Friday, February 28, 2014

Book Review: BeagleBone Home Automation


Recently I was given a reviewer's copy of BeagleBone Home Automation from the publisher Packt Pub. The fact that I was given a copy of the book in exchange for a written review has in no way influenced my rating of the book.

BeagleBone Home Automation by Juha Lumme didn't live up to what I thought the book should be.

While I liked the book as an overall book on how you can work with the BeagleBone Black, it didn't seem to cover home automation. It does give lots of ideas that you can build out though. Juha also provides a fair amount of python code for running on the server and an Android based Java application as well.

The reason for the low rating is that I was hoping to see how to integrate the BeagleBone system into the house so you could use it to dim/brighten lights or raise/lower shades based on inputs fed into the system, but that was missing.

I did like chapter 6 which walks you through building an Android app to interface with the BeagleBone remotely. Being able to connect and control the BeagleBone when connected via the internet was a nice addition to the book.

If you want a good introduction to using BeagleBone with some accessories, this is a good book. If you want to build a home automation system, this will give you ideas on how to start things out, but doesn't finish the process in my opinion.

For those who like to see actual ratings, I give the book a 3 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Building a Home Security System with BeagleBone


Recently I was given a reviewer's copy of Building a Home Security System with BeagleBone from the publisher Packt Pub. The fact that I was given a copy of the book in exchange for a written review has in no way influenced my rating of the book.

Building a Home Security System with BeagleBone by Bill Pretty was a fun book to read.

Bill starts out by giving a quick overview of alarm system sensors: passive infrared, glass break and temperature and then walks you through building a simple alarm.

Chapters 3 and 4 walk you through planning how to layout your system, build the hardware and writing some software to control it.

Chapters 3 and 4 walk you through planning how to layout your system, build the hardware and writing some software to control it.

Chapters 5 and 6 take you through testing and automating the system.

In chapters 7 and 8, Bill gives a solution that will allow you to use the built system to also go through an protect your home's computer network.

The book concludes with a chapter that gives ideas on devices that could be added on such as a fingerprint scanner or RFID reads.

Even though I might never actually build my own home security system, it was interesting to see how the BeagleBone can be used to run this type of system.

For those who like to see actual ratings, I give the book a 5 out of 5 stars.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Book Review: Getting Started with Beautiful Soup


Getting Started with Beautiful Soup by Vineeth G. Nair is a book that was easy to read and fun to follow along with.

The book basically has four parts to it. The first part covers chapters 1 and 2 where you install Beautiful Soup and learn how to create objects. The second part covers chapters 3, 4 and 5 where you learn about searching through, navigating over and modifying the contents of the object. The third part covers chapters 6 and 7 where you learn about encoding and output formatters. The final part is chapter 8 where you use all the techniques you've learned in the earlier chapters to build a web scraper that gets price information on Packt Pub books from the publisher itself, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The book is well written and is recommended to anyone who wants to learn how to work with Beautiful Soup.

For those who like to see actual ratings, I give the book a 5 out of 5 stars.

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Book Review: Learning Cloudera Impala


Recently I was given a reviewer's copy of Learning Cloudera Impala from the publisher Packt Pub. The fact that I was given a copy of the book in exchange for a written review has in no way influenced my rating of the book.

Learning Cloudera Impala by Avkash Chauhan is a book that I wanted to like, but couldn't really get into.

In addition to numerous errors that I noticed, for me the text didn't flow well and it took me longer to read than it should have because of this. I believe that the author knows how to use and implement Impala, but he had wasn't able to convey that to me in a way that I felt I was learning something. The book is also light on examples showing how the technology can be used to accomplish the task at hand.

I know that Impala is a newer technology and more books will come out covering it, until then I think that reading the online documentation is just as good a bet as reading this book.

I unfortunately can't even recommend this book as a reference as there are too many places that the author sends you to the web to learn more about a topic that he has covered at a very high level.

Maybe I missed the point of this book, but too me it falls short.

For those who like to see actual ratings, I give the book a 2 out of 5 stars.

Sunday, February 09, 2014

Book Review: Learning scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python


Recently I was given a reviewer's copy of Learning scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python from the publisher Packt Pub. The fact that I was given a copy of the book in exchange for a written review has in no way influenced my rating of the book.

Learning scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python by Raúl Garreta and Guillermo Moncecchi is a book that gives you a quick introduction to the scikit-learn toolkit. At a total of 118 pages, this book is a quick and easy read. The authors don't go deep into depth behind the mathematics involved in the different machine learning techniques that they discuss, but then that's not the point of the book and could be seen as a plus to some.

I like the fact that they chose to distribute the code via the iPython notebook format so you can run the code inside a browser window (as long as you have the necessary dependencies installed). The authors walk you through installing most of the dependencies, but there are others that are left to the reader to install on their own, and because of that there were a couple of examples that didn't work properly when walking through them for me. This is in no way a problem with the book though and is easily fixed by downloading the missing Python modules.

I enjoyed walking through the examples and felt that the authors accomplished what they set out to do with this book and highly recommend it to those who want to get an introduction to scikit-learn.

Overall this is a great book and I definitely recommend it.

For those who like to see actual ratings, I give the book a 5 out of 5 stars.