Rating: 
Summary: web publishing according to Weird Al Yankovic
Review: How can you trust someone who is making jokes all the time? If they want to be a comedian, they should publish a comedy book like Irma Bombeck or Dave Barry. And furthermore, the jokes aren't even that funny. Most of the jokes fall into, what I term, the "facile paradox" category that is so popular with academic types. To construct a facile paradox, you take an aspect of a statement, doesn't really matter which, and take that aspect to an extreme, to the point of logical absurdity, and "hey presto!", you've got a joke, and have established yourself as a very witty person. So, reasoning by association, how can you trust serious information from someone who is 1) joking all the time, and 2) telling jokes that aren't that funny. I guess I have to concede that there is some good food for thought in this book, but you'd be better off just hacking around at random in other contexts, at least then you'd have a better chance of running into someone sincere and trustworthy.
Rating: 
Summary: Amusing, but sadly dated
Review: Greenspun writes well. He gives a good, clear explanation of web development and e-commerce. And the jokes are often funny.But - the world about which he writes no longer exists, and possibly never existed. This book is about as dated and as irrelevant now as those "how to survive the Y2K catastrophe" things that were all over the bookstores before December 31, 1999 and in the trash on January 1, 2000. I suppose, like other dotcom executives, he's writing his "what went wrong" memoirs now.
Rating:
Summary: Very insightful but not a "how to" book
Review: What our follow reader Matt Dougherty said in his review is basically very accurate, with the exception that I am leaning more towards seeing Mr. Greenspun's bloated ego (as stated himself) as his motive for writing the book rather than a profit motive. We should respect the author's boldness in airing his personal and very subjective view of what is right and wrong for the computer industry. Afterall, many great minds throughout history were very opinionated and eccentric. Whether the readers can use those points of view to their benefit is another story. If you are looking for a book that talks about the technical know-hows on how to build a web site (such as books published by O'Reilly or the ...for Dummies series), this is NOT the book you are looking for. It will provide much philosophical guidance on what a good web site, server, and program should be like based on the author's baised views. Although very insightful in many respect, his suggestions could be too narrow for most reader's needs. The writing is also about subjects that require very mixed levels of expertise on the reader's part. Some part of it is for novices and will drive a guru to sleep, while some will require very specialized technical background to understand.
It will be interesting to know if someone could spend the time to check how many times the word "MIT" appears in this book. When the author mentioned that the world believes Microsoft products are excellent because of the many impressions advertisement made, I went to sleep believing that MIT is THE only university that is worth attending. The author denounced the book "Creating Killer Web Sites" and many graphic artists by saying that too much unnecessary graphic on the web is meaningless to the users while his book is full of meaningless photos (that he took) and using excessively heavy paper normally reserved for printing books on arts. My point is that he is not doing what he preaches, which makes him no better than the "losers" (the Microsoft programmers) he refers to.
In summary, you will gain a few excellent insights about building web sites. You will find a lot of wasted time reading about the author's self-promotion including but not limited to the numerous mediocre photos he took. Good reading if you do it on the Internet through his web site, but a waste of $40 if you are buying the book.
Rating:
Summary: Horrible. Don't fall for the egotistical propaganda.
Review: On the surface this looks like a cool book. It's an easy read. It has lots of colorful pictures. Most of the stuff that Adolph...I mean Philip says makes sense. Then you realize what this book is really about...Philip making money. Everything that he writes points you back to having to use his ACS system. He is SO anti-boxed-software that it's not even funny. Everything that he says that his ACS can do, other back-end systems can do too. Thousands of sites around the world do it withOUT using the ACS. He wants you to believe that the ONLY way to get a solid database driven web site is to use the ACS. That is just not true. Companies get sucked in by all of the neat features of his system that they don't stop to think about the future.... The only people on earth who can manage that system are people who work for HIS company. There are maybe 4 or 5 people outside that company who know how to use it. So, if you start using their system and realize that they are charging you too much money (which they will) you are S.O.L. because there is no one on earth that you can hire to be your developer/programmer. If you had used a back-end that the rest of the world knows and understands there would be no problem. This book is just a tool to suck you in to his company and then trap you into using his software. Avoid this book and avoid the company. There are dozens of better books out there explaining this topic withOUT as much ego. The fact that the guy wasted space in the book and made you pay for extra pages and high-quality color printing so you can see his photos should tell you something. If I wanted a photography book I would have bought one. This man thinks he's God and should be avoided at all costs.
Rating: 
Summary: Web savvy, uncommon sense... and funny too.
Review: One of the few technical books that has made me, at times, laugh out loud. For all the right reasons. The book covers essential understanding for building useful web sites. The author gives working examples from his own code base, which may be unusual to some (AOLServer/Tcl in particular), but the principles are independent of the code: they are universal, and the software is available with a little effort but no money. Dr. Greenspun writes with purpose, drama, a biting wit, high intelligence and above all a desire to communicate what he knows for the benefit of others. Available online, but beautiful in print. The one web book I recommend buying.
Rating: 
Summary: I like this book.
Review: This year I used this book as the sole reader for a group of graduate students engaging in web design. We read it over the course of 6 months, with each chapter roughly syncing with a phase in our design. The chapters are relevant to design for business, but they're sufficiently general that we could use it as a text for designing an academic site. When the site goes live I hope the wisdom contained in Philip's book will be manifest in its (the site's) pages.
Rating: 
Summary: oracle/tcl/aolserver/acs
Review: na
Rating:
Summary: Laugh and Learn
Review: This book was fun to read, and, it really opened my eyes to a lot of important issues in the "e" world. Philip provides a unique historical perspective with attitude. The irreverent observations and comments about popular myths that are currently worshipped as TRUTH in the business community's dealings with "high" tech vendors allow readers to laugh their way to significant insights. I will never look at an application, web site or database in the same way again. I have been inspired to learn more about databases and look forward to implementing a database as an internal service in the company I work for.
Rating:
Summary: On the Button
Review: This really is a superb book. I've been a developer for over ten years and now manage a small company. Around here, it's not so much that the letter of Greenspun's book is law, but it gets pretty close. It's such a relief to find a book about web development, technology and technologists that is based on those rare and elusive things, experience and common sense. You'll find great insights here into software development as a whole, the world of technology and technologists, the principles of good web site construction, and so on. And all of it is supported by something unusual in the world of the web; a humane and literate world view. By comparison, most other books on the subject are either get rich quick scams, marketing hype, sales pitches for particular products, or just plain ill-informed. Congratulations then to Philip Greenspun, and thanks for proving that level-headed opinions and an understanding of technology and technologists, while still 'as rare as rocking horse crap', can nevertheless find a voice among the hype. Oh, I forgot to mention the beautiful photographs. Forgive me.
Rating:
Summary: A Web book with an attitude
Review: Most Web related books are big and useless, with a little technical information and lots of filler. Philip Greenspun's book is refreshingly different. It covers a lot of what you need for building websites, but it isn't a complete reference on HTML, Tcl or any given tool. It's rather a discussion of how the web can be best used. Greenspun's insight is that to have a really interactive and useful website you need to build it on a database. What the book teaches is how to link web and database in a meaningful way. But there is more to the book than that. It is also a pithy critique on the software industry, and this is actually what I enjoyed most. Greenspun will tell you that anyone with a brain will use the Emacs editor, that copyright law is killing software. He will tell you that C and C++ memory allocation is responsible for most bad software, that Common Lisp should reign, that managers spend too much money on shaky software tools and too little on good programmers. His opinions are well argumented and his picture of a possible brighter future is very appealing. As a nice plus, the book is sprinkled with beautiful photographs and is printed on thick satin paper. Buy it to think about the web, to watch the pictures, and to be annoyed and enlightened by Greenspun.
|
