Programming Books

This is just a excellent overrview of Machinima - way above the norm for Dummies books. The depth and breath is very impressive.

I'm pretty much a beginner to this topic, and I've found this is precisely the book you need to get if you want to learn how to make movies on your PC... I've found answers to every question I've ever had without all the jargon (and understandable definitions of jargon I've heard). It even gives advice on getting organized and how to go about creating a story... and with the included DVD (which has a little machinima program called "Moviestorm"), you can get started right away, and for free. Time for creative fun!

Highly recommended!

This book is the perfect guide for anyone interested in making films. Not only does it reveal the world of machinima, but the authors have provided a very informative and useful guide to the world of filmmaking. This could very easily be the classroom for students who want to explore film production as well as open up the new possibilities of film to the seasoned pro.

Machinima for Dummies is simple to understand, entertaining and if you only want to get one book on Machinima - this is the one.

Somebody gave this book two stars because he thought it lacked coverage of Second Life. Oops, he was wrong. Even if he was right it's a stupid thing to attack the book about. So here's another uninformed opinion to balance out his.

Finally! A book discussing the many aspects of Machinima for a "dummy" like me! ;) I've been looking all over the corners of the web for advice and tips for filming, editing, and creating Machinima, but now I can just look at this book for easy reference. The book kept me pretty interested throughout, and I felt that the writers really worked hard. (I read their blog..) :)

The book details the aspects of Machinima in a variety of games; some I never even heard of before! There are enough tips, hints, and advice in this book to allow any person, beginner or novice, to feel confident enough to enter the world of Machinima. Oh, and the attached DVD was an incredible bonus! I never even heard of "Moviestorm", but it came free (yes, FREE) with the book. This is one book that any "Machinimaker" needs, no matter your skill level! :)

I liked the way book is set up, explaining questions as you move along. But I couldn't help but stop and wonder what the author was trying to convey at several points in the book. The difficulty wasn't in the technical info., as much as the grammar and sentencing used in explaining. I may be just spoiled on Alan Carter's and Dave Kinnaman's writing style. -J.S.

this book contains many material, word by word, same as the book "MCSE TestPrep TCP/IP" by Emmett Dulaney(ISBN1-56025-843-6). I don't know which one copies which one. This book published by NewRider which has the almost identical WEB page as QUE the other publisher.

This book is layed out unlike any book I have ever seen. They wrote the book by asking questions such as what you would get in the exam, then use the body of the material as the explaination. I was amazed at how quickly I learned IP and how easy it was to pass the exam.

I was very impressed with this book. It was a pleasent suprise to find out that some of their questions were the same as on the exam. I read two other books, and they didn't even come close to preparing me for the exam. I would not recommend this book for beginners in TCP/IP.

I passed the TCP/IP exam with a 900 and this book really helped me. It has tons of questions, some of which you will see on the exam, and two full length practice exams at the end of the book. All the questions have detailed explainations. Answering all of these questions really help solidify what you have learned. Spend the 16 bucks!

Unlike many other microprocessor books which mainly focus on programming, this book provides practical and detail knowledge on hardware interfacing. These including design of address decoder and mechanical characteristic of microprocessor buses.

For student or fresh engineer who want to get the real thing works, this is the book.

This is especially handy as the 3rd edition has a cd-rom with a cross-compiler!

This book is suitable for a semester course in microprocessor systems. It has good coverage of hardware and software topics. I use it in a senior/master's course which studies the 68000 and SPARC as comparative CISC/RISC architectures. The book comes with a CDROM including a PC-based 68000 simulator for readers who do not have access to real 68000 hardware.

This book makes all things clear about designing systems controlled by microprocessors and uses the Motorola 68000 family of microprocessors as an example. It is full of clear examples and many exercises for the student, and shows details of both the hardware and programming aspects of microprocessor system design, making it ideal for engineers who are interested in the subject. The book starts with an overview of the microcomputer in general, and shows how the microprocessor and its accessories control the larger microcomputing device. Next, the author introduces the reader specifically to the Motorola 68000 family of microprocessors and their respective architectures and features.

Next the author tackles an art that is usually passed down by word of mouth from master to apprentice - how to program a microprocessor and its peripheral devices using the C programming language as well as assembly language. This is followed by chapters on memories, exception handling versus interrupts, and coprocessors and caches.

The next few chapters are on the external devices that are usually a necessity for a microprocessor controlled system - parallel and serial ports, external timer devices, special devices to control IEEE-488 buses, and special buses such as the VMEbus and Nubus. Actual existing peripheral devices are used in the examples. There are plenty of circuit diagrams and code snippets in both assembly language and C to show how the various pieces of a microcomputer are assembled to make a working system.

Although today RISC designs based on "microprocessor cores" power the vast majority of mass-produced computing devices, the approach to creating the components of these core-based microcomputers is basically the same as it was in the days when we used to wire-wrap a 10MHz 68000 system together. Thus, learning the art of microprocessor system design is something any engineer interested in digital design should know. This book is an excellent source for learning that art. The following is the table of contents:

1. THE MICROCOMPUTER
Microprocessor Systems
Examples of Microprocessor Systems

2. PROGRAMMING THE 68000 FAMILY
Assembly Language Programming and the 68000
Programmer''s Model of the 68000
Addressing Modes of the 68000
An Introduction to the 68000 Family Instruction Set
Program Control and the 68000
Miscellaneous Instructions
Subroutines and the 68000
Introduction to the 68020's Architecture
Speed and Performance of Microprocessors
Structured Programming and Pseudocode (PDL)

3. ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE AND C
Parameter Passing
The Stack and Local Variables
C and the 68000
Summary of C''s Syntax

4. THE 68000 CPU HARDWARE MODEL
68000 Interface
Timing Diagram
Dealing with Timing Problems
Minimal Configuration Using the 68000
The 68020 & 68030 Memory Interface
Worked Examples

5. MEMORIES IN MICROCOMPUTER SYSTEMS
Address Decoding Strategies
Designing Address Decoders
Designing Static Memory Systems
Designing Dynamic Memory Systems
Worked Examples

6. EXCEPTION HANDLING AND THE 68000
Interrupts
Privileged States and the 68000
Exception Processing
Exceptions Implemented by the 68000
Interrupts and Real-Time Processing
The Reset and the Bus Error
Exception Processing and the 68010 and 68020

7. THE 68000 FAMILY IN LARGER SYSTEMS
Error Detection and Correction in Memories
Memory Management and Microprocessors
Cache Memories
Coprocessor
Introduction to the 68040 Microprocessor
The 68060

8. THE MICROPROCESSOR INTERFACE
Introduction to Microprocessor Interfaces
Direct Memory Access
The 68230 Parallel Interface/Timer
The IEEE 488 Bus

9. THE SERIAL INPUT/OUTPUT INTERFACE
Asynchronous Serial Data Transmission
Asynchronous Communications Interface Adapter (ACIA)
The 68681 DUART
Synchronous Serial Data Transmission
Serial Interface Standards

10. MICROCOMPUTER BUSES
Mechanical Layer
Electrical Characteristics of Buses
VMEbus
NuBus

11. DESIGNING A MICROCOMPUTER SYSTEM
Designing for Reliability and Testability
Design Examples Using the 68000
Design Example Using the 68030 Monitors
APPENDIX
SUMMARY OF THE 68000 INSTRUCTOR SET
ABOUT THE CD-ROM

This book presents an excellent intro to the design of microprocessor systems using the very powerful and easy-to-learn Motorola 68000 family. It concentrates on hardware design/interfacing, programming,timing issues, memory mapping and address decoding, serial I/O and peripherals. Covers all the important issues. The information is of high quality and very well written. The reader should have a knowledge of binary/hex number systems and basic digital design as prerequisites. Comes with cd-rom containing software tools. I recommend this book highly.

This book is certainly useful for any students attempting a project on ASP.NET coz it provides many examples. It's very handy when I used it for my teaching too.

I'm experienced in HTML, SQL, VBScript, VBA, etc. but I've never really had to create something with a 'real' user interface. I've done lots of quick and dirty data fixes when something bad would happen with payroll or billing or whatever. I put up a personal webpage with pics of my friends and family, yada, yada, yada.... Anyways this book helped me take all that disparate knowledge and apply it to a real user interface. The book has lots of examples and Web Matrix is a good place for a beginner to start, Visual Studio is overwhelming.

The hardest part of all is deploying your website. The author explains how to host your own website which I was not even going to try to attempt but it is helpful to understand the process. He gives a brief overview of deploying to a remote server which is all anyone could ever do, each hosting service is different. Choose your service carefully, ask friends, co-workers, people who have already done it. Not all hosting services are equal. Turns out the service I was using that claimed to support asp.net only sort of did. Lot's of sweat and tears to finally get them to tell me that. Soooo get this book, do the examples and then for practice use aspSpider.net to deploy your site. It's free for people like me who just need the practice. They have a forum that was very helpful to me.

I rarely give reviews to books (much less five-star reviews), namely because I am not easily impressed. THIS book is one of those rare gems - especially in the computer industry - that appears to have been well-written and proof-read.

I have actually walked through this book, followed the instructions, and produced the desired result. I have learned a great deal in doing so, and I don't feel like the author assumed too little (or too much) was in my noggin to start with.

I also found the book to be quite informative during periods when I was without-computer (such as train commutes or potty breaks).

THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE for Mike Pope. May his tribe (and future book projects) increase!

I just have this book for 4 days ago and now I already completed the first 4 chapters. The books is well written and easy to be understand with a good example. The person who plan to read this book shoud have some knowledge relate to HTML and Visual basic (6.0 or .Net is preffered). All of the sample project and example in this books is prepare in VB.NET. If you are working with C#.Net and plan to build a dynamic website, don't buy this book. Finally, I recommend this book who plan to build a dynamic website from the first step.

A must have for everybody starting to learn how to build dynamic web pages. Well written chapters with easy to follow step by step instructions create a great book!
If you have no experience in building web pages this is the place you should start.

This book, published in 1997, is a real beauty. In May 2000 as I installed Exchange 2000 I needed to trouble-shoot SMTP at a low level. Chapter 2 with its instructions on how to roll your own SMTP session using nothing but telnet helped me find an access problem that had eluded me for days.

Understanding DNS was also a snap with this book. Banging around with ping still is an essential check on installation integrity when setting up servers and workstations. The common, low-level utilities, including system sniffers and logs, are nicely explained throughout the book.

The book is only 234 pages and many of the details on Exchange 4.0/5.0 will not be of interest for much longer. However, the essentials of Internet SMTP mail are covered so clearly that this book is one that I will retain in my library for a long time.

The book is lots of fun for those who like to hack away from the DOS prompt (and a bit beyond). However, if you think "ping" is something that goes with "pong," you can skip this one.

This book is concise, engaging, and informative. The author is clearly above par in his ability to define what is going on in the back ground of Exchange without boring you to death. And if your not familiar with the internals of POP3 and SMTP messenging, theres some interesting hands on with Telnet. A MUST HAVE BOOK for anyone starting to learn Exchange.

This book is a refreshing change from the 700 page "cover-it-all" titles. It's right to the point with plenty of background info about SMTP, POP3 and DNS issues as they relate to IMS. Current coverage of Exchange 5 and good diagrams. Reccomended as a great supplement to a generic Exchange book

Outstanding book covering SMTP mail and the Exchange Internet Mail Service/Connector. If I could only have two books on Exchange this would be one of them. Great explanation of SMTP and how to configure IMS.

Even though this book covers mainly exchange 4.0 the information here is wholly appropriate for exchange 5.5.

The book covers smtp, and pop3 and using internet mail with exchange using indepth material.

This book is excellent and also makes a good ongoing reference as well.

You can email me at expat.muller@t-online.de

cheers

The built-in vfp report writer, is with no question a powerful tool, but when it comes to end-user report customization, MS Excel is still the report writing tool of choice. This is a great book for those starting to get acquainted with office automation specially for those who wanted to make use MS Excel as the report writer via VFP. The accompanying ebook makes it a lot better...

After 28+ years in this business I have finally stumbled upon an author who knows how to write technical books. This one should be a "how to write" example for other alleged authors.

The book, is clear, concise, and well designed. No assumptions are made; yet it is structured in a manner that one can easily skip over items of familiarity. It is an ideal book in that it spans the needs of users at all levels of expertise and is loaded with real "meat and potatoes" practicality and minimal blue sky theory. No matter what your level of expertise (or the lack of it), you can be creating quality applications within the first hour!

My hat is off to these writers and editors!

This may be one of the best 'how-to' development books on the planet.

Generating complex Office output from any development language (be it VFP, VB, etc.) can be a daunting task. The first time you try it on your own, invariably you hit a wall and think to yourself, 'how do I do this, how do I get around that, etc.'

Tamar and Della do an incredible job of covering the details. I recently finished a project where I had to generate some of the most complicated formats in MS Word that I've ever seen. (Anyone who is 'new' to Fox should also check out Tamar's "Hacker's Guide to VFP", another strong title).

99% of the time, if I did a search through the PDF version of the book, I came across a meaningful code sample that helped me out...or at least pointed me in the right direction. This book could have sold for three times the price and I'd still feel the same way about it.

Even 5 stars doesn't do this book the proper justice. It has an almost endless supply of tips and techniques. The examples cover so much of Office Automation that the book is a 'de facto' reference manual as well. I've been in the business since 1988, and average about 8-10 book purchases a year. Along with Allen Holub's compiler books and Ken Henderson's 'Guru Guide to SQL Server', I'd rate this as one of the best technical 'how-to' books I've ever seen.

I wish someone would write a good .NET applications book along the lines of this book. The difference between a valuable reference book like this one, and a good % of the junk that's been published on .NET, can only be measured in conceptual light years.

Prior to this book, I had been dreading my foray into automation. Literally, within minutes of opening the book, I was automating Excel. And within a couple of hours, I had already built my first automation component for an application. These guys make it so easy!

Every book and article I have ever read by Granor and Martin has been superb, and this book is no exception.

A good book for combine two powerfuls application like vfp and office

COM is built on top of RPC. This book is a bit dated, but still a good guide for learning the technology that COM is based on. COM will make much more sense if you take a little time to learn RPC first.

using a microsoft rpc interfac

using a microsoft rpoc interfac

rpc programmin

The authors take the reader from the very first steps to rather complex applications of Remote Procedure Calls. Along the way, they explain how RPC works, and why it is one of the better tools for implementing true client/server systems.

Despite a very few factual errors (the page on memory allocation using RpcSs contains one) and despite a too-short description of when to use which memory allocator, I rate this book at nine out of ten. For a perfect ten, the authors will have to include material on secure, authenticated, RPC, too.

If you do serious DCE or MS RPC programming, or if you are trying to learn the ropes: Try to find a copy. And no, mine is not for sale. ;-)

Its a must have book

This book builds on a basic understanding of SQL Server, showing real-world scenarios and advice on what to look for to make database application perform optimally.

I've read at least a half dozen books on MSC Sql/Server at this point, and this was by far the most useful. It's both a good guide to general DB development practices and a tutorial on SQL/Server. This book and the MSC manuals is enough to get someone started on SQL/Server. I took the time to write this review in the hopes of saving someone else all the effort I expended buying and reading the useless books.

This is, by far, on of the most usefull books on Microsoft SQL Server I have seen. It covers important information about optimizing queries, indexes and the database itself. A must read for SQL developers and administrators.

Really covers SQL tunning well. Gets a little too much into general DBA stuff in the end. I would recommend the Ken England book over this one, simply because it is more concise.

This book is a compilation of various functions and commands available to the VisualBasic 5 environment. It provides examples and supplimental information to help users with different levels of expertise.

Recommended if you want to really program in VB 5.0.

I found this book to be helpful with my everyday programming. This book contains example code for every command in it. This bok also gives you the correct arguments for each command. I find this book to be one of my best developement tools in my arsenal. I recommend this book strongly to anyone looking to do serious VB programming.

This reference book is a mirror image of the online help, but a lot more convenient. It contains pretty much all you need to know...and unlike the majority of tutorial books out there, the example code actually works.

How can you not love the VB5 Language Reference.

I teach VB for a living, and I tell my students to re-read this Reference guide every 3 months---there's always something new that you'll see in it.

Others will tell you that this information is provided with Books Online (and it is), but I prefer the printed version.

Though you can get the exact same information online, I find that sometimes it's just better to have the hard copy in front of me. The book does a good job of not only showing the syntax, but what arguments to use and situations where the item applies. It's proven to be very, very useful and people would do well to pick this up if they prefer to use hard copy as I do.

Derivatives are not simple things. It almost seems that complexity was a design goal when they were being set up. In order to determine their real value either today or in the future you almost have to model them on a computer.

This book covers dozens of different types of derivatives, including the common ones and some of the new even more esoteric ones. It talks about the structure of the derivative, and then presents models of them. The models are presented in the most common modelling 'languages' in use today. There is a lot of code involved, but there is not a CD included with the book. Instead, an access code providing a one time download for the code. Note, a one time download. Be sure and save the code quickly and on several media. This procedure allows the models to be updated as needed without regard to the time it takes for the book to move from being written to being published, but if you have a disk crash....

The biggest things this book provides are: first, you get to see what an expert in the field has done, and second, you get the code to run his models on your system, and of course you can modify them if you find some other aspect suits your needs better.

This is a new book, first printed in December 2006, so it is current with the derivatives being marketing at that time.

I highlight two points:

1. The inclusion of Matlab and Excel code in almost all topics of the book.
2. All the content is new and more advanced, there is no recovered topics of his previous book.

This book offers prebuilt, modifiable code that you can use for energy, power, weather and many other derivatives applications. The download process is fast and easy. For those who use Matlab, C++, or Excel, there is no competition. A great book with unique content and code.

This book was my ultimate go-to resource on several financial engineering projects (on the buy side). It covers many different derivatives and provides example MatLab and C++ code that is easy to modify and extend.

The instructions for setup and downloading the code could be more clear, perhaps on a CD.

Great book. But the code downloading process is a bit weird. Don't know why they just attach a CD.