Sea of Stars has been the subject of a vast amount of hype. Whether it’s sincere or astroturfed, I can’t say. However, after watching a couple reviews from respected members of the JRPG community, I decided to give it a shot. I’m glad I did, but there’s a caveat I need to apply: I effectively had to force myself to finish the game and I have no desire to complete all of the achievements.
I recently got the opportunity to take a look at Learning Heroku Postgres, a new book by Patrick Espake that seems intended to help new PostgreSQL database administrators get their data into the cloud. The chapters are short, concise, and the questionnaires at the end are a nice touch. But does it hit the mark? Almost.
Before I get too far into this review, I should point out that Heroku is a proprietary service that presents a modular deployment system for various programming languages, applications, administration, monitoring, and other related services.
There comes a time in every DBA’s life, that he needs to add functionality to his database software. To most DBAs, and indeed for most databases, this amounts to writing a few stored procedures or triggers. In extremely advanced cases, the database may provide an API for direct C-language calls. PostgreSQL however, has gone above and beyond this for several years, and have continuously made the process easier with each iteration.
As a newly minted Packt author, it makes sense that I might get a request to review one of their books from time to time. On this particular occasion, I have the opportunity to give a look at Instant PostgreSQL Starter by fellow PostgreSQL user and author Daniel K. Lyons.
I’ll be straight-forward with a giant caveat that I’m not the target audience for this booklet. I tried to read with the perspective of a new user since we’ve all been there once, but please bear with me if I break character.
As far as post-apocalyptic dystopian novels are concerned, Robert Gleason’s End of Days is unique mostly because it’s mid-apocalyptic. Some of the blurbs on the jacket proclaim Gleason as the “Dante of our age,” so it must have been worth reading. I’m not sure what kind of hyperbole inspired a comment like that, but I really hope it’s sarcasm.
That isn’t to say End of Days is bad! Far from it.
