Music Review - Techno Party (Volume One)
Rockin' Compilation
The "Party" in "Techno Party" is exactly where this album falls in the midst of similar various artists compilations. It's a really rockin', pumping beat, aggressive mix of techno music, perfect to keep you awake while working out, hacking on your computer, etc. I have to give it three stars because, as good as it is, a compilation techno album like this one that isn't groundbreaking simply doesn't have the lifespan to merit a higher ranking.
posted by Terry Smith @ 8:10 PM
0 comments
Don't Waste Your Money
I'm sure the diehards of this genre will think this is the greatest album ever, but I don't find it to be anything special. The vocals are lame and the electronica is just as lame. I do grant the fact that is truely an "album" in the sense that one song leads into the next and there is a general theme and character across all the songs. Unfortunately, it's just not a very good one.
Murk Muck
Interesting and different
Isn't every "dance" song these days nothing but computer-generated bass thumpety-thumps of headache-inducing boredom with two or three synthesizer cords copy\pasted on top? ATB's Addicted to Music album has plenty of the above weaved through it, but it's generally composed and unique enough to be interesting to listen to. "I Love The DJ" starts the album out in the stereotypical thumpety-thump fashion that you would expect an album of this genre to have, although it is restrained and toned down by some female vocals. The same applies for "I Don't Wanna Stop". "Everything Is Wrong" is a nice little slow tune. For some reason it sounds like a soundtrack piece for one the latest James Bond movies. (I don't know if that's good or bad.) "Long Way Home" is a very popish track with a Kylie Minogue-like background beat. "We Belong" with the chorus "I never thought I'd find what I was looking find. I never thought I'd find the place I would belong." is a surprisingly mold breaking tune that you can actually slow-dance to. "I Will Not Forget" and "Do You Love Me" get back into the cookie-cutter thumpety-thump world again while "Break My Heart" returns to a style reminiscent of 4 Strings or Ian Van Dahl. "Trilogy" is a surprising little piano piece that's very nice. The female vocals on the album don't stand apart as being exceptional, but they match the music and mood well. There's a great jewel of a hidden track after Cabana Moon. I'm guessing it's called "Ruby". It adds yet another twist to the album as being more of a pop/rock, dare I say, ballad. All in all, this album is interesting-enough to deserve 4 stars.
A decent mix of trance tracks but nothing extraordinary. The album starts out with a couple of tunes that I consider ideal trance music, mellow, a good beat, and great background music. Def by Stereo by Echoplex is what I consider dance, not trance, though the lines between the genres are admittedly blurred. This song has a strong thumping beat and is not relaxing or trance-like in any way. A few of the other tunes include some vocals, most notably on The Sun by Drax and Scott Mac and Change by Sunscream. These are decent songs and can be great to listen to in the car, but they're not excellent dance songs and not mellow enough to listen to as background music while you're working on something else.
Great
Great album. If you like Lasgo or Ian Van Dahl then you'll love this albulm.
I thought this was an OK book until I took the SQL Server 2000 certification exams. Total trash! Luckily, I had also studied Rob Vieira's book, Professional SQL Server 2000 Programming. Stay away!
Jeff really shows off his experience with consulting for and working with the .NET framework team in this book. This is one of the very best .NET books and will remain as such for the lifetime of the technology. It covers the internals of .NET, critical to a solid foundation of knowledge for a technical leader in .NET. As such, it's not a "getting started guide". There are dozens of those on the market, but few "must haves" like this one.
This is a very decent overview of Windows-based programming in .NET. It's dry and boring in the typical certification-book style. The real question is, "Is it a great book for passing the certification exams?" I'll let you know after I take the tests myself.
Appleman's Developing ActiveX Components with Visual Basic 5.0 was so good that I bought Developing COM/ActiveX Components with Visual Basic 6.0 when it came out. Both of these were among the very best VB books of all time. Unfortunately, Moving to VB.NET is not in the same camp. The book tries to introduce VB6ers into VB.NET, but does a very bad job of getting from A to B. Most developers can understand most of .NET after discovering that it's 80% Java with keywords changed. Instead of starting with this foundation, the book wastes a lot of space explaining prinicples that are new to only the most hardcore Microsoft zealots. In Appleman's defense, this book was first published when .NET was still in beta and was likely rushed to press. Don't get me wrong, there is some great technical content here as Appleman is still a great technician and good at explaining the "internals" of things. The COM Interop and Accessing the Win32 API chapter is particularly good and helped me get through a VB6/VB.NET integration project. If you're totally new to VB.NET and find this book on sale, buy it; otherwise, don't bother.
This is a very odd book in that eight of the chapters in this book cover ADO and nine cover .NET and ADO.NET (not including some extra chapters covering specific DB providers). You likely don't have much need for the ADO chapters, but the ADO.NET coverage is very good. The author gets to the point and has excellent step-by-step examples for both Windows Forms and ASP.NET. The later chapters give the best coverage I've seen for working with XML, reading XML from databases, synchronizing XML with datasets, etc. After reading it I still often refer back to this book as a reference.
Jeff Prosise has been around the Microsoft world for a long time. If you've been around awhile, you might recognize him as the author of Programming Windows with MFC or from several of his other books. This book, as expected, is very well-written and a technically accurate book. Unfortunately, it only musters a rating of three stars because it tries to cover too much. If you want a broad overview of .NET, then this is an excellent book for you. My problem with the book is that its first three chapters on .NET fundamentals don't cover the basics as deeply as I think developers should know them. The single chapter on Windows Forms that follows next is, frankly, completely useless. The next seven chapters (Part 2 of the book) do a very decent job of covering ASP.NET. If anything, this is a badly named book. It should be called Programming Microsoft ASP.NET. Part 2 is followed by a single chapter on ADO.NET. I recommend Mike Gunderloy's book for ADO.NET. Next are single chapters on XML, multithreading, and remoting. All in all, it's a good overview and a decent ASP.NET book (you'll still need another book or two on the topic).
This is an excellent book. In fact, it's the best ASP.NET book I've seen yet. I did find myself skipping around in it a lot more than reading it cover to cover, but, all in all, it's a great book. I often refer back to it as a reference. Also, the code examples are in both VB.NET and C#.
I've used this book more than any other technical book I've ever owned. It's always by my side when I'm doing a large amount of HTML and CSS development. It's extraordinarily organized, and I refer to it constantly. The only reason I can't give this title five stars is that by my rating system it's not absolutely essential reading for technical leaders. There are other books that have the same reference material as this one; however, none of them do as good a job conveying it.
Philip Greenspun is the creator of photo.net and a very entertaining author as well. This a great book for beginners to get an overview of web publishing, online communities, and databases. Some of the specifics of the book are a little dated but the concepts are not. I often refer back to this book for ideas and inspiration. The online version of this book is free, but the print edition has great glossy pages and is packed with gratuitous, full-color pictures from Philip's image library.
This a very decent reference and so-so tutorial of JavaScript. If you're doing JavaScript you definitely need this definitive guide, definitely.
I own Danny Goodman's JavaScript Handbook from circa 1996. That has nothing to do with this review other than to say this guy has been doing this stuff for a long time. This is a great reference book to have handy and has good examples of each tag, element, or keyword in HTML, DOM, CSS, and JavaScript.
This is the only Java book that I give 5 stars. Any technical leader who has not read this book likely has dangerous gaps in his/her Java knowledge, particularly in regard to threads in Java. The book is divided into 68 Praxis, following the trend started by Scott Meyers with this definitive Effective C++. From what I've heard, Joshua Bloch's Effective Java would also rate at 4-5 highlighters.
I wish I could recommend a better introduction to Java Web Services. David Chappell usually does a good job at explaining new technologies in simplified form; however, he falls short with this one. It comes very close to being a step-by-step, build-up tutorial but falls short. If you already know SOAP, perhaps coming from the .NET world and you just need to make the right connections in the Java world, then this would be a good book for you. However, if you don't know SOAP and you're looking for a thorough understanding of what's going on under the covers before you move on to advanced APIs, then this is not your best bet. Actually, I'm not sure what is. I started writing such a tutorial myself but got distracted by other projects. However, this book is solidly average, nothing necessary wrong with that, and if you can find it at a good discount it's a decent buy.
This book came out from O'Reilly in Spring of 2002 about the same time they published Java Web Services. If these had been combined and editing together, they would have had a star book on their hands instead of two average books. I can't say anything particularly bad about this book, but nothing particularly good either. If you're getting started with Web Services using Java, this and the title above are both decent sources to get you going.
If you're looking to learn JMS, then this is a decently good book to get you started. One of the best things about it is that it's not very thick and it gets to the point pretty quickly.
Read Code Complete by Steve McConnell. You don't need this book. It contradicts itself on several occasions and is totally wrong on others. It's unfortunate and sad how many organizations want to adopt texts like this as their "coding standard". A pamplet-sized book of bullet-points can't make developers competent, but a comprehensive manual of the best in software engineering practices like Code Complete can.
This is an excellent resource for imaging development with Java and an altogther beautiful book complete with glossy, color pages. The only downside to this text is that there seems to be a new imaging API every week in the Java world. Even still, this is a great source to help you get started.
The only thing I learned from this book was the use of the -verbose:gc Java command-line option that prints a report to syserr each time the garbage collector runs.
I have a previous edition of this book and thought it was a very good guide to learning Java. Is it great? No, but it seems to be the best all encompassing book to learn the fundamentals of the Java libraries. It's one of the best books to teach a Java class with.
Total trash. This is one of those books where the publisher has packed in as many pages as possible to make it seem impressive. It is completely unreadable and not even useful as a reference book.
If you like the large-print version of Reader's Digest, then you might be happy with this book and it's gigantic text. Otherwise, I recommend avoiding it. I admit this more of a personal opinion that my other book reviews, because Eckel has written several books and has his own following. However, as I was learning Java this book was not useful to me whatsoever. In any case, a free, electronic version of this book is available on Eckel's website.
Beyond words. This is one of the greatest texts ever written.
This is THE book to have on SQL Server 2000. Robert Vieira unquestionably knows his stuff and covers every aspect of SQL Server completely and thoroughly.
If you need to sling some really nasty SQL which you probably shouldn't be writing in the first place, then this book is for you. Celko is the man. As a cover-to-cover read, you will pick up on a lot of new SQL techniques, but in general, this is a "I know where to look when I need to know that book." If you know the basics of SQL and want to start your SQL Master training, then start here. Just keep it close by when you need to remember how Celko was able to get "that" to work.
This is an absolutely essential reference for Oracle. Though you probably want to buy the new edition, Oracle 9i: The Complete Reference. I don't recommend these for reading straight through, just as terrific references. Both editions include the book on CD that I keep installed on my laptop and other development machines. It is very, very handy.
Throbbing-good bass with a constantly-changing techtronics background overlayed with exceptionally clean and soothing female vocal tracks. Terrific!
Some Things is very similar to Ian Van Dahl's Ace album for which I wrote, "Throbbing-good bass with a constantly-changing techtronics background overlayed with exceptionally clean and soothing female vocal tracks." The techno throb and female vocals in this album are much more upbeat and aggressive as opposed to more of a trance throb in Ian Van Dahl's Ace album. Male vocals on some tracks mix it up even better. Some Things and Ace are a couple of only a few albums in the genre that I continue to listen to over and over again. The sound quality of both albums is extraordinary, and I highly recommended both of them.
