New Book: Professional VMware Server
New Book: Professional VMware Server by Eric Hammersley (Wrox), $26.39 at Amazon
What you will learn from this book
- Steps on how to install and configure VMware Server
- Tips to follow when creating development base images
- Methods on how to organize your image libraries and prepare them for use
- Best practices for using VmCOM, VmPerl, and the Programming API
- How to integrate VMware Server into your existing environment and automate its functionality
- Ways to leverage VMware Server to provide banks of testing machines on demand
Who this book is for
This book is for software developers, lead developers, and software testing engineers who want to integrate VMware Server into their existing systems in order to create and test applications on various platforms.
[via virtualization.info]
Sorry to be blunt but Wrox books suck big time ;-)
Posted by: Tarry Singh | December 20, 2006 at 02:53 AM
@ Tarry Singh,
One of the great things about online venues like this one and p2p.wrox.com is that we are able to communicate directly with readers about our products. We get emails and reviews every day - some good, and some bad, and we are always happy to talk about the positives or negatives of any book in an effort to make better products for our customers.
For the Wrox titles that you had a bad expereince with, did you let us know? Did you post on our forums, or send us an email? I'd love to talk with you about what specific products you have had negative experiences with, and how we might be able to correct those issues.
Have you read this particular book, or are you just making a blanket statement about Wrox because you had previous negative experiences? If you have read it, I'd like to know how we can make it better. If you haven't, then I'd still like you opinion and I'll even ship you a copy for free if you'd be willing to provide constructive feedback.
Chris Webb
Executive Editor
Wrox
cwebb at wrox dot nospamcom
Posted by: Chris Webb | December 20, 2006 at 12:21 PM
Chris,
I attend and also give courses on several technologies (What I give: Oracle, Virtualization etc), What I attend is too huge to mention here. And I have been doing this for a long time.
Anyways I have been a Wrox reader for a long time (1999) too. I saw and witnessed the painful demise of Wrox some years back. There have been some good books BUT somehow somethings changed. I don't know what but it is not only me, my students would rather want something else.
The courses I attended (last being Java, Servlets etc) had the same issue. Instructors pointed to HeadRush series. I think the problem is:
o Books are far too thick and contain a lot of irrelevant material (too much intro etc). You need to move over to page 400 to really get started. I have the books from php, java5, jsp,oracle etc and all of them have the same problem. (And I mean professional series).
You take care of that problem and you lower the suck factor considerably. Once again there has been no negative experience as such but show me a book that is good and we'll do a great (but honest) book review on my blog. I have however applied for a instructor's copy of this MS Virtual Server but you can send me a copy and we'll do an online review on this book.
Best,
Tarry
Posted by: Tarry Singh | December 21, 2006 at 12:48 AM
Correction: 2nd last line replace MS Virtual Server WITH VMware Server.
Posted by: Tarry Singh | December 21, 2006 at 12:49 AM
Tarry,
Thanks - that's the kind of feedback that helps us make better products.
I agree with you that some books are just too big, and sometimes you simply have to raise the barrier of entry on some topics.
Ill be interested to see what you think of the VMware book - you will note its only 437 pages, and we feel like we picked a good "jumping in" spot for this title.
I look forward to your review, and I'd love to start a more direct dialog with you on other books and topics.
Chris
Posted by: Chris Webb | December 21, 2006 at 05:03 PM