Customer Reviews

Clouds to Code

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Chapter 1 alone is worth the purchase price. The rest of the book is the case study itself, which I consider to be icing on the cake. Jesse Liberty recounts the challenges of a real project for a real customer. I enjoyed reading about the way they tackled decisions, the order in which they did things, and the mistakes they made.

A real life case study of a real project. What is interesting about this book is that all aspects from requirement assessment up till deployment of one specific project are bundled in one book.

It is very rare that you can find a real life project completely documented in one book. This by itself makes the book valuable. The only criticism I can give is that this is a fairly small-scale project (one customer, one location). The author does reflect on this subject and does consider scalability. However, I fear that the reader gets a false impression that this project can be easily scaled up. In this respect I disagree with the impression the writer gives. Nevertheless, a brave attempt and valuable book.

By the way, some others critics have some tough criticism. To me most of them are biased. His choice of an 'all Microsoft solution' might not be yours but it is a solution! IT is not science, there is no single right way of doing things.
I am biased too, that is, I would have chosen a different architecture, design, tools, and implementation model. But that is not the point!

Most programmers tend to jump into projects with both feet and not spend the time to work all the kinks out of their thought processes. While this method occasionally works out well for simple, single-programmer projects, it certainly does not work when multiple programmers are involved!

This book was helpful to me personally by streamlining the design stages and helping push the timeframe to write code into the future AFTER a system has been fully fleshed in. This minimizes code rewites because of rashly-made design assumptions.

Finally, the book emphasizes a semi-strict discipline which cannot hurt any programmer. The ample discussion of experienced pitfalls serves as a good example of what not to do!

This book hits the nail right on the head. Filled with experienced insight, "Clouds to Code" highlights many mistakes made time and time again in software development. After the first chapter you will be hooked!

Clouds to Code is the book for anyone who's ever wondered what it's like to develop software. Get away from tutorials and into real life! Jessie gives us everything from code samples to what book he read to what tools he used. Awesome book!!

After studying OOP, I still wasn't clear on how to actually work with it. This book provided a solid example of appropriate methodology and greatly increased my confidence.

I enjoyed reading this book. After reading several academic books on OO practice, I was really none the wiser. But now I can refer to this book on how to apply all those techniques. The case study details the good, the bad, and the downright ugly parts of the development lifecycle - it's reassuring to know that someone else gets up from the keyboard thinking "have I thought of everything ? Is this design really right ??"

This book tries to cover so much ground so it is destined not to succeed in all areas. The technologies it covers are indeed all Microsoft focused/centred and the case study described serves as a vehicle for examining obstacles and how the author's team overcame them. However, the solutions given are not anything out of the ordinary and no new ground is broken - it is all common sense really or a case of back to basics. The reason I rate this with 3 stars (besides the luck of a 2.5 stars option) is because the first chapters have some basics on project management that are not described in the usual boring style found in other books/courses. The advice on e.g. how to prioritise deliverables or on planning a project is very straightforward, easy to follow and to the point. This is a very practical book but quite what audience it aims to satify remains unknown.

This book had an unusual combination of three elements:

- It was well written.

- It was interesting.

- It was useful.

I would recommend it for anyone embarking on an OO project (and have been doing so to everyone at work).

My only (slight) criticism is that it almost made it all sound too easy.

I had just completed taking a course on UML notation and was itching for a real world example of its application. This book was just what I was looking for. A must for anyone who thinks there is no such thing as a workable software development process.