Wireless Data Books

If you need to get up to speed quickly or just a quick reference for a new technology, this is a good solution; it is written by people, who know their field, in clear concise language (no upper level math degree's needed). Making good use if diagrams and well worded descriptions the book will fill in the mystery behind how video gets to your phone. This is not a replacement for a text book for system designers, but is an excellent resource for persons needing a quick but thorough understanding of cellular video.

Mobile Data and Wireless Lan Technologies is a book to help system administrators. Some buildings are hard to wire.Some people are hard to keep plugged in. When the telecommunication or I.T. manager calls in a consultant, how will they talk? This book is a tutorial for the administrator or network technician .It covers a large range of topics. It will not make the reader an expert. It may allow the reader to ask important questions.

As the review title suggests, the first drawback with this book is a lack of index. It is inconceivable that a book of this sophistication could be published without an index.

Putting that immense weakness aside, this is a really useful book. I am always wary of books that are really just collections of papers with each chapter written by a different set of authors. I have written such chapters for composite books myself and realise how little co-ordination there normally is between the authors and, consequently, between the chapters. So chapter N will use different terminology from chapter M for the same concept, chapter N+1 will not follow-on from chapter N, etc. Certainly this book has some of that weakness but there does seem to have been some sort of effort to align terminology and reduce repetition between papers.

There are a lot of grammatical errors not picked up in the editing phase (speeds measured in km on page 277, "hypothesis" for "hypotheses" on page 50, etc.) but apart from rather nasty misprint on page 59 they don't generally cause a loss of sense in the article.

OK, once beyond the lack of index (!!!) and grammatical errors, what are the articles like? Generally insightful, stimulating and useful. They are almost without exception fairly elementary and do not demand any great depth of knowledge in location technologies or data analysis. Instead the content is qualitative and presents methods for approaching issues rather than solutions of those issues.

I'm glad I bought the book and have learned from it.

My background: practitioner rather than academic in this field. Designing and writing systems for location-based knowledge discovery.

Ezio Biglieri has again written a good text on Digital Communications, following his popular book on TCM (Trellis-Coded Modulation). This book avoided the pitfall of covering too much material, but only barely. Don't get me wrong: there's a lot of excellent and state-of-the-art knowledge in this book, but the problem is exactly that there's a lot of excellent and state-of-the-art knowledge in this book. I see this book more along the idea of Proakis' "Digital Communications" book, which is a reference first, tutorial second, although this book is much easier to read than Proakis' book.

Although the title suggests strong emphasis on wireless communications (which is good), most of the book applies to the general notion of Digital Communications, and even includes a chapter on Voltaire channels (dispersive channels). There are several small sections on the very recent research results, such as turbo codes and belief propagation decoding. This is very nice, but it's also very brief. Too brief to be a tutorial.

So if you're looking for an alternative to Proakis' "Digital Communications", this is a no-compromise alternative in terms of coverage.

The book is not an easy read. Let me say that right up front. In part due to the inherent complexity of SIP. And the fact that when you try to use it in tandem with other protocols and products, the complexity increases.

However if you persevere, it may be worthwhile. SIP's main usage in the marketplace seems to be as one of the enabling underlayers of VoIP. And VoIP is growing strongly, due to the allure of free long distance calls.

Not that you are necessarily restricted to VoIP. Another advantage of the book is its delineation of various other applications that also use SIP.

The book is very easy to follow and understand. It simplified setting up security features in my wireless environment.

Mobile electronic commerce is a field that is struggling to grow. Widely believed to have vast promise. Shi here presents a series of articles suggesting how this could come about.

Currently, there are still numerous problems. But the multiyear success of simple applications like buying music tones in Europe and Japan has inspired speculations as to what more could happen.

One thing to note is that the current successes involve the cellular operator acting as a gatekeeper, who handles the billing. Needless to say, the operators wish to keep this central role. Future growth might involve a means of sidelining the operators, and letting users do business with each other more directly.

The book has papers by various authors that explore the problems in wireless or mobile computing. You might naively think that cellphones work, so doesn't that prove the thesis? Certainly, cellphones are vital to this discussion, in part because the cellphone networks underwrote the research and development that proved that one type of mobile network is practical and easy to use.

But there may well be other types of networks. For remote Internet access, say. And when users move from cell to cell, the problems of updating the user on the network are not simple. The book also goes into how to efficiently send non-trivial amounts of data to a moving user. Caching issues can be very difficult.

The book has many challenges that you might want to research.

"Wireless Internet & Mobile Business How to Program" contains a good discussion of the various elements of programming for wireless devices. The reader will come away from the programming chapters with a solid understanding of how to implement simple structures. The chapter that introduces algorithms is clear and concise; the chapter that introduces control structures is easy to understand (if somewhat odd in its ordering). The chapter that introduces Object Oriented Programming provides a clear introduction to objects. This approach, using several real-world examples, is a good way to orient the non OO-minded to the use of objects. It covers the different aspects of objects in the abstract well. However, it could use a clearer explanation of why developers should use objects instead of the regular, top-down structured programming they've (possibly just) learned. For those new to programming, this is essential.

The book is not really just a "How to Program" manual, as are some of Deitel & Deitel's other similarly named texts. (Their excellent C++ and Java books come to mind.) Some of the chapters, like the one on employment opportunities, are in danger of becoming obsolete quickly. However, overall this is a solid text with good treatment of wireless programming and other loosely related topics.

I work at a company which produces wireless networking products. In my search for books on the subject, this is the best one I've found that explains wireless networking from the point of view of someone who wants to design or install wireless networks. Also included are details of the best commercial products and contact information for the makers of those products.