Applications Books

Turtle Geometry teaches mathematics and physics via the computer and the Logo programming language. The mathematics covered is pretty advanced, including topology, and general relativity. Yet, through the use of turtle geometry this advanced math and physics becomes accessible to the layperson. Although all of the examples are in the Logo programming language there are listings of Basic routines in the back of the book. With the help of the Basic routines I was able to easily translate the Logo/Basic code to the Python programming language which I choose to use for reading this book. The reviewers of this book mention it as the beginnning of a revolution in mathematics education. It seems though, that this revolution did not come about as computers are still not used very effectively in the classroom. I think this is very sad as the teaching approach used in Turtle Geometry could be very successful in the classroom.

Anyone interested in logo from beginners to advanced users will benefit from reading this book. It has very easy and simple to understand examples, along with a review, and questions at the end of every chapter. Some solutions are provided at the end of the book, (and their even correct, as opposed to many other text books I've read). The pace of the book gets gradually more difficulst, yet more interesting as you reach the climax at the end. A must read for anyone interested in Mathematics.

I discovered this little gem of a book while exploring the stacks in the library when I was attending a local junior college back in the 80's. The author uses Logo's turtle graphics as a way of exploring the properties of geometric space. From very simple beginnings drawing regular polygons and other simple shapes, the book gradually works its way to more and more complicated scenarios. After exploring the properties of ordinary turtle graphics, turtle graphics are tried on the surfaces of spheres and cubes, then on more complicated surfaces. Little by little, concepts of non-Euclidean geometry are introduced, until the final chapters in which the turtle is used to demonstrate the geometric nature of gravity in Einstein's general theory of relativity.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone with interests in computer programming, geometry and physics. The unusual approach this book takes to the understanding of curved space is deceptively simple and surprisingly powerful.

"...this book accomplishes what the authors intended. It is an extremely comprehensive review of ultrasound as applied to surgical practice. It is a very important reference and will hold a prominent place on my bookshelf." (Current Surgery, Vol. 60, No. 1, January/February 2003)

"...a first-rate resource for the practicing surgeon..." (World Journal of Surgery)

"...this book succeeds in offering a basic and user-friendly introduction to ultrasound for its intended audience, the surgeon..." (Abdominal Imaging)

Matt Piper begins walking you through FM Synthesis while introducing you to the Subtractor Synth. This is an excellent way begin and give you a much deeper understanding of the instrument you're using. The knowledge you have from learning this synth applies to almost all of the other components of Reason.

He proceeds in a similar way through the other components of Reason, again using plain and easy to understand English. Examples on the CD are good.

Hang in there and go through this manual slowly, and you'll learn a lot.

I've owned Propellerheads Reason for years but never understood how to use it properly. I'm a songwriter by trade, and not an engineer, so I found all the various knobs and devices in Reason a bit overwhelming. The high cost of recording in the studio, however, convinced me I needed to learn how to produce my own tracks. With that in mind I purchased several books and videos in order to try and learn Reason. Of all the books and videos I've purchased, this is my favorite book.

Not only does the book explain many of the most important and confusing devices in Reason, but it also very clearly explains a number of audio engineering concepts. If you've ever been confused reading an article ore even a magazine review that waxes on about the virtues of Oscilators, LP, HP, and Notch filters, LFO's, etc, this book will explain those concepts very clearly. An interesting result of that is not only am I more confident using Reason, but I am more confident about Audio engineering concepts in general. Now when I hear songs on the radio I'm able to identify the type of sound used in the song (e.g. hmmm, that killer riff in is probably an analog synth using sawtooth waveform pattern with a low pass filter on it....), something I never imagined I'd be able to do.

The Subtractor and Malstrom synths are covered in detail, which is good because they set the foundation for the rest of the material in the book.

The NN-XT section demystified sampling for me. Sampling is something I've always found a bit confusing and quite honestly a bit scary. With this book it was easy to upload samples, map them across my keys, and use velocity switches and other nifty tricks to get them to sound more realistic.

Surprisingly enough one of my favorite sections was the Redrum. I never cared for this device much because all of my Redrum beats sounded like they were programmed by a robot. In this book however I learned a number of tricks and techniques for livening up those robotic rhythms and bringing them to life.

The combinator section was excellent as well, and reinforced a number of key concepts discussed throughout the book.

If I had one criticism it would be that the three appendices of the book- the NN-19 sampler, the Dr. Rex Loop player, and the section on making your own refills, are not in the book, but are in the corresponding disc that accompanies the book. You can read them on .pdf files on your computer, or you can print them out, which is what I did. I didn't like this is because these Appendices are rich treasure troves of useful information, and they should have been included in the printed version of the book.

All and al I thought this was an excellent book, and as a result of using this book and others in the Skill Pack series, I feel that I can approach Propellerhead Reason and my music project with confidence.

Richard Ladson
Singer/Songwriter
[...]

I am a music hobbyist who has owned Reason for a couple of years but never understood how to create sounds "on purpose" rather than just twiddling knobs cluelessly. This book immediately helped me begin to understand the inner workings of synthesis in Reason. I recommend this book especially for novices, like me, but more experienced may gain something from it as well. Mr. Piper's writing style is very clear and he makes sure you know what things are important to grasp before moving forward. This is very helpful. He also writes with just enough of a humor to keep things positive and enjoyable. If your copy of Reason is collecting dust because you can't comprehend it, get this book.

The authors have done a great job of providing criteria, explanations and examples for web users who wish to evaluate information found on the web. We all know there is a ton of stuff out there, much of it bad or biased. Now we know how to tell the wheat from the chaff. Individual web users will want to have this book handy when looking for consumer, health, business or other kinds of data on the web. Teachers may want to require it as a text or supplemental reading in courses which involve web use. Students who include information found on the web in their research can use this guide to determine the quality, currency and objectivity of web sites. This book fills a gap in the literature. Nicely written. Easy to read. Great gift idea.

The authors have done a great job of providing criteria, explanations and examples for web users who wish to evaluate information on the web. We all know there is a ton of stuff out there, much of it bad or biased. Now we know how to tell the wheat from the chaff. Individual web users will want to have the book handy when looking for consumer, health, business, or other kinds of data on the web. Teachers may want to require it as a text or supplemental reading in courses which involve web user. Students who include information found on the web in their research can use this guide to determine the quality, currency and objectivity of web sites. This book fills a gap in the literature. Nicely written. Easy to read. Great gift idea.

This book is an in-depth analysis of the factors that make a Website believable. The authors, two librarians, examine numerous aspects of Websites and point out how they can be used to evaluate sites as trustworthy sources of information or goods. They begin with 5 traditional evaluation criteria: authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, and intended audience, and give examples of how these criteria apply to Websites. They also extend these criteria with evaluation measures that are specific to the medium. They then apply the evaluation criteria to different types of Websites: advocacy, business, informational, news, personal, and entertainment pages. This book is a must-have for libraries and researchers. It would also be very useful for serious Web designers who want to understand what kinds of design factors will bring credibility and respect to their Websites.

I got this book expecting that it would just sit on my shelf most of the time. I'm a DBA, not a developer, and was really just getting this so I would have it to thumb through every now and then. When I opened it, I started looking through some of the chapters, and couldn't put it down. I read 5 chapters that first night, and went back again and again. The author clearly knows this technology, and has a very relaxed, smooth style. He also has a very educated sense of humor that reminds me a bit of Dennis Miller. You will not be bored reading this book. I was also impressed with the level of depth he was able to reach in a book that was supposed to only survey the material. I found myself sitting at my server with the book in my lap trying the things in each chapter. I have a basic knowledge of a lot of the technologies in this book, but I had no idea how much I didn't know. This isn't the only book you'll need to finish a project, but even if you've been developing for years, you'll learn quite a bit that you never thought possible. The reference sections in the back are incredible too. Very complete.

I really enjoyed the section on DHTML, and XML. I have been writing with DHTML for quite some time, and it's one of those things I just memorized, but this book actually explains so many things, I find myself going back over my own code and actually understanding why I had to do things the way I did. Don't even get me started on the JavaScript section. Is there anything this guy doesn't know? My only real complaint is that the publishers didn't contract him for a sequel. This is a book that could easily be split into 2-3 different volumes, and I firmly believe that the author could more than fill them up. Trust me, he is a true master of his craft, and even if you're old-hat at most of this, you will still learn enough to make the cost of this book worth your while. Tom Yager really went out of his way on this one, and he really understands what people need/want in a book on web development. I sincerely hope he writes another.

This book is targeted at a technical person, who doesn't have extensive exposure to Microsoft Technologies. As a software architect coming from a Unix/C++ & NT/Java background, this book gave me enough background to feel confident in building architectural prototypes using Microsoft Technologies.

The flow of the book is very good, transitioning from major section to section with little difficulty. This book is not a reference book on any of the technologies mentioned on the cover! It is a great overview of each topic and how they inter-relate.

The downside of this book is that it doesn't go into enough detail in some areas. To actually begin implementing some of the ideas, you need another teaching aid to learn the Microsoft Tool in question. Fortunately, the book offers pointers to good references on each of the tools described.

All in all this book was a very thorough, easy read giving a great overview of the current state of the art in Microsoft System Architecture.

I got this book expecting that it would just sit on my shelf most of the time. I'm a DBA, not a developer, and was really just getting this so I would have it to thumb through every now and then. When I opened it, I started looking through some of the chapters, and couldn't put it down. I read 5 chapters that first night, and went back again and again. The author clearly knows this technology, and has a very relaxed, smooth style. He also has a very educated sense of humor that reminds me a bit of Dennis Miller. You will not be bored reading this book. I was also impressed with the level of depth he was able to reach in a book that was supposed to only survey the material. I found myself sitting at my server with the book in my lap trying the things in each chapter. I have a basic knowledge of a lot of the technologies in this book, but I had no idea how much I didn't know. This isn't the only book you'll need to finish a project, but even if you've been developing for years, you'll learn quite a bit that you never thought possible. The reference sections in the back are incredible too. Very complete.

I really enjoyed the section on DHTML, and XML. I have been writing with DHTML for quite some time, and it's one of those things I just memorized, but this book actually explains so many things, I find myself going back over my own code and actually understanding why I had to do things the way I did. Don't even get me started on the JavaScript section. Is there anything this guy doesn't know? My only real complaint is that the publishers didn't contract him for a sequel. This is a book that could easily be split into 2-3 different volumes, and I firmly believe that the author could more than fill them up. Trust me, he is a true master of his craft, and even if you're old-hat at most of this, you will still learn enough to make the cost of this book worth your while. Tom Yager really went out of his way on this one, and he really understands what people need/want in a book on web development. I sincerely hope he writes another.

There is not one book as of today, that is as comprehensive as this one.

A good book to understand the evolution of wireless domain in terms of infrastructure, technology, devices and applications.

Very informative for any person wishing to understand the wireless world. Especially the first part, which deals with the evolution, providing technical details in an understandable format.

Sections on "How cell phones work?", "i-mode story" etc are very useful and informative.

The book is an ideal companion for sales and solution delivery personnel from the point of view of understanding concepts clearly.

Highly recommended for those who wish to dwell in the wireless domain or those who are already providing solutions in wireless space.

This timely and relevant book covers the topic of wireless architecture and application development in a through and well presented format. The content is very up to date and well explained.

When recommending books I always ask myself if I would give the text away in my TrainingCity.com classes. "Wireless Internet Applications and Architecture" by Mark Beaulieu passes that test with flying colors.

Although the book is targeted at product developers it would be an excellent addition to any telecom or IT profession faced with the task of understanding the current wireless infrastructure and state of emerging XML based wireless applications.

Wireless Internet overviews the various technologies and architectures of what is becoming a necessity for corporate technical staffs. It tells how to devise and implement wireless Internet applications and reveals the latest wireless hardware and software trends. It describes business products, standards, and applications, and explains issues involved in integrating wireless capabilities. It covers phone-based systems, PDAs, the wireless office and evaluates the current state of wireless communications.

To a layperson, this book serves as a good guide to learn the language of the wireless Internet and offers an initiation of the amazing applications that are enabled when wireless telecommunications and the Internet work together.

To an experienced engineer, this book gives an overview of the technology enablers and new standards such as WAP, BLUETOOTH and the road map for Global wireless data.

To an industry person, this book acts as a resource center for existing applications on the Wireless Internet. It provides an exhaustive list of existing applications created on the Wireless Internet.

Overall a very well researched book, it covers a lot of ground. Clearly written by an expert, I strongly recommend this book as a developer's guide and reference.

If you are a programmer, attending a writer's workshop may not be an event on your list of things to do, as you probably do not consider yourself a writer. And yet, if you are a developer on a widely used piece of software, the consequences of what you write may be seen by more people than read the material of all but the most popular of authors. Furthermore, despite all efforts to quantify and qualify software development as a branch of engineering, it remains a creative act, and the code of the best developers is similar to poetry. It reads like a great sonnet, with a rhythm and flow that impresses and teaches you.
Furthermore, software development is more than just creating code, there are associated documentation and help files to be written. While substantial improvement in the quality of user's manuals has been made over the past several years, much of it is still abysmal. Therefore, if I were to be named the manager of a large software project, I would require the complete set of documentation writers to attend a writer's workshop that follows the guidelines put forward in this book. Gabriel describes in complete detail how to manage such events so that everyone is exposed to the gentle, yet firm and complete form of criticism so necessary to good writing. He is certainly a rare individual, a combination poet and computer scientist, and he has introduced the concept of a writer's workshop to the software patterns community. Gabriel is clearly also a talented expository writer, as the explanations are an excellent combination of memoir interspersed with instruction.
His experience in facilitating and attending such workshops shows a depth of background and understanding that exudes confidence in this form of training for designers. It is clear to me that everyone in a software project who writes something permanent can benefit from a workshop, and that includes the programmers. The most difficult hurdle in making such workshops a success is handling the problems of fragile egos, passionate beliefs in a system, insecurities and overly harsh criticism. Gabriel describes circumstances where he has been the witness to and recipient of criticism that is beyond the normal bounds considered to be constructive. This experience is put down in great detail and used as a backdrop for instructions on how to make the workshop process as egoless and constructive as possible.
After I thought about if for some time, it was clear that a poet is an ideal person to teach developers about writing. For a poet must write with great clarity, brevity and purpose, for even the best poem can be weakened by one or two inappropriate words, a fact that Gabriel mentions using a couple of examples. Programs too, must also be written to such specifications, and even the best programs can be rendered into lawsuit fodder by a few incorrect statements. Poems are also constructed using abstractions and metaphor, the very foundations of modern programming techniques.
Finally, the best advice that Gabriel gives about writing is the best advice that anyone striving for success can receive. He attributes it to golfer Jack Nicklaus, but in fact different versions have been uttered by many people, few of which are athletes. The story is that after Nicklaus made a very difficult shot, a (ignorant) spectator told him how lucky he was to have made that shot. The tart response from Nicklaus was that his luck always seemed to improve the more he practiced. Writer's workshops are fundamentally an act of directed practice, which is the best there is. Anyone who writes anything more permanent than grocery lists can benefit from a properly run workshop and in this book Gabriel shows you how to organize and execute a successful one.

Published in Journal of Object Technology, reprinted with permission

Every fall, just after school starts, some of the finest minds in object-oriented programming depart for an extraordinary conference in an improbable location. Held at a turn of the century mansion hidden among the corn fields of central Illinois, the PLoP (Pattern Languages of Programs) conference is one of those rare, magical events where everything you know about the way the software world works is turned on its head.

Instead of "acolytes" gathering around the feet of the "master" to hear the same talk that he gives at every other conference, experienced folks like Richard Gabriel, Ralph Johnson, Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham sit and give personalized advice about how the patterns and pattern languages written by first-time authors can be improved and strengthened. It's a place where you might find out one of your dinner companions has written four books on OO design and speaks at conferences twelve times a year, while the other is a new graduate student just getting started in the field.

How does this occur? And why do people keep coming back year after year? The key is in the primary innovation of this conference -- bringing the notion of an Author's Workshop to computer science. Richard Gabriel is the person who introduced that idea to the computer science community, and he writes lucidly and joyfully about the wonder and the terror of Author's workshops in this delightfully agreeable little book.

In this volume, Richard describes how the Author's workshop came out of the creative writing and poetry community, and provides a roadmap for carrying out a writer's workshop. He describes the benefits of the process, and gives sage advice to the participants in such workshops. He draws his stories and examples from his varied experiences in workshops in both communities (software and literature) and explains why such an unlikely way of doing things has come to be so valued and cherished by the software patterns community.

So, if you've wondered why people in the software patterns community are so set on the way they run their conferences, read this book and you'll understand why. But that's not the only value; reading this book can give you insight into how to improve your own writing in any genre, and how to marshall the resources of your communities to improve the quality of your work. I'm hooked on this process, and I'm delighted that I finally have something to refer people to so that I can share some of the magic of this unconventional way of teaching, and learning.

This is a unique book. It tells you about the writers workshop
process. The writers workshop process has its origins in the creative
writing community, and has been used in the software patterns
community. Richard Gabriel explains how the process can also be used
in other domains where creative effort is involved, such as reviewing
marketing materials. I book for two reasons. First it provide great
insight into the creative process (as applied to anything) and the
values that are used in the writers workshop can benefit anyone who
creates things, even if they don't use the workshop process. Second,
if you do want to use writers workshops, this book explains the hows
and whys of them. I had been involved in workshopping software
patterns since 1995, and I though that I pretty much understood what
they were about. I learned a lot reading this book.

I recommend this book for anyone who involved in the creative
process(of any sort): Software engineers, writers, teachers, and
students.

I learned X-Windows programming from this many years ago. Please bear with me as I set up the scenario here. As an independent consultant, I was in a situation where--in order to win a juicy federal contract--I had to represent that I was sufficiently expert in X-Windows to (a) build a toolkit of custom widgets; (b) build tools that allowed users to choose from a set of predefined "color palettes" such that (b-i) only certain classes (let's call them "Brand Q") of applications followed those palettes, other applications following the standard system palette, and (b-ii) the palettes interacted with the window manager such that, when the last Brand Q application was iconified, the standard system palette was restored, yet, as soon as any Brand Q application was deiconified, the user's chosen palette was reinstantiated; and (c) build tools that enabled a Certified Professional Ergonomist, or CPE (!), to experiment with widget appearances and parameters so as to craft an optimal set of palettes and then represent those palettes in such a way that X applications would properly follow what was visually intended. Oh, on top of all that, it had to interact with a visual GUI builder called UIM/X that implemented a whole set of "shadow widgets" that paralleled Motif widgets and let you edit their properties--rather like a Java "bean editor" one might find useful nowadays.

Well, I had to learn enough to write a thick, highly literate design document within a couple of weeks, and then go out and build some 40K lines' worth of applications code (in C, of course) and 15K lines' worth of "system" code (I'd define as "systems code" software that (a) interacts with the window manager vis-a-vis iconification and deiconification semantics; (b) communicates complex data structures via interning atoms with the X server; (c) tortures strange color mapping behaviors from an outdated NCR monitor that could only physically display sixteen colors at a time [thus having to rely on dithering and related visual effects to achieve other "colors"] and offers tools for related colormap management tasks) within a handful of months.

Now, I'm not complaining about the level of effort--given the six-figure consulting fee that lay at the end of the rainbow. But without Young's outstanding book, I'd have been dead in the water. Oh, of course I had access to the O'Reilly series of seven or eight books--which were occasionally useful for stealing a handy application that could quickly be incrementally modified (e.g., I needed quick code for a dialogue box managing three green buttons, and one of the O'Reilly books illustrated the code for a dialogue box sporting four yellow buttons). But Young taught me enough about X that I was soon empowered to write my own functions to populate recursive pull-down menus; to write the internals for a widget that borrowed functionality from two other widgets and used cutesy memory management tricks (akin to mainframe-lingo "lookaside buffers") that let me sequentially stack up their respective resources; and to learn how to take advantage of some interesting internals facts, e.g., that the XmN family of symbolic constants are defined as strings identical to their names (a la #define foo #foo).

Bravo, Mr. Young! You taught me much, and you taught me well.

This well written book, with numerous coded examples (that work!) is one of the best computer reference book I've encountered. Although it has not been updated to included Motif 2.1, most applications are still being written in Motif 1.2 anyway. It also includes the necessary Xt and X11 background to write GUIs. I went from zero experience with windows programming to writing full featured X-windows applications solely with the aid of this text and elementary knowledge of C. The author, who worked at Silicon Graphics, went on to write the Open Inventor library (which unfortunately is in C++). Great book!

Once upon a time, when I moved from Windows programming environment to X-Windows.. I found things were so diffiult for me.

Lucky me, one day I went to the library and found this book. It helped me to get start with X programming in s considerable short time. The step of this book is quite easy to follow, and not difficult to understand. At least it made X more friendly to me. Although it was Japanese edition and my Japanese isn't that good. (And I will buy the English edition soon).

If you want to program in X, this one is a must, Along O'Reilly X Reference Series (which I think is the best of X-Ref).

I've been a technical communicator for 17 years, and bought this book when it first came out. With the advent first of electronic publishing, where everyone had to know something about layout and design, and next with the Internet explosion where even your dog's vet has a website, poorly designed or not, and now, the advent of XML, which will further drive the art of communication into the hands of the unskilled, this book is a gem. It is still as applicable now as it was then, and easily applies to electronic style guidelines as well as to print.

If you are at all interested in how people learn, how they consume information, what works in layout (electronic or print) and what does not, read this book. It should be mandatory reading for everyone who works in the 'knowledge industry', from tech writers to webmasters to information architects.

Desktop publishing has raised the bar on professional documentation. Consultants and other professionals need to be able to turn out volumes of reports, requirements documents, plans, and a variety of other professional documentation. It is no longer good enough that these materials are neatly typed on the page. Reports need to have an attractive, professional look to them.

The Xerox Style Guide provides a full range of advice on layout, style, and correct usage. I found the layout portions helpful in achieving page layout that looks highly professional and improves the comprehension of the reader.

The advice on writing clear is also helpful, and more concise than many other style guides.

An impressive work which has aged well. The design notes and example it sets transcend the print medium. This is the Platonic ideal of standards manuals.

I loved it

I was desperate to find an easy to follow book on Access and this book was perfect! If you need a guide that will show you the quickest and easiest way to learn Access without a lot of computer programmer jargon and time, this is for you!