Applied Languages Books

The previous review was for the 1994 edition of the book. I bought the 2002 version of the book. This edition does not have the disk packaged with the book. Instead a broken link to the TELOS web page is given. After much searching on the internet I did find some of the notebooks for the book. But not the notebooks and ASCII text for each chapter. Without the chapter notebooks the 2002 version is just about worthless. It has only been four years since this edition was published and TELOS does not support the book. So I give the book two stars.

Quantum methods with Mathematica is one of these concept books that combine a traditional subject with a new and powerfull way of presenting and analysing it. Quantum mechanics due to its mathematical nature is particuarly well suited for a Mathematica face-lift. I think the book is well suited for teaching undergraduate QM since you do things instead of just reading about them and that usually works with students. On a proffesional basis, it is not particularky well suited for heavy duty work but having said that to do such a thing would destroy its usefullness as a textbook. It can act as the starting point for more serious work with Mathematica and QM, and I would recommend it as a reference book or teaching aid with no hesitation.

This book is great to see research into this subject, and a great example of how to write a book on you rresearch, but it's not an easy read, and difficult to understand, if you don't do research.

This is truly an eclectic book, which offers a socially-aligned understanding of the key issues that play out in reading research. For a long time now, researching into reading, especially second language reading, has been viewed as a psycholinguistic objectivity of inputs and outputs. Consequently, research agendas have neither factored readers' agency or voice into their methodologies and conceptualizations. In light of this, the book offers a healthy alternative by alerting to the asocial and acontextual aspects that characterize our understanding of L2 reading and how to neutralize it with a more socially-empowering and enriching understanding of issues in reading research. A "must-read book" for all those engaged in reading research.

This book covers the material but examples are few and far between, making the exercises much harder than they should be. The text is definitely not a light read, either. As a previous reviewer pointed out, there is more than one version of the second edition. The two versions are indistinguishable at cursory glance: you must compare the text and problems in depth to distinguish between the two editions. We encountered this problem in my class while doing homework from the Chapter 4 exercise bank: some problems were different in the two books, an issue that was discovered only when folks turned in their assignments. Pick another computer architecture book if possible.

I had this book as an undergraduate. While it covers a wide range of topics, it does so only by giving many topics a shallow treatment. The material in the book is insufficient for many of the exercises, and the book's examples routinely contain errors. Additionally, at least two versions of the "second edition" exist, and while they are not differently marked, the examples and problems are different.
If you need a book that will describe the aspects of design WITHOUT providing accurate details, this is probably a good book for you. But if you need precise details, or if you plan on teaching undergraduate students, I strongly suggest looking elsewhere.

I've had Vincent Heuring as a professor. All I can say about the book is that it's a good reference for a professor doesn't cover his own material well. He attempted to explain things in class, but could never quite come through. The books helped greatly in clarifying his lectures.

This is an excellent text for learning architecture. Ideal for anyone who needs to discover how computers work.

This book builds knowledge from ground up so it is a very good book for people who have no background in computer science or computer engineering. Appendices are very neccessary materials if a reader has no background in this area at all so I would recommend to read the appendices first if you have no background.

I was looking for a book with Math and Physics formulas and explenation how to use them in game programming. I saw this book and took a glance in it in the book store and it looked verry nice.
But it have been a big disappointment. The first two thirds of it is either verry simple (points and lines) or "strange" stuff like 3D rotation. If you are intrested in 3D game programming you proberbly don't buy a book for beginners. Also the structure of the book is verry wothless, it takes time to find what you are looking for.
I wold not recomend this if you are choosing between this book and another. I'll give it 2 two stars, and thats a high grade for it.

This book was my textbook for a class. The book is well written and the author explains the concepts pretty well, my biggest problem is the errors. A lot of the answers in the back of the book are wrong. Since this was for a class we focused on the problems that did not have answers in the back of the book, but when you are trying to work through one of them as an example it can be difficult. We found at least 2 every week. Since I had a teacher it was not a big deal, but for those who are buying this book to study on their own it could be a bigger problem. I've seen other reviewers mark this up to human error, but when you are writing a book to educate you have to try to cut out errors like this and if it was maybe one or two fine, but there are a few.

The book can't be pointed as bad or good, the title tells everything, like the author says in the Introduction this book isnt the last one you should read for this field, its just a starting point, anyway I found it simple and you need to know some math and physics to get it all clear, besides that you have 6 nice demos with full code you can study and run for better understanding. Who wants to get a simple and clear basic concepts should get the book, others may prefer most complete titles.

I bought this book hoping it would explain some of the math related to games, like vectors, quaternions, matrixes etc. and operations with them, the reason I chose this book was that I wanted one which didn't present advanced math in the first chapters.

The book fails at explaining anything at all and it doesn't just start at a WAY to basic level (I wouldn't have been surprised if the author explained multiplication).

In the chapter about trigenometry the author tries to apply what you have learned with an example of an flying arrow, (s)he doesn't even tell why it is like that just that if the arrow is shooten 50 units some way the shadow will be 25 units away from the shooter.

At first I thought it may be better later, but when the author says the following:
"Anything from a char, which can hold values from -128 and 127, to an unsigned long, which can hold values between 0 and 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (or 2 to the power of 64)"
Here are two problems, first it is up to the compiler to choose whether char is signed or unsigned, this means it can also go from: 0-255, but the biggest mistake is to say that a long is 64 bit! How many bits a long is isn't defined in the standard and on most current compilers(MSVC++ 2003 .NET included) sizeof(long) is 32 bit.

I can't comment on the physics, matrixes etc. since I put down this book when I came to the chapter about vectors since it was just SO bad, this is why it didn't get 1 star.

For people want an alternative I recommend 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development.

I had read some of the reviews for this book and they focus on parts where almost all books have human errors, code or math examples, but the explaination of the theory is very well reviewed. This book is very well organized and explains very well the topics. This book is a very good book for begginers on games physics and math, its not a book for learning math, physics or programming, and by reading the reviews of the book you'll see what I meant, seems a lot of people misundestood the book title.

About half of this book is directed at Rosenheim's fellow academics, arguing the significance of Edgar Allen Poe in technical terms that were outside my experience. But the rest of the book more than made up for it, drawing parallels between 'crypt' and 'cryptography' as it were. Rosenheim makes a good case for Poe's contributions to both the technical and cultural impact of cryptography today

Elizabeth Stevens......the word "college" is spelled with two L's. A "genius" would surely know that. By the way, the book isn't half bad either.

This is an unabashedly academic book, and it certainly provides some ammunition for people wishing to play Sokal for a day and make banal snipes at the Humanities. But it also contains some genuine insights about the way our psychological need to keep and uncover secrets has influenced the course of the last century. People looking for a perfectly accurate description of how encryption works should look elsewhere. People looking for an intriguing discussion about *why* people want so badly to encrypt and decrypt things have pretty much nowhere else to look; this is one of the only books I've found on the topic. It's a relatively strong start in an engaging direction of study. Fans of Poe, especially, are likely to find something of value tucked away in this piece of scholarship, though it is at times unnecessarily dense.

Rosenheim, a professor of English and American Studies at Williams College, has produced a rambling, disjointed meditation on cryptography, Edgar Allan Poe, espionage, Thomas Pynchon, and the Internet.

Unfortunately, Rosenheim's attempts at discussion of technical matters are nearly always marked by severe misunderstandings of the mathematics and physics involved. For example, consider his definition of quantum cryptography, which appears in the glossary:

"A form of cryptography in which, under certain experimental conditions, pairs of photons may be created that exert an influence over one another that cannot be explained by quantum mechanics. Measuring the polarization of one particle immediately and identically changes the spin on its antiparticle. Such polarization takes place regardless of the relative positions of the two particles in the universe, in a result that seems to violate the second law of classical theory. It is theoretically possible that a stream of such polarized photons could be used to encipher messages that could be sent over space in literally no time at all."

There are so many errors in just these four sentences that it is difficult to know where to begin. First of all, the behavior of entangled photon pairs is, contrary to the claim, perfectly explicable through quantum mechanics. Second, practical quantum cryptography is not currently based on entangled photon pairs --- although Ekert did propose such a scheme --- but a different mechanism proposed much earlier by Wiesner and Bennett & Brasssard. Third, the reference to the ``second law'' is, of course, utter nonsense.

Other blunders in _The Cryptographic Imagination_ include conflating monkeys and apes, misstating Zipf's law, wildly over-estimating the amount of pornography on the Internet, misstating the name of the Usenet newsgroup "alt.sexual.abuse.recovery", and comically misspelling the name of one of the inventors of RSA as "Ronald Rivers". Rosenheim even makes mistakes in his own field: he claims that Georges Perec's book _La Vie: Mode d'Emploi_ was written without the letter "e", when in fact it is another book of Perec entitled _La Disparition_.

This is not to say that I didn't get anything out of Rosenheim's book. I was intrigued to learn about Lizzie Doten, a 19th century mystic who "channeled" ersatz poems of Poe and other writers such as Shakespeare and Burns. But the book is marred by the usual postmodernist excesses: making much of tenuous or nonexistent connections, second-rate wordplay (the series in which _The Cryptographic Imagination_ is published is entitled "re-visions of culture and society"; among postmodernists, this sort of gratuitous hyphen insertion is apparently considered essential), and opaque exposition. Consider the following two examples:

"When I claim that Poe helped end World War II, the `Poe' in that sentence represents both a particular author and the literary genre he helped create and for which he serves as a synecdoche." [p. 15]

"Such a homeopathic technique for the creation of mysteries produces highly cathected readers; the surface of the cipher produces a crypt in us, which we proceed to fill with our imagination, just as the semantic vacuity of Khumnhotep's [sic] glyphs contextually signified Khumnhotep's [sic] power and his resistance to comprehension." [p. 48]

_The Cryptographic Imagination_ will be of little interest to anyone wanting to learn about cryptography. In fact, I can scarcely think of a reason to read it, except perhaps to see an example of what passes for scholarly work in some academic disciplines.

Perhaps English majors will enjoy this book, but I didn't. The author constantly draws parallels between encryption and totally unrelated literature. Treating foreign languages or the Bible as a type of cryptography is going too far. If you're a Poe fan, this book is for you, but if you'd rather learn something about cryptography, find another book.

This book is horrible.
The text is ugly, some definitions are strange (for example, the author defines O-notation for complexity in a totally non-standard and non-intuitive way) and the reading the book is a pain.

Please use another Cryptography book. Good examples are Mao's Modern Cryptography: Theory and Practice) and Stinson's Cryptography: Theory and Practice for example. There are also the Handbook of Applied Cryptography and Foundations of Cryptography, volumes one and two.

Buchmann's text provides an excellect introduction to cryptography for those who are comfortable with mathematical rigour, and have some knowledge of number theory. Buchmann does provide a review for each of the number theoretic concepts he introduces throughout the text. However, one who is unfamiliar with number theory and not comfortable with learning by proofs might get lost. The other problem with the text is its brevity. This might be suitable for a class on cryptograpy, but it proves quite detremental to self-study. The brevity is especially problematic in the section dealing with Elliptic Curve Crypto (3 and 1/2 pages) Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who is comfortable with rigour, and doesn't mind brevity.

Very readable. If you are new to crypto,
this is the book for you.
Very well written.

This book should not be adopted as a textbook for a course in cryptography. It demonstrates little to no copy editing. For example, the text switches from English to German within the same sentence. This book contains countless errors which are not even reported in the errata. Further, the book is terse to the point of not supporting the students. It presumes advanced knowledge of algebra which is not explained in the text itself. This is true when it discusses irreducible polynomials, polynomial division, and its very terse segment on Galois Theory in an early chapter.

I adopted this text for my course based in part on prior Amazon recommendations and the general reputation of the Springer UTM series. Please, do not adopt this book as a textbook unless and until Springer performs a major rewrite. My students impressions of this textbook were confirmed not only by myself, but by one of my colleagues in the department as well. This experience with this book was in a 600 level graduate course populated by both mathematics graduate students and computer science graduate students. All students are profoundly unhappy with this text.

As someone else mentioned already this is the only book in its kind and for me this is the only quality it possesses. If it really stood up for what the table of contents promises then it would be the perfect book but the content lets you down pretty quickly. The C++ language is used in a style that if you don't use other references there is no way to be able to understand C++ code written in the real world. Except for using the oo structures of the language everything else is in C style. But lets say you want to start with this book since it focuses on applications to pde and then perhaps move on to a more advanced reference for C++; then the book turns out to be too descriptive giving only a feeling of what's involved. There is no need to mention that no book can teach you the math for pde, however you won't learn C++ as well. The only thing you can expect, again as an other reviewer mentioned, is to run into some slick ideas about how to exploit oo concepts for meshes and adaptive refinement.

Whilst I'm no mathematician (rather, an engineer turned software developer), and so whilst I can't comment on the mathematical aspects presented, I didn't appreciate the C++ code in this book. An overview of C++ is given, but it doesn't use the terms that are generally used in a programming book. In addition to these peculiar terms, much of the C++ code is simply bad, and would likely crash sooner or later in the real world.

I've had the book for several weeks now and have worked through most of the book and tried to use several of the example classes. From the perspective of an engineer who writes a lot of code for engineers to use and understand I'd say the book is definitely written from a computer scientists point of view with heavy use of templates, inheritance and operator overloading. Several of the code examples are missing parts such as a default constructor in the template for the point class needed to run the ultra simple example. Also, there are several inaccuracies such as claiming in Fortran you must declare array sizes at compile time. This hasn't been the case in over 14 years.
I still give the book 4 stars for being the only book of its kind plus it isn't all bad. There are some good ideas presented especially in the use of templates and how to use objects to build up a hierarchy from points to meshes. This was presented in a well detailed way which was easy to understand and really improved my understanding of templates, classes and OOP.

The book does give a good introduction to C/C++ if that is what you need. If you already are an expert at C/C++, this book is excellent introduction for applying PDE's with C/C++, though I could have asked for more examples.

I bought the book to help me write better PDE's in my work with Image Processing, Fuzzy Logic, Neural Networks. The Author does explain thing in a very concise way, but be prepared to do research and work through the exercises.

However, there is some noticable code in the book that just does not work, but can be easily corrected. There is also some misinformation with the STL library and it's capabities. This can be a problem for those not well versed in the STL. Also some of the functionality is not as effiecent or well written as he claims to be. This is especially true the operator overloads, but it not bad.

Otherwise I would have given it a five star.

this book contains a few gems, mostly from Chomsky, but the authors write very bad english!

Although I am not a Chomskyan, I personally am fond of this book. It is well-written and lucid, presenting basic Government & Binding theory in terms that are very easy to understand. I doubt a single non-technical introduction to generative grammar of this brevity and clarity has yet been written (far superior to Pinker's hand-waving in _The Language Instinct_), and I recommend it to anyone, non-generative linguist and non-linguist alike, who is interested in current mainstream linguistics in North America.

However, Cook does seem worshipful of Chomsky to a degree that is just short of disturbing; Chomsky is frequently quoted more as authority than for argument, and does indeed appear on almost every page. The overall affect was, for me, disquieting.

It is also, of course, no longer accurate: "Chomsky's" Universal Grammar is now the Minimalist Program, which is handled only by a final, tacked-on chapter. Cook should completely update this book with a third edition that starts with Chomsky's current theory from the beginning.

The Government and Binding Theory (GB), though Chomsky prefers it to be called the Principle and Parameter Theory, is the most popular version of Chomsky's grammar in 1980s'. This book is an easy reading to cover every important part of GB. All significant terms are highlighted in a shaded block, which is very convenient for the reader to check up. In particular, the last chapter of the book provides a brief but clear explanation for the current version of Chomsky's theory, i.e., the Minimalist Program (MP). The chapter is a good help for the reader who want to transit from GB to MP, though he would be quite surprising to see that almost all key concepts in GB, such as D-structure, S-structure, Government, disappear in MP. This is a good introductory book both about the GB and MP framework.

This is my second LabVIEW book outside of the documentation set that ships with the product. It is well worth the read. A good portion of the book talks about good structured programming techniques, which is important, but not what I expected.

The real benefit of the book is in the advanced techniques, examples and tips that I'd not found anywhere else in any detail.

It's doubtful that any one person would benefit from every portion of the book because the author covers a broad array of topics, but the items I found of interest were very complete and allowed me to sit back and say, "O.K., Now I really understand how that's done."

In my opinion, the most useful sections of this book are the chapters on software engineering, and preparing a comprehensive requirements document. Having worked on several VIs originally developed by other LabVIEW programmers, I can definitely say that the development process is something we all need to pay more attention to...

Another interesting area is the section devoted to encryption. I have successfully applied these concepts to several of my own projects.

While not a LabVIEW "learning" text, or a practical guide to DAQ problem-solving, this book is very useful for the LabVIEW programmer who has mastered the basics and is looking for other interesting directions to follow.

This book is so "wordy" that it will put you to sleep. There is very little useful information or examples on the CD. I think I wasted my money on this book and don't want you to do the same. If you really want it, I will sell you mine at 50% off. I don't want it.

This IS NOT a standalone book. It can be read ONLY with NR f77 (2. Ed. also titled Volume I). The discussions on the algorithms given there are not repeated here. The few new recipes (eg on random numbers using a lot of f90) are explained in the excellent style one has come to expect of the authors. However to make sense out of the book you must have both this and the volume 1 open at the corresponding pages. This makes it inconvenient to use. For this reason it was something of a disappointment.

The cleanliness of the code in the recipes (as expected from the authors other recipe books) and the introductory chapters on f90 and parallelization still make the book worhtwhile.

I think I would have given the book more stars if my expectations (based on previous version) were not so high.

Although the original FORTRAN77 version of Numerical Recipes is highly acclaimed (and rightfully so, it is really worth every buck) I do not recommend this FORTRAN90 book. I was very disappointed when I received it. A huge part of the book only contains F90 program listings for the same routines that are derived and discussed in detail in Volume I (F77). The two new introductory chapters make it not worth buying the book. Instead, get the Numerical Recipes CD-ROM which includes the source code for C, F77, F90 and other languages and maybe a good introductory or reference book on F90.

(The review of "oblinqued" down below is obviously referring to the original book as the F90 book was not available in 1991).

This is one of the greatest advances in numerical analysis of the 20th Century, and a "can't do without" in the computer age. However, I bought a personal copy in 1991 and the quality of the binding was terrible as pages have kept falling out in the most frequently used sections. It's one of the books I'll take to my grave, if it doesn't die before I do. I think the publishers should be ashamed of themselves for not treating such a great classic with more respect.