Applications Books

This is the best book on synchronization in digital communications. The explanations are exceptionally clear and each chapter ends with key points highlighted. Great book for those serious about this topic.

why not have chinese edition? it's an immense market!
for me ,a chinese student,one hundred dollar is too much!

As mentioned in the preface the four areas that differentiate this book from others are (1)only *digital* synchronization is discussed, (2) Maximum Likelihood metric is used throughout, (3) for performance measure the Cramer Rao lower bound is used and (4) in addition to PAM, CPM is considered in detail too.
However, what I like most about this book is (1) its organization where you can directly jump to the chapter of interest with minimum overlap between chapters and (2) its coverage which is very fundamental, deductive and solid, staying away from ad hoc arguments.

This book summarizes authors' works on synchronization in digital comm over the past ten years. There are very few books specifically dedicated to this topic. According to my knowledge, several books on sync are now out of print, and the publication of this book can fill this blank. The most important feature of this book is that it provides valuable information on the sync techniques for continuous-phase modulation (CPM) which will play an improtant role of the next generation of PCS.

I think most texts on econometrics are heavy on math and light on memorable information. This text uses a conversational style to make its many points. The end result is that the book doesn't put you off the subject. I took a couple of courses with Dr. Halcoussis at Cal State Northridge, one of which was intro to econometrics. We used this book and it definitely made the subject easier to understand. Today, I use this book mainly as a reference on the subject, for a required course at a grad school I'm studying finance at. I think Dr. Halcoussis's econ courses seemed easier to me than other econ courses mainly because of the uncluttered language he used when he lectured. I think that same way of communicating shows up in his book, and that's why I recommend it.

This book explains complicated topics in a clear and engaging manner. Math is not my strongest point but with the aid of this textbook I gained a very good understanding of the concepts and did well in my exam. The book has understandable definitions and helpful examples in every chapter. The friendly tone and voice make the text a pleasure to read. I think you could teach yourself stats using this book. Highly recommended.

I have to admit, econometrics can be a very difficult subject to tackle. There are books that are very mathematial in their approach which can lead the reader astray. However, Dennis Halcoussis has found the bridge that allows the undergrad. to comprehend this most difficult subject. In the first few pages, Halcoussis even tells the reader about how other textbooks can simply loose students in theory and mathematics! This is very true, just go pick up one of many econometric textbooks.

After thumbing through Woolridge's Introduction to Econometrics, I knew that I needed another econometrics text that would serve as a better medium and would allow me to quickly understand topics like autocorrelation, heteroskedacity, and time-series data. Halcoussis has found the appropriate balance. He offers some of the math behind the theorems and regressions if the reader is interested. Although, this book is rock solid for reader comprehendibility, it does not allow the economics grad. student to see everything that he needs. So, it may be wise to supplement this text with another of the more theoretical and mathematical texts. But overall, this is the best text out there for the beginner.

This book is a great text for a very difficult subject. It contains wonderful examples that are never boring and is a great starting foundation for beginning econometricians. It is very well written and teaches the subject with clarity.

I picked this text for my virtual reality course here at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory and found it to be an excellent, well written, comprehensive introduction to the field.

It is interesting this book, since gives a complete visualization of the current virtual reality. In form didactics it travels all the fields of the VR, not serving alone for a neophyte, also for somebody that the VR knows. Very good book
Hugo Neira S

I received this book shortly after it was published. Since then it has served well as a reference for my students working in my VR research group, as well as being very enlightening for me as well.
I will be teaching a course on VR the next two spring semesters at Valparaiso University, and will be using this text.
The book does a great job of spanning the current VR technology out there, as well as addressing issues for development. I'd recommend it for VR researchers, as well as those teaching VR at the undergrad or grad level.

Understanding Virtual Reality" is the definitive, authoritative, and exhausive exploration of the field by two insiders and practioners, Sherman and Craig. Virtual reality, a uniquely viewer-centric, large field-of-view, dynamic display technology has evolved over the past decade in many physical formats, driven by many software applications using a variety of operating systems, computers, and specialized libraries. Sherman and Craig capture them all in this substantial volume.

Most writing about virtual reality involves summarizing and interpreting interviews and demos, with massive doses of the speculative and the spectacular, and lots of historical fuzziness. Sherman and Craig, however, lived in the world of actual VR production at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where corporate researchers, educators, scientists, and artists make use of this technology in their daily work. They have personally suffered with VR tech and benefited greatly from access to it as well as to amazing amounts of computing, engineering, and scientific talent. They were held to real deadlines of corporate contracts, scientific conference demonstrations, and the design of IMAX productions. While they were doing all this, they were also writing this book. As a result, "Understanding Virtual Reality" has the integrity and feel of a long-term, eyewitness account and a personal journal, because these production-oriented researchers were documenting the times contemporaneously, rather than trying to reconstruct the details years later.

I know all this because I was their group leader for a couple of years in the mid-90's at NCSA, and their colleague in VR the years before and after. I co-invented the CAVE hardware, among other things, with Dan Sandin at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in 1991.

The Unicode character set is among the most widely used and least known of the international software standards. Java programmers have used it every day for a decade or so, but barely one in ten appear to know anything about it.

The content of ISO standard 10646 (successor to 8-bit ISO 646), goes way beyond just a charcter set. It contains information critical to the correctness of any program that steps outside the English-language world, i.e. every program on the Internet, and many others sooner or later. This is the basis for correct handling of numerals (there's a lot more than 0 to 9), letters, and text. It's also the explanation for some program behaviors that might otherwise baffle a programmer, or at least a programmer with the wit to be baffled.

More than just crucial, the content of this standard is plain fun. Its snippets of information from every major world language give wonderful insight into how people express themselves. It drives home the delighful diversity of human language and experience. It's also a near-bottomless source of stump-your-friends trivia.

I admit, I'll never use every fact in this incredible assembly. I use a lot of the information, though, and I use it as the point of entry into every discussion of internationalization and localization of software.

One reason for the wide acceptance of the Unicode standard is that the Unicode consortium has made it so freely available. There's no point in my discussing in detail what is in this volume when you can peruse PDF files of the entire work on the Unicode website (minus only chapter division graphics).

Browse through the book just like you would in a bookstore or library. Print out parts of it or all of it for free if you want. Well, it is free if you don't count the cost of paper (about 1500 sheets or twice that for simplex printing), cost of a binder (or maybe two binders) and the time you would have to spend punching the holes.

If you are mainly or only interested in particular sections of the standard then printing only those sections may be a reasonable thing to do.

On the other hand the price is *very* reasonable for an 8½" × 11" hardbound book with 1,462 pages. If it's the sort of book you know you want for browsing and for reference then it is likely you will want it in this nicely bound copy.

Like the previously published versions of the Unicode standard, this book is a beautiful book that is useful to those who don't need or want to get into the technical details of character properties and rules for bi-directional display and other necessary rules for displaying the characters. But for the actual use of many characters you will have to consult other lists outside the Unicode book or files, e.g. dictionaries and grammars of various languages or explanations of symbols used in various fields of mathematics.

Language and writing systems are messy and inconsistant and handling them systematically and coherently cannot be made easy. Accordingly the rules and explanations in this standard are by necessity often long and involved and couched in technical language. It can't be avoided that, for example, one must sometimes distinguish carefully between _characters_, _glyphs_, _graphemes_, _grapheme clusters_, _ligatures_ and _digraphs_ and whether one character is a _canonical equivalent_ of another character or sequence of characters or a _compatibility equivalent_ of another character or sequence of characters or just similar to another character or sequence of characters.

The Unicode character set is still a work in progress. Version 4.0 may not even approach the half-way mark in encoding every character that has been used in normal text records by human beings for which a meaning is known. No-one has ever tried to produce a list of characters on this scale before. No-one yet knows how many distinct characters there are.

But 4.0 covers 96,382 characters from *almost* every script currently used for modern languages and from some ancient scripts as well including Ugaritic cuneiform, Cretan Linear B and the ancient Cypriot syllabary. (Sumerian/Akkadian cuneiform is being worked on and Egyptian hieroglyphics will eventually follow.)

Included are a plethora of technical symbol characters including mathematical characters, chess pieces, die faces, characters needed for modern western music notation, characters needed for Byzantine music notation, ornamental dingbats and so much more. All of it is now at the fingertips of every computer user -- that is if fonts that contain the characters are installed.

Finding fonts that display some of these characters is still a problem. :-(

But it would be a worse problem if these characters weren't assigned to a common character set. The past practice of numerous special fonts for various symbols and scripts which disagreed with one another on how the characters were encoded produced a horrible mess.

Large as it is, with 40% more pages than version 3.0, the book doesn't contain the whole standard. Increasingly as the standard has expanded tabular material has been dropped from the printed volumes and replaced with references to data files available on the website or on the CD that comes with the book.

The end of section 3.2 specifies six files found as Annexes on the website and on the CD which "are essential parts of version 4.0" including an explanation of the bidirectional algorithm which appeared in the printed text for earlier releases. And there are many mentions in the printed standard of other files available on the CD or website. A binder containing printouts of this material is necessary if you want a truly complete hardcopy of the entire 4.0 standard.

Unfortunately the 4.0 HTML files are carelessly laid down on the CD with external links pointing to files on the Unicode website and not to the corresponding files on the CD. Graphics are sometimes missing though the only file I think this matters with is StandardizedVariants.html which has a number of variant character images. (The data in this short file should have been in the book).

If you work online you probably won't notice anything wrong but you also are likely not to notice that after clicking on a link you are viewing a file from the Unicode website instead of a file on the CD. That may matter in the future if you need to reference a 4.0 file and don't observe that the file you are actually looking at is from the website and is a "latest version" file that has been updated beyond 4.0. If you are working offline you can avoid this, but it is annoying to have to manually search for the file by name because the link fails.

Also, although the Readme.txt file on the CD mentions "mapping tables" and files with "the extension .UNI", these useful conversion tables which were included on the CD's with previous releases are missing on the 4.0 CD. But they are available on the website.

This is a minor caveat. I suspect most people will use the website in any case rather than the CD.

Anyone dealing with XML or java soon runs into Unicode because this is the standard for representing characters in electronic form in those computer languages. Java, for instance, was designed from its inception to use Unicode. Earlier computer languages like C and C++ can have routines added to handle these, while C# uses XML and hence Unicode.

But chances are, when you deal with Unicode, you only deal with a subset. Often only a small subset at that, unless you are using Chinese/Japanese. Typically you work with ascii and the codes for your spoken language if that is not a Western European language. Very few of us deal with much more than this.

Which illustrates the appeal of the book. The Big Picture. ALL of Unicode. The breadth is stunning. It shows the written form of every major spoken language and many minor ones. Has the pictograms for Chinese [of course]. But also the symbols for Khmer, Canadian Aboriginal, Tamil, Syraic, et cetera, et cetera. Thumbing through this, you may encounter languages that you did not even know existed. It is one thing to say that we live in a multilingual world. But it is another to actually see it expressed comprehensively at the most basic level.

There are two audiences for this book. The first is any computer person who has to deal with issues of internationalisation.

But another audience is every Department of Languages or Cultural Anthropology in a university. If this describes your background, then you should know that you do not need facility in computing to appreciate the significance of this book. You can use it as a standard reference, akin to the Oxford English Dictionary vis-a-vis the English language. Look, ignore the computer stuff in the text. Yes, you can do this. The book groups related languages into common chapters. The explanatory text is lucid and the graphics for the languages lets you easily cross compare. Of course, at a higher level of meaning like sentences, you will need specialised texts in those languages. But to understand a language, you need to start at its letters or pictograms.

Think of this book as an index into all the languages of man.

This book is one that every programmer should have access to. Packed with all of information concerning the latest standards, with explanations, this is the reference that I use whenever I need data regarding Unicode mappings. I recommend it to all of my students and have asked all libraries where I have influence to add it to their collection.
There is also a CD included with the book. It contains a database of the current and all past versions of the Unicode mappings, a series of Unicode technical reports and an installable version of the Unibook Character Browser, a small utility for viewing character charts and properties. Invaluable if you prefer electronic versions of the data.

There is a saying 'better late than never!', so I'm writing this review. I just borrowed this book from the library looking for a way to understand classes, constructors and destructors, and fortunately I found them here in this book! I esp. like chapter 3 & 4, and I bought my own copy from Amazon as I am very pleased!
I hope Mr.Jamsa will follow this up with another for Visual Basic 2005 or 2008.

Chapter 12 dissects assemblies and covers versioning. I am moving from the Java world--understand manifests in Jar files. This as good discussion.

Explained reflection in great deal ... things now make sense. Was able to convert the demo program that queried itself (types of objects--their methods, attributes, ...) into a ASP page that performs a very generic sort of ado.net data. Very cool.

Covers all aspects of VB.NET. The discussion on threads demonstrates classic coding -- locks, monitors, and more -- the code works!

Good coverage of ASP.NET and Web services.

Recommend!

This book has been a great reference and learning aid. From start to finish it gives you a great insight of Visual Studio 2008 and the versatility of this program. There are many step by step examples of the many uses of Visual Studio 2008 as well as many tips and web site references. From building application programs (such as smart client and web applications) to accessing data(by using XML or SQL Server) this is a great reference for any programmer. I would strongly suggest that this book become a part of any programmers library.

This book is good for a first overview of what and how do to with VS 2008.
The reader should have minimum programming skils, not a dummie at all.

This is exactly what you need to get started with Visual Studio 2008. Whether you are a novice programmer or an experienced developer this book has something for you. It is a very easy read and has a basic step by step approach throughout. For anyone interested in programming with Visual Studio 2008 or if you just want a good reference guide, I would highly recommend this book.

I haven't read the entire book yet, but my initial impressions are that it is an excellent beginning book for Visual Studio 2008. It also touches on some topics not immediately related to Visual Studio, such as modern programming practices, which I found valuable as a junior programmer.

If you are a veteran Visual Studio user, this book is probably too basic for you.

Most of the chapters are overviews, rather than in-depth coverage of any one topic. However, the content is very practical and concise, and contains a lot more useful information per chapter than some more poorly written books would.

From what I can tell, this book is very similar to the previous edition for Visual Studio 2005, with much of the same text. This new version includes mostly the same chapters, with a few new chapters on new features - notably AJAX and LINQ. The new JavaScript debugging does not appear to be covered, which would have been nice.

The new book is missing a few chapters that were in the 2005 edition - one on SQL Server Reporting Services and another one on Using Enterprise Library.

The omission of Reporting Services is unfortunate, since that is a popular alternative to Crystal Reports. (The 2008 edition still has the Crystal Reports chapter that the 2005 book had.) However, if you are going to use Reporting Services you'll probably get a separate book for that anyway. And perhaps the RS chapter was left out of this 2008 book in anticipation of SQL Server 2008 (scheduled for release later in 2008).

All in all, this is an excellent overview and introduction to Visual Studio 2008. If you have a little .NET programming experience and want to learn more about the basics of Visual Studio development, this book is for you.

When I purchased this book, I thought I was getting a step-by-step guide for beginners who build websites. Unfortunately, it turns out this book is for the experienced web designer whose looking for more ideas. I found a better book for beginners through the "Dummies" series. Oh yeah, if you can afford it, hire someone to build your website!

This book is an excellent guide to Web design. It is very well written with practical information. The reading is easy and very interesting. I reccommend it very much.

"Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites" is the first book on web design to focus on integrating marketing, customer service, accessibility, and web standards into the design process. It's an accessible, clear, and up-to-date resource on best practices for modern business- and service-oriented websites.

Kevin Potts begins the book by pointing out that the internet is now an essential medium for businesses of all shapes and sizes; at the same time, customers are more sophisticated than in the early days of the internet, and have little patience for poorly designed websites. In order for a company to present an effective presence on the web, it "must deliver beyond customer expectations; better content, sharper design, smarter architecture, and more proactive communication and interaction are all components of websites that produce exceptional results for corporations."

In the first chapter, the author begins by outlining what a company's website should be doing:

* Marketing, selling products, & promoting services
* Providing customer support & company information
* Creating branding & market awareness

He then covers planning, researching, and selling the design (or redesign) within the company, then moves on to a brief overview of platforms and technologies.

The rest of the book proceeds to show the designer how to create an effective and compelling site for his or her client. He covers content creation, accessibility, architecture & navigation; essential sections of a company website such as the Homepage, About page, Products, and Support pages; error pages, print-friendly pages, legal considerations, and SEO; email marketing, RSS, and advertising campaigns and metrics.

This book is an amazing collection of diverse information presented in a clear and concise fashion. It's not intended as an in-depth treatment of any of the subjects he covers--rather it's an invaluable checklist of essential tools and considerations for designing a top-notch company website.

"Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites" has become a valuable addition to my reference library, and it is one that I know I will reach for first when I am planning a new or redesigned business or service website.

"Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites," by Kevin Potts,was first brought to my attention by my wife, Adrienne, a website designer whose business, Cloud Islands, develops business identity plans for internet marketing.

She recommended it to me as an extraordinarily useful text. I've found it particularly readable, including the chapters on platforms, content management, standards-based development, and other topics which normally are either over my head or simply difficult to read.

Potts' chapters on content and SEO are cogent, provide excellent examples, and are as useful as any I've ever read. The book is only several months old, so he is even using illustrations from Google Analytics new web configurations.

It's published by [...], which is a publishing house run by and for web designers.

I don't often recommend books for other people's professional libraries, but this one is proving very useful to me.

Although this book sounds like a "tech" book, it is far from it. It only contains about two pages of actual code total. I highly recommend this book for anyone who runs a small to medium-sized business where you interact with your web design company directly, or any executive who has to interface with the web development team.

It could also be good for web designers who have been AWOL for the last half-decade or more, or people new to the business who want to learn. Although you won't learn any HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, you will learn stuff that no one else has published in one handy volume. Great for a day at the park - leave your laptop at home. I've written a far-more extensive review on my blog, so search for my name if you feel the need to read really long reviews before buying, but if I can save you some time, just take my word for it and buy it if the above describes you.

I purchased Web Connection from west-wind.com and was very excited about the possibilities, however I knew very little about how the web worked, and I made many mistakes.

I was truely amazed and very very pleased when I got my copy of WebRAD - this book is very complete and well thought out. It takes you step by step through creating a web application with WC and VFP, and even how to set up your web server properly. All the details and common errors are covered, as well as the best way to do things for different circumstances. I would have saved many days research if I had had this book from the beginning.

For example: when you set up a project in Web Connection, the wizards do many things for you automatically - this book tells you step by step how to set up these things properly (manually if you want to), so you know how _and_ why, and how to deploy your application to your production server. And there is so much more!

This book is extremely timely for me. I have a WC web site for my business, and the SSL appendix alone is worth the price of the book. I really liked how the entire development process was summarized in the first 4 chapters so developers can get an immediate sense of accomplishment before they get into the details in the later chapters.

For chapters that had references to other resources, a complete summary of those resources was provided at the end of the chapters. This makes it quite convenient to find additional help without having to search through the chapters.

The chapters on troubleshooting are very well organized as well. One of these chapters categorizes common problems, then lists each symptom followed by a cause and solution.

The new WebRad book from [website] is everything a good technical book should be. It shows the common pitfalls, in text and graphics; relates concepts to what is already known; and shows an organic progression from specific to broad to specific.

Confused by what the Web is? HTML? CSS? It's all here.

Need to know about NT/Win2K permissions on IIS? Deployment of COM servers? Comparison of .prg-based class libraries? It's all here.

What it's really about ... is almost irrelevant to whether you should buy this book. If you plan to edit or write a technical book, this one is worth having as an example of the task being done right.

As Whil Hentzen, the namesake of Hentzenwerke, can attest, this is not my reaction to all the Hentzenwerke collection. Congratulations to the authors (Harold Chattaway, Randy Pearson, and Whil Hentzen) and the editor. I mention the editor (Barbara Peisch) not just to make nice: no author is capable of putting together a totally coherent book. It always takes two points of view, in order for the reader to become the focus of the book, rather than the author. A strong editor makes the difference between an interesting author and a good book. This is a good book.

Web Connection is a difficult environment to work in particularly if you are new to working with a) a local server and b) a framework for interfacing the VFP language with HTML.

It took me almost a year to complete my first Web Connection project because I had to get most of my answers from the Web Connection forum from people like Randy Person.

Now there are real examples to follow and clear explanations of how each feature works.

Web Connection is a powerful framework for developing VFP applications for the Web. This book will make the learning curve so much better for users of the Web Connection framework.

Congratulations to Randy, Harold and Whil for their thoughtful, meticulous documentation to explain how to set up and use this wonderful product.

Mike Smith

A well written book that managed to hold my attention. Good, understandable technical explanations and fascinating tales of organizational intrigue. Important lessons for anyone taking part in complex development projects. The acchievements described are quite mindboggling. As I have been personally involved in naval command and control development, and am a naval technology freak, I found this book extremely interesting.
A bit long for a casual read, but easily lends to skipping around.

When Computers Went To Sea is an outstanding book because it takes us back almost 60 years (October, 1944) to define the problem to be solved and traces how this definition evolved to the threats our nation and our world face today. There's an important story here for all of us as we think about current questions like the 7/11/01, Page 1, Wall Street Journal article on Risk Assessment - Plans for a Small Ship Pose Big Questions for the U.S. Navy.

NTDS was a successful early (starting in the 1950s) large-scale digital computer hardware and software development project. How could NTDS be so successful in a hostile environment when so many comparable military and commercial development projects experienced major problems? This book also tells that story very well, with important lessons for all who manage large software and hardware developments.

Some readers unfamiliar with NTDS and the Navy ships and people involved may find the book a bit difficult to read because it is filled with well researched and documented names and facts. However, the important stories and lessons are written in a way we can all understand and appreciate as we learn more about the roles Alan Turing and Seymour Cray, and many other well-recognized people, played in this important part of our history.

I bought this book because I thought it might help our grown children understand what I did in the Navy. Now I will have to buy another copy for them because I'm sure not going to give them mine!

Today's high bandwidth technologists have nothing over the NTDS architects who masterminded the solution to the very complex engineering problems presented by warfare: real time data acquisition and weapons assignment. (The penalty for error is death of comrades in battle.)

The story is told with all the warts and struggles, which ring true: inter-departments squabbles, jousting with Congress and contractors, resistance of the fleet commanders. It's all there.

The complexity of engineering project management with multiple contractors, tough cost and schedule constraints remain the same in the new millennium. A good addition to the reading list for any business school.

I confess to being biased. My father, Captain Joseph Stoutenburgh, USN Ret., is a principal in the book. When I was 6 years old I did not understand why Dad was gone for weeks at a time. Now I know he was altering forever the nature of tactical warfare and in turn the geopolitical reach of the United States.

As a sailor who served as a computer technician from 1967 to 1978, many of the issues that this book documents bring back a flood of memories. The historical background is well laid out in chronological order and contains many personal perspectives on what would normally be a dry and very technical subject. An extensive table of contents, a good glossary and index make this a prized reference book in my library alongside my Jane's publications. The sparseness of illustrations and photos are my only criticism of this fascinating historical compilation.

I just got this book, having pre-ordered it awhile ago. As a BREW games developer, I am finding Mr. Barbagello's explanation of some of the finer points of BREW very useful. I've already had a few "Doh! So *that's* how that works!" moments, and I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in coding applications for BREW. BREW has a definite learning curve to it, but this book could make that much easier. You should have a good grounding in C/C++ before diving in, though, so be warned. The book has an extra section on how to construct BMPs in memory for use in BREW, which sounds easy enough, but if you know anything about BREW, isn't. Overall, a wonderful book I wish I'd had when I was learning BREW.

It's amazing that so little has been written on BREW, but with this book the above author is at the forefront of the upcoming tidal wave announcing and providing us an insightful and indepth how to manual on how to develop and publish BREW applications.

This book is a great gift for BREW developers, Out of two books available for the Qualcomm's BREW this one has definitely more advantages, Even it doesn't matter that you are a Game Developer or not this will help you if you want to a become a BREW developer.
Amarjeet Singh
Bangalore India

This book (Wireless game development in c/c++ with brew) was pretty good. It is the best info I can find on the subject. There were only two books that I found about brew the other being Qualcomm Brew platform by Ray Rischpater, but If you are going to become a brew developer it might be in your best interest to drop the 80$ and get both books.

This one was the best out of the two I did get.

Also, even though the book has the words 'game development' in the title, it is a great book for non game dev people. My applications have nothing to do with games.