eBook(lets) from O’Reilly

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by mp3monster in Books, General, Technology

Tags

architecture, Big Data, booklet, books, creative commons, Design, development, ebook, ebooks, free, open books, oreilly, vJUG

I received an email through the virtual Java User Group highlighting the availability of a couple of eBooks around Java published by O’Reilly. The details are below. The books are more booklets (nothing wrong with that). The key difference being that they are shorter and focused on one or two focused subjects (in this case Java 8’s Lambda’s & Streams) which is great because I don’t want a whole Java book again, I just want to get a handle on the key changes and language innovations. It is worth highlighting that these aren’t just ‘free chapters’ which is what you see happen sometimes as the goal of the book is described, doesn’t depend on prior chapters to work the illustrated material and structured with the appropriate cover material contents, index etc so works as a discrete entity.

This approach seems to be coming more common at O’Reilly at least as a marketing device, and we have seen this being done with the Dummies brand where the booklets have then been printed as conference give aways.

Some may argue that this is a reflection of our ever shortening attention span with books. This maybe the case for some, but I suspect it is more about providing some that is more digestible than a ‘free chapter’, but more importantly reflects the recognition that for books that are providing guides (as opposed to reference books – which I’d include patterns books) people don’t want to buy a latest edition of a book where the 1st chapters are exactly the same as the previous edition of the book and that the only significant change is a new section on Lambdas for example.

Any way the latest book details received are:

Introducing Java 8

by Raoul-Gabriel Urma

Offers a practical tutorial to some of the core Java 8 features and gets you programming quickly with Java 8.

Object Oriented vs Functional Programming

by Richard Warburton

Explains the similarities and differences between functional programming and object oriented programming with Java focused examples.

http://insightfullogic.com
@RichardWarburto

The other book(lets) that have drawn my attention to the trend include:

In addition to these Book(let)s O’Reilly offer a range of ‘reports’ such as:

Mapping Big Data, Evaluating Machine Learning Models, Data Driven (the full range can be seen at Free Data Reports)
Open by Design
Design for Voice Interfaces (Siri, Cortana etc)

In addition O’Reilly have a page on ‘Open Books’ (here) – covering significant texts O’Reilly have had some involvement in but published under licenses such as Create Commons.

[18-01-16 Update] New booklet added for Modern Java Script
[13-03-16 Update] New booklet Continuous Delivery With Windows and Dot Net
[14-03-16 Update] New booklet Modern Java EE Design Patterns
[13-08-16 Update] New booklet Release Engineering How Google Builds and Delivers Software and Functional Programming in Python
[16-09-16 Update] new booklet
- 20 Python Libraries You Aren’t Using (But Should)
[19-09-16 Update] New Booklet Monitoring Distributed Systems
[28-09-16]New Booklet Little Book of HTML/CSS Frameworks

Open World – Key Messages

22 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by mp3monster in Cloud, General, Oracle, Technology

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As Oracle Open World comes to a close. What are the big take homes? Well I have to admit to not having been at OOW phyiscally this year, but tracking things from the UK. That sais from this vantage point …

2nd Generation IaaS. The announcements on the evolution of Oracle’s offfering bring some significant steps forward with multi data centre resilience within each region /geographical area. What isn’t clear is whether the resilience will be OOTB on all services, or a cost add at the IaaS and some of the PaaS services. But for SaaS I’d be expecting it to be part of the offering. Below are a couple of screen grabs from Thomas Kurian’s keynote to help convey the details …

Regions Around the World

Regions Highly Permant Linkage

Illustrative details of Data Centre nodes

IaaS Hardware and Platform Supported

The 2Gen IaaS is interesting because previously Oracle have underplayed the IaaS offering on the basis that it had been necessary to help pitch PaaS and SaaS. But this year with the new generation there seems to be a fair bit of detail on the IaaS make up to help convey and provide clarity of a robust underpinning in capacity, capability, power and security. Which aside from help sell more IaaS it should help reinforce the messaging on the higher order offerings about foundation strength.

The IaaS message also makes it easier to convey the message that Oracle cloud doesn’t have to mean Oracle software – it is just as capable with OpenSource tech. This had felt a little niche with the Java cloud services. It certainly appears that Oracle wants to take the fight if not to AWS certainly with Azure, Rackspace etc

Following this IaaS message is the cloud in your own data centre. Which addresses residency questions, but provides the cloud software stack and cloud financial models. What will be interesting is how the auditors (as anything likely to demand on-premise deployment is likely to have compliance needs and audit with it) are satisfied that despite Oracle maintaining all the cloud software remotely won’t represent an issue.

How the IaaS data centre level resiliency will impact the PaaS offerings is going to be very interesting as SOA providing high availability across multiple locations is not trivial.

We have also seen signs of far more dynamic elasticity being shown with examples of being able attach policies to a service to trigger scale up. It will be interesting to see if the ability to mix metered and unmetered resources has also improved. Presently they have to be run as discrete domains because of the pricing models involved.

More broadly Oracle are filling out their cloud portfolio and offerings are starting to be harmonised – but there is a long way to go, for example ICS and SOA CS don’t OOTB link to Log Analytics for example). But MySQL as a PaaS offering has crept up on me, with the smallest compute footprint being 24p an hour it is time to take notice.

New Kid on the Block and others

12 Monday Sep 2016

Posted by mp3monster in General, Oracle

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Tags

Cloud, journal, OIC - ICS, Oracle Scene, oracle-integration.cloud, OUG

So no new blog entries as I have been busy publishing elsewhere, with the Oracle User Group we appear in the latest edition of the Oracle Scene Journal:

click on the image to open the journal properly

We also have a submission in for the November edition, which will be published before the user group’s Tech 16 conference – which I will be presenting at.

We have been posting a lot on our website that supports the book – oracle-integration.cloud. Lots of useful references to supporting resources, and some blog posts providing supporting information (and more in the pipeline). Not to mention with pressing on with the last couple of chapters.

Then finally a webinar, the first in a series for the UKOUG about adopting cloud – details at – http://www.ukoug.org/events/ukoug-applications-journey-to-cloud-webinar-1/. The webinar was recorded and the presentation that went with it are accessible if you are a UKOUG member.