Software Books

I picked up this book to help me develop an application knowing absolutely nothing about GTK+ programming and it was beyond helpful. Excellently written, not to mention many code examples showing how to use the GTK+ library properly and efficiently. This book gives you the tools and the understanding for building your own applications and not just re-creating the examples given to you.
I highly recommend this book to anyone programing in C and want to learn how to use the GTK+ library along with the GLib and Pango libraries. This is one book I'm not going to let go of.

FINALLY... a great book on GTK+.
Easy to follow and understand, great example, great explanations...

Usually I dislike the writing styles in Apress publications, but this is a definite winner. For the first time I can say I actually understand and can effectively use GTK+.

A textview widget in python had me stumped, but no longer. Anyone wishing to tackle GTK+ programming should buy this well organized and excellent book. It is well worth it.

I got this book a few weeks ago and found it to be well written and to the point.

I wanted to like this book, but unfortunately I cannot in good conscience give it 5 stars as the other reviewers have.

I will say the book is well organized and is definitely useful as a starting point for studying GTK+ and the author clearly has a great deal of knowledge about the subject. But what should have been the main strength of the book that differentiates it from the mostly inadequate online tutorials is the author conveying to the reader straightforward explanations of important concepts and insider tips and tricks that can only come from extensive experience. He tries to do this, but I found many of his explanations ambiguous and confusing. Important terminology was left undefined or poorly defined which contributed to the confusion.

The author dutifully plods through a presentation of most of the main widgets, providing essentially the same trivial example code each time with minor variations- basically just showing how to put the widget onscreen. But there was a frustrating lack of material devoted to how to use signals and events to perform any useful tasks. The vast majority of the functionality of any GUI application lies in its event handlers and callback functions. After reading this book, you will be able to prototype the GUI for your application, but you may be at a loss to make it actually do something.

By Ch.3 and 4, the same example code has been replicated so many times that there is an increasing frequency of copy-paste errors that gradually becomes very annoying. Also, there are many typos in the text. The lack of editorial oversight and technical review on the part of the publisher combined with the author's lack of attention to detail and failures in exposition has created a book that I can only marginally recommend- mostly because all of the other books that have been published on GTK+ are either out of date or out of print, so this book seems to be the winner by default.

Overall this is a really great book with lots of examples and good problems, however my complaint is that some of the problems haven't been covered in the examples and so they are too difficult to solve. For instance, in the chapter on node voltages, none of the examples covers floating voltage sources that have other components like resistors in series with them, yet a number of the problems involve such floating voltage sources. I had to refer to the Schaum's Outline of Basic Circuit Analysis (another very good book, btw) to find an example problem for that.
If you're looking for books on electric circuits, however, I would definitely recommend this one along with the Schaum's Outline book I mentioned above.

This is a decent start for novice engineers. Unlike other texts on the same subject it has very effective methodology of teaching the very basic concepts of electric circuits. A bulk of solved examples is there to help you understand techniques of circuit analysis. It really soothed me when I was suffering from "circuit phobia". This text is highly recommended by me for beginners.

I am very satisfied with Alexander's book. Compared with any other book in this field, the others actually don't really stand a chance. Why? Because you can actually teach from this book EFFECTIVELY. The pedagogy works here, whereas many other authors have unfortunately failed. The communication works; and the chemistry works too. I think we engineers really need to realize this important issue. And always try to improve.

This one book ist the best Engineer book for me since my undergraduate years. The great difference between this one and others are the very illustrativ problems. Charles Alexander is somewhat well known as an engineering educator - I could very feel this from the book's layout.

This is probably the most useful engineering textbook I have on my shelf. Not only is it very easy to understand, but as a reference, I like it even better! The math is lucid, yet never overwhelming, and in addition, the problems are quite interesting. I highly recommend this book, rather than Nilsson's. (I think one of the Authors of this book has written/edited an EE handbook as well, which I am less familiar with. Maybe I'd check that one out too)

I admit that at first I was thinking this book would focus more on the game engine part of the toolset development in its title. I knew it wasn't REALLY about developing a game engine but even so, make sure you understand what you're getting.

That said, I really liked this book. I'm halfway through it already (it's a very quick read given how discrete each chapter is and the clear and easy to read print and examples).

I've read a number of game development books and you rarely get everything done right. This book gets close. The author describes the particular problem the chapter seeks to solve (e.g. encryption, batch processing, etc.) and goes through the steps of solving it.

The book is similar to those programming gems types of books that aren't organized in some linear fashion but are discrete chapters on specific topics that can be picked and chosen as you see fit.

The author does a very good job of putting the examples together and many of the chapters have been useful to me (I plan on implementing a number of the tools/frameworks he mentions).

If you're working on a game engine, I really suggest trying this book out. This assumes you're not already an expert game programmer who already built a lot of these sorts of tools before.

If you're looking for something that will help you build a full-fledged game engine, look for another book...then come back to this and get it to help you flesh out your toolset.

I just received my copy of Game Engine Toolset Development and I have been unable to put the book down. The author gives a good introduction to .NET 2.0 and relates it to toolset development for games. The chapters are easy to read and follow and he gives good advice on how to build good tools. He could have looked at other toolsets to make the book more complete, but I see this book as a way to introduce students to game programming who have a basic programming background (Java, C++, C, Alice 2.0, etc.).

I bought this book thinking it would help me write a new tool for, say, building 3d models, or some other general tool. When it arrived I got excited just by the shear size of it, it's huge!

However, I started flipping through it browsing each and every chapter (didn't read them all in detail of course, but quite a few) and it doesn't teach you how to make a NEW tool for your game, it teaches you how to make an EXISTING tool better. While that knowledge is extremely valuable (and the reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 3), it's not what the description of the book stated: "Readers are not required to have any experience developing game engine tools." If you have no experience developing a tool, you're going to have a little trouble getting started. If you know enough math and have good enough coding skills to get a game engine going, you'll be able to write a tool for your game, but you don't need this book to do it.

Now, with that said, this book IS quite good and worth your money so long as you don't expect to read this book and then write a tool, you're going to need more info. Get the book anyway and use it as a guide, it's usefull in that aspect.

This book is so good at making a tool better, most of it's "gems" can and should be applied to ANY application, game tool or not. Also, it covers some good highlevel (or lowlevel, depending on how you view it) .Net functionality such as interfacing with COM and code documentation, as well as few other excellent techniques. These "gems" are quite valuable on their own.

So, in conclusion, if you know nothing about writing a tool, or you don't know C#, hold off on buying this book (make sure to put it in your wish list however). If you have a tool but find it's difficult to work with, or you want to broaden it's appeal, or just simply make it better, get this book, you won't regret it.

This is an excellent book, which covers a lot of important aspects of game/engine tool development, but it is more like a recipe book, as each chapter subject is almost stands on its own - just like game programming gems series. My favorite is how to integrate native code into a managed application. The book is well written (one of the best I've read recently), and the only thing i missed is a few chapters on how-to integrate into an existing pipeline - like importer/exporter for a common 3d package at least. A better title for this book would be "(game)tool programming gems"

Then, as a hobbyist, I'll just let you know that this book not only teaches, but flat you gives you some great modular code that you can work into many different types of tools.

There's also some great design principles covered that have improved my workflow, even though i'm currently working solo.

This order was handled above and beyond the call of duty. They handled everything, including the problem of USPS losing the package. No questions were asked and the book was reshipped immediately. Thank You for the great service.

This book opened my eyes. I'd finished a Ph.D. in computer science, and had a decent exposure to quite a few programming languages and paradigms, before coming across this book. I was surprised to start working through this introductory book, and find myself learning new things! The book transformed my approach to programming.

From page one, HtDP starts talking about good program design, and gives a methodical approach. Until this, I'd always thought programming books were "here are ten small example programs; go write ten more." That's hardly teaching. But HtDP builds up a straightforward design recipe, to guide programs along. If I get stuck or have a mistake in my program, 90% of the time I realize it's because I strayed from the book's recipe. The approach is language-independent, although some programming environments make it much easier to implement the design recipe; the book provides links to a good (free) Scheme environment, which it uses for its code examples too. (I've come to use that environment day-to-day). My code--in any language--has become much more robust, and when I do have a bug I usually locate it early, thanks to this book.

In addition, HtDP made me think about things I'd taken for granted: How is assignment to a variable fundamentally different than assignment to a structure's field? Even, *why* do I use assignment statements in certain situations, instead of choosing a functional approach? How often do my programs actually need the efficiency of imprecise floating-point arithmetic, vs using bignums which totally liberate me from numerical inaccuracy?

Although the text is available on line, I cherish my hardcopy. This is a book to first learn programming from, and one to revisit every five years.

As a programming do-it-yourselfer I've had many conflicting responses to this text -- it's didactic style, its attention to detail, its sometimes patronizing tone, its rigor and broad scope and at the same time its immersion in minutia and quiddities I have never encountered in 'computer books' I had ever perused. Perhaps it's my liberal arts background, or love 'em/hate 'em sensitivity to all those broad stiff-spined textbooks I had carried in back-packs since childhood, combined with a disdain for the authoritative stilted style these educators exude -- despite their patent love of their subject. I felt at once both patronized and condescended to.
From the very start of their journey into a detailed six step-by-step process that show the reader how to analyze problem statements, how to formulate goals, make up examples, outline a solution, and test a solution the authors proclaim their pedagogical ends: "We [...] believe that the study of program design deserves the same central role in general education as mathematics and English. Or, put more succinctly, everyone should learn how to design programs..." This is not a textbook, this is a revolutionary pamphlet calling for educational reform. I had read nothing like this in the tens of 'Dummies' and 'In 24 Hours' books I had exposed myself to. One part priggish, two parts pedagogic. I often found myself asking for whom was it written? First-year college student?, ambitious would-be high-school programmer wanna-be? Math mavens? Surely not a middle-aged bookish clerk who tastes run more to Turgenev and Dostoevsky than Turing and Dijkstra. But then I demanded more than mere anonymous web-lurking from my lowly pc. I remember myself many years ago trying to learn BASIC on a massive time-share computer and telling myself surely there was had to be more magic to computing than this. Well, after reading more texts and having had to unlearn the 'Dummies' and the 'In 24 hours' style of disinformation I had finally found the marrow of a discipline that is as demanding as any I had ever come across and as vexing as any artistic rigor I had ever been inspired by. Come be confused, come be amused, amazed and intellectually abused. Sorely, if I find I have little talent for this excruciatingly logical endevour, I have also found a full-blown appreciation of such daunting computational cheekiness. Much to learn here, and this is only the "core subject of a liberal arts education." What had I been wasting my time on all those years as a professional student?

I have been professionally developing software for about 5 years. I found this book to be one of the most useful and helpful books to help my coding skills. Even though I have been programming professionally for a few years and have a computer science degree, I learned a lot of new neat concepts from this book. It also helped to me to remind me of all the basic good practices that I have forgotten.

It is also an excellent book for beginners. The books doesn't use a popular programming language like Java to accomplish its goals. Instead, it uses Scheme so the student can focus on the concepts rather than syntax. It also teaches great concepts and breaks the problem down on how to solve various problems. Also it isn't "hardcore" like SICP-- it is very friendly to non-MIT level people.

Great book! I liked the way the author approaches how to begin designing programs. I am half-way through the book and I am finding it very entertaining. Yeap! I recommend this book.

This is a reference that constructs ones understanding of C# one feature at a time in a one step at a time methodical manner. The liberal use of diagrams helped me visualise concepts more easily. I liked this approach when the author discussed delegates and events. Many books try to explain it but I was satisfied that I understood completely only after reading this book. e.g. I did not know that a delegate is actually a cillection of callbacks (not just one) before this. I also liked the friendly, usable and pallatable introduction to LINQ. Please note that this is a C# book and does not discuss dot net libraries. So you will have to buy another book for that.

It's good for someone new to C# (not necesarily new to programming) and also for more exerienced programmers who may keep coming back to it to really dissect language details - e.g how do I make best use of bit fields?

Dan Solis's Illustrated C# 2008 is a pleasure to read and from which to learn, both with concise information and the easy to understand illustrations in it.
The illustrations make this book unique in that they make relatively foreign concepts easy to understand. They are consistent, build one on another, and make sense. He takes the concept of the stack and the heap, explaining how temporary data is stored, right from the beginning. With each new data type, or type member, an illustration shows how it is different from the others, and therefore why that user defined type was developed.
I strongly recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn the basics of a computer language, and especially C#, which is becomming the standard, as well as the language used my Microsoft in their program development.

What a delight!

This is the C# book that I always keep next to me. If I am unsure about some type of class, delegates, interfaces, etc. I open up this book and get right up to speed. While concise, Dan leaves nothing out in terms of details required for effective C# programming.

The LINQ coverage is outstanding! It is so good that I hope Dan does an entire book on the subject. His mastery of informative graphics would be an ideal format for help to save us T-SQL hacks from having to stand on our heads to get at LINQ.

I highly recommend this book.

You will not read a better book on C#.

The first edition (2005) was great, this one is even better.

If you only get two books on C# then this should be one of them.

But, if you only buy one book... :) then get this one.

Sorry this review is short on content, but the other reviewer will bring you up to speed. (just the ones with 5 stars)

The 2008 version vs 2005 version

It includes a new chapter on asynchronous programming using delegates.
It includes a new chapter on the new LINQ features.

One small down side in the 2005 version (not sure about the 2008 version)

The author states that fields should begin with upper case letters and local variable begin with lower case. In 2005 chapter on Methods, the author makes the mistake of using upper case for local variables...

This may have been corrected in 2008 version.

I now have 4 books on C# and this is by far the best (at least for me). The material is well organized with consice, well thought out explanations. In addition, the figures add a great deal of to clarify the text. To me, this book was written to inform.

As I usually make numerous notes this book fits my needs very well with an ample amount of white space.

Thanks to Daniel Solis.

Mr. Ulrich has delivered a framework with which IT areas can effectively leverage their existing applications and data to meet the ever-changing business environment. Bill's chapter on Case Studies provides real life examples of how to use his methodology. We face rapidly changing business drivers, including the need to make our businesses internet-ready. This book provides the materials to allow companies a fighting chance to succeed.

I read Bill Ulrich's book and was delighted to see that he was clearing laying out strategies that we were dealing with as we worked with our clients. We now make Mr. Ulrich's book part of our mandatory reading for our consultants and have purchased copies for distribution to some of our key clients. This has helped both our consulting teams and our clients in planning and project executiion.

Mr. Ulrich understands how businesses have a tremendous reliance on legacy systems. Pressure is always on the IT staff to meet the demands of the business cusomter. The IT community is asked to bring products and services to the consumer through the internet while managing the internal demands to keep expenses under control. Bill's book lays out a framework in which the business community can build company-specific plans to leverage their prior investments while striving to meet today's business drivers in a manner that is cost effective.

Bill has filled this book with tremendous value for any one working with existing systems of any kind. He builds in the flexibility of approach by mapping many common and not-so-common methods and strategies through his exploration of specific case studies. Chapter 3 is a valuable item on its own - rarely have I seen such a thorough and clear examination of all the different 'movements' in IT in the last 10 years. Nice job, Bill.

Corporations have been trying to retire legacy systems for the past couple of decades. Each new technology (be it client/server, ERP packaged apps, etc) were supposed to put the nail in the coffin for legacy systems. Yet, legacy systems continue to thrive despite attempts to retire them. One reason why they continue to exist is that in many instances, they support business processes in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible. Bill's book views this area more as a transformation effort (evolution) rather than wholesale legacy replacement (revolution). This book is a must read for IT departments as they struggle to remain relavent in an era of outsourcing.

The strategies outlined in this book will help the IT department become a partner with functional business units in delivering solutions that address burning business problems. The focus shifts to providinig measurable value to the business as opposed to implementing unified and elegant technologies.

From beginner to expert this book contains all of the answers to your lingo needs. It is packed with examples and thorough descriptions.

I can't find an updated version of it - if anyone knows of one please let me know!...

This book has got to be the best computer related book I ever bought. I wish there were reference books in this format for every other programming subject like Perl and JavaScript. It's the only book you will ever need for Director's lingo.

The thing I like most is having the Lingo grouped by subject, it makes things so easy to look up.

Darrel, please make a reference like this for Perl!!!!

If you are already familiar with the Director interface, and want to do things in Lingo that most people only wish they could do, pick this book up right now! This is the only book I use on a daily basis for quick information. Darrel Plant not only gives a clear explanation on every command but also gives you examples that you can understand and use in everyday applications. I also greatly appreciated the way that the book content is organized. Rather than list the commands in alphabetical order, they are grouped according to the type of element or function that they control. It's nice to put something together that the user/client likes, but use this book and they will be saying, "Awsome! Love it! Wow, how did you do that?" ------ Thanks Darrel

...your life will be easier if this book is within reach. I even take it with when I have to go on-site to a client. Very useful having the Lingo grouped by subject. Also very useful icons by each Lingo word showing if it can be used in Shockwave and which versions of Director it can be used in. A must-have for a Lingo programmer.

(excuse my english, I'm Swiss) Before purchasing this book or even knowing about it, I had some heavy problems in finding the right way (or a shorter one) to solve several problems in programming Multimedia-applications. I ordered this book and everything changed! It's descriptions are so easy (even when you aren't originally english-speaking!), because you just can read the text and know what the command, keyword, property a.s.o. is all about. You have even more than one solution showed in examples. There is only one bad thing: if you use this book very often, the cover of the book looks old soon; it could be a little stronger. My suggestion: if you suffer a headache from studying and controlling your non-functioning scripts, you better get this book as soon as possible and keep it handy! You will gain a hell of a time!

Have fun

Best regards

Patric Simon

This is the book for you if you are new to MATLAB. The book covers the basic steps of MATLAB and how to apply them to real word engineering or mathematical problems in an interactive environment.

The book is well written and is very easy to use. This is a great book for the beginner, but I would not recommend the book for anyone that has over 6 months of experience.

The Item was in very good condition & the shipping was prompt & before time.

If you plan to start with Matlab with no prior experience, this book beats most of the other available titles.Since an inside view of the book is not available on Amazon, I will for the benefit of others list out the chapters here.Ch1 begins with the necessary introduction,developing familiarity with the command window,display formats and precedence of operators.It moves on to Ch2 and Ch3 where arrays are introduced and the mathematical operations on them explained.Ch4 is about script files,Ch5 on elementary plotting techniques using in-built functions like plot and fplot.Ch6 introduces functions and Ch7 extends the previous material to formal programming techniques like loops and control structures.Ch8 explains curve fitting and interpolation,Ch9 is about three dimensional plots and special graphics.Ch10, the last one of the book uses Matlab to do symbolic math which cover elementary algebraic equations.The examples contained in the book are from elementary physics and engineering,so if you are looking for more advanced material that has been treated using Matlab,this might be a little less helpful.The numerical techniques again cover simple problems like projectile trajectory,flow of water from a vessel with a small hole punched in its sidewall,RC circuits, viscosity and so on.Relatively advanced topics like Fourier transforms and applications to signal processing are also left out.If you are done with this book or feel that the material isnt of much help, I will suggest that you might try "Numerical Computing with Matlab" by Moler(he is perhaps one of the architects of Matlab).This book(electronic version) is available for free from the mathworks website [...].Overall this book does a good job in explaining details and is also generously sprinkled with figures and screenshots.Please try it if you are first timer to Matlab.

I am a robotics engineering masters student who is REALLY behind on his Matlab knowledge based on the fact that i have a background in biology. (Long story). I just completed my first semester and bought this book in May to learn matlab more thoroughly over the summer. This book is just FANTASTIC. I couldn't ask for more. It is structured logically, the examples are CLEAR and it just makes total sense. I never realized that it would be this readable and excellent. If you are a beginner it can truly be read cover to cover. The problems are interesting and the step by step guides are just what i needed. I initially thought twice about spending the $80 when there were cheaper texts available, but let me tell you from experience, don't bother. I have read some other Matlab texts and they pale in comparison to this one. It is worth every penny. If you have a limited knowledge or are without any knowledge of Matlab GET THIS BOOK. It is great and worth the extra money.

I purchased this title because I am starting a numerical analysis sequence next year using Matlab and I knew only how to plot in 2D and do simple calculations at the command line. After studying from Gilat's text for the past month or so I feel very comfortable using Matlab for all the basics and I am ready to learn how to exploit the full power of the program.

Each chapter gives just enough mathematical background to provide anyone with at least college algebra/trig enough to understand what is going on.
Although this book does not cover any topic too deeply, it does cover the fundamentals of many aspects of Matlab in a way that allows the reader to move fairly quickly through the whole book without getting bogged down in any one area.

In the end you will know the basics about how Matlab operates: how to work with vectors and matrices, how to write simple programs and function files, how to plot and format data, how to fit data to a curve, and how to differentiate and integrate both numerically and symbolically, and a bunch of other great tools for solving problems.

Also, as the other reviewers mentioned, the book makes very good use of graphics to show how input and output should look, as well as what exactly each line means.

I would recommend this text to anyone wanting to learn the basics of Matlab.

You can just feel, behind this book stays huge experience. Well written, CD is very handy and I am happy to have this book

This book is very well written. It really tells you what you need to know when using AD. Another great Sybex book that made the 70-640 exam easy!

There are a lot of IT guides out there but this is the one I can't do without. Superbly written, thorough and easy to follow. The labs are also invaluable and turn the words into real knowledge. I highly recommend this book for any IT professional's collection.

70-640 is a breeze after using this book just finished all of my certifications and this book made the 70-640 exam easy. I would recommend this book to my co-workers, friends and strangers alike. If you are prepping for the 70-640, this is all you will need to understand the content and pass the exam. The authors of this book knew how to gear the content to make it easier for you to understand and pass the exam.

This book is absolutely outstanding! They way the authors break down each section and give real world scenarios make this book unique. Given the changes in Server 2008 this book is a must have if you wish to pass the 70-640. After reading this book and using the CD I have passed the test and I know it was because of this outstanding book! I highly recommend this book if your goal is to pass the 70-640 while still obtaining a firm grasp on each concept.

You can just feel, behind this book stays huge experience. Well written, CD is very handy and I am happy to have this book

This book is very well written. It really tells you what you need to know when using AD. Another great Sybex book that made the 70-640 exam easy!

There are a lot of IT guides out there but this is the one I can't do without. Superbly written, thorough and easy to follow. The labs are also invaluable and turn the words into real knowledge. I highly recommend this book for any IT professional's collection.

70-640 is a breeze after using this book just finished all of my certifications and this book made the 70-640 exam easy. I would recommend this book to my co-workers, friends and strangers alike. If you are prepping for the 70-640, this is all you will need to understand the content and pass the exam. The authors of this book knew how to gear the content to make it easier for you to understand and pass the exam.

This book is absolutely outstanding! They way the authors break down each section and give real world scenarios make this book unique. Given the changes in Server 2008 this book is a must have if you wish to pass the 70-640. After reading this book and using the CD I have passed the test and I know it was because of this outstanding book! I highly recommend this book if your goal is to pass the 70-640 while still obtaining a firm grasp on each concept.