Digital Hierarchy Books

The advent of the personal computer and design software such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop have greatly changed the way in which design work is done. Still, at the fundamental level the essence of good design still require an understanding of the fundamental design theories. The old concepts of line, shape, form, value, color and texture are still fundamental to good design be it of a poster, a kitchen appliance, or an automobile.

This book discusses how to combine the traditional approaches with the advances made possible by digital techniques. This is the second edition and builds on the material covered in the 2003 edition by providing discussion of the more powerful software that is available now.

The CD that comes with the book includes several tutorial projects for the student to complete as well as links to provide trial versions of Illustrator and Photoshop.

The two other reviews seem questionable. They read like an add for the book.

Honestly, the book has nice illustrations. It is short on design princples, and long on examples. Check out Robin Williams Non-Designer's book as well.

Hashimoto teaches timeless precepts of visual design. Many of which predate the Internet. The book seems apt for someone already knowing something about Photoshop and Illustrator. It shows how to use those programs to apply changes to a design, in accordance with the precepts. But primarily you benefit at a higher level, in understanding through the book's examples how to use basic key ideas in design. Hence, the book is not necessarily restricted to users of those design programs. If indeed you favour another program not covered here, the book can still be very informative.

By the way, one chapter uses the example of typeface design. This has an air of antiquity about it. Designing letterforms goes back centuries, and has many subtleties that the chapter lets you appreciate.

Visual Design Fundamentals: A Digital Approach by Alan Hashimoto (Associate Professor of Graphic Design and Computer Art, Utah State University) is a superbly organized and presented resource and self-teaching guide for artists and designers seeking to take advantage of basic computer skills and techniques to create appealing, emotionally charged, and attention-gathering works of two-dimensional art. Visual Design Fundamentals includes straightforward tutorials and projects using Adobe Illustrator CS and Adobe Photoshop CS in order to provide hands-on experience with principles such as modular design, color theory, typeface design, figure abstraction, and more. An included CD offers files needed to complete the projects and trial versions of Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Highly recommended for an graphic artist seeking to create and utilize computer generated illustrations and/or designs, Visual Design Fundamentals is replete with both black-and-white and color illustrations throughout which wonderfully enhance the detailed, practical, "user friendly" instructions.

This book is for anyone new to design fundamentals, digital art and computer imaging software. The author, Alan Hashimoto, has written two books in one. First, he discusses the elements and principals of two-dimensional art design and how they apply to both traditional art mediums and the digital art medium. Second, the book is an introduction to digital imaging software. He discusses the difference between object-oriented and paint software. Throughout the book he teaches the basic skills needed for creating artwork on the computer using both Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. However the two objectives of this book are well integrated. The author has done a great job of demonstrating how to apply traditional design fundamentals to 2D digital art. He then reinforces this with seven digital art projects which help the reader to apply this knowledge while creating computer generated art.

Hashimoto discusses the design elements of line, shape, space, volume, value, color and texture and the principals of design such as unity, variety and balance. His explanations are easy to understand even for the novice and he uses many full-color digital art examples. However the best aspect of this book is the conceptual process used for completing the seven digital projects. This process starts by defining the design challenge and then brainstorming various approaches with thumbnail sketches. Next the design is further refined into roughs which incorporate more details. The final phases of the process are a trial run of the finished design and then the completed design.

The purpose of these seven projects is not only to apply the information in the book to real life examples but to demonstrate how the steps of the conceptual process can be accomplished using the computer. Hashimoto first discusses the traditional methods used for completing the process and then progresses on to digital methods. His step-by-step instructions for the Adobe software are very thorough and easy to follow. Even if you have not used this type of software before, these projects will teach you the basics of the software and how to use it. He also covers related topics such as scanning your artwork into the computer and printing your completed projects. I enjoyed all seven of the projects. But the one that I found especially useful was typeface design.

Project One - Modular Design
Project Two - Letterforms and Shape
Project Three - Figure Abstraction and Non-Objective Shape
Project Four - Value
Project Five - Color Theory
Project Six - Typeface Design
Project Seven - Digital Montage/Collage

Reading this book was like attending an art course at your favorite university. The author's presentation of the information resembled a class lecture which he reinforced with class assignments. So it is no surprise that Alan Hashimoto is an associate professor at Utah State University where he teaches graphic design and computer art. He is also an accomplished artist.

As a technician working with various networks this book helped

me understand the importance of transferring the network into an ATM network

Bullard cracks open the door, letting leaders see inside the mind of Harold, an individual present in all churches. He appears to be antagonistic, critical of everything he doesn't understand, and in the mind of a leader, not worth the trouble it would take to keep him.

Is he? Is the problem Harold? The leadership? A combination of both?
Once the problem is identified, what needs to be done about it? How do different people with different backgrounds come to accept the same vision?

Among other things - Harold's Breakthrough Discovery can be a great discussion tool for leadership training to answer these types of questions.

For any one trying for introduction to the topics SONET/SDH ATM This book is the best. Very lucid explanation with lot of good figures and mainly you can read it at bedtime/while travelling and get authentic overview of the subject , A must for the managers in the field and engineers starting to work in the field. The main feature is that it packs a lot of information in such a compact book and which is very well readable.

This book is certainly not a in-depth/exhaustive documentation of SONET and ATM. However, it does provide a general understanding of how SONET/ATM fits in the grand scheme of things. It explains some of the obvious facts of why things are the way they are (e.g. 4Kbps BW of human voice signal, and therefore 8Ksps by Nyquist's sampling theory).
I do agree with Newport Beach reader that there seems to be some errors (I didn't know Shannon is accredited with 2X sampling theory, I have never heard of frequency hopping associated with DMT, usual just CDMA/SS).
I do find the book well organized and ideas flow in continuous manner. This is good for picking up buzz words but be prepared to look elsewhere for a full explanation. As an example, it mentions about optical components such as EDFA and pumps. If you know what these components are, then everything flows. If not, then you'll have to google.
Book should be good for manager/sales people. Even an average engineer with minimal experience (like me) would find it too brief. This is the kind of book for bedtime reading (i.e. no equations) and would most likely sit on the shelf after.

The book is thin ( less than 300 pages ). However, it covers 2 topics: SONET and ATM. It goes in a slightly abnormal way to arrange the content: Many detail facts, less explaination. For example, it provides a huge amount of figures in comparison with other books. There are some sentances describing the coverage of SONET on OSI-RM to be from layer 1 to layer 7, but no further discussion to tell us why? It does give us a crue to refer to the GR documents of Bellcore, but this apears to be another difficault problem. It's also a pity of lacking completeness. For example, TMN is not mentioned here; while in other books TMN occupies a certain space for its expectation to operate SONET management. All the cases above apple to the 2nd half of this book, ATM.

Overall, the book still worths a glance. The value of this book lies on the depth of each topic discussed. Along with marvelous figures, this is fairly a good source for reference.

With the current explosion of SDH networking across the globe, a reader would expect a little more substance on SDH in a book that claims to also cover SDH. While the book does highlight SDH in a few chapters, it lacks greatly and cross-references much information on SDH to SONET. While SONET and SDH are similar, they are not the same and the book can confuse readers wanting to learn about SDH by referencing SONET rates in an SDH chapter. I wish some of these authors would get off the SDH bandwagon and stop trying to write something in an area that appears to be outside their expertise. This book is a book about SONET and ATM. For any reader wishing to learn more on SDH, this book is NOT the book to read. The only thing I found useful in this book was the figures available on the CD inside the cover. What I do with the book now is let it collect dust on my bookshelf.

This book was published by the IEEE. It lists two technical reviewers (Curtis Newton and Kevin Sparks) and the author thanks certain anonymous reviewers, I assume, in addition to Newton and Sparks. And yet, the book has an amazing number of errors, even to my quick reading. For example, on page 4 he credits Shannon as developing the criteria that you must sample at twice the bandwidth of interest, when this is generally credited to Nyquist (even Shannon credits Nyquist). On page 10, he claims that 2B1Q is limited to 392 Kbps, when 2B1Q is used on HDSL to provision T1 lines at 1.544 Mbps over two pair (about 784 Kbps over each pair). Extensions to the standard by companies such as Conexant have pushed 2B1Q to about 2.046 Mbps on a single pair. Also on page 10, he associates "frequency hopping" with DMT, instead of wireless spread spectrum. He also claims that CAP modulation can only achieve data rates of 10-175 Kbps. I'm sure the engineers at Globespan will get a chuckle out of that. On page 66, there's an error in Figure 8.9. On pages 55, 56, and 57, his explanation of pointer adjustments has an error on when the pointer is adjusted. And that's just with a quick review (maybe 30 minutes).

But perhaps more importantly, his explanation of SONET/SDH is just not very thorough or clear.

Unfortunately, I can't point you at a good book on SONET/SDH. All of the books I looked at just don't do a good job of explaining it. If you already know the technology you can read the books and understand them, but if you're just starting out you'll get lost in a hurry.

For a good explanation of the network, in general, the best book I've found is Bellamy's "Digital Telephony," 3rd edition. His explanation of SONET, while accurate, is too brief for a novice, however.

This book decribes quite good the T1/E1 subject. However the T3 section is very limited, and the E3 is not mention.

This book is intended to focus on a digital transmission discussion. For any digital transmission discussion (either high speed or low speed), one of the most important issue is sychronization. I see this sychronization as blood flow in human body, controlled by heart (clock source). Sychronization is so important that every digital transmission discussion would be meaningless without discussing it. Since this book is intended as a preliminary to more advanced broadband topics, I think sychronization dicussion rewards at least one special chapter in this book.

I found sychronization discussion in this book was little. The author only described clocking, timing, and synchronization as sub chapter with little discussion of slip, jitter, and wander concept. For beginner to try to understand sychronization as fundamental of broadband telecommunications, the discussion was not deep enough. I found sychroniztion discussion in "Engineering Networks for Sychronization, CCS 7, and ISDN" by P. K. Bhatnagar would be more informative for beginner than this book.

I also found that almost every time the author was derailed in presenting the T/E carrier itself. I think this book should focus extensively on T/E carrier and not other topics. Instead the author "confused" readers (especially beginners) with mixing ISDN, SONET, and SDH into discussion. I think the author should discuss synchronization and t/e carrier deeper first in at least (maybe) 7 chapters before entering discussion of ISDN, SONET, SDH, and other more advanced broadband telecommunications; in order not to confuse beginner readers.

I think the only "real discussion" in this book are chapter 6, 7, and 9. This three chapters are focused on the heart of t/e carrier itself. I think the author did a quite good job in the explaining. I think only these three chapters makes this book a quite worthwhile (and deserves 3-star rate rather than 2).

<(...)BR>I think this book would be more suitable for professionals who already have tastes of t/e carrier rather than beginners. If this book has more coverages, it would be a great book for both experiences and beginners. I expect the third edition (if would be any) would become more extensive and have more coverages.

This book is interresting for those who are beginning to work with SDH or Sonet Networks and includes a part on synchronization. It is a practical book who does not go too much theoretically in complicated concepts.

While C# programming is not the focus of this book I did find it quite useful as a learning vehicle for advanced .NET topics and as a companion book to a C# Language reference. For all you programmers I liken it to asking the resident guru how to do something who invariable responds with an answer that is more or less but never precisely what you actually need. With that in mind the book is similar and thus compels you to debug or fill in the gaps for the missing or non-working program logic. One thing for sure you for prerequisites you are well advised to have a decent background of Visual Studio .NET, C/C++, Threads, and Sockets programming too. Without these core understanding I suspect the gaps will be quite difficult to fill.

With that said if you are just looking for heaps of boilerplate code or functional snippets there are plenty of websites you can Google with downloadable source code you can learn from.

It is dissappointing nonetheless tha publisher decided NOT to provide the Sample program updates. For $49 bucks multiplied by the units sold, it would seem a pretty simple proposition.

This book I though would give me inside out of the C#. However, half of the book is filled with excerpts of the full source code that is available on the CD. I tried an example code in Chapter 5 that creates a TCPClient, it did not work. The website [website] where the member area is located, doesn't contain any usefull links rather update your profile. While registering, the website gave a SQL Server ODBC error that it could not save the record. However strangely I received confirmation e-mail even after the ODBC error occured. Overall, I am not satisfied with this book. Its just waste of money.

For topics that I am not familiar with I feel that a lot of details are missing. As such I read the new topic's chapter up to 4 times to ultimately feel that I need another source. As such I consider this book to be a good reference book.

On a more positive note the examples that the book gives are abundant and could serve as a starting point for your own development.

This text is meant as a general overview of the .net framework but it also delves into source code to provide more detailed examples. Unfortunately, this only serves to confuse the reader as many of the examples are not cohesive or clearly explained. There is little benefit in smearing examples over half the textbook if you are not going to take the time to explain them properly. It seems as this was a rush to market product where the examples only serve to make the book thicker. The authors should have made up their minds initially if the text was meant to be an overview or a detailed "how-to" book.

This book is an excellent introduction to many topics including the .net framework, VS.net IDE, Windows Forms, Remoting, MSMQ, ADO.net, ASP.net, Web services and more. There is also a 60 or so page chapter on C# programming.
This book was published before VS.net was released and all the references are made to the beta.
The writing style is very clear and the book is an easy read. Each chapter has a summary of key concepts as well as a short FAQ section at the end.
The code examples are all in C# of course.
This book is best suited as an introduction to .net technologies for an already at least moderately-savvy professional. This book will not make you a .net guru ready to jump and develop .net enterprise solutions. But it will help you understand all the new "buzz words" and explain key concepts. After reading this book, it will be a lot easier to understand which book you need to pick up next to get into the details.
This is also not the best book for a total beginner. A lot of knowledge is already assumed. A lot of differences are pointed out between asp and asp.net for example, or between C# and C++. A person with previous knowledge in these areas will benefit from there comparisons but they will only help confuse someone who is just trying to grasp everything from scratch.
All in all, I think this is a great book - books like this are needed, in that they give a great overview and don't spend 500 pages exhausting one particular topic when you just wanted to know the basics and put all the pieces together. Anyone who buys this book with this in mind will not be dissappointed.

"If you plane to design a Cache memory system, this book is NOT for you. It's just a collection of statistcal measurements."

The big problem with this book is that it's outdated. More than fifteen years old, it studies relatively small kilobyte-sized caches when today's computers are using multi-megabyte caches. The treatment of multi-level caches isn't very strong, and ignores L3 caches completely. The book studies VAX and old RISC architectures, which have some carry-over to today's machines but are not directly applicable. The book doesn't describe MESI or any of the related multi-processor protocols.

The blurb here at Amazon says the book is useful to both software and hardware engineers, though I can't imagine that to be true. The hardware-appropriate details only cover power consumption, and don't deal with partitioning, leveling, associativity imlpementations, concurrency, and so on.

But on to the strong points: The book does a great job of explaining how older memory caches work. The main point of the book, in fact, is developing, describing, and studying mathematical models for cache performance and implementation. The author examines a variety of different structures for caches, both in commercial products and in hypothetical architectures.

By simulating the performance of the respective machiens, he shows how they really work. Trade-offs between cache size, block size, and set associativity are modeled and graphed very carefully, and the tradeoffs discussed in-depth.

I just love some of the sundries the book offers: a thoughtful symbols table explains the variables and the symbols the author consistently uses throughout the book. The biblography is very valuable. though it doesn't cite any papers newer than 1990, it provides a wealth of references for further research. The index could have used a little more attention.

The claim of this book is to present "next generation" networks, however out of the 198 pages only 20 pages cover the enablers for these networks: LCAS and GFP. And even these sections are full of technological errors and are incomplete. Other sections in the book contain also many technological errors. This book contains more errors than his previous book "Understanding SONET/SDH and ATM". I get the strong impression that the author copy/pasted parts of the many references (20 pages!) without having the knowledge of the technology he tries to describe.
A better book to read is: "Next generation SDH/SONET: Evolution or Revolution?" as this focusses completely on LCAS and GFP.

I bought the book hoping to use it as an introductory text for GFP, VCAT and LCAS. After all that's what the "next-generation" SONET is about. The author first starts with explaining the T-carrier hierarchy (which is OK as a general introduction to TDM networks), but each section looks totally out of the context and no relationship is established with the rest of the text. Similar case is with the next chapter on packet networks. Finally, come the chapter on GFP. At the first glance it looks like the entire chapter dedicated to GFP may contain a lot of information, but when one starts reading it's completely disappointing. Most of the sections are incomplete, some are not even technically correct. Most of the sections are random excerpts from tutorial papers that author lists at the end of the chapter. One would be much better off getting the May 2002 issue of IEEE Communication Magazine and reading all the papers that have been published in that issue (the issue was dedicated to GFP). In the next chapter (where one would expect detailed technical tutorial on VCAT and LCAS), there is very little information. I was able to Google out more material on VCAT and LCAS then what I was able to find in this book. This is about a point where I stopped reading and regretted the money spent on the book. I do not recommend it at all.