Multimedia Books

This book is one of the best around for anyone interested in setting up an alternative worship service/experience. The companion CD-Rom has loads of useful resources and suggestions to help. I would recommend this book to anyone who knows they are unhappy with "trad" worship but don't know how to go about exploring alternatives to the old forms of worship.

I really appreciate the easiness and the clarity of this book. It is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in music production techniques and engineering skills.

There are several books on Content Management Systems (CMS). But there are only very few books on the market covering the topic of Digital asset management (DAM). Three books stands out:
"Professional Content Management System: handling Digital Media Assets", "Digitial Asset Management: how to realize value of video and image libaries" and "Expanding a Digital Content Management System: for the Growing Digital Media Enterprise".

Each book describes the subject in different perspectives. The "Digitial Asset Management: how to realize value of video and image libaries" by David Austerberry is more like introduction to DAM and related concepts and technologies. While "Expanding a Digital Content Management System: for the Growing Digital Media Enterprise" by my former collegaue and friend, Magan Authur is discussing how to plan and implement a large scale digital content management systems.

The Professional Content Management Systems by A Mathure and P. Thomas empersizes much more on (and deeper in) technical and applicaiton design aspects. Besides the basic concepts, it covers a wide range of topics on DAM from user requirements;video production use cases and workflows; media formats and standards; system architecture and integrations; hardware infrastructure and application requirements. The deepth of the discusions on systems architecture of both software and hardware are incrediable. The application modules and use cases scenarios presented for broadcasting industry are very well illustrated. The book reveals fully the authors vivid imagation, creative and industry experience.

Even though I may not completely agree with every piece of the design described in the book, some of the core concepts and use cases described are really valuable. (I have built one of succussful commercial enterprise DAM system used by by many large enterpises in broadcasting, advertising and Coorporate Marketing before this book was published).

I especially recommend this book to Product Managers and System Architect who are trying to build a DAM system; or trying to build applications on top of the DAM System. I have read ths book twice since I brought it over 1 year ago. It's still very refreshing to read it.

disclaimer: I have no association with the authors of the book (don't know them) or BlueOrder.

Chester Chen (Xiaoguang Chen)

Just the book Programming Windows 95 user interface will be worth the money, along with other books. I tried to get Programming Windows 95 user interface but it was out of trace--you cannot found it even at MSPress. I thus bought this one although I had other great books on the CD. A must have and a big bargin.

First I studied OSEK(Open system together with interfaces for automotive electronics: Offene Systeme und deren Schnittstellen fur die Elektronik im Kraftfahrzeug) by OSEK documents.
In Japan there are open source OSEK os, TOPPERS/OSEk is available.
Second I studied OSEK os using TOPPERS/OSEK.
Third I now read this book.
This is very compact information using OSEK OS, not making OSEK OS.
In the CD there are source code for each chapter.
You can feel what is the OSEK OS.
Now OSEK OS is ISO standards ISO 17356 series.

Chapter 11 of this book is concerned with porting existing MMX to WirelessMMX. If you are the type that is going to play with MMX code, chances are you have been playing with MMX code, and this chapter is ~the~ chapter that you are looking for.

I haven't read far through the book yet, nor tried the examples, but the reading is very presentable and the topics are well aligned with existing needs for performance optimized software on PDA/Phone devices.

IntelPRESS has good connections with the hardware developers at Intel, and the book has been reviewed by some of the key Intel Developers and Systems Integrators. In a world where correctly surfing the technology wave is the difference between staying afloat and drowning -- I look to IntelPress to keep my head above water.

Reviewed by Regan Windsor for Reader Views (3/07)

What does the sinking of the Titanic have to do with project management today? Mark Kozak-Holland presents a wealth of information relating the best practices of project management to the pitfalls of the Titanic project.

The Titanic spent four years in development, for only four days in operation. Although the story of these four days is well-known, it is the details of the project from architecture to operation that provides fascinating insight into what ultimately leads to project failure. What lead an unsinkable ship to sink? The same thing that leads today's IT projects to fail - poor decision-making.

The business world of 1909 was not overly different from today - stiff business competitive pressures. What White Star needed was new business strategies that took advantage of emerging technology. By focusing on customer service they wanted to differentiate through increased quality of crossing and customer experience, building the ship based on comfort and space rather than speed. The project had a solid business case and addressed the needs of all three classes of passengers.

Today's IT projects must also ensure due diligence in examining the business problem, articulating competitive services, defining potential costs, and assessing risk. Projects must also determine by segments customer/target audience, value propositions, and create both profiles and scenarios for each of these. Also, establishing desirable service level targets is important for guiding the architecture.

The Titanic architecture stage was solid. Large investments were set aside for state of the art, emerging technology in safety and operations features (non-functional requirements). They also made a shipbuilders model (equivalent to an IT pilot project) and used it to analyze all exposures to the possibilities of loss.

The construction stage integrated many complex technologies and selected safety features to reduce risk. As construction progressed, overconfidence around the abundance of safety designs (non-functional requirements) began to result in a perception that the Titanic was unsinkable.


As the Titanic moved into the design phase some conflicts between functional and non-functional features began to emerge. Decisions were made that compromised individual safety features and escalated the level of risk. Business pressures for the Titanic to go live were enormous due to the large investments tied up in the four-year construction. Sound like some IT projects you know of?!

Due to the pressures the Titanic moved prematurely into the operating stage, where the new pressure became to prove Titanic to be superior to Olympic (its sister ship). And thus the thread of poor decision-making continued. While entering Iceberg Alley, not only did the lookout deck not have binoculars, the bucket test was forged due to rope too short to reach the water, but the ship was actually picking up speed to maintain an unrealistic schedule. While some of these errors occurred due to "skipping out" on the testing phase, the error in judgements that contributed to the crash were a result of business and marketing pressures.

"Project Scapegoats: Lessons from the Titanic Project" is a taping of a lecture by the same name. The DVD also includes on screen slides full of interesting and valuable insights not only on the details of the Titanic project but also the lessons learned in relation to IT projects. Also included in the discussion of each phase of the Titanic from architecture, to construction, planning, testing, and operating are slides covering Best Practices in IT projects. While a couple of slides are blurry or unreadable, the key slides coupled with the lecture information provide an invaluable resource.

"Project Scapegoats: Lessons from the Titanic Project" takes a fascinating historical project and turns it into an interesting and informative lesson in project management.

I would recommend this book to people who have browsed the web and now want to get involved in writing their own web pages. I love the fact its Macintosh oriented! Also, this book takes you through a (brief) history of hypertext, html, etc. and explains (briefly) the controversies between purists and standardizers - I have a better understanding of where all this came from. Pfaffenberger is an excellent and entertaining writer - maybe a little tiny bit simplistic in some ways but not condescendingly patronizing and very thorough. After having looked through several books including "HTML for Dummies" (definitely condescending) and another thick book professing to give you everything you need to know on running a website (which was written by a compendium of people and assumed you understood all sorts of things) - I would say this is a great starting point. (I rated a 9 because I feel there is ALWAYS room for improvement...)

I picked up this book a couple of years ago, when the second edition first came out. It provides a very complete overview of digital video, from capture, through non-linear editing and compression, to output or streaming video (web-based) applications. The major concepts are well-explained and fully illustrated -- including video clips on the CD that show the various phenomena being discussed. The book falls down in only one category -- it devotes a significant amount of time to specific product descriptions and evaluations. However, given the lead time for production of a book, these product descriptions were out-of-date when the book first appeared. They are even more out-of-date now. If you read the book in order to familiarize yourself with desirable features of products and how you might use them, it is excellent. If you use it to select a specific product, you will probably be making a mistake.

"These Are the Days of Our Lives" is a very good book. This is my fourth time reading it. Even if there are a little bad words in it(like f***!)I still think you should read it if you are a super duper Queen fan !!!!