Absolute OpenBSD: Unix for the Practical Paranoid, 2nd Edition – A good & long-overdue update – #bookreview

Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition
Unix for the Practical Paranoid
Michael W. Lucas
(No Starch Press – Kindle, paperback)

This updated new edition likely will be hailed — and rightly so — as a major event by many dedicated users of OpenBSD. After all, the first edition of Michael W. Lucas’ book was published a full decade ago, back when, the author concedes, he still had hair.

OpenBSD’s founder and long-time administrator Theo de Raadt has called this new edition both “[t]he definitive book on OpenBSD” and “a long-overdue refresh.” The praise can’t get much higher in OpenBSD-land.

OpenBSD is a highly secure, Unix-like operating system frequently used in Domain Name System (DNS) servers, routers, and firewalls. It also can run on a wide array of computer hardware, ranging from new systems to old VAXes, 386 machines, Apple’s PowerPC Macintoshes, and most products from Sun.

“Old systems can run OpenBSD quite well,” Lucas notes. “I’ve run OpenBSD/i386 quite nicely on a 166 MHz processor with 128MB of memory. You probably have some old system lying around that’s perfectly adequate for learning OpenBSD.”

Indeed, he explains, “As a matter of legacy, OpenBSD will run on hardware that has been obsolete for decades because the hardware was in popular use when OpenBSD started, and the developers try to maintain compatibility and performance when possible.”

The OpenBSD software has an intriguing and complex history that involves the 1980s breakup of AT&T, lots of lawsuits, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) project, the University of California, and the eventual emergence of the “BSD license.” The result was “perhaps the freest of the free operating systems,” Lucas says.

Today, Lucas emphasizes, “OpenBSD strives to be the most secure operating system in the world.” OpenBSD developers constantly work to try to “eliminate [security] problems before they exist,” he states.

“OpenBSD is a gift. You’re free to use it or not. As with any gift, you can do whatever you want with it. But you’re not free to bug the developers for features or support.”

His 491-page second edition offers a heavy dose–23 chapters–of how-to instructions. And readers are encouraged to read OpenBSD’s man (manual) pages online. In a book where the first chapter is titled “Getting Additional Help” and the second is titled “Installation Preparations,” you can guess that this is not aimed at absolute newcomers. Actually, Lucas says: “This book is written for experienced Unix users or system administrators who want to add OpenBSD to their repertoire.”

Still, if you want to learn and use OpenBSD, you will need this book — and some online documentation and very likely some advice from the OpenBSD community, as well. There don’t seem to be recent introduction-level books floating around. However, there are a few tutorial sites, including this one. And OpenBSD.org maintains a list of support and consulting specialists. Training also is available from a number of companies that can be found via the Web.

If you want to use OpenBSD but not spend much time learning it, you also can purchase a support contract and let someone else set up and maintain your system. Even then, you likely will want to have this new edition of Absolute OpenBSD handy for reference–and for learning, just in case, down the line, you change your mind.

– Si Dunn

Hadoop is hot! Three new how-to books for riding the Big Data elephant – #programming #bookreview

In the world of Big Data, Hadoop has become the hard-charging elephant in the room.

Its big-name users now span the alphabet and include such notables as Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, the New York Times, and Yahoo. Not bad for software named after a child’s toy elephant.

Computer systems that run Hadoop can store, process, and analyze large amounts of data that have been gathered up in many different formats from many different sources.

According to the Apache Software Foundation’s Hadoop website: “The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.”

The (well-trained) user defines the Big Data problem that Hadoop will tackle. Then the software handles all aspects of the job completion, including spreading out the problem in small pieces to many different computers, or nodes, in the distributed system for more efficient processing. Hadoop also handles individual node failures, and collects and combines the calculated results from each node.

But you don’t need a collection of hundreds or thousands of computers to run Hadoop. You can learn it, write programs, and do some testing and debugging on a single Linux machine, Windows PC or Mac. The Open Source software can be downloaded here. (Do some research first. You may have use web searches to find detailed installation instructions for your specific system.)

Hadoop is open-source software that is often described as “a Java-based framework for large-scale data processing.” It has a lengthy learning curve that includes getting familiar with Java, if you don’t already know it.

But if you are now ready and eager to take on Hadoop, Packt Publishing recently has unveiled three excellent how-to books that can help you begin and extend your mastery: Hadoop Beginner’s Guide, Hadoop MapReduce Cookbook, and Hadoop Real-World Solutions Cookbook.

Short reviews of each are presented below.

Hadoop Beginner’s Guide
Garry Turkington
(Packt Publishing – paperback, Kindle)

Garry Turkington’s new book is a detailed, well-structured introduction to Hadoop. It covers everything from the software’s three modes–local standalone mode, pseudo-distributed mode, and fully distributed mode–to running basic jobs, developing simple and advanced MapReduce programs, maintaining clusters of computers, and working with Hive, MySQL, and other tools.

“The developer focuses on expressing the transformation between source and result data sets, and the Hadoop framework manages all aspects of job execution, parallelization, and coordination,” the author writes.

He calls this capability “possibly the most important aspect of Hadoop. The platform takes responsibility for every aspect of executing the processing across the data. After the user defines the key criteria for the job, everything else becomes the responsibility of the system.”

The 374-page book is written well and provides numerous code samples and illustrations. But it  has one drawback for some beginners who want to install and  use Hadoop.  Turkington offers step-by-step instructions for how to perform a Linux installation, specifically Ubuntu. However, he refers Windows and Mac users to an Apache site where there is insufficient how-to information. Web searches become necessary to find more installation details.

Hadoop MapReduce Cookbook
Srinath Perera and Thilina Gunarathne
(Packt Publishing – paperback, Kindle)

MapReduce “jobs” are an essential part of  how Hadoop is able to crunch huge chunks of Big Data.  The Hadoop MapReduce Cookbook offers “recipes for analyzing large and complex data sets with Hadoop MapReduce.”

MapReduce is a well-known programming model for processing large sets of data. Typically, MapReduce is used within clusters of computers that are configured to perform distributed computing.

In the “Map” portion of the process, a problem is split into many subtasks that are then assigned by a master computer to individual computers known as nodes. (Nodes also can have sub-nodes). During the “Reduce” part of the task, the master computer gathers up the processed data from the nodes, combines it and outputs a response to the problem that was posed to be solved. (MapReduce libraries are now available for many different computer languages, including Hadoop.)

“Hadoop is the most widely known and widely used implementation of the MapReduce paradigm,” the two authors note.

Their 284-page book initially shows how to run Hadoop in local mode, which “does not start any servers but does all the work within the same JVM [Java Virtual Machine]” on a standalone computer. Then, as you gain more experience with MapReduce and the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), they guide you into using Hadoop in more complex, distributed-computing environments.

Echoing the Hadoop Beginner’s Guide, the authors explain how to install Hadoop on Linux machines only.

Hadoop Real-World Solutions Cookbook
Jonathan R. Owens, Jon Lentz and Brian Femiano
(Packt Publishing – paperback, Kindle)

The Hadoop Real-World Solutions Cookbook assumes you already have some experience with Hadoop. So it jumps straight into helping “developers become more comfortable with, and proficient at solving problems in, the Hadoop space.”

Its goal is to “teach readers how to build solutions using tools such as Apache Hive, Pig, MapReduce, Mahout, Giraph, HDFS, Accumulo, Redis, and Ganglia.”

The 299-page book is packed with code examples and short explanations that help solve specific types of problems. A few randomly selected problem headings:

• “Using Apache Pig to filter bot traffic from web server logs.”
• “Using the distributed cache in MapReduce.”
• “Trim Outliers from the Audioscrobbler dataset using Pig and datafu.” 
• “Designing a row key to store geographic events in Accumulo.”
• “Enabling MapReduce jobs to skip bad records.”

The authors use a simple but effective strategy for presenting problems and solutions. First, the problem is clearly described. Then, under a “Getting Ready” heading, they spell out what you need to  solve the problem. That is followed by a “How to do it…” heading where each step is presented and supported by code examples. Then, paragraphs beneath a “How it works…” heading sum up and explain how the problem was solved. Finally, a “There’s more…” heading highlights more explanations and links to additional details.

If you are a Hadoop beginner, consider the first two books reviewed above. If you have some Hadoop experience, you likely can find some useful tips in book number three. 

– Si Dunn

Getting Started with Mule Cloud Connect – To help sort out the chaos of Internet services – #bookreview

Getting Started with Mule Cloud Connect
Ryan Carter
(O’Reilly – paperback, Kindle)

In a digital world increasingly cluttered with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms, Open APIs, and social networks, complexity quickly can get out of hand.

“It all starts,” Ryan Carter writes in his new book, “with a simple API that publishes somebody’s status to Facebook, sends a Tweet, or updates a contact in Salesforce. As you start to integrate more and more of these external services with your applications, trying to identify the tasks that one might want to perform when you’re surrounded by SOAP, REST, JSON, XML, GETs, PUTs, POSTs, and DELETEs, can be a real challenge.”

Indeed. But never fear, Mule ESB can ride to your rescue and connect you quickly and easily to the cloud. At least, that’s the marketing claim.

Some truly big-name users, it should be noted, are adding credibility to Mule’s claimed capabilities and usefulness as an Open Source integration platform. They include Adobe, eBay, Hewlett-Packard, J.P. Morgan, T-Mobile, Ericsson, Southwest Airlines, and Nestle, to mention just a few.

Meanwhile, riding Mule to the cloud is the central focus of this compact (105 pages), well-written get-started guide. Its author, Ryan Carter, is both a specialist in integration and APIs and “an appointed Mule champion” who contributes regularly to the MuleSoft community.

“Mule,” Carter points out, “is an integration platform that allows developers to connect applications together quickly and easily, enabling them to exchange data regardless of the different technologies that the applications use. It is also at the core of CloudHub, an Integration Platform as a Service(IPaas). CloudHub allows you to integrate cross-cloud services, create new APIs on top of existing data sources, and integrate on-premise applications with cloud services.”

The book is structured so you start off by building a simple Mule application that will serve “as the base of our examples and introduce some core concepts for those unfamiliar with Mule.” Then Carter shows and illustrates how to “start taking advantage of Mule Cloud Connectors.” He includes numerous code examples, plus some screenshots and diagrams.

The book’s six chapters are:

1. Getting Started
2. Cloud Connectors
3. OAuth Connectivity
4. Configuration Management
5. Real-Time Connectivity
6. Custom Connectivity

Carter emphasizes: “Mule Cloud Connect offers a more maintainable way to work with APIs. Built on top of the Mule and CloudHub integration platforms, Cloud Connectors are service-specific clients that abstract away the complexities of transports and protocols. Many complex but common processes such as authorization and session management work without you having to write a single line of code. Although service-specific, Cloud Connectors all share a common and consistent interface to configure typical API tasks such as OAuth, WebHooks, and connection management. They remove the pain from working with multiple, individual client libraries.”

If Mule does not have a connector for a resource that you need, the book shows you how to create your own.

Getting Started with Mule Cloud Connect can get you started on a beneficial ride of  discovery, and it can take you onto the trail that leads to solutions.

– Si Dunn

All for Search and Search for All: 3 New Books for Putting Search to Work – #bookreview

Seek and ye shall find.

That’s the theory behind the still-debated benefits of digging through Big Data to uncover new, overlooked, or forgotten paths to greater profits and greater understanding.

Big Data, however, is here to stay (and get bigger). And search is what we do to find and extract useful nuggets and diamonds and nickels and dimes of information.

O’Reilly Media recently has published three new, enlightening books focused on the processes, application, and management of search: Enterprise Search by Martin White, Mastering Search Analytics by Brent Chaters, and Search Patterns by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender.

Here are short looks at each.

Enterprise Search
Martin White
(O’Reilly, paperback, Kindle)

Start with this book if you’re just beginning to explore what focused search efforts and search technology may be able to do for your company.

The book’s key goal is “to help business managers , and the IT teams supporting them, understand why effective enterprise-wide search is essential in any organization, and how to go about the process of meeting user requirements.”

You may think, So what’s the big deal? Just put somebody in a cubicle and pay them to use Google, Bing, and a few other search engines to find stuff.

Search involves much more than that. Even small businesses now have large quantities of potentially profitable information stored internally in documents, emails, spreadsheets and other formats. And large corporations are awash in data that can be mined for trends, warnings, new opportunities, new product or service ideas, and new market possibilities, to name just a few.

The goal of Enterprise Search is to help you set up a managed search environment that benefits your business but also enables employees to use search technology to help them do their jobs more efficiently and productively.

Yet, putting search technology within every worker’s reach is not the complete answer, author Martin White emphasizes.

“The reason for the well-documented lack of satisfaction with a search application,” he writes, “is that organizations invest in technology but not staff with the expertise and experience to gain the best possible return on the investment….”

Enterprise Search explains how to determine your firm’s search needs and how to create an effective search support team that can meet the needs of employees, management, and customers.

Curiously, White waits until his final chapter to list 12 “critical success factors” for getting the most from enterprise-wide search capabilities.

Perhaps, in a future edition, this important list will be positioned closer to the front of the book.

Mastering Search Analytics
Brent Chaters
(O’Reilly - paperback, Kindle)

This in-depth and well-illustrated guide details how a unified, focused search strategy can generate greater traffic for your website, increase conversion rates, and bring in more revenue.

Brent Chaters explains how to use search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search as part of an effective, comprehensive approach.

Key to Chaters’ strategy is the importance of bringing together the efforts and expertise of both the SEO specialists and the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) specialists — two groups that often battle each other for supremacy within corporate settings.

“A well-defined search program should utilize both SEO and SEM tactics to provide maximum coverage and exposure to the right person at the right time, to maximize your revenue,” Chaters contends. “I do not believe that SEO and SEM should be optimized from each other; in fact, there should be open sharing and examination of your overall search strategy.”

His book is aimed at three audiences: “the search specialist, the marketer, and the executive”–particularly executives who are in charge of search campaigns and search teams.

If you are a search specialist, the author expects that “you understand the basics of SEO, SEM, and site search (meaning you understand how to set up a paid search campaign, you understand that organic search cannot be bought, and you understand how your site search operates and works.)”

Search Patterns
Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender
(O’Reilly – paperback, Kindle)

“Search applications demand an obsessive attention to detail,” the two authors of this fine book point out. “Simple, fast, and relevant don’t come easy.”

Indeed, they add, “Search is not a solved problem,” but remains, instead, “a wicked problem of terrific consequence. As the choice of first resort for many users and tasks, search is the defining element of the user experience. It changes the way we find everything…it shapes how we learn and what we believe. It informs and influences our decisions and, and it flows into every noon and cranny….Search is among the biggest, baddest, most disruptive innovations around. It’s a source of entrepreneurial insight, competitive advantage, and impossible wealth.”

They emphasize: “Unfortunately, it’s also the source of endless frustration. Search is the worst usability problem on the Web….We find too many results or too few, and most regular folks don’t know where to search, or how….business goals are disrupted by failures in findability…[and] “Mobile search is a mess.”

Ouch!

Colorfully illustrated and well-written, Search Patterns is centered around major aspects in the design of user interfaces for search and discovery. It is aimed at “designers, information architects, students, entrepreneurs, and anyone who cares about the future of search.”

It covers the key bases, “from precision, recall, and relevance to autosuggestion and faceted navigation.” It looks at how search may be reshaped in the future. And, very importantly, it also joins the growing calls for collaboration across disciplines and “tearing down walls to make search better….”

– Si Dunn

CompTIA Security+ Exam SY0-301 Rapid Review – For Security+ certification – #bookreview

CompTIA Security+ Exam SY0-301 Rapid Review
Michael Gregg
(Microsoft Press – paperback, Kindle)

IT security professionals know the importance of certifications to their careers and their continuing credibility with employers or potential clients.

The CompTIA Security+ Exam SY0-301 Rapid Review is a handy and helpful guide for IT security specialists who are preparing for Exam SY0-301, to earn a CompTIA vendor-neutral Security+ certification

Important note: This book is for certification candidates who are already well-versed in their field. It is specifically “designed to assess your readiness for the SY-301 exam,” the author notes. “It is not designed as a comprehensive exam preparation guide.”

If you want to begin studying for Exam SY0-301, you are urged to start with the CompTIA Security+ Training Kit, which is scheduled for release in 2013.

The Rapid Review and the SY0-301 exam are aimed at IT professionals who have “a minimum of two years of experience in IT administration with a focus on security.”

Also, exam candidates should have “[d]ay-to-day technical information security experience” and “[b]road knowledge of security concerns and implementation.”

Like the exam, the Rapid Review focuses on six areas: (1) network security; (2) compliance and operational security; (3) threats and vulnerabilities; (4) application, data and host security; (5) access control and identity management; and (6) cryptography.

Along with definitions and explanations, the Rapid Review challenges the reader with numerous true-false questions and “Can you answer these questions?” queries. The true-false answers and their explanations are presented immediately after the true-false questions. Meanwhile, the answers to the “Can you answer these questions?” queries are presented at the end of each chapter—and you have to do a bit more work and reviewing to sort them out.

– Si Dunn

Juniper MX Series – A comprehensive guide for network engineers – #bookreview #juniper #networking

Juniper MX Series
Douglas Richard Hanks Jr., and Harry Reynolds
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

This comprehensive, well-written handbook is aimed directly at network engineers who want to know more about the feature-rich Juniper MX Series of routers.

Actually, “handbook” is a bit of a misnomer. It takes two hands to comfortably handle this hefty, comprehensive, 864-page guide.

The two authors, both network engineers themselves, note that the Juniper MX Series is “[o]ne of the most popular routers in the enterprise and service provider market….”

They add: “The Juniper MX was designed to be a network virtualization beast. You can virtualize the physical interfaces, logical interfaces, data plane, network services, and even have virtualized services span several Juniper MX routers. What traditionally was done with an entire army of routers can now be consolidated and virtualized into a single Juniper MX router.”

The book’s chapters are:

• 1.      Juniper MX Architecture
• 2.      Bridging, VLAN Mapping, IRB, and Virtual Switches
• 3.      Stateless Filters, Hierarchical Policing, and Tri-Color Marking
• 4.      Routing Engine Protection and DDOS Prevention
• 5.      Trio Class of Service
• 6.      MX Virtual Chassis
• 7.      Trio Inline Services
• 8.      Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation
• 9.      Junos High Availability on MX Routers

The chapters, organized by feature sets, include review questions (with answers conveniently located nearby), so you can track your learning progress.

The authors have extensive experience with the Juniper MX router series. Douglas Richard Hanks Jr., is a data center architect with Juniper Networks. Harry Reynolds has more than 30 years’ experience in networking, with a focus on LANs and LAN interconnection.

– Si Dunn

For more information: (paperback – Kindle)

Deploying Rails – A good how-to guide covering choices, tools & best practices – #programming #bookreview

Deploying Rails: Automate, Deploy, Scale, Maintain, and Sleep at Night
Anthony Burns and Tom Copeland (Pragmatic Bookshelf, paperback)

Maybe you have been studying Ruby and Rails and now feel ready for the next big step. Perhaps you are already on a job where a Rails application needs to be deployed and running on a server ASAP. Or, maybe you manage a team that must deploy and support a Rails app, and you want to understand more of what they actually must accomplish to get the app up and running – and keep it running.

Deploying Rails is a very good guide to the decisions that must be made and to the tools and best practices essential for success. The two writers are both professional Rails developers with strong backgrounds.

Their 217-page book, they note, “is “centered around an example social networking application called MassiveApp. While MassiveApp may not have taken the world by storm just yet, we’re confident that it’s going to be a winner, and we want to build a great environment in which MassiveApp can grow and flourish. This book will take us through that journey.”

That “journey” is organized into 10 chapters and two appendices, all well written and illustrated with code examples.

• Chapter 1: Introduction – (including choosing a hosting location)
• Chapter 2: Getting Started with Vagrant – (setting up and managing a virtual server and virtual machines)
• Chapter 3: Rails on Puppet – (“arguably the most popular open source server provisioning tool.…”)
• Chapter 4: Basic Capistrano – (“the premier Rails deployment utility….”)
• Chapter 5: Advanced Capistrano – (deals with making deployments faster and also easier when “deploying to multiple environments.”)
• Chapter 6: Monitoring with Naigos – (monitoring principles and how to apply them to Rails apps. Also, how to perform several types of checks.)
• Chapter 7: Collecting Metrics with Ganglia – (how to gather a Rails app’s important metrics from an infrastructure level and an application level.)
• Chapter 8: Maintaining the Application – (how to handle “the ongoing care and feeding of a production Rails application.”)
• Chapter 9: Running Rubies with RVM – (using the Ruby enVironmental Manager [RVM] in development and deployment.)
• Chapter 10: Special Topics – (“We’ll sweep through the Rails technology stack starting at the application level and proceed downward to the operating system, hitting on various interesting ideas as we go.”)

The two appendices cover (1) “a line-by-line review of a Capistrano deployment file” and (2) “deploying MassiveApp to an alternative technology stack consisting of nginx and Unicorn.”

A key focus of the book is building a set of configuration files and keeping the latest versions stored in Git, so deployment of a new or updated app can go smoother.

Deploying a Rails app involves making many different choices, and the process can go wrong quite easily if not set up properly.

“The most elegant Rails application,” the authors caution, “can be crippled by runtime environment issues that make adding new servers an adventure, unexpected downtime a regularity, scaling a difficult task, and frustration a constant.

“Good tools do exist for deploying, running, monitoring, and measuring Rails applications, but pulling them together into a coherent whole is no small effort.”

Deploying Rails can significantly ease the complicated process of getting a new Rails application running on a server. Equally important, Rails experts Anthony Burns and Tom Copeland can show you how to keep the app running smoothly and configured for growth as it gains users, functionality, and popularity.

– Si Dunn

Understanding IPv6, 3rd Edition – Welcome to the new, improved & BIGGER Internet – #bookreview #microsoft #windows

Understanding IPv6, 3^rd Edition
Joseph Davies
(Microsoft Press, paperback, list price $49.99; Kindle edition, list price $39.99)

The Internet can now expand into a much bigger realm than was possible before the worldwide launch of IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) on June 6, 2012.

The web most of us use has long relied on IPv4, the circa-1981 Internet Protocol built around 32-bit addresses. This scheme can accommodate approximately 4.3 billion unique addresses worldwide. On a planet where (1) the population now has surpassed 7 billion and (2) many of us now have multiple devices connected to the Web, Internet Protocol version 4 recently has been in dire danger of running out of unique addresses.

IPv6 will fix that problem and offer several important new enhancements, as long as we don’t find ways to expand the Internet to parallel universes or to the people on a few trillion distant planets. IPv6 uses a 128-bit addressing scheme that can accommodate more than 340 trillion trillion trillion unique addresses. So go ahead. Get online with that second iPad, third smart phone or fourth laptop.

IPv4 and IPv6 are now running in a dual stack that supports both addressing schemes. The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is not seamless, however. A lot of work remains to be done by major Internet service providers (ISPs), web companies, hardware manufacturers, network equipment providers and many others to enable IPv6 on their products and services.

Joseph Davies, author of Understanding IPv6, has been writing about IPv6 since 1999. His new 674-page third edition provides both a detailed overview of IPv6 and a detailed focus on how to implement it, within a limited range of Windows products.

“There are,” he notes, “different versions of the Microsoft IPv6 protocol for Windows….I have chosen to confine the discussion to the IPv6 implementation in Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows Vista.”

This well-written and well-organized book is not for beginners. Its intended audience includes:

• Windows networking consultants and planners
• Microsoft Windows network administrators
• Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers (MCSEs) and Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCTs)
• General technical staff
• Information technology students

Davies and Microsoft offer downloadable companion content for this book: Microsoft Network Monitor 3.4 (a network sniffer for capturing and viewing frames); and PowerPoint 2007 training slides that can be used along with the book to teach IPv6.

If you need a guide to best practices for using IPv6 in a Windows network, definitely consider getting Understanding IPv6, 3^rd Edition.

– Si Dunn

Introducing Windows Server 2012 – A guide to what’s coming in a much-anticipated release – #bookreview #microsoft

Introducing Windows Server® 2012
Mitch Tulloch with the Microsoft Server Team
(Microsoft Press, paperback, list price $14.99; Kindle edition, list price $0.00)

 The anticipated release date for the new version of Microsoft Server®  is sometime between the third quarter of 2012 and early 2013. And this book’s introduction hails it as “probably the most significant release of the Windows Server platform ever.”

Windows Server® 2012, it states, will offer “an innovative new user interface, powerful new management tools, enhanced Windows PowerShell support, and hundreds of new features in the areas of networking, storage and virtualization.”

There also will be major emphasis on cloud computing. The product has been “designed for the cloud from the ground up and provides a foundation for building both public and private cloud solutions,” the book declares.

Introducing Windows Server® 2012 is “based on beta,” according to the cover disclaimer. And, according to the author, the book  “represents a ‘first look’ based on the public beta release of Windows Server 2012 and is intended to help IT professionals familiarize themselves with the capabilities of the new platform.”

The 235-page book is divided into five chapters:

• Chapter 1 presents “The business need for Windows Server® 2012.” Not surprisingly, the main focus is on cloud computing and multi-server platforms.
• Chapter 2’s focus is “Foundation for building your private cloud” and how the new product can provide “a solid foundation for building dynamic, highly scalable, multi-tenant cloud environments.”
• Chapter 3 looks at the Windows Server® 2012 features and capabilities that can create a “[h]ighly available, easy-to-manage multi-server platform.”
• Chapter 4 discusses how you can use the product to “[d]eploy web applications on premises and in the cloud,” with its “scalable and elastic web platform” and “[s]upport for open standards.”
• Chapter 5 focuses on Windows Server® 2012 features and capabilities that are key to “[e]nabling the modern workstyle.” The author states: “Today’s business users want things simple. They want to be able to access their desktop applications, and data virtually anywhere, from any device, and have the full Windows experience. And from an IT perspective, this must be done securely and in ways that can ensure compliance at all times.”

Since this book is a “first look” written prior to the ready-to-manufacture (RTM) date, some of its screenshots, feature descriptions and stated capabilities may differ somewhat from the product that will be released.

But this overview can be a useful – and inexpensive — guide to have handy while considering whether to move to, or upgrade to, Windows Server® 2012.

– Si Dunn

Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, Third Edition – Big Tools for Big Data – #programming #bookreview

Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, Third Edition
Tom White
(O’Reilly, paperback, list price $49.99; Kindle edition, list price, $39.99)

“The good news is that Big Data is here,” Tom White writes in this revised and updated third edition to Hadoop’s “definitive guide.” But: “The bad news is that we are struggling to store and analyze it.”

Indeed, Big Data is now being measured in zettabytes, which is “equivalently one thousand exabytes, one million petabytes, or one billion terabytes,” White says. And all of us are creating, storing and trying to benefit from expanding amounts of data each day.

Enter Hadoop, “a reliable shared storage and analysis system. The storage is provided by HDFS [the Hadoop Distributed File System] and the analysis by MapReduce. There are other parts to Hadoop,” White emphasizes, “but these capabilities are its kernel.”

Hadoop (it’s not an acronym; simply the name of a child’s toy elephant) is a complex programming language. But, White says: “Stripped to its core, the tools that Hadoop provides for building distributed systems—for data storage, data analysis, and coordination—are simple. If there’s a common theme, it’s about raising the level of abstraction—to create building blocks for programmers who just happen to have lots of data to store, or lots of data to analyze, or lots of machines to coordinate, and who don’t have the time , the skill, or the inclination to become distributed systems experts to build the infrastructure to handle it.”

This new edition covers recent changes and additions to Hadoop, including the MapReduce API and new MapReduce 2 runtime, “which is built on a new distributed resource management system called YARN.” Several chapters related to MapReduce and other topics also have been added or expanded.

Hadoop can run MapReduce programs written in a variety of languages, including Java, Ruby, Python, and C++. And: “MapReduce programs are inherently parallel, thus putting very large-scare data analysis into the hands of anyone with enough machines at her disposal.” Hadoop, meanwhile, provides powerful parallel processing capabilities.

Hadoop increasingly is being employed by companies and organizations that must deal with processing, analyzing, and storing very large amounts of data. White’s book includes some case studies that explain Hadoop’s role in solving several Big Data challenges.

Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, Third Edition is not a beginner’s how-to book. But it’s definitely recommended for “programmers looking to analyze datasets of any size, and for administrators who want to set up and run Hadoop clusters.”

– Si Dunn