Wireless Books

Very beefy topic, chock full of information about this amazing new technology. Could have gone into scatternets in more detail, but overall a good read

This book provides you with lots of details required for beginners but there are better books available.
This book is written by two authors and you can clearly notice that. One author writes in a simple manner and other writes in a complicated way.

Bottom line is, this book might satisfy your needs but there are better books availabe other than this book.

I picked up this book with the hope that it would share some insight into why i-mode was such a big success. It did that only.

This is an extremely 'business/management' style of book. Full of hullabaloo, simple to read and gets somewhat preachy at times.

However I did enjoy reading it, although I sometimes doubt validity of some speculations made (Such as Singapore eradicating paper and coin based money entirely by the year 2008).

I'll give it 3 stars because it did give me the answer I was looking for but it wasn't a life changing experience reading it. Sorry.

How has Japan's NTT DooMo become as big as AOL's customer base - five times as fast? This is Japan's mobile phone service, who grew to second-largest in the world in just to years. Insights into industry secrets, Japanese business, the wireless and computer worlds like make DoCoMo--Japan's Wireless Tsunami: How One Mobile Telecom Created a New Market and Became a Global Force a book difficult to easily categorize, but packed with important business insights. Highly recommended for all readers.

I've been looking for literature that explores why Japan is so technology obsessive, they have to have the latest of everything and feel utterly out of touch if they dont. Technology is fashion.

Having lived there a year i instantly recognised the name 'DoCoMo' and thought it was the perfect forum to analyse this exact phenomena, DoCoMo is the mother of all technology companies over there and really has become a part of the way of life there.

This book separates into chapters based on emotion, an odd idea, but one that works quite well. For me the Love and Fun chapters accurately depict the passion the Japanese have for technology and how DoCoMo capitalized on that.

However I wasn't looking at this book as an example of a business model. I skipped most of the facts and figures, though they are easy to read and very relevant. People who are skepical of this books practical use offering a business model that has a totally different approach, probably havent spent enough time in Japan to see how successfully DoCoMo has been. I believe this may be the future of the business model. But essentially i think this book would fit much better in the 'Technologies Influence On Society' section of the bookshelf.

Those who are researching technology as part of society are the ones who will really get a kick out of this book, there are so many interviews with developers, users, fanatics and novices, it is a feast of information that explains just why the Japanese are atleast a year ahead in the Mobile Industry. And why the Japanese are so passionate about their gadgets.

This book doesn't give a clear understanding of DoCoMo and it's mechanisms.
It's more of an unctious eulogy about people at Do-Co-Mo and the enterprise itself.
What we learn: Keichi Tachikawa had a keen sense of inequality, former Chairman Ohkochi is impatient, impatient etc., Keichi Enoki seems to be the lucky guy.
This is a latter day celebration of a Japanese enterprise. The rendering of the story could have been influenced heavily by the style of a communist storyteller, writing a biography of communist saint Breshnew or marshal Shukow.

Few facts. Tons of incense. Sprinklings of modern management thought.

Not devoid of facts, but these are incoherently interspersed into a rambling storytelling about all and everything.
This book did waste my time and continuous factless ramblings made me feel angry at times.

Chapter one of this pathetic book begins by informing us that "Business cases aren't romance novels. Things begin, and end, with the numbers". Not so this book. As well as seemingly endless diversions into such eclectic themes as post war land reform in Japan, General MacArthur's victorious cavalcade into Tokyo, hitch hiking in New England, some unfathomable nonsense about the "mystic Southwest" of the United States, a reference to Mary Poppins, a couple of paragraphs on Bruce Springsteen, the problems of mowing lawns in Utah, the relatively high mortality rates of upper class Britons during both world wars, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the usual sociological drivel of upwardly pointing nails getting hammered down in Japan, some buzz words from complexity theory, some tips on putting golf balls and interminable pages of insipid tips on how to turn your (non Docomo related) work into fun, we are given six shallow chapters respectively titled Love, Inequality, Impatience, Luck, Fun and Strength with a further appendix called Intimacy and M-Commerce. That is followed by a mercifully short interview with Docomo President Kouji Ohboshi, which, because it was originally carried in 1996, is, like the entire book, totally irrelevant to the current market conditions Docomo faces.
Although the book's blurb claims the authors had unprecedented access to Docomo's top executives, there is no evidence of that in this over priced book. We are, however, told that Ohboshi "looks like a conventional Japanese executive. He is tall". We are also told that he has the style of a cockroach, meaning that he is impatient and hurries around a lot. Because cockroaches tend to get stamped on, it is a dangerous and, at best, very silly metaphor to describe a dynamic CEO of a thriving company.
It is almost as silly as the 20 or so pages given to the digital experiences of Yasuko Sato who, we are told, had to overcome the sad fact that "Mama and Papa Sato lovingly, relentlessly instilled good old-fashioned analog values in their daughter." Although Mama and Papa Hayes did the same, I have used mobile phones in the jungles of the Golden Triangle and the Andes Mountains as well as in a fishing trawler 300 miles off the coast of Iceland. Talking about the wonders of i-mode or mobile phones in the tones Mitch and John (as they annoyingly call themselves throughout the book) is like talking of the wonders of black and white TV; they are old news.
To impress on us how successful Docomo has been, we are supposed to be amazed that its headquarters are in "a skyscraper so large that each elevator holds sixty-three people. Sixty-three! In just one elevator!" As if that was not penance enough for us to bear, the authors appeal to our vanity by telling us that we are the new "cosmopolitan, global kind of thinker" because we are reading a "whole book" on Docomo.
Instead of giving us a "whole book" on Docomo, all they serve us up is the most shameless padding that would make the laziest high school student blush. Only two paragraphs after mentioning "those alphabet soup economics equations that make so little sense to most of us", we read "Okay, enough about boring economic theories" and we are back to the problems of mowing the lawns of Utah.
Technical details are also, we are told on page 127, "perennially boring" even though they are vital to understand Docomo's short history as well as its prospects for future success. The mobile telephony industry Docomo finds itself in is a young industry, one that will mature in time just as wireless, television and the Internet did before it. Until that happens, the industry's many intangibles will complicate our best efforts to predict the industry's future trends. Instead of trying to identify those intangibles, the authors let us know that "what we can tell you, after years in think thanks and universities and high-powered consulting firms" is that luck is paramount in a successful business.
This is easily the worst business book I have ever read, let alone reviewed.

There are some specific nuggets that can be gleaned, including an interview of the air interface; however having had additional training in WiMAX, this book falls far short of being a comprehensive course where the reader would be equipped to start working on a WiMAX system.

There is quite a long list of filler material, including lists of companies (some of which no longer exist), and an applications section that is full of maybes.

I would say if you can pick this one up used at a discount, it would be worth it for the few nuggets inside, but don't splurge on a new copy.

I completely agree with a previous reviewer - 60% of this book is acronyms and company reviews. The few pages that are devoted to WiMax are useless and will do nothing to further your understanding of this subject. If you are even remotely temped to purchase this book look at it in a brick and mortar bookstore to see for yourself.

In the forward of this book the author starts out saying that this book is intended to complement the technology-focused WiMAX books that are already out there. This book, instead focuses on markets, applications, revenue impacts, and integration.

To be sure, it gives a little bit of background technology, where antennas have to be located, things like that. And there is an awful lot of information about equipment manufacturers, trade associations, and acronyms (this is a new industry, a whole new list of acronyms). This is basically where you can go for more information if you wish.

WiMAX offers the potential to completely change a bunch of the communications characteristics in the world. In the developing world there is a need for digital communications. A doctor in a remote hospital in Africa facing something he hasn't seen before and needing information from the web. There's a picture of a telephone central office in remote South Africa that is built into a shipping container. WiMAX offers communications without having to string a lot of wire. There is some 'looking into the future' in this book. I'd have liked to see more.

This is not at all light reading nor is it a crash course on WiMAX. I never before input any comment on any books. I only felt it important to warn future customer out there. I put the book down after 40min. Seeing that is is mainly made up of pages of source descriptions like company info. No insight on any important items of WiMAX. It is similar to taking the specification yourself and try to make sense of it.

Really dissapointed technology reader.

I work for a chip company in the WiMAX space and we passed this one over for a training piece as there really isn't much on WiMAX in it. The editing and illustration seem a little out of joint as though its some sort of "formula book". Whats really missing is any reference to applications for WiMAX, that is, what is WiMAX to be used for? Who, exactly, would deploy WiMAX and why? The book spends 339 pages and doesn't really get to the point of the applicaitons for WiMAX.

It would have been real helpful if the author had actually interviewed some service providers to see how or where they would deploy WiMAX. Given all the other WiMAX books rushing to market, I give this one 2 stars.

This is a great introduction to space-time wireless. Being a master's student, the book brought me up to speed with the basics very, very quickly. My classmates found the book to be extremely useful too. The book provides good intuition along with the required math. Most areas of space-time wirelss are covered adequately. I felt that the proofs could have been provided in more detail. But on the other hand, it did encourage me to brush up on my math skills. Highly recommend this book for beginners and then the book by Larsson and Stoica as followup.

This book is a very good introduction to space time wireless communications. It's comprehensive and gives a good overview of the field for beginners.

I have read several books about space-time coding, I think this book is not good for the new readers althouth it says "I am an introduction". This book is only an orginization of many papers and the auther's work. In my opinion, Larsson's "Space-time block coding for wireless communications" is much better!

This text does not deserve a long review. Here are my main reasons:

(1) The content is a result of badly organized copy and paste process from the first author's research group with major errors.
(2) Even the author diversity visible in various chapters does not add value, I believe the second and third authors are Paulraj drones. There is not one good chapter that I can recommend someone to read.
(3) Branka Vucetic et.al.'s book is a much better organized one although it suffers from the cut and paste process.

Recommendation: AVOID! Do not buy this self referencing piece of crap, and give the trees a chance to grow.

There are many good tutorial and seminal articles on space-time wireless communications and coding. This book does not even do a good job on these references. [...]

May be it could be better to name this book a collection of papers and theses. I recommend reading papers, themselves; as there is no good book on space time coding and MIMO yet. These paper collections are biased.

Apparently some people buy into this kind of work. But I found it to be poorly written and filled with inaccuracies. It appears that no technical reviewers reviewed this book before it was published. A very sloppy book - like a first draft of a book that was never completed.

I was especially disappointed to see the name Prentice Hall on this book. This publisher should be ashamed.

Hougland churns out books for the sake of churning out books. This one is a worthless rehash of a questionable technology. Save your money on something else. The writing quality is extremely poor, cursory, and appears to be rushed - probably to get this to market before the WAP standard is obliterated anyway.

The only reason this book was written was simply to get published. It is a poor example of a technical manual. Hougland is a pretender who writes like he knows what he is talking about, but is only good at ripping off other people's work.

Save your money for toilet paper or Huggies.

I really liked this book. most of the other WAP / WML titles either just talked about WML or low level-WAP protocols. Thhis book covers key concepts like security and has a lot of code examples. I have even used the JDeck wap library at work. I have never seen anyone use the multi-part MIME stuff with WML before. very cool, bleeding edge stuff.

Cover the all the basic u need to know about WAP.A must read for Wap starters

This book is very poorly organized at best, and WRONG at other times. It is clearly a product of a quick attempt at bringing a title to market without significant editing. A semi-technical proofreader could see that there are many discrepancies, which by chapter 3 had me second-guessing nearly everything that was said. Even worse, the software that comes with this book seems to require a license which is not provided, which makes it useless.

Any WAP book that only tests code on Nokia and Ericsson handsets is completely misguided. Worldwide, a vast majority of handsets contain browsers from Openwave (formerly Phone.com). Any one writing real WAP applications needs to ensure that they run well on these handsets. We're talking about Motorola, Siemens, Samsung, Alcatel, Phillips, Sanyo, Denso, LG, etc, etc, etc...

This book presents in 430 pages an easy and efficient way oflearning WAP programming. It can also be used as a reference, as itcovers all WML and WMLScript commands in the WAPspecifications. Numerous examples (including 90 pages of Perl-CGI and35 pages of Java Servlets) with source code visualize the process andform a basis for the reader's own implementations. Excellent readingfor beginners, students, lecturers and professionals. END

I completely agree with the reviewer that mentions the book is very Euro-centric. For domenstic developers, what's needed is coverage of Openwave browsers and HDML migration. Try "Dynamic WAP application Development" instead -- it's a nice reference to issues significant to the U.S. market.

Previous reviews are somewhat misleading: One claims that software provided with the book comes without a licence - in fact the readme on the CD gives clear and simple instructions for obtaining the necessary licence (takes about 60 seconds). Another criticizes the book for only testing applications for use with Nokia and Ericsson handsets - in fact, as a glance at the back cover could tell you, every example in the book was also tested on a Phone.com (as was) emulator.

This book has little to do with game programming. It's a book about MIDP 2.0 programming with Java ME for building mobile applications (using GUI controls). The last three chapters (which are quite small) touch on tiles and sprites. So basically you've got a 400+ page book while only about 50 pages is actually about programming mobile games? I would have STARTED the book with chapter 13 and moved on from there into various game topics, instead of ENDING there and doing a poor job of it. The example game in the last chapter was designed for the old 128x128 screens and is probably about 4-5 years old (with 8x8 sprites) which is unacceptable for a book released in 2007 with this title. This is a GOOD book on MIDP 2.0 programming...if you ignore the "game" part of the title. I used this book to teach a course on the subject, but will need to find another for next semester.

Like one of the other reviewers, I got this book because it was required for one of my classes. This book is kind of a paradox, in that it's meant for beginners as it tries to explain things in excruciating detail, but it somehow manages to do a really poor job of it. It does a good enough job of explaining the software that you need, but once it gets into code samples, it ends up saying almost nothing using a lot of words. There are many parts where the same thing is explained two or three times over, while other important parts of the code are glossed over.

The worst part is that the text is littered with typos, which is especially bad because many of the typos are of class and method names, and even worse because I've noticed several typos within the code samples. If they had an editor for this book, he should be shot.

I would not recommend this book unless you really needed it for a class, like I did. I can understand most of what it's trying to explain (albeit after reading some things over two or three times), but if I didn't know a good bit of Java already, I'd be totally lost with this book.

The authors do a good job of going into excruciating detail to get you started. I bought this book because my school is forcing me to use Java for this class, which isn't that bright. Writing programs for small devices is better done in a widely used language such as C. Using Java, you have more constraints, such as only being able to write apps for devices that support Java's VM and also having to give up some of your memory to Java's GC and abuse of the heap.

Writing apps for small devices using C makes a heck of a lot more sense because you have a lot more control over memory usage and can write apps for ANY device in which the manufacturer allows you hardware access.

In all honestly I can't give this a accurate rating as I only skimmed through it. The reason being that I was expected something similar to the first edition but found it was completely different and focused less on game development and more on fundamental MIDP2.0 programming. People who are interested in learning JavaME will find this book interested. Anyone looking for a updated version of the excellent first edition will not find much here - but that's only my opinion.

Nothing to complain about as far as the contents; it's an interesting hodge-podge of articles by or about Tesla. What I didn't like about the book was the bizzare typesetting and the poor reproduction quality of the photos. The photos are noticeably pixelated and low resolution; it almost looks like the photos were badly scanned jpegs taken off a website! Over half the book is set in ALL CAPS using a monotype font. Weird.

In The Tesla Papers, David Childress has compiled the writings of Nikola Tesla into a comprehensive, informative, and down right fascinating volume of material that provides background and insight into Tesla's amazing inventions. Divided into seven parts the reader is treated to Tesla: Humanitarian; The Problem of Increasing Human Energy; The Wireless Transmission of Power; Tesla's Electric Car; The Tesla Papers; Tesla's FBI Files; The Marconi-Tesla Trial Transcripts. The Tesla Papers is enhanced with some of the papers on Tesla's thoughts and work regarding wireless power, anti-gravity, robotics, free energy, advanced solar power system, patents, and material collected on Tesla at the Colorado Springs Tesla Symposium. The Tesla Papers is a "must" for all Nikola Tesla enthusiasts, as well as students of alternative science, iconoclastic technology, and suppressed history.

Lately, I have been trying to read everything I can on Tesla. I was intrigued by a special on one of the television networks. I had heard of Tesla before but didnt realize that he had accomplished so much in his life, or that he was fascinated with the signals he claimed to be receiving from outer space (possibly the planet Mars he thought). For this reason, you can imagine my disappointment on trying to gain any new knowledge from the pages of this tome. There is absolutely nothing new here. Its not even put together in a presentable format.Oh well, maybe others will get into this work. I guess I just could not!

This is not a very good book. It is simply a reprint of Tesla's early writings with some added comments and packaged to look like a new book. If you are interested in the subject, look for The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla, which is a much better book with a lot of good info.

Reading the few reviews of this book you would either think that it stinks or that it is a gift from the gods. Both ideas would be a bit off the mark. In fact, based on the reviews (and the price) I avoided buying it for a while. Until one day during a course in UCLA with fred j. harris I heard him recommend this book. So I bought it.

Here are the bad things about the book, as I see it:
- The price is ridiculous, but hey we all know the racket that the likes of Kluwer Academic Press run, don't we? Hugely over priced academic books for hardbacks with AWFUL typography. You would think that with all the money they are making from us they would have enough to upgrade their printing systems.
- Yes, the book has a couple of error warnings from whatever text editor they used to write this book.
- Yes, it does not LITERALLY tell you how to make OFDM systems work, but, come on guys are you really that literally minded? This criticism may be true but it speaks more of the reader than of the writer.

And now the good stuff:
- Chapters 3, 6, and 7, are worth the price of the book (particularly 6 and 7).
- Chapter 6 on synchronization gives a very good systems view of OFDM. Anybody working on the implementation of OFDM-based real-time systems would profit from it.
- Similarly Chapter 7 on the impact of front-end effects is very good for somebody working on development.

If you are looking for a book to help you with your research topic in school this is not the book for you. But, if you are a DSP or Systems engineer working on the development of a real-time OFDM/OFDMA system, I can assure you that you will appreciate this book at least for the chapters I mentioned.

"This book...gives a comprehensive overview of the implementation of OFDM systems. It capitalizes on the large experience of the authors with the implementation of OFDM base WLAN system. For those who study or work on broadband communication in a wireless multipath environment, this book is a useful and easy-to-read reference monogram." Zongsen Wu, Shaowen Song and Tianying Ji , Physics and Computing Dept., Wilfrid Laurier University , ON

As the title of this book suggests the authors try to give the reader the essential background knowledge on implementation aspects of an OFDM system.
As usual, the book starts with a short introduction to the propagation model, OFDM transmission and the essential building blocks of such a communication system (e.g. coding).
In fact, most of these description do not go much into detail, rendering these chapters useless for experieced readers.
Even the synchonization and channel estimation, which are the essential components of a receiver are described very sketchy.

Moreover several chapters of this book are presenting the design of a WLAN receiver IC without going into details. There is only little more information than you could get from reading the authors' papers about their simulation system and their receiver ICs. If you expect a book that helps you to get around the problems in OFDM system design, you will be disappointed for sure.

All in all the book is a nice introduction to OFDM, but in no way a "how-to make it work" book. Regarding the content of the book and the low quality of the pictures, a price of 150$ (12/2003) is overpriced.

I have invested all my efforts to understand what the authors are saying. Oops! I couldn't make it.
The authors have put together very little piece of work (compared with the amount of good work published in various journals/conferences etc), but the title of the book is really flamboyant, proving "much ado about nothing".
I do agree with some people on the review of other OFDM books about the poor FFT/IFFT explaination in this book. The book does not even have a nice system model which the readers can follow. Throughout the book, the authors provided only a birds-eye-view of the problem and the solutions (in all aspects of the system design). No analysis of whatsoever. The chapters are not even edited properly, as you can see some funny statements in the book (page.125, "Error! Objects cannot be created from editing field codes", page.54, "Error! Reference source not found").

This book is very similar, in spirit, to the books of Ramjee Prasad and Van Nee, and Heiskala and Terry. The authors have provided references to their own work, without considering the good works put up by the fellow researchers in OFDM.

Over all, this is one of the pathetic, over-priced books from Kluwer. My recommendation is: don't read it, even if you get this for free.