Apache Maven Dependency Management

A very easy-to-understand and follow good for introducing Maven:

http://www.amazon.com/Apache-Maven-Dependency-Management-Jonathan/dp/1783283017

While most of the stuffs are basic, I get away with:

1. how to analyze dependency in Maven
2. how to create and use profile
3. how to determine which transitive dependency being taken in the project and how to exclude some of them
4. how to create a release and how to distribute maven dependency
5. how include include non-Maven standard library as dependency in a Maven project
6. how to migrate from Ant project to Maven project
7. the various maven-plugins such as exec-maven-plugin, maven-assembly-plugin, maven-install-plugin, maven-release-plugin, maven-dependency-plugin, maven-compiler-plugin.
8. What is dependency scope and how / when to use them.

Instant Drools Starter

Very-easy to understand and follow tutorial for Drools:

https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/instant-drools-starter-instant

Should get you quickly up-to-speed with java development using Drools, also not bad as a quick reference book on Drools syntax.

Elastic Search Cookbook

The book is nice and easy for someone who just starts learning ElasticSearch. Interesting reader can get the book from:

http://www.amazon.com/ElasticSearch-Cookbook-Alberto-Paro/dp/1782166629

There are some parts which i feel a bit verbose such as when explaining the installation and different ways of search, query, map, etc (which will be useful for reference anyway) as i only need to understand a subset of these command while explore the rest in the wild (e.g., http://java.dzone.com/articles/elasticsearch-java-api). While I did read through most of the materials, the book seems to me a bit week to present in a short and concise way to get someone immediately up-to-speed with working with various features of elastic search. However, coupled with a bit of online resources, it is actually quite easy to get started and toy with elastic search.

Learning Storm

Just completes the book "Learning Storm". Very nice read, interesting readers can go to the following link to buy:

https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and-business-intelligence/learning-storm

The book covers quite widely, with quite a number of ways to show how other technologies  working with Storm introduced in a easy-to-understand way such as the covering of ZooKeeper, Kafka, Hadoop, YARN, Ganglia, JMX, HBase, Redis, MySQL, etc. I especially likes the way they teach Trident, which makes it much easier to grasp the concept of Trident, and the last chapter on machine is extremely useful.

While the normal readers can read the book chapters by chapters to take a slow and full exposure. For someone like me, who always like to delve directly into practice, the best approach is actually to read the book three times, each time skipping some chapters.

During first time, the reader should go through chapter 1 to chapter 4, skipping the thrift library introduction in chapter 3, and then directly jump to chapter 8, which gives an example of log processing in Storm. With this the reader will build a level of confidence after practicing the simple cases in these chapters.

During the second time, the reader should go through chapter 5 and chapter 9 to get a good ideas of what Trident is and how Trident work, as well as how to do machine learning using Trident.

During the third time, the reader can optionally go through the thrift library in chapter 3, then go to chapter 7 which show rich tools to interact with Storm such JMX and Ganglia. Finally if there is a need for integration with Hadoop, then go to chapter 6 and some other parts in chapter 7.

Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 3D Beginner's Guide

Just completed that book, below is the link for anyone interested to buy the book:

https://www.packtpub.com/game-development/learning-c-developing-games-unity-3d-beginners-guide


The book teaches some simple programming in C#, but does provide in a succinct way how to do C# coding in Unity environment, which is suitable for my case as i know quite a lot about C# but nothing about Unity development. So in a sense the book is also good for programmers who previously know nothing about Unity IDE and wonder how to add codes to a game to modify game behavior (kind of like a teach yourself in 6 hours books on how to start code on Unity).

The first 6 chapters basically a hello-world C# tutorial, with some minor examples of:

1. how to create and attach script to game objects, how to get game object using GameObject.Find("[gameObjectId]"),

2. how to get the MonoBehavior sub-class script object attached to a game object (i.e. the class defined in a script attached in a game object) using thisScriptInstance.GetComponent<classname> (where ClassName refers to the class name of the MonoBehavior sub-class)

3. how to rotate a game object, by calling its transform.Rotate(x, y, z) method

4. How to expose a script object's variable as property in the Unity Inspector panel (by declaring the variable as public)

5. Where to add script behavior during game initialization (i.e. in the Start() method) and game update (i.e. in the Update() method) or for GUI output (i.e. in the OnGUI() method)

Chapter 7 teach about a simple design of a state machine and its implementation (as a script object derived from MonoBehavior)

Chapter 8 delves a bit more into implementation of individual state. Not much interesting stuff except the part where it shows how to use Unity API to interact with Unity engine, such as

1. add codes to pause a game scene (by settings Time.timeScale = 0) and restart again (by settings Time.timeScale=1). The Time.timeScale sets the game speed. Time.realtimeSinceStartup is another interesting property which returns the time in seconds from the start of the game.

2. Some basic Unity properties and method including:

Screen.width: width of the game screen
Screen.Height: height of the game screen.

bool GUI.Button(Rect rect, String text): create a button on the game screen, the return value can be used implement logics run when it return true (i.e. onClick) or false. Note that this method must be called inside the OnGUI() of a MonoBehavior object

bool GUI.Box(Rect rect, String text): a label on the game screen. Note that this method must be called inside the OnGUI() of a MonoBehavior object.

3. How to attach a script object to an empty game object (by selecting GameObject--&gt;Create Empty, then attach a script to it by dragging the script onto the create empty game object in the Unity Hierarchy panel). This is good for, e.g., when building a Unity scene of a GUI panel for game settings and configuration.

4. How to implement logic in the MonoBehavior.Awake() method override to persists an object across multiple scenes (via static member variable and DontDestroyOnload(this.gameObject) and DestroyImmeidate(this.gameObject))

5. How to switch between different scenes using Application.LoadLevel("[sceneName]") (all scenes must be in the "Scenes In Build" accessed via File--&gt;Build Settings)

While the first 8 chapters to most C# programmers is not worth much except for some of the stuffs mentioned above.

By the way, Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 is worth some reading for Unity programming using C#

Getting Started with Storm

Just completed reading the "Getting Started with Storm" book, I will say this is one of the easiest-to-follow books I have read, yet it provides good basic understanding of working with Storm, a distributed system for processing streaming data. A good read, totally recommended for someone interested in learning Storm.

http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Storm-Jonathan-Leibiusky/dp/1449324010