I wanted to like this book. I really did. With all that can be done with HTML5 and JavaScript, seems like there's a huge opportunity for doing very interesting things on iPhoneOS devices (both the iPhone and the iPad) without having to write Objective-C or deal with the App Store.

This is a good book for anyone working with the Enterprise products of VMware :ESX, ESXi and vCenter Server.

This book is a good Python Programming tutorial. It does a good job of explaining the concepts of Python programming to individuals who would like to learn Python. The book is written in eleven chapters. It has two appendix titles ‘A’ and ‘B’.

Comparing to Perl, Python has a quite lagged adoption as the scripting language of choice in the field of bioinformatics, although it is getting some moment recently. If you read job descriptions for bioinformatics engineer or scientist positions a few year back, you barely saw Python mentioned, even as “nice to have optional skill”. One of the reasons is probably lacking of good introductory level bioinformatics books in Python so there are, in general, less people thinking Python as a good choice for bioinformatics. The book “Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics” from O Reilly was published in 2001. Almost one decade later, we finally get the book “Bioinformatics Programming Using Python” from Mitchell Model to fill the gap.

Having worked in configuration management for the last 15 years or so, I've been exposed to most of the mainstream version control systems. Recently I've been using BuildBot and found an fixed some bugs. They use the git revision control system (hosted on github), so it was time to learn something new.

This book is one of the best books I came across about Python. What I really like about the book is that whenever the author has to present some code: he immediately shows the difference between Python 2.x and Python 3.x which I think is very useful for somebody who wants to see the difference between those two versions of Python. The author also makes sure to present some code whenever he introduces a concept. I found this to be a more practical approach as it helps in driving the concept home for the reader.

This is a DVD video with an accompanying workbook and covers most of Python. While not specific to Python 2.x or 3.x, it frequently highlights differences in syntax between the two. The audio is in the informal style Wesley uses for his class presentations. There are video clips of him introducing each chapter. These are "talking head" format with some computer screens in the background. Each lesson starts with a Goals section and concludes with a Summary, reviewing what was accomplished. The bulk of the lesson is in what might look like a computer slide (Power Point) presentation, with screen shot animations as well.

My first involvement with Erlang was while I had this book as a guide. I had no significant experience with functional programming concepts or “real concurrency”. I had been disillusioned about concurrency by using Python (aka Python threads).

I was glad to hear another book on Regular Expressions was in the making, I couldn’t wait for a review copy. I have been a user of Jan Goyvaerts’ regex software tools for just over a year now even though I had often-encountered the websites authored by him, while googling for Regular Expression resources. In one of his blog entries, I came across a notice of this forthcoming book, and emailed O’Reilly that I would like to be a reviewer.

Review by Robert Field. This book has a full discussion of the Python 3 language, targeted at experienced programmers, but not requiring any previous Python knowledge. Overall, the writing is clear, the graphics and typesetting well executed, and the chapter exercises definitely reinforce the exposition.