail, the standout feature of this book is its focus on real-world business problems in the enterprise and the solutions offered by COM+. Any IS manager or developer will be able to understand concepts like transactions, resource management, events, and asynchronous communications through the author's carefully rendered diagrams and business scenarios. There's not much actual code here, but the author does suggest techniques for designing components to take advantage of COM+.
Standout material includes a full discussion of the built-in support for transactions in COM+ and a new feature that has real potential for better performance for today's Web sites: In-Memory Databases (IMDBs). (With IMDBs, instead of optimizing code, administrators can just add more RAM to the server for a real performance boost.)
As the author notes, COM+ builds on the success of COM on the Microsoft platform. For any IS manager or programmer working on Windows, Understanding COM+ delivers a useful introduction to what's best in the new COM+ on Windows 2000. --Richard Dragan
Topics covered: Enterprise applications and COM+ overview, COM+ architecture and infrastructure, interception, COM+ components and catalogs, context and transactions, security, threading models and synchronization, resource management, Just-In-Time (JIT) object activation, object pooling, queued components (QC) and asynchronous communications, queue moniker, COM+ events (publishers and subscribers, COM+ In-Memory Databases [IMDBs], and load balancing).
]]>Les objets .NET, comme le garbage collector, l'interopérabilité avec des composants COM, la gestion des exceptions, la sécurité, sont étudiés en détail, avant de passer à ASP.NET, aux services web de .NET et aux WinForms.
Cet ouvrage, agrémenté d'un style sympathique, est une bonne introduction à l'architecture .NET. Les exemples fournis (écrits en Visual Basic, C#, HTML) sont simples et clairs et on trouve aisément les liens vers les sites et forums indispensables pour aller plus loin avec cette technologie. --Véronique Spir
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