I came across some tantalizing prospects I would like to buy and thought I would pass them on to the list.
Wicked Cool Shell Scripts by Dave Taylor This book covers ~100 shell scripts. Many of them quite useful. The author pays attention to OS specific nuances. There is good coverage of shell scripting on Mac OS X. LinuxWorld Magazine voted this book the Best Shell Script Programming Book of 2004 The Amazon readers gave this a 4 star rating. Data Crunching by Greg Wilson This book covers data manipulation techniques in Java and Python. I looked at it in the local Borders here. It had very clear explanations of XSLT and XML. I was impressed Avg. Amazon rating: 4 and 1/2 stars How to Break Software: A Practical Guide to Testing by James A. Whittaker Testing Computer Software, 2nd Edition by Cem Kaner, et al I looked through the Whitaker book and it had, what I thought were, a lot of good black box testing routines. Robert would love this as it has many memory and disk filling techniques. One of the amazon reviewers derided it as simplistic and "recommend it to all Fat Client testers using MS products". The book covers these attacks for user interfaces: * Apply inputs that force all the error messages to occur. * Apply inputs that force the software to establish default values. * Explore allowable character sets and data types. * Overflow input buffers. * Find inputs that may interact and test combinations of their values. * Repeat the same input or series of inputs numerous times. * Force different outputs to be generated for each input. * Force invalid outputs to be generated. * Force properties of an output to change. * Force the screen to refresh. * Apply inputs using a variety of initial conditions. * Force a data structure to store too many or too few values. * Investigate alternate ways to modify internal data constraints. * Experiment with invalid operand and operator combinations. * Force a function to call itself recursively. * Force computation results to be too large or too small. * Find features that share data or interact poorly. (this is copied from one of the Amazon reviews) I did peruse the book and it seemed to have some interesting tests. The Cem Kaner book is highly regarded but written from the standpoint of professional testers, who work in a structured company environment. I did not get a chance to peruse this book but the table of contents had interesting entries on how to corner hard to reproduce bugs. Accelerated C++: Practical Programming by Example by Andrew Koenig, Barbara E. Moo I have this book and am actively reading it. Whether judged by technical, pedagogic or literary standards, this book is a work of high perfection. The concepts and code are explained very thoroughly. Andrew Koenig was a researcher at AT&T labs. His principal inquiries were in C++ and Object Oriented Programming. His wife, Barbara Moo, was the first person to write a compiler (FORTRAN) in a high level language (C). Previously, compilers had been written in assembler. She was also one of the architects for AT&T's Worldnet Service. Amazon rating: 4 and 1/2 stars -- Kind regards, Jonathan _______________________________________________ CWE-LUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.cwelug.org/ http://www.cwelug.org/archives/ http://www.cwelug.org/mailinglist/
