Programming Books

I am an instructor for a 3D Game Content course and Game Art is one of our books. The industry art pipeline and procedures are very well laid-out in this book. Would love a second edition covering the next gen techniques that will be surfacing.

Great book that covers modeling techniques for game companies, uv layout's , future Tech Compontents such as Normal Maps, etc. A well good purchase for anyone who wants to know how it's done or to improve there knowledge.

I have read this book and find it extremely informative. The book is written with the readers perspective in mind. It gives beautiful insight into the industry and the dynamics of it. It also has great walk-throughs with media on a CD that you can use as part of the "practical" experience.

Good Job!

People don't think alike. The person who can handle the programming complexity of doing a graphics engine is often not the person who is capable of designing the characters, scenery, and equipment needed for the rest of the game. In this area, the digital artist comes into his/her own. Note this says digital artist. This requires two separate skills, one is the ability to create vizualize what art is needed, the other is to use a computer rather than some other media to generate the desired image.

The game design business represents an opportunity for the digital artist to obtain jobs with real companies that are relatively well paying. This book gives an artist's perspective into the game industry. It talks about the industry, the work, and gives insight on how to get a job. But mostly it talks about what kind of art is needed for gaming. It shows the detail that is necessary to produce a visually pleasing game.

The CD included with the book includes numerous illustrations and files from Maya and ds max. It also includes a trial version of Rt/Shader software. The book presumes that you have a workingknowledge of at least one major 3D program (3ds max or Maya) and Photoshop.

This is a splendid book that is positioned to take an aspiring digital artist and carry him to the next level -- employment doing a job well beyond flipping burgers.

I was an art director in the video game industry for a number of years and one of the most frustrating aspects was interviewing artists that wanted to be part of the industry but did not know how to prepare themselves. This book addresses that problem in a thoughtful and comprehensive way.

For any aspiring artist that wants to be in the video game industry, this is the book. The examples and explanations are clear and easy to follow. Using this book, you would be able to prepare a very capable portfolio.

Buy it, read it, and put the knowledge to use.

I like this book so much, I've purchased it 3 times! (My first copy was "borrowed" by one of my designer/producers, my second copy was left at Ubisoft SF, and this is my 3rd copy for myself.)

Great mixture of theories, old-school practices, and new-school techniques.

Although I personally disagree with some parts of what this book teaches, it this game design book is one of the most comprehensive I've seen. Well-recommended.

This might be a good book for teachers looking for material in their classes gamedesign or gamedevelopment. It may also be a good book for selfstudy, if you have the discipline to do the exercises. You need to have played a lot of the classic videogames though, otherwise you might not be able to do the exercises, which are mostly about thinking about gamedesigns and making little designs or design alterations on existing games.

Few people realize just how big a business digital gaming has become. Think of it this way: It's bigger than the domestic box office of the film industry. The amount of time spent playing games by young people now exceeds everything but television in time spent on entertainment. The main factor driving the development of the new extremely powerful computers is gaming, slower machines are capable of handling almost all office tasks.

The authors of this book have a great deal of experience in both designing games and teaching how to design games. This has given them an understanding of how beginning designers grasp the structured elements of games, common traps they fall into, and certain developmental exercises that help the student learn to make better games.

Note that this is not a programming manual, nor is it a graphics design manual. It is on game design. What are the characteristics that make a game, how can you prototype and play test the game without a horrendous programming expense, and finally some input on the game industry and how to decide on how you might like to be employeed in that industry.

I consider this an excellent book on game design. As an amatuer board game and basic computer game designer, I found a lot of the material extremely useful in the *process* of coming up with a game from start to finish.

The chapter on prototyping did a great job in showing how to go ahead and create a prototype from a game idea, while keeping it simple and concentrating on the "core gameplay mechanism."

The chapter on "Playtesting" and "Functionality, Completeness, and Balance" builds on the prototype chapter by emphasizing the iterative nature of design where one go aheads and evaluates, tries new things, identify problems and keep evolving.

The next chapter following is maybe the most important chapter that discusses whether you game is fun, goes in to some theory of what makes a game fun, and relates various techniques of improving player's choices so as to make the game fun.

This is a great book that gives you the necessary tools to go ahead and be able to at the very least create a viable prototype of a game that is possibly fun and playable.

Let me join the chorus here, this is a really well written book. The focus on free and current software tools (Stanti's Editor especially) makes following along easy. It may be a testament to the ease of use when it comes to python in general (just beware your use of the tab key!), but I had no problems getting the results described and learned buckets as a result.

If you're new to game programming (or even programming in general) Andy Harris' book is certainly a great place to start. I am by no means an "expert" in the programming field, in fact, I only picked up programming again for the first time in about 10 years. Python is a very powerful, user-friendly environment to program in and coupled with what you'll learn in this book, you have the tools and potential to become almost an expert in no time. Game programming is a great place to start if you're looking to pick up programming in general.

"Game Programming: The L Line" is very excellently and comprehensively written. In my opinion, Harris has made a very useful guide to game programming and I hope you enjoy this book as much as I have!

Andy Harris did a great job on this book. I sponsor a computer programming club for high school students and this book is the best at getting to actual game creation. The first three chapters go over basics of programming, but then graphics and pygame are used early and well.

This book is a bargain at 570 truly helpful pages.

For someone who has never coded a game before, and who perhaps is also new to the entire field of programming, this can be daunting. Commercial games are usually coded in C++. Which is quite an intricate language, especially for the neophyte. Harris furnishes a plausible alternative, where the scripting language Python is used to teach an introductory course in game programming.

You do need some earlier exposure to Python. Though if you still feel awkward in it, you can use this book for the extra reason of gaining experience in Python. Harris explains that there is an open source Python gaming site, that offers the eponymous pygame. You download and install this on your machine. It gives a simple, very bare bones Integrated Development Environment for game coding. If you have used more general purpose IDEs, like Microsoft's Visual Studio, then you can certainly learn pygame. It is much smaller.

Within pygame, you can code small games. Yes, small. But the pedagogy is important. The games elucidated in the text have properties common to many, much larger games. As in how to write event driven code, for example. Or drawing geometric figures on the screen. And using sprites.

The flavour of the games is like those games of the early 80s. Or the current games for cellphones.

Don't judge this book by it's cover! For some reason,
this book is part of a series of Wiley books, and they
all have the same cover.

This is a book about learning how to program computer
games using the Python programming language and the
PyGame package. PyGame is a Python wrapper around the
SDL library. This book offers step-by-step tutorials
that introduce game programming with complete Python
programs. All the programs work on several platforms:
MS-Windows, Mac, and GNU/Linux. Chapters 1-3 introduce
the Python programming language. Starting with Chapter
4, you begin to learn about graphics programming. In
Chapter 6 the programs begin to use OOP/classes. Then,
in Chapter 7, you begin to learn how to make 2D games
with sprites, sound FX, and keyboard and mouse control.
Game programming is a fun way to learn how to program
a computer, and Python with PyGame makes it relatively
easy as well.

This book has detailed information on creating graphics
and sounds for your games, using free, open source
third-party tools that are available on all platforms.
The GIMP is used for graphics, and Audacirty is used
for sounds. So unlike many other game programming books
which require expensive third-party programs in order
to make games, ALL the programs in this book are free.

The book has an easy-going, conversational style of writing
that makes it seem that the author is looking over your
shoulder, helping you to learn game programming. I'm really
glad I bought this book. It is worth many times its cover
price considering the amount of information it contains.

Things I like about this book:
1. Easy to read and understand with step-by-step tutorials.
2. Helpful reference tables throughout the book.
3. Complete example game programs.
4. All the third-party programs required are free and open.
5. Source code and extra appendices available for download.

Happy Programming!

I got this book in time and in perfect condition. Prompt delivery!!!

Nelder and Wedderburn wrote the seminal paper on generalized linear models in the 1970s. Since then John Nelder has pioneered the research and software development of the methods. This is the first of several excellent texts on generalized linear models. It illustrates how through the use of a link function many classical statistical models can be unified into one general form of model. This unification is helpful both theoretically and computationally. Various applications are presented in a clear manner.

Nelder and Wedderburn wrote the seminal paper on generalized linear models in the 1970s. Since then John Nelder has pioneered the research and software development of the methods. This is the first of several excellent texts on generalized linear models. It illustrates how through the use of a link function many classical statistical models can be unified into one general form of model. This unification is helpful both theoretically and computationally. Various applications are presented in a clear manner.

This is an important book. It is a mature, deep introduction to generalized linear models.

General linear models extend multiple linear models to include cases in which the distribution of the dependent variable is part of the exponential family and the expected value of the dependent variable is a function of the linear predictor. Besides the normal (Gaussian) distribution, the binomial distribution, the Poisson distribution and the Gamma distribution, are just some of the exponential family members most frequently encountered in the scientific literature. Using appropriate functions to join the dependent variable to the linear predictor many classic models of applied statistics are included in the broad frame of generalized linear models: "logistic regression", log-linear models, Cox's proportional hazards models are just some of them.

Further extensions to the "base" family of generalized linear models, such as those based on the use of quasi-likelihood functions, and models in which both the expected value and the dispersion are function of a linear predictor, are well presented in the book.

Examples, and exercises, introduce many non-banal, useful, designs.

There are some minor drawbacks. Some more advanced topics might have been introduced more smoothly (i.e. conditional likelihood). Some other topics are better understood when you are already familiar with the specific object of study (i.e. Cox's proportional hazards models as a generalized linear model). The book does not provide software examples, nor is it related with any specific statistical package. However, the maturity of the reader to whom the book is addressed should be so high that translating the majority of the examples presented in the book in the "language" of a familiar statistical package should not be a problem.

The first edition is already a well-known text and reference, this expanded version is even better. Very comprehensive and very helpful.

Graphic Design Portfolio Builder is a good supplemental book for designers and beginning students. I wrote supplemental because this book does not comprehensively cover the features of Photoshop and Illustrator software (and it wasn't suppose to) but to help beginners you get familiar with the software and up and running.

The book is very colorful, well laid out and full of useful information. What is comphrehensive is that it covers all aspects of what designers or artists would face and be challenged at work or in classrooms. Each lesson is written by an professional designers and artists with years of experience and I highly enjoyed reading the chapters so far.

The projects in the book are fairly challenging and somewhat time consuming which is good since it makes you explore the software to its full potential if you're feeling ambious.

For inspirations, I recommend you checkout other students work in the book or on their website. It really challenges you to come up with your best work and experiment with different ideas and creative concepts.

PROS:
Easy reading... lots of hands on pratice, which is also worded in an easy to understand language... Comes with a FREE membership to basically a webgroup website, but if you choose to take advantage of the service, the very authors of the book will critique and help you develop your projects, VERY HELPFUL/VERY COOL

CONS:
You have to have photoshop and illustrator in order to take advantage of this product

This book was so very helpful in aiding my desire to build a portfolio! It helped me learn more about Photoshop and Illustrator - plus gave me assignments that were reviewed and critiqued by a very helpful and polite instructor. This is more than just a book it is a full class at a book rate! I would recommend it to anyone looking for this type of work or just to improve what they already know.

[...] The company is centered around on line training in the general area of graphics design. ==This book is designed to go with one of their courses. The goal of this course is to help you create a portfolio of your work. It has a series of projects where you download various components of a project, then you do the project and post your results back on-line. A Sessions instructor will then give you a short critique of your work so you will have specific person to person contact that lets you know how you are progressing. This is kind of like working as a designer and having the client look at what you've done.

As you might well guess from the sub-title, these projects are oriented to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. This is not exactly a beginners course in these software package. You should have at least some beginning understanding of how to use these packages. The concentration hers is on improving your design skills, not on the details of the software.

Having taught graphic design for the last 13years, I am always looking for material to use as a reference or even text in my classes. This book gives many ideas on projects that students can use to create a quality looking portfolio for that first job interview. Even though I am constantly encouraging my students to go beyond the simple text assignment, many do not. This book my just give them that spark to do just that.

This book is a wonderful book for beginning hibernate. It has the right balance of theory and practice, and it is always right to the point and concise. I used it to get up to speed on hibernate 3 after not touching hibernate for two and a half years, and it was exactly what I needed. The paper quality is pretty bad, like some others have noted. However, I have read through about 70% of it (the only 70% I am going to read) and the paper/binding has shown no sign of deterioration, so do not let that keep you from reading it.

'Harnessing Hibernate' is a great resource for learning more about and how to use the Hibernate technology to map Java code to relational databases and vice versa. In today's programming world you want to be able to create object that directly map to database tables and fields. Not only does this allow for persistence and good scalability, it hides the SQL stuff that can otherwise make for difficult programming and puts them into familiar classes instead. Before this book there really wasn't great resources out on the market for learning about this technology but that is no longer the case. With 350+ pages spread over 14 chapters, good writing and separation of content this is a must have for all seasoned Java database and Hibernate developers.

***** RECOMMENDED

While I was at work one day, I decided to write the persistence layer of an application that my team was working on. I had minimal experience with Hibernate because I had worked on another project where a coworker implemented the persistence layer and used Hibernate. I got to see a bit of the magic that Hibernate provides, and I thought it would be excellent for my current project. My problem was that I did not really know how to set everything up.

I searched on Amazon for books about Hibernate, and I wanted to make sure I bought one that was fairly current so that I could see how to use it with the latest technologies. I came upon Harnessing Hibernate which is only a few months old. Even though there were only two reviews, after reading them, I decided to take a chance on this book. Wow, these reviewers were exactly right!

The authors take you through a music cataloging project. Their progression through the concepts is nothing short of amazing. They seem to give the perfect amount of detail and explanation at each step, and then you begin to form questions in your mind. They seem to anticipate them, because these questions always seem to be answered in the next section.

I should inform you that I often dislike reading books on computer technologies. I find that most authors tend to make the books as dry as possible, going on and on, ad nauseam, about every detail and idiosyncrasy of the topic. The authors of Harnessing Hibernate, however, make the book completely enjoyable to read. Their style is conversational, and they do not try to talk over anyone's head. They give you plenty of useful information that you can use immediately, and inform you of other sources to investigate if you want more information on a particular aspect of the material.

Anyway, if you want to learn Hibernate in a clear and concise manner, then you will not be disappointed if you buy this book. It will keep you reading, and you won't fall asleep while doing so. And hey, you'll understand all of the material and you will even learn a lot about Hibernate! I do not give complements lightly, but this is indeed a perfect book.

I just got this book in the mail last week, as it was just recently released. From reaing it, I can tell you that it carries on the tradition of high quality editing and content that we expect from O'Riely books.

There has been a real lack of good, up to date, READABLE books about Hibernate on the market. You only have to scan amazon to see some of the horrible reviews many books have received. But this book is excellent, and I can assure you that many five star reviews will follow this one.

Harnessing Hibernate is a fine book, which uses the most efficient ways to achieve its goal. Though focusing on Hibernate, the book enlists the usage of various frameworks such as Spring Framework, Stripes and Maven.


Part I: Hibernate in a hurry: The core

Build:
The book starts with how you should build which used to be a dread. The authors choose to use Ant - Maven task, which is cool. I use Maven directly, but that's beside the point. Both approaches are better than finding the JARs on the web.

Database:
HSQLDB is what the book recommends and for some reason it makes sense . It really is the best way to go. I am not suggesting to format your Oracle DB server and install HSQLDB; but I am suggesting you stay focused and worry about the big DB later; the book goes back to a larger DB; so don't worry too much right now.

The Project Hierarchy:
This one, I must admit, I do not care for; I think Maven directory structure is better and one should not have to create this manually, but that's probably personal. This is later reviewed in Chapter 12: Maven in More Depth.

Core hibernate:
The book doesn't mess around too much. It explains how to configure hibernate and before long you find your hands in hibernate mapping. From chapter 2 through chapter 9 you'll find yourself in the core of Hibernate: mapping, hibernate configuration, persistent objects (creating and finding), collections and associations, richer associations, custom value types, annotations, criteria queries and a look at HQL.

Part II: Playing nice with others: beyond the core

MySQL - a nice short intro to MySQL is shown.

Hibernate and Eclipse - yes, this is in here too (and up to date Eclipse v3.3). And just in time for you to get ready for a later chapter, Spring and Hibernate, which is the way J2EE is going anyway (lightweight).

Maven in more depth - Maven does not have many books out there and this is a very nice in depth explanation. If you think you've gotten short changed, take a look at Java Power Tools (you'll love that book too). The chapter is enough to get you moving with Maven, and if your Maven experience is anything like mine, you'll never go back to Ant.

Hibernate and Spring - this book could not have gotten any better than this. Spring, is like a dream. Rod Johnson, Colin Sampaleanu and team have done it well. Unlike the other monolithic approach, Spring takes advantage of already existing frameworks and offers this invisible layer to allow you to focus on what's important; your business code... and, of course, the book delivers. It shows you how Spring simplifies Hibernate development. If you're new to layered development a la separation of concerns (SoC) the book first introduces you to the DAO pattern. It then continues with the reason so many of us like the Spring framework: HibernateDAOSupport and the HibernateTemplate. Although I prefer to use the HibernateTemplate directly and avoid loosing my one chance at inheritance, I agree with the book examples. The authors are tying to help you understand what kind of support Spring offers.

Stripes with Spring and Hibernate - Now, the book could just end here and be done with it, but no, it continues with the web app. I mean, wow. The book ends with style. It uses Tomcat - and I think it does it to prove a point. You don't need a fancy big server to get J2EE running these days. Stripes is a cool project to work with and I thank the authors for introducing me to a framework I was clueless about.

This book is truly amazing. If you're looking for an in-depth approach to Hibernate take a look at Java Persistence with Hibernate. If, however, you're an impatient developer this is the book for you. I think it offers just enough in-depth theory and it keeps you awake with frequent easy to understand code.

James Elliott, Timothy M. O'Brien and Ryan Fowler; I thank you all for writing this book.

/.Will

Before reading Roger's book I was pretty sure I had a solid understanding of Honeypots, how they work, how they should be deployed, etc. I can honestly say that I still learned a lot from this book. Recommended for beginner to advanced user. The examples are great and very specific. Running a honeypot in a windows environment definately benefits many of my clients because they are unsure how to properly secure a *nix machine. This book showed me step-by-step how to set-up a fully functional Windows Honeypot that anyone can administer. Thanks for the great info Mr. Grimes, can't wait to read the next book.

I have been recently doing research on honeypots/nets and having read through Know Your Enemy(honeynet project) and Tracking Hackers(Lance Spitzner). Both were full of great information but this book really lays out the what it takes to have a succeful honeypot and gives step by step instructions on how to set up a few different types. Its easy to read for a beginner, and easy to follow. It's also the only good guide to honeypots on the Windows side, and as a bonus all of the tools and information are current, as it was published this year(2005).

Honeypots are an exciting technology with tremendous potential for the security community. However, one of their limitations has been they have primarily been Unix based. Roger does an outstanding job of addressing this issue, bringing them into the Windows community.

Review by Lou Vega of the Greater Charleston .NET User Group

This book provides immediate and useful information whether you have previous experience with Honeypots or hadn't even heard of one until you picked up the book. I would recommend this book to anyone who has ever been interested in network and systems security as it pertains to a Microsoft Windows environment, especially in light of the fact that most previous books and articles with information about Honeypots were geared toward *nix systems.

Those who have no previous experience with Honeypots and would like a background lesson can jump right into Chapters 1 and 2 which should give them a fair basic understanding of what's involved. Those persons who want to get right to work...start browsing between chapters 3 and 8 for hands on information including screenshots and installation/configuration information. Later chapters cover more advanced information concerning the monitoring and analysis of the traffic captured using your Honeypot.

The author doesn't leave you stranded with just setting up a Honeypot either. The chapters on Network Analysis, Honeypot Monitoring and alerting, and Honeypot data analysis give you a chance to begin to make real use of the Honeypot and the data gathered while using it. The walkthroughs for setting these analysis and monitoring tools seem easy enough and the author makes good use of available open source tools out there for those who don't have the budget for some of the commercial applications available.

An added bonus for any networking security person is the wealth of information concerning how to harden a Windows Server, common ports used in malware and numerous configuration demonstrations make this a handy book to keep as a general security reference.

This book will make a fine addition to any IT professional's reference collection.

Grimes has a valid gripe. Honeypots have risen to prominence as an aggressive anti-cracker method. So that, for example, the well known Honeynet Project has been running for several years, with good results. But the bulk of these honeypot efforts has been in unix machines. If you run a network of Microsoft boxes, there is a dearth of comprehensive documentation, until this book came along.

It is written for the Microsoft sysadmin who wants to establish a honeypot that is state of the art. This could be one or more machines on her network. Grimes gives detailed instructions. Most importantly, for the honeyd program. Two chapters are devoted to its installation and running.

But even aside from whether you end up running a honeypot, the book has value. It explains network traffic analysis and various tools that aid in this, such as Snort or Ethereal. With or without a honeypot, you'll need more than a passing acquaintance with traffic analysis, and the book can aid in this.

I don't even have an iMac yet. I purchased this book to learn more about them and I did. It answered all of my questions completely and opened my eyes to a number of abilities the iMac has that I hadn't realized.

I have had my Indigo iMac for 1 1/2 years now. I bought
several beginner books, being a computer 'newbie'.
This book is so fantastic (it's big), but even if you don't
have time to read it cover-to-cover, you can jump into
any section you want to learn about, and you will never
feel frustrated learning to use the computer. It is fantastic,
everything concise, clear, and above all the MOST
comprehensive iMac manual I have found! A must have,
just amazing. It's got it all!

This book goes into great detail about both the iMac hardware and the software programs included with it. It is very well written, with easy-to-follow instructions and explanations as well as lots of illustrations and screen shots. The index is comprehensive and helpful. This book covers all iMac models up to the most current iMac DV, and has very useful explanations of and instructions for using System 9. It also functions as a very good manual for AppleWorks and other software. I bought this book for my 73-year-old father, who has never used a computer before, and I recommend it for everyone who is buying an iMac for the first time.

I bought this book 2 days after purchasing my IMac, and boy was it helpful! It takes you through all the steps you need to REALLY get your machine up and running! This is a must have for people who are new to the Mac and work on PCs mostly.

Just as the title says this book provides you with instructions on how to do virtually everything with your iMac (hey, somebody can probably think of a useful iMac job it does'nt address). "Todd" starts off with setup and goes from there, even presenting options in peripherals (external drives), and software (utilities). This book is basic enough to be understood by a new iMac user and goes far enough to probably help a "techie". I initially bought this book to help me get to know the machine before it was delivered--now I keep my copy next to my iMac for reference.

I read this book several years ago when I first got in to web design. This book was so easy to follow and clear to understand that it only took me a few days of reading before I was able to build my first web site. While this book is a little old by technology standards, the information it has about HTML is still valid and current.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning HTML.

A good primer on HTML and web publishing in general, if you don't want to get too deep. The tags are laid out clearly, and the methods to achieve certain looks or feels are plainly illustrated, but the book doesn't teach that much theory, so you are generally stuck with the methods they teach. Some of the methods are somewhat non-standard, which worries me, but as a whole the book is sound and easy to read. I would recommend _HTML 4 for the Worldwide Web_, by Elizabeth Castro, instead. It is very clear and basic, but it covers more of the theory so you can be a more powerful designer.

This book is so wonderful! I thought the "For Dummies" series would be easy enough, but I've found those types of books often have excess information I really don't care about. I will be taking a class in a few weeks that requires knowledge of HTML, so I needed to learn it easily, and quickly. I'm the type of individual who learns best in bulleted or outlined lists and HTML In An Instant is laid out just this way.

The book is setup perfectly and takes you from the basic concepts HTML structure, all the way up to Java applications. It's not too big and is consistently formatted throughout.

I had previously purchased the Visual Quickstart series and quickly found out these are not so "quick." Frustrated, I finally just sat down in a Borders and pulled out several HTML books and selected this one. I can't rave about it more....

This book is good well designed for someone who has not time to cut through a text book just to find a simple way of coding one thing in HTML. The pictures are clear and precise. You can have a website or any other HTML document up and working before you have to learn the theory behind it. Even for experts a quick reference can help. This book is also the basics behind all the extended languages. Some people use the skills learned in this book just to make their Discussion Boards more colorful and add the dimension of pictures and sound.
Table of Contents:
1. The internet
2. Introduction to Creating Web Pages
3. Getting Started (display Web page in Web Browser)
4. Change Appearance of Text
5. Add Images
6. Work with Images
7. Create Links
8. Create Tables
9. Add Sounds and Videos
10. Create Forms
11. Create Frames
12. Advanced Web Pages (JavaScript and Java Applets)
13. Set up Style Sheets
14. Using Style Sheets
15. Publish Web Pages
16. Summary of HTML Tags

There are thicker books out there but none so graphic.

It is exactly what I was looking for. I have VB experience but am new to HTML. The whole book is examples of code with screen shots of how a web page would appear. It even goes into creating classes, style sheets, and adding Javescript. It is a good reference for someone with experience (I have had developers borrow mine) and simplistic enough for a beginner. I definatly recommend it.

This is THE very best book on Linux Kernel in general. Without refering any piece of kernel code, it explains very neatly not only the Linux kernel architecture in detail but also the most advanced features of IA64 CPU giving simple examples. This book will definitely move you one step forward to face the challenges in dealing with Linux kernel.

This is a terrific text, that simultaneously throws light on the arcane of the IA64 architecture and the Linux kernel. I just wish this book had been available when I started messing around with low-level IA64 stuff.

In one word - EXCELLENT!

I bought this book to fulfill my desire of knowing how an OS works under the hood. I am happy to say this book served the purpose extremely well. In addition, now I better understand all the necessary details of IA-64 architecture. This book not only answers 'how is it done' but also gives a precise 'why' to every 'how'.

Right from the print quality to the content everything is just wonderful. I still enjoy repeatedly reading the Virtual Memory chapter.

This book should certainly be useful to anyone interested in understanding how modern CPUs function. More importantly it will help you gain insight on modern operating system design and implementation along with the finer points of why a particular function is implemented in a certain way.

In all a in-depth, well written book which is also well-built! You should not find anything to complain about it.

My search for a good book on linux internals ended with this book. What makes this book different from the other linux internals is the fact that unlike other books, this book does not dump the kernel code as is. Instead it gives a very good description about various subsystems and design criteria which helps one understand the concept very easily.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about linux/ia64 kernel.

Not only it this a fine book, the book mentions the website: www.lia64.org/book which has a book search feature. This is sooo much more powerful than a printed index. I wish ALL books had a site like this so they can be electronically searched!