Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef

Did not read this book in details, basically going through the first 4 chapters and briefly glanced through the rest of the chapter. My primary objective is to compare Chef's features with Puppet's. Maybe because i learned Puppet first, i found that Puppet's syntax is easier to memorize, but the cookbook and recipe features of Chef is very useful for a sysadmin beginning his / her career, and mixing with Ruby code is also a welcome feature. Did not really read the TDD and BDD that book is trying to focus with Chef, maybe some other days when got more time can revisit this.

Link: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030973.do

Online Course: Introduction to 2D Game Programming with XNA

This course is very similar to the MonoGame course I read, albeit providing a bit more on how to manipulate in the game such as sprite sheet and animation as well as a more feature game (instead of the simple pong game in MonoGame course), but since sprite sheet concept and other stuffs taught in the course, i have already used these features and logics in my own MonoGame app before being taught there, there is really no much to learn in this course for me.

Link: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/xna

Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide

Very easy to follow book on Puppet, I managed to learns some key concepts of puppet such as package (install software package and versioning), service (manage services), file (check file exists and create files, etc), exec (running commands), user (create user and user access control and ssl), template (create template files in erb files for adaptive configuration), cron (scheduling), class, modules, nodes and import (puppet files structuring) and the very nice Facter tool from Puppet

Link: https://www.packtpub.com/networking-and-servers/puppet-3-beginner%E2%80%99s-guide

Online Course: Raspberry Pi for Developers

I was recently taking this online course to refresh my knowledge on Raspberry Pi and Python, the course is nice albeit focusing on the simple and basic stuff (actually this was what exactly i looked for in taking the course). While course is simple, it talks about how to GUI remote access the raspbian os running in the raspberry pi using tightvncserver (actually just linux standard GUI remote access), how to install wiringPi, how to work with RPi.GPIO to control the GPIO pins on the raspberry pi, and other nice tips such as audio playing using pyaudo and wave (needs to have external audio card with raspberry pi), how to set up nginx server and node.js (standard just like most set up on linux)

Link: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/raspberry-pi-for-developers

Online Course: Cross Platform Game Development with MonoGame

Pick up this course because I need to quickly write a simple simulator of some animals doing crowd simulation using C# that will run in mobile, Unity 3D seems to be the option but its 2D features seems to have a steeper learning curve than MonoGame, therefore i picked the MonoGame (open source alternative to XNA that supports cross platform including mobiles). The course is quite simple, in fact the pong game used as demo in the course is next to nothing compared to the kind of games I built in the past, but it turns out to be quite a pleasure to learn MonoGame by watching the course.

Link: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/monogame

Online Course: Unit Testing In Java With JUnit

Just completes this course to upgrade my knowledge in JUnit, very nice and easy to follow, apart from learning about the advanced features in JUnit just as matchers, theory, suite, categories, rule, parameterized test, the course enriches me by providing information on how to using JUnit with Ant, maven, as well as code coverage tools such as ECLEmma (directly installed by eclipse) and Cobertura (when used with CI tool such as jenkins), Continuous testing tool such as infinitest, mockup tool such as jMock, (Not sure whether it is the google voice issue, though, the example given for google voice as dependency in unit testing seems to get into problem producing error message such as "https://www.google.com/voice/b/0/settings/tab/phones - Unauthorized") as well as Selenium for web test automation)

link: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/java-unit-testing-junit

Online Course: Getting Started with Jenkins Continuous Integration

Just completed the online course "Getting Started with Jenkins Continuous Integration", it is very simple to follow and perfect for beginners who want to use Jenkins for CI. One thing though, user can ski the section 3 and jump to section 4 on plugins to learn how to set up MSBuild and MSTests plugin properly if they want to follow section 3 on hands-on, otherwise, might waste some time trying to figure out why builds failed even though the plugins have been installed.

Link: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/jenkins-introduction

The Docker Book

Bought this book to learn docker, totally worth the money. Just completed reading it and was already able to experiment the results on AWS EC2.

Link: http://www.dockerbook.com/

Online Course: Introduction to SVN

Just completes the online course "Introduction to SVN", I should say this concise course is much better than reading a book which makes you tire by forcing you to read nonessential features that are difficult to remember.

Link: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/intro-to-svn

Online Course: Text Retrieval and Search Engines

Very nice to course to learn how to implement search engine. Thanks to the course, I was able to build a basic search engine in C# having features introduced in the course such as:

Ranking Functions:
  -- BM25, Pivoted Length Normalization for Vector Space Model (IDF, TF transformation, doc length normaliation)
  -- JM and Dirichlet Prior Smoothing for Language model based query likelihood
  -- PageRank and HITS from Link Analysis

Feedback Functions:
  -- Rochhio algorithm with implicit feedback for VSM
  -- KL divergence model for LM

Inverted Indexing and Map-reduce

Web-crawler:
  -- breadth-first search, parallel, focused search

Link: https://www.coursera.org/course/textretrieval

Concepts & Applications of Inferential Statistics

Very nice text book on inferential statistics, teach with easy-to-understand examples. I was able to implement the ANCOVA and two-way ANOVA in C# based on the explanation given there.

http://vassarstats.net/textbook/

Online Course: R Programming

Very easy-to-follow and concise course on R Programming, take me around a day to view all the lecture videos and practice in R while following the videos (I liked Dr. Roger Peng's pace as well as the selective inclusions of R features in the course materials, most of the book on R out there try to cover too much and only ends up making the books more like a desktop reference or instruction manual for R). I particularly likes the parts covering the explanation on the usage of lapply, sapply, apply, mapply, sapply and split, as well as the parts covering the subsetting of vector, list, matrix, and data frame, which in the past it is a bit confusing for me

https://class.coursera.org/rprog-013

Online Course: Data Analytics and Inference Statistics

Very nice course for statistics introduction, Dr. Mine Centinkaya gives very easy-to-understand and concise explanations for many basic concepts such as probability tree, bayes rule, CLT, confidence interval, hypothesis testing, chi square independence and GOF testing, distributions such as t distribution (used for when CLT does not hold for small samples), f statistics and ANOVA. The course is still continuing but i could not wait for the availability of the videos for the last two weeks and ends up reading the companion book "OpenIntro Statistics" (the last two chapters more on linear/logistic regression as well as related statistics such as predictor correlation, predictor coefficient confidence interval, R^2, residuals as useful tools such as backward elimination and forward model selection using p-value and R^2)

https://class.coursera.org/statistics-003

OpenIntro Statistics

Very nice book to start learning inferential statistics, very concise and contains a lot of examples. The book is freely downloadable from:

https://www.openintro.org/stat/textbook.php?stat_book=os

You will be able to get a clear explanations of concepts such as central limit theorem, confidence interval, standard error, hypothesis testing (for continuous, categorical variables), Chi square GOF and independence test, normal/t/f statistics, bootstrapping, ANOVA, multiple comparisons, regression model selection (forward, backward model selection).