Social Media Mining with R by Richard Heimann and Nathan Danneman, Packt Publishing Book Review

What an engrossing read!
I must admit I fret at the beginning, how I can embark on the most advanced and seemingly difficult topics as R, Social Media, together? But somewhere early in chapter 2 I relaxed, thanks to Richard and Nathan who delivered the not so familiar (to me) content gradually and with much aplomb. I liked the R primer in same chapter.
Getting Twitter data turned to be a breeze as you will see in chapter 3. Chapters 4 and 5 are not exactly technical, for example they expand on the nature of sentiments, social behaviour, and mentioned a few pitfalls, however to my surprise, I enjoyed them a lot. Most importantly, these two chapters serve as a base to the rest of the book in terms of a model on which the analysis is going to be conducted. Chapter 6 is where you work hard, but not too hard than it would make you put the book away and shut your computer down, rather it was fun full of algorithms, graphics and cool insight!

I finished this book in no time, but wish it was longer. Certainly, the authors are the ones I will be looking for to buy more books from.

Like I said, this is a somewhat a short book, but it covers what it promises very well, for those who wish to expand further the authors provide a list of related literature.

I think a contractor wishing to deliver a social analysis assignment fast should not look any further. And one can sure expand further than extracting tweets. I trust the principals and techniques remain almost the same.

In terms of my closing notes, the reader needs to be familiar with Git[Hub], some or no R and better running a 64 bit OS, preferably Linux or Mac (mainly because these OSes already come with tools as CURL). The book publisher site is http://www.packtpub.com/social-media-....

Oh, and the book rating by me is 5 out of 5.

Persistence in PHP with Doctrine ORM by Kévin Dunglas, Packt Publishing Book Review

In short, Persistence in PHP with Doctrine ORM is a book about harnessing the power of Doctrine ORM, but also:

• Will let you build a working project using Doctrine involving advanced techniques;
• Will guard you from doing mistakes early in your getting known Doctrine, and
• Will advocate on appropriate technologies to use in addition in case your next creation is going to see the world.

I would recommend this book to a developer who worked with PHP already, but getting ready to embark onto a more intensive data processing endeavor.

The book is not terribly long, yet comprehensive enough to allow a person to become proficient in Doctrine say overnight (yes, my Kindle app estimated my reading speed at ~ 2.5 Hrs, that is without me experimenting with code). Personally, I value concise books because they give me a push and allow a relatively comfortable solo sailing with an occasional exploration of a topic I did not encounter learning but stumbled upon doing real-life work.

As an aside, use of an ORM (not just Doctrine specifically) is typically being perceived as a negative phenomenon by the data people (disclaimer: I am the data person), unsurprisingly Kevin mentions performance implications under the so called Big Data scenario. This has it’s grounds, I agree, as for example tuning DML or data retrieval, so let’s not argue here, but at least one aspect on an ORM not possible to beat - is its ability to allow seamless transition from one database platform to another, relatively uncommon in the past, seems to being picking up nowadays. But do not be overly optimistic, no migration is ever smooth, it just alleviates some of the pains and minimizes the costs of engineering and maintaining your software.

On the not so bright side the author does not cover executing stored procedures/packages, and apparently Doctrine (as most OSS projects) has a long list of defects, yeah, I can hear you, this is a book review, nothing else, ditto.

So one last interesting discovery, the Doctrine community focuses more and more on a NoSQL, Mongo in particular, which is thrilling.

You will find information in the book on how to build your own SQL, implement association, inheritance and even a not so often used many-to-many relationships.

On the odd note, I saw a circular reference created in one of the book examples, while possible it is very dangerous! Also the book covers only one approach: building your app code-first: meaning the database schema is created after a class, which I (you know who am I ) don’t endorse, alas I am / was new to Doctrine.

I suggest Kevin adds to ver. 2.0 of this book the following:

1. Building an application the schema-up way, too, and
2. Provide an example where Doctrine is using a Mongo database.

I give this book a 5 out of 5 rating because it has achieve its objectives, however it seems that Packt could give it the “Instant” moniker due to its material coverage.

Creating Reports with SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Course by Packt Publishing Review

Creating Reports with SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services

I confess, it was my first time reviewing a video from a publisher. Yet produced by a Ph. D! I was thrilled yet overwhelmed by the feeling of an enormous responsibility.

Un-surprisingly, the end result is superb. The video covers enough ground for a newcomer to the Reporting Services world to quickly become productive and deliver a stunning dashboard.

Overall, I like the idea of delivering educational content visually. It is much faster to make yourself familiar with software in the shortest possible time this way than reading a book. Especially if it is about visualizations.

I liked Dr. Dallas Srinder’s voice, it is clear and monotone, not too fast and not too slow with no time wasted on secondary items. The length of each topic is sometimes too short, but it does allow experimentation on your own.

Big kudos to Dr. Dallas Srinder!

5 out of 5.

You can purchase the course here: http://bit.ly/1a0NpEJ