Packt Publishing celebrates their 2000th title with and exclusive offer

Known for their extensive range of pragmatic IT ebooks, Packt Publishing are celebrating their 2000th book title `Learning Dart’– they want their customers to celebrate too.

To mark this milestone Packt Publishing will launch a ‘Buy One Get One Free’ offer across all eBooks on March 18th – for a limited period only.

Packt is one of the most prolific and fast-growing tech book publishers in the world. Originally focused on open source software, Packt contributes back into the community paying a royalty on relevant books directly to open source projects. These projects have received over $400,000 as part of Packt’s Open Source Royalty Scheme to date.

Their books focus on practicality, recognising that readers are ultimately concerned with getting the job done. Packt’s digitally-focused business model allows them to quickly publish up-to-date books in very specific areas across a range of key categories – web development, game development, big data, application development, and more. Their commitment to providing a comprehensive range of titles has seen Packt publish 1054% more titles in 2013 than in 2006.

Here are some of the best titles across Packt's main categories - but Buy One, Get One Free will apply across all 2000 titles:

• Web Development
• Big Data & Cloud
• Game Development
• App Development

Book Review: Test Driven Development with Mockito

Recently I was given a reviewer's copy of Test Driven Development with Mockito 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.

Test Driven Development with Mockito by Sujoy Acharya is a good introduction to Test Driven Development (TDD) and should get a person new to this methodology up to speed quickly. There are just a couple chapters that actually deal with using Mockito though.

Chapters 1 through 3 bring you up to speed on what TDD is and how to apply it. Chapter 1 gives a definition of TDD and what the methodology is all about. Chapter talks about refactoring: when to do it, when not to do it and when to stop. Chapter 3 talks about applying TDD.

Chapters 4 and 5 start covering the different styles of testing: outside in (mainly used for acceptance and regression testing) and inside out (mainly used in development). Chapter 5 talks about what the author calls test doubles which are stubs, mocks, dummies and fakes.

Chapters 6 and 7 are where we're introduced and shown Mockito in action and how to use it in a TDD environment. You learn how to stub, mock and spy objects which allows you to better test the code's logic and not external dependencies (database connections, email, etc.).

Chapter 8 talks about patterns and gives examples of replacing conditional logic with both the command pattern and the strategy pattern.

Finally chapter 9 talks about adding TDD to legacy code that had no tests originally.

There are two appendixes in the book. Appendix A talks about different tools such as Eclipse and JUnit, while Appendix B talks about agile practices.

Overall I thought the author did a good job of meeting the objectives he set out to meet when writing this book. I wasn't crazy with how some of the code examples were inline text and others were screen shots and there were a couple issues with the text. This book would be good for someone new to TDD and Mockito, but probably not helpful for those who have some experience with either.

For those who like to see actual ratings, I give the book a 4 out of 5 stars.

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.

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.

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.

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.