Applications Books

I read a lot of books on Compression, but this is indeed the best one I ever bought. I love this book and read it frequently.

The authors of this well balanced textbook succeed admirably well in teaching the subject to the union of students in math and in cs, and to engineers. The danger with subjects that cut accross fields is that they might appeal to the intersection of audiences involved rather than to the much larger union. The authors seem to be at home with all the types of readers, they realize that the lingo and the aim is different for the different and diverse groups of students. Indeed, the tools of information theory, data compression, and arithmetic coding are widely used in science. While the mathematical parts of the subject is old[Shannon, Kolmogorov..., measurements of information, entropy, channel capacity], the applications are still going strong, with new things coming out at a fast rate right up to the present. So the emphasis in the book on data and image compression is very appropriate. There is even a JPEGtool user's guide in the appendix.

I am a gradute student in computer science and I have read a lot of books on this subject, including 1- Digital Image Compression, by Weidong Kou, 2- The Data Compression Book, by Mark Nelson, 3- JPEG Still Image Data Compression Standard, by Pennebaker. I have also browsed few other books on this subject, but one thing I can say for sure, that this is the best book ever written on the subject of Compression. It explains the information theory and data Compression in the best possible way, with best examples. Once read, you will never forget the algorithms. I just love this book, and read it every once in a while.

As a First Year Law Student I am required to take a class on property law. Until my professor started to talk about estates I was doing well. Sensing the utter confusion my classmates and I had on the subject he recommended this book for us. He was absolutely right. This book is an invaluable tool for those learning about property law for the first time. I'd be lost without it.

I'm at a #7 ranked law school and have a terrible property textbook and throughout the year I used this book to bolster my understanding. Many times I felt like I understand much better than my classmates becaues this book gives you such a solid foundation. It also has exercises for each little section so you get it all down pat! Now I am studying for my 1L property final and am so grateful to have this book that I took the time to come here and write a review. This book is especially strong for understanding present and future interests in possessory estates. But it also has concurrent ownership (joint tenancy, tenancy in common, etc.). Finally, this book is slim and small so I am even grateful for that because toting around all the heavy law textbooks makes you not take this for granted. ;)
Thank you Cornelius Moynihan!

My girlfriend is in law school. When she had time to talk to me the other day, she told me about how this book has been a huge help and helped her understand her property class better than her other textbooks. Not for the novice, but perfect for the future lawyer that really needs to understand the concepts.

Computers and Internet service providers (ISP) are an integral part of nearly every aspect of modern life and business. In ISP Liability Survival Guide, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Counsel for MCI WorldCom Timothy Casey brings to bear his expertise and experience to provide detailed explanations on the varying laws governing networking and the Internet, and how their technical features impact running a liability-free ISP. He offers critical considerations for adopting effective policies and procedures for effectively structuring an ISP operation. He also gives valuable insight into contracting with users, vendors, as well as sales channels to accommodate the laws and maximize ISP profitability. ISP Liability Survival Guide is critically important, crucial, essential reading for anyone charged with operational responsibilities for providing ISP services in today's technologically driven communications marketplace.

ISP Liability Survival Guide written by Timothy Casey is an excellent guide for ISP's to follow in order to run an effective service and remain within established industry standards of practice and the law. This book will help ISP's to sort through all the existing laws, regulations, policies, and issues and help them to determine which ones apply to them and how applicable ones should be enforced through their services.

This book provides an excellent treatment of handling intellectual property issues. Trademark, copyright, patent, and domain name issues are big today. ISP's will receive a mini-course in dealing with them. What is a trademark? What is a copyright? What is fair use? What constitutes infringement? What are the implications of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)? What is the ISP's liability? How does an ISP respond to a complaint? It's all covered here. ISP's will appreciate the advice on handling reported incidents of alleged infringement.

ISP's face a number of other serious threats to their services. Some of these are caused by the conduct of their own clients and sometimes through the efforts of outside parties looking for ways of expanding their reach. ISP's must keep up on gambling, pornography, spamming, spoofing, cookies, fraud, defamation, libel, and child privacy issues. This book will educate ISP's about these troublesome issues and provide them with strict guidelines that will keep them operating on the strait and narrow.

ISP's receive advice and instruction on other matters such as planning, establishing, and enforcing policies and terms of service. They will also benefit from the number of actual case studies that reveal how various laws, regulations, policies, and court decisions have clear implications on how they should conduct their own services. This is must reading for any ISP and company who wants to do things right!

Timothy Casey, a senior VP for MCI WorldCom, transmits executive-quality knowledge in "ISP Liability Survival Guide" for a panhandler-level price. Despite the fact that he is what we techies would probably call a "suit," his writing is relaxed, anecdotal, and even humorous. But don't let his conversational writing style fool you; he is a MAJOR player in this industry. As a corporate executive and quasi-ambassador, Casey is a kind of Internet lobbyist. He has been immersed in virtually every state, federal, and international regulatory craze, preventing the regulators from turning the Internet as we know it into one great big cluster... (I hope I'm not the only one who still uses that phrase from Clint Eastwood's 'Heartbreak Ridge.') After reading the book, it kind of amazed me that he would disclose as much useful information as he does for the relatively small cost of this book. Other prominent Internet-lawyers-turned-writers charge literally five times as much, and you get less useful stuff and more legal jargon. And even if you enjoy being ripped off, no one has written a book of this type yet! Casey covers every aspect of Internet law that affects ISPs and similarly-situated e-businesses and customers. If anyone has read about the richness vs. reach debate (Evans and Worster, "Blown to Bits"), you will know what I mean when I swear that the info in this book is extremely rich. I love this book, and it still amazes me that in an industry where information is our chief commodity, Casey is giving away so much rich knowledge, practically for peanuts.

A wonderful book! Maple has been described as "the force" in CAS with Mathematica described as "the dark force". This wonderful book brings Mathematica into the light.

Joy does work on Mathematica 5.1, however, the current version, and it runs on both Mac and PC platforms (OS X for the Mac and Windows XP for the PC).

Joy is a wonderful compilation of program-based notebooks that shorten the time-to-use Mathematica dramatically, for both novice and computer-savvy students and learners. The manual is well-written, visually attractive, and uncluttered.

Joy of Mathematica makes it far easier to graph (2- and 3-D, parametric, polar coordinates, and more), manipulate expressions (simplify, solve), differentiate and integrate functions, work with series and sequences, vector fields, matrices, multiple variables, and so forth.

Writing adjuncts to Mathematica is something of a cottage industry, and several other Mathematica-based programs can help: Calculus Wiz (for high school and college students), Explorer, and Navigator, for instance.

Wolfram Research (publisher of Mathematica) wants to penetrate the secondary-level educational market and is offering very attractive site licenses to schools and individual licenses to students at those schools. It is not clear whether the publishers of Joy will offer a similar site license and individual student purchase rate.

Finally, it is not known at this point whether the authors will re-optimize Joy for Mathematica 5.1 version.

"The Joy of Mathematica" really does make Mathematica software a "Joy" to use, and to learn. Users of Mathematica know and love the powerful capabilities of this excellent mathematical software environment for symbolic and numeric computation with incredible support for 2D and 3D graphics. Students and professionals considering adopting Mathematica are often awestruck by the enormous range of mathematical capabilities suddenly put at their fingertips. However, Mathematica is not a Joy to use, as each powerful command (and there are many) is accompanied by so many parameters and modifiers (all necessary), requiring a not so Joyful syntax. "The Joy of Mathematica" comes to the rescue, and indeed, it is a real JOY to use! "Joy" comes in the form of a book, an easy to use tutorial and guide, with an accompanying CD. The software on the CD installs easily, and modifies your own Mathematica "front end" environment by providing very useful and well organized pull-down menus which launch diaglog boxes. The diaglog boxes are great! They remind the user which parameters and choices need to be specified in the context of a particular Mathematica command. They provide immediate examples for the student to try. They output clear summaries of the entered requests, organize the computed output, and allow the user to view the actual Mathematica commands which "Joy" issues. This in turn helps the user learn Mathematica's arcane command syntax (if you want to bother). "Joy" provides the student and experienced user with the menu structure we all wish we had when using Mathematica. "Joy" is really a terrific teaching and learning tool for college students of science and engineering, and a great way to bring great math software into the hands of high school students. It's a "Joy" for me and my son, and it will work for you too.

I have learned sailing, chess, computor languages, photography, tennis, and other skills out of a book. Personally Photoshop is a very user unfriendly software package but also the most capable one as well. After getting this book 1-2 years ago, it has been used extensively. The directions are excellent and the clarity is remarkable. Without question, I would recommend this book to any begginer using Photoshop. There really is no better book. I still refer to it often.

Before I use a book, I give it a feel test. I'm looking for a useful feel; is it inviting, does it compel me to open it, are the pages easy to read, is it easy to navigate, does the index work? Julie King's Everyday Photoshop for Photographers, passes all my preliminary feel tests with high marks.

The pages are laid out so the chapter headings flip across the top in an easy to read fashion. They are large and descriptive, so when I searched for masking, I flipped quickly to Chapter 6, Selective Editing: Masking in Photoshop. The right hand page lists the Part section in vertical type. I really appreciate a book that flips well.

The information presented utilizes brief concise paragraphs with lots of bulleting and bold headers. Snippets of important information are specifically color coded to content, Remember(Blue), Watch Out!(Red), and Time Saver(Green). These are strategically placed with excellent information.

However, when working with a subject such as Photoshop, it is extremely important to visualize the techniques discussed with images reflecting sometimes subtle differences. There's just nothing worse than portraying Photoshop results with lousy pictures. King has an excellent collection of high quality images that faithfully reproduce the techniques discussed. They are bright, clear and visualize even the most subtle Photoshop effects. The qualities of the images are crucial to the text and often self-explaining.

Included are excellent screen shots of Photoshop's tools and palettes. They are easy on the eyes in the context of the text. Tables list speed keys for tools and commands. King also added Tool Tricks, more blocked snippets of ready to use information such as:

Press a number key to adjust the opacity of the next stroke you paint with the Brush tool or Clone tool. Press 0 for full opacity, 9 for 90 percent opacity, 8 for 80 percent opacity, and so on. To adjust opacity in increments smaller than ten, type the specific value: 85, 23 or whatever.

King provides a basic background on the use of Photoshop, how to move around within it, providing basic element descriptions using common, everyday language that a novice user can understand and relate easily. She discusses manipulating photographs via cropping and color controls, masking techniques, levels filter use to control exposure and color variances, remixing and replacing colors, fixing defects with the cloning tool and healing brush. Her text will be useful to the novice or the expert.

Mary Kuster
Member, D-MAG.org

This is the second book about Photoshop that I bought. I started with How to Wow Photoshop for Photography... when I found you already need quite a bit of foundations to work with this book (I will let you know how it works when I get there). So the following week I went to the bookstore and go through all the beginners Photoshop books I could find.
This one caught my atention and I have to say that it has totally opened my eyes to PS. I haven't finished reading it yet (four chapters to go) but I am already able to adjust exposures and colors with levels and curves, adjustment layers, crop without altering the quality of the image... Awesome, all that in two weeks! Every single effect explained in the text has worked for me. The flow of the book, although a little boring at the beginning (two chapters making selections), works very well (I had to go back to those two chapters many times).
Also appreciated the lack of technical language and the moderate sense of humor that keeps you up without feeling you are being fooled with stupidities.
Overall, I am amazed of the profusion of details, for both PS 7 and CS, Windows and Mac operating systems, tricks to speed and improve your work, pictures ilustrating the before and after of the technique and almost every step in between!.
If you have been scared of Photoshop as I was, this is your book. It will help you go through the basic operations you need to improve your photographies and prepare them to print or share on the internet.

This is the best material processing book for lasers that I know of. A good starter and reference book. The only other good source of reading that I know of are the LIA publications. Most importantly it describes in a surprisingly clear way the properties of a beam as they relate to processing, and good basic equations for heat transfer.

This book is amazingly good for those who are new in this field. It starts from the scratch and then makes your concepts. I think everybody should have one copy.

You can't think of a process in the laser business that isn't described in this book. Especially if you are an not a pro in laserstuff but still interested in the basics of laserprocessing, like welding, hardening, cutting etc.

Every chapter ends with a funny cartoon on something to do with the subject of that chapter. This comes in handy for presentations or other intermezzos.

But this cannot be called a shallow book, some real tough formulas can be found here, they are explained so well though, you can really understand them after only reading them twice or so.
Actually if you want to publish stuff in this field you might consider using this book as a reference. It is that good.

Ronald Popma
(PhD-student University of Twente the Netherlands)

This wonderful, timely book consists of interviews with the country's top legal researchers. I can't think of a better way to learn about legal research than from experts like Sabrina Pacifici, Cindy Chick, Diana Botluk, Genie Tyburski, Leigh Webber and the others profiled.

If legal research is part of your professional life, do yourself a favor: Buy This Book.

Jerry Lawson, Author of The Complete Internet Handbook for Lawyers (ABA 1999).

This book should appeal to: 1) software developers and usability testers, to learn from experiences with well-established proprietary and newer web-based interfaces to highly structured databases (billions, literally, of pages in Lexis and WestLaw); 2) content developers, web trainers and educators in all fields who wrestle with quality issues of web content; 3) observers of how professional communities use the web, as organized associations and for bottom-up information sharing; 4) amateur and semi-pro searchers who want to get tips from real pros trained in library and information science, as well as specific legal contents and methods.

Warning to workplace cynics: this is a no-Dilbert zone.

Example interview topics include: (software/usability) how are browser bookmarks used? are any web utilities widely adopted? (content/training) when is the web a trustworthy source of information? which comes first, in what circumstances: the web or fee-based services?

(community organizers) how do websites evolve to so well serve diverse professionals using cooperative and volunteer labor? (amateurs/semi-pros) how do people who search for a living in a rapid turn-around environment organize their work? (cynics) are there really people who still have long-lasting careers and love their work? how do they survive the nutty managers, mindless meetings, and constant change of fads?

Expanding the series and theme of "super searcher" books, this set of interviews goes more deeply into the technical aspects of legal research without losing the non-legal reader in either the terms of the field or the names of the content providers. My only complaint was the frequent reference to "stock techniques taught in legal research" which might have been better defined or compared, but I loved the phrase "build a search".

The online secrets of top legal researchers are covered in an important guide which uses interviews with experts to focus on legal research topics. From web site listings and commercial services to databases and professional journals, this is packed with practical references to legal research processes.

I am so pleased to have found a book on Arts & Letters that I can understand and use! I have learned more about this program in a week than I have in an entire year! After working through the projects provided by the author, I am creating objects and manipulating them with ease. Thank you Ms. Ballew!

I've been using Arts and Letters since its inception in the early 80's, but I've never had a book on it. Finally one is available. Ms. Ballew has done a good job of getting all of the program in the book, and it really covers everything.

I use this program in my business and it works great for me. I like this book and recommend it for anyone who has the program.

Wow! this is the book I've been looking for! I've had Arts & Letters for about a year now and have never been able to find a book on it. This book explains all about the program and about all of the menus and tools too. I like the examples and the files on the cd, and I can tell that Ms. Ballew has been using the program for a long time. Thank You!!!

This is my second amazon review ever in seven years. I mention this to emphasize how much I believe in this book. I teach an introductory programming class to artists/designers at a University. Finding a good textbook has not been easy. I am very happy to finally find what I consider the "missing" book. I will definitely be adopting this book as one of the required texts for my Intro to Interactive class in the spring. I am very impressed with the content. It is very well suited for my students who are not fluent (and are sometimes quite intimidated) in programming lingo and concepts:) Other books cover the fundamentals usually in one chapter, and get into the key concepts very quickly. This book is paced better for the novice, and, as another reviewer noted, is very friendly and inviting. Job very well done!

In the past 10 months I have returned to programming computers, having taken a decade off doing such to produce dance music, work as a surgical nurse, and currently to do CAD/CAM programming for a stone manufacturer. In the nineties I coded a bit in pure assembly, but have never coded in a high level language, never one with objects or garbage collection, and honestly haven't coded at all for 12 years.

This book should have been the first book I picked up when I was staging my return, as it is the first beginner level programming book to hold my interest, and one which enables the user to work with first class multimedia applications while still coding at the beginner level. Data visualization has really taken off, and Casey Reas and Ben Fry's Processing language is a beautiful abstraction on top of Java for creating rich media, generative art, and visualizations.

I've built a small coding library of 75-100 retained books from the 400+ I bought from Amazon in the past 10 months, and this is absolutely the first book I should have read - without a doubt. Processing, the language, is an absolutely wonderful platform for learning to program - and I wish I could say that I first learned to program using this book and Processing.

If you are curious about learning how to program, "Learning Processing" gives you a much more interesting set of tools to work with for learning the basics - I think this will lead to continued interest in some who might otherwise give up early.

I have (but have not read cover to cover) the other Processing related books - "Processing" by Reas and Fry, "Processing" by Ira Greenberg, and "Visualizing Data" by Fry - and I think the reason I haven't completed them is because they are intermediate level programming books, and will make more sense to read now, having completed "Learning Processing."

Finally, I think it's important to mention that I have noticed that it is increasingly obvious when books are written by educators, as opposed to professional coders. There is a certain command of the readers attention span that only teachers/educators can harness, and this is no exception.

I highly recommend this book, which perhaps, could have been titled more aptly "Learning to Program via Processing," but which was a fabulous read nonetheless!

grantmichaels

I just received this book yesterday, and I have to say that this book is probably the friendliest "instructional" book. I say instructional, instead of programming because as a designer, I can comprehend the concepts that Shiffman talks about. It's even friendlier than some Photoshop and Flash books that I've read through.

I have both Shiffman's and Casey Reas' book (last year), and I'm starting Shiffman's book. Casey's book is for intermediates. I would even recommend this book to high school students who are interested in programming, however, most high school students are professional programmers already (look at the kids that work on Facebook).

This book fills a major hole in the education of EEs, p-chemists, and materials scientists that need to know something about the interaction of light and matter. Explanations get past the formal math to reveal the physics behind.

This book covers most of the details regarding the light-matter interaction because it points to the actual topics right from the beggining, without boring and escessive formalisms. Even though by having 244 pages, it is more solid and clearer (by a far extent) than Yariv's one, and is much Better than Lounden's book. Perhaps, an odd point of the book could be that it has not extensive excersises left to the reader. Nevertheless, the book "really" introduces to hot topics in the field. I strongly recommend the book for first-year graduated students, and anyone that needs to have a quick straighten up for quantum electronics.

The thing that jumps out is that there is a lot of emphasis on the physical meaning behind the math. It puts everything into perspective quite well.