Programming Books

This books is a fantastic desk reference to any NLP practitioner. It is structured perfectly to be able to flip to the required pattern that you need. Also the patterns are laid out so that you can write or develop your own style of performing the pattern, this is done by giving you an understanding of the process of the individual pattern.

Simple put. I recommend it.

I find this book really helpful in the way it starts with a really useful summary of the power of NLP, moves into the main section which organize the different patterns according to what they apply to (states, strategies, languaging, etc) and then wraps it all up with a section on how to use the patterns in the overall dance of NLP.

There is a tremendous amount of interest currently in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Oprah's Book Club, Selection 61). NLP creates a bridge between where most of us are, with all the voices, beliefs and limiting decisions playing in our heads, and where we'd like to be - that space of inner peace that Tolle so eloquently describes.

As a practitioner of NLP and other modalities to help myself and other people achieve greater inner quiet and peace, I know that it can seem to be a long step between our current reality and A New Earth. NLP makes the transition not only possible, but easy, interesting and fun.

The Sourcebook Of Magic is a great collection of about 70 NLP patterns, all of which are featured in the book book of NLP techniques (plus 130 more) ). In addition, the authors give a thorough explanation of NLP in a remarkable way. Even just for these well written theory pages, I would recommend that you'd get a hold of Sourcebook Of Magic.

A sourcebook that has daily implications. Used and read on a daily basis. I dont think you will outgrow the concepts available for you to try it on yourself and anybody else.

Each element is relevant and challenging, complete in its description and yet flexible enough for you to experiment. I plan to have it as a constant companion.

I bought this book recently, and even working on the first pattern, I noticed a significant mental shift, when I ran the pattern through my own neurology. I have used that pattern many times, and just feel very calm. It could also be called the Law of Attraction pattern.

A complaint of many NLP books is that they are difficult to read or the concepts are difficult to grasp. I can assure that this book is not difficult to follow, if you have a basic grasp of NLP. I highly recommend it.

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This book is one of many I have read on SQL Server 6.5. It is clear& very well written. It highlights key points and goes into the right amount of detail. It is a must-read for anyone designing, deploying, or administering a SQL SERVER 6.5 database.

Had response problems with current database setup and SQL statements. The chapters on Indexing and Optimizing really work. Ex. A simple query on two tables took 2.5 minutes. After applying some of the suggestions, the query took a little over 2 seconds...

The techniques described in this book are effective and well thought out. Even if performance optimization is not your main goal, this book is well worth reading. The book delivers in-depth information on indexing, locking, the optimizer and many other topics in a very readable format. Ideal for those with some knowledge of SQL Server who want to dig deeper.

This book completely demystifies a number of SQL tuning concepts. This book provides a superb overview of the various performance topics, and then drills down deep enough into the concepts to give you the insights necessary to tackle thorny performance problems with multiple causes. This is still a very valuable book for SQL 7.0--the majority of the concepts are still with us.

After you have spent 8-80 hours trying random combo's on the Server Configuration panel trying to guess what you should do, buy this book and score a direct hit! Microsoft should bundle this book with SQL Server. If a little more detail were provided on the internal data structures of SQL Server one could write a bulk loader that bypassed SQL Server entirely (I know its been done by others) and load 10 X as fast. (hint-hint) This is the closest thing to a K&R for MS SQL Server I've ever seen. I really like the brevity of this book. Every word counts! Very, very good job Ken!

I have absolutely no experience with S1, so i was kind of unsure if start directly with Struts 2, or learn at least basics of S1. Now, after reading this book and finishing one smaller project with S2, I've to say, that this book will give you really great foundation of web development using S2. Chapters are very well written and easily understandable.

I especially want praise authors for chapter nine(spring integration part). This was one of the most useful book chapters, I've ever read. Not only it has thought me how to let spring manage creation of beans, but also the motivation for using dependency injection pattern).

Simply great book, which I strongly recommend.

In my view, this book is an excellent introduction to the Struts 2 framework. The authors approach to the reader is well thought out and the book is actually a "good read". The conversational tone with which the book was written lends itself tremendously to the reader grasping a firm hold of the technical information. It's not "dumbed" down at all, it's just explained very well. Each chapter builds on previous information presented to provide a clear picture of how the framework operates.

According to the authors, there is foundational knowledge that must be understood before Struts 2 can really become a useful tool in a developers hands. (See chapter 4: Adding workflow with interceptors.)

They do an outstanding job of taking the reader though the key concepts of the frameworks architecture. At the end of each chapter, I understood what they were saying and I had a clear idea of the concepts they were attempting to get across. Not many technical books do this very well, however, this one does.

As far as Struts 2 being the "best" framework? I won't go there. However, Struts 2 looks to be more than capable of handling the requirements when developing both simple and complex web applications. It appears there have been lessons learned from Struts 1.

In summary, it is the opinion of this reader that if you want to learn and *understand* the Struts 2 framework this book will get your there and you will enjoy the journey as well.

Struts 2 In Action is the best resource (hard or soft copy) for Struts 2 available. I took a look at this book as someone with quite a bit of experience using Struts and Struts 2. I really thought I had a good understanding of the core framework before, but many of the topics that lack online documentation were covered in more depth than I had seen in the past. As an example, many others have shied away from covering OGNL because it is a language all by itself. In this book you will find what I consider to be the most thorough explanation of how OGNL fits into Struts 2 and how to use it yourself. I was tempted to give the book 4 stars because there are a few things that I thought could have gotten more coverage, like Spring/Hibernate integration and AJAX, but I realized that it really would be impossible to cover everything in one volume. Struts 2 is a large and comprehensive framework and with anything of that scale, a good understanding of the fundamentals is the best way to start. This book delivers.

If you are wondering what is covered, you will find comprehensive coverage of the following -
- writing actions
- action workflow basics
- type conversion
- OGNL
- form tags
- non-form tags
- results
- intro to Spring/Hibernate integration
- validation
- i18n
- struts 2 plugins
- migration from struts 1

This is a proper "In Action" book. I do strongly recommend it. If you plan to buy only one reference in the subject, look no further this is it! Down Brown is a Struts PMC member and an authoritative voice, among others he is the author of the Struts 2 REST plugin which is a superb addition to the framework from version 2.1.2

The book is very well written and easy to follow. I personally found the explanations very concise and appreciated the most their unique and clear way of breaking down and explaining all code snippets. This is really a great reference.

The first two chapters are a very good introduction to the framework. I am a pure version 2 user and had to learn most of these concepts from online documentation and from the Struts mailing lists.

Among all the topics covered I enjoyed and appreciated the most the coverage of:
- Interceptors
- OGNL and Type Conversion
- Validation! before this book, you could only find the relevant coverage of this topic scattered online in e.g. WebWork articles outdated
..for Struts 2. The authors did an excellent job explaining validation in chapter 10
- Really unique was the coverage of:
..... Unit testing actions
..... Tiles plugin
..... execAndWait interceptor "processing your request, please wait .."
..... UI component templates
..... Writing Struts 2 plugins

On the big plus side, the authors did a superb job keeping the book agnostic to minor versions of Struts 2 i.e. there were several differences from 2.0.x to 2.1.x and I was very happy to see that the examples and explanations were not outdated for the later.

On the down side and as a trade off I can only complain that the book left the Ajax topics out; maybe also because there have been many changes on this topic from minor versions of Struts 2 e.g. the ajax theme of Struts 2.0.x was converted to the dojo plugin in version 2.1.x. In any case, I somehow find the Ajax topic in Struts 2 to be one of the best documented online.

I believe that the Practical Apache Struts 2 Web 2.0 Projects (Practical Projects) book from Ian Roughley is a very good complement to this one. If you want to find coverage on topics like Security and Ajax in Struts 2 you will want that one too. The only issue there is that the coverage of the ajax theme is partially outdated for the newest version 2.1.2 of the framework

I had to learn Struts2 quickly since I recently changed jobs and my new team has several web application projects built using Struts2.

Overall, I thought the book was done very well if you are looking for a good introduction to Struts2. The first 8 chapters are very good.

The main negative is the source code for the book's examples. The authors provide one very large war file with all the source code embedded into the war file along with an overall web application divided into sub-applications for each chapter.

This packaging of the source code into the war file made it difficult for me to create individual projects in my development IDE that demonstrated just the material in a specific chapter. I had to spend quite a bit of time breaking down the source code into individual web projects and then figuring out on my own what jars needed to go into each project, what the struts.xml file needed to have, and what ever else was necessary to separate out just that chapter's sub-application so I could run that example and play with it.

Where this really became a problem was in chapters 9 and 10. Chapter 9 is a very advanced introduction to integrating Spring and Hibernate/JPA into Struts2. I never could get this chapter's example to work correctly.

However, chapter 10 on the validation framework then uses the same code as chapter 9, so you really cannot separate out the code for either chapter 9 and 10.

The validation framework is likely something even beginning Struts2 developers will want to use, while Spring/JPA/Hibernate is for more advanced developers and should have been well after the chapter on how to use the validation framework.

Also, the authors really don't give you a good understanding of what Struts2 jars you need to have to build a basic Struts2 application. There is some information about this in chapter 13 (setting up your IDE) but this information should really be at the beginning of the book. Also I don't think the list the authors provide is accurate since my basic HelloWorld (get the user to enter a name, call an Action class, and then display Hello userName in new jsp) worked with far fewer jars. Note there is apparently a new example war that just is a basic Hello World so there may be some information in that war file. That war was not on the manning web site when I purchased the book.

This book is good but be prepared to struggle working with the code examples if you want to work on the examples in your own development environment.

I recommend the authors create separate complete war files for each chapter's example to make it easier for users to just get that chapter's example code into their development IDE.

Lastly, the book does get 4 stars because the author's explanations of the basics of Struts2 (chapters 1-8) is very easy to follow for experienced Java developers. I'm now ready to tackle the Struts2 applications in my new job.

The best part about this resource is that it assumes nothing. It takes a complete novice and explains that RSS means really simple syndication. Then it goes into the value of having changing content, the need to choose an RSS that is not only compatible with your content, but will add ever-changing, relevant content. I am using the resource to be sure that I have an accurate understanding of what it is, who it helps, how it helps, when to use one, and how to subscribe to an RSS Feed.

Being a sometime web developer, it is important to keep up with the latest web technologies. If you have never heard of RSS or are not that familiar with it, I recommend this book as a great introduction to what RSS is, and how you might use it in a website.
It is not expensive, and is a good foundation in that it explains the basics of news feeders and how they are used, but doesn't go into a lot of technical/code information. In other words, if you want to code your own newsreader, find another book. On the other hand, the author does explain how to syndicate any item you want for RSS.

I just finished reading Ellen's book. For a year or more, I have seen webfeeds on some websites, and those little XML and RSS buttons showing up everywhere. For the life of me (and I'm pretty technosavvy), I just couldn't put it all in context. This book lays it out concisely and makes a compelling case that news and webfeeds are the next communication phenomenon, likely to be as ubiquitous as faxes and email.

I'm not always a "Dummies" fan, but this one rocks! My website will have a feed very soon and I'm already thinking of many ways to use this new technology in creative marketing efforts and to deliver content in a more useful way to our clients.

Colorado divorce and family mediator, Lawrence King, J.D.
Divorce Resolutions, Colorado Center for Divorce Mediation

I love this book, it has broaden my horizons. I didn't know anything abour rss until i read this book, I'm now well on my way. If you are looking for a book that will teach you the basics of rss and that will get you started on your rss project, this is the book. Because of the vast amount of information in this book, you will actually be more confident in any rss project you start, even if you are just looking to buy another book on a related topic. This is the perfect book to start working on syndicating websites and rss, or just to understand why it works.

I should be finished this book in about two days. It has been very helpful and specific and a vast improvement on some others in the Dummies series. Ellen Finkelsrtein has done a good job and crafted a good book. I particularly like the wayu she says: go to this web site and do this this, So I go to the webiste and bookmark ans I find it very valuable.
feedvalidator.org was one such site. I went and it complained soem of my taigs.com blog was not properly validated: litle things like a ">" i na closing tag omitted. So I fixed them. Without this book, they would still be broken. The little things add up in this game.

Another thing: she does not waste time explaining irrelevant basics. She sticks to her topic and does not squander time telling you how to install this, that or the other. She also divides up the programming bit from the take it and go bit. There is an acompanying site which gives you the code to write your own feeds. All in all, I concur with the earlier reviews and give it top marks.

Beautifully, gently written. Very touching anecdotes of Lakin's long and excellent experiences with children in elementary school. Lakin is sensitive and effective with his students, as a teacher, a principal and writer and gives the information that is both amusing and poignant.

"Teaching as an Act of Love" by former principal Richard Lakin explains the methods of teaching K-4 grade school children and how these impact children with different learning needs and abilities. Laced with the compassion and humor, the insights of an experienced professional glow as the kids say and do the funniest things. The book explores the shortcomings of excessive bureaucracy and testing in public grade schools, and the importance of building enthusiasm for learning at an early age. A very enjoyable read, with many helpful tips on how fill one's own children with a "can do" attitude in life.

This insightful and inspiring memoir demonstrates that a caring and dynamic educator never stops teaching. Richard Lakin opened the doors of knowledge and understanding to children by allowing their curiosity, insight and intuition to enliven their learning environment. Now he is writing about his experiences in a way that motivates parents and teachers to persevere in creating supportive and stimulating learning environments. I intended to share this book with a special teacher friend and then realized it is also a gift I will give myself and my daughter who is just beginning to shape goals and research options for her young son's education.

Teaching as an Act of Love is a real winner for anyone interested in kids and in education! Written with love, humor, insight, and humility, Lakin gives numerous real life examples of what works and what doesn't work in schools. The title says it all. Teaching IS an act of love,

As a retired French and Special Education teacher, I could relate to the basic premise of the book and enjoyed following Lakin through his many adventures in dealing with elementary school students. I laughed at the many examples of delightful children being themselves, empathized with feelings of bewilderment, got annoyed at the narrow "bean counter" approach to education. And I smiled many, many times as the difficulties melted away when genuine caring and professional expertise prevailed. Lakin is to be complimented for including all the school staff into his book, because, as all teachers know, everyone contributes a meaningful part to the whole effort..

I was impressed with Lakin's dealings with parents, always seeking what is best for the student, and engaging to help the parents provide meaningful support. He clearly understands that "One size does NOT fit all". This philosophy of education based on caring, discipline, listening, and acting out of commitment to the child touched me deeply.

This is a book for everyone!! Parents, teachers, all school personnel, and former kids will enjoy and be inspired by Lakin's experiences and philosophy. He takes us through his education career, showing us his vulnerabilities, and his capacity to find solutions through imagination, listening, and love. Congratulations to Richard Lakin for presenting us with an amazingly readable book about an amazingly complex subject: education.

Richard Lakin, a teacher and principal, speaks from long experience, learning from, modeling, and advocating for, caring classrooms which nourish children in their developing years. A refreshing and inspirational collection of stories for teachers and school systems who dare to make essential interventions in the health of our culture as a whole.

I LOVED loved loved this book! Unlike other books on speaking that focus on the mechanics (and, really, if you're a public speaker, shouldn't you already know not to say "ummm"?) of speaking, this book focuses on how to use speaking as a powerful tool to get your unique message out to the world to help transform others. And that is truly exciting!

Gail Larsen believes quite firmly that we all have our own particular message to bring to the world, and to speak effectively, we need to tap into and deliver that message. What's especially clever about the book is that it will help create the very transformation in its readers that it wants readers to create in others....it will help a reader find his or her own message, which really seems to be another way of helping the reader find his or her own life's mission.

Once you're speaking from your heart, with sincerity and passion, the mechanics will come. Yes, Larsen gives some valuable advice in that regard, too, but this book is truly above and beyond a mere book on how to speak...it's really more of a matter of finding out WHY you want to speak first. It's a must-read for anyone who wants to change the world one speech at a time.

Athletes sometimes find their high performance "zone"-when everything clicks perfectly. In her new book, Gail Larsen in her no-nonsense approach shows how anyone can find their high performance "zone"-a zone beyond just public speaking. Without laying claim Gail shows how someone needs to find and journey through their "comfort" and "home" zones to be a great and powerful speaker. In the process and with her process she is really showing people how to reach peak performance in any pursuit. For executives this book is a must read if authentic personal and corporate purpose is high on their agenda. Gail's techniques are some of the finest in the world for companies searching for how to present their purpose, competitive position and source for branding.

Every senior executive should be grounded in Gail's methods. She makes it possible for the executive to win the attention and trust of any stakeholder or audience - this is a must read.

Mark Long
Attorney and founder SuperLab
www.mysuperlab.com

Transformational Speaking presents a spiritual path in a how-to book - what a rare find! It's beautifully written, passionate, and totally authentic. Gail is someone you WANT to learn from, and has so much to share. Her teaching is filled with depth and presence, and makes you realize that a podium is a meditation cushion in disguise. And vice versa, too. Become a better speaker, Gail's way, and you're bound to find more than a little enlightenment along the way.

TRANSFORMATIONAL SPEAKING
If you want to change the world, tell a better story...
Gail Larsen

Transformational Speaking literally transformed me as I worked my way through the book. Filled with the heart-wisdom of a woman who knows her territory and exercises that help you go straight to the core of who you are, this book will transform you too . . . if you let it.

This is true if you are a beginning speaker or a speaking pro. Gail makes you think, first about yourself: what are my innate talents and gifts; what is my core message? Our lives contain the answers. That alone is worth much more than the price of the book.

And just when you believe there is nothing left she has to tell you she comes in with: know your audience, "relive don't remember", the nuts and bolts information of the business of speaking.

This is a real human being demonstrating what she is writing about. Do I need to say more? Yes! I strongly urge you to buy the book. Read
Transformational Speaking if you want to find your voice, be your most powerful self, contribute your best gifts to the world and, of course, be a transformational speaker.

Reviewed by:

Lynda Klau, PHD
Licensed psychologist, coach, speaker

Gail's book is inspirational. She gives you tips that show you how to be the kind of speaker you like to hear. It takes courage to show up real and share your own wisdom; Gail helps you find that courage and wisdom and then how to share it in a winning way. Great book. Anyone who is a speaker or wants to become a great speaker should read her book.

Extremely well written book on type systems in programming languages. Uses lambda calculus to explain type systems. Practical aspects show up in the ML implementations downloadable on the books site.
Contains a lot of programming language theory besides just type-systems. Can be used as an introductionary book to programming language design. Concluding: Great book!

Writing baby interpreters using OCaml for the funny languages (include lambda calculus!) used in the theoretic chapters is a pretty cool idea and I really like it.

Elementary discrete mathematics and first-order logic are required for grokking the maths materials through out the book though. If you don't have enough patience to deal with math symbols, theorems, and formal proving, then this is not the right book for you ;)

IHMO, this is a highly comprehensible book for introducing lambda-calculus and type theory to readers without much background knowledge in either abstract algebra or theoretic computer science (like me ;)). I've been looking for such a book for long, in fact :)

Besides, this was the very book which directly inspired the birth of Pugs (a Perl 6 interpreter/compiler in Haskell) according to Audrey, the Pugs project's leader.

Highly recommended!

This text is perhaps the most accessible yet thorough introduction to type systems I've encountered.

On the one hand, it offers excellent grounding: practical motivation is provided, numerous examples illustrate the concepts, and implementations are provided which can be used to typecheck and evaluate these examples. At various points, extended demonstrations of the type systems under consideration are given (e.g. showing how objects may be encoded). The exercises are well constructed and in many cases, accompanied with answers and detailed explanations in the appendix.

On the other hand, it offers an excellent exposition of the material: Pierce provides a lucid account of the static and dynamic semantics (primarily small-step operational) for various lambda calculi. He proceeds in a stepwise fashion via the gradual accretion of features: from first order (simply typed) systems to higher order systems incorporating bounded subtyping and recursion. He also gives attention to the metatheory of these systems (focusing on proofs of progress and preservation, and for systems with subtyping, of decideability). Internally, the text is well organized, with clear dependencies among the chapters, and the bibliography is extensive.

It should be noted that, while reasonably comprehensive, the text is necessarily limited in scope. For example, aside from the discussion on Featherweight Java, systems other than typed lambda calculus variants are not considered. In my opinion, the focus on these (in some sense "low-level") calculi makes foundational issues more apparent, and the linear progression from simple to complex variants lends a pleasant cohesiveness that would have been lost in a more general survey. However, as object/class encodings were discussed at various points, it would have been nice to see a more integrated presentation, in the spirit of the paper Comparing Object Encodings [BCP97].

I need basic information on type safety, theory of object oriented typing, and how to axiomatize nonstandard kind of typing systems. I need it now, in a form that I can put to use without too many side trips

This book is almost what I was looking for. It builds up a semantic logic based on lambda calculus, then creates typed versions. Pierce really does work very methodically up through the levels, ending at about the place where C++ templates and recursive type definitions start. Along the way, he's careful to match the typing axioms to semantics, covering unusual topics like exceptions and type inference while he's at it.

Almost what I was looking for, but not quite. As I said, I have immediate needs, and I'm not into theory for its own sweet sake. That means I had little appreciation for all the chapters that created arithmetic all over again, starting from Peano axioms (or something like), via the lambda calculus. I know that low-level axiomatizations and lambda calculus are much beloved of the theoreticians, but I encounter them only rarely, and when I was trying to get something else done, like now. For me, they created a diversion blocked by an impediment. Also, however convenient it may be for theory, functional programming is mostly a journal-page peculiarity in industrial practice. I admit, analysis of functional programs pushed me into insight I might have missed, but I would probably have been quite happy dealing with assignment formalisms instead.

I almost gave this three stars, because its unnecessary notational baggage and off-main-stream topics weren't doing my job. Bruce's book (ISBN 026202523X) was a much more profitable use of my time. Still, Pierce's goals weren't mine, and the mansion of type analysis has many rooms. Not all of those rooms are furnished to my taste, and don't need to be. I rounded up to four stars for what it meant to do.

//wiredweird

This is a textbook about programming language theory, somewhat mathematical-- but it's must-read material for anyone who wants to gripe about programming languages cluefully, much less design them.

For me, this book strikes exactly the right balance between theory and practicality. Chapters on the mathematical properties of various tiny programming languages are interleaved with chapters that provide annotated implementations of those languages.

The book will also give you the background (notation and terminology) you'll need to read cutting-edge research papers on programming language theory.

This book contains all the information I was missing. Excellent presentation of the material, well written, great exercises, doesn't go off into lala-land. Highly recommended. Some math background very helpful (you need to know what a mathematical proof is).

The author presents Unicode well from all possible angles. He also explains related topics like character encodings, transfer encodings, ways to input the characters in popular software programs, font issues, portability. It is well written.

Its side notes are also interesting - explaining things like Arabic right-to-left with its contextual characters with 4 different forms; or how they mused over using one common Chinese Han character to be shared by Japanese , Koreans and Vietnamese versus including a version of each in their languages' ranges of individually separate characters.

Are you an IT professional who needs to understand Unicode and work with it? If you are, then this book is for you. Author Jukka Korpela, has done an outstanding job of writing a book that explores Unicode processing generally, but does not go into great detail on all parts of the Unicode character space.

Korpela, begins by providing a self-contained tutorial presentation of Unicode and character data. Then, the author gives detailed information about using Unicode and other character codes. Finally, he discusses relatively independent topics to be read according to each reader's specific needs.

This most excellent book guides you through the Unicode and character world. More importantly, it explains how to identify and classify characters.

I had to deal with Unicode in greater detail for two reasons. I am working on some old ASCII and ANSI text converter for the web to be able to show them in text format in a browser, rather than converting them to an image as existing tools do. The second reason is XML and the normalization of the content distributed via XML and processed or used by XSLT or DHTML apps.

I realized that the whole subject is a lot more complicated than I initially thought and the number of questions that needed an answer to move forward with what I was doing increased significantly. I was finding stuff on the web, a little bit here and a little bit there and had it one day, because progress was slow.

I stumbled one day across this book via a Google search, which returned passages from it from its Google Book search results. I found a very good answer to one of my questions and answers to some other questions that were lying around unanswered from before. I checked the index of the book to see what subjects it covers and realized that it pretty much covers all of them. So I went ahead to Amazon and bought it right there and then.

I am glad to this day that I found it and can recommend it to anybody who has only little or no knowledge of Unicode and struggles with getting a grip on all those standards for data encoding, which make it hard to keep the data within XML and text files intact across platforms and prevent your XML based application or tool from breaking because of illegal data in your content.

If you're like me, you probably think of Unicode as "expanded ASCII" and that's about it. But there is infinitely more to the subject than I thought, and Unicode Explained by Jukka K. Korpela is an exhaustive reference to all that is Unicode. And in this increasingly global computing environment, you will need to know this information...

Contents:
Part 1 - Working with Characters: Characters as Data; Writing Characters; Character Sets and Encoding
Part 2 - A Systematic Look at Unicode: The Structure of Unicode; Properties of Characters; Unicode Encodings
Part 3 - Advanced Unicode Topics: Characters and Languages; Character Usage; The Character Level and Above; Characters in Internet Protocols; Characters in Programming
Appendix - Tables for Writing Characters; Index

In concept, Unicode is real simple. An expanded character set using 16 bit encoding, and you can accommodate far more languages and symbols than straight ASCII. But the implementation is far more complex than that. Korpela starts with the basics of characters... what they are, what they mean, and the nuances involved. From there, you learn about how applications have to interpret the different encoding standards and handle things like case, sort orders, line breaks, etc. When I saw the size of the book (600+ pages), I wondered if the material was just a lot of reference tables that could be found online. Gladly, it's not... This is an exploration of everything that is Unicode, and you'd have to wade through a lot of web pages to even begin to glean the level and value of information that you'll find here.

If you have anything to do with programming or designing global software, this book purchase is a no-brainer. And even if you're not doing anything in that area right now, this is one of those reference titles that is worth having on your bookshelf and available for the first time you *do* need it. It won't take long to pay for itself...

This book is excellent. The author's writing style is easy to read and he pretty much explains everything about Unicode. It's perfect if you're working with multi-lingual Web sites or email, or just if you want to start using Unicode for all of your Web site development (something everyone should do).

The only thing disappointing about this book is that all of his examples and screen shots are for and from Windows. A reader could come away with the feeling that Mac OS X and Linux don't have as much support for Unicode as Windows which, of course, is not the case at all. The least he could have done is to mention and give screenshots of Linux's "Character Map" app and Mac OS X's built-in "Character Palette", both of which are pretty much just like the Windows "Character Map" app.

I'm surprised O'Reilly allowed a book about such a platform-neutral subject to be so Windows-centric. Hopefully they can hire someone to add Linux and Mac OS X examples into the second edition.

In my opinion, this is the best book on UNIX programming I have seen. If you already know C and want to learn how to program on the UNIX os, this is the book to get. This is what taught me. I usually always have this book with me. I even like the color!

This book gives an excellent introduction to systems programming in unix. Within a couple of weeks of buying this book, I was able to design and implement a multi-process client server (socket based) application from scratch. The author also discusses the common C library functions used and the caveats there of. (for instance, the gets() function is a dangerous one!) Although I program a lot in windows NT, I still find this book to be a good reference, especially when porting applications from unix to NT. One thing that I wish the book had is a discussion on remote procedure calls (RPC).

This book isn't just a handy reference for programming in C in the UNIX environment; it's a useful reference for any C programmer. For example, the discussion of file I/O is very clear.

This book is written in a very easy and understandable way. It explains main concepts, system calls and their parameters and how to use them. It lays an excellent ground for a quick start in UNIX systems programming and prepares for more in-depth material like books by R. Stevens. I would say that this book is a must-read for all starters.

If there ever was a book that was badly advertised, this one is it. If we're to believe the cover and even the reviews on Amazon, it's just another book on Unix, when actually it's an essential Unix System V C libraries reference for C programmers. I haven't found anything remotely similar out there. I only bought it after flipping through the pages in a bookstore. It covers everything from file I/O through IPC. It contains tons of code that clearly show how to use each function. As it's a little dated, It doesn't cover pthreads or IPV6, but hopefully the author will make a second edition soon...and make sure that C programmers know that this book is what they're looking for!

What a great pleasure it is to thumb through my buddy Tim's (and Ahui & Steve's) hard work and see the big payoff. Guys, this thing is great. Sits perfectly alongside any computer/instructional/technical/howto book. Things are made easy and very well explained throughout. And hey, any book I'm in can't be a bad one. :-)

Dude i know the guy that wrote this book. I had a beer with him one night and he told about this book and i was like wow. I think i might have to buy it. TIM YOU RULE

This book is excellent in almost every respect.
It does a great job of introducing the reader to the LDraw suite of tool for making LEGO creations on your computer. Though this book is geared toward beginners, it is also a great tool for those intermediate users looking to expand their LDraw horizons. I especially liked the sections on creating building instructions. Additionally, all the reference sections make this book worthwhile for even the seasoned LDrawer; I loved the visual color reference on the inside front cover. This book would make a fine addition to any LEGO enthusiasts library.

This is an EXCELLENT book for people SERIOUS about building simple AND complex models using LDRAW. While working with the program I found myself constantly referencing the book--which can be read front-to-back... but ALSO be used as a quick reference book. This has earned itself a permanent position on my bookshelf--no wait--next to my computer!

If you want to do lego CAD, this book is for you! I had used MLCAD and LPub before I got the book to some degree, but my abilities exploded after going through the tutorials. LSynth is also very clearly explained. The CD that is included is a big plus for those who have had difficulty installing the software (all of which is free from the internet though) and also includes some tutorial models for use with the book. The additional resources described in the book show that he is interested in getting as much use out of Lego CAD from the general populace.

All in all, well worth the money and the read!