Microsoft Books

Folks lucky enough to have attended Ms. Stephens' instructional seminars on Word and Excel, or anyone looking to improve their computer skills without having to translate technical jargon will benefit from her excellent manual on Microsoft Word. Ms. Stephens takes you the process step-by-step and teaches user shortcuts and tricks of the trade for producing professional documents in easy to understand terms. A must for computer newbies or anyone who just wants to learn some quick tips and production shortcuts.

I found this book to be very comprehensive, easy to read and understand, and very useful. I used it to replace reports that are generated by the iSeries with CSV files (Comma-Separated Value) that are transferred to our network where they can be opened with Excel. Once opened with Excel, they can be sorted any way the User wants, columns can be totaled on-the-fly, filters can be applied to the data, etc...
I also used the information in the book to link files on the iSeries to tables in MS Access. I was able to take a file on the iSeries and find duplicate records without writing a program. I was also able to take two files on the iSeries and find records in one file that were missing from the second file, again, without writing any programs. Likewise, I was able to find records that were in both files.
Talk about cool, you can even create data entry screens in Access that add/update data in the files on the iSeries. The screens in Access are GUI as opposed to the "Green Screens" on the iSeries.
I've only begun to scratch the surface of this book. I'm looking forward to trying out some of the other techniques that are layed out by Chris and Brian.

This is one of the few books that gives you insight both on the business/functional side *and* the technical challenges of implementing a Project Management software (and there are).

Gary is one of the most active participants in the microsoft.public.project.* groups and has a stack of experience to share. It really helps that he's an MVP, but not working for Microsoft - this enables him to share critical comments on "what's difficult with Project" and helpful workarounds.

Think added-value-on-every-page... and quite difficult to read end-to-end, because of the wealth of information and the itch to try it yourself. This book will definitely help you implement any MS Project Server 2002 (and probably even 2003) solution!

I like it and it was brand new and it got me through the game levels. I was able to find it only at Amazon, not in any stores locally.

An excellent introduction of VS.Net and explanation of IDE development vs stand-alone development, and a thorough coverage of analysis and design phases of the development process. Also excellent worked out examples in each chapter. There are a good number of objective questions and several programming exercises at the end of each chapter, which is very helpful help for the teacher using this textbook. Writing style is extremely clear and very effective. Complex topics, including the ones listed below have been explained in a manner that every student can easily understand them:

data validation in response to a question:" What should you do when input values are incorrect, Existence Check, Data Type Check, Range Check, Reasonableness Check, Code Check, Cross-Field Check, manipulation of numbers using arithmetical operators, manipulation of strings using operators like concatenation, substring, parsing, methods for changing to upper case etc., date-time manipulation, exceptions and exception handling, call stack, application exception, execution call stack, stack trace property, pass by reference, pass by value, instance method, overloading, shared method, static method, top of stack, recursive methods, theoretical concepts of "arrays," and "good use of arrays," use of proper encapsulation by making the operations visible and the data and the implementation of the operations hidden in the objects, common formats for saving information in sequential data files using plain text: (1) Fixed-width text files, (2) CSV (Comma-separated values) files, and (3) Tab-delimited file, Inheritance and Polymorphism -- two important important components of Object Oriented Programming etc. )

I have seen other books where authors create confusion in reader's mind when they try explaining complex topics in a confusing way. I found everything in this book very easy to understand.

After looking at the table of contents, I admire the strategy of the authors - they are presenting the "more technical things earlier" and "more management issues a "bit later." Also they have separated some programming conventions into appendix B (because the conventions may differ at some software houses). I like the authors separating such material from the chapters of the textbook.

Writing style is indeed very clear and very effective, and it reflects the pedagogical skills of the authors. The authors skillfully and successfully explain many difficult issues in programming, like, hash table, stacks, queues, etc. I fully expect to use this book when I teach C# at my university.

Inside Photoshop 3 by Gary Bouton will flatten the learning curve. If you start at page one and work through every lesson and example, you will feel like an expert. Even though you may never be able to plumb the depths of Photoshop, you will be able to do any thing that you imagine to do

Straight from Microsoft comes this authoritative guide to the many ways you can use the tools developed for SQL Server 2005. The book documents an impressive build out of functionality, to make the administrator more productive. No doubt, in part, the book is also a competitive response to IBM and Oracle's database offerings.

For those of you interested in protecting your database against attacks, there is a useful section on surface area reduction. SQL Server comes with several services. Quite possibly, your usage might not need some of these. So you are shown how to turn them off. Lessens the risk. Plus, some services are accessible on the network. If you only need these accessible locally, then you can disable remote network access. Simple precautions that can improve matters. In fact, many of the features described in the book can be disabled, and often are, as a default measure.

The most powerful tools appear to be those for data mining, in the Analysis Service 2005. You can add custom logic, in addition to various algorithms that come with the service. The narrative also shows examples of graphics of the analysis, where various methods can be easily plotted. For some readers, the data mining is where you can add or find the most value to your data.

My impression is that you should not need to read the book sequentially. Just pick the sections that are germane. The chapters seem largely independent of each other.

There's a good bit of information out there about SharePoint search. Patrick & Lars did a fantastic job pulling all this together in this book. You see the OOTB config options, a solid discussion on the other search options with the MSFT Search Server editions. I really like the API stuff though... working with the full text and keyword searches in the API as well as a detailed discussion on the Query and QueryEx Web services. The section on customizing the OOTB search result response is also very helpful.

MS Windows 95 is the most proficient book available currently. The best guide to get u through learning and interacting with your PCs.

It takes one of the big network providers---such as America Online, AT&T WorldNet Service, CompuServe, or Microsoft---to get Internet Explorer 3 going. Then a crawler, spider or worm updated Web server directory or search tools---such as AltaVista, AT&T WorldNet Search, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos, Magellan, Microsoft, or Yahoo!---to help find addresses for downloading document, media or program files. And a WinZip decompression program to open anything Zip-compressed for faster copying. And a WebEdit Home Page Wizard to create a DIY Web page or to edit from a pre-fab template, for storing in the same folder with picture files from clip art downloads, drawing or paint programs, or scanned images and photos; publishing in the Internet Service Provider Web server space; and listing with the major search tool directories. And all the while a Content Advisor can censor Explorer access to objectionable parts of the Internet, but not for such Explorer companion products as Comic Chat, Internet Mail, Internet News, and Microsoft NetMeeting conferencing and telephoning. And until practice makes perfect, Ned Snell's DUMMIES 101: INTERNET EXPLORER 3 FOR WINDOWS 95 (which unfortunately now has to be special ordered) has user-friendly logically ordered chapters with helpful quizzes and regular summaries, which make the book a prerequisite for the out of stock MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER 3.0 STEP BY STEP and for Joe Kraynak's THE COMPLETE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO INTERNET EXPLORER 3 (which also needs to be special ordered).