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by Aaron Brady.
Original Post: Tiny Frameworks and Book Reviews
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@simonw got me all too interested in the tiny alternatives to Rails, Django and TurboGears. He pointed at Juno which led me to Sinatra (which is apparently not much of a secret, shows what happens when you don’t follow a community).
Sinatra, in particular, has a smattering of interesting little apps developed with it, of which So-Nice stood out for it’s ruthless pursuit in being small. It controls mpd and iTunes and doesn’t even include graphics for the navigation buttons (instead relying on crafty use of Unicode, something I thought was a weak spot for Ruby).
Now, on to reviews.
I’m not yet reviewing the Practical Plone 3 book Packt Publishing sent. I’m finding it basically unenjoyable, but want to finish the book so it at least has a fair chance.
One book that I have enjoyed, though I have issues with, is Pro OpenSolaris. It doesn’t hurt that it’s a topic I’m rabidly interested in at the moment.
The book is well written once you get into it, and touches on enough subjects without throwing useless information at you that you feel you’ve benefited from the authors input, and not just read a bunch of man pages.
It starts of by pitching OpenSolaris at Linux developers, something I hadn’t initially considered - and coming from a more general Unix background I somehow didn’t quite like - but actually I think it really does make sense. Certainly where I work we are quite Linux-centric and OpenSolaris is only getting interest based on the unique features it provides (SMF, ZFS, DTrace) rather than as a general purpose OS.
The author is clearly aware of this and doesn’t spend too much time covering the common ground between most Unixes and OpenSolaris, or even Solaris 9 and OpenSolaris, instead choosing the firmly focus on getting up and running with ZFS, DTrace, Zones (which I really enjoyed, as I had no previous experience of this) and a development stack of Apache, MySQL, P-language, Netbeans and Subversion.
My criticisms mainly come down to focus; a lot of the introduction is spent reassuring the reader that Solaris is like Linux. If you’ve bought the book, you’ve probably already bought into that concept - perhaps more people read the first chapter of books in bookstores than I’m giving credit for, but I thought this was given too many inches.
Further on, just like I thought that Expert Python Programming’s coverage of Mercurial was a little out of place, I think that going through using Netbeans, while largely skipping IPS, was too specific to one kind of development. Also like EPP, I think the title is inappropriate; if you’re pitching the book to convert Linux developers to Solaris developers (and not necessarily system administrators) then how is it “Pro”? The concept is very much that this is your first Solaris-oriented book.
Finally, and in a way it should be considered honest praise, the book is too short. I wanted more info and just turned the page of an interesting chapter into the appendix. I would still recommend the book (work bought it, so I’ll be haranguing other people into reading it) and in general would equally recommend looking at OpenSolaris for development and deployment.
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