Hardware Books

The book introduces the concept of interactive multimedia documents in a comprehensive though exaustive way.

Excellent for researchers in the area seeking for a text book that will cover all aspects of a multimedia document life cycle (design, modelling, execution, distribution in the WWW).

contents of Interactive Video-On-Demand Systems : Resource Management and Scheduling Strategies

This series of books/CD's start showing you from lesson one what you need to know to put together an interactive presentation. It shows you rollovers immediately, and interactively controlling elements on the screen. It is a very good series. After one weekend with this book and the companion Director book, I was able to put together a really well organized and functioning presentation (as long as you know how to use Photoshop as well)

This book has 20 projects which guide a person through the steps to create a personalized career plan. It was originally intended for a classroom where teachers could duplicate the projects. One book for the whole class.

Any adult, young or mid-life, who wants to take charge of their career plan can do this following the activities in the projects. The activities can easily be done individually or with a spouse or friend.

A real bargain when considering the cost of NOT having a good career plan.

Feel free to contact the author if you have additional questions.

Eileen Dittmar
edittmar@charter.net
www.eileendittmar.com

The Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh is a great book and a great bargain especially in the paperback edition.It's highly recommended!!!

This book takes the reader through the ins-and-outs of the modern PC. Explanations are well written and aided by graphics when needed.

MPEG-1,2,and 4 make multimedia content available, while MPEG-7 makes content accessible, retrievable, and filterable. This book is all about the MPEG-7 standard, its implementation, and its applications. The book is divided into six sections which I describe as follows:
Section 1, the introduction, introduces the MPEG-7 standard, history, and its motivation.
Section 2, "Systems", covers system architecture, the description definition language (MPEG-7 is expressed in XML), and the binary format for MPEG-7.
Section 3, "Multimedia Description Schemes", describes the organization of multimedia features that can be described with MPEG-7. This section shows how search, retrieval, filtering, navigation, and browsing are supported by certain MPEG-7 tools. The next two sections are the most fascinating for people involved in multimedia description and retrieval.
Section 4, "Visual Descriptors", discusses how MPEG-7 can describe visual components of images and video for efficient retrieval. Color is described in multimedia via color histograms, dominant color, and color layout. There are also texture descriptors as well as shape descriptors and motion descriptors all present in MPEG-7 to "describe" visual information.
Section 5, "Audio Descriptors", likewise, describes how audio can be indexed via specific descriptors of its content that are far less obvious than those for vision. These include automatic speech recognition techniques, finding spectral similarities, and the use of hidden Markov models. The descriptors are both high and low level. Low level descriptors use the power and the spectrum of the audio signal for data matching and description. High-level tools include melody descriptions in the case of music, recognition of words spoken, log attack time, and even "query by humming".
Section 6, "Applications", shows applications for MPEG-7 that are broadly classified into search/browsing applications and mobile applications. The browsing applications mentioned include real time video retrieval, browsing TV news broadcasts, and audio music retrieval.
A DVD is included that contains technical reports, working demos, and the official MPEG-7 reference software. The DVD demos include using MPEG-7 for video browsing and also searching for images using texture as a descriptor.
The tone of the book is academic, but there are many examples in the book that really clarify the use and expression of the standard. I recommend it to anyone interested in MPEG-7. To get the most out of the book you should already be familiar with XML, information storage and retrieval techniques, and the field of computer vision. Due to the diverse background required to really understand the book, I wouldn't let the low Amazon sales rank scare you - it really is a five star book on the subject! Also, notice that used copies can be found on Amazon Marketplace for a fraction of what a new book costs.

I really loved this book and found it very useful. If anyone is into multimedia systems, this is a must have book.

One of the most respected names in the A+ and IT industry has to be Mike Meyers; his All in One Study guide is simply one of the best books on the market. Now Mike has gone and released an add-on to the book that will make the learning of the A+ material easier to understand and comprehend.

Looking through the book brings back so many memories for me over the past 15 years and reading through the material I found a wealth of information, that I was able to pass on to my A+ classes. From cover to cover the information is nothing short of amazing and takes apart the pc from stem to stern and allows you to put it back together.

The breakdown is some of the best classroom material I have ever seen and I have been teaching for over 5 years and A+ for over 4. This book covers the hard drives, including FDISK and Disk Management within NT and 2000. I was hard pressed to find a hardware topic that wasn't covered; there is even material on joysticks and musical instruments.

If you are looking for a breakdown of the hardware exam for A+ than you might want to grab a copy of this book. For the instructor out there this book is a great addition to the classroom material. I think that the next release should have a cd with hardware utilities, but overall this is another outstanding effort from Mike Meyers.

This book is written in fairly simple language is is not difficult to comprehend. On the other hand, it talks about very advanced technologies that use completely new medium of computer structure. It's just extremely interesting to read. If this technology will work in the future, becoming practical rather than theoretical, our world will never be the same.