Variants Books

Panzer III & Its Varients is THE book to buy about this German Tank of WWII. All of the models and varients are captured- the prototypes, production tanks- in many excellent scale drawings, cut aways and photos.

What makes this book so excellent is the quality of the photos and line drawings. Everything is covered in a single source- hull, chassis, powerplant, suspension, turret, armament, armor, equipment- it's all there.

Two minor irritants, first is that many of the line drawings have not been translated from the German orginal. Secondly, many of the photos & drawings about the Sturmgeshutz (self propelled gun varient) are duplicated in Spielbergers work on the Sturmgeshutz.

An excellent work, a valuable collection to anyone's collection, highly recommended.

Its about time somebody wrote a book like this. This book is great and has lots of good quality illustrations and examples. I'm not aware of alternative titles covering this area well. Hopefuly this will be useful to trainees in Radiology.

At the very outset, I would like to mention that Pro Java EE Spring Patterns book is meant for people who are well versed with J2EE/JEE and the Spring framework. If you are looking to learn Spring, there are other books that might be more suitable.

The idea of this book is to illustrate the major JEE design patterns and how you can use Spring to implement those.

The author, Dhrubojyoti Kayal, has a distinctive style of writing that is easy to understand and follow. There are code snippets galore in the book and configuration details. These two facets make the book a very valuable asset for any serious JEE Architect who is looking to make the most out of the Spring framework. Towards the end, there is a chapter that demonstrates how to ease development of Spring based projects using Maven and the pretty nice Blazon ezJEE IDE. The IDE, based on Eclipse, has the necessary plug-ins already configured thus making life easier for the developers.

Overall, this is a very good book that talks about the core JEE design patterns and the Spring implementation of it.

What do you gain from this book?

* A unique insight into how Spring can be used to implement Core JEE patterns
* A recap of the JEE patterns
* Using the power of Maven to make development less tedious

I highly recommend this book to JEE Architects and designers.

Great job done!!!

I am surprised that this little book was largely ignored during the brief time it was in print. It is lacking as a tutorial, but it is great if you are interested in combining some interesting video and motion algorithms with DirectX and Java Media Framework to create a working application.

Chapter one is just an introduction to the components that make up a video application. It is very general and therefore not too useful. Chapters two and three are about DirectShow and how to expand it if necessary. These chapters are also very general and there are better books on the subject.

Chapter four is where the interesting part of the book begins. The authors implement a change detection filter in DirectShow. The code is commented well enough with the algorithm clearly exposed so that you could implement it in any other language. I tried it out myself in Java and found that the algorithm worked quite well.

Chapter five extends the simple change detection filter into a full blown security application with plenty of details on the controls needed, and was a very interesting read.

Chapter six is about using DirectShow to interface to a pan-tilt camera. I read through it and found it interesting, but I did not implement anything shown there.

Chapter seven is a very good chapter on object tracking using the mean-shift algorithm. I translated this code into Java and the algorithm did work as advertised. It is very hard to find readable discussions, much less working implementations, of object tracking algorithms, and this chapter has both. There are plenty of equations shown to explain what is going on and why the algorithm works.

Chapter eight is more about integrating the pan-tilt controls and the mean-shift algorithm into DirectX for a complete application.

Chapter nine is the only chapter that references the Java Media Framework. Chapter nine shows the reader how to acquire and display live video, perform image processing on Java video that has been captured by JMF, and how to transmit video across a network. This chapter is valuable for two reasons. First, it is one of the few books that has a solid treatment of JMF's real time player along with working code. Also, it is one of the few books that demonstrates working code for JMF's processor, which was the centerpiece of its last release.

Therefore, if you are interested in motion detection, object tracking, or camera/computer interfacing I strongly recommend this book. It is worthwhile for people whether or not they are using DirectShow, but obviously, you should already be familiar with computer vision and image processing if you want to understand this book's contents.

This is a quite good book in Java and Java programming. It teaches Java in a chronological order which is easy to follow and you do not need to know C++ to start with this book! The book spans over all the basic features and some of the more advanced. One of the drawbacks with the book is that some of the examples are a little bit to brief if you are a novice on Java.

Twain's novel Pudd'nhead Wilson can seem like an enigma at first, since it is a story about slavery written almost forty years after the end of the Civil War. Certainly race was still a pressing contemporary issue for Twain at the time: by 1893 Reconstruction had failed and race relations in the United States were a mess. Although a black man no longer had to fear being sold "down the river" as Roxy and Chambers do, extreme forms of violence were a distinct possibility. Part of the point here is that although the institutions surrounding race may have changed since 1850, the fundamental problems, even by 1893, had not. By featuring characters who are racially indeterminate--that is, characters who can "pass" or who are not immediately identifiable as black--Twain confuses the issue still further. When slavery was still legal, an individual's racial profile mattered on a concrete level: someone who is one-thirtysecondth black,like Chambers, could be owned as a slave, while someone with no known black ancestry could not. Racial identity, by the 1890's, had become a much more nebulous concept. Broader issues of identity are a compelling problem in this novel. Although this is by no means a carefully structured and polished piece of literature, Twain's multiple plots and thrown- together style do serve to inform a central set of issues, with the twins, Pudd'nhead, and Tom and Chambers all serving as variations on a theme. The coexistence of many characters and many localized plots mirrors the novel's setting. In its vacillation between the tiny town of Dawson's Landing and the metropolis of St. Louis, and in the centralized presence of the Mississippi River, with its possibilities for endless mobility, the novel offers both hope and despair: the world is too big a place for everyone to be known absolutely to their neighbors, yet one also has the ability to start over in a new place.

The idea of being able to start over is continuously interrogated in American literature. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, which appeared almost exactly one hundred years before Pudd'nhead Wilson, sketched out the ideals of self-determination and personal identity in American culture: a man can become whatever he wants, no matter what his background, as long as he has a plan and the work ethic to realize it. Echoes of Franklin can be seen in the eccentric, scientifically-minded Pudd'nhead Wilson, whose writings mirror Franklin's and whose careful analysis and re-categorization of the world around him is also reminiscent of the American icon. Pudd'nhead's self-realizations, though, are dark and socially unsuccessful. Twain's characters live in an America where social mores are largely fixed and one's success depends not on determination but on fitting into a pre-existing public space.

Twain, like Franklin, was a celebrated public figure, immediately recognizable as a collection of carefully developed mannerisms and trademark items. Like Judge Driscoll in this novel, Twain somehow found himself high placed enough in society so as not to be bound by its rules. In Pudd'nhead Wilson, though, Twain looks at those who avoid constraints of reputation and public opinion by being so far beneath society as to be almost irrelevant. He also looks at those who, like the twins, get caught in the middle, in a mire of shifting opinions and speculations. The "plot" of this novel, if it can be said to have one, is a detective story, in which a series of identities--the judge's murderer, "Tom," "Chambers"--must be sorted out. This structure highlights the problem of identity and one's ability to determine one's own identity. The solution to the set of mysteries, though, is an incomplete and bleak one, in which determinations about identities have been made but the assigned identities do not correspond to viable positions in society. The seemingly objective scientific methods espoused by Pudd'nhead may have provided more "truthful" answers than public opinion, but they have not helped to better society. In the rapidly changing American culture of the 1890s, where race, celebrity, and publicity were confounding deeply ingrained cultural notions of self-determination, the depopulated ending of Pudd'nhead Wilson is a pessimistic assessment of one's ability to control one's identity. Twain's novel moves us from Franklin's comic world of possibility to a place where self- determination is Twain, like Franklin, was a celebrated public figure, immediately recognizable as a collection of carefully developed mannerisms and trademark items. Like Judge Driscoll in this novel, Twain somehow found himself high placed enough in society so as not to be bound by its rules. In Pudd'nhead Wilson, though, Twain looks at those who avoid constraints of reputation and public opinion by being so far beneath society as to be almost irrelevant. He also looks at those who,

like the twins, get caught in the middle, in a mire of shifting opinions and speculations. The "plot" of this novel, if it can be said to have one, is a detective story, in which a series of identities--the judge's murderer, "Tom," "Chambers"--must be sorted out. This structure highlights the problem of identity and one's ability to determine one's own identity. The solution to the set of mysteries, though, is an incomplete and bleak one, in which determinations about

identities have been made but the assigned identities do not correspond to viable positions in society. The seemingly objective scientific methods espoused by Pudd'nhead may have provided more "truthful" answers than public opinion, but they have not helped to better society. In the rapidly changing American culture of the 1890s, where race, celebrity, and publicity were confounding deeply ingrained cultural notions of self-determination, the depopulated ending of Pudd'nhead Wilson is a pessimistic assessment of one's ability to control one's identity. Twain's novel moves us from Franklin's comic world of possibility to a place where self- determination is accompanied by tragic overtones, a place reminiscent of the world of another, later American novel about a self-made man that does not end well: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Java programs have the reputation of being slow. Performance is thought to be
Java's trade off for cross platform portability and higher developer
productivity. Real-time systems demand on time responses and in many cases,
should not fail. At the first glimpse, Java seems quite unsuitable for
real-time systems. Well, if you think so, you might want to read Peter C.
Dibble's book "Real-Time Java Platform Programming".

In fact, real-time specification is the first Java Specification Request
(JSR001) in the Java Community Process and the reference implementation just
came out in early 2002. So, this is a very timely book for this very important
new application area of the Java platform.

The focus of this book is not well known Java syntax and API functions. This
book spends a lot of pages discussing what are real-time systems, what are the
requirements and why Java 2 Standard Edition is NOT up to the task. As a
result, we can learn important things about real-time system design and the
philosophy behind the real-time Java specifications. Java is only a tool. A
real-time system engineer should first know the system design so that he can
apply Java to the new situation. I find the approach of this book very
effective.

Back to the question we raised in the first paragraph: It turns out that
performance is not THAT important for a real-time system. We can have a slow
real-time system but it has to give consistent and predictable results
everytime it runs. That consistency allows us to design systems that we know
will meet the deadline. One of Java's core problems in real-time applications
is the unpredictable behavior of the garbage collector. The book have lengthy
discussions on new algorithms on memory management and the real-time Java
approach to this problem.

Of course, garbage collector design and memory management is an example of many
real-time system design aspects covered by this book. Other important issues
include threads and synchronization. I find this book very readable for both
Java programmers interested in real-time system engineering and real-time
engineers interested in Java tools.

This book could be even better if the author can organize scattered sample code
segments into a consistent sample application and use it to demonstrate
different usages of the real-time Java platform. Also, the author did not cover
the installation and basics of the reference implementation. Nor did he cover

real application scenarios on real devices or simulators. That makes it a bit
difficult to understand the context of the examples.

Vohra makes strong emphasis on suggesting that Ruby on Rails has advantages over PHP and over Java. Of course, this stirs up fans of those approaches. But approaching Ruby on Rails through this book shows a fairly easy language to learn. You can code with an object oriented outlook, as well as using the Model-View-Controller pattern or architecture. Experience in other languages has shown OO and MVC to be very useful, especially for developing web applications.

The book also takes the programmer into the use of Ajax. This highly popular method is readily compatible with Ruby and Rails. So too is the idea of running a Web Service. The latter is typically defined strictly in terms of [ascii] XML messages. Leaving the developer to choose an application language. Well, the book suggests that Ruby on Rails is a plausible choice.

And for those of you already using the Eclipse IDE, Vohra explains how Ruby can be coded inside Eclipse. So you don't have to abandon Eclipse. I've noticed that Eclipse users tend to be avid fans of it, and deeply reluctant to leave its nice surroundings.

A much underrated work of Zola's, this book is a fascinating mixture of steamy sex and high finance, worthy of the best TV soap operas. It gives you all the tricks of insider dealing and how to take the risk out of real estate speculation. All this against the backdrop of the building of the modern Paris, the "City of Lights" we admire so much today. This is the world of "get-rich-quick" with a vengeance. Also possibly the first recorded use of a bearskin rug for illicit sex (between teenage son and father's second wife). A big improvement on Zola's first book, it deserves to be much better known than it is. A must for everyone who wants to be upwardly mobile.

This book is very good for someone who needs examples and explanations of sample code. I found this book very easy to read. I will use this book as a supplement in my class. It provides a different way of explaining material that would sometimes be confusing. I like that this book breaks down every line of code and explains it to the novice programmer.