Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Review – Windows PowerShell 3.0 Step by Step” by Ed Wilson;O’Reilly Media, Inc.

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Today I will talk about a book  titled  ” Windows PowerShell 3.0 Step by Step” by Ed Wilson;O’Reilly Media, Inc.

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When I first heard that Ed Wilson is writing a book on Windows PowerShell I was greatly excited. I am a great fan of PowerShell and by all means Ed is the right person to write a book on it.

I am a great fan of his blog http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/ too.

My rating for this book is a full five !

stars

I consider this book as my PowerShell Bible, and its been always a reference guide for me since I started reading it for the first time.

First of this book talks about the latest version of PowerShell,ie 3.0.  The book is well organized into 3 sections.

First section talks about Windows PowerShell overview and its fundamental role.

Second section covers Windows PowerShell scripting.

Third section covers specific applications such as AD, Exchange etc.

There are very clear instructions to find your best starting point for this book, however if you are really new to PowerShell, then reading the whole book is definitely recommended.

Whole lot of good exercises are made available at the end of each chapter which will ensure that you learn the concepts really well.

When I started reading the initial chapters I was wowed by the amount of tips/tricks provided by the author for his readers. There is a PowerShell script which is provided for every tip which can be leveraged by the reader for his/her use. These tips/tricks are always useful for users who started of with PowerShell recently and also it will come handy for expert users.

Example – Chapter 1 talks about a script which will add both the Windows PowerShell ISE and the Windows PowerShell console to both the Start screen and the taskbar on Windows 8.

There are plenty of tips available in the book which will be well appreciated by both beginners and experts.

Here is a quick glance of what each chapter talks about –

Chapter 1  – Empowers the reader to get started with PowerShell and explains a great deal of information on how sufficient help can be obtained for cmdlets.

Chapter 2 – Talks a great deal about cmdlets(The heart and soul of PowerShell).

Chapter 3– The focus of this chapter is on Power Shell providers. There is great amount of details available in this chapter.

Chapter 4 – This is one of my favorite chapter of this book. This chapter talks about capability of PowerShell to do remote connections and run commands for a remote system.

Chapter 5 – Is all about scripting. There are lot of real world examples and that’s the beauty of this book.

Chapter 6,7– All about functions and modules.

Chapter 8 –  Great amount of changes was happened for PowerShell ISE in 3.0(Integrated Scripting Engine) and this chapter deep dives into ISE.

Chapter 9 – I consider this chapter very important. This chapter talks about Profiles and trust me, there are a lot of good examples provided.

Chapter 10,11,12 and 13 – Great resource for learning WMI. Again one of my favorite chapters and anytime reference point.

Chapter 14 – Talks about CMI Cmdlets.

Chapter 15,16 and 17  – If you are a Windows Admin,then you just cant afford to miss reading these chapters. These chapters provide you with great deal of information on managing AD(Active Directory) with PowerShell.

Chapter 18 and 19 – Talks about debugging scripts and handling errors. Great resource to ensure that PowerShell scripts are error free.

Chapter 20 – Focuses on Exchange administration.

Where can you download this book

You can download the book from  http://oreilly.com/ and do a search using the title or you access here to get you routed directly to this book.

Print ISBN:

978-0-7356-6339-8 | ISBN 10: 0-7356-6339-4

Ebook ISBN:

978-0-7356-6337-4| ISBN 10: 0-7356-6337-8

Conclusion

This book by all means is worth every penny and any IT professional would love to get a copy of this book and maintain it as a reference.

Thanks for reading and keep watching this space for more.

Book Review – SQL Server Hardware by Glenn Berry

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I’m really happy and excited to write my first book review. I just completed reading the wonderful book  SQL Server Hardware written by deep SQL Server Technical Expert Glenn Berry(B/T)

I will rate this book with 

I am pretty confident to say that this book will make you “a better DBA/Consultant“.

Glenn with his deep technical experience structured the book really well, and it’s worth reading each and every page of this book. Trust me, you will love it!

What this book is all about – 

In simple words, this book will help you setup SQL Server environments with great confidence.

Setting up highly reliable, highly performing environments are never an easy task and by reading this book, you will be better equipped to deal with multiple decision making situations.

There is a great amount of chance that the person a senior DBA will be responsible for making the decision of selecting the best hardware to run SQL Server workloads in most of the environments. He/She should be having thorough knowledge about the workload which can be expected to run on the new system, and based up on these facts the CPU/Memory/IO decisions needs to be made.

Within CPU category the DBA has to further decide on the no of sockets,cores,threads etc.When it comes to IO,there are lot of other factors which needs to be decided like which RAID level should be used etc.There are lot of factors which needs to be considered for Memory too.

The DBA who makes the decision of selecting the hardware should be aware of the latest trends in processor/memory/IO technology and should be able to bench mark them with confidence. Lacking the hardware related knowledge can often stress out the person and can often force confusion on what to select from a greater set of available options in the market.

This book will help that person who is going to select the best possible hardware to run SQL Server workloads.

The best part of this book is that it not only covers the hardware portion of SQL Server,but it also covers some great and exciting areas like Selecting the best Operating System,Tuning the OS,SQL Server versions,editions, comparisons,patching,instance level/database level configurations etc.

A quick glance of the chapters included in this book is mentioned below –

1. The first chapter explains the hardware fundamentals.

2. This chapter deals with the storage subsystem.

3. This chapter was something really new and exciting to me and it deals with database and hardware benchmarking.

4. Deals with hardware investigation tools.

5. Explains Windows OS editions and benefits of running the correct version for SQL Server workloads.

6. Deals with SQL Server editions and versions.

7. Explains installation, configuration of SQL Server for optimum performance.

You can get this book from Amazon and they offer both Kindle and Paperback options.

http://www.amazon.com/SQL-Server-Hardware-Glenn-Berry/dp/1906434638

Conclusion

This book gave me lot of confidence and I would recommend this as a ‘Must Read’.I would like to convey my sincere thanks to Glenn for writing such a valuable book and helping the SQL Server Community.

SQL Server MVP Deep Dives,Vol 2

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Finally I got hold of the much awaited SQL Server MVP Deep Dives 2.I had pre-ordered this book before PASS 2011 to ensure my copy.

Top quality material delivered by the best SQL Server minds.Hats off to all the 64 MVP’s who contributed for this book.

Most important part is the authors of this book support the children of Operation Smile(http://www.operationsmile.org/).Operation Smile is an international children’s medical charity that heals children’s smiles, forever changing their lives.