Programming Books

I found this book very informative and practical. I particularly liked the emphasis on using your head and not making silly decisions because of all the hype.Lots of good information throughout.

I bought the book after having seen the book featured in TIME magazine. It was well worth the it. My husband had not been interested in hearing or reading anything about Y2K saying that the whole thing was overblown. He picked-up the book after I received it and he couldn't put it down - I haven't seen it since. I found out today he has now loaned it to a friend, so I am buying myself another copy, but I am having it sent to my office this time!

So many Y2K books focus on telling you why you should be shaking in your boots. This book presents researched facts along with more useful and usable tips and advice than any other book I have read. And this one was also EASY TO READ and didn't contain pages and pages of technical stuff that, frankly, I don't understand anyway and don't want to understand at that. I HIGHLY recommend this book to everyone who wants straight info about Y2K and useful information. After reading the book I bought copies for my family and friends as gifts - my highest compliment!

This subject of Y2K is a little scarey since it is something new and unknown. Dr.Shepard's book helps me understand it and feel better. I bought the book on Amazon about 3 weeks ago and read it, trying things he suggested and I liked the book. I think you will like it too.

Dr. Shepard's book on the Y2K situation is well titled, as it truly is a very practical guide to what we will be facing just one short year from today. It has been thoroughly researched and is complete in its scope. An even more important point to my mind is the "easy read" style and theuser-friendly layout of the book. The nature of this subject produces anxiety so I especially appreciated the clear writing style and humor that invited me to continue in my education on this fast approaching challenge. I found a concise description of the problems keyed to specific areas of life; the examples that allowed me to focus on those that apply to me; the preparations I can make to mitigate the shock of these problems; and some creative solutions if I do find myself caught up in their impact. I now have reason to hope that with my heightened awareness and the proper preparations suggested in this book, I will get through the impact of the Y2K changeover in good shape and, with luck, even some grace. Thank you, Dr. Shepard!

good book. easy to understand and easy to do the exercises. much easier than the dreamweaver 8 book, this is cs3 and this book works!

This is a really good book to learn Dreamweaver. It talks a little about the subject then immediately lets you try it out. Great way to learn.

This is an excellent step by step book on how to create web pages using Dreamweaver. I would highly recommend this book.

My Dreamweaver CS3 class uses this textbook. I am brand new to web site creation and find this book a great place to start. Instructions are for both Mac and Windows, and the files on the included CD are very useful in teaching the student how to actually create and edit content. I am ordering another book from the Revealed series for Flash.

The book is awesome. Especially for those who like to learn by doing it. Despite few editing issues like miss typo or calling different functions with the same name, i was able to follow with the content. Higly Recommend.

'Advanced Excel for Scientific Data Analysis' is one of those niche books that is absolutely the standard in the field. Warning/fact #1 is that this books is NOT NOT NOT for the every day regular Excel user. Repeat, this book is NOT for you. Jam-packed full of mathematical equations without a high amount of screen shots, this book is for mathematicians, physicists, econometrics people, statisticians or anyone that needs to go way way past the normal 'AVG' and 'SUM' functions found in Microsoft Excel. This is not light reading and its about as pinpointed to a specific audience as can be.

If you are a power Excel user go buy this book immediately and you will learn how to release its power better than ever before!!

***** HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION

Do you need a spreadsheet tool to analyze experimental data? If you do, then this book is for you! Author Robert De Levie, has written an outstanding book on advanced Excel that shows you how to conduct the numerical analysis of experimental data, such as are usually encountered in the physical sciences.

De Levie, begins by describing some of the standard mathematical methods, such as numerical integration and differentiation, and how to perform these most accurately on the spreadsheet. Then, the author examines precision--with random fluctuations and their reduction or removal. Next, he shows you how to apply the least squares methods to polynomials in the independent variable x, and to multivariable functions. The author continues by describing the nonlinear least squares method, where one compares a given data set with a model expression that depends on one or more numerical parameters.
In addition, he also deals with the application of Fourier transformation in numerical data analysis, rather than instrumentation, where it is often built in. Then, the author discusses the use of time-dependent signals. He also describes particular types of errors: The algorithmic deviations caused by replacing a differential equation by an approximation thereof. Next, the author will show you how to copy spreadsheet data into a macro, manipulate them, and return the result to the spreadsheet. He continues by looking at some common mathematical operations, often encountered in scientific data analysis, and their numerical implementations on the spreadsheet. In addition, the author shows you how to extend the set of tools available for matrix operations in Excel. Finally, he focuses on three types of spreadsheet-related errors: those that are rather easy to make on a spreadsheet, those that result from Excel's adherence to the IEEE-754 protocol, and those that are in hidden in Excel.

The author of this most excellent book has made a great effort to make it as broadly useful as possible to the reader, and to incorporate examples from different areas. More importantly, the author believes that this book offers instead, an attempt at the synthesis of different areas, thus illustrating how many numerical problems can be fitted comfortably in the convenient, user-friendly format of the spreasheet.

Every modern scientist and engineer relies upon some type of software for the analysis of data. Many software programs are available in the market today and each seems to have its own unique code and learning curve. In the PC world, perhaps no other software for data analysis is more common and easier to learn than Microsoft Excel. Many high school students are already using Excel for their homework assignments. All of these features make Excel an attractive analytical tool for scientists and engineers at university and afterwards. All such tools need reliable tutorials in order to train users to harness their full capabilities. Most available literature on Excel is introductory in nature, and therefore not appropriate for advanced applications. Robert de Levie's "Advanced Excel for scientific data analysis" helps fill in this void.

Prospective readers should be aware that this text is not appropriate for beginners. The author clearly alerts readers to this point in the preface. This is also readily apparent from browsing the Table of Contents. I was skeptical at first with some of the more advanced applications such as solving differential equations in Excel. Many scientists use higher-level programming languages such as Mathematica and Matlab to solve differential equations. While such software packages are quite powerful, they also have steep learning curves. I previously thought that Excel is not capable of solving differential equations, but Chapter 7 turned me into a believer.

The major emphasis of the examples is on least-squares and Fourier transformation. Chapter 2 does a nice job of contrasting Excel's three available routines for linear regression. The author does a very thorough job showing how Excel can be effectively used for Fourier transformation, and gives many examples. However, some other useful mathematical topics are either covered minimally or omitted entirely. For example, I was disappointed by the lack of a routine to calculate eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Excel's array structure makes it well-suited to linear algebra and the author should consider adding more on this topic in a future edition.

One of the greatest strengths of the book is its detailed coverage of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Advanced data analysis require the use of special user-defined functions, and VBA allows one to extend Excel capabilities to satisfy this need. Unfortunately, VBA code sometimes conflicts with Excel code. For example, the square root operation in Excel is SQRT, but in VBA is SQR. While the author certainly has no control over this, he does an excellent job alerting the reader to these pitfalls.

Chemists definitely need a reliable tool for the analysis of experimental data. de Levie's book covers most of the techniques we use in our lab. The book clearly demonstrates how Excel is not just a convenient tool for plotting data from the stock market or keeping track of students' grades, but a powerful tool for scientific data analysis. This book is highly rercommended for all students and research workers in the areas of analytical and physical chemistry.

If I had written this book I think I would have called it Scientific Excel rather than Advanced Excel. To be sure, the book is certainly for advanced Excel users, but it won't help you do an advanced business application.

You'd best have some knowledge about Excel before starting this one. There's a brief survey of Excel at the beginning that starts off comparing a spreadsheet to an accountant's ledger. That's pretty basic. Anyone with any Excel experience at all can follow the first three pages. On page four he is talking about making a thousand point plot with random numbers, normal distribution -- no longer something from Excel for Dummies. By page 5 he's calculating averages and standard deviations. By the end of this Survey chapter he's talking about the accuracy of the calculations performed by Excel.

Subsequent chapters discuss various types of mathematical manipulation that are often needed in the analysis of scientific data.

There are three chapters on Least Squares. This is the fitting of a curve to collected data so that the trends might be more easily visualized.

There is a chapter on Fourier Transformations, which is the probably the most frequently used analysis tool when working in signal processing. Geophysical seismic data, radar receivers, cell phone systems are all processed primarily using Fourier Transforms. This kind of data is of course too voluminous for Excel, but the techniques used here would be ideal for quite a number of laboratory applications.

A couple of chapters cover convolution, deconvolution, and time-frequency analysis as well as Numerical integration of ordinary differential equations.

All of these processing tasks are done using macros. These are described in the book, or can be downloaded from the author's website -- www.bowdoin.edu/~rdelevie/excellaneous/. This web site also includes some additional macros that enhance Excel's computationability when handling numbers of higher precision.

The final four chapters of the book are on writing your own or modifying existing macros, with an orientation to scientific analysis.

I consider this to be almost a mandatory book for anyone interested in using Excel to analysis scientific data.

This book does not give much info on Excel itself. I think the book is outstanding in that it opens one's eyes to using Excel for tasks like non-linear least squares fitting of data to models, signal deconvolution, etc. In retrospect, that one could use Excel for this should not be too surprising, but I have found myself resorting to MathCAD for many of these things when a solution implemented in Excel would have been easier to share with colleagues since Excel is more available. There is a bias towards biological/chemical examples, but nothing too egregious.

If you are working with Filemaker Pro files on the web, this book is essential. Although the title says, "Advanced," I think it would be perfect for beginners also.

I particularly appreciated the expository style of the book. In a way that I haven't found in many other computer manuals, the authors start with a real problem the reader has and show how to solve it, adding interesting general commentary along the way. For example, I had a problem developing an XSLT document to import variable numbers of repetitions of a field - there, on pp. 330-333 is a brief statement of the problem, specification of a solution, and clear explanation of the code. I recommend this book to any FMPro user who wants to work with FMPro and CDML, PHP or XML/XSLT. Well done! I hope these authors produce other books of the same calibre.

This is more than a book, it is really a course in web development. The authors communicate the material in a way that is easy to understand, and the book is filled with examples that you can do as you read. Although the focus is on FileMaker, the knowledge you'll glean will apply to web development efforts with other databases as well. I reviewed and skimmed the chapters out of sequence in order to get a sense of what the book had to offer. Once I had that overview, I began to read the chapters in sequence and I think that's the best approach, as material in succeeding chapters builds on the previous chapters. No stone is left unturned as XML/XSLT, Instant Web Publishing, CDML, Lasso, PHP and Web Services are covered concisely, yet in depth. Take your time with this book; after working through the material you'll be prepared to do web development using any of the aforementioned technologies.

This is one of the first books that goes beyond a mere rehash of the manual, like most FileMaker books out there. This book is a treasure trove for those who already have their feet wet in FileMaker and are looking to go to the next level.

This is a very good book, and if you're looking to web-enable your FileMaker 6 application, this is pretty much the only source for in-depth information that's available.

However, this book definitely left me wanting more. I have been building a fairly sophisticated web application in CDML using the Web Companion, the web toolkit that comes built into FileMaker 6. This topic gets less than 50 pages, and feels light. Many of my questions went unanswered. This topic could have been 100 pages, easily.

Two other toolkits, Lasso and PHP, while great options, require you to acquire and install add-on software. Each gets 60+ pages in the book. It's great that there's additional information (possibly required to cover installation), but devoting that much space to things not built into FileMaker, while not giving enough depth to the built-in component, seems like the wrong focus.

Another flaw with the book is that it doesn't really cover larger-scale applications. You get information about how to access, search, modify, and delete data, but you don't really get advice about how to structure a full-blown web application. Things like managing user sessions, authentication, etc., really are not covered at all. You'll need another book (which won't use FileMaker as an example at all) to get information about these basic web application topics.

In the end, this book gave me enough information that I could get started, and a good enough CDML reference that I've been able to figure out a lot more on my own. That makes it quite a good book, well worth the money spent. I would love to purchase an expanded 2nd edition.

I should note that it remains to be seen how well this book will hold up after FileMaker 7 Advanced Server is released. There's a lot of changes in FileMaker 7, and all of the web functionality has moved to the Advanced Server (not yet released), so many things may change...

Very good book, expecially for the advices presents in it, unfortunately for some implementation aspects, the author, focuses too much on the Verilog language.

while there's a veritable sea of books discussing VHDL and other hardware design technologies, there's precious little in the realm of practical, roll up your sleeves and get the job done FPGA design info.

mr. kilts takes a very pragmatic hands-on approach to FPGA design and implementation with logs of examples, practical board level design advice and a book layout that focuses on what you need to get the job done.

the coverage of simulation techniques and considerations alone, is worth the price.

Books on basic logic design swarm the shelves. So do books on Verilog and VHDL. Why, then is logic design always learned on the job? I mean real, industrial logic design, with all the gritty bits. Kilts asked the question too, and wrote this book in response.

The first three chapters start in on the first three goals (conflicting goals, usually) of logic design: high speed, low power, and minimal area. Speed, of course, includes both throughput and latency - again, goals that often conflict with each other. Examples go well beyond the basic, on up to pipelined AES, a pipelined RISC, IEEE floating point units, and commercial standards for digitized audio, case studies with plenty of room to make the design points that Kilts means to get across.

The book's value comes from its willingness to get into technology specifics, way past the bland idealizations of pure logic design. For example, clock gating doesn't just make a design hard to follow, it often blocks the use of the chip's special purpose clock networks. Those have been engineered beyond belief for low skew under massive loading. You can use other wires as clocks, but you expose yourself to lots of ugly problems when you do. Special logic inputs matter, too, especially dedicated set and reset lines on flops. (I've seen some remarkable uses of the dedicated carry lines between closely coupled LUTs, too, but he doesn't touch on those.)

Of course, there are weak spots. Kilts touches on simulation and testbenches, but only touches. Testbenches and verification have their own texts, though, and exotica like mixed level simulations depend intimately on the specific tools at hand. A few pages, but only a few, presented maddening typos, like the capital-X-sub-i on p.125 where small-x-sub-i would have made sense (non-technical readers: if you made it this far, just trust me, it matters), or the resistor symbol in figure 15.12 where inductance is discussed. Section 8.2, on implementing math.h kinds of functions should simply have been dropped, or maybe replaced with a discussion on range reduction. The intended reader took Calc I and remembers the Taylor expansion. Being familiar is its only advantage, though. It doesn't minimize mean-square or maximum error, doesn't deal with endpoint continuity or differentiability in piecewise approximations (which aren't mentioned either), and has lots more problems. A list of grown-up techniques and references would have been far more helpful. Also, this text simply does not address one of the most pressing and painful issues in real-world logic design: compilation time. Although Kilts mentions floor-planning, he says nothing about how it supports incremental compilation, and notes tradeoff of result quality vs. turnaround in only one offhand phrase, as near as I could tell. Incremental compilation might be a non-Xilinx advantage, though, so forgivable within Kilts's stated limitations.

Kilts more than makes up for that small weakness in other areas, including discussion of parameterization. Because this is Verilog based, it doesn't mention VHDL's architecture configurability. Even in Verilog, though, parameterization appears pervasively in industrial design, especially when reuse matters, and rarely if ever shows its face in basic texts on logic design.

This book assumes that you already know Verilog well enough to build a simple pipelined processor, or at least to follow along closely. It also assumes that you've spent some time with industrial synthesis tools, and can translate from tool-specific advice in this book into the different but equivalent specifics of the tools that you're using. In academic terms, I'd call it a backup text for a third course in logic design, or for a course in something else that uses FPGAs heavily. It's not just for classrooms, though. Beginning professionals stand to benefit from this advice, and even battle-scarred logic designers who still remember 5V power rails might pick up a hint or two.

-- wiredweird

This is a great reference book for any level FPGA designer. This book skips past the basics unlike most books on FPGA design and jumps right into advanced topics that practical FPGA designers need to be aware of.

Plenty of discussion on the trade offs that must be faced in FPGA design based on you desired optimization target (speed, size, & power) and discussion of methods to achieve that goal. Lots of practical example code is used to illustrate each topic.

Discussion of simulation techniques and coverage which is becoming a key factor in verifying HDL based designs.

This book contains several topics that I have been waiting to see discussed well in a textbook including floorplanning and the pitfall of using asynchronous resets.

Besides HDL design techniques, the author discusses the PCB level design methodologies that must be used when designing an FPGA into a system. This disscussion is a great complement to this already fine book.

Finally! A book that actually talks about advanced design techniques instead of giving a historical overview of FPGA design.

I have to admit that I didn't read this book cover to cover. Rather, I use it for reference as needed. It's starting to get that same tabbed look that my other reference books have.

Highly recommended for anyone wanting to troubleshoot and take care of their Mac themselves. It covers in detail the set up, administration and daily care and feeding of OSX.

If you are studying for the ACHDS exam, this book is all you need. I just got back from taking my exam and received a 96% score. Everything from this book with prepare you for the exam. I would of gotten a perfect score but I think my nerves got in the way.

Get this book, you won't regret it.

The book is very well written with clear explanations, and detailed lessons. Because you read about it and then go through an excersize, you retain the information better. I would recommend this book because it really does almost feel like you are in a class when you are reading.

I needed this book to study for my Apple Certs, and found it to be very concise and all of the sections were explained well. It was more of a review for me, but once in a while, I found a tidbit of information that I did not know. I was kind of exciting finding little "secrets" about an OS that I have been working with and developing on for years.

I recommend this book if you are looking to study on your own or if you just need, or want, more insight into the way Mac OS X works. The information is fairly complete and when it is not exhaustive, I found that the authors had placed direct URLs to many of the great resource web sites.

If it is Apple certification you want, you can choose to use the web based Applecare technician training or this book. To do a great job on your cert tests, I recommend both. The book allows you to learn and study when you are not in front of a screen. Completely web-based programs require me to print out a lot, and I found I did not have to with the book in hand.

You know C, you know pointers, you know how to program. But what you need is something to teach you more about creating firmware applications. How to actually make something work! What actually goes on inside this black-box that we call the ARM core? How do you make it do some simple DSP?

There should be a course in every college that basically teaches the information contained in this book!

Product came in faster than expected and it was in new, excellent condition.

The authors have done a wonderful job of taking something complicated and making it very simple, without dumbing it down. They explain why and how, and the material is well organized. There are useful reference tables scattered throughout. There is no attempt at humor, and I'm grateful for it.

Highlights include discussions about registers, Arm multiple load/store instructions, the Arm function calling convention, tactics for writing fast C and assembler, DSP implementation, memory management, and assembler code for things like division. The chapters on firmware and basic OS implementation each show a simple yet functional implementation.

My only complaint is that there's nothing practical in here about IO, not even JTAG. The authors have limited themselves to the ARM core only, perhaps because there are many differences between the microprocessors that use it. This makes the title a bit misleading - in my view a System Developer's Guide should have enough information so that you can at least write a "Hello World" program of some sort, even if it doesn't work on everybody's hardware.

So to do anything practical, you'll have to track down a lot more documentation for your specific microcontroller. Still, five stars for the clear, detailed information on the topics it does cover. I will certainly be using it as a reference.

This is the best book I've seen for the ARM series of processors. I have developed with many processors, on and off the Job and am now planning to develop for the ARM7 and ARM9 processors; particularly the AT91 and the AT91SAM7 series of processors by ATMEL. Base on the processors' hardware specs they are perfect for the small time developer. But, when looking the ARM's instruction set, it appears that programming them requires a steep learning curve.

This book will easily reduce my learning curve, at the very least, by more than half. It is clear, comprehensive, and to the point.

In a world that has strict requiresments on performance, power, as well as development time, a developer has to ARM himself. This book will show you how to do just that.

This book covers many aspects of programming the ARM familiy, including a surprisingly thorough discussion on fixed-point DSP computation.

Having come from another architecture, this book really got me going on ARM. It complements the documentation manufacturers usually provide for their ARM chips in that it covers the ARM core much more in-depth.

The book discusses everything from register usage to memory management units. If you want to become an expert programmer in C/Assembly on ARM systems, you must buy this book.

Also included is a nice comparison of the ARM and Gnu assembler directives, which came in handy when I converted an ARM assembly file to the Gnu syntax.

This is one of the best technical books I've ever read. It is very easy to read, no nonsense, very practical and packed with lots of designer's secret you probably won't find elsewhere. Although many newer ARM cores had been designed since the publication in 8 years ago, the content of remain relavent, as there are still many designs based on ARM7 and ARM9 which are explained very detail in this book (some limited coverage on ARM10). Maybe the author just need to publish a Volume II to continue from this book left, rather than another edision.

This book isn't just for ARM user, I would recommend it to any engineer or graduate student who deal with microprocessor. Most microprocessor textbooks only tell you 'how' a processor or a bus work. This book tells you 'Why'. The author tells from his real design experience on how to improve the professor performance by using different pipeline, memory architecture, cache, bus etc.

Buy it, it is fun to read!

In 20+ years of software development on a host of different target processors I've seen all kinds of documentation. My current projects represent my first exposure to the ARM. I have found this book to contain everything almost everything I've needed. The only thing that I'd like to see the author add in the next edition is a better discussion on EABIs (Extended Application Binary Interface). This book is a very good source for anyone needing to understand the guts of the ARM processor for software related needs. It is one of the better sources I used over the years.

This IS a good book. Plenty of contents. It's better be used as a mix-purpose book as a guide material and a referrence. You'd better focus what you want if you don't have that much time. Otherwise it will be a very good spare time reading.

This is a really good book to have ! Real stuff !

This book is very easy to read, but it also provides surprisingly quite detailed information that is sufficient to understand ARM chips' design and architecture. The book is almost self-contained although a little background in computer organization/architecture is helpful (but not necessary).

Excellent reference.

However, I didn't like the idea of using MIX assembly language. Book would have been more readable if examples were in plain english pseudocode (even better would be 'C'). At least second edition should have taken care of this aspect.

I also suggest books from Cormen & Sedgewick on same subject.

This book is bible of computer programming.

It contains most detailed explanation of searching and sorting methods I ever found in a book. Contains all internal sorting and searching and external sorting and searching algorithms.

The only drawback of the book is that all algorithms are written in MIX - some kind of assembler, and because of that they are hard to read.

I just bought the book I needed out of the set. I needed to build a database that did not use any commercial package (this gives full access and no royalties). This book saved my bacon. I almost did not buy it when all I saw in it was math. But I was desperate and it paid off. Turns out you could not explain it any other way. This book goes way beyond binary, and bubble sorts. I use it primarily for balanced trees. I may try some thing more exotic later. I can not tell you about the other volumes but this one will defiantly pay for it's self.

First the basics: it's great, it provides wide-ranging and deep analysis, it shows many views and variants of each problem, and its bibliography is helpful, though not exhaustive. The historical notes, including sorts for drum storage, may seem quaint to modern readers. And sorting has been done, right? You just run a shell program or call a function, and tap into the best technology. Does it need to be done again?

Yes, if you're on the edge of technology, it does need to be done again, and again, and again. That's because technology keeps expanding, and violating old assumptions as it does. Memories got big enough that the million-record sort is now a yawn, where it used to be a journal article. But, at the same time, processor clocks got 100-1000x ahead of memory speeds. All of a sudden, those drum-based algorithms are worth another look, because yesteryear's drum:memory ratios are a lot like today's memory:cache ratios of size and speed - and who doesn't want a 100x speedup? Parallel processing is moving from the supercomputing elite into laptops, causing more tremors in the ground rules. GPU and reconfigurable computing also open whole new realms of pitfalls as well as opportunities.

Knuth points out that the analyses have beauty in themselves, for people with eyes to see it. His analyses also demonstrate techniques applicable way beyond the immediate discussion, too. Today, though, I have nasty problems in technologies that no one really knows how to handle very well. I have to go back and check all the assumptions again, since so many of them changed. If that's the kind of problem you have, too, then this is the place to start.

//wiredweird

As a previous review said: "This is a book about the science of algorithms. Algorithms are either right or wrong."

Knuth uses the MIX programming language throughout, and if you hope to learn programming by reading this book, you should look elsewhere. Maybe someday we'll have 2^32 registers, but we will still be trying to make our programs work faster on this, as yet, uninvented architecture. The fundamental concepts will remain the same, and people will still be reading Knuth to understand them.

A good reference for serious computer science students. Others should look at O'Reilly. They have some really good books on visual basic.

This is an encyclopedia of what is known about sorting and searching and what computers can do. It is nothing else.

Graduate students in computer science (especially those in theory, algorithms and the occasional compiler fan) will benefit. Hackers and script kiddies will probably not benefit from this book.

I've been designing games for more than 20 years and I've read a ton of books on the subject.
This one is unique.

Most game design books focus on teaching you how to make a good game, detailing what techniques and processes one must master to understand an audience, to design a product that will satisfy their needs and aspirations, and to work with a team to produce it. "The Art of Game Design" goes beyond that: It teaches you how to become a better designer.

Here's an excerpt from the Deck of Lenses' instructions (it's the deck of cards sold separately that illustrates the 100 design "lenses"):

How to Design a Game
Step 1: Think of an idea for a game (it's easy, it can be anything!)
Step 2: Try it out (no really - try it out - you have to play games to see if they work)
Step 3: Figure out what's wrong with it, and change it so it is better. Then go back to Step 2!

That's what game designers do, over and over again, until they're satisfied with the game or they run out of time or money. However, if there are lots of books out there that explain how to increase the quality of whichever aspect of the game you want to change, it's the first one that so directly and so thoroughly addresses the problem of "figuring out what's wrong" with a game at each iteration.
In the book, Jesse Schell presents one hundred ways of looking at your game in order to figure this out, one hundred lenses. Even if this number seems big, it really isn't, because the book covers every domain touched by design: from the nature of the playing experience itself, to understanding the player, the game mechanisms, interface, story, technology, theme, etc.
For instance, here's the sum-up of a lens taken at random:

Lens #82: The Lens of Inner Contradiction
A good game cannot contain properties that defeat the game's very purpose. To remove those contradictory qualities, ask yourself these questions:
- What is the purpose of my game?
- What is the purpose of each subsystem of my game?
- Is there anything at all in my game that contradicts these purposes?
- If so, how can I change that?

The book doesn't give answers but helps you ask the right questions. I think of this book as the Tao of Game Design, a path toward understanding, each step its own path that can be explored and perfected. The one hundred lenses are one hundred design domains in which a designer can become more proficient. Jesse Schell's knowledge, experience and talent are obvious when he clearly explains how to consider all these questions, why they are important and how they are linked together.
This book makes and helps me think. To me, that's the best things a book about design can do.

It's rare to find an instructional book on any topic that takes such a broad, holistic view of it's subject matter. Not only is it loaded with useful info on game design, but many of it's methods can easily be applied to the creative process in general. It's depth and breadth of thought set it easily above any other game design book I've come across.

The Art of Game Design is a book which provides an easy read, it has a simplistic elegance to it, yet the depth of the book is quite deep which will keep you thinking for hours upon end. For me one of the most impressive things about the book is that it pretty much covers everything that a game designer should be aware of and how their decisions will effect the real world (it even talks about the moral obligations which I have never seen covered in a book about game design!). If you really want to learn the depth of being a game designer this book is a must read.

The Art of Game Design is simple in its language yet intriguing in its concepts. Jesse's well written book is equivalent to a four year undergrad degree in the same subject. The bulkiness of the book might seem overwhelming, but once you start reading, you delve right into it without you even knowing it.

The book draws inspiration from a myriad of topics and fields and definitely provides life lessons on a deeper level. The philosophy and its understanding helps in knowing yourself better, first as a person and then as a designer.

The Art of Game Design will inculcate a positive design perspective to the way you observe everyday things and events. Even if you are not a designer, it certainly is an excellent addition to collectibles that broaden your horizon. A must-buy for those aspiring to be a designer.

good things come to those who wait - and i have been waiting for this book for years. jesse schell has managed to compose not only a game design guide through an idealized design process, but also a handy catalogue of "lenses" that will help designers to inquire whether their game is enjoyable, or not, and how to improve the design. most importantly, 'the art of game design' provides intellectual as well as practical inspiration throughout - what more can you ask from a book in this field?