Review: DNS & BIND on IPv6

Author: Cricket Liu
Format: Paperback, 52 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media (May 27, 2011)
ISBN-10: 1449305199
ISBN-13: 978-1449305192

I have a relationship with a number of publishers whereby I can request review copies of their books and then, after going through them, write my reviews. This is a perfectly normal transaction and a win-win for both the reviewer and the publisher. The publisher gets some free marketing and the reviewer gets a book.

I requested Cricket Liu's DNS & BIND on IPv6 from O'Reilly...twice, along with several other titles. They never came and never came and never came, which is unusual, especially after they told me they'd sent the package twice.

Ordinarily, I would have moved on, but I really have an interest in IPv6 and Liu is the DNS and BIND guru, so I did something I normally wouldn't have done. I bought the book. I had a gift certificate so technically, I wasn't out-of-pocket, but a little less than $30.00 for 52 pages is still a tad spendy (as you can tell, I live on a budget).

All that aside, when the book came, I tore into it with a passion.

Liu's book, and a number of other similar "thin books" being put out by O'Reilly are really more of an appendix to larger tomes. Just imagine the content of DNS & BIND on IPv6 fitting into the back pages of DNS and BIND 5th Ed. (2006). I can imagine when the 6th edition is published, the IPv6 book content will be folded in, but that's just my wishful thinking.

Don't expect a lot of background from the IPv6 book. It assumes that you are well versed in DNS and BIND and don't need a lot of hand holding. In fact, you are expected to know a fair amount about how IPv6 works before beginning to read as well. The "background to IPv6" part of the book is barely a page long, then you launch right into IPv6 forward and reverse mapping.

If you are a DNS administrator and just need to understand how IPv6 figures into your job, this book is a good introduction. Like the other books in this series (last August, I reviewed Migrating Applications to IPv6 which is only 50 pages), the limited page count allows the reader only a taste of the topic at hand. You're not going to dig very deep (slight pun there for dig fans). Actually, a certain amount of the content can be traced back to RFC 1886 which is the IETF documentation for DNS Extensions to support IP version 6.

I was just a little disappointed that Liu didn't mention that RFC 1886 has been obsoleted by RFC 3596, especially since the latter RFC was released eight years ago. It may not have made any difference in how he wrote the book, but keeping up with standards is the lifeblood of understanding IPv6 implementation.

Still, the book doesn't disappoint as long as you keep the intended audience and scope in mind. If you're a DNS/BIND administrator and you need a brief ramp up on IPv6 and name resolution, Liu's book is the source to check out.

31 Days Before Your CompTIA A+ Exams (2nd Edition)

OK, I realize that the name on the cover says "Ben Conry" and he wrote the original content that was submitted to the publisher, but for unknown reasons he abruptly dropped out of the project. Meanwhile, the technical and production editors had marked up his content with a ton of questions and proposed changes and somebody had to deal with them.

Enter "me".

If you go to page "v" in the frontmatter, you'll see "About the Author" which tells you about Ben and then you'll see "About the Contributing Author" which is my bio. I don't get "cover credit" because the primary content isn't mind and I was brought into the book late in the game, on the other hand (sorry, Ben), I had to "fix" a lot of the content so it would make sense in relation to the current A+ exam domains. Hopefully, this will make the book more successful on the market, but you, the reader, will have to judge that for yourself.

If you're studying for the A+ exams and you want to give yourself an intense 31-day review prior to exam day, please pick up a copy of 31 Days Before Your CompTIA A+ Exams (2nd Edition), published by Cisco Press.

Please keep in mind that you must do your primary studying from some tome like Mike Meyers's CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition or the McGraw Hill book CompTIA A+ Certification Study Guide, Seventh Edition (I wrote the companion to the McGraw Hill publication: CompTIA A+ Certification Practice Exams).

After studying with one (or more) of these "big books" and then using the "31 days" book, take the exam, then let me know how you did by commenting on this blog. I also encourage you to post a review on Amazon (be nice) to let others know how well the book helped you out.

Good luck to all A+ test takers. Cheers.

How Can These Books be Banned?

I know this is a little off topic for this blog, but when I "re-invented" it, my intention was to broaden its scope. I came across a link to libraryland on NPR this morning and followed the link to the 2011 Banned Books List. I've read a lot of these books. I seriously doubt they're banned in the U.S (unless we're talking about public school libraries and such). or in many western nations. Too bad NPR or Libraryland failed to run even a small explanation about where these books are banned and under what conditions people are forbidden to read them.

Recovering from the Windows 7 Red Screen of Death

OK, this isn't really how my Windows 7 Professional screen looked last Sunday evening after "the disaster", but I'm not really an artist. The screen looked more or less like the usual desktop except everything had a reddish cast and it resembled an out-of-tune TV image from the 1960s (back in the day when you had to manually fine tune your TV to better pick up a local station).

Here's the background.

I was doing some work in my home office under my desk in the nest of power and network cables when I accidentally hit the power switch to one of the surge protectors. Among other devices, my Windows 7 machine was connected to this unit. No big deal. I've done this a thousand times. I turned the surge protector back on, hit the power button on my Windows 7 machine, and figured all was well.

Wrong.

I got an message saying a serious error had occurred and that I should boot into system recovery using the Windows 7 install disc to repair the damage. Fool that I am, I just rebooted to see if that would fix the problem. It didn't. Since I could still get to the desktop, I accessed System Restore and rebooted back in time a couple of days figuring that would do it.

Nope.

I broke down and got the repair disc and used it to reboot the machine.

When I got to the System Recovery Options screen, I clicked Startup Repair as the most logical option. It went through its routine saying that it might fix the problem and reboot once or need to reboot several times before the error was fixed. After the first reboot, the problem was still with me. I tried again, but had no better luck. I was cursing the fact that I had no backups of my machine to restore it in case it was completely hosed.

I powered the unit down and opened up the box. I made sure the SATA drive connections were solid and that all of the RAM sticks were firmly in place. This proved to be a vain effort, but it was worth a shot.

Rebooted using the disc and ran Startup Repair again, looking for the "Startup Repair could not detect a problem" message, but no such luck. Finally, at the end of the routine, I clicked the "View diagnostic and repair details link". All of the tests were OK except one. The machine couldn't find a valid boot partition.

Oops.

I copied the exact error message down and Googled it, which lead me to sevenforums.com.

Basically, forum user SIW2 saved my ass with this:

Boot 7 dvd to system recovery options command prompt. Type:

Diskpart

lis vol

( find the vol letter e.g C or partition number e.g. 1 for the system partition )

sel vol C ( or sel vol 1 , obviously use the correct letter or number)

act

exi

I followed his advice step-by-step praying all the time that God would be merciful. After I was finished and closed the command prompt, I removed the disc and rebooted the machine.

Ta-da!

It's alive!

Moral of the story is that bad things can happen under mundane circumstances and back up your frigging computer! The other moral of the story is never, ever throw away, lose, or misplace all of the discs that come with your computer. You never know when you'll need to lay your hands on them quickly.

Oh, there really is a Windows 7 Red Screen of Death, but it's not exactly what I experienced.

Book Review: HTML5 Media

By Shelley Powers
Paperback: 138 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (August 17, 2011)
ISBN-10: 1449304451
ISBN-13: 978-1449304454

I understand that O'Reilly is publishing a series of hardcopy and ebooks that sport a rather modest page count in order to get the material to market very quickly. Shelley Powers' HTML5 Media is one of them. Please keep in mind this book isn't intended to teach you everything you want to know about HTML5 but rather, to show web developers how to insert HTML5 media elements into web pages using the new video and audio elements.

The book's front matter states that the target audience is web developers, authors, and designers who need to ramp up to using HTML5 video and audio elements fast. Hence the size of the book. No one wants to read through 800 pages when they need to do anything fast. Powers' book, with its scant 138 page count, is guaranteed to be a fast read...maybe. Actually, that depends on how much you already know. While the book doesn't require you have a lot of experience with actual video and audio files, you will need a background in CSS and JavaScript for this to make the most sense to you. Of course, if you are a designer or developer, that should go without saying.

While sample code is available, sample video and audio files are not. It's sort of a BYO...F (for files) affair. This is to keep the size of the downloadables manageable, so be prepared to have video and audio material of your own available (if you don't have much on hand, don't worry. Powers provides a number of resources where you'll be able to access what you need).

It's not just about the HTML...it's about the browsers. You can be fabulous HTML5 designer but if your browser (or your customer's browser) doesn't support the audio and video elements, you might as well not bother. IE9 or later is required, but you can also work with Firefox 3.5 or Chrome 6 and do just fine. If you keep your browsers current, you have nothing to worry about.

I got to work right away with what I learned on page 2, creating a basic audio page and, by adding the controls attribute to the audio element, I could play a sample mp3 I had on my computer (Sleep Away by Bob Acri using Chrome 9.0 on Windows 7, in case you wanted to know).

With my first minor success completed, I decided to download the sample files for the book and went back to the preface to look for the link...and didn't find it. I found the usual boilerplate text under "Using Code Examples" and while Powers says in the "Examples" section that there is a downloadable, I couldn't see where she provided the URL. Fortunately, I had already looked up the book's site at oreilly.com and easily found the correct zip file (and remember, when you try to work with these files, you'll need to provide your own video and audio material and change the default names to the names of the files you're working with in the sample code).

The book presents its content in four chapters which covers the default use of the video and audio elements, customizing the media elements (this is where CSS and JavaScript experience starts to come in handy), and other, more advanced material, including media elements in SVG documents.

Frankly, I found working with this book to be a blast. It's short enough to not be overwhelming to the reader and to impart a real sense of accomplishment very quickly, but dense enough to provide practical information that can be leveraged into actual, real-world web projects (not all books do this). Doing a bit of research, I took a look at some of the other books Powers has written including Learning JavaScript, 2nd Edition and JavaScript Cookbook. HTML5 Media is another fine example of her writing and another fine book from O'Reilly.

If working with media files in HTML5 sounds like something you want or need to do, I'd recommend picking up a copy of this book.