A Century of Jazz: From Blues to Bop, Swing to Hiphop - A Hundred Years of Music, Musicians, Singers and Styles

Customer Reviews:

Blue Is My Love.......2007-02-19

I bought this for myself as a 60th birthday present. I grew up listening to Benny Goodman, the Dorsey brothers and Glenn Miller since this is what my parents played on the phonograph. The first album I bought for myself was Muted Jazz by Jonah Jones who played with Cab Calloway. Jonah passed away in 2000 and I was disappointed not to find him here though he may be hiding somewhere, since there is no index. If you are like me and enjoy sitting and musing over what was, this is the book for you. The second album I bought for myself was Time Out by Dave Brubeck; a bit about him in there, but I'm not a snob like many who criticize Dave, and I loved all those old artists: Louie Bellson, Dexter Gordon, Cannonball Adderly, but I ramble.

The best thing about this book is all the great album art and statements by the artists themselves. . .and the memories.

A jazzy Book of Jazz.......2002-03-07

The medium is the message! Start with the heft of the volume. And there you have a sense of jazz's musical and historical weight on America and the world (at least Europe, and a tiny tiny sprinkling of the Latin American and Carribean...But where is the rest of the world, Carr? Say, Japan. Or isnt that jazz?).
The splahing color and gloss and newsy trivia spread all over the book can only highlight the fact that improvisation makes more beautiful and glorious not only the melody and tempo but also a historical (or book) account of jazz. Really, a century of jazz does not have to deal with the dry history, or a scholarly exposition, or even a musical theory of such an enchanting thing like jazz...About jazz? It is enough to hear its throbbing colors, see its haunting sax and mid-night whispers...and smell that ubiquitous cigarette smoke (I dont like that part really but soemtimes you cant have a choice of your uncles and aunts). Get this book for the necessary info and history, for the thrill and romance of jazz.

Century of Jazz: From Blues to Bop, Swing to Hiphop - A Hundred Years of Music, Musicians, Singers and Styles

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Century of Jazz: From Blues to Bop, Swing to Hiphop - A Hundred Years of Music, Musicians, Singers and Styles
Roy Carr
Manufacturer: Da Capo Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OSBSQS

Book Description

Even before the 1889 baseball season began, battle lines had been drawn, revels this history of 19th-century baseball. In the National League, The Players Brotherhood, led by New York Giants shortstop John Montgomery Ward, challenged the insulting classification system devised by league owners. While American Association players had no brotherhood, they proved capable of organizing impromptu responses to abusive treatment by owners. Owners battled with their players and yet struggled to control overflow crowds on weekends and holidays as both major leagues staged the closest, most exciting pennant races to that time. Americans responded by pouring into ballparks in record-setting numbers.

Customer Reviews:

The absorbing true story of baseball in general and the New York Giants in particular in the late 1800's.......2006-01-07

Baseball In 1889: Players Vs. Owners is the absorbing true story of baseball in general and the New York Giants in particular in the late 1800's, as the popularity of the sport began to take off and politicians, team owners, athletes and others vied for control over nascent leagues' power and the immense profits to be made from fans. As the stakes grew ever higher and disgruntled athletes complained about their treatment, the season became, as one sportswriter put it, something close to a Lobster-Frankenstein nightmare! Vivaciously written, Baseball In 1889 offers clean and convincing historical proof that sports feuds over money are not a recent sour development, but quite literally an intrinsic part of American history. Highly recommended.

Book Description

Ever sat down to watch your favorite TV show and thought, “How can doing this teach me how to live a better life, make the world a fairer place, define good from bad?” Mark Rowlands uses our favorite television shows to answer the great questions of philosophy. Let Buffy the Vampire Slayer make sense of the burden of responsibility, Ross and Rachel teach you about love and friendship, 24’s Jack Bauer explain the importance of justice—all ably assisted by the finest philosophical theorists who have ever lived: Nietzsche, Epicurus, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle.

Customer Reviews:

Fun and thought-provoking.......2005-04-11

A great companion to his big screen sci-fi examples in "The Philosopher at the end of the universe", Mark Rowlands turns his eye to the small screen to illustrate the inherent conflict between the 4 strands that constitute the fractured modern worldview--individualism, relativism, voluntarism and instrumentalism. Themed chapters are culled from Buffy, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Friends, 24, Seinfeld, The Simpsons and Frasier. And no worries, it makes a good read even if you've never seen some of these shows.

Customer Reviews:

Applying Testing Skills in Agile Projects.......2005-01-19

This book explains, in detail, the value of having a tester role on an XP project. Much of what is written on XP focuses on the role of developers in writing tests, and this book will help you understand the value that testing professionals can add to an XP, or other agile, project. The function of a tester changes when a team applies XP; In the spirt of lean software development, this book shows you how to apply the skills of testers in a new environment. One minor flaw in the book is that it is targeted at testers. While testers need to understand how to apply their skills to an XP environment, others such as Coaches, programmers and project managers also need to understand the value of testers.

Get this book if you are a tester, developer, coach, or project manager to understand how testers can improve your XP project.

Resolution of an apparent contradiction about testing.......2003-05-07

While I yield to no one in recognizing the value of testing software, my first reaction to reading the title of this book was one of skepticism. One of the fundamental principles of extreme programming (XP), is that the software is developed in small increments, each of which must pass a unit test before the next change is made. In fact, in many cases the unit test is written by the developers before they write the code. These incremental tests are also carried out by the two-person coding team, so it seemed strange to be reading about testing XP. From the title and blurbs on the covers, it was a natural assumption that the focus would be on testing other than that done by the development teams.
After reading the book, that skepticism has largely gone, although I do possess some residual doubts about XP and how it scales. The basic point is that programmers are very good at testing their code at the unit level, but weak when asked to verify it at the system level. I agree with the authors that there should be a dedicated tester who examines the code at a level higher than the unit. However, I am also of the opinion that this is a confirmation of the doubt about XP expressed by so many observers, namely that it does not scale up to large projects well. The testers that they are proposing are more in the realm of a manager responsible for testing rather than a tester.
This is of course very sensible. Once the programmers start producing code tested at the unit level and the integration process begins, someone must be responsible for the smooth flow and testing of the integration. This is also the level where the ever-present customer, another fundamental principle of XP, really sees the functionality of the code for the first time. While XP proponents speak a great deal about having the customer at the side of the coding team, realism dictates that they will generally be restricted from that level. Only the most technically sophisticated customer will be able to glean any useful information from most of the unit tests that will be performed. This is where the additional layer of the test manager is of use. By creating and demonstrating the higher level tests, the test manager can give the customer information that they will understand and can respond to.
The authors also put forward a very controversial statement, "No manual tests. All acceptance tests on an Extreme Programming project must be automated." While I am in general agreement with the principle that tests should be automated for easy repetition at each level, the reality is that nearly every use of words such as { "no", "never", "all"} is too extreme. Especially when you are describing something as subjective as the behavior of computer programs and the human response to them. How one can automate the response of a customer to the appearance of a GUI interface is something I do not yet understand, and this is mentioned, but not examined in the book.
One very positive aspect of the book is the exercises at the end of the chapters, and the authors do the very commendable thing and provide solutions at the end. After years of frustration with math and computer books that list exercises but avoid solutions, any book where they are included must be given a higher rating.
After reading this book, my confidence in the value of XP has increased, ironically because one of the fundamental weaknesses is examined with an explanation of how to overcome it. The uber-tester is a concession to the problems of scaling, and the inclusion of such individuals will definitely make the development process run smoother. If you are going to use XP and your project is of any size, then you should read this book.

Published in the online Journal of Object Technology, reprinted with permission.

Rave Review for "Testing Extreme Programming".......2002-12-02

What a great book on Testing in the Xtreme Programming Environment! I expect this book to become the Bible for test engineers and customers who are engaged in formal testing on an Xtreme Programming project. Lisa and Tip walk us through some introductory theory, and then provide a detailed case-study to illustrate their methods. Though appearing somewhat complex to a non-programmer, their chapters 21 through 25 show the important principles of how to automate your acceptance test.
Though I haven't yet had the experience of working on an Xtreme Programming project, I do have 30 years of hardware, systems, and software testing experience. Prior to reading this book, I read Kent Beck's "eXtreme Programming eXplained", so I had an introduction to Xtreme Programming.
Once again, this is a great book. My welcome to 2 new authors; I hope we see more books from them in the future.

Extreme programming from the tester's perspective.......2002-11-21

This book is a professional tester's perspective of being involved into an XP project. The book will invigorate the testers who never worked in XP environment to start doing this practice. The book starts with an introductory overview on XP, which is self-contained and should be easily understood by any tester, unless he or she has prejudices against XP. This introduction is helpful for those who inherently would like to use XP. The skeptical readers should first take attention to Kent Beck's "Extreme Programming Explained".

For those who don't like to imagine of someone in the tester "role" on an XP project, the authors encourage to think of having a programmer with a "tester focus". The authors define the tester role to fill the communication gap between the user and the programmers.

For those who are already practicing XP, this book should be a good repetition of the core XP practices. If you like to refresh in memory the essential aspects of XP, read this book. The authors give their own vantage point on XP, which compliments the original Kent Beck's idea.

This book also contains the introduction to some automated test tools like JUnit (a testing framework for Java) or JWebArt (an HTTP-based web testing tool). However, the JUnit introduction given in this book won't help great deal to the C++ programmers, because the CppUnit, the C++ testing framework, have sufficient differences from JUnit. What the XP community who work with C++ really miss at the date of publication of this book is a good CppUnit manual.

The book also have essential focus on story estimation and iteration planning, from the tester's perspective. However, from the programmer's point of view, this book contain very few useful ideas. The programmers might want to refer to Ron Jeffries' "Extreme Programming Installed" for some useful testing strategies, tips and tricks.

An excellent book--for programmers, managers and testers.......2002-11-02

This book is fantastic. I'm only a tester to the extent that everyone doing XP is a tester but I found many valuable things in this book. There are excellent chapters about how to estimate and plan releases and iterations, including excellent tips on finding hidden assumptions in your stories. I like the book so much that I just bought a copy for a tester who works for me and told him to go home, read it, and not come back until he has so that we can discuss how to put some of the book's advice into practice. Everyone working on an agile project (not just XP and not just testers) will benefit from this book. It is one of the best-written and most useful in the entire series.

Average customer rating:

Great intro and overview if that's what you're looking for
Excellent book, explains the core of testing frameworks
A keeper
A really useful book
njbulitka

Unit Test Frameworks
Paul Hamill
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0596006896

Book Description

Unit test frameworks are a key element of popular development methodologies such as eXtreme Programming (XP) and Agile Development. But unit testing has moved far beyond eXtreme Programming; it is now common in many different types of application development. Unit tests help ensure low-level code correctness, reduce software development cycle time, improve developer productivity, and produce more robust software. Until now, there was little documentation available on unit testing, and most sources addressed specific frameworks and specific languages, rather than explaining the use of unit testing as a language-independent, standalone development methodology. This invaluable new book covers the theory and background of unit test frameworks, offers step-by-step instruction in basic unit test development, provides useful code examples in both Java and C++, and includes details on some of the most commonly used frameworks today from the XUnit family, including JUnit for Java, CppUnit for C++, and NUnit for .NET. Unit Test Frameworks includes clear, concise, and detailed descriptions of:

The theory and design of unit test frameworks
Examples of unit tests and frameworks
Different types of unit tests
Popular unit test frameworks
And more

It also includes the complete source code for CppUnit for C++, and NUnit for .NET.

Customer Reviews:

Great intro and overview if that's what you're looking for.......2005-10-27

I had used JUnit for several years before picking up this book and I like to think that I know the tool pretty well. So why did I decide to read this book? I read this book because I thought that might help me venture a bit outside my familiar JUnit turf and into doing test-first programming with languages other than Java. The short version? A very nice introduction to all the included xUnit ports. The long version? Read on.

The first four chapters are general introduction to the topic of unit testing (and to some degree, test-driven development). I was prepared to do a quick scan through them all but ended up reading chapters 3 (xUnit architecture) and 4 (writing unit tests) almost word to word-the topic was mostly familiar but the authors solid writing kind of kept me going.

The first two chapters didn't pique my interest that much, perhaps because I had already seen people develop a unit test framework from scratch as an introduction to the domain.

The real meat of the book that I was looking forward to was in chapters 7 through 9, the introductions to CppUnit, NUnit, PyUnit-which were mostly new to me although I had done very little fooling around with them before. I wasn't disappointed. The author managed to put together a pretty good set of tutorials for these frameworks. Obviously the same information is available online but I still prefer reading a treekiller rather than a printout of a web page.

The not so bright spots in the book, in my opinion, were the chapters on unit testing a Swing GUI and on XMLUnit. Not that they were in anyway badly written. I just felt like they didn't belong. I would've personally swapped in a couple of additional xUnit ports instead (Ruby and PHP, for example).

This is definitely not a book you'll carry with you from project to project. There's approximately 100 pages of substance split among half a dozen topics so none of them gets covered in detail. The rest, almost 100 pages of the book is what I'd classify as "nice to have"-I don't mind having that material in the book but I also wouldn't have minded if they'd left them out.

To summarize, if you'd like to get an idea of how the unit testing frameworks on different platforms/languages differ and what they have in common, this is as good an introduction to them as any and well written in all dimensions. However, you might be disappointed if you're looking for a more long-lasting companion.

Excellent book, explains the core of testing frameworks.......2005-05-27

I have been using JUnit for unit testing on Java for quite a while and I have also been exposed to other testing frameworks, but had never looked under the hood is such detail as Paul does in this book.

He starts with a good overview of what a unit test framework and then takes us to a very nice tutorial on building your own unit test framework from scratch. This exercise is very well documented and you learn the basic principles behind a unit test framework while building a simple application and the unit tests required to test it.

After laying out the foundation, he goes on to explain in more detail how to write unit tests, how to use assertions, how to deal and test exceptions and expected errors, how to test protected behavior, how to organize your project for testing and using more advanced techniques like mock objects and performance testing.

He also includes a chapter that deals with testing GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) which is a challenging task, but he offers good ideas for doing test driven development for a GUI to the application that we have been building during the previous chapters.

After all the basic concepts have been covered, the next chapters are dedicated to the most important (or more popular) unit test frameworks which are JUnit for Java, CppUnit for C++, NUnit for C# on .NET, PyUnit for Python and XMLUnit for XML documents. It is interesting to note that throughout the book the author uses the same application for the example code, so that we can compare the actual implementation of the tests using the different frameworks.

In the appendices, there is a C++ version of the simple Java framework that was built on chapter 2 and there are also summaries of the class reference documentation for JUnit and CppUnit.

Overall I think it is a very solid book with good examples and very concise content. Even though it doesn't cover all the unit test frameworks that exist today, I think it covers the most important ones, but the real gem is on the in-depth analysis of what makes a unit test framework.

If you are already familiar with one or more unit test frameworks, this book will give you a deeper understanding of them, and if you are still programming without writing unit tests... shame on you ;-)... buy this book and learn how simple it is to have a very good unit testing framework, no matter what language you use.

A keeper.......2005-05-11

This is a very solid, no-nonsense introduction to unit test framework.

For a 200 page book, this one is packed with carefully chosen information, detailed enough for new comers to start unit testing, useful enough for a frequently-visited reference, and at the same time concise enough for anyone to get an overview of the unit test landscape.

A really useful book.......2005-05-01

I have put off writing a review of this book because I had very mixed feelings. On the plus side, it is a very clear concise guide to unit testing - a great introduction.

On the negative side, I figured that any decent programmer already knows what's covered here. Even those who don't write unit tests (bad programmer, bad) knows what they are and how to do it.

Then I was stuck on how to unit test in a particular case and the author email me - look on page 37. And there it was.

So, if you are learning to program - GET THIS BOOK. No one will hire you unless you know this. If you're an experienced programmer, it can still teach you a thing or two.

- dave thielen

ps - the author is a friend of mine and that did cause me to round up my 4.5 rating.

njbulitka.......2005-04-15

I found this book to be a little on the thin side in terms of detail. I was hoping for a more detailed treatment of unit testing in general, and the various Frameworks available. For an introduction/detailed treatment of unit testing, you want to get another text. For an overview of various types of unit test frameworks, this book is OK.

Software Process Improvement: 12th European Conference, EuroSPI 2005, Budapest, Hungary, November 9-11, 2005, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

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Software Process Improvement: 12th European Conference, EuroSPI 2005, Budapest, Hungary, November 9-11, 2005, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Programming | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 3540302867

Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceeding of the 12th European Software Process Improvement Conference, EuroSPI 2005, held in Budapest, Hungary in November 2005.

The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agile methods and software issues, spi studies, improvement methods, quality and knowledge management, as well as engineering and development.

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Software Quality - ECSQ 2002

Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 3540437495

Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Software Quality, ECSQ 2002, held in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2002.The 31 revised full papers presented together with seven abstracts of invited presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 technical and experience-based paper submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on quality at Web, requirements engineering and QA, process improvement experience, risk and cost management, personal software process, partnering for quality, defect management, the COTS market, XP and/or maturity, new approaches to testing, and effective inspection.

Test Driven: TDD and Acceptance TDD for Java Developers

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Test Driven: TDD and Acceptance TDD for Java Developers
Lasse Koskela
Manufacturer: Manning Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 1932394850

Book Description

In test driven development, you first write an executable test of what your application code must do. Only then do you write the code itself and, with the test spurring you on, you improve your design. In acceptance test driven development (ATDD), you use the same technique to implement product features, benefiting from iterative development, rapid feedback cycles, and better-defined requirements. TDD and its supporting tools and techniques lead to better software faster.

Test Driven brings under one cover practical TDD techniques distilled from several years of community experience. With examples in Java and the Java EE environment, it explores both the techniques and the mindset of TDD and ATDD. It uses carefully chosen examples to illustrate TDD tools and design patterns, not in the abstract but concretely in the context of the technologies you face at work. It is accessible to TDD beginners, and it offers effective and less well known techniques to older TDD hands.

What's Inside

Learn hands-on to test drive Java code

How to avoid common TDD adoption pitfalls

Acceptance test driven development and the Fit framework

How to test Java EE components-Servlets, JSPs, and Spring Controllers

Tough issues like multithreaded programs and data access code

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Testing Extreme Programming
Crispin Lisa
Manufacturer: ADDISON WESLEY PROF
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K2HHU4

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