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I came to know about Johanna Rothman's "Hiring The Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science Of Hiring Technical People" through Laurent Bossavit's weblog. I thank you very much Laurent because this book is a priceless jewel.
My 10-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):
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This book is the B-52 of hiring management. Fully loaded with tons of great tips and piloted by the very talented Johanna Rothman, it will parachute numerous boxes packed with smart and effective tips on the head of hiring officers struggling on the battlefield. The well organized flight plan will take you through stopovers dealing with recurrent hiring management topics, such as defining hiring strategies; writing job descriptions; sourcing, selecting and interviewing candidates; creating fool-proof phone-screens; checking references; hiring technical managers and many more. During the trip, Johanna will hand out numerous check lists that will help you organize your work more efficiently and prevent you from going too deep into the mud. What’s more, she will share the most common dos and don’ts that you can follow when creating your own job descriptions and offers. She will also embellish your journey with invaluable and true war stories that she actually experienced during the past twenty years. If you still manage to be hungry after this reading, you will find plenty of excellent references to other books whose content nicely complements Johanna’s masterpiece.
This 300-pages book enclosing a mountain of priceless information is definitely one of the best books on hiring management available on the market today. Whether you are a hiring manager in need of some guidance or improvements or a simple job seeker willing to put together outstanding job applications to maximize your chances, don’t wait any further and get this book NOW!
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Together with the complimentary copy of "The Product Marketing Handbook for Software", Rick Chapman also sent me a copy of "In Search of Stupidity: Over twenty years of high-tech marketing disasters". In five words: this book is true marvel.
My 9-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):
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I would qualify this book as a great marketing antipattern repository. All the true stories reported by Rick Chapman illustrate the worst practices in high-tech marketing he experienced over the past twenty years. With an entertaining narrative style, he immerses you in the corporate life of the big companies he worked at and delivers a fair dose of crispy details about some scary war stories that you wouldn't believe they actually happened. You would think that companies like IBM, Microsoft, Novell and Borland to cite a few, have never (rarely) made stupid mistakes. Well, you're wrong! As the saying goes, “nobody’s perfect”. This statement gets all its sense when applied to people working for big corporations that have the money and the brain cells, but despite this, still manage to shoot themselves in the feet every now and then. Money doesn’t buy you anything, but it is isually a good magnet for stupid managers, so watch out!
To understand the content of this book, there is no need to be a marketing guru whose resume reaches the moon. In fact, this book is suitable to pretty much anyone, whether you want to discover which practices to avoid at all costs, or whether you simply want to laugh out loud and despise those wannabe "deus ex machina" working for big corporations. Grab your copy, sit down comfortably and start turning the pages. You won't regret it, unless of course you were actively involved in one of those shameful and pathetic undertakings :)
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I have had the great pleasure to review DV Press' latest DVD, called "Beginners JSP 2.0 2004... on DVD". This is really high-quality material that I would advise to anybody desperately looking for professional JSP training at an affordable price. To give you an idea of how cool that stuff is, you may freely check out some sample clips on their web site.
My 9-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):
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Willing to learn JSP? Don't know where to start? Terrified by that big 500-pages JSP spec? Can’t afford professional courses? Don’t know which JSP book to pick out because there are so many? If you are asking yourself any of the previous questions, rush to your local store and buy this professional DVD today!! Neal Ford elegantly manages to ease your way through the maze of JSP development by delving into the details of every single basic and advanced details about the JSP technology. Judge by yourself: the author will tell you about the JSP/Servlet big picture, tomcat administration, all JSP elements, actions, implicit objects and scriplets. Not enough? Well, he goes on with session management, database access, bean tags, expression language, Model 2 pattern, JSTL, connection pooling, events and deployment issues.
More than 8 hours of high-quality authoritative JSP content presented in a virtual class style by a very knowledgeable professional trainer switching back and forth between slide presentations, live code development in the Eclipse environment and execution in a browser. What’s more, for those 30 bucks you will spend, well actually invest, you get all the presentation slides as well as all the code developed during this virtual class. The only drawback I can point out is the poor quality of the sound, which cost this DVD his last horseshoe. No big deal though, but it could have been better mastered.
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Ever needed to generate Word documents from your Java applications? There are only a few tools that allow you to do that. The Apache POI team has developed an API for manipulating Excel files (org.apache.poi.hssf packages) and is currently developing one for Word files also (org.apache.poi.hwpf packages). However, the latter is still in early beta stages and is not bundled with the 2.0 release, so you have to go into CVS and get the files by yourself.
If this suffices, then you are good to go. Otherwise I can propose another solution. A German software company, called Müller & Stein Software, proposes on its website a free component (yes, as in "free" beer) that you can call directly from your Java application to generate any kind of Word files. The downside is that it won't let you read the Word file, though. You're gonna have to use the POI HWPF API if you need that functionality.
The way the whole thing works is incredibly easy. In the bundle, you will find three key files:
WordAPI.exe: Word driver component (2000/97) for any Windows platform (XP/2000/NT/ME/98/95)
WordProcessing.java: Main class to use from your Java applications to interact with the Word driver
SampleTemplate.dot: A template Word file with which you will customize the generation
All you have to do is to define bookmarks (Insert/Bookmark) in the template Word file and give them a name. This name will let you identify what goes where when you generate the Word file. Then, from you Java application, you can write code like:
1. WordProcessing.createNewDocumentFromTemplate("SampleTemplate");
2. WordProcessing.typeTextAtBookmark("AddressLine1", "O'Reilly & Associated, Inc.");
3. WordProcessing.typeTextAtBookmark("AddressLine2", "Mr Miller");
4. WordProcessing.typeTextAtBookmark("AddressLine3", "101 Moris Street");
5. WordProcessing.typeTextAtBookmark("AddressLine4", "Sebastopol, CA 95472-9902");
6. WordProcessing.typeTextAtBookmark("Salutation", "Dear Mr Miller,");
7. WordProcessing.exec();
Let me explain a little further what this code does:
- On line 1, we let the driver create a new Word document by giving it a hardcoded template file name (without the extension!). There is another alternative in which you can let the user dynamically choose the template to use. Just use the method
createNewDocumentFromTemplateToSelectByUser() instead
- Lines 2 through 6 use the
typeTextAtbookmark() method to send strings (2nd argument) to the given bookmark (1st argument). It is also possible to directly send an array of String objects in one shot instead of having to repeatedly call the typeTextAtbookmark() method.
- Finally, you just invoke the
exec() method to generate the Word file. Actually, until you call exec(), all the WordProcessing call does is to write commands into a temporary file that the Word driver will use.
Before calling exec(), you have the choice to call a variety of other methods as described below:
saveDocumentAs(): tells the driver under which name to save the generated Word document
closeDocument(): tells the driver to close the generated Word document
printAndForget(): tells the driver to print the generated Word document to the default printer. An overloaded method allows the developer to hardcode the name of the printer to print to. The file is not saved anywhere!
printToPrinterToSelectByUserAndForget(): pops up the printer dialog and tells the driver to print the generated Word document to the chosen printer. The file is not saved anywhere!
executeMacro(): tells the driver to run the macro whose name is given in argument.
As you can see this Java2Word component is very simple, yet very powerful. Play around with it and you won't be disappointed. The installation is straightforward and the driver is very fast. In my case, I have to generate 50 pages Word files, and the whole thing takes like four to five seconds.
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APress addressed me a complementary copy of Godfrey Nolan's latest title, "Decompiling Java". It was definitely a fun and instructive reading that I would recommend.
My 8-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):
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Fascinated by the Java lady? Ever wanted to ask her out but never dared to? Get this book and take a shot. After discussing some legal and moral issues and telling you how to protect yourself, this book will teach you how to approach her and ask her out politely. Then, it will delve into the most intimate details of her bytecode attributes and show you how to manipulate them efficiently. Also, the author briefly describes a couple of free and commercial tools you can use to play with her. The book goes on describing techniques you can exploit to protect her sources from being seen by anyone. Such techniques include: obfuscation, encryption, server-side execution, digital rights management, fingerprinting, native implementation and many more. The second half of the book is fully dedicated to designing and implementing a working Java decompiler from scratch using the JLex and CUP (i.e., Java implementations of lex and yacc).
Basically, I very much appreciated the way I have been introduced to this wonderful and charming lady. Our chat was both enjoyable and enlightening. However, the date was over when the whole thing started to get interesting and I admit that 250 pages left me hungry. I would have liked to see a couple more concrete examples discussed and analyzed in minute details. Nonetheless, this book is a very good introduction to the topic and would satisfy both beginner and medium Java developers willing to peek beneath the lady's bytecode veil.
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