Software Books

I've worked in the telecom industry for years, and this dictionary accurately defines more telecom terms than any other. However, it is not very well-written. The style is really colloquial and inconsistent. One definition may read like it's straight out of IEEE-100, while others sound like a hallway conversation between engineers. Even within a definition, the same term may be capitalized in one instance but not in others. So, I'd put it in the library for sure, but get The Authoritative Dictionary of IEEE Standards Terms (IEEE 100), Seventh Edition and McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms, too!!

This book is perfect for computer enthusiasts, business owners who utilize computers and telecommunications, scientists, a wide
constituency of educators, computer programmers, web designers and just about anyone who may need to understand computerese in simple English. Important definitions are listed; such as, ADCU, back lobe, card cage, isochronous distortion, etc. There are strategies to minimize calling charges by utilizing prepaid cards for national and international calls. Important computer user groups may be accessed at:
o atmforum.com
o ectaportal.com
o ecma.ch
o gigabiethernet.org
o 10gea.org
o 3GPP.org
o aitp.org
o ansi.org
o apcointl.org

The book is a solid investment for any computer professional, teacher, computer user group or business person.

I use this book all the time. This is the perfect reference book for every engineer working in the Telecomm field

Less than nine months ago I started working for a software company that makes OSS/BSS solutions for Telecommunication operators.
As an economist I had a lot of problems understanding the sector and the acronyms that telecommunication people love to use. Having this dictionary at hand did definitively help me a lot. I do recommend it to every person wanting to get a general understanding of the sector. Only a pity that Harry did not include more graphics to help with the explanations.

As a telecommunications student, I was leery of all the abbreviations and unfamiliar terms. This book was very helpful in explaining new words and phrases, especially since the telecommunications industry is full of strange acronyms. Very worthwhile!

In my opinion, this is the best Oracle press I've ever read in its quality. The book is well organized, has extensive tested examples and the author's strong experience apparantly added to the value of the book.
For those who want to be specialized in Oracle database tuning, this book is a must.
I wish all Oracle books would be in this level of quality.

Hi,

This book is great for DBA and Developper alike. I would recommend it to anyone working with Oracle, even if you're not working to solve performance issues. With all those tips at hand never your application will suffer from poor programming.

Guillaume

I highly recommend this book as a handy reference to keep at your desk. It is full of handy tips and a great assessment for reviewing your own environnment.

I love reading this book. I typically read a few pages before bed. It's filled with lots of practical examples and suggestions. Very thorough explanations. Some of the examples could do with a little more explaining but overall it's still very useful.

Great book for Oracle database professionals who want to deepen their understanding of the manifold factors that affect performance. I learned a ton of instantly useful information during my first pass through the book. I now keep this book within arm's reach as a reference, using it frequently to address tuning issues as they arise.

I already read many Oracle books from Oracle Press & other publications. They are very good. This book takes different approch of How-to Style content which is very much practical & solves day to day administrative needs. Topics are covered in detail. Most importantly examples given are from grounds up. Excellent! This book is also helpfull for all who know a little bit of Oracle Database & want to know more in depth

We all know, especially here in Brazil, the money that one pays to have a good Oracle trainning. If you already have a little knowledge of Oracle and its jargon and are self estimulated, this book will take you to high level of expertise without a pain . Want to know Oracle ? Start with it.

Among all the Oracle reference books, I found this one to be the most useful and practical book. This book is very well written and has an easy to read format. The detailed step-by-step instructions in Q&A section helped me solve problems quickly. This saved me much time and effort than going through piles of other reference books and trying to pull pieces of information here and there together to get a complete picture. I highly recommend this book to Oracle DBA's in all levels.

As an Oracle Instructor and DBA I've had the opportunity to review numerous Oracle texts for DBA's and have to say I've been quite disappointed with most of them. Mr. Yuhanna's book however is an exception. Out of the many DBA texts I have on my shelf this is the one I goto most frequently. Unlike other texts which spend excessive amounts of time covering uncommonly used features and little to no time covering commonly used features this books covers almost all the basics in a hands on approach. The book is setup in a step by step how-to format. Although it doesn't discuss concepts much that is not its purpose and the best concepts book is the Oracle Documentation anyway. I've have yet to see a good how-to DBA book until I came across this one. As a consultant/instructor I recommend it quite frequently.

The book is very useful for both new and experienced DBAs because it has a lot of practical examples. I especially like its Q&A format with scripts which makes reading very interesting.

Till I saw this book and Bert Monroys website my imagination and creativity for minimally very finite. Its amazing how he shows what can be done using image editors like photoshop. Its just blows you away. My wife thought the pictures in his books are photographs and when I told her bert monroy created them in photoshop, there was no sound from her. She was quite amazed. This book is well recommended. Authors like Bert Monroy truly amazes with their talent and give us additional thoughts and inspiration on how to improve our work.

I found this book very useful, very well illustrated, as Bert Monroy describes his technics. He teaches methods that opened my mind to the power that Photoshop CS has. While he covers many aspects of the program he dos not indulge in the usual rehash of every photoshop feature, focusing on specific projects. His reputation for a graphics artist and teacher are well deserved. Wonderful examples, just enough detail to convey the point without beating you over the head. Included color photos are well laid out, his teaching method couldn't be better. The tone will particular instruct the novice or intermeadiate user, but everyone will find something of use here. If you are looking for blow by blow 'how to' for every feature, look at Photoshop CS Sudio Techniques, or the Adobe Class Room in a Book. I only wish this book had more samples, examples. If you can't buy it, hope your local libray has or will. Do this for its artistic voice.

This book will get your imagination going. Some great tips.

The only reason I don't give it 5 stars is that there could have been more content.

Bert Monroy is probably one of the most talented Photoshop users there is. If you've ever seen him on TechTV, you've seen how effortlessly he uses PS.

This book is full of amazing artwork Bert has done with Photoshop, along with a lot of tips and techniques from the master himself. You'll have a hard time believe that this book isn't just a collection of photos. Bert style is so photo-realistic it's jaw-dropping.

Definitely a must-have book for any PS enthusiast. Even if you don't plan to use PS for Photoreal artwork, there are techniques here that are applicable to other uses for PS but the book itself is worth the price just for the awe factor of Monroy's work.

Bert is a great artist and teacher. I took a class from him, and learned so much, but couldn't absorb it all at once. This book allows you to learn his techniques at your own pace, and will give you the confidence to start creating images from scratch in Photoshop, or add painting techniques to your image manipulation. Highly recommended for intermediate to advanced Photoshop users and all artists.

Issues specific to Open Source are well-covered in this book. I found the section titled "Handling Difficult People" especially useful; his advice in this dodgy area is to act eloquent and keep feedback directed at the problem, not the person. If the person *is* the problem, nip in-public issues in the bud and contact the person directly to resolve the personal issue(s).

Fogel presents lots of down and dirty day-to-day details on how to create excellent software. Not just Open Source, either... the transparency built into the processes he describes are also useful within a company firewall.

Fogel places a huge emphasis on development by random unsalaried people, but I feel that most important and rapid development is due to corporate sponsorship.

Overall: excellent. Read it cover to cover, refer back to it often.

If you are thinking of starting/managing a project in an "open-source" model, this is the book you MUST read.

The book is very well written and goes over lessons learned of others that created their own open-source projects. Believe me... every step so you don't have to guess anything!

How to start, how to document, where to deploy the project, what people to invite, whether or not coding standards are necessary, democracy versus dictatorship, all of these questions are answered inside.

A friend of mine has told me that much of the information in this book can be seen for free in video in Google. It's worth looking for.

I read the book in 5 hours and i think my time was very well invested. I now believe that this model is not only suitable for small projects but to larger projects. The complexity of the system will not the an issue if you apply the rules in the book. I still have to try it though... ;-)

Just yesterday I was talking to a friend about this book and we discovered each other very glad with it. First of all, the author has a lot of experience with the theme in question. Furthermore, Karl Fogel is very compelling with words. He knows how to write down his experience in a way that is pleasant, certainly due to a lot of writes he had made through plenties of open source projects.

With this book you will be in touch with topics like the needed infra-structure to setup open source projects, the dinamics of the open source community, strategies for packaging and releasing software, common issues that arise in open source daily development and how to workaround then, a brief about licenses (with properly links for more information on this topic); just to highlight some aspects.

This book was the first hand someone land me into the open source world. It's helping me in three ways: to extract more from open source softwares that already exist, to start my own open source project, and to look at software development through a new, different, and till now better perspective.

Hope this review helps you!

If you have already read pretty much everything that there is to be read about why you'd want to start, manage, fund or participate in an Open Source project, but want to know everything about how best to do it, then Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software is the book for you.

Drawing from his extensive experience with the Subversion project, Fogel provides in this book a comprehensive overview of all aspects of Open Source software development, covering technical, social, political, economical, legal, and managerial aspects.

While the book is more aimed at medium-to-large scale projects, especially those involving some kind of corporate entity, there is much in it that is applicable to most projects, excluding maybe only those little, one-man efforts that rarely become successful. But if you are the originator of one of the latter and, should it suddenly attract a wide following, you'd better be prepared to face the unavoidable problems that popularity brings.This book will come in handy in this case.

Here are, in my opinion, the strong points of the book:

* Providing a concise, yet comprehensive, overview of all aspects of Open Source development. This is really the manual of open development.

* Demonstrating that there is much in open development that is similar to more traditional, corporate-style software development (you cannot always rely on good will and volunteers), but also much that is different, in motivation, rewards and objectives.

* Putting the accent on the human aspect of development: mutual respect between participants is often the deciding factor in determining whether a project will thrive or fail. Since even the best of intentions sometimes are not enough to foster a peaceful, productive and collaborative environment, Producing Open Source Software contains a lot of useful, practical advice that you can follow if you want to keep developers happy and motivated.

It's easy to make the mistake of viewing this book as "too fluffy" or perhaps too soft to be of any use to the practical user or developer of open source software. Nothing could be further from the truth: in a classic open source way, the author has compressed man-centuries of OS community experience into a practical working guide for anyone who wants to do something serious in this area.

If you want to understand programming the Flash Communication Server and it's capabilities this is a good place to start.

Although I'm using Flash Media Server 2, this book is still highly relevant as not much has changed. The core objects and language is the same so I would not hesitate to recommend it for anyone looking to use FMS.

This book is all about the design of applications using Macromedia's Flash Communication Server MX. FCS MX enables the building of media-rich web applications by taking care of the basic tasks required in the networking of the applications. Thus, you can focus on the application itself rather than worrying about low-level communication details.

Since this book is concerned with situations where multiple Flash applications will be executing on the same server simultaneously, there is going to be considerable effort involved in coordinating events, which is addressed by this book. You should already have FCS installed and running on your server and you should also have Flash MX available on the client. The following is description of the book by chapter:

Chapter 1, Introducing the Flash Communication Server - Acts as an introduction to FCS and an overview of the whole book.

Chapter 2, Communication Components - How the FlashCom communication components encapsulate commonly needed features such as chat, video recording and playback, bandwidth control,and user configuration. These components implement many basic building blocks for your application.

Chapter 3, Managing Connections - This chapter covers connections in more depth past the SimpleConnect component, including how to write custom code to handle various changes in the connection status as well as different errors.

Chapter 4, Applications, Instances, and Server-Side ActionScript - This chapter describes how to write Server-Side ActionScript and work with the objects that control application instances and the Flash movies that connect to them.

Chapter 5, Managing Streams - Offers a somewhat oversimplified but complete example that shows the basic steps in publishing one live stream and subscribing to a second.

Chapter 6, Camera and Microphone - This chapter explains how to use both the Microphone and Camera classes to record live streams. These classes are at the heart of most communication applications involving multimedia.

Chapter 7, Media Preparation and Delivery - This chapter covers many details for compressing and streaming audio and video.

Chapter 8, Shared Objects - This chapter starts an entirely new subject - shared objects, which provide a mechanism for the transmission of data between client and server.

Chapter 9, Remote Methods - This chapter also shows how to broadcast method calls to every movie and application instance connected to a shared object or stream, or send them to and from individual movies using RMI.

Chapter 10, Server Management API - Discusses the Server Management API and its applications, including monitoring a FlashCom Server, gathering statistics on application instances, and managing the log streams.

Chapter 11, Flash Remoting - Demonstrates how Flash Remoting can be used to add data connectivity to FlashCom applications. Flash Remoting can access web services, server-side scripts, CGI applications, XML files, or the local filesystem with the help of an application server such as ColdFusion.

Chapter 12, ColdFusion MX and FlashCom - Teaches some specifics involved in using Flash Remoting with ColdFusion MX and FlashCom. There are some practical working examples shown that demonstrate how you can leverage the benefits of Flash Remoting in conjunction with FlashCom.

Chapter 13, Building Communication Components - This is the first step in building complete applications, and is demonstrated through an extensive example.

Chapter 14, Understanding the Macromedia Component Framework - How to modify an existing component and how to create a new one. Also discusses server-side framework code and its core features and data structures.

Chapter 15, Application Design Patterns and Best Practices - Describes some of the best practices available to application developers. This chapter provides some useful design options, patterns, and best practices that will help you build better applications.

Chapter 16, Building Scalable Applications - Deals with building multi-instance and multiserver applications that don't bog down as the number of client connections increases.

Chapter 17, Network Performance, Latency, Concurrency - Traditional network design issues affect FCS also.

Chapter 18, Securing Applications - Specifically this chapter examines the three A's of security - Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting.

Excellent book, stuffed of examples very well explained, easy to read and to understand, essential for who desires initiate or even though to profound itself studies on FlashCom.
Obligator reference in projects involving FlashCom, either for fast consultations and advanced tasks.
Excellent approach of subjects as Design patterns and security, yonder a perfect demonstration about audio, video and much more.

If you're a developer looking into real-time server communication using Adobe Flash, this book is a must-have. It guides you thru various levels of application development in an easy to understand format, and provides well documented pieces of code to assist you in the learning process of putting together your project:

Topics covered include:

- learning about components and how to use them
- establishing and managing client connections
- publishing live and recorded streams
- local communication with clients
- remote communication with outside applications

The book also shows how to build and integrate your own custom components, and how to scale your application using the components that you've created. Other highlights include information on how to use shared objects and server management API, as well as ways to improve both design and performance.

I have purchased every book written by Susan Kitchens. I need the information, I need the insights and I appreciate the amount of work she puts into every title. If you use Bryce - any version - you need her books.

Even if you've upgraded to Bryce 5, Real World Bryce 2 can be the Brycer's best friend. Many of the techniques are still applicable! In fact, some of the "problems" noted in the text with the windows version of Bryce 2 no longer apply, they've worked since Bryce 3D!

Susan is an excellent author and graphics artist. This woman is the Salvador Dali of the computer graphics world! Her books are indispensible!

If you've ever wanted to really understand Bryce and how it works, this is the book for you. It really helped me streamline the process of making cool worlds in Bryce. The color examples & awesome artwork are a nice bonus.

Every feature in covered in great detail, far beyond the scope of the original Bryce manual. The author presents advanced features, showing how to make undersea worlds, rivers, & waterfalls using Bryce & Photoshop.

She devotes over 100 pages to working with texture. Other chapters cover working with other software, rendering and realistic nature imagery. There is even a chapter on making alien world scenes.

The CD also has some great examples including rendering tests & tutorial Bryce files to play with. There are also 100's of spectacular images of different worlds created by over 80 different artists.

If you've ever wanted to really understand Bryce and how it works, this is the book for you. It really helped me streamline the process of making cool worlds in Bryce. The color examples & awesome artwork are a nice bonus. Every feature in covered in great detail, far beyond the scope of the original Bryce manual. The author presents advanced features, showing how to make undersea worlds, rivers, & waterfalls using Bryce & Photoshop. She then devotes over 100 pages to working with texture. Other chapters cover working with other software, rendering and realistic nature imagery. There is even a chapter on making alien world scenes. The CD also has some great examples including rendering tests & tutorial Bryce files to play with. There are also 100's of spectacular images of different worlds created by over 80 different artists.

We purchased this book out of desperation, as we had a project demanding instant "alien" backgrounds. As the program's documentation was so incomplete and erroneous as to be virtually worthless, we eagerly ordered Ms. Kitchens' book after reading rave reviews. And, it is almost everything expected. While Bryce can be "played" with to achieve spectacular results with no documentation at all, this book has allowed us to use the program in depth, which is required by our commercial graphics demands. Unfortunately, it is not perfect, and these flaws make me wish Ms. Kitchens would find a better publisher for her work. First of all, the promised CD for the Windows platform is not included, but must be ordered by means of an included postcard, with a promised "3-4 week delivery time". We feel this is deceptive, and only refrained from returning the book due to our pressing needs. Secondly, after getting through a somewhat fuzzy-headed and arrogant foreward, we found that the (numerous) excellent illustrations were poorly placed in reference to the text, resulting in constant page turning. For a technical manual, it is incumbent on the publisher to better coordinate the placement of text and illustrations. I'd say this publisher needs to show the same concern and dedication in their efforts as Susan Kitchens has shown in hers.

Great book- I am transitioning from graphic designer to account manager for a print company. I will still be using some of my graphics knowledge. It has really helped to fill in gaps in my knowledge in regards to the print end. Thanks so much- love the book!

I'm using this book as the text book for an Electronic Publishing course I'm teaching. Claudia's style is dry and humorous, which makes the complex material easier to digest. Lots of wonderful tips and insights. I highly recommend it for anyone trying to comprehend how design goes from computer to print.

I am a trainer in the graphic arts field and I recently read this book for a group of students I am working with that needed to have more of a printing understanding. It was such a great read and very informative that I had to buy it for my students. The information has proved very valuable to them. Anyone who wants to get their jobs on Press with the least amount of problems should read this book.

If you are new to the desktop publishing business, this book has lots of answers and even brings up questions I didn't know to ask. Ms. McCue is to be commended on her writing style, as well. Buy this book!

I have been a designer with an Ad Agency for 6 years. Where was this book when I was just getting started?

In today's design schools we are taught how do run the programs and how to make a good looking design but nobody teaches you how to build a proper file that won't drive your prepress guys in to screaming fits... until now. Learning how to do 1001 tricks in Photoshop/Illlustrator/Quark/InDesign/Freehand will do you no good unless the files you send to the printer will actually print. This is the book I wish I had read when I first started and I highly recommend it. This is money well spent. I use it to teach our newer employees on what to do and what not to do when sending files to the printer. It explains problems in an easy to understand manner.

The only flaw in this book... some things seemed to be repeated constantly.

this is far the best com book I have read. I am happy to be in possession of one

It's a great book to possess, When it comes to Component programming. After Don Box "Essiential COM", this is by far the best COM+ book I have read. It will give you good understanding about not just writing but design and implementing COM+ Components. Examples are great and right to the point.

I finished this book over a year ago, and never got around to writing a review. Probably won't help too many with most of the new development moving to .NET, but here goes. Overall, it was solid but I thought it could have done two things better. I thought the coverage on MSMQ could have been stronger and the project at the end did not get tied together as well as it should have. I like the approach of a lot of the Wrox books that really get into detail WHY they're doing something in their projects they use to tie their ideas together. I felt as thought the author really almost rushed this section of the book, and, in doing so, missed the opportunity to really drive home his points. Hopefully he reads these and will take a page out of the Wrox books in really getting down to explaining his reasoning and what is going on when he's tying his ideas together with a project in his next book. I thought he did an outstanding job up to that point though.

Scot Hillier's book COM+ VB is destined to be considered a classic among the great big programming books. I wouldn't jerk you around. In fact I can honestly say I love to read Scot's work. Tony Davidson once said "A Smith can be a common man, but does that mean I see a Smith and think: "There before
heaven go I"? There is absolutely no need to ponder. In fact to ponder this is to get confused. I read and laid down the book again. Soon I'll read more.

Joanne Brady

I started my COM+ learning experience with Peishu Li's "Visual Basic and COM+ Programming by Example" and then used this book to get a more advanced look at COM+. This was NOT money wasted. I highly recommend both books to users wanting the learn about COM+ and n-tier. This book is very well written. Developers with a background in MTS may want to skip the "by Example" book but you definitely want to read this book. Scot Hillier understands COM+ (and MTS for that matter) and his style of writing is pleasant to read.

I'm developing FileMaker applications since 1988. No other book paid for itself in a shorter period of time. I advice everybody who is serious with FileMaker to buy this collection of technique files you find in the accompaigning CD. The first FileMaker book I didn't feel cheated.

A MUST for any and all Filemaker developer. Much more than a simple 'how to' book. Gets to the heart of how to create solutions with FileMaker Pro.

When I first started doing database development back in 1995, I searched long and hard for a good book that'd teach me all about many of the "hard to get your head around" features of FileMaker Pro such as advanced scripting, understanding calculation formulas, dealing with related data and portals, and how to build killer user interfaces. At the time, there were no good books (to my knowledge). Later, after I'd finished my first subcontracting gig as a FileMaker developer and started my own company, I stumbled across Scriptology. I don't even remember where I found it (it was some unlikely place like a mall bookstore or something.)

I have to say that the book helped a great deal in my efforts to become a professional Filemaker developer, an advanced scripter, and a careful database planner/architect. I had already learned many of the techniques illuminated in the book by the by...from colleagues or by surfing the Web, but never before had all the greatest tips and techniques been collected in one place. Enter Scriptology.

One point, though. While I'm sure John and Matt are putting together a new edition as we speak, the book is dated in some respects (it doesn't cover FileMaker 5's new features). It also doesn't cover some very advanced FileMaker topics such as ODBC connectivity, Web development, or the use of plugins. For these reasons, the book seems pricy, but it'll still add a great deal to any developer's FileMaker database-building arsenal.

After using a customized filemaker pro solution for two years at work, which the company had outgrown, I decided to start from scratch and create my own. I have purchased several filemaker books over the past few months and this is the only one which supplemented the filemaker pro manual. It says it covers Filemaker Pro 3.0 and 4.0 but everything applies to Filemaker Pro 5.0 also.

Absolutely every technique I was trying to do was described in detail here. This book explains some of the workaround techniques that are not instantly built in to Filemaker but are possible with a little work. The supplemental CD has each technique as a seperate database file making it easy to analyze and adapt to your own database.

Filemaker Pro is much easier to use than Access and superior when creating both an interface and printed reports, especially graphic intensive reports such as catalogs.

Read the Filemaker Pro manual, then buy this book. The high price of the book is completely covered in the fact that it is so comprehensive and covers advanced techniques in such easy to understand language.

I got a lot of ideas for my own databases from reading this book and was highly impressed by such detailed content.

If you are deciding between Visual Quickstart's Filemaker Pro (it only covers what is covered in the Filemaker manual), Filemaker Pro Bible (hardly comprehensive enough to be called a bible), Automating Filemaker Pro (more theory and description than how to automate it), and Scriptology, ONLY buy Scriptology. It will save you a lot of time and money (unless you are stupid like me and buy all the other books first).

This is the perfect book to have on hand once you get past the stage of learning how to create layouts and relationships. All the other books seem to brush over scripting quickly or make the assumption that the reader somehow instinctively knows what a vested If statement, loop, or set field is, when each might be used in a script and why. For weeks I understood none of this. After an evening with this book it's finally starting to all come together. This book explains everything very clearly and intelligently, is extremely well organized and I believe perhaps the best computer book I've ever purchased. I, too, was afraid I might regret paying ..., but I have no regrets at all (and I certainly have no affiliation with the author). Two thumbs way up!