Macintosh Books

This book breaks each chief complaint down into an H&P. It then tells you exactly the types of questions and physical exam findings you should look for given that chief complaint. Perfect for those (including myself!) who are still trying to figure out the relevant information for a given symptom/cc.

This book saved my rear on rounds!

I thought this was a wonderful book about blogging. It is not a thin and light book. But, instead, is packed with lots of information and well worth its cover price. It is well written and well organized. And to see specifically what is covered I recommend you examine the Search Inside material provided by Amazon for this book. There you can find a basic Table of Contents and a very detailed one, too.

There were four topics I especially liked the coverage of in this book: (1) blogging tools, (2) blog styles, (3) blog theory, & (4) how to start a blog.

The blogging tools covered were Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, and Expression Engine. I have created blogs at both Blogger and Wordpress. And I think the discussion of both in this book was very fair and representative. I have heard Typepad is a really great service, and it is very reasonably priced. But I have opted to do my blogging on the freebie side so far. I have no experience with Expression Engine. But this book has me thinking of doing some investigation into that service.

The blogging styles mentioned were:
>> Personal diary
>> Views & reviews
>> From the desk of...
>> Organizational outreach
>> Internal organizational
>> Community

I was surprised the style I use for my current blogs was not mentioned: Question & answer. But there really are an unlimited number of blogging styles. That's the beauty of blogs - you can make them what you want them to be and to do.

Throughout the book the author covers blog theory. And he gives us his take on how to actually start a blog. He includes notes, tips and sidebars to help the reader better grasp the material in the book. If you follow the pointers in this book you will probably create a real winner of a blog. You might even include images, video, audio, forums, tags, wikis, and some moneymaking features. But you don't have to. Hopefully you'll get more hits, more fans, more friends, and even more customers. 5 stars!

Do yourself a favor: don't judge this book by its (awful) cover. I've had this book by my side every step of the way while setting up my very first blog, and I have to say it has been a huge help. Stauffer's style is direct and engaging, not cutesy. He tells you what you need to know to get started, without a lot of fluff.

I wanted to write a review here because I think this books deserves a big audience, and because the Amazon listing tells you little about what's covered. So here's what's inside:

"Web 2.0 Blog" covers four different blogging platforms: Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, and Expression Engine. So if you're interested in one of these four, you'll find the book very helpful. If you are trying to decide which of the four to go with, the book is even more helpful, as you can compare them feature by feature. For instance, you'll see that while Expression Engine seems quite powerful and flexible, it's obviously more complicated than the other three. Stauffer does a good job of helping you weigh the pros and cons of each.

The book covers quite a lot in a 450 pages, and it does it very well. There's even a basic introduction to XHTML and CSS, giving you a peak at how each blogging platform works under the hood. Other topics covered in depth are:
- RSS feeds
- Photoblogs, podcasting, audioblogging, and adding video
- Working with social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Technorati
- using wikis to collaborate with readers
- adding a forum to open the discussion beyond comments
- community and group blogs
- sending e-newsletters to your subscribers
- getting traffic and monetizing your blog

Highly recommended.

Goo

this is a neat deal! I realized that Amazon's price works to about half that of Border's for this bundle.. The only downside is that the quicken book might be of no use to someone who does not use it (like me). But, hey if you get it for free, who's complaining!

This is awsome book. If you are into troubleshooting appletalk, or just want to learn detail about AppleTalk Protocol this is great book. This books also talks about the difference between AppleTalk Phase I & II. I like this book specially because its writen by the creator of AppleTalk Mr. Gurcharn Singh Sindhu. Mr. Sidhu really know AppleTalk inside out, he is the God of AppleTalk.

I've stated before that I appreciate the style of Radia Perlman. She tells a story, giving rich insight as to why things do what they do.

This book comes close to doing the same thing, in a spirit crossed between Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated and Perlman's writings.

AppleTalk is an elegant protocol many too quickly dismiss as "outdated." Within it exist many working paradigms regarding utilitarian "ease of use" connectivity that would be of great benefit to those brainstorming where to grow TCP/IP.

This book is well worth the money, and even though we've stopped developing AppleTalk stacks its constantly referenced for creative examples.

The technical writers responsible for this book should be proud of themselves. Its top notch.

Nice text that I use more than any other IM text. Hey, over 100 other books reference it in their pages--enough said!

I first came across this book last year when I was feverishly studying for my 4th year medical exams. What really excited me was that I could look things up in the index and actually find a paragraph or two explaining my query, no matter how obscure the reference. Textbooks like Harrisons baffle me; why would I want to spend 45 minutes looking at the ten different times my word has been mentioned when all I want to know is what it means and when its important.

Anyway I think this textbook is very well set out and thouroughly comprehensive. Obviously its not a bed-time read, but its really helpful when you're stumped by a fact in a multi-guess paper or you have some obscure fact to look up and present to your consultant.

I have no hesitation in giving it 5 stars. Right now I'm waiting on the next edition....I hope it comes in soon.

David Van Der Poorten (5th year medicine University of New South Wales) Australia

This was a required textbook for one of my college classes and it was such a good book that I still use it today as a reference (over 13 years later). In fact, I refer it to people quite often. The material is presented in a logical way that makes it easy to learn.

This book is really good for the beginers, but the language is little hard for the beginers !! thats it

This has a lot of great tips and I needed this book before I even took my iphone out of the box! It guides you step-by-step and I really love the visual reference ( a necessity for me!) Enjoy-you really can't go wrong with this handy guide.

This is a great book that shows you how to use all the bells and whistles of the iPhone. Easy to follow steps and full color images make it fun to look at and read.

The best thing about this book is it's conversational approach and handsome author. It's filled with fantastic content that's so entertaining I almost couldn't put it down, and I'm not saying that just because I wrote it! OK, maybe I am a little bit. But seriously, I had a good time writing it and I think you'll enjoy reading it just as much. Plus, my email addy is in the preface so you can tell me what you didn't like.

My sixty-[mumble] year old mom loved it and she's kinda technophobic. She's calling me and telling me about how she read a chapter, designed her own photo book and sent it off to Apple to have it printed all by herself. Trust me. If she's geeking out on a computer book, well, let's just say that she's no geek, so I musta done something right.

Calling The iPhoto 4 Book "just" an instruction manual doesn't do it justice, it was a laugh out loud don't want to put in down read. I laughed out loud so many times I started getting looks from my family. If school text books were this engaging and fun to read we would have more "geeks" on our hands. The book was written from an almost comic conversational stand. It felt like you were sitting around with some of your friends on Saturday night talking about making a funny slide show instead of the old fashioned click "oops that slide was put in backwards slide show." You almost felt like the authors were sitting there with you just shooting the breeze while they imparted their knowledge on how to make friends and family beg to see your photos.

The book is broken down into eight different parts with twenty five chapters complete with notes, tips and sidebars. The sidebars had little stories or observations that will have you chuckling. The walk through was so simple and easy to follow that you almost didn't want the book to end.

Chapter One: Taking Interesting Photos - This chapter covers the garbage in garbage out concept. While computers and software have come a long way in helping you tweak your photos it doesn't help if the original photo has nothing to offer. There should be good composition, object or person etc should fill most of the frame, good lighting and a direction that the eye follows, if it doesn't have all or most of those elements use a different photo. Lag time and how to compensate for it is covered. "Lag time the delay between when you press the shutter button to when the picture is actually taken, is usually more prevalent in the lower end digital cameras". Plus other nifty tips and tricks.

Chapter Two: Getting Started With iPhoto - Covers registering iPhoto if you haven't used it before. The "Organize" mode is where you will be spending most of your time. When you pass your mouse over the icons at the bottom of the screen a little box appears and gives you a bit more info on the icon. In "Edit" mode you can go from the default basic editing program that comes with iPhoto to whatever graphic program you have on your computer. I set mine to default to Photoshop CS. You can also adjust the display pane so your photos are displayed in the number of rows and columns you like working in. You can also change the background color of the display pane from white to black or any of the grays in between.

Chapter Three: Importing Pictures - The "Import" mode lets you bring your photos into iPhoto either directly from your camera, compact flash, CD/DVD or photos already on your hard drive. You can hook your camera up directly to your MAC with either a USB or Firewire cable and bring your photos into iPhoto that way or you could use a card reader. Some cameras have a few more hoops to jump through for you to get your photos into iPhoto, a card reader simplifies things. Using a CD/DVD or hard drive just drag and drop your photos into iPhoto.

Chapter Four: Organizing Your Photos - We sometimes get very excited once we start something new that we forget this important step that will save us much frustration in the long run. Organizing when you first start pulling photos into iPhoto it might not seem like a big deal but once you start taking more and more photos you will wish you had done so in the beginning. This chapter covers how the program will organize things to a point even if you don't in the beginning. It creates a film roll for groups of pictures from an import session. It has a quick view of sorts where you can see all of the photos you imported in the last month or the last roll you imported. You can also rearrange the order of photos, so if you are building a slideshow and you want uncle Bob goofing off to start the slide show move that photo to the beginning. Some of us remember when we had only so much space to name a file, like 8 characters. We now can put more info into naming our files, like "Northern Lights Christmas Day 2004" so at least the name of the roll can be easily identified.

Chapter Five: Leveraging the Power of Albums - Albums are the next progression from the film rolls of chapter 4. You can create and customize albums, by adding, removing and rearranging photos in the albums, you can also merge albums. Or create a smart album. With smart albums you can use keywords or ratings to put specific photos within your album. This becomes very valuable when you want to create slideshows or have a book printed.

Chapter Six: Assigning Titles, Comments & Keywords to Images - Your camera has a default name that it gives your images, most of the time it begins with DSCN followed by several numbers. That's fine to a point but the images that you are keeping you might want to give a relevant name or something other than the numerical code. Comments and keywords are a great tool to use to find that image or images later. You can use "vacation" as a all around comment or keyword, but if you want to get more specific you can put in where you took the vacation like "Brazil Vacation". So you can use those words or comments for iPhoto to only show you the pics you want, it's a great way to weed through the tons of photos and create a smart album.

Chapter Seven: Understanding the Edit Tools - Once you click on the edit tab you see a bunch more tools available to use. You can crop, rotate, retouch, enhance, fix red-eye, adjust brightness/contrast, convert to B&W or to Sepia tone. You can use the default edit tool within iPhoto or you can double click and it will take you to the other application you specified during your setup phase.

Chapter Eight: Better Photography through Editing - You learn about aspect ratio cropping. I really like this chapter so when my clients want me to crop more of the photo to make them look slimmer but they want more of the back ground I will have them read this chapter. You should however have a general idea how you are going to use the photo. You will need to decide if you want a 5x7 or a 4x6 or if you are just using it for the web. You learn how to use the red-eye correction tool. The enhance tool works by taking the lightest part of your photo and the darkest part of your photo, it however is going under the assumption that the light part is white and the dark part is black for it to get a balance of colors between. Sometimes the enhance tools works well and at other times when the colors are not so readily discernible it can make your photo a bit cartoonish. If you want to try and tweak the image yourself you can use the brightness/contrast tool. You can also "retouch" that piece of broccoli stuck between uncle Bob's teeth to make you image better. Changing the photo to either B&W or Sepia tone. This technique works better with some photos than with others. Experiment to see what works best and remember if you don't like any of the changes you can always revert back to the original.

Chapter Nine: - Editing Outside of iPhoto - You set this up in an earlier chapter. iPhoto allows you to make some basic edits to your photo if you have some text you want to add or other more dramatic changes you will need to go to the outside editor. You need to open the outside editor within iPhoto for any changes to apply to the current image. iPhoto makes a copy of your original file so if after your changes you decide to go back to the original you can. You do however have to make sure that the images is saved in the same format .jpeg or iPhoto won't recognize that you have made any changes to this file. If you add layers just save a .PSD file then flatten the layers and save it as a .jpeg file and you're covered if you want to go back and make more changes.

Chapter Ten: Making A Slideshow - This is not your old high school slide projector slide show. This one is way cooler. You can add transitions, set how long the slide will be displayed and chose to have the slides displayed randomly and scale the photos to fit the screen. Need to check this before going ahead because you might cause a few decapitations. You have the choice of creating a slideshow using an album or by selecting specific photos. To add some pizzaz to your slideshow you can add music. The only thing about this slideshow is the transition and timing applies to all slides you can't have different transitions within the same slideshow and you have to use the whole song.

Chapter Eleven: Basic Print Tools - This chapter covers the different types of printers, printer resolution, plus the different types of paper. It explains how to configure your printer to work with iPhoto. I loved the last part of this chapter about the photo off the low res camera, I laughed so hard. I have had clients bring me their out of focus, underexposed print and want me to make uncle Chester look like he's sitting there with them in the correctly exposed photo I just shot.

Chapter Twelve: Using iPhoto to Print Your Pictures - So after setting up your printer you are now ready to print out your photos. You have many options when it comes to printing you can print either one photo, a couple of photos on one page or a contact sheet of all of the photos within an album or that you have selected. You can choose the size of the images you would like to print, like 2 5x7's on one sheet, or 4 3x5's on one sheet, greeting cards etc...you can do this by using the presets that come with iPhoto. However if you print a contact sheet it does not print out the file name which can be a bit of a bummer if you have a lot of photos that look similar.

Chapter Thirteen: Printing Your Photos Professionally - With so many places offering you an opportunity to have your prints made from digital camera it's a shame not to take advantage of them. You have your local services like WalMart and Costco offering to make prints, greeting cards and calendars with ease. You also have your web services that allow you to upload your images and order more cool stuff like T-shirts, mugs and mouse pads plus other neat stuff. Of course with iPhoto you just have to hit the order prints button and you are on your way. It's pretty self explanatory once you log in.

Chapter Fourteen" Sharing Your Photos Electronically - This chapter covers sending email photos, building a QuickTime slideshow, creating a desktop image, making a screen saver and backing up your photos. I remember the first time I scanned an image and tried to send it (this was years and years ago) it took forever and of course it got kicked back to me and I crashed my aunts computer. I have since then learned the correct way to send photos via email. In iPhoto it's very simple to email photos. You can choose what size, small, medium or large and it automatically resizes the photo for you and off it goes. You can also make a slide show and export the images into to a QuickTime movie and email it to your family of baby's first steps. It shows how to setup a screen saver using your photos instead of the default blue. Plus the biggest reminder of all to backup your photos. I had the unfortunate experience of having to have my external drive saved. As we all know CD's are great but you can only fit so much info on one. I have over 250 GB's of photos from my clients. Burning CD after CD was driving me insane so I bought a large external drive dumped all of my work on it and thought I was safe. The partition failed the company couldn't figure out why because it never went anywhere it just sat on my desk it wasn't moved or anything. After the $1300. price tag to recover the photos (they were fortunate to recover everything) I do a double back up now. I went and bought a DVD burner to put my images on so at 4 GB's I will at least not have to store as many as I would a CD but I backup like a mad person now. (This is from the PC side of my life.)

Chapter Fifteen: Sharing Your Photos on the Internet - For those of you that have wanted to post your photos for the world and your friends and family to see this chapter walks you through setting up a .MAC account and publishing your photos with HomePage. You can build your website pretty easily with this program. Just click, click and click and a few more clicks and you're done. Pretty neat if you are one of those people that like to share your images while still on vacation you can send an email letting everyone know to go look at the new slides.

Chapter Sixteen: Creating an iPhoto Book Design - Any wanna be author's out there? Here's where you can astound your friends and family with a hard cover bound book of your photos. There are seven basic book themes that are built into iPhoto. Choose the one that bests suits the types of photos you are arranging. Try to do this before getting to far into the book, while you can change themes mid-book all of the custom text you so laboriously entered earlier will be lost. Remember however that it's one album per book. Make sure it's your best stuff that goes into this book the minimum charge for the book is $30.00. This book feature would be a great gift idea for the grand parents. Put together a day, a week or a year in the life of their favorite grandchild(ren) and you are sure to get unlimited baby sitting for a really long time.

Chapter Seventeen: Laying out Pages of the Book - Here's where you get into the meat and potatoes of laying out the pictures for your new bestseller. Get those photos together, make sure that the photos tell a story. Some pictures work best when they are shown together to tell a story some work stronger by themselves. This is where you get to decide how many photos will go on a page what order etc...

Chapter Eighteen: Adding Text to Dress up Your Book - Here's where you get to add the little blurbs that you think your picture needs. You can choose the font style, size and color in most of the templates. Make sure to spell check, spell check, nothing screams amateur like a misspelling for all the world to see. The font limitations I think are great. I know some of you want to add every font you have in your arsenal to your book, I have over 400 fonts and I use them sparingly. I have seen some brochures that contain so many fonts that it becomes a distraction.. OK down right annoying. So double check that your colors and typeface are easy to read.

Chapter Nineteen: Previewing and Printing Your Book - If you are going to plunk down $30.00 to have your book printed and bound preview before you buy. Heck make your own ink jet print of the book so you can see what it will look like. Also when you preview you can see if any text was cut off, and many other little things you might not have noticed on the screen. For those of you that like a challenge you get to learn about making your own book theme in this section. Once you have proofed your book you are now ready to order. Just click the order book and follow the directions and your master piece will be on its way.

Chapter Twenty: Creating an iMovie Slideshow - This is a step above the slideshow that you can create in iPhoto. The transition and slide duration limitations are gone. You can add a voiceover, use part of a song instead of the whole song and you can use multiple songs for more dramatic effects. The possibilities start becoming more exciting. You don't have to open iPhoto to create this slide show just launch iMovie and start drag and dropping and you're on your way. For the voice over you can use your built in microphone or attach your camcorder and use that microphone. You also have access to more effects to spice up your slide show. Just don't over do any once effect and you will be fine.

Chapter Twenty One: Creating and iDVD Slideshow - iDVD is the next level up from iMovie and the next level down from Final Cut. iDVD comes with many templates choose the one that suits your needs. You can customize it a bit by changing the colors and font sizes and some more stuff. You however have to use iPhoto to access your albums for this program. You have to use entire albums so get all of your photos sorted before you pull them through into iDVD. You can rearrange and delete slides in your show. You can add music for the intro and the slide show. Then preview before you burn.

Chapter Twenty Two thru Twenty Five: Are mostly odds and ends about what folders to stay out of, so you don't mess up your iPhoto library. Automating iPhoto with Apple Scripting. Twenty Questions and Using your digital cameras.

As I said in the beginning the book is very user friendly. It points out some of the glitches and things that will make you see red. Gives great examples and it does it with lots of humor. The only thing that I found a bit of putting was that the book was in black and white. Not a big deal. So even my totally afraid of the computer Grandmother could follow this book and make some cool slideshows.

The Visual Quick Starte Guides are just about the fastest way to get started on using a software package around. As stated from the title, this is a highly illustrated book that uses tons of screen shots to get you started using a software package.

In this case the package is iPhoto and it's written by a master writer. Because of the large number of illustrations in the book, it is very fast to go through. (My only problem is when I click on something wrong, my screens don't look like his, and then have to backtrack and find my error.) The easy visual approach works well for me.

If you're a beginner to iPhoto, this book will help you get it up and doing what you want in a very short time. The next step is to do more, say up to the intermediate level, and all that takes is that you go further into the book.

The other surprising thing about this book is the way it's organized. Most tutorial books are just that. You follow the tutorial through and then go do things. These books are then useless as a reference book. This one is different. Each task, almost each page, is organized with a headline of what you're going to do on that page. Then the index has an entry that points to the right page. For instance if you're going through the book there's a chapter on Sharing Photos. There's a page on Printing Greeting Cards. Learning about sharing photos will send you through the page on Printing Greeting Cards. But if you forget that, going to the index will give you an entry on Printing Greeting Cards that will send you to that page which is complete enough to enable you to get the greeting cards without having to go through the whole chapter.

His approach works for me.

Before picking this book up, I'd all but given up on iPhoto. I found it a bit too simple and way to encumbering of my system. But this book really changed my perspective. Well, this book and the fact that I needed a better way to organize my pictures on my Mac than simply having massive folders of pictures.

The book is very accessible and although I thought I was familiar with the program, it opened a lot of new doors and taught me a lot I didn't know. It also provided resources for other programs that work well with iPhoto and how to connect iPhoto to Photoshop (or any digital image editor) so I can do more advanced editing outside of iPhoto.

I think most important for me was learning that I didn't need to have my photos all in one library - that I could use a separate program like the iPhoto Library Manager to make separate, context specific, libraries. This was amazing, as the more photos in a library, the more encumbering it can be on your system.

Without a doubt, I find this to be one of the best and simple books out there covering iPhoto. I highly recommend it!

This is a really helpful addition for any mac owner that wants to really use all that iphoto has to offer! Easy to understand even for cyber dummies . (Like me)

I'm a long time Mac user and have been using iPhoto since it came out. This book really hits every aspect of the program, and tells not only what's there, but how and why to use it. Examples are concise and relevant. This book is a good book for an advanced iPhoto user, and a must have for the beginner. Apple should include a copy of this book with every Mac.

I only found two points to comment on in the book:

1) You don't need to rename the iPhoto Library folder or use any third party tools to maintain multiple iPhoto Libraries. You can simply hold down the Option key when launching iPhoto and iPhoto will ask if you want to create a new library or find an existing one. This worked with iPhoto 4.

2) One thing users can do to improve the performance of iPhoto is to turn off the Drop shadow option in the Appearance preference. I don't think he mentioned that.

Otherwise he hit everything a person using iPhoto needs to know about. Great book!

Allan Marcus
Los Alamos National Lab Mac User Group