Hardware Books

I found this book very helpful in learning to use all of Painter's features effectively. It was easy to read & has lots of good photos. My only wish is that it had more accurate instructions on using the CD.

My favorite section was on the Painter pallets. It shows example pictures for each "brush" & it's variants. Sample photos also showed the various options available in the gradient box. These made it far easier to know what tool to use.

Other sections of the book covered masking, image hose use, painting & composite techniques, special effects, working with type, enhancing & outputting images, animation & web application, and using Painter with other programs.

The CD contains some good movies on making blobs, creating an image hose from a floater, building and editing floaters maps and making mosaic or patterned type. It also includes tutorials on making movies & working with color.

This book is very useful, in that the ideas and follow-through presented will get you well into capable use of the software. The organization, quality and content are top-notch.
Job Well Done!

Wayne D
Arizona-where art is everywhere!

It's an incredible book! A must-have for all Painter users. The book contains step by step instructions to create amazing effects seen on fully colored pictures.

This book goes beyond other computer books, including the Dummies' series, to explain the stuff in plain English, with a lot of humor thrown in. I particularly liked the chapter on helping kids think, using the PC--critical thinking..something that's clearly lacking these days...

Despite the title, this book's designed for Dads AND Moms, and it's a good one...well written with a sense of humor...it breaks jargon down to human English..Best chapters were on Developing Critical Thinking Skills, using the PC; Raising a Computer Smart Daughter and Keeping Kids Safe on the Internet...There's also a good primer on buying a personal computer. Any parent wanting to guide their child through the digital age should pick up this book.

Excellent down to earth resource for computer ignorant and/or illiterate parents who would like to try to keep up with their children when it comes to the computer.

The difinitive edition of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List, PC INTERRUPTS lists every DOS and BIOS interrupt call I have ever needed. This book should reside on the shelf of anyone interested in low-level code, especially assembly. -nick black

Nobody else could write a book like PC Interrupts, than Ralf Brown & Jim Kyle. This book is not only a reference, it is written from programmers for programmers and all the needs of an experienced developer. The title speaks for itself, the book is a milestone in Computer Literature and traces a long period of general PC development. May be, that the most of the stuff is dated, but anyway there's often enough a good reason to read some and the enormous information impact makes the book valuable for every programmer, today and forever. I recommend the book particularly!

The classic Brown-Kyle book, this book is just great it has all the interrupts and third party calls info that every programmer needs I can't say anymore about this book just that it rocks!

I AM TAKING A CLASS IN COMPUTER REPAIR, AND I NEEDED A BOOK TO WORK WITH, MY SCHOOL BOOKS. I LIKE TO READ YOUR BOOKS. BECAUSE IT READLY HELPS ME. AND THIS IS A VERY EASY BOOK TO READ AND IT HELPS TO UNDERSTAND HOW TO FIX COMPUTER WORKS. AND HOW YOU CAN UP GRADE YOUR OWN PC. THAT IS THE BEST BOOK FOR ANY ONE WHO WANTS TO FIX A PC ON THERE OWN. I AM VERY HAPPY THAT I FOUND THIS BOOK. THANK YOU FOR HAVING THIS BOOK FOR PEOPLE TO FIX THERE OWN PC. I ALSO WANT TO THANK RUTH MARAN FOR ALL HER BOOKS. SHE HELPS WITH PICTURE AND WRITING THAT ANY ONE CAN UNDERSTAND.

for those newbs like i was who are scare of upgrating a pc or repair it well this books is perfect for you it has so many pages that show you how to do all the above things with out reading a lot yeas read less and learn more i got to tell with this book i reapir and upgrate my pc sometime not like before but also help you to build one
i have just one sujesstion BUY IT!!!

I have checked several "pc upgrade" books which are in great details but vague. This one has only 225 pages and the best thing of this book is that it practically shows you with images rather than giving you more technical info to make it more complicated. That's why I found it so easy....! to follow. If you really want to learn how to repair or upgrade your pc, then save some money and buy this one.

Extremely helpful even to a complete phobe like me. I had never found a book that I could actually sit down and read until this one.

Omigod. Someone finally wrote a computer book that isn't 8000 pages long. It's like the first 100 pages missing from every other computer book. Highly recommended for everyone that really wants to start at the very very beginning. I loved it, and I have to guard my copy with my life. Get your own!

This book explains everything in language we can understand. It starts with taking the computer out of the box and even shows you where the plugs go. It's a great tool for people who have a phobia against computers. It is so simple even my grandaughter could understand it.

If you know XP Home and XP Pro, but you either need to know more about it for home use, or more for tech support, this book is a great item.
Covers all conceive-able aspects, and then some...; very good section on networking in a wireless environment, especially if you are combining a wired and wireless home network that you need to lock down.
Now all I have to do is find out where the resource sharing sections are ( As in shared devices ).... lots to do, now even more; gives excellent scope for expanding your ideas for a better home network.

Recently I was doing some consulting for a company and performing a Windows XP Professional Rollover and upgrade. I was also teaching a class for A+ and the new objectives which has XP questions. This book while not a certification specific book, handled both jobs very well.

What this book is is more than how to configure the desktop and change the background or setup XP to look like the "Classic" windows interface. While it does all that it also takes you through security and networking and what I found to very interesting is that it discusses the Home and the Professional versions as well as the 32 and 64 bit versions.

There are step by step procedures throughout the book to help you learn to perform different operations, such setting up the ASR process, dual booting Windows 9X and XP and how to do searches for people, computers and more.

There is a great deal of pictures and diagrams in the book; however I think that some of them need to be in color in order to completely understand the full meaning the photo.

There is also a cd included which has an additional chapter that the book does not cover. It also has over an hour of video to show you how to perform certain technical functions.

Overall the book is very comprehensive and for those wanting to add to the knowledge they have or possibly use this book for certification exams you have a very good source of information.

I have been a little overwhelmed with the various options, utilities, etc. and Windows XP Pro and was looking for a book that provides a comprehensive overview. I think this book is what I was looking for and am confident that if I have a question about XP Pro, I'll find the answer within its pages. The authors also strike a good balance between focussing on XP Pro out of the box and the various third-party utilities, etc. available to make your life easier.

tmr

The book arrived on time and was in very good condition, the cd included had no scratches. The book is very useful and right on time for for me to get an A!

Beware of buying this book used, without the cd-rom included. You need the cd-rom more than the book itself. Without the cd-rom you will be unable to complete any assignments because the tests and quizzes are in the disc.

I really like this book. It's overview of the PC really helped me, a beginner at computers, understand many terms better. I enjoyed learning with this book and especially the CD. I really liked how the CD actually showed me how to do everything and explained everything so well.

This is a great ruby book for those new to the language, or for those who already know a good deal of ruby but wouldn't mind learning how to do some cool quirky things with ruby, like programmatically compose and play midi. This book will not walk you through how to use ruby if you are new to the language -- but their are plenty of other books (and online references) that can do the real introductory teaching. Working through some of the projects in this book *will* help you really get comfortable with ruby, by putting it to practice in non-boilerplate ways.

If you have more experience with Ruby, this book is still compelling. It walks through some nonstandard projects -- interesting projects on their own, and certainly the sort of projects that will get your mind working, and have you looking at the problem and the language in a new light.

Throughout, care is taken with the writing -- the text isn't a boring technical manual, but is compelling and interesting, while packing in a lot of technical detail!

The past few years have seen the English-language Ruby book market explode. Before the phenomenal success of Rails it was perfectly possible to own every available title (and not use much storage space), but now that would be quite a challenge and lead to considerable redundancy. Having worked my way through quite a few Rails books of late, reading Practical Ruby Projects--a Ruby book that doesn't even mention web frameworks--was both a pleasant diversion and a highly illuminating experience.

Like the last volume I reviewed (Pro JavaScript Design Patterns), this book is unabashedly aimed at experienced programmers. There's a brief paragraph on "getting set up", but no detailed guide to obtaining the tools. Instead we dive right in to a sequence of projects that includes: making music (dipping into calling C code from ruby), animation, simulation, building a strategy game (and adding a RubyCocoa frontend), genetic algorithms, and even implementing lisp and parsers. Once again the "apress roadmap," a diagram intended to show how the skillsets in their different volumes build on one another, is misleading pitching this between "Beginning Ruby" and other volumes I've reviewed like Practical Ruby for System Administration and Pro Active Record. Don't believe it. Though there's little overlap in the material, this is a more advanced volume than either of those and readers should be prepared.

The pace of the book is measured and Topher Cyll does a good job of gradually building up the projects a step at a time. Along the way a variety of practices are demonstrated with many methods stubbed out for demonstration purposes before being filled in when they are needed, and considerable time spent on decoupling code. That latter piece is particularly in evidence in the chapters on building a turn-based strategy game and then developing a RubyCocoa front-end. Despite careful design early on further refactoring is needed to make it easy to apply the front-end and that process is carefully worked through.

Most of the book makes some use of existing libraries. The initial lisp chapter uses the sexp library and the subsequent section on writing a parse relies on rparsec. For the most part, however, use of the libraries is kept to a minimum, allowing for fairly self-contained code. Unit testing is largely ignored until the last chapter, where the need for tests when constructing a grammar/parser is explained and a test-first development model is encouraged. That works well to demonstrate the power of tests for complex (and often brittle) code.

This is not a book designed for public transport reading. Working through chapters on the bus I frequently found myself wanting to reach for my laptop to get a better grasp of how a piece of code worked. While the explanation is generally very good, with material of this complexity there is nothing like running the code and tweaking it to make sure you've understood exactly what each transformation does. It's a book to take your time over, so be prepared!

A few editorial errors have crept in, suggesting a re-organisation of the contents late in the day. In particular an early reference to s-expressions seemed to presume that the lisp and/or parsing chapters were featured early. That's not a big deal and will hopefully be corrected in later printings; the author does encourage skipping around within the book, but there is value in working through it roughly in order, and not just for the two "paired" chapters that explicitly build on one another.

Perhaps the most striking thing about this book is the reminder that even for those of us whose primary programming activity is web development, studying other areas can be extremely helpful. Not only is it helpful to see how other developers structure their code, but tools like genetic algorithms and parsers are likely to be very helpful where web applications require sophisticated processing and/or backend systems. And it never hurts to learn a little lisp. For the ruby developer who's comfortable with the language and wants to stretch out a little, this book would be an excellent investment.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.

Most Ruby books milk newbies jumping on the bandwagon for cash. This is a book for experienced Ruby programmers who want to be awesome Ruby programmers. The book of the book is all about parsing and shows you how to implement Lisp in Ruby; the first project is a compact, simple, powerful system for creating music in real time in Ruby. I'm using it to drive Propellerhead Reason from the command line and I'm on page 25. This is an absolutely excellent book. The best Ruby book I've seen in years. The only Ruby book I'd recommend to experts. This is the bomb book.

Before the present days of "All-In-One MCSE Exam Cram", there were those computer professionals who knew about the construction of their computer hardware on a micro level and how to write programs that would control that hardware. This book is from those times. Using Basic, C, Pascal, and assembly language the reader is shown how to do such tasks as play a sequence of tones in the foreground, draw individual pixels in various graphics modes, print graphics on a laserjet printer, and intercept keystrokes without displaying them. Granted, there are much easier ways to do the things talked about in this book than assembly language programs, but you get a very good lesson on the inner workings of your computer to boot. Things have not changed so much over the years that basic computer architecture is not the same and therefore some of the information is still useful. The table of contents for the second edition is as follows:

1. Program Organization
2. Equipment Determination - Shows you how to inventory and assess various system resources.
3. Managing Memory - Shows how to inventory conventional and expanded memory. Shows how to manipulate expanded memory.
4. Programming Interrupts - After a brief tutorial on PC interrupts, you are shown how to program an interrupt controller chip, enable and disable particular interrupts, write your own ISR, and finally chain into existing interrupts.
5. Clocks and Timers - Shows how to control time, date, the real-time clock, and control real-time operations.
6. Programming Sound - Takes you from merely beeping the speaker to playing one or more tones to making sound effects.
7. Intercepting keystrokes - After intercepting keystrokes you may want to display them, intercept conditionally, and write a general purpose keyboard input routine.
8. Interpreting Keystrokes - How to look up various codes, use the numeric keypad and cursor keys, and use special purpose keys.
9. Using a Mouse - Setting the characteristics of the mouse, define the mouse's relationship to the screen, and inputting both analog and digital data from a game port.
10. Managing Disk Drives - This is all about how to manipulate and determine disk space and recover from disk errors.
11. Directory Access - How to manipulate directories and files.
12. Reading and Writing Files - The basics of file IO.
13. Controlling Video Hardware - How to control the screen display mode, background, border color, find and manipulate the cursor, and scroll a text screen.
14. Displaying text - How to write individual characters and strings.
15. Displaying Graphics - How to write pixels for the various graphics formats including EGA and VGA and how to find a color at a particular
point on the screen.
16. Controlling a printer - How to control and print on an HP LaserJet.

The examples in this book will tell you how to control most of the basic hardware on your computer at a low level. Controlling the head and motors on the floppy drive, activating and using XMS, and many more are all explained and include a code example in 4 languages. In addition, each section includes tutorial and background information on that area of computer hardware that explains some of the background that might affect results.

This is basically a cookbook for doing all kinds of neat things with your computer. Has code snippets in c, basic, asm, and pascal.

I love this book!

I have used many beginner-to-intermediate books on Java, but this has always been the best one I could find as a reference for GUI-related topics. It has excellent, practical examples on layouts, colors, and constructing basic GUIs. It's been the one book that I end up having on my desktop when I start any new GUI.

This book fills in a niche market between an OOP theory book and an advanced Java reference book. It shows you how to apply OOP and use Java for rapid application development. If you know basic of Java and want to use JBuilder for RAD, this book will help you.

Daniel Liang is one of the most reliable Java authors and this book for advanced programmers, who already know Java, is unique. It allows programmers to progress rapidly and use JBuilder's built in tools for creating state of the art Java programs quickly. Shows how to use Java Beans. It also comes with JBuilder.