Software Books

This book is amazing! . As a DBA , I keep on referring this book again & again . It has very useful information & can be used by anyone who wants a really good understanding of DB2

Cheers to the author for writing such a wonderful book!

This book excels in clarity , depth and the number of topics covered . The questions at the end of the chapters are helpful too .
Also , anyone preparing for the DB2 Certification ( for OS/390 ) would benefit from this .

DB2 for Z/OS and Os/390 Development for Performance (Volume 1&2
by Gabrielle Wiorkowski

This book is extremely helpful for all levels of DBAs, system programmers and DB2 developers. It is most comprehensive and includes all features of v.6 and v.7.
At our shop, we have always used Gabriell's book for all releases
of DB2. This particular edition is very helpful, in the sense it is a text book for all levels and all parts of DB2 world.
Anytime in question, we look it up in this book for answer.

I will recommend this book as a must for DB2 tech team.

I've believed for some time that Gabrielle Wiorkowski knows as much as, or more than, anyone outside of IBM's DB2 development team about DB2's use of indexes, optimization, and other aspects of performance. This book is based on what she has learned, her direct experiences, and the experiences of other DB2 professionals with whom she comes in contact. ... It is you, the administrator, database designer, or application developer who applies its capabilities wisely or unwisely. This book provides practical information of use to you today in your job environment. Marilyn Bohl, Vice President, Work Process Systems, San Jose, CA.

Working with DB2 from 1985 forces one to read many books.
Gabrielle's book is the best ever I've read (and use) for DB2 on OS/390 (Z/OS) platform.
Very good explanations, clarity of write and easy to find structure.
I have many other books, but this is my leading (by far) favorite.
If you ever wish to know DB2 - this is the book you must have.

Very good book, explains real-worlds issues one faces when developing COM components.
A few first chapters are extremely useful (something I had to learn hard-way. Have I had this book, I would have saved myself many hours restructuring my projects). Basic ATL types are also explained and recommendations given are very good.
Concise but very useful is explanation of BSTR, OLESTR, CComBSTR, _bstr_t types.

This is an excellent book; a little pricey, but worth the money if you are serious about COM+. And I mean serious! This is not a beginners book, for that I would recommend "Inside COM+ Base Services" by the same publisher. This book is a little too biased towards MS development environments. For example they compare VC++, VB, and VJ++ and casually mention there are "other capable environments". Hmm. Then again, this is a Microsoft press book, and COM+ is a Microsoft technology, so its to be expected.

This book picks up where introductory COM books left off. The first chapter is about error handling in your COM+ objects - not a good place to start learning COM :)

Particularly useful to me was the last third of the book, the design patterns. Here, the authors give us a meaty example of a "real world" COM+ enterprise solution. What other book gives you this? Answer: none. Get this book!

This book, is without a dought, the best COM book ever done. In my seven years as a working COM engineer and some say expert, I have read and bought every single book on COM. And when you come right down to it, even Don Box's book, they are all the same: explaining IUnknown over and over again, rehashes of available documentation and books with esoteric and useless ICat and IDog interfaces. None of them deal with the real COM world and the problems we really face every day. This book does. This book assumes you are a working COM developer and focuses on the hard problems: Smart Pointers, Strings, Enumeration Interfaces, Streaming and trying to deal with the world of STL. It offers real solutions and real code that can be used today to bridge to the STL world and to deal with things like enumerations. It offers code to deal with COM enumerations and collections, a topic scarcely covered. This book has become my number one resource.

An excellent book. The early chapters reveal solid solutions to oft-encountered COM problems - error handling, string manipulation, smart pointers, multiple-reader single-writer locks, streaming and marshal-by-value etc. The later chapters concentrate mainly on design techniques for building scalable applications. In my (humble) opinion, chapter 13: The MTS Revolution is worth the price of the book alone. This chapter describes the evolution of technologies for building scalable systems, introduces the single-concurrent-client model and explains how to write scalable systems keeping code maintainable and in the general case, lock-free. All would-be COM+/MTS developers should read this chapter! I've read both this and Tim Ewald's Transactional COM+ - both excellent books and compliment each other very well. In my opinion, Brown's chapter 13 is far superior to Ewald's chapter 1. Both attempt to acheive the same thing, coaxing the regular developer into the COM+ mindset, but Brown's offers logical facts and reasoning as opposed to Ewald's non-real-world convoluted IPerson examples.

This book covers the software design aspect of COM+ with very good detail explanation of the why and what are your options in COM+ system design. The book also covers in depth discussion in using STL, architecture pattern, MBV and concurrency which are very valuable to software designer. If you are going to work on a software development that uses COM+, this book definitely will save you a lot of research and experiment time and resources.

I'm a graphic design student, and a recent assignment forced me to design for the web, something I had never done before. when gathering information on web design I came across Lynda's book at a local bookstore and finally there was a book written by an idiot for idiot's, it's very easy to understand and without the jargon that plaques most of the books on the subject. Unlike many computer books it lasts, I can still come back to it many months after I bought it and look up things that I didn't notice before. It's filled with useful information and is a MUST-GET for every designer. The only drawback for non-designers is that you're expected to know your way around professional software like Photoshop and illustrator, but how much can ask from one book?

This is definitely a must read for anyone who is beyond the basics of HTML and struggling with photoshop and illustrator to make professional looking web graphics.

I didn't like the other Lynda Weinman books as much, but they are unique in the field.

If you like this book try "Creating Killer Websites" next.

Any graphic designer who is serious about building web graphics should add this book to their library. The book is chock full of useful hints, tricks, and how-tos. Lynda Weinman wrote this book with the designer in mind. There is no tedious HTML coding - although there are lots of HTML examples. I find myself referring back to "Designing Web Graphics" regularly when designing web sites. Thanks Lynda.

I don't care how much you know, you don't know enough when it comes to web graphics. Ten minutes browsing some sites should make that clear. This is a full color throughout book. What idiot would produce a book about web graphics in Black and White, but that's just what Lynda's publisher almost made her do. She refused to do the book unless it was full color and they backed down. She puts that same commitment to sound ideas into the content of the book and it has revolutionized how these kinds of books get published. Now there are a bunch of them, and surprise surprise they are also all color. This one is still the best because Lynda's has got tons of first hand experience in the field, (not just a bunch of theory) and she explains things in a clear concise way. Do you know about transparency? It's here Do you know about optimizing for different browsers? It's here. Do you know how to cut the size of your graphic way way down without loosing detail? It's in here. Do you know how to create tiled backgrounds that download super fast? Get the book. Do you know what the differences between Mac and PC color pallettes are? I went from "Where's the "ON" button?" to making a living at this because of the beauty of this book. You need this book, and no I don't know Lynda and I don't get any money for this. I'm just thrilled when someone writes exactly the book that I would have written if I had known how.

This book has been really helpful to write my own tools for image analysis, such as leaf area index estimations from digital images and microscopy imaging analysis.

I think that for people involved in image processing and analyisis, this book is a must.

Great text for learning image processing and using it with MATLAB. Hopefully the instructor also uses its mathematical insight as well.

If you want to get up to speed on Matlab and plan to use it for image processing, this book is a must.

I have lots of experience in computer graphics and in programming languages like C++ and C#, but prior to reading this book I had never really used Matlab nor implemented complicated image processing algorithms. This book is a great introduction to both.

The book is divided in twelve chapters touching both low-level image processing (e.g. spatial filtering) and higher-level concepts required for computer vision, like image registration and segmentation. Gonzalez et al are talented writers, explaining relatively complicated concepts clearly and concisely, without getting lost in the mathematical details. People interested in the more theoretical aspects should (and probably already have) check their other book.

The only potential downside of this book is that it's definitely designed to be read sequentially, one chapter at a time. The matlab concepts are introduced piece by piece. For example, if you skip Chapter 5 (on image restoration, i.e. getting rid of noise) you may not realize that you missed the introduction to the image registration functions. Personally I liked this style (it added variety to a potentially dry subject), but a reader with less time to cover all of the matter may find this to be a problem.

This book educates the reader in image processing and MATLAB. While I am experienced in both, I found the book to be an extrememly useful reference book for projects involving image compression and image representation. The book offered practical descriptions and useful code for computing the fast wavelet transform. It was especially useful in describing how the edges should treated. This is a big issue that other textbooks gloss over. I had never seen it described in a textbook, and it was described so well.

The color image processing chapter is excellent, and the image processing chapter is pretty good. Lots of explanation and code.

While the book stands alone, it can also be seen as a useful companion book to the more theoretical "Digital Imaging Processing" by Gonzalez and Woods (2nd edition). This is a different book even though it has close to the same name.

I bought this book for two reasons (a) I needed an overview of IP and (b) I wanted to examine different pattern analysis algorithms with a practical twist. On both counts, as an non-IP researcher, I was very satisfied. The book is very well laid out, so well in fact that it would put to shame many of its rivals. It served my needs. I can't comment on whether it will meet the needs of a broader community. I would certainly recommend it based on my experience.

I hesitated to buy this book without seeing it 'in hand' first. I took the chance and I am *so* very glad that I did. This is an excellent reference book. It's an easy read, is extremely helpful, and it provided me with more information than I realized I needed. The author is experienced, opinionated, and direct; all of which lead to a book that is emininently useful.

One of my fears in buying this book was that it would be so biased toward PC users that it would be useless for me as a Mac user. I was extremely pleased to find out that was far from the case. In fact, the author has written several books on working with the Macintosh computer. That said, this book is meaningful to ANY computer scrapbooker, regardless of their computer platform or operating system.

Finally, the book includes reviews and recommendations on software, printers, etc, which I found very helpful.

I have read the first few chapters and already have learned some things that I didn't know even though I've been working with graphic packages for years. We can all learn more.......I feel the book is going to be useful. Hopefully it will get me up and really doing digital scrapbooking.....it looks easier than it is. The book is well layed out and very organized. I would recommend this book to a new digital scrapbooker like myself.....have fun with it and get up and doing it......

I received this book as a mother's day present this year (after griping that I didn't know what to do with my digital pictures in my scrapbooks). The book is amazing and very easy to read and follow. Though I'm still exploring the huge amount of information, I've already used some of the techniques like turning photos into watercolors (you'd swear I spent hundreds of dollars having an artist do an original watercolor of my daughter when actually it only took me about 20 minutes to do it with Photoshop Elements). I am also going to get a lot of use out of the sections on using clip art instead of stickers or stamps and computer fonts instead of rub off letters. I'd recommend this book to anyone who needs new scrapbooking ideas!

Digital scrapbooking has become very popular and in this book the author, Carla Rose, shows you how to blend digital and traditional scrapbooking to expand your creativity.

Your first step to creating a scrapbook is deciding on a theme or story to tell. Based on that, you choose a style that reflects your project and yourself. Now you are ready to gather your tools and get started creating. Rose discusses the tools for traditional scrapbooking and what is needed to go digital. She covers the advantages and limitations of several software programs.

Moving on to page design, Rose discusses aspects of page composition such as the use of white space and leading to enhance the readability of your pages. Next she explains the rule of thirds and how to use grids to help you design your pages around a center of interest which is usually, but not always, a photo or photos.

She discusses each page design element individually starting with background color and texture. She suggests creating background papers from scanned objects such as candy canes, leaves and fabric.

Rose then talks about photos. She discusses various corrections that you may need to make to old photos. She shows you step-by-step how to fix a badly damaged photo and how to turn a regular photo into a vignette (oval) shaped image. Next she covers correcting and enhancing your digital photos. She shows you how to blur the background area to enhance the subject of a photo. You may also need to make corrections to perspective, color, contrast or red eye.

She explores having fun with your photos by applying special effects and filters. Using plug-in filters and your software program, you can turn your photos into watercolor paintings or line art. You can also create a composite or collage from several photos.

Rose discusses the basics of typography and how to choose a font that will reflect the theme and style of your scrapbook. She discusses the special digital effects that you can add to your text such as drop shadows and embossing.

Publishing your scrapbook on the Internet has become very popular and Rose discusses the basics of webpage design and HTML. She has included the HTML code for a sample webpage to get you started.

Carla Rose is a professional photographer and Photoshop expert. She has written several computer books.

J'ai adoré ce livre car l'auteur parle autant de scrapbooking sur papier que sur ordinateur. Après avoir lu une partie du chapitre 7, j'ai pu effectué des corrections sur de vieilles photos de famille avec un résultat époustoufflant et cela en quelques minutes. Très bon livre de référence pour les gens qui veulent apprendre à faire du scrapbook autant manuellement que sur l'ordinateur.

This is it, the one book you need to learn digital scrapbooking. Sally gives you clear concise step-by-step instructions that will take you from the basics of digital scrapbooking to more advanced techniques.

Chapter by chapter you will build your skills. Then have fun with the CD full of digital scrapbooking supplies. Paint Shop Pro is a great digital scrapbooking program and Sally is definitely a GREAT Paint Shop Pro teacher!!

(Sally's other books are great as well.)

I purchased this book before I committed to a particular software and it was so helpful. I used it to practice with free trial copies of various softwares to help me decide which one I wanted to go with. The examples are great. The text is easy to follow and thorough. I am very satisfied with this book and learned everything I needed to get started and even do some advanced techniques!

I bought this book for a start in digital scrapbooking. It is great for teaching some of the basics, but I have Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 and the latest it includes is 2.0. Quite a few of the operations have changed when trying to do such things at adding shadows and combining layers. Needless to say I had to buy another book for 4.0. This has some great ideas however and some good information on filters.

What an Amazing book! It's for everyone that keeps asking "when will we have a book for digital scrapbooking?" This is THE digital scrapping book to have. There is something for everyone from the beginner to the advanced digital scrapbooker. There are almost 300 pages packed full of information and color photos. An added bonus is a CD that includes Tutorials, Page Kits, Templates, and Alphabets. That's not all either, there are over 100 Fonts, Clip Art, free and shareware Plugins, and Sample Layouts that were featured in the book. It is not program specific and covers Digital Image Pro, Paint Shop Pro, Photo Impact, Photoshop Elements, and Photo Plus. I work at a large digital scrapping website, Digital Scrapbook Place, and will definitely be recommending this book to our members.

I am also using "Digital Scrapbooking" as a reference book and keep it on my desk. There is an index so it's easy to find whatever you're looking for quickly. I only wish this book had been available when I was struggling to learn how to digital scrap. Thank you Sally and Lori for an awesome book! It's obvious that a lot of thought went into this book to give digital scrappers exactly what they have been asking for.

sandi

If you are thinking of making the move to digital scrapbooking you will do well to read this book by Sally Beacham and Lori J. Davis. Assuming that you have not committed to one image editor, the authors use five popular image editors in the examples throughout the book. They demonstrate the similarities and differences between Jasc Paint Shop Pro, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Microsoft Digital Image Pro, Serif Photo Plus and Ulead Photo Impact. But this book is not about imaging software. It is about digital scrapbooking.

The authors begin by discussing the pros and cons of digital scrapbooking and what you will need to get started. Besides showing how to make completely digital scrapbook pages, the authors also show many ways to integrate digital scrapbooking with traditional scrapbooking.

Next, they cover scanning photos into the computer and what can be done to correct and enhance your photos once they are in digital form. They discuss image corrections such as cropping, alignment, noise reduction, red eye removal and color correction.

The authors discuss two popular styles for scrapbook pages. The first style, faux-paper, emulates the textured paper, fibers, tags and other embellishments of traditional scrapbook pages. The second type, graphic design, has a more commercial look which emphasizes enhancement of photos and elaborate word art. They discuss how to use pre-designed layouts and how to design your own pages digitally.

Next, they begin to build a digital layout. They discuss color and how it should relate to and enhance your photos. Once you have chosen a color and texture for the background of your layout, you add your photos.

Text techniques and word art are a natural extension of digital scrapbooking. The authors discuss the importance of fonts and the digital effects that can be applied to the titles and journaling on your scrapbook pages.

There is a large section on plug-in filters and how they greatly expand the creativity of your image editing software. The special effects from these filters can be applied to your photos, digital background papers and embellishments.

The authors discuss how to save your digital page in the various formats for printing, burning to CD, emailing or posting on the web.

The accompanying CD contains several tutorials, clipart, over 100 fonts, trial versions of popular plug-in filters, sample layouts and page kits.

Lori J. Davis is a technical writer and author of many books on Paint Shop Pro. Sally Bracham is an author and teacher of Paint Shop Pro and related subjects.

What a wonderful book! Turns out the book goes above and beyond the great description that I read. I'm very happy with my purchase and will purchase 30 more for my photography students! It really breaks down a complicated hobby into easy and understandable information.

Although not new to digital photography I have found this book reveals many aspects of the subject which in many other books are frequently not explained fully enough to totally grasp the concepts or are explained in such detail that one has to fathom what it's all about.

Explanations are clearly detailed on how to optimize such subjects as exposure, balancing white point, controlling color, archiving images and numerous others aspects of digital photography.

Kevin gives readers the opportunity of trying a number of exercises relating to the contents of the book and even offers images which can be down loaded from his web site.

This book is well illustrated with explicit explanations and the setting out of topics makes for easy understanding. A book well worth reading for both the enthusiast and experienced photographer.

After much thought and reluctance I finally have made the transition from film to digital and purchased a DSLR. I needed a book to help me make the transition and decided on Kevin Ames' book. A very fortuitous choice on my part indeed. He writes in a fashion that is interesting, informative, to the point and most importantly easy to understand. As a result of using the book as a guide I have enjoyed the digital transition thoroughly and have come to realize I have made the right decision.
What impressed me the most was when I had a problem registering for downloads from his website and I emailed him. I was expecting an email in return. Got not an email but a personal phone call from Kevin to help me with the problem!! Kevin was extremely helpful. He not only took the time to solve the original problem but gave some very good advice on other issues as well. His enthusiasm for photography and willingness to share with others his knowledge and expertise is evident in the book and was borne out by a personal phone call from him. I am very impressed. Buy the book, you will not be disappointed.

I have enjoyed this book which provides a good blend of 'understanding your camera' with 'how to work magic with it' in CS2. I have recommended the book to others; especially those confused with all the camera and CS2 technologies. I refuse to lend it as I'm afraid I won't get it back.

For those not fortunate enough to attend one of Kevin Ames' workshops, as I recently did, this "Dummies" book is the next best thing. Whether you are a beginner to digital photography or a practicing professional, Digital SLR Photography with Photoshop by Kevin Ames is a valuable addition to your "toolbox."

Ames is that rare combination of artist and teacher, and this book is one of the most comprehensive, clearest and easiest to follow "how to" books that I have come across.

I've been a photography hobbyist for more than fifty years and the early chapters on fundamentals were still a worthwhile refresher. As a serious amateur my pictures are important to me, so I found Ames' unique approach to non-destructive image processing, disciplined file organization and foolproof archiving to be extremely valuable and essential information.

Very informative, detailed, user friendly, you don't need to be photo pro to read this. I have learned a most from this one compare to another books. Read it, make notes and hit the field for some great pics.

It's amazing how much essential information is contained within the covers of this compact guidebook. It's filled with shrewd advice on working with digital cameras of all types, from simple point and shoot models through advanced digital SLR cameras. Even if you already know how to operate your camera, you'll find lots of tips on coping with special problems you'll encounter in travel photography situations.

This is a full color book with beautiful photos on every page, all of them of a type that the reader can aspire to after reading the advice in the guide. I especially appreciated the format of this book, which was small enough to tuck in a camera bag and take with you. Take it with you on every trip you take. I know I will.

I used this author's D50 field guide to learn to use my Nikon camera. Now, just when I am ready to set out on a dream vacation with my family, he comes out with this guide aimed especially at those taking vacation or travel photographs.

I must admit that I like this one even better than the D50 book, mostly because 1/3 of it is NOT taken up with explanations of how to use camera controls. This book is chock full of great travel tips, how to prepare for your trip, how to equip your camera, and valuable information on maximizing storage, etc. Like the other book, most of its content deals with techniques for taking great pictures, but these are all travel oriented. The author works through several dozen different kinds of photo opportunities and offers recommendations for settings and how to approach the shot. Well worth studying before the trip, and including in your backpack, purse, or camera bag while you travel.

This is my fifth photography book in the past year, and I'm getting to be a bit of an expert on them! (joke). This is the first book that I have seen that is intended for the digital photographer who is planning a trip.

David assumes some photographic knowledge, but covers some of the basics anyway. I won't go into that. Where this book excels is in teaching how to prepare for a photo-safari trip, or just how to maximize on a regular vacation. How to take photos that don't look like the typical tourist shots. What to pack. What not to. And how to learn to take good travel photos by using your home area in a series of homework assignments. "Digital Travel Photography" covers technique for landscape photography, nature, portraits (that don't look posed), and even planning a photo-vacaton to cover local annual events.

Although David recommends packing this book as a filed guide, I don't equate it to the bird and nature guides that are pocketable. High marks for content and abundant color illustration.

i am an ameteur photographer that is trying very hard to understand a manual digital camera. i want to learn to take better pictures and use the manual features on my camera instead of the auto all the time. i have read many many photography books (probably 25 to 30 in the last 3 years). many go on way too long about how to select a camera - i don't think a book should cover that - cameras change too much from month to month and a good camera store should be able to steer you in the right direction. and, the books spend the last half covering how to change your photos on adobe. well, not everyone uses adobe. no matter what program you use, get a book on that. so, i loved this book, didn't delve into these two subjects too much. i can finally start to get a grasp of f stops and lighting and all that. my pictures have finally started to improve and i can understand what the book is saying. most other books i've read are either WAY to basic, too many or not enough pictures, too detailed for me to understand, etc. this book is perfect! i am learning a lot but it's not so far out there that i need to take a college course to understand the language used!

EXCELLENT book.... I cannot rate this one high enough.... at firstI thought it might have been expensive but it is NOT... the price is well WORTH it for what you get, Knuth is a master!

This book won't teach you TeX or Metafont. It might not even teach you all that much about particular algorithms (although Chapter 3 is one of the most detailed explanations of TeX's linebreaking algorithms published anywhere). Instead, this book offers a look behind the scenes.

Instead of beholding TeX and Metafont in their almost final versions, as published in _TeX: The Program_ and _Metafont: The Program_, respectively, you see them grow from the first design studies (when Knuth thought of TeX as a program for two grad students to write over a summer) to where they are today. You see how the collaboration between Knuth and Zapf on the Euler fonts worked, and you get another glance at many facets of Knuth's mind (And a beautiful mind it is indeed, even though it is entirely sane).

If you have any deeper interest in TeX and Metafont, this book is well worth the money.

This book collects numerous writings on TeX and typography from one of the greatest coumputer scientists of all time, Donald Knuth. Here you get to read fascinating inside information on Knuth's earliest development of TeX, how doggone hard he worked to get the letter "S" just right in his computer modern fonts, how to typeset his wife's recipes, and other bits of amazing minutiae. Knuth's style is breezy and funny in a wry-dry kind of way. (He's the kind of down-to-earth genius you'd love to take out to dinner.), and I was amused to find out that he seems to be a film buff. (His journal from his early work on TeX shows that he went to see "Earthquake," for goshsakes, "to relax"!)

This is a brilliant book, a book to treasure, and with its relatively short essays, a book to keep handy for bathroom reading. But then again, you may get addicted and just keep reading one chapter after another! If you love TeX (or LaTeX or AMS-TeX) as much as I do, you'll have to have this book. It's that good, and you will not only be astounded by his genius, entertained by the presentation, but you'll learn things too. Trust me on this one.

I got this book primarily to understand the word-wrapping algorithm in TeX,
and just that chapter alone was worth the price of the book.

Having said that... when explaining algorithms, I find Knuth concentrates so
much on the minutiae that the bigger picture is often lost; but that's just
his style and the exposition is always very clear. I've gone through parts
of TAOCP, so his style of teaching wasn't a complete surprise to me.
The word-wrapping chapter itself has a very leisurely style with a lot
of history and background, and it was a very enlightening and pleasant read.

The book itself is a selection of papers, articles, transcripts
of talks and working documents by Knuth on TeX and Metafont
(for the most part.)

Some chapters were not particularly interesting to me, they dealt with
specifics of tricky typesetting with TeX, which I feel has a clumsy
programming syntax.

Other chapters were great reading as they dealt with the historical
development of TeX and Metafont. For example, he writes about his collaboration
with Hermann Zapf on the AMS Euler typeface, which gives great insights
on how fonts were developed with Metafont. There are a couple of chapters talking
about his fascination with digital typography and his gradual descent (or is that
ascent!) into developing TeX and Metafont, and they were fun to read.

If you're a Knuth fan, you'll definitely want to get this book. The historical
material makes for nice, light reading, and if you get the urge, you can plunge
into the technical chapters and see some interesting gears within TeX
and Metafont.

This is a highly stimulating collection of essays about TeX, typography, the delectable art of programming, the joy of a beautifully constructed letter A, the world, the universe and everything. Knuth's style is, as always, eminently readable and possessed of a fluidity unmatched in technical writing this century. Definitely recommended.

All in all just a fascinating book on a fascinating topic. In general, the introductory parts of each chapter are accessible to anyone with a standard 12 year education. The mathematics are best understood by people with a background in algebra and statistics at the American High School level, but not much more. If you buy this book, expect John Ashcroft to put your name on a list of people buying dangerous published works (and with the Patriot Act in place, I am neither paranoid nor joking). The best chapter is the one about encoding information in ordered lists. This book taught me how to include a one line hidden message in a 50 item list of my favorite Country and Western Songs of all time (and THAT is a cool thing to do).

This book is a great introduction to learning how to hide data in places most people wouldn't think about looking. Sample code and various URL's are provided for places to start, this not the easiest subject to grasp, but the book helps put it at a manageable level.

A great place to start!...

This is a deep, serious book about making information transmogrify, even if there are a few silly parts. I liked the funny parts and they reminded me of Goedel Escher and Bach

This is a very easy read that does not really assume much about the reader other than mathematical maturity at the precalculus level, knowledge of programming in a higher level language, and a curiosity about hiding information in such things as images. In fact, I bought this book to get a grasp on how to hide a watermark in an image. The early chapters are devoted to material that forms the basic toolkit for steganography - private key encryption, secret sharing, and error correcting codes. The later chapters describe how to apply these techniques in various ways to hide information.

Chapter 5 discusses common data compression algorithms, not to the point that you could write an encoder/decoder system, but so that you know which allow perfect reconstruction and which do not. Compression leads to the topic of mimicry, which is the subject of chapter 6. Basic mimicry produces text that looks statistically similar to the original text but is far from perfect. Chapter 7 shows methods of improving mimicry techniques so that the mimicked text not only passes statistical tests for similarity to the original, but passes rules for grammar. This leads to the concept of context free grammars and their role in mimicry. Thus, you can hide data in realistic sounding text.

Chapter 8 concentrates on a robust and complete model known as the Turing machine. Such a machine hides data as it "runs forward", while running the machine in reverse allows the hidden data to be recovered. Certain proofs show that this is a stronger data hiding model than those previously discussed.

Chapter nine discusses a more image-processing related data hiding topic - hiding in the noise. What appears as noise to the untrained eye can actually be a message. Of course, the flip side of this is "real" noise has the power to obscure the hidden message.

Chapter 10 discusses anonymous remailers, which is the deletion of the name of the originator of a message by an intermediate node. Such systems can range from very secure to very insecure depending on strategies involved. Chapter 11,"Secret Broadcasts", is a companion chapter on how to broadcast a message so that everyone can read it but nobody knows the source. The solution lies in the "Dining Cryptographers" algorithm, and this solution is discussed at length.

Chapter 12, "Keys", discusses message keys as extensions to the concept of keys in basic cryptography, which was discussed earlier in the book. Adding keys to any algorithm discussed up to this point makes that algorithm stronger. Chapter 13, "Ordering and Reordering", discusses how steganography strategies might be disrupted by reordering parts of a message, and discusses methods that might prevent this from being a problem.

Chapter 14, "Spreading", is a more mathematical chapter than the preceding ones and takes a different approach to the problem of information hiding. It takes ideas from spread spectrum radio and applies them to steganography. This is the one chapter where a knowledge of calculus, Fourier transforms, and even wavelets will be helpful.

The last three chapters, "Synthetic Worlds", "Watermarks", and "Steganalysis" are short and more subjective than previous ones, mainly giving the reader a broad overview of these topics.

The book has a wealth of algorithms, equations, and simple examples. There is even a very basic Java mimicry program in the appendix. However, this is not a programming book full of ready to implement solutions - you will have to do that yourself. There are numerous references to web addresses where you can find both executable and source code for implementing some of the algorithms mentioned in this book. I would say if you are interested in hiding information in data of any kind - text, sound, imagery, etc. - then this book is essential reading. I highly recommend it.

I read the entire book from first to last page and enjoyed the content absolutely. The book has theory and practice, clear examples and many references to free and open source software to make tests. The math part has razonable level (not too much, not to little). I have no found anything better in the area.
Good for Peter Wayner!

P.D. ...