Book review of Raspberry Pi Robotic Projects by Packt Publishing

I bought one more text book to learn of Raspberry Pi and this is quick review of the book.



Raspberry Pi Robotic Projects by Richard Grimmett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I've had almost no experience in building robotics development before reading Raspberry Pi Robotic Projects because I was thinking that it costs a lot to pay for a computer or server, hardware components, and text book. However, I found it wrong after buying Raspberry Pi and this book.

I am totally new with robotoics development, but I did enjoy reading this book because I found that I can learn how to develop it quickly by following several small projects with Raspberry Pi, open source software, and some hardware stuff which I should by on Amazon.

There are some who feel it too easy and light for each projects, but I believe that this book is also fun to just read to learn about how hardware components work with programming by paying just $14 (kindle edition).

Lastly, this is quick review of each chapter.

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Raspberry Pi
I love the pictures of Raspberry Pi, hardware components and the explanation for each component.
Installation guide is also nice with several picutres for beginners.

Chapter 2: Programming Raspberry Pi
If you are not new with programming, you can skip this chapter.

Practical robotics development begins the chapters below.
What I love most is the pictures of the hardware components such as a USB camera, wheels, a speaker, and completed version because it helps us understand how it works and is build at last.

Chapter 4: Adding Vision to Raspberry Pi
Chapter 5: Creating Mobile Robots on Wheels
Chapter 6: Making the Unit Very Mobile Controlling the Movement of a Robot with Legs
Chapter 7: Avoiding Obstacles Using Sensors
Chapter 8: Going Truly Mobile The Remote Control of Your Robot
Chapter 9: Using a GPS Receiver to Locate Your Robot
Chapter 10: System Dynamics
Chapter 11: By Land, Sea, and Air

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Next, I need to purchase hardware components to achieve some of the robotics deployment in the book..

Book review of Raspberry Pi Server Essentials by Packt Publishing

I bought Raspberry Pi and SD card to try something related with hardware components recently because I've been using public cloud like AWS for years, but I just felt like trying to use a tiny computing and gathering some data into public cloud.
As I was very new with Raspberry Pi, I just bought a text book to learn about what I can do with Raspberry Pi quickly. This is my review of the book.




Raspberry Pi Server Essentials by Piotr Kula

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


If you want to try hands-on about installing several servers such WEB, DB, open source games, Streaming, and playing audio on Raspberry Pi, this book will bring you a good and quick hands-on step by step. But, it is focusing on application, there are little study about H/W component and its architecture, programming, nor server architecture. However, If you are a beginner with Raspberry Pi, it will be the first step to have fun with it by paying at least $55 ($10: Book, $35: Raspberry Pi, $10: SD card). Besides, I recommend you should buy the kindle edition.

This is quick review for each chapter.

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Raspberry Pi
Summrized hardware requirement, essential peripherals and installing OS. You can find what you need to enjoy Raspberry Pi at the essentials peripehrals section.

Chapter 2: Preparing the Network
Wireless configuration, benchmarking tools and Internet configuration are great and helpful

Chapter 3: Configuring Extra Features
Hardware watchdog is interesting to monitor its status.

Chapter 4: Using a Fast PHP Web Server and Database
Summirized minimum setup and configuration to implement LAMP servers.

Chapter 5: Setting Up a File Server
If you need a File server, you should read it.

Chapter 6: Setting Up the Game Servers
Here, it's getting more playful by installing open source games.

Chapter 7: Bitcoins ? Pools and Mining
I am not interested in Bitcoins and mining, so I skipped. But, it might be interesting to measure how much CPU is used during the mining.

Chapter 8: Streaming Live HD Video
Short hands-on about how to stream video by installing and compiling.
It was fun because I've never had experienced in streaming and gave me a quick insight how to stream.

Chapter 9: Setting Up a Media Center
This chapter also shows streaming and playing audio and was fun to try to play audio and make slideshows.

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This is This is my Raspberry Pi!

By the way, I tried internet bandwidth with speedtest_cli.py via LAN, following at Chapter 2.
The bandwidth is not so bad.

pi@raspberrypi /tmp/speedtest-cli $ ./speedtest_cli.py
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Testing from xxx. (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)...
Selecting best server based on latency...
Hosted by Ookla (Seoul) [1156.26 km]: 63.014 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 12.38 Mbits/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 27.87 Mbits/s

Buy One, Get One Free on all of #Packt’s 2000 eBooks!

I do love such a campaign because we don't have to pay double when we are thinking of buying several books and we don't have to carry books if we buy e-books!

"Packt Publishing is launching a campaign to coincide with the release of our 2000th title. The campaign begins on 18th Mar and will continue up until 26th Mar. Packt is giving its reader a chance to dive into their comprehensive catalog and Buy One, Get One Free across their entire range of eBooks."

I had a mind to read the books below with this opportunity even if they are recently released or not.

• Piwik Web Analytics Essentials
• 
• Learning Nessus for Penetration Testing

• Network Analysis using Wireshark Cookbook
  
• Software Defined Networking with OpenFlow
  
• VMware vSphere 5.x Datacenter Design Cookbook
  
• Instant RabbitMQ Messaging Application Development How-to [Instant]
  
• Advanced Express Web Application Development
  
• Advanced Penetration Testing for Highly-Secured Environments: The Ultimate Security Guide
  
• Performance Testing with JMeter 2.9
  

Book review of Getting Started with Phalcon by Packt Publishing

I decided to study Phalcon PHP Framework by reading Getting Started with Phalcon because I was very beginner about PHP Framework itself.

Getting Started with Phalcon by Stephan A Miller

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I had known nothing about the Phalcon PHP framework before reading "Getting Started with Phalcon", but I learned the basic step by step with the following chapters:
* Chapter 1: Installing Phalcon
* Chapter 2: Setting Up a Phalcon Project
* Chapter 3: Using Phalcon Models, Views, and Controllers
* Chapter 4: Handling Data in Phalcon
* Chapter 5: Using Phalcon's Features

I think that I did take the first step of the Phalcon PHP framework with "Getting Started with Phalcon", but I believe that the very beginners should read the official documentation section to understand the basic, http://docs.phalconphp.com/en/latest/... because the book mainly focuses on their function, not the reason why Phalcon PHP Framework is needed, the principles of PHP Framework itself, and Framework Benchmarks.

The sample codes and the comments at each section help us understand how they work and what they do at each chapter to follow the instructions and create the sample project. The author also provides the sample codes in the book at their github, http://eristoddle.github.io/phalconBlog/, so we can quickly and easily try them.

Lastly, I think that there's some instructions that have been not correct about installing process because some commands or URL have been updated. I just revised some of the commands on my blog here. http://hashnao.blogspot.jp/2014/03/qu...

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Lastly, there are some instructions which needed to be revised when creating a working environment with Amazon Linux AMI on AWS.

P11 Installing Phalcon on Linux

sudo yum install php-develphp-mysqlnd ccc libtool

↓

sudo yum install php-mysqlnd gcc libtool

P12 Installing Phalcon on Linux

git clone git://github.com/phalcon/phalcon.git

↓

git clone git://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon.git

This is just beginning of studying Phalcon PHP Framework, so I need to create sample application with the framework later.

Book review of Mastering Zabbix by Packt Publishing

I would like to make a quick review about Mastering Zabbix by Packt Publishing because I recently read itto learn how to manage large environment with Zabbix.

http://www.packtpub.com/monitor-large-information-technology-environment-by-using-zabbix/book


Mastering Zabbix by Andrea Dalle Vacche

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Mastering Zabbix is quite helpful for the beginners or the intermediate those who need to manage and monitor IT infrastructure especially for mission critical environment or with hundreds of nodes because it covers database-sizing, capacity planning, distributed monitoring, High availability and Failover, managing alerts and template, and integrating zabbix itself with the best practices of zabbix.
If you are facing with the trouble like handling hundreds of alerts which the nodes your zabbix monitors sent to you, your zabbix server's performance is getting worse as the infrastructure is growing, or generating SLA report to analyze and measure the operating ratio of the IT infrastructure, it should be worth reading and the solution for you with the practical examples.
I'm pretty sure that there will be definitely some those who don't need this book because they love zabbix or OSS monitoring solutions, and become enthusiastic about finding solution themselves. But, you will be able to reduce and save your time to soluve your issues by trying some of the solutions on this book.
Lastly, I like the 3rd chapter, High Availability and Failover, because it broadly covers the basic understanding of the levels of IT service, the common problems of HA architecture, and how to implement HA clustering of web server with corosync and pacemaker and clustering of PostgreSQL with DRBD on LVM, moreover DRBD performance and optimizations!
The problems is that it's written about Zabbix 2.0.0, not 2.2.0, so I hope that the book is revised for Zabbix 2.2 or later in the next version. But I recommend you should try to read "Mastering Zabbix" because nobody wants to carry the technical books with you everyday.


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Book review of Icinga Network Monitoring by Packt Publishing

I got an opportunity to technically review Icinga Network Monitoring by Packt Publishing by chance in 2013. I believe that I have written down some articles about Icinga on this blog.
 It was my first time to technically review a book actually and I already expressed my gratitude for this opportunity, but I'd like to thank to those who gave me this opportunity again and I also hope that Icinga Network Monitoring will help especially the beginners learn about Icinga.

Icinga Network Monitoring by Viranch Mehta

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I honestly believe that this book will be the help for beginers who want to learn Icinga, on the other hand, it might not be entirely satisfactory for those who want go deeper into Icinga.
What I like about this book is it has good schemes to systematically understand its architecture and how to, because it is hard and takes time to grasp the whole structure of a monitoring software.
For example,

* Each chapters are well composed with introdcution and summary
* Enough tables, diagrams, and graphs to help us understand their images or concept
* Showing how to write and integrate custom plugins
* Threshold values about warning and critical are explained with command line and interepretation
* Index implemented

You can check the Icinga architecure with the graphs at the official HP, if you want to understand it deeper or more.
https://www.icinga.org/about/architec...

I'm expecting that the book for Icinga-2.x will be published soon.

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Finally, I am introducing one of my document about monitoring solution as it's not today's theme, but close to it. I am currently looking for and verifying the cloud monitoring solution, both OSS and SaaS which AWS Partner Network to automatically register and monitor the nodes on AWS. I tried these solutions below for example,

* Zabbix for HyClops by TIS Inc,

* Sensu by Heavy Water Operations, LLC (OR)

* Zenoss Amazon Web Services ZenPack by Zenoss, Inc.

* Hyperic HQ by Hyperic

* Stackdriver by Stackdriver

* CopperEgg by CopperEgg corporation

I summarized my evaluation on Zabbix for HyClops, StackDriver, and CopperEgg on my slideshare (written in Japanese)

Aws向け監視ソリューション比較 from Naoya Hashimoto

I am also thinking that how much Icinga automates discovering, registering and monitoring them some day!

Today, that's it!