Software Books

Farhang-Borjeny does a superb job explaining complex topics in a very straightforward fashion.

As a course instructor, I found adaptive filters a very helpful book for teaching. It is also an easy to read book, as a self-study. Having used the previous books in the market, I found this a lot easier to teach. My students seem to understand much better. The very nicely designed end of the chapter problems are very helpful in enhancing the students understanding of the basic concepts. Farhang-Boroujeny has a very special view towards the fundamental concept of convergence; the significance of the power spectrum of filter input on convergence behavior. He starts injecting this concept right from the chapter on Wiener filters and carry this through out the book. Chapters 6 and 12, giving the basic concepts of LMS and least squares, are really nice and very instructive. Chapter 7 is very enlightening in understanding the basic concepts of the convergence and its relationship with the power spectrum of filter input. Chapter 8 has made the difficult topic of frequency domain adaptive filters very easy to follow. It also contains some unpublished work which I found very interesting. Other chapters also bring to the attention new views of adaptive filters. I am sure that the students and new researchers enjoy this book and will learn all important concepts of the adaptive systems and filters from this very well written book.

Congratulations to Dr. B Farhang-Boroujeny!

This book is one of the best books on the subject! The writing style is as clear as Widrow's "Adaptive Signal Processing" and it has as much detail as Haykin's "Adaptive Filter Theory". In short, if you have to get ONE book on the subject, this is the book to get. Perfect for either studying on your own or learning in a classroom setting, and relevant to both researchers and practicing engineers.

Superb, great book! . Starts with simple theory, it makes you think harder and harder and you progress into the deep science of adaptive signal processing and the implementation of filters with different algorithms, difficult themes are made easy and over all this is great reference book for the designer. I wish I could get a solution manual for a deeper and more reliable analysis. It will serve you well is you use Matlab to analyze and simulate complete Adaptive filters for equalization or so.

[Also posted on my blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/luisabreu/archive/2008/06/11/book-review-ado-net-3-5-cookbook.aspx]
After several days, I've finally finished reading this book. This is really a very complete book wit lots and lots (and lots!) of examples. It's fair to say that it covers most (if not all) ADO.NET related scenarios (I'm an SQL Server user but if you're into Oracle then it also has several examples that show how to use ADO.NET and Oracle).

I do have one complaint though: chapter 8. Currently, I'll personally "hurt" anyone that is working on the same project as me and that uses ADO.NET objects on window forms or ASP.NET front ents! Ok, I'm not violent, so I wouldn't really hurt anyone :) serioulsy, don't use ADO.NET objects on your UI.

Having said this, I still recommend it (specially if you're working with ADO.NET).

The 'ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook' is a great resource for every .NET database developer out in the world. With 950+ pages of content you will not be reading thin, as this goodies book comes with 222 tidbits of information that will help you in your everyday work.

Subjects covered include:

- connecting to a variety of data sources
- working with disconnected data objects (datasets)
- querying data
- executing functions and stored procedures
- using LINQ
- searching and filtering data
- adding and updating data
- copying/transferring data
- database integrity
- binding data to web forms
- XML data
- optimizing .NET data access
- debugging stored procedures
- doing batch updates
- enumerating SQL servers
- SQL Server CLR integration

I feel that is an outstanding companion book for .NET database developers that are looking for a resource that specifically outlines tasks into a neat, organized manner. Instead of thumbing through a book to figure out a particular way to do something, these common tasks and questions are broken up for ease of use and efficiency. If you are a .NET DB developer you definitely owe it to yourself to add this great book to your collection of technical books immediately.

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for a review by a "technical expert". I really liked how the book was laid out with a problem-solution-reasoning approach (known as a recipe). Each one was generally useful for those unaware of how to do things in ADO.NET. The examples were short and too the point. The topics were quite varied so just about everyone will find something in this book. In particular the recipes on getting schema information programmatically will really benefit a lot of people because it is neither common nor easy.

I had only a few complaints about the book. The first complaint is with the title. It says ADO.NET v3.5 but in reality almost all the recipes cover any version of ADO.NET from v2 on. This might cause some people to shy away from the book. This book is really for anybody using ADO.NET.

This leads me to the second complaint. There really was no 3.5 content mentioned. LINQ and SQL 2008 were mentioned a few times but they aren't specific to ADO.NET v3.5. LINQ itself seemed out of place for the topic.

The final complaint I had was that the recipes are mostly designed to be copy and pasted into working code. The code samples don't really follow what I would consider an appropriate pattern for professional code. Therefore simply copy/paste will cause more problems than not. It really would have required no additional lines of code and would not have complicated things to have "done it right". Still this seems to be standard practice for most technical books so I can't harp too much.

Overall I recommend this book for anyone who works with (or will) ADO.NET of any version.

(Full Disclosure: I was a tech reviewer for this book and received a free copy)

I've been using the various incarnations of Microsoft data access technologies for quite some time and have been using ADO.NET for a few years, so I wondered whether I was going to learn anything new from this book. It covers all of the territory to get started (connection strings, basic usage of ADO.NET classes, etc.), but what I really appreciated was that it topics that advanced ADO.NET users would find useful and I certainly learned a few new tricks.

The topic on writing provider and database independent code (Section 10.22) which covers how to do it right if you are targeting .NET 1.1 (which we do) was particularly useful to me. Chapter 10 (Optimizing .NET Data Access) is just generally a good chapter no matter what your level and covers asynchronous SQL calls (executing and cancelling), ASP.NET data caching, paging queries, SQL Server stored procedure debugging and more.

Since my job was to actually run every code snippet, I can vouch for their quality. Most are built off the AdventureWorks sample database that comes with SQL Server Express, so they are ready to run. The rest come with full DDL to create what you need (databases, stored procedures, etc), and the code and SQL is available online so you don't have to type it in.

This book was excellent and very informative. Mr. Young impeccably explains how to use PDFs to achieve the desired results of your product. I've often been confused on how to precisly use various PDF products, but with this book, I can now design my product the way I want it to look. This book is definitely a "must read"!

I'm one of those people who buys every software book on the market. I've looked at lots of books on PDF. This is the best yet. It's practical and tells me how to avoid making the most common mistakes in creating a PDF. I wish the rest of my colleagues would read this.

Unlike many books in this category, Carl Young's book is not a rewrite of the Acrobat Help file. He lays out the most common mistakes creators of PDFs make, and then provides step-by-step solutions. Highly recommended.

Every graphic designer should own this book! Designers constantly send PDFs
that are waaaaay to big, or have missing fonts to my small marketing/pr
firm. I may buy copies for every designer I work with.

Perhaps the most pertinent question answered by the book is what are the differences between Elements 2 and 3. If you are an existing E2 user, is there enough incentive to migrate to E3? Huss devotes considerable space to squarely address your concerns.Of the changes, the most useful is Photo Organizer. A huge improvement over File Browser, which is what E2 gave you. PO is well suited for collections of hundreds or thousands of photos. Many people who take photos regularly will run into the scaling constraints of File Browser. PO lets you attach metadata to a photo, in the form of keywords which you can choose as succinct descriptors of the photo. Then, later, if you search for a keyword, PO will return a set of thumbnails of the photos with that metadatum. Picking a thumbnail gives the original image. Very simple to use.If you know HTML, the metadata in PO maps to the <meta> tag that can be used in any HTML page.

Serious collectors should welcome PO. The only drawback is that it does not exist in the Mac version of E3; only in the Microsoft version. Huss speculates that Apple's iPhoto is too close in functionality for Adobe to economically develop a Mac version.

What a great book! What separates this book from all the others is the downloaded pictures that you work with as you make your way through the book. I kept the pictures in their chapter folders and put them in a folder called Elements 3: 50 Cool Ways. Then after practicing with them, when Adobe asked me if I wanted to save changes, I said no - so I could practice again and again. I must be slow because I have needed to practice them again. Thanks Dave, for a wonderful book. Will you be doing the same for Elements 4?

This book is not only a pleasure to read, it also was superbly reproduced and technically accurate (not all books are!). Dave Huss goes the extra mile to provide an excellent selection of real world (read: useful) tutorials that cover in detail how to retouch and correct common digital photography problems (color cast, wrinkle removal, panorama assembly, red eye, perspective correction). It also covers common challenges associated with managing digital photo libraries (album assembly, photo cataloging, image management). The photo projects are perfect for newcomers to digital photography (like me) and expose many of the features of Photoshop Elements I needed to get up to speed on fast. Well worth the investment.

This is the most user friendly book that I have ever held in my hands. The great thing about this book is that Dave works with you one on one by having you download the pictures that are the examples in the book! This way you work on the same picture step by step and you can see what your picture should look like through the edit process. This book is very FUN and INFORMATIONAL! Buy it you won't be sorry!!! And you will do things with this program that you didn't know you personally could do!!!

The book shouldn't be called Used, its was Crisp as New, and exactly what you wanna expect at the start of a new class, having a colourful mak free book in your hands.

The coverage of C++ and data structures looks pretty good. There are lots of programming examples, and the book is written very well. I'm recommending it for our 2nd year course in data structures and C++. Our students know Java, but not C++, so it's been a challenge finding a data structures book that packages a semi-introductory version of C++ with a standard course in data structures. This book appears to be the best suited out of about 5-10 books that I've reviewed for this course.

I actually feel that this book is a mixed bag. On one hand, the concepts are intuitively presented and are easy to understand. On the other hand, the book doesn't delve too much into technical details, which may or may not be a godsend to various students. Personally, I'd rather use the Drozdek Data Structures text, since it goes into much more detail into analysis and logic behind choosing various data structures and algorithms in order to implement an ADT.

Anyway, it's still a great textbook for an introductory course in data structures. Just be sure to get another textbook on the same material down the road if you want to get a more detailed understanding of the concepts presented.

I am teaching the second programming / first data structure course in the department of electrical and computer engineering. I have used the first edition of this book several times, and as of fall of 2004 I am into the third of semester of using this second edition as a mandatory text.

This book is very good for students who already know how to program in C, C++ or Java. The first C or C++ course does not have to cover introduction to OOP though. My students learn C part of C++ in the first programming course. This book covers object oriented programming part of C++, and introduces/reintroduces pointers, file IO with streams, and C++ strings (good for former Java programmers). Then it follows into data structures. It starts with its own definitions of dynamic array that grows, and a simple linked list as basic data containers. Then it focuses on organizing access to data with stack and queue, and then migrates to the standard template library (STL). Everything is kept on the undergraduate student level. All other STL books I know assume that you are already an expert in programming or at lest for students after two programming courses, and are too difficult for average non-CS students.

I originally rated the first edition with four-stars only because it introduced pointers very late, out of the proper sequence and added the fifth star for the unique blend of introduction to OOP C++ and data structures, and STL. However, this edition is free from this inconvenience and it also makes C++ and data structures course accessible to former Java programmers. It gets true five stars from me this time.

This is definately the book to get to get up to speed with powerbuilder. I just picked up the advanced book in this series. by the way, newer versions covering powerbuilder versions thru 10.5 are available from the author/publisher, [...] And you won't have to pay more than the list price, which is what some used copies are listing for.

The intro book was excellent, so it was a no-brainer getting the advanced book. The advanced book provided excellent help for me as a new PowerBuilder user. As soon as you open the book, you're already learning plenty of tips that will help you later. Yes, this info is in PowerBuilder help, but here it's all in a nice, consise 'get-to-the-point' format. This book is used in the company's actual advanced class, so you also get a disk with exercises and solutions. The price may seem a little much for some, but for someone having to learn this quickly, which makes sense economically - 1)spend a couple of thousand in some 3 day 'quick' class or 2)spend a couple of hundred and get what you need without leaving your desk? This book is definitely worth it. The chapters on the datawindow report presentation styles (tabular, grid, etc) are excellent!

This book realy help me in construction of classes and objects using the PowerBuilder 7. It's desvending and show the secrets. If you want a way to mastering PowerBuilder, this is the right way.

If there was ever a book teaching Powerbuilder 7 advanced secrets then this is it. A must have for all developers of Powerbuilder. What you learn in this book is invaluable

"Advanced Sharepoint Services Solutions" is the second book by Scott Hiller, on Sharepoint Technologies. The first one was about building basic web parts. This book is for developers who have good knowledge of Sharepoint technologies. It is also assumed that you have already built some web parts and also have good understanding of .NET development. If you are looking for basic Sharepoint stuff, refer to his other book "Microsoft Sharepoint Building Office 2003 Solutions".

The Advanced book is not a complete reference on Sharepoint technologies. Instead it contains 8 chapters, which covers widely different areas. There are few chapters which are not covered by other Sharepoint books. This book is good source for CAML, Information Bridge Framework, Business Scorecard Accelerator, Sharepoint and BizTalk Integration, and for Sharepoint and Content Management Server Integration.
Since these topics are usually not covered in regular Sharepoint books, it becomes good source for these topics.

The book has good amount of source code (in C#) along with the text and provides some great ideas for system integrations. But as I said before it is not a complete reference book, just some great solutions for customizing and integrating Sharepoint technologies.

Well, so Hillier's first book on SharePoint wasn't enough for some readers! Apparently, he found demand for explanations of broader, more advanced usages, that he furnishes here in this book.

Perhaps the more important of these are discussed in the second half of the book. Microsoft has developed several other intricate applications, independently of SharePoint. But consider how it integrated the various parts of its Office suite, so that you can easily go from Excel to PowerPoint, say. In similar wise, Hillier explains how SharePoint is compatible with Information Bridge Framework, Business Score Cards Accelerator, BizTalk Server 2004 and the Content Management Service. Granted, none of these is as successful and widespread as something like Excel. These packages are far more specialised and their usages might often involve some programming effort. Thus too, using SharePoint with them also necessitates programming.

Ok, there are parts where you might pass an XML data file to an application, where this file tells it much of what you want it to do. And the XML approach is declarative, not procedural, so it minimises your programming effort. But typically, there are places where you still need the latter.

My impression of what Hillier describes is that Microsoft is not done with further refining of this integration. There are simply too many low level programming steps to be currently dealt with. No fault of Hillier's, naturally. He's calling it as it is. But let us hope that Microsoft continues improving these products.

Scot Hillier is the best SharePoint author - period.

For example: developers need to write web parts. Web parts are custom controls. Can't view a custom control at design/development time, right? Need to install it into SharePoint, run it, test. Right?

Wrong! Scott shows you how to design, develop, and debug at design-time. This little tidbit alone is worth the price of the book.

All of his books will help you become the best SharePoint developer out there.

Sharepoint is so confusing when you get into the backend and this book answered almost all of my questions. Best book I've found. You can tell the author spent a lot of time digging around in the guts of SP and was probably as frustrated as most of us are trying to figure out how to do the simplest of things. Small book, high price. WORTH IT.

I received this order on time and in excellent condition. I will do business with again.

"The African American Odyssey" just got better with the release of the 3rd edition. Updated accounts, in-depth coverage, a broadened focus (the American West, and beyond America), and the wonderfully helpful enclosed CD which allows for additional research, all make this a comprehensive volume for any and all students of African American history.

The blending of the famous and the unknown, men and women, North and South, slave and free, provides for a tapestry that weaves together both the terror and the triumph of the African American experience which enabled them to move beyond the suffering to a place of healing hope. The faith-basis for so much of the African American triumph could have been covered more comprehensively, though it is more than hinted at in the original sources covered.

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction .

An effective book, which the young new generation of African Americans can really gain their sense of knowledge from.

"The African American Odyssey" just got better with the release of the 3rd edition. Updated accounts, in-depth coverage, a broadened focus (the American West, and beyond America), and the wonderfully helpful enclosed CD which allows for additional research, all make this a comprehensive volume for any and all students of African American history.

The blending of the famous and the unknown, men and women, North and South, slave and free, provides for a tapestry that weaves together both the terror and the triumph of the African American experience which enabled them to move beyond the suffering to a place of healing hope. The faith-basis for so much of the African American triumph could have been covered more comprehensively, though it is more than hinted at in the original sources covered.

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction , Soul Physicians, and Spiritual Friends.

I have been using this book as a second reference in my Algorithm
Engineering class during the whole semester. I found it extremely useful for its nice structure, content and diversity of subjects treated, especially the ones in computational geometry such as Geometric Sweeping and Voronoi diagrams, for instance. I believe this book should be useful to any student taking algorithms class for its structureness, clearness, and completeness.

This is a great book overall, but I give it 4 stars as it lacks the mathematical explanations that I personally was looking for. I am graduate student in Computer Science and a E-Commerce Consultant by profession. This book is more detailed than the Sedweick (I can't spell his name) in the sense that it has some more of a mathematical approach. It lacks the level of explanation that the Sedweick book provided. It has some math, but overlooks some steps thus targeting someone with a pretty solid math background, not someone with sophomore level undergraduate math background.

Overall.. if you're a student taking an algorithms or advanced algorithms class (especially a graduate class), you might want to invest in this book.

I have studied both undergrad and grad algorithm courses from this book at KFUPM. For a beginner, the author provides a moderate level of mathematical analysis which helps in building a solid foundation, but avoids minor details that may obscure the overall grasp of the subject. The Exercise sets at the end of each chapter vary from easy to challenging....

The book represents a well written, consistent and easy to follow view on the area of algorithm analysis. It gives an excellent overview of various mathematical and computer science areas, including but not limited to combinatorial geometry, NP-problems, complexity theory, graph theory, algorithm analysis, dynamic programming and even computational geometry.

Most of the chapters are intended for a senior level undergraduate and graduate student, but some (such as part 4 devoted to complexity problems) are more suitable for "mature" audience and require some preliminary knowledge in the area.

I found chapters on sorting, data structures, recursion and functional programming well written and structured, and examples to be practical as well as informative.

Sections on amortized analysis, randomized algorithms, approximation algorithms and iteration improvement deal with current directions in the algorithmic research and provide an excellent overview of the "state-of-the-art" in these areas. I also enjoyed reading through the section on greedy algorithms (shortest path and minimum spanning tree problems).

Section on computational complexity and analysis of the relationship between complexity classes seems to be a bit complicated, those who are interested in this area should probably do some preliminary reading.

The last section on computational geometry (my area of expertise) and applications of Voronoi diagrams could be extended, but even in the current state it givs a pretty good idea of what computational geometry is all about.

Overall, I give to this book a "5 star" review and recommend it for anyone who is seriously interested in learning exactly how algorithm design and analysis work. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and can only wish that author would write more books like that in the future!

The book was band new just like the seller said and arrived in a timely manner. I would buy from this seller again.

I used this book in my introductory level computer science course. I found this book to be an essential tool in my early undersanding of how computer works in general and more importantly how to develop working algorithms. This book is well designed and easy to read and easy to understand. This book comes with a CD ROM. I believe this is the key feature to this book. On the CD ROM there are emulators of various computer operations. (eg. Compiler tree breakdown, and many other emulators. An Excellent book!

Deckers gives you a concise tour of computer science. Not enough to turn you into a programmer, given the space limitations of the book. But he covers many key ideas in the field. Including Usenet, email, virtual communities [think Second Life], and the World Wide Web. Naturally, he has to explain HTML, as the graphical language of the Web. HTML is so simple that he essentially explains all its important points. Including the crucial hyperlink tag.

The book then segues naturally from HTML to XML. Where you can now write your own tags. Immensely flexible and popular.

It is only after this, that the book goes into the traditional topics of computer science. The explanations of what makes a programming language. He uses JavaScript as one example of such a language. So you learn about constructs like for loops, if-else and while statements.

The book is really dominated by the Web. The pedagogy stresses this.

This book is one of the two texts in FSU's COP 3502: "Introduction to Computer Science" course (a required course in their Computer Science degree). As the authors state in the preface, they "wanted to design a 'CS 0' course that was a true survey course." They did an excellent job. Basically, they start with the assumption that the reader has never turned on a computer in his life and take him through its history, how to use it, what programming is about, and how the hardware works. They even teach a bit of HTML and JavaScript. There's very little I can say that is bad about the book. It comes down to some typgraphical errors, an incorrect web address for the online portion of the book (easily figured out from the page their web address takes you to), and my belief that they took out too many steps in describing computer switches, gates, and circuits. Frankly, I'm amazed that they reasonably went from a neophyte level to a fully-grounded level in one book. I rate it as 5 stars out of 5.