Cisco Press' "Networking and IP Addressing Fundamentals" by Keith Barker, CCIE

Cisco Press' "Networking and IP Addressing Fundamentals" by Keith Barker, CCIE
5/5
Excellent material, a great refresher for a person interested in reverse engineering Network domain design. Looking forward to IPv6 presentation now and the impact to these fundamentals. I've been using hosts within LAN, WAN, ISP network, VPN like we all are. Its interesting to understand how routers, swtiches and hubs make this communication possible.

Regards
Sudeep

"Java Performance - Charlie Hunt Video Training"

 5/5

Pranaam!! A valuable sneak-peak, a concise presentation on Java 1.7 performance tuning, with all important GC tuning options. The course is good to reinforce Oracle Performance Tuning training or for professional performance tuners to get a refresher. Each Garbage Collection type is explained with examples from verbose GC logs. The explanation is more on what are GCs, the what to performance tune is specific to context and is rightly not a black & white answer for the audience.
The G1 garbage introduced since later versions of 1.6 is interesting and I'd like to more about this.

The sections are divided around 3 topics. Something tells me that part of this training is about to arrive with details on G1 garbage collector or improvements in concurrency in existing GC types.

• JVM Overview
• Collecting Performance Statistics
• Understand HotSpot JVM GC Logs

Regards
Sudeep Namboodiri 

"Learning VMware ESXi and vSphere 5.1 Administration" by Glen Martin

4/5

"Learning VMware ESXi and vSphere 5.1 Administration by Glen Martin"
Very good hands-on training on ESXi related administration, useful for everyone including Solution Architects and System Integration Architects apart from system administrators to understand VMware's virtualization tools. The training covered fundamental working knowledge on below areas:
You can look at topic index for more details

• vCenter, vSphere, ESXi topology
• ESXi installation, vCenter installation
• Virtual Storage fundamentals
• Virtual Network fundamentals
• Creating a Virtual Machine
• DRS
• HA
• vMotion
• Storage vMotion
• Performance tuning
• vCenter Update Manager fundamentals and installation
• VMware Update Manager
• Data protection and security

The instructions were clear and concise. The oration  appeared to fast forwarded, limiting pauses in between all segments, leaving the audience a bit stressed. This is not a replacement for VMware documentation by any means, but is definitely a very good view for howto on VMware tools. Further reading and training is necessary if you came in researching the Performance aspects of virtualization.

Regards
Sudeep

"Data Design Introduction" by Tim Miles [2013]

A good jumpstart into database design practices, explained to the point and very lucidly. 1hr and 39min long.

http://bit.ly/162cvNY

Questions answered:
What is a Database?
What are types of databases?
What are relationships?
What is process of database design :
    determine purpose of database
    collect forms, reports, etc
    meet current and future users
    normalize the data, remove redundancy
    create the database
    review
what is Normalization?

"Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices" [2004]

Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices [2004] ,  by  Dirk Krafzig; Karl Banke; Dirk Slama

This book gives a  good introduction to SOA Concepts and associates with real case studies. The examples are useful in Enterprise Architecture strategies. The initial chapters provided a good historic perspective of technologies and approaches like CORBA, that influenced SOA strategy. I found this book to be very useful.

 

Architectural Blueprints - 'The "4+1" View Model of Software Architecture by Philippe Krutchen'

A seminal work in presenting a model for describing essential views or perspectives while architecting a software based system.
Below are the 5 broad views that are essential for covering concerns of various stakeholders dependent on the system

• Logical view : for line-of-business users
• Development view : for Project managers, solution integrators
• Process view : for Solution designers and integrators
• Physcial view : for system engineers
• Scenarios view : to iterate and develop views

By mapping from one view to another, a system can be architected to a great precision in first attempt, this becomes a stepping stone for future iterations. After 2-3 iterations the system is solid.


There are many references over internet, I used below.
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~gregor/teaching/papers/4+1view-architecture.pdf

"Learning Oracle Database 11g by Lewis Cunnigham" - 2012

This is a good breezy introduction to Oracle 11g database for anyone who wants to get familiar with whats/hows of databases concepts. The presenter has touched through all important aspects, so it was very useful for me. I've intentionally skipped 3 chapters, first "Database security", "Very Large Databases" and "PL/SQL" , considering the priorities. This is a good stepping stone for Oracle Database performance tuning concepts.