Software Books

I have been using this book as a second reference in my Algorithm
Engineering class during the whole semester. I found it extremely useful for its nice structure, content and diversity of subjects treated, especially the ones in computational geometry such as Geometric Sweeping and Voronoi diagrams, for instance. I believe this book should be useful to any student taking algorithms class for its structureness, clearness, and completeness.

This is a great book overall, but I give it 4 stars as it lacks the mathematical explanations that I personally was looking for. I am graduate student in Computer Science and a E-Commerce Consultant by profession. This book is more detailed than the Sedweick (I can't spell his name) in the sense that it has some more of a mathematical approach. It lacks the level of explanation that the Sedweick book provided. It has some math, but overlooks some steps thus targeting someone with a pretty solid math background, not someone with sophomore level undergraduate math background.

Overall.. if you're a student taking an algorithms or advanced algorithms class (especially a graduate class), you might want to invest in this book.

I have studied both undergrad and grad algorithm courses from this book at KFUPM. For a beginner, the author provides a moderate level of mathematical analysis which helps in building a solid foundation, but avoids minor details that may obscure the overall grasp of the subject. The Exercise sets at the end of each chapter vary from easy to challenging....

The book represents a well written, consistent and easy to follow view on the area of algorithm analysis. It gives an excellent overview of various mathematical and computer science areas, including but not limited to combinatorial geometry, NP-problems, complexity theory, graph theory, algorithm analysis, dynamic programming and even computational geometry.

Most of the chapters are intended for a senior level undergraduate and graduate student, but some (such as part 4 devoted to complexity problems) are more suitable for "mature" audience and require some preliminary knowledge in the area.

I found chapters on sorting, data structures, recursion and functional programming well written and structured, and examples to be practical as well as informative.

Sections on amortized analysis, randomized algorithms, approximation algorithms and iteration improvement deal with current directions in the algorithmic research and provide an excellent overview of the "state-of-the-art" in these areas. I also enjoyed reading through the section on greedy algorithms (shortest path and minimum spanning tree problems).

Section on computational complexity and analysis of the relationship between complexity classes seems to be a bit complicated, those who are interested in this area should probably do some preliminary reading.

The last section on computational geometry (my area of expertise) and applications of Voronoi diagrams could be extended, but even in the current state it givs a pretty good idea of what computational geometry is all about.

Overall, I give to this book a "5 star" review and recommend it for anyone who is seriously interested in learning exactly how algorithm design and analysis work. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and can only wish that author would write more books like that in the future!

this is a okay book about mashups. I was hoping for more technical details, but a great start at conceptualizing mashups used by Amazon.com.

The book covers more than the Amazon APIs so I recommend it if you are interested in mashups in general. I'm very keen on JSON right now and was pleased to find that covered as well. I think the author is a very good programmer who has many clever ideas like using XSL to transform XML into JSON (although using Yahoo! Pipes is easier). I'd have to say that this is one of the few programming books I've read that presented some really ingenious solutions and creative project ideas. Most books just provide uninspiring "Hello World" examples.

If you want to build applications and mashups using the Amazon E-commerce and S3 APIs this book from Francis Shanahan is a great place to start. It begins with a good overview of the ECS services and then covers useful topics like XSLT, Ajax, JSON, and mobile. Good coverage of both the Amazon SOAP and REST APIs. Includes mashup examples using primarily Microsoft tools like C# that mix with Yahoo Maps, eBay, and YouTube.

One thing you'll get here but not in a lot of other comparable books are architecture diagrams for each project. This is particularly helpful for mashups where there's often lots of integration happening at multiple layers. The illustrations help solidly conceptualize what happens where.

If you want to learn the various ways in which you can use Amazon's Web Services, this is an excellent starting point. Shanahan goes beyond "mashups" in the strict Web 2.0 sense of the term; he looks at the various ways of supporting wireless devices, and the use of the S3 storage service. The only nits (so far - I'm still working through some of the material) are that he assumes the use of Microsoft tools, and he identifies the term "JSON" with one particular style of mashup using script retrieval. (JSON is a serialization scheme which can be used for many different use cases, including RESTful interactions.) But these are minor points; this is an excellent book - and a lot of fun, too.

The book was band new just like the seller said and arrived in a timely manner. I would buy from this seller again.

I used this book in my introductory level computer science course. I found this book to be an essential tool in my early undersanding of how computer works in general and more importantly how to develop working algorithms. This book is well designed and easy to read and easy to understand. This book comes with a CD ROM. I believe this is the key feature to this book. On the CD ROM there are emulators of various computer operations. (eg. Compiler tree breakdown, and many other emulators. An Excellent book!

Deckers gives you a concise tour of computer science. Not enough to turn you into a programmer, given the space limitations of the book. But he covers many key ideas in the field. Including Usenet, email, virtual communities [think Second Life], and the World Wide Web. Naturally, he has to explain HTML, as the graphical language of the Web. HTML is so simple that he essentially explains all its important points. Including the crucial hyperlink tag.

The book then segues naturally from HTML to XML. Where you can now write your own tags. Immensely flexible and popular.

It is only after this, that the book goes into the traditional topics of computer science. The explanations of what makes a programming language. He uses JavaScript as one example of such a language. So you learn about constructs like for loops, if-else and while statements.

The book is really dominated by the Web. The pedagogy stresses this.

This book is one of the two texts in FSU's COP 3502: "Introduction to Computer Science" course (a required course in their Computer Science degree). As the authors state in the preface, they "wanted to design a 'CS 0' course that was a true survey course." They did an excellent job. Basically, they start with the assumption that the reader has never turned on a computer in his life and take him through its history, how to use it, what programming is about, and how the hardware works. They even teach a bit of HTML and JavaScript. There's very little I can say that is bad about the book. It comes down to some typgraphical errors, an incorrect web address for the online portion of the book (easily figured out from the page their web address takes you to), and my belief that they took out too many steps in describing computer switches, gates, and circuits. Frankly, I'm amazed that they reasonably went from a neophyte level to a fully-grounded level in one book. I rate it as 5 stars out of 5.

I bought this at the recommendation of one of my professors and I'm so happy that I got this as my first Bible reference software. Not only is the content absolutely fantastic, but the Logos system works great, even though I consider myself a beginner user so far. I keep my notebook with me in class and can very quickly find supplementary information that is related to topics being discussed. It is also great to have at my fingertips while doing homework when I run into a new idea in my reading and want to get another explanation for it. I also love the links to the Unabridged Theological Dictionary of the NT. I currently use the books in my seminary library, but am looking forward to getting that on CD-ROM as well.

There are many bible dictionaries available on the market but the Anchor Bible Dictionary (ABD) is probably the most comprehensive and represents the finest of biblical scholarship. There are more than 7200 pages, 6000 entries from 800 leading international scholars. Having it available through the Logos Library System is an enormous advantage (if you want something even better than Logos, check out the Accordance for Mac version of this dictionary). You can do quick searches, easy cross-referencing and also sorts of other fun stuff. If you are going to invest in a Bible Dictionary, you can't do wrong with this CD-ROM version of ABD.

First this is in reality more like an Encyclopedia than a Dictionary. While it is more "Liberal" in its perspective you also have conservative author's as well. Like anytype of of book you need to think for yourself. Where it is helpful is in giving a lot of archeological data and excellent bibliographies. I am currently a seminary student working on an MDiv degree. Having it on computer is a life saver. My school's library only has one set for a lot of students (our seminary has over 400 students and that doesn't include the undergrad students). In a class I took on the book of Acts and the General/Catholic epistles we had two sections of the class with 45 students all needing the same volumes of ABD. However having it on computer solves that problem. Also it makes doing research and adding quotes to my research/exegesis papers a synch. This is a really great resource. It should not be your only resource. There are a lot of good Bible dictionaries out there, so don't just depend upon one. God calls upon us to think for ourselves, Paul said to his young friend Timothy "To study". Logos/Libronix has some great titles available, check them out.

There's not much that needs to be said about the quality of the scholarship in the Anchor Bible series as a whole and the Anchor Bible Dictionary in particular - world class. This review is simply to recommend the digital version of the dictionary. I live in the UK and its pretty hard to get the disc version so I bought from Amazon in the US and paid the import duty (17.5% - outrageous!) The shipping costs on the hardback were prohibitive
The product loaded easily and immediately interfaced with other digital versions of book I have on my machine which uses the 'logos' system. The system allows a range of 'bookmarking' across the 'logos' library which really helps with research. The disc does not just reproduce the pages of the hardback work but provides links to other parts of the book which are relevant to the article you're reading. It also enables you to read bible references mentioned in the text by hovering your mouse over the reference.
The ability to seach against individual words or strings of words is magnificent. Also 'copy and paste' facility means it's really easy to export text to other documents.
In short, unless you really love the feel of books, (and who doesn't) and value that above convenience (and this is a reference/research resource not 'furniture' after all) then there's no contest - buy the disc not the book. That said the physical books are lovely to have ....No! I made the right choice!

The definitely guide to Derby. This offers much more explanation and information than the online documentation provided by Apache. But what do you expect... it comes from the minds at IBM themselves.

However, unlike most of IBM's publications and documentation, this is actually readable and informative. You don't have to wade through a series of unknowns and missing pieces of the puzzle in order to figure out what IBM was trying to actually get at.

This will not only help you define and work with Apache Derby, but also make your applications lighter, faster and easier to deploy.

Apache Derby is the only open source, pure Java RDBMS database and APACHE DERBY-OFF TO THE RACES comes from IBM's own database experts and tells how to make the most of Derby and its commercial counterpart IBM Cloudscape. Learn how to support development efforts, install Derby on both Windows and Linux systems, how to understand how programming languages interact with them, and build sample applications step-by-step: everything is here to learn the fundamentals and troubleshoot virtually any problem.

If you've ever been curious about using or integrating Apache Derby (or IBM Cloudscape) into your project, here's the book you'll need... Apache Derby - Off to the Races by Paul C. Zikopoulos, Dan Scott, and George Baklarz. Very well done...

Contents: On Your Marks... Get Set... Go!!! - An Introduction to the Apache Derby and IBM Cloudscape Community; Deployment Options for Apache Derby Databases; Apache Derby Databases; Installing Apache Derby and IBM Cloudscape on Windows; Installing Apache Derby and IBM Cloudscape on Linux; Managing an Apache Derby Database; Security; SQL; Developing Apache Derby Applications with JDBC; Developing Apache Derby Applications with Perl, PHP, Python, and ODBC; "Your Momma Loves Drama" in JDBC; "Your Momma Loves Drama" in Windows; "Your Momma Loves Drama" in PHP; "Your Momma Loves Drama" in Perl; "Your Momma Loves Drama" In Python; Web Site Contents; Apache Derby and IBM Cloudscape Resources; Troubleshooting Hints and Tips; Index

Derby is one of those technologies that has remained "under the radar" for awhile. The Cloudscape database from IBM was released to the open source community under the name Derby, and basically those two packages are the same core code. Cloudscape has a few more add-ons and support from IBM, but if you learn one you learn them both. The authors do a very good job here in helping the reader to understand the architecture and benefits of having a small-footprint embedded relational database system in your application. The start of the book lays the groundwork very well, and establishes the "why" of Derby. But rather than remaining a high-level overview, they dive into the core of the software, showing how to install it, work with it, and how to secure your data. The real value comes when they take a sample ticket application ("Your Momma Loves Drama") and shows how Derby can be integrated the application in a number of different languages. Even if you don't necessarily know Perl, PHP, or Python, you should be able to follow along enough to extrapolate how the concepts can be applied to your platform of choice. After reviewing this book, I've got some ideas on how I'd like to play around with this...

A very solid addition to your programming bookshelf. Between this book and the online resources, you should have everything you need to master the Derby/Cloudscape software.

Apache Derby is a very promising package that is being freely offered, as both source code and binaries. This book is an aggressive promotion of its virtues. The authors stress many things about Derby, or its IBM sidekick, Cloudscape.

Derby addresses a persistent need amongst many Java programmers for an easy to use SQL database. Often, a Java programmer has only cursory expertise in coding for a full database like IBM's DB2 or Oracle. Best usage of these often requires you to be a DBA.

By contrast, Derby comes as a Java JAR file, and can be plonked into your programming environment just as any other JAR file. The book explains in depth how to then interact with Derby, at the level of your Java source code. You can see that you get a pretty powerful engine. Including features like stored procedures and user defined functions, that let you optimise for speed.

Speaking of speed, that is perhaps the biggest possible drawback of Derby. It is run as Java bytecode in a jvm, which is not quite as fast as a package compiled into native binaries. The book seems to deprecate this aspect, but you should be aware of it.

You might find Derby useful enough that you don't have to migrate to a full database like DB2. The book stresses that the code you write to interface with Derby will also do for DB2. There is a potential problem here for IBM, if it loses DB2 business to Derby. But maybe it feels that if it never promoted Derby, then sooner or later, an equivalent product would come along.

Obviously, to use Derby, you still need to know basic SQL statements. And some understanding of how to develop related tables to hold your data. The text is not meant to teach you these skills.

The first chapter also makes various cogent points about the advantages of using Derby. With sometimes unintentional hilarity. A passage says the intent is not to besmirch Microsoft. But despite this pious protestation, it proceeds immediately to do just that. By opining that Microsoft's SQL Server has a 5 year lag between upgrades - Server 2000 and Server 2005. While Derby has source code available, and a much faster cycle for introducing new capabilities.

Apple Training Series: iLife 04
By Michael Rubin
ISBN: 0321256069

Book Review by Al Simukonis, Tucson Macintosh Users Group

Peachpit Press has published a guide to Apple's iLife '04 Programs. The book's author is Michael Rubin.

Michael Rubin self-describes this book as "not so much a training manual as it is a way to show you how to enrich your world by weaving digital audio, photos and videos into many aspects of your life." He promises to skip entire areas of functionality of the programs in order to teach "media literacy" in your life using the iLife programs: iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and Garage Band. He also promises to explain how to share your completed vision with friends, family and clients through iDVD and the web via .Mac.

The book is divided into 14 chapters which consist of projects that introduce the reader with audio capabilities of iTunes, progress to still and moving visual expression using iPhoto and iMovie. Final lessons detail how to combine digital sound and vision into a usable and interesting slide presentation or a movie. These later chapters also show how to easily distribute your created vision and message using hardware and software .

The beginning of each chapter lists the goals (i.e. familiarity with using iTunes) that it intends to achieve in that section, the tools necessary to complete the goal (i.e. a personal music CD or an optional camcorder), and the estimated time it will take to complete that section. Lessons range from a 15 minute iPod introduction to 90 minutes for many of the others. To complete every lesson should take about 15 hours.

The book is very well laid out, has very clear illustrations of screen shots you should expect to see on your own computer, and photos of hardware you will be using. There is a logical progression to the lessons that builds on previously gained knowledge and experience.

If you have the iLife programs, at least a G3 Mac with FireWire and at least system 10.2.8 (minimum 10.2.6) with 256 MB Ram, 1024 x 768 resolution, QuickTime 6.4 (the latest version at this moment is 6.5.1) you can begin. Other recommendations are a 600 Mhz G3 for Garage Band, a 733 Mhz G4 for iDVD, iSight, a digital camcorder, a digital camera, a tripod, a .Mac account. If you have all this equipment this excellent book will show you how to use all of it to express yourself well. If you do not have all this hardware do not let it scare you away from the book.

I found that there are three ways to approach this informative iLife familiarization guide.

The first, of course, is to have a computer with a DVD burner and player, all the camera equipment he covers, and the $100 or so per year dot Mac account that allows you to easily share your creations with the world via the web. After you finish the very clearly explained features of the software and hardware in your arsenal, you will have a core of media knowledge that will give you the potential of being the next George Lucas.

The second way is to go through the book using only the 4.2 GB of photos, video clips, and music on the included DVD. This should be downloaded onto to your hard drive, so a hard drive with sufficient free space is necessary. The full iLife program, Michael advises us, takes an additional 4.3 GB if it is not already on your computer. With limited hard drive space you can get by 250 MB if you only use iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie. An Apple with a DVD player (and preferably burner) is essential for this option.

The examples in the book and the DVD are shown from the perspectives of a student with a school project, a father shooting his daughter's birthday party and a ceramics studio owner who wants to show customers a technique via a video presentation.

The third way, if you are not ready to invest in all the hardware and software that this book covers, is to go through it using only hardware you already have. For example, first I read the book cover to cover. That was a very clear introduction to the potential available to me with my little iBook and the iLife software. I had already played with iTunes, and have a substantial collection of digital photos on my hard drive, but do not have a DVD player on the iBook. Instead of using the photo examples on his DVD player I was able to substitute my own pictures in his lessons. It took a little imagination to substitute his ceramics demo for my cactus garden, but the principles of the program remain the same regardless of the actual images used. If you do not have your own photo collection you can often find legally downloadable images on the internet that you can use for this purpose.

The scope of this book is quite vast. Digital cameras, theories and practice of good composition and lighting, image manipulation, creating books, organizing digital photo albums, creating slide shows with music or narration, making videos from still pictures or camcorders, time lapse photography, theory and use (or not) of pans, tilts and zooms, burning DVD's and creating your own music with Garage Band are all covered. It is like a semester in college taken at your own pace.

One of the best quotes in the book is "editing is not about throwing out bad material. Editing is about building something interesting and watchable" .

With time and practice this book shows any media non-professional how to use the Macintosh and the iLife programs to achieve this goal relatively easily. It does this clearly, logically and interestingly. After the versions of these software programs change this book will not be obsolete because the principles of good audio-visual presentation will remain the same.

If good communication is a necessity or a hobby or if you simply want to know how to get more personal enjoyment from the music and visual capabilities of the Macintosh take a good look at this very well-written book.

Mr. Rubin covers each of the iLife products -- iPod (2 chapters), iPhoto (5 chapters), iMovie (5 chapters), GarageBand (1 chapter), and iDVD (1 chapter). Each chapter covers a specific set of tasks in a step by step manner. And, with nearly every step, he provides explanatory material -- things to look out for, hints, tips, etc. Furthermore, he not only tells you what to do but why you are doing it. By the time you complete the chapters about an application you are well-grounded in how to use it because he has explained all of the basic tasks as well as some of the more arcane features of the program. He even devotes an entire chapter to camcorder shooting techniques. I purchased this book primarily for some instruction in using iMovie. By the time I completed the iMovie chapters I felt comfortable in my ability to shoot digital video, import what I shot to the computer, edit the clips, add sound effects and music, and put it on a DVD. The publisher also includes a disc with the book that has every photo clip, video clip, and sound clip you need to complete the exercises. In many cases the disc also includes a file with the finished project so that you can compare what you did with a professionally completed sample. This is absolutely the best book of its kind that I have ever used. The publisher, Apple, Mr. Rubin, and everyone else involved in this book's production should be very pleased with the result.

Book: "Apple Training Series: iLife `04" (377 pages)
Author: Michael Rubin
publisher: Peachpit Press, 1249 Eighth St., Berkeley, CA 94710
published: 2004
price: $29.99
Phone number of company: 1-800-283-9444
Pros: easy to read, nicely organized, great color illustrations, excellent index, overall very helpful for the beginner or advances iLife user
Cons: no real cons; ideally, I would like to have seen a second CD included that would have allowed people with OS 9 to get a sample of the iLife lessons

This book was of particular interest to me to review since I will soon be using Apple's iLife '04. This an awesome program with 5 subparts: itunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and GarageBand. I wanted a good overview of all five, and was very pleased with what I found. It was easy reading, and its organization, a series of 14 lessons, allows you to learn at your own pace. The book also comes with a CD that you play to work along with the lessons. For me, I had to skip that part for now but certainly will be using it next month after I get my G-5 and begin using OS X (required for iLife). But even without it, the book alone is great for introducing the power and relative simplicity of iLife '04. The great illustrations and index also help a beginner, and would be very useful too to advanced users of iLife. I particularly liked the nice organization and clear writing style of the book, with each section ending with a review of what you learned.
This book is set up as if you were three different people learning about the various parts of iLife '04, namely a parent with a 12-year-old daughter, a high school student, and a small-business owner. Through those people and their needs, you get a real hands-on understanding of what the program can do for you. In all, you learn to 1) create custom CDs and play them on an iPod or a regular stereo system; 2) organize and use still images from your digital camera to create great photos and books of photos, plus slide shows; and 3) create movie DVDs combining still photos with music, special effects, titles, narration, music, and more. Finally, you learn to upload your slide shows and videos to the Web and burn DVDs. Additionally, there are nice "extras" at various logical places in the book, like tips on using your digital camcorder.
Below are the names of the 14 lessons, which further show the progressive nature of the learning process this fine book offers. In all, I would highly recommend this book. It is a great learning tool and well worth the money.

Lesson 1: Making a Custom CD from your music collection
Lesson 2: DJ a Party with your iPod
Lesson 3: Shooting Digital Snapshots and putting them in your Mac
Lesson 4: Organizing and Refining your photos
Lesson 5: Printing and sharing your photos
Lesson 6: Adding motion and effects for a dynamic slide show
Lesson 7: Making a time-lapse video
Lesson 8: Shooting and assembling a very simple movie
Lesson 9: Adding narration to your dynamic slide show
Lesson 10: Shooting with Hollywood-style techniques for better videos
Lesson 11: Editing and finishing a professional-looking movie
Lesson 12: Creating unique music for your projects
Lesson 13: Putting your slide show on the Internet
Lesson 14: Burning DVDs of your videos and slide shows

This is the official Apple Training Guide to the iLife software packages.

Apple doesn't include much documention with their iLife products. This book is a quick and easy way to learn these packages. As an Apple certified product, this is the book used in the Apple Training and Certification program. You can use it by yourself at your own pace where it's broken down into fourteen lessons.

The lessons are aimed at the practical use of the packages, not some esoteric project just made up to show off the software. It starts off discussing audio. Then it moves to mnaging still images, printing still images, and finally moving images, i.e. video.

From his background in the motion picture business, the author has written some very interesting pages on how to use Hollywood techniques in your own movies.

This is the most complete iLife book.

I'm glad that there's finally one book about atl server, but this one seems to have been written in haste. Sure it shows you how to hook up to a database and pull out records, but the examples are not nearly as complex as msdn's . In particular, the caching section is seriously lacking...

This is an excellent book on the definitive technology for VC++ developers wanting to write web applications. ATL Server is the evolution of ISAPI; better, faster and much easier to write. If you are comfortable with C++ template programming and attributed Visual C++, you will find this framework a joy to work with. Just like ATL, ATL Server is streamlined, high performance and easy to extend.

Written by the ATL Server team, this book will guide you through the different parts of ATL Server, giving you not only reasons for why certain design decisions were made but also real-world examples.

The ATL Server library is the perfect addition to ATL, adding the ability to create web services and web applications with the light-weight model of ATL. I found this book very useful for getting new members of my development team up to speed on the basics of ATL Server development (both those with previous ISAPI experience and those without).

I also found this book very useful when tackling some of the more difficult problems that our application faced. In particular the Advanced sections on SRF files, Request Handlers and Web Services provided a number of useful techniques that we were able to apply in our application.

The book also outlines some techniques for using parts of the ATL Server library in non-web applications, which we are finding very useful as we update some of our existing code.

If you're a hardcore C++ developer wanting to do native web development, ATL Server is a great library to work with. If you've done ISAPI extensions, you'll find ATL Server to be a natural, flexible and very performant extension of that model, which makes development a *lot* faster.

And if you like that, then this book is a great way to get you up to speed on ATL Server. It is, after all, written by the people who wrote it. The book is wonderfully easy to read, covers both the basics and plenty of advanced ATL Server topics, and has tons of examples. Plus, it has the advantage of being written with real applications in mind.

On the other hand, if the profile above doesn't sound like it fits you, then this book is probably not for you :)

I had to learn AutoCad in a crunch and had no previous experience, this book is written in very easy to follow instructions. The exercises are easy to follow and there's a wealth of knowledge between those pages!

Thanks Mr. Sykes for this excellent teaching tool.

I was just starting out with CAD at work and needed a book to teach me AutoCAD. I couldn't have asked for a better one! This book explained a topic/tool thoroughly, but then it literally walked me through how to use it (One Step at a Time). (There is even a CD with video demonstrations of many of the exercises.) After that, the author provided several exercises for me to work on my own (from simple to challenging). I feel very comfortable working in two-dimensional CAD now and have produced several client-ready drawings. I even got a raise!

Buy it today i have it and it tought me a now i am almost a pro buy it today

I've taught AutoCAD for over ten years now - piecing together bits and pieces from one book and another. But no book ever covered the subject as well as the One Step at a Time series. With Sykes' 2002 book, I can cover both basic and intermediate classes. With his 3D book, I can complete my student's training in the same easy style they've become accustomed to.
Good job, Sykes! Keep it up!

I have tried many different bagpipe software also being as registered owner of BagPipe Writer Gold. The sound created in writing this new software is awesome. Never before have I heard a tune sound like the real deal as is produced by this software. No need to go and buy a Sound Blaster card that is required by most of the other Bagpipe software I know it is the real deal as one of my dogs started to howl as soon as I played Scotland The Brave using this software. She howled all the way thru playing the tune just as she does if I am playing the real bagpipes( poor old gal) I highly recommend if anyone wants the real deal and the real sound. Purchase this software and get rid of all the others This is the one all bagpipers have been looking for!"

The sound created by this new software is awesome. Never before have I heard a tune sound like the real deal as is produced by this software.

This is a great product! It should fill a need longfelt in the bagpipe community!

I have been piping for 15 years now and wanted to find composition software to use to produce my own music. I was overwhelmed at how realistic the sound quality was that this software produces! It is truly heads above all other software packages! Additionally as an instructor the ability to produce sheet music for my students with the correct finger positions in invaluable! I love it!

I love this one! It is real easy ro follow unlike the thicker manuals propping up the corner of my computer desk. I needed something to show me how to link some of my documents to other spreadsheets and this book showed me how to do that quick and easy. I recomend Basics to Business to folks like myself who are managing their own consulting business.

Basics to Business-Minding Your Business with Excel is an excellent reference guide for the business owner, as well as, the college student. Although you may have experience using excel, this 48 page book makes looking up the more complicated functions a snap. I use this book to link data in the daily accounting of my small business. This is much easier and faster than referring to those 600 page training manuals. It is more of a "cliff notes" version of a reference guide which we can all appreciate in our fast paced busy lives. This book is resourceful and everyone will benefit from owning a copy.

This book has been the best for organizing and running my two small businesses. Although I've enjoyed "Dummies" books, having all I need to know in 48 pages has saved me A LOT of time.

Basics To Businss Easy To Read Easy To Follow. A Must Have For Business And Computer Science Students!