Hardware Books

Before the present days of "All-In-One MCSE Exam Cram", there were those computer professionals who knew about the construction of their computer hardware on a micro level and how to write programs that would control that hardware. This book is from those times. Using Basic, C, Pascal, and assembly language the reader is shown how to do such tasks as play a sequence of tones in the foreground, draw individual pixels in various graphics modes, print graphics on a laserjet printer, and intercept keystrokes without displaying them. Granted, there are much easier ways to do the things talked about in this book than assembly language programs, but you get a very good lesson on the inner workings of your computer to boot. Things have not changed so much over the years that basic computer architecture is not the same and therefore some of the information is still useful. The table of contents for the second edition is as follows:

1. Program Organization
2. Equipment Determination - Shows you how to inventory and assess various system resources.
3. Managing Memory - Shows how to inventory conventional and expanded memory. Shows how to manipulate expanded memory.
4. Programming Interrupts - After a brief tutorial on PC interrupts, you are shown how to program an interrupt controller chip, enable and disable particular interrupts, write your own ISR, and finally chain into existing interrupts.
5. Clocks and Timers - Shows how to control time, date, the real-time clock, and control real-time operations.
6. Programming Sound - Takes you from merely beeping the speaker to playing one or more tones to making sound effects.
7. Intercepting keystrokes - After intercepting keystrokes you may want to display them, intercept conditionally, and write a general purpose keyboard input routine.
8. Interpreting Keystrokes - How to look up various codes, use the numeric keypad and cursor keys, and use special purpose keys.
9. Using a Mouse - Setting the characteristics of the mouse, define the mouse's relationship to the screen, and inputting both analog and digital data from a game port.
10. Managing Disk Drives - This is all about how to manipulate and determine disk space and recover from disk errors.
11. Directory Access - How to manipulate directories and files.
12. Reading and Writing Files - The basics of file IO.
13. Controlling Video Hardware - How to control the screen display mode, background, border color, find and manipulate the cursor, and scroll a text screen.
14. Displaying text - How to write individual characters and strings.
15. Displaying Graphics - How to write pixels for the various graphics formats including EGA and VGA and how to find a color at a particular
point on the screen.
16. Controlling a printer - How to control and print on an HP LaserJet.

The examples in this book will tell you how to control most of the basic hardware on your computer at a low level. Controlling the head and motors on the floppy drive, activating and using XMS, and many more are all explained and include a code example in 4 languages. In addition, each section includes tutorial and background information on that area of computer hardware that explains some of the background that might affect results.

This is basically a cookbook for doing all kinds of neat things with your computer. Has code snippets in c, basic, asm, and pascal.

I love this book!

I have used many beginner-to-intermediate books on Java, but this has always been the best one I could find as a reference for GUI-related topics. It has excellent, practical examples on layouts, colors, and constructing basic GUIs. It's been the one book that I end up having on my desktop when I start any new GUI.

This book fills in a niche market between an OOP theory book and an advanced Java reference book. It shows you how to apply OOP and use Java for rapid application development. If you know basic of Java and want to use JBuilder for RAD, this book will help you.

Daniel Liang is one of the most reliable Java authors and this book for advanced programmers, who already know Java, is unique. It allows programmers to progress rapidly and use JBuilder's built in tools for creating state of the art Java programs quickly. Shows how to use Java Beans. It also comes with JBuilder.

Any criticisms you have encountered about this book being biased towards prepress are true. But if you are involved with PDF in prepress, this book is very good.

This book will take you from beginner (but not novice) to advanced intermediate. It won't take you to expert; but then expert comes with experience. Given that each prepress environment has its own peculiarities, you'll have to work within your system to take it to its limits. This book can help some of the way.

My only complaint is related to my personal situation. On occasions, concerning some particularly fine points, the book suggests "ask your prepress partner". I am trying to become that prepress person, so I found this frustrating. Understandable, but frustrating.

I needed something more comprehensive and revealing than the usual offering of beginners texts. Yet, I WAS a beginner.

This book not only covers the general abilities of Acrobat, it discuses little known intricacies and technical issues that will make you a power user in record time.

Remarkably, the information is explained in simple, ordinary language.

I started working for a medium sized ad agency 2 years ago. Every document we produce has to be made in to PDF format for review by our clients. I could make a PDF, but really had no true understanding of the settings and what I was really doing. This book is truly excellent at giving a novice a complete understanding of the PDF format. For someone already knowlegeable about the PDF format it is also a very valuable reference. This is one of the most useful computer books I have bought in years and I buy alot of them. When our tech-guy has problems with Acrobat he comes to me and borrows this book.

The best thing about the book is that it breaks down PDF creation by program. For example, if you use Quark Xpress there is a chapter dedicated on how to use Acrobat with Quark. If you use Microsoft Word there is another chapter on using Acrobat with it. These chapters present you with real world scenarios and how to deal with them.

This is not some kind of quick start guide. It does get in to some detail and that helped me a great deal. It doesn't just gloss-over a subject or give you bare-bones steps on how to do something.

This is an easy to understand book that will help out anbody at any level with using Acrobat. I can't say enough good things about it. This is the first book I have purchased in the "Real World" series of books... it won't be my last!

This book is tremendous for professional graphic artists using Photoshop for high end electronic pre-press production. It's full of useful techniques and guidance not only on how to color correct, etc., but also what to look out for. We are an electronic graphic arts production company in the Chicago area, and we learned a lot from this book

This book should be included as a standard accessory in any digital artist toolbox. I use this book as a desktop companion whenever I am working on images with Photoshop. JWoods@kodak.com

Taking you step by step from picking a computer system, through calibrating it, acquiring images, correcting them, and getting them on paper, Real World Photoshop 3 is a whirlwind introduction to pre-press production. As a photographer with no publishing experience, I was fascinated by some of the things that could be achieved with my images as I applied each chapter. I was also horrified at the bloopers I had unwittingly pulled and relieved to find ways to avoid them. David and Bruce share their personal approaches (and differences of opinion), which gave me a bit of reassurance. The humor interspersed is head and shoulders above that in "Photoshop for Dummies" and does not distract when you are struggling to grasp a hard concept.

As a newbie to PSP - this was a definite MUST HAVE - really shows you what the PSP is capable of, and how to do it. Clear, concise, easy to understand. I feel like this $$ was well spent.

I bought my PSP a while ago and love it, but never explored beyond the basics. I've bought a couple other Rough Guides in the past and liked them, so I thought I'd check this one out, and I highly recommend it. It feels like I have a whole new PSP. I spent all day yesterday loading movies and music onto my PSP, and now know how to really use it for wireless web browsing. Lots of stuff. If you have a PSP, check it out.

I am new to the PSP and was looking for a guide which goes beyond the instruction manual which comes with the unit. The Rough Guide to the PSP fits the bill, it is a great reference guide and explains how to use the PSP in a easy to understand way, it also goes beyond the basic operation of the PSP. The authors give plenty of ideas of where to get additional inforamtion, I can highly recommend this book.

I think this book is excellent. I found the material accurate and easy to follow. I brought this book for my whole project team, I thought so highly of it meeting it's title claim. I was able to take a topic and actually learn it in the alloted time. The beginning chapters provide a good overview of the topics and using MS Project, setting up the project, and good structured project design. When I have a team I need to get up to speed quickly on MS Project, I will again use this book as the tool.

This is one of the best software manuals I have ever used. If you want to learn the essential basics of MS Project quickly and easily, buy this manual. He uses the online templates to walk you through the steps to build a project. It was easy to follow his instructions. I had the outline prepared for my own project. Begining with chpater 3, I used the manual to build my project as I progressed through each chapter. This was a great hands-on learning experience!

This is one of the best software manuals I have ever used. If you want to learn the essential basics of MS Project quickly and easily, buy this manual. He uses the online templates to walk you through the steps to build a project. It was easy to follow his instructions. I had the outline prepared for my own project. Begining with chpater 3, I used the manual to build my project as I progressed through each chapter. This was a great hands-on learning experience!

I really liked this book. It was very informative. Although published by HP Press, the book talks extensively about other Unix platforms as well as NT. The book is probably one year old by now, but I still recommend it. The authors cover almost every hardware option you can think of. A must read for any IT person planning an SAP Implementation.

I highly recommend this book to companies that are going to start an SAP project. The book provides the foundation to design and build a solid technical infrastructure for SAP. Moreover, it is easy to read, covers every aspect, and is plenty of examples.

I am an experienced SAP technical consultant and wish this book were available some years ago. On common problem I have seen is that companies don't understand, from the infrastructure point of view, what an SAP project involves. The objective of this book is to make them aware of what they don't know (and could hurt them) at the right time, which is before the project actually starts.

I wish that I had this book when we started our SAP project. This book will help anyone who is thinking about installing or upgrading SAP. It helps explain how SAP software will use the hardware. And how all of the pieces fit together. Even though this book is by HP press it stays true to the theme. They do try and "sell" HP hardware or solutions every once in awhile, but for the most part this book is generic in vendor. You won't go wrong with reading this book or just having it for reference the next time you have to upgrade your hardware or if you are having response problems and need to know how to evaluate your hardware. We have been an SAP customer for six years and have grown up with SAP in the US (started at version 2.1 and have just completed our 4.6 upgrade!).

This book is an excellent and essential in-depth reference to both industry and academic audiences. It also was an ambitious undertaking. In 500 pages, the author has attempted to cover the history, current practice and the challenges of next generation mobile computing. Whether you are simply curious about smart phone application development, or are entering the profession yourself, "Smart Phone and Next Generation Mobile Computing" s a good place to start your journey down the road of mobile computing. Every section of this book is very clearly layed out and the index is very easy to use. Pei is well qualified to author this book. His academic and professional backgrounds have given him a solid foundation in the art and practice of mobile computing.

This book is the most comprehensive reference on smartphone/mobile computing on the market so far. It not only covers mobile computing fundamentals such as wireless networking support and hardware/software platforms, but also provides in-depth discussion on advanced topics like security, QoS, and challenges facing various mobile applications. Its level of detail not found in other books could benefit a large group of emerging mobile application developers like myself.
Highly recommended!

This is a very brief review, since I haven't finished reading the book, but I'm finding this to be exactly what I wanted: an intelligently written book that focuses on a very diverse set of uses of Smart Phones, and provides good technical deatil about their capabilities.

As an IT student, I occasionally run into material that I find stale, boring, and overwhelming. This book isn't like that. I am able to review study material that is not only useful, but fun to read! You can't go wrong with this book, it is a valuable resource to learning OSs and what makes them tick.

Looking for the A+ certification? As you know this certification has 2 exams, I for hardware and 1 for the Operating systems. This book is a great prep tool for the OS section as it covers several key operating systems and few that aren't on the exam.

The book starts off with a hardware overview, which is very helpful in the understanding of software. Then you deal with the older operating systems like Windows 3.X and DOS, this is a nice foundation to learn the roots of the operating system.

Then comes NT, 2000, XP and there is even section for the MAC OS and Linux group. What I liked about this book was the exercises and labs; they would prove to very helpful in understanding certain concepts.

About the only thing missing is cds with evaluation copies of the operating system(s), in case you don't have access to them. Overall this book is a great compliment to the Mike Meyers All in One A+ Study Guide. As an Instructor, this book becomes a valuable add on to the curriculum.

This book is great for students who want to become IT professionals. It's more than just learning how to use client-side operating systems. In this book, you learn how to install, configure and troubleshoot, and includes coverage of networking. Read this and you're on your way to an A+ certfication not to mention a desktop support or help desk position. It's a beautifully designed book.

Michael and Dennis Cohen have done a great job in this book to help beginning to intermediate users with the iLife suite. I am often called upon to help friends with their Macs. When they have questions on the iLife programs, I find it much easier to refer them to this book than to try and talk them through the problem on the phone or via iChat. Thanks to the Cohens for making my iLife as a consultant a bit easier.

Apple has long said it makes computers for the rest of us, and now with its iLife suite of tools Apple appears to be making software for the rest of us as well. The Teach Yourself Visually series of computer books seems to follow the same philosophy, but where TYV's offerings for more complex programs like Photoshop serve as "scratch-the-surface" introductions, iLife '04 really does look deep under the surface of Apples' popular suite of tools. My favorite section, perhaps because I know the least about it, is on GarageBand, which is the most exciting piece of software I've seen in years.

The Teach Yourself Visually books all benefit from strong integration of explanatory text with detailed graphics, but the text portion of this particular book benefits from clear, thorough, and often quite humorous writing. The author obviously knows the programs-more important, he knows how to communicate that knowledge to his readers (I believe he's the same Michael Cohen who writes the multimedia section of the famed Macintosh Bible). I highly recommend this title-for twenty bucks, it's a bargain.

Teach Yourself Visually iLife 04 is the perfect book for someone who wants simple, easy to follow instructions for using each of Apple's iLife programs (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, Garage Band). What makes this book different from all the other iLife books are the clear step-by-step instructions, all accompanied by full color screen shots and illustrations, for using almost every iLife feature. The tips that accompany each task save time and effort in using the iLife programs and point out special features that aren't generally known. This is the book to get if you want to learn how to use iLife 04 without having to become a computer scientist, or read pages and pages of text. Get this and start using the software right away while you read.