Programming Books

Although the title suggest otherwise, Advanced Rails is really required reading for anyone using Rails - beginners and gurus alike. The information provided is excellent, with essential tips and sound advice. In particular, the chapters on routing, security, internationalization and database issues are well worth the purchase price. Like Obie's The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series), this book should live on your desk in your workspace. What's missing? Well, it would have been nice to see information on Git considering the effort put into covering source control systems. It's also surprising that there is not more on testing techniques and issues. But overall, this book is fantastic, and chocked full of juicy info you won't find in any of the other Rails books currently available.

This book is almost worth it just for the first chapter's dive into Ruby metaprogramming, but the rest of the book doesn't disappoint. Ediger delivers useful advice regarding available methods, alternatives and considerations that all serious web developers should take into account.

This book should be non-optional for all Rails development teams, as it has some of the most sane and sober treatment of relevant topics I've ever read in a single book. From security to databases to deployment, this book gives the reader a solid foundation in nearly all of the major disciplines involved in building web applications.

As Ruby on Rails rocketed into the development community's hearts and minds a few years ago, the number of books on the subject climbed with it. However, a lot of these books were introductory in nature (Agile Web Development with Rails, Beginning Rails, Build Your Own Rails Applications, etc.). What's a budding Rails-head to do once they've gotten the basics down? Books like Advanced Rails -- which was released late last year by O'Reilly - aim to fill this void.

Author Brad Ediger has been kicking around the Rails scene since the pre-1.0 days. Though not a Rails "luminary" necessarily, he certainly qualifies as an advanced user. He is CTO for a Real Estate tech company called Tasman Labs and runs a web design (and Rails consulting) firm called Madriska Media Group. He seems like a sharp cookie and a decent writer.

Advanced Rails covers quite a bit of territory, going for breadth rather than depth most of the time. Each chapter covers a classic, pivotal development concern... well, at least most of them do. The chapters are as follows:

1. Foundational Techniques
2. ActiveSupport and RailTies
3. Rails Plugins
4. Database
5. Security
6. Performance
7. REST, Resources, and Web Services
8. i18n and L10n
9. Incorporating and Extending Rails
10. Large Projects

By "Foundational Techniques", Ediger is referring to Ruby and Rails techniques, principals and patterns like Metaprogramming, Don't Repeat Yourself, and Functional Programming techniques. The chapter also goes into a fair amount detail about the Object/Class/Module relationship. A bunch of this may not be particularly new material for most Rails users who've been at it for at least a few months. However, it's still nice to have all this stuff in one forty page chapter... good to have handy to refer to. Also, there are some nice nuggets in there that could save you some head-scratching. For example, what's the difference between Kernel#lambda and Proc.new? The answer is that, if you *return* a value from the block passed to Proc.new, the calling method is exited as well, abandoning any code that you might have after it.

If the first chapter feels like it's leaning towards a reference work, the second chapter -- which digs into all the goodies offered by ActiveSupport and RailTies -- pretty much falls over right into reference-land, complete with a method-by-method listing of features added to standard library classes. This may seem even more like just putting api docs available online into print, but Eidger defintely adds a bit more explanation. And, I haven't really seen anyone give a rundown of just what the heck RailTies does. That's the library that provides the glue to pull together the more famous Rails libraries to make it all work together as rails: generators, initializers, etc. There is definitely some interesting and not necessarily readily available information here.

Chapter three covers Rails Plugins, and is quick and painless. It explains the common files and directory structure in a plugin and talks about how Rails loads them. It also talks about using Piston instead of svn:externals to manage plugins and show some example plugins.

The following three chapters cover more of the classic eternal problems faced in running high-traffic sites: databases, security, and performance. These really make the most sense in an "advanced" book; they are the "brass tacks" that everyone must get down too if they go beyond the "toy app" stage. Ediger talks about the strengths and weaknesses of the various popular database systems. He also goes into the benefits of using the filesystem to store data, which is largely because web servers can make use of fast system calls to dump files straight into the TCP socket. He also covers some advanced db features like composite keys, stored procedures and clustering.

The security chapter isn't all that long and a lot of the info it covers can be found in beginner Rails books... SQL injection, cross-site scripting etc. However, the book would be remiss to not include this material and it is presented in a concise and complete manner. This would be good to refer back to now and then to make sure you haven't slipped in your security awareness. Ediger also doesn't hesitate to make specific recommendations, like "whitelist rather than blacklist".

He also jumps right into recommendations while writing about performance optimization in the next chapter: "Algorithmic improvements always beat code tweaks", "As a general rule, maintainability beats performance", "Only optimize what matters", "Measure twice, cut once". He then goes on to cover specific tools and techniques for uncovering your bottlenecks, from a quick explanation of basic statistics to using httpperf, benchmark, and Rails Analyzer Tools, improving database calls (using indexes and "include" on finders), and the various caching solutions. There is plenty of good information in this chapter; also a good bit of reference next time you need to track down a logjam.

Chapter seven covers RESTful Rails, from the very basic theory as outlined by Roy Fielding to exactly how Rails has chosen to use these concepts, and is the longest chapter in the book. The amount of coverage REST gets seems questionable since Rails has been very heavily into the RESTful approach for over a year and embraced the philosophy so thoroughly that it's hard to imagine anyone using Rails today without being exposed to the concepts.

On the other hand, one can still wire up verb-oriented actions in routes.rb and might be able to get away with ignoring all the RESTful goodness. So maybe there are some out there that can benefit from this chapter. Plus, having such thorough, theory-to-practice coverage allows the chapter to stand on its own as a solid reference to the whys and hows of RESTful Rails. It also has one of the better sections on RESTful routing that I have seen (routes being one of the more mysterious and sometimes frustrating pieces of Rails).

Rails has gotten plenty of grief for its lack of official support for Internationalization and Localization, but in Chapter eight, Ediger lays out the options, such as gettext, Gibberish, and Globalize. He is most enthusiastic about this last library and it does appear to be quite powerful, including support for translating strings, translating model fields, localizing numbers and dates, and even recording what needs to be translated by saving them in the database. Creating multi-lingual websites is a hard problem in any web-development framework and most other frameworks have plenty of head start. However, Ruby and Rails certainly isn't without options and it will only get better.

The next to last chapter of Advanced Rails runs through a number of alternatives to the standard components of the Rails framework. On the database end, it covers DataMapper, Ambition, and Og, giving this last one the most attention. For alternatives to ERB templates, Ediger talks about Markaby, Liquid and Haml, all in a very brisk fashion. He also talks about using traditional Rails components -- like ActiveRecord and ActionMailer -- outside of Rails applications. The chapter closes with a discussion of how to contribute to Rails (hint: submit a patch... don't just bitch!).

The last chapter is called "Large Projects" and covers some useful information about working on a Rails project with a team, beginning with version control (though anyone who is writing code that covers more than a single file and *not* using version control is just plain insane). This starts with a quick overview of Subversion, however this feels like it is really a set up for making a case for "decentralized version control". Ediger does a good job of explaining these concepts, using Mercurial for his examples. This seems a bit unfortunate, since many people on the Rails core team have embraced Git and it is looking like Rails will eventually move its repository to Git. However, Mercurial has a reputation of being more user-friendly, so that may have influenced his decision. And it's useful information regardless.

Chapter ten continues on to discuss avoiding migration numbering collisions, issue tracking, keeping Rails and required gems within a project, web servers, load balancers, production architecture and deployment tools like Capistrano. This is all covered in a fairly quick fashion so don't expect a lot of depth.

That last sentiment came up often while reading this book. It often felt like Ediger was trying to get every possible Rails-related topic into the book that he could, but didn't want to come out with some 1000-page behemoth. Plenty of the topics mentioned don't have much more coverage than you could get with a quick "googling". However, there is something to be said for being exposed to a lot of tools, projects and concepts in one go, even if the exposure is sometimes superficial. I definitely found reading this book worthwhile and will keep it around to refer back to now and then. I don't know if I'd go so far as to label it required reading, but then again books on web frameworks rarely are.

With 'Advanced Rails' the O'Reilly family of Rails books is looking to add a Rails book that talks about some of the extra stuff you can do with this great technology. At 300+ pages long this isn't a book with 'Learning' in the title, rather it assumes that you have some fundamental Rails knowledge and are looking to improve your skill set.

Chapter Overview:

01. Metaprogramming
02. ActiveSupport and RailTies
03. Rails Plugins
04. Database Stuff
05. Security
06. Performance
07. REST and Web Services
08. i18n and L10n
09. Incorporating and Extending Rails
10. Large Projects (Source Control and the like)

Rails is a powerful framework but it isn't an easy one to always understand and get working. If you are looking to use Rails in your web app and want to get better at understanding the ins and out of it, this book can really help fill in the blanks.

If you want to become a better Rails developer/admin pick up this book and get better immediately.

**** RECOMMENDED

For a programmer who doesn't work in an office full of rails gurus this book answers a ton of questions I would like to ask, but have no one I could ask.

Half of the book is bits of rails wisdom mixed in with recipe like code snippets.


A very timely book for me. I especially like the further reading sections at the end of each chapter. The book is new enough that all the links are current, and I have learned a few nuggets of knowledge from these as well.

The section on globalize was immediately useful on one of my current projects and returned my investment in the book many times over.

No wonder amazon only has one left today.

Highly recommended for anyone wanting to troubleshoot and take care of their Mac themselves. It covers in detail the set up, administration and daily care and feeding of OSX.

If you are studying for the ACHDS exam, this book is all you need. I just got back from taking my exam and received a 96% score. Everything from this book with prepare you for the exam. I would of gotten a perfect score but I think my nerves got in the way.

Get this book, you won't regret it.

The book is very well written with clear explanations, and detailed lessons. Because you read about it and then go through an excersize, you retain the information better. I would recommend this book because it really does almost feel like you are in a class when you are reading.

I needed this book to study for my Apple Certs, and found it to be very concise and all of the sections were explained well. It was more of a review for me, but once in a while, I found a tidbit of information that I did not know. I was kind of exciting finding little "secrets" about an OS that I have been working with and developing on for years.

I recommend this book if you are looking to study on your own or if you just need, or want, more insight into the way Mac OS X works. The information is fairly complete and when it is not exhaustive, I found that the authors had placed direct URLs to many of the great resource web sites.

If it is Apple certification you want, you can choose to use the web based Applecare technician training or this book. To do a great job on your cert tests, I recommend both. The book allows you to learn and study when you are not in front of a screen. Completely web-based programs require me to print out a lot, and I found I did not have to with the book in hand.

Excellent reference.

However, I didn't like the idea of using MIX assembly language. Book would have been more readable if examples were in plain english pseudocode (even better would be 'C'). At least second edition should have taken care of this aspect.

I also suggest books from Cormen & Sedgewick on same subject.

This book is bible of computer programming.

It contains most detailed explanation of searching and sorting methods I ever found in a book. Contains all internal sorting and searching and external sorting and searching algorithms.

The only drawback of the book is that all algorithms are written in MIX - some kind of assembler, and because of that they are hard to read.

I just bought the book I needed out of the set. I needed to build a database that did not use any commercial package (this gives full access and no royalties). This book saved my bacon. I almost did not buy it when all I saw in it was math. But I was desperate and it paid off. Turns out you could not explain it any other way. This book goes way beyond binary, and bubble sorts. I use it primarily for balanced trees. I may try some thing more exotic later. I can not tell you about the other volumes but this one will defiantly pay for it's self.

A previous review said: "This is a book about the science of algorithms. Algorithm's are either right or wrong."

Knuth uses the MIX programming language thoughout, and if you hope to learn programming by reading this book, you should look elsewhere. Someday we'll have 2^30 registers, and we will still be trying to make our programs work faster on this, as yet, uninvented architecture. But the fundamental concepts will remain the same, and people will still be reading Knuth to understand them.

A good reference for serious computer science students. Others should look at O'Reilly. They have some really good books on visual basic.

This is an encyclopedia of what is known about sorting and searching and what computers can do. It is nothing else.

Graduate students in computer science (especially those in theory, algorithms and the occasional compiler fan) will benefit. Hackers will probably not benefit from this book.

First the basics: it's great, it provides wide-ranging and deep analysis, it shows many views and variants of each problem, and its bibliography is helpful, though not exhaustive. The historical notes, including sorts for drum storage, may seem quaint to modern readers. And sorting has been done, right? You just run a shell program or call a function, and tap into the best technology. Does it need to be done again?

Yes, if you're on the edge of technology, it does need to be done again, and again, and again. That's because technology keeps expanding, and violating old assumptions as it does. Memories got big enough that the million-record sort is now a yawn, where it used to be a journal article. But, at the same time, processor clocks got 100-1000x ahead of memory speeds. All of a sudden, those drum-based algorithms are worth another look, because yesteryear's drum:memory ratios are a lot like today's memory:cache ratios of size and speed - and who doesn't want a 100x speedup? Parallel processing is moving from the supercomputing elite into laptops, causing more tremors in the ground rules. GPU and reconfigurable computing also open whole new realms of pitfalls as well as opportunities.

Knuth points out that the analyses have beauty in themselves, for people with eyes to see it. His analyses also demonstrate techniques applicable way beyond the immediate discussion, too. Today, though, I have nasty problems in technologies that no one really knows how to handle very well. I have to go back and check all the assumptions again, since so many of them changed. If that's the kind of problem you have, too, then this is the place to start.

//wiredweird

This book is great for the self taught person with significant insignificant questions. In completing this book, all those questions answer themselves. None of that "cutsie" just great tutorial. Instruction is easily to understand and follow. I've gone through the book a couple of times and discovered something new each time. When I finished with this book, I knew what I was doing and why.

Money well spent on this book.

Straigh-forward writing with no pretension. Some knowledge of 3D graphics vocabulary is helpful but not necessary.

Book is one example from beginning to end; presumably the author. Starts with some pictures and, step-by-detailed-step, ends with an avatar.

The only fault I found is that he doesn't mention Poser in the list of 3D modeling programs for human figures.

If you want to learn how to model a detailed digital human,this is THE book for you! You start out with totally empty viewports,and if you follow the book you'll end up having created a model with an incredible amount of detail.

The author explains in great detail the process of modelling every body part (head,neck,arms,hands,legs,feet and torso) with anatomical references where they're most important.

I wanted a book which I could use as a definitive guide to model a detailed and anatomically correct human body or body part,and I'll look no further when I have to do so. It's also got a clever chapter about modifying the same model to create very different ones, and a good chapter about texturing and UVW unwrapping. Finally, it refers to cloth and hair (somewhat briefly) and,no,it DOESN'T cover rigging. But it does cover, extremely well, human modelling, which is what mr.Brilliant had set out to do,I assume. Very very good!

I used this as a class textbook and it worked fairly well. This is not a single program book so this will work well with whatever program you model with. Although, depending on what you model with, depends on if you need to go out and find plug-ins that will do what he does. The book is really good going through step by step. Although there are some occasions where he leaps forwards ahead with really telling you what to do. Also, sometimes when he gives instructions, there aren't any images to go along with them, so you have to end up guessing what to do.
This is modeling for realism/cinematics and if you want to use this book to model in-game characters, you are out of luck. The was he teaches you to model is extremely high poly (especially in the head). The CD doesn't do much for you, it mainly just has naked pictures of the guy he models on it so you can copy exactly what he does. The book does give good information on the differences between modeling men and women, although it is fairly brief. He does go into UV mapping pretty good as well as modeling hair. The book doesn't, however, go into modeling clothing fairly well, just a short chapter. The book also doesn't even mention rigging, which I think is a crucial part in character modeling.

Given that you are already familiar with some type of modeling software, this book is the best resource you could have! The non-software specific approach of the book keeps it focused on the concepts of creating a good model rather than the user interface. Every detail of the body is covered with step-by-step diagrams, and a lot of it focuses on creating a topology that is animatable and will subdivide correctly (ie the mesh is mostly in quads). It also covers texturing, rigging, facial animation, both modeled and simulated hair, and simple clothing. The book discusses anatomy to the extent that it is needed to create a realistic model, and uses those concepts to demonstrate how the male model you create can be changed into a female, or into a fantasy character that looks completely different.

One thing that did make it a little difficult to use was that in the screenshots, the mesh was transparent and therefore you couldn't tell whether vertices were at the front or the back of the model. More screenshots with an opaque mesh would have made it easier to see the topology.

Overall, the explanations are concise and makes the task seem efficient, easy, and fun.

At first glance you may easily dismiss this book; featuring a rather dull cover; size that is dwarfed by the more "popular" C books - do not be fooled! This is an excellent text for learning about the C language.

Admittedly, if you're new to programming in general, then this book may seem a little difficult. For instance the first chapter launches straight into a discussion of C idioms: keywords, variables, operators etc. If these are foreign to you I would recommend you also buy an introductory programming text, then return to this book when you understand these concepts.

These assumptions aside, Kalicharan clearly and concisely discusses control structures and arrays, functions, character handling, data types, input/output and more. The concepts of each chapter are thoroughly explained and incorporated into numerous programming examples.

Indeed this is one of the strongest points of the book. In particular I liked the way Kalicharan introduces the three programming constructs; conditional execution, looping and iteration first, BEFORE discussing for example, the printf statement like most other C books do - which can be highly confusing to the novice C programmer. (Kalicharan leaves it until chapter 9). Thus a strong grounding in the fundamentals of programming is emphasised from the very start and is a consistent theme revisted throughout the book.

Unlike other C books, Kalicharan gives a brilliant discussion of pointers. What is dismissed as "too hard" in other texts is covered with ease and again, numerous examples to illustrate. For this chapter alone, one should buy this book.

Following the chapter on pointers is a good introduction to "advanced" data structures, linked lists and binary trees. These are left out of most other C books, bar those dealing with data structures specifically (university texts etc) but it is here that the power of the C language becomes apparent.

Topping off the book is a chapter in file handling. Text and binary files are discussed.

The range of topics, clarity of expression and *working* examples (I compiled every program in the book without error...) makes this book an essential addition to any C programmer's library. I hope another book from this talented author is on the way soon! (How about Java or C++?)

A friend recommended this book after I complained of the difficulty of learning C, having tried more popularly recommended books. I'm glad she did, for this book made C easy and fun to learn. An excellent book, strongly recommended.

I had Noel Kalicharan (UWI) for my Year 1 programming. Used many of the books he wrote and can vouch for the calrity and ease of use of his books, overall high quality. Even better when combined with his lectures.

A fantastic book! Its simple, clear and systematic presentation and explaination of concepts along with the abundance of examples make learning to program in C an easy task. And all the scary stuff you may have heard about pointers in C become mere rumours after reading the relevant chapters! An excellent book for learning and teaching.

This book is one of the best books explaining ANSI C. It starts from the newbie level and delivers the knowledge needed for any good C programmer to survive.

The writing style is very nice, the author has done some fine efforts in keeping his threads of thought clear and easy to follow.

For people who already know C, this is also good as a quick reference and is something concise to quickly refer to, in small issues. They could also just use it to quickly refresh their knowledge of C every once in a while.

It doesn't cover any advanced topics, but it does what it promises to do, so there's nothing serious to put this book down.

This book could have helped me greatly when I was just starting to learn C programming, but it didn't... Just because I only bought it too late, at the end of my C programming days!

-Mokhtar M. Khorshid

this is good companion to C in nutshell. answering your c question quickly and effectively.

Not intended as a reference or a tutorial for the C language, this book fills one niche well - the gory, often forgotten or differently understood, fine details. When writing code, and noticing some behaviour which doesn't look completely natural, this FAQ can often help clear some things out.
In my opinion it is also good to read it at least once from the beginning - this gives some good insight on the language that might not always be immediately visible to beginners, or intermediate programmers who do not have years of experience behind them.
Most every C compiler these days supports some extensions and non-standard features, and some of those might be difficult to notice as non-standard. This book will also help you program in a more portable manner, and think in more standardized C.

Summit gives us an extensive test of our C knowledge. While C has a simple syntax, and lacks object oriented complexity in notation, there are many nuances that catch out unwary programmers.

A lot of the questions revolve around the assembly language-like constructs in C, for pointer arithmetic. Very easy to trip up here. And also in the related area of memory (buffer) allocation.

If that is not enough to keep you busy, Summit also talks about issues of portability across different operating systems or across different versions of the same operating system. At least you usually don't have to worry about the version of C itself. For system dependencies, Summit covers both unix and MSDOS. While C and unix grew up together, a reality is that much C programming goes on under Microsoft.

The references to MSDOS in the text reflect that the book was written in 95. Though even then, Microsft was deprecating DOS in favour of its newer Windows offerings. A newer version of this book might be overdue. Where Summit would no doubt discuss C under XP.

Simply put, this book does a good job of condensing years of FAQs from the comp.lang.c new group. Some of the questions really get down into the nitty gritty of C. The answers are easy to read and understand.

This is an essential book for any programmer. I remember buying it when it first came out in Fall 1995. I was an undergraduate senior at the time and thought I was a hotshot C programmer. How mistaken I was! Reading through this book was a humbling experience, as each page showed me fine details of C that I did not already know.

This is an excellent book. It is organised into chapters on different aspects of C, and in each chapter are dozens of FAQs that range from rather common to extremely fine-detailed. Three chapters which I particularly liked were Chapter 1 (declarations and initalisations), 3 (expressions and evaluation order), and 6 (arrays and pointers). Later chapters introduced new (at the time) concepts to me, including getopt, variable-length argument lists, and preprocessor tricks. The level of detail provided in each answer is extraordinary.

Other things I liked about the book: The index is excellent. There is a lot of discussion (spread across the FAQs) on the differences between K&R and ANSI C. (This was relevant to me because at the time, I was splitting my work between gcc and the proprietary cc compilers on DEC Ultrix and SunOS.) The style of writing is friendly and does not talk down to you. This is not a beginners' book!

Note that there is an online version, but it does not have nearly as many questions as in this book.

I salute this author with his kind of patience to walk through the implementation of the tiny PIM with the STL and with very detail and clear explanation. He has started his plan well with the class diagrams. I have learnt and pickup a number of good programming techniques (as simple as the various way of string manipulation) from this book and going to try as many STL as possible in my project development using Borland Kylix 3 Professional (C++), GNU g++/gcc, Visual C++ Professional 6, Borland C++ 5.02 and Borland C++ Builder.

Great intermediate explanation of the C++ Standard Library complete with a project from beginning to end. I especially liked the approach the book took by equating its premise to learning a foreign language by interacting with native speakers rather then memorizing the vocabulary.

This is a very good approach to teaching the standard library. The author has a style very similar to mine, so perhaps I'm biased... but I don't think so. He writes clearly and with a purpose in mind: to help the reader understand the material as thoroughly as possible. And he accomplishes his goal, with only a few typos along the way as minor distractions.

One point I should clarify, though: as far as I can tell, Jesse Liberty's contribution to this book consists of having his name on the cover. While this is unfortunate for the actual author, whose real accomplishments are undermined by that association, it is much better for the reader than if Mr. Liberty had actually had anything to do with the writing of the book. In that case, I would have expected to see much less clarity in the explanations and hundreds of errors, as those are his trademarks.

Kudos to Mr. Halpern! Keep writing... but under your own recognizance. You shouldn't have any trouble finding a publisher who will take you on without any "sponsorship". Good, clear technical writing is hard to find.

After returning every STL book I've purchased I caught this book here on Amazon. Pablo Halpern does a great deed to the STL community by putting out a great book on STL topped off by the use of UML to help students understand the full cycle of developing an application. If you're new to the programming world this is a MUST have to quide you along analysis, design, and implementation with a concrete example. If you're a seasoned pro but are missing STL from your life ( much like I was til I read this book ) this book will get you going. Halpern does a great job of keeping the example on an open architecture, so for those of us who want more than in-memory persistence and a command line UI implement a database and our choice of UI for the example. I myself turned this into a great COM+ web application using ASP for presentation and an added layer of COM+ data objects from my collection to hit a SQL Server 2000 database...

I am half way through this book and thoroughly enjoying it. The STL is incredibly powerful. I have read Josuttis' book, which is also a great book, but once I finished it, I felt that I had a obtained a great appreciation for the STL, but was still a little uncomfortable using it. With this book I feel that I am getting a better feel for the library because I'm actually using it in the context of a real application and am able to experience first hand the usage and trade offs of the different containers/algorithms contained within the STL. Between the two books, I think that I will be well on my way to becoming STL proficient. Simply by working through this book, you will gain many months worth of valuable programming experience.

This is a great book for a quick hands on learning for XML. I really like it and it solved my problems. I always thought parsing the XML was too damn confusing but with this book I now completely understand the DOM and SAX parsing.

This book does a great job of introducing the basic concepts and getting you into code soon, so you can see the concepts and syntax in action. The topics included XML, CSS, XSLT and XPath, DOM, SAX, and XML Schemas. All these abbreviations are explained in the book. The core concepts are well introduced without being overwhelmed in syntax, and advice if often given on what is best to use (for example "Can I use DOM or SAX instead of XSLT?").

The use of an 8 character "CodeNote pointer" allows obtaining additional information from the codenotes web site while keeping the book a readable size and price. For example the paper chapter on SAX included examples in Java, but the online "CodeNotes" allows obtaining the source in Visual Basic. In the chapter on installation, I found both the instructions on the book and the online web site out of date, so they might want to update the web. The online notes on Sample architectures was particularly helpful, so don't neglect the section on "additional material" at the front of the book. I would have also liked an actual completed application demonstrated online.

This book is probably the best value of any of the technical book I've purchased. At only $..., this book covers all the important aspects of XML in a very understable and enjoyable way. It's laid out well and the examples (and following explanations) are clear and very helpful. If only all technical books could be written this well. And is that the most aesthetically pleasing cover you've ever seen or what?

This book presents the core of XML in an organized, no-nonsense fashion. If you need to get up to speed quickly on XML this book is a great investment (and quite inexpensive too).

I used this in conjunction with an Infusion class I took and what a great book! fantastic job!

The book is useful even if you have programming experience in other languages. It explains important concepts (list, cells, symbols, variables etc) better than many other programming books do.

Highly recommended!

This is a great book for those wanting to learn Lisp.
In the first part of the book, when describing functions, the author stays away from Lisp and any real programming notation, using diagrams to show some of the fundamental concepts -- which are explained in such a clear way that everything become so obvious! Later he switches to Lisp, telling you it's a "different notation for the same ideas".
The text is always clear, short and right to the point.

An excellent book for beginners. If you are a newbie and you want to buy only one Lisp book, this is it! Highly recommended.

We had a LISP course (prerequisite for AI) in the university, and our teacher used this book. I immediately fell in love with the language! This book is written in a fun way, that really makes sense. It was only from this book that I mastered the art of recursion (the cat in the hat comes back? the dragon stories?). Everything was fun about this book, you really have the sense that it was made with extreme passion and dedication; something that usually doesn't apply to programming books.

This is an excellent tutorial. A good place to start before reading any of Graham's books.

Although the book is now out of print, you can use the link below to download the pdf at no expense.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/

A clearly written book, which employs a simple language. Another beauty of the book is that all loose ends are tied up. As sentences unfold one will realize why a particular phrase was used earlier and so on. That makes a big difference for an engineering text book.

It is the best book that I know for fundamentals. Hence, it will be useful for years to come.

Must have for all embedded systems people.

Helped me in my undergrad (older version). Helped me when I gave subject GRE recently. Covered Pipelining superscalar, out-of-order execution processors, caching and secondary storage, combinational and sequential ckt review etc real well. No computer architecture book covered them all so clearly, and in one book.

This was the assigned text for my junior year computer engineering course on computer organization. I loved it. The explanations are clear, progress logically, and are clearly presented. I find myself picking it up from time to time, both to read the more advanced chapters out of personal interest and to look up details needed in more advanced coursework.

After reading this book do not believe you'll know everyting about computing , but you'll know more than others do.

I had a chance to recommend this to a colleague just last week. It is easily twice the price of the "competing" books on the market, but you get what you pay for. With this book plus (perhaps) a hands-on course in the microprocessor laboratory--interfacing various logic families to output devices, e.g., or whipping up a robot of limited capabilities--the student gains the ultimate understanding of what makes computer systems "tick," from the loftiest levels of software, through the details of instruction set implementation (microprogrammed control, prefetching, cycle-stealing DMA transfers) and even the detailed digital logic circuits that underlie the CPU.

I dare say the student who aces this course is all but prepared to build a simplistic CPU on his own--"simplistic" because, though the concepts can be understood quite completely, it's an intricate challenge. Notably, the book has kept pace with the times: while the PDP-11 instruction set is didactically wonderful--clear and easy and even sporting reasonable opcode mnemonics--you don't see lots of PDP or LSI (or, for that matter, VAX) minis floating around nowadays. So, HV&Z moved on to the 68000, the Power PC, perhaps even the Pentium in the latest (of five or six) editions. (Good move, gentlemen: you've actually done your homework rather than just changing "happy" to "glad" and reprinting with a new version number!)

I used this book as a junior, but (a) I went to Cooper Union, which operates at an extremely high intellectual level [let's put it this way: I took a number of graduate-level computer science electives--compilers, OS, etc.--taught by Bell Labs MTSs as a junior and senior; and some "doctoral" courses that I took at Case were--honest Injun--watered-down versions of similar courses I had taken at Cooper], and (b) I graduated more than twenty years ago, and requirements always creep downward: a few credits fewer, a few tangential courses eliminated, perhaps one fewer humanities elective necessary to matriculate, etc. By 2006 standards, I would reluctantly have to reclassify HV&Z as a postgraduate text.

(A little puzzle for the reader: we had to build--from NAND gates--a microcomputer featuring two three-bit registers, and my squad was the only one that implemented an "exchange registers" function that required only one cycle and used no auxiliary storage registers. How did we do it? Tick ... tick ... tick ... time's up! The circuitry compared corresponding bits from both registers. If they matched, it did nothing; if they differed, it flipped both! So, there was no literal "exchange" operation: rather, each was simultaneously reset to the value of the other.)