Equipment and Software Books

I just read this book Nov. 2007 and it is still useful but nearly obsolete. It also has a disk that has some trial versions of software and the color pictures from the book.

On the critical side the pictures in the book are black and white, you have to use the disk to see the color pictures. Also the print is difficult to read as there is an annoying design on every page.

Since you can get a used copy for .01 it's probably worth it though I got mine in the library.

I'm a four year digital camera user. I wish this book was out when I first got in to digital cameras. I was able to pick up a lot of new tips tricks. The book has an excellent chapter on imaging software and printing your pictures. Also chapters on (my favorites) How many pixels are enough, Difficult pictures made easy, Sharing printers, Sharing your pictures on the web, just to name a few. I think this book is a must for any digital camera user or any one that uses imaging software. It's a lot of book for the money!! It is very easy to read and understand and I'm sure that I will use it for many years to come as a reference guide.
Daniel Vanhorn

Although this is basically an good book, it is not in the same class as Stephen J. Bigelow's "Troubleshooting, Maintaining & Repairing Pcs, 2nd Ed." or "Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing Pcs, 10th Ed." As an example of Johnson and Stauffer's inaccuracies, note the discussion about types of mice in Chapter 5 where they write: "A bus mouse typically uses an IBM PS/2 style connector ..." and "A bus mouse, when connected to a PS/2 port...". Compare these statements with Bigelow's care (page 834) in distinguishing the bus mouse with a 9-pin DIN (circular) connector from a PS/2 mouse with a 6-pin DIN (circular) connector. Therefore, one could NEVER connect a bus mouse to a PS/2 connector. Note also that Johnson and Stauffer state "Many PS/2 mice come with adapters that plug into the PS/2 connector and turn into serial connectors." The authors fail to warn the reader that a PS/2 mouse can NEVER be attached to the serial port using such an adapter if the design of the mouse does not include the special detection circuits that permit the mouse to determine if it is connected to a PS/2 port or a serial port. Most PS/2 mice DO NOT contain such detection circuits. The book by Johnson and Stauffer is certainly easier to read, but the average reader would be better off to spend additional money to purchase the Bigelow book. The result would be that that of owning a book that is harder to read, but the knowledge found therein is more accurate and more complete and therefore worth the additional effort required to read the book.

Have read through this book, and it is one of the best I have seen that is written is plain english. It is very easy to understand and the information is very up to date.

A friend of mine lent this great book. I have plenty of experience with the 8051 and needed to learn about the 80251. Great tips and examples enabled a smooth transition from one processor to the other. It's very clearly written. I would recommend it to anyone. It could have some good examples in "C" though.

A solid introduction to Photoshop Elements 3 that will appeal to photographers moving from traditional film and darkroom printing to digital photography. While this book doesn't venture too far into 'advanced' techniques, and doesn't explore the 'hidden features' mentioned in some other Elements guides, it does cover all the essentials and includes some useful tips and techniques. Comparisons with film camera and darkroom techniques will appeal to traditional photographers.

If you're new to Elements, this guide will give you a thorough grounding, but if you've been using Elements for some time and are looking for more advanced techniques then you'll probably find another book more interesting.

Quite possibly, the typical Social Work student is not from a strong mathematical or computing background. But she is often expected to understand and apply common statistical analysis on data, especially if she is a graduate student.

Patterson offers a relatively easy approach for her to acquire this knowledge. By using spreadsheets, like Microsoft Excel. Or, for that matter, she might even use the free OpenOffice spreadsheet. These now come with many common statistical functions, to compute mean, standard deviation and other metrics. Plus, a spreadsheet can often display tabulated data, in various graphical forms, like bar graphs or pie charts. There is no need to learn a language to find the statistics, and another language to graph the results.

Another benefit is that the spreadsheets are now widely available on many personal computers. Hence, what she learns here can be easily applied elsewhere.

With this book, Digital Photo Projects for dummies, you start out learning the basics, then progress to expert projects. The book gives the basics to get good results from your digital camera, without assuming you are an "expert", by overloading you with lots of technical background. The book takes you from the first step of shooting the photo, to starting the appropriate software for your camera, to how to retouch and enhance your photos.

This is a step-by-step book for those of us who need training from the very beginning. This book covered everything from finding the right camera, printer and software to taking you into shooting a photo; where it explains exposure, color and focus. After taking the photo, it explains how to download the software that belongs with your camera onto your computer. Then, it talks about simple photo-editing tools, retouching photos, tips on red-eye, covering blemishes and whitening teeth. I learned how to add text, take out people from my photos and add new backgrounds. I was amazed at how easy it was to fix a photo that I thought was a complete loss, and turn it into a photo that I could print. It was easy to do simple tasks on a photo, but also get creative and turn photos into digital collages, postcards and calendars.

The best selling point about this book is that it comes with a DVD that contains video tutorials that show you how to accomplish projects in the book and a few additional ones that are not in the book. The DVD is about two and a half hours long. The DVD also has some free trial versions of photo-editing software like Adobe Photoshop Elements that you can try before you buy. The DVD was easy to follow right along with the book. The book also gives tips as a sidebar and warnings of potential pitfalls to avoid. There are even technical tips for the more advanced; making the book useable by the more advanced photographer.

Overall, the book and DVD were of great help to me in learning the basics then incorporating them into my photo editing skills and giving me an end result that I was
proud of. I would highly recommend this book to all digital photographers and scrapbookers.

No good but VERY GOOD.This book made you to deep concept Why RGB? , Why CMYK? , How about ILM and Photoshop? , and many more.Advise to beginner but you must persist, example and detail will move you to real photoshop.I gave 4 stars cause of some tool not deep example level, histogram and other.Common tool can use with every version.I had one.

This book is a good place to begin if you haven't made the move to digital yet. Although some of the information is a little dated with the rapid changes in cameras, there is still much that is valuable within this book.

The book is a conference proceedings writeup. Unfortunately, it lacks an introduction that attempts to put some perspective or overall theme on the papers. So you might end up trolling the contents pages and the abstracts of each paper, in the hope of finding something relevant to your needs.

One paper on better ways to model terrain, via Voronoi decompositions. While another paper studies how to display large scale dynamical astrophysics. This is an extreme problem, where time and spatial dimensions can vary by several orders of magnitude. So displaying an animation consisting of equal time steps often proves inadequate. The authors suggest a hierarchical approach, somewhat fractal-like in spirit, if you will.

There are numerous other papers that urge similar approaches.

This book was very helpful. I'm not very familar with the internet and my office I work in has me doing different projects. I have to use the internet alot and this book is great for people who know about the internet but arent experts.