Software and Tools Books

For a newbie following the examples closely is generally a must; however, there are some "trivial" steps left out of the book ... that turn out to be necessary to get the sample projects moving. Given the brevity of the content, the inaccuracies of the samples, and the high price ... my suggestion is to look elsewhere.

This book made use of an earlier version of Rails, but if you aren't totally clueless and have the wisdom to read warnings from IDEs, generation scripts and the server, you can actually get the code running.

BTW, 99% of the code works without warnings/errors at all. FWIW, I switched to Mac OS X to do this (from Dell using XP), so I was fighting a lot of other differences besides having a more modern Rails, and I actually got through it all. Also, I am an old Java/C++ programmer... so if somebody younger than me cannot get this stuff, maybe they should think carefully about whether programming is for them (Rails development is still programming).

This is a hands-on, bottom up book. I did wrestle a bit with reading the chat about the code *then* coding or coding the code and *then* reading the explanations. It was *fun* to use this book and I really enjoyed using this book for getting a visual, and (for me) potentially useful application running.

Best of all, IMO... the core material is under 150 pages! Hard to find such terse and useful books these days. If anyone remembers the power and elegance of K&R's C book, you'll appreciate this fact.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

[1] Uses Rake for migrations and yes on a modern Rails (pre 2.0) you will see deprecation notices that tell you what you need to do... either way it works.

[2] Uses some deprecated start_forms_tag but guess what, if you have the internet you google around and you figure it out. And you know what then? You own what you learn and are not just spoon fed the code.

[3] Does not go deep into theory.

[4] You best try your hand at Ruby first just so you can read Rails code... ummmm it uses Ruby ya know.

[5] Is not TDD or BDD... so you are coding the evil, old fashioned way. Unless you are Donald Knuth (who claims to have no need for unit testing).

[6] Be careful during the DB migrations section, I screwed up the order of some things, I don't think the book misled me. I also figured my way out of it while also learning how to get around SQLite3's command shell. No whining from those spoiled by pushbutton IDEs please.

[7] This book will not make you a Rails guru, it opens the door and gives you working code base to head down that road. You'll still have other books, blogs, and Wikis ahead of you.

Buy it for pre Rails 2, I assume it is still largely applicable to Rails 2, which came out last year (end of).

While this book does not require it, I found using NetBeans IDE with Ruby/Rails support helped me get the coding done much faster than using VIM or TextEdit. I did not use it to generate the application and the components. For that I used the Rails command line scripts per the book.

I definitely will avoid both authors in the future.

I can't fathom how O'reilly "approved" these authors to write such book with so many ridiculous errors from typos to just blatant errors.

I supposed O'reilly is also declining in terms of quality (See my "Learning Ruby", "Learning JavaScript" review as well).

Bad:
1) Too many errors
2) Outdated (Rails is 2.0, the book, rushed, is using 1.1)
3) Too pricey
4) Bruce A. Tate always jumped shipped form one language to another with no deep interest/experience in each of the "new languages"
5) You're building the examples based on "scaffolding" auto-generation

Good:
1) That I told you not to buy this book.
2) That Bruce is no longer writing more books (yet)
3) That others also echoed the same complains

This is a great book, and I recommend you consider it, but for a couple reasons you might not want to buy it.

First, it's a great *short* overview of the process of developing Ruby on Rails apps. I found that I understand all the things I've read elsewhere but it's sometimes hard to put it all together and remember all the steps in a logical sequence. Because of the magic of Rails (and its use of metaprogramming and code generation and other groovyamazing stuff, you have to learn to THINK DIFFERENTly about development. While you're in the process of making the mental shift, both conceptually and syntactically, it's good to have cheatsheets to simply REMEMBER what works, and which magical incantation does which thing. There are plenty of cheatsheets for Rails and Ruby, but none that I've seen that are like this: all the basics, in sequence, with clear explanation.

Think of it as a stepping stone between DHH's screencast and his Agile Web Develpment with Rails (written mostly by Dave Thomas), which is a little on the long side for a first book. (It's much better to get a firmer grasp of the big picture before focusing in on details. Sorry about the mixed metaphor.)

However, you should note that it is now quite old and in need of updating. It is also frustratingly full of errors: spelling, grammatical, factual, and technical. So be forewarned. If you can put up with all that, however, it's very useful, and clearly written. O'Reilly just needs to fire all their proofreaders.

I read through this in an afternoon in a bookstore. I'm wondering... Why would you get this book when for several dollars more you could get the bible of Ruby on Rails: "Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers)?"

Where this book is overly terse and covers the bare minimum of subjects, AWDwR has lots of details and examples. Get that book and the companion Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition and you're all set for some fun evenings.

Tate has a habit of rushing books out (e.g., Spring: A Developer's Notebook) and this is another one of those. It occurs to me that this book should have been in that "Developer's Notebook" series...

Tate has been ringing the death knell of Java for several years now and extolling the virtues of THE NEXT BIG THING (in this case, Ruby on Rails). He oughta slow down and figure out at least one of these technologies before he attempts to write about it.

Ironically, the next paradigm shift from Java to RoR will probably happen in spite of Mr. Tate's exposition. Stick to AWDwR, you won't be sorry.

I found this book very helpful in navigating through Eclipse. Be sure to check which version of Eclipse you have; there are differences that can lead to confusion for first time users.

I stumbled onto Eclipse from a very unorthodox path. In my concurrent Java programming unit I continued to have problem in getting students to address all issues of import in their assignments. I thought that I should write a progressive series of programs to address one issue at a time. In class we were relying on command line compilation and execution of the Java programs.

To develop Java programs, I downloaded Eclipse IDE and started to write programs one project for each set of progressed specifications. Soon I had some 10 projects with 10 sets of codes. Eclipse was great, it allowed me to debug and see activities even in multi-threaded execution of programs. However, I wanted to have some transition among my 10 projects to be smooth. I wanted to use consistent interfaces, shared code for classes and comments. I wanted to learn more on refactoring functionality of the IDE. I bought the book to fill this goal.

Have not found much to help my goal but the book has exposed me GUI builder ideas V4ALL. But this project seem to be already gone. SWT was also a new exposure. I have not yet explored it but would it be acceptable replacement for Swing for a university course?

Over all the book is nice and easy introduction to using Eclipse IDE but much of what it introduces can easily be learned from the Eclipse help, tutorials and commonsense. It is time that the author be magnanimous and put the book on Web for all Eclipse beginners to read and adapt the tool. Good book but I am not sure if I can ask my students to spend money on purchasing a copy. An update to reflect the current state of the IDE would also be welcome.

Time has started to diminish the value of this book. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 deal with building GUIs using the V4ALL Eclipse plugin, which is now classified as Obsolete. Also with Eclipse 3.3 now available (the book focuses on Eclipse 3.0), a new edition of the book is definitely needed.

This book a a very good start for Eclipse new users in the way that it presents all basic features of Eclipse 3.0. I recommend it to any one.

I bought this book and have been making my way through it to teach myself about Eclipse. I did fine for the first five chapters, but after that the trail grows cold because the book is based on Eclipse prior to the 3.0 and later releases. I began having lots of problems because the instructions and screen shots no longer came close to matching what is actually in Eclipse 3.0. So I gave up after chapter five.

Sorry for bad review but book is not for Professional but novice users and managers.

I concur with just about every other reviewer. At a time when there's such a dearth of introductory material on jsr 168, I expected a lot from this book, but unfortunately got very little out of it, and worse yet, I have had to un-learn some of the practices I picked up from this book.

I got really excited looking over the first chapter's example portlet -- a Lucene search portlet. But there are some glaring mistakes in the code. One fundamental mistake I see a lot is their use of request.getParameter("mode") to retrieve the portlet mode, when it's much better to use request.getPortletMode(). The mode parameter is not always set and can sometimes be null; it's much safer to use the getPortletMode() method. In general, I would have liked more explanation in chapter one on jsr 168 basics. There simply aren't enough texts out there that do this well.

But I do laud the fundamental premise of the book -- using powerful, mature open-source projects (apache lucene and james) -- to build a portal. Search and mail are the foundation of any commercial portal and I think the open source alternatives compete well here; however, they haven't been tied into a framework that you can deploy out of the box, so I think the authors tried to meet a very real need.

This book helped me overcome some difficulties I had in my new portal development tasks and in understanding some of the basic concepts needed for developing portlets within/without a portal framework. This book is definitely worth a look for those interested in portal creation.

As others have noted this book is a rip off. Of the 12 Chapters 6 are completly unrelated to Portal deveelopment. Chapter 2 is Searching with Lucene, 3 - Messaging with Apache James, 4 Object to Relational Mapping with Jakarta OJB and 5 is Content Management with Jakarta Slide.

In fairness there are a couple of useful sections - but overall its quite incomplete.

Enterprise portal based on Portlet is very flexible for rapid development. A good practice is to plug-in quickly a variety of portlets as placeholders to compose a mock-up portal as the baseline for further detailed discussion with stakeholders. Of course, all the parties involved know that the mock-up presented is still a mock-up and they expect there is a production release at the end.

This book is also a mockup, though we readers did not know this until we paid this book as the final deliverable.

This book has two parts. The first part, Open Source Portals, contains 6 chapters. Chapter 1, The Java Portlet API (JSR 168), mainly lists lengthy attribute names and descriptions for CSS Style Definitions and for User Information Attributes, without much explanation. Much better material may be found online just a google away. Many pages are given to the code of a sample portlet. The explanation is as much as the comments made by poor programmer, almost none. Why do we readers have to pay in order to have the pleasure to read poorly commented coding? The sample is built upon Apache Lucene API, though it has not been introduced at this stage at all.

The remaining 5 chapters in the first part introduce several subjects that may be used to support a portal development, researching with Lucene, messaging with Apache James (for mail), object to relational mapping with Apache OJB, content management with Jakarta's Slide, portal security. The authors take these pieces of the components of their portal framework. A problem with this book is that the authors keep introduce a large amount of terminologies and software components without much insight. For instance, they never bother to explain why they use Apache OJB in their portal framework. Isn't Hibernate also a popular O-R mapping tool? I wish the authors explained to us other alternatives and at least some hints of why they choose certain open source tools instead of the others in portal development. This is particular important for using open source tools since there are often many alternatives.

The second part is titled How to Build a Portal. Again, you will discover many placeholders without much substance. For instance, under Design Pattern Consideration in Your Portal, nine standard design patterns are presented, several lines of description for each. The authors just do not bother to explain why they consider these 9 patterns are important for portal development and other are not, or they merely provides a partial list to demonstrate design patterns are still important to portal development as it is for any other development. I will give you another example here. Chapter is devoted to Effective Client-Side Development Using JavaScript. The coverage here is just common for any web development. I do not understand why the authors make this subject an entire chapter, in particular since this book covers a large amount of subjects in a moderate 400 pages, and in particular some fundamental subjects are still missing, such as the coverage of portal servers/containers.

I am not kidding. Open source portal/containers are not covered much in this book for Professional Portal development. Open source portal servers are briefly mentioned in the introductory part in about one page, each in several lines. Apache Jakarta Pluto is covered in a bonus chapter on the book's companion Web site. Apache Jakarta Jetspeed is mentioned in 7 linesJ. Liferay Enterprise Portal is introduced in 15 lines. This books give more coverage on EXo Portal. is introduced in 8 lines and it is introduced briefly again at Chapter 9, when a moderate Portlet is demonstrated.

According to the publisher, "An outstanding team of authors provides a complete tutorial and reference guide to Java Portlet API, Lucene, James, and Slide, taking you step-by-step through constructing and deploying portal applications." The book fails to deliver this promise.

This is, by far, the best PeopleSoft book on the market. I have tried several administrator handbooks, however none of them comare in the slightest to this book. As far as ERP is concerned, the author really knows his business.

For Peoplesoft consultants this book is of no use.The back cover says detailed 'step by step guideline ' is of false information. Mostly who buy this book must be a peoplesoft consultants who are involved in the integration project who needs some real time examples of how to do the integration.However this book never talk about a single example.

I can write this book in 5 hours.

Guys don't get cheated .This is the worst book I came across by Mc Graw Hill.

If any body interested to buy this book please let me know.

I had to fill in the ratings as mandatory.Actual rating which I could gives is 0.

My company is deciding between SAP and PeopleSoft and hired me to help them determine which is the best platform. I bought this and Miller's other SAP book. The two resources were extremely helpful to me!

This text is really right on target for anyone doing PeopleSoft integration. I am most pleased to have the chance to give this book the highest rating possible. It is really very well done and would be of great help to anyone involved in this subject.

There are several reasons why this book cannot be recommended to anyone at any level who is interested in learning about PSFT Integration Tools.
1. The core content is positioned for a System Administrator to know how the system components all work together, from an enterprise perspective, not an integration perspective. The same can be learned from the PSFT manuals and whitepapers.
2. The concepts are both complex and simple - failing to completely satisfy any particular audience (IT Directors, product evaluators, technical resources).
3. There are no "technical" details, as you might expect from the title. No samples and the screenshots and diagrams are very weak. You can see other reviewers who have made this same complaint.
4. Writing style like a shotgun blast - numerous spelling and grammar errors, 2nd grade reading level sentences intermixed with collegiate level sentences. Throughout you will find redundancies, overlaps, concepts running on tangents that have no purpose or objective to the reader, etc.

Shame on those of you who found this book to be anything more than useless!

I tried to read this book twice.
I'm writing an interface to PeopleSoft system.
This book does not provide much useful info.
It is confusing too.
I much prefer PeopleSoft Administrator's Guide
by Darrell Bilbrey.

This book was a great way to learn the concepts of Maya. It is colorful and engaging. The book uses fun examples to teach the reader about creating animations.

This book starts out with basic concepts and runs up all the way into complicated animation details. It would be a great book for any level - but absolutely perfect for someone starting out, and looking to become a Maya pro.

This is exactly what i was looking for, i think this is an amazing book if you want to learn....you have to get it.

I gave this as a gift, but the recipient told me it's an excellent resource and well worth the investment

This book was used in my Intermediate 3d Animation course and it's pretty good for the basics of rigging a bipedal character. However, the book tends to be inconsistent with some of its naming conventions for certain bones while rigging, which could confuse a beginner. For example, when they go through and tell you to name all your bones, they tell you to name the "knee" joint "up leg", then a few chapters later, they refer to it as the "knee joint" instead of "up leg."

horrible. as some have said, names are misused, images are confusing,
greatly lacking in explanation. i've been banging my head against this thing for two and a half weeks and i give up. clunky workflow examples and frankly outdated pipeline. anyone interested in a book like this would do themselves a favor by checking out Gnomon Studios or Digital Tutors. they present more sophisticated and intuitive workflows. save your money and use the manual that came with your software as reference with the video guides available from the above mentioned companies. it'll save you from the inevitable ulcers Learning Maya 7 will cause. p.s. been using EIAS since '95. Not new to this game. hope the review helps.

You won't find much difference in the dryness of this book as compared to other offerings from Microsoft, but if you can make it through the book, you will find that this is a one technically accurate resource. Everthing dealing with servers is covered from planning, installation, configuring, upgrading, maintenance and troubleshooting. The backup chapter is excellent just for the diagrams and written information alone. The book also includes many lab exercises that a reader could do which is atypical of the other Server+ books available. Okay, now the bad news. The included CD-ROM is useless which is typical Microsoft Training Kit fare. This is not an easy book to read as I found myself zoning out during the more drier parts of the book. As I mentioned earlier, there is great information found throughout the book you just have to reach it. Lastly, if you can live with the subtle pro-MS slant you'll do fine. I would recommend an additional Server+ book (one that's easier to read) if you choose to use the MS Server+ book as your main study guide to round out your exam preparation.

I just got back from a $[money] learning experience. While I enjoyed reading this book, it lacked the detail that many of the SERVER+ Exam test questions required that you know (or guess well) in order to pass. I'm hunting now for another book because I can afford just so many $[money]-shots to my budget.

I think we all know the dryness that exists in most of MS's study guides but I am hear to say that I actually enjoyed this book! It was very informative and used many analogies to paint a clear picture of the information. After reading the book I thought that there must be somthing I was missing for taking this test. I was wrong! I have no networking experience at all! I read the book, enjoyed it, took the test and passed the first time! Wahlah!

Overall the book is pretty good. It is easy to read and follow and it includes practice lessons at the end of each section. However the book is too heavy on Windows 2000. The Server+ exam is supposed to be vendor neutral but you wouldn't know it by reading this book. If you want to pursue MCP or MCSE then this is a good place to start, if you want a book that is not Microsoft bias then skip over this one

This book is worth the cost. I have not taken the test yet (I do plan on it), but it has been heavily useful as far as better understanding the server(s) I work with every day. It also refreshed my mind on the A+/ network+ objectives that are included in the Server+ exam as outlined by Comptia.

The book's CD also contains a full copy of the book, so if you and your laptop want to leave this heavy little tome behind, just download and go! Also, the A-Z network encyclopedia E-book was pretty impressive (it includes several diagrams and a heckuva lot of information).

The only reason I give this book four stars is the simple fact I wish they would have included an interactive, sample test on the CD. Sample tests are usually pretty helpful, and doing them on the computer sets the feel for the actual exam. Otherwise, an excellent book!

I'm not sure this book ever had "all the ingredients you need to create 5-star web pages". This book is getting old now, and only covers basic HTML, so it's certainly lacking something in today's world of JavaScript, Flash, DHTML and CSS.

What it does have, and what keeps me from discarding it in favour of newer and more comprehensive HTML and page-design guides is its sensible advice on web site design. It's one of the few books with "web" and "design" in the title which actually covers web site design issues! It urges readers to think in terms of simple sites with useful content, and consider how the information might be used by people from all over the world as well as the usual issues of download speed and browser compatibility. If you follow its advice you might actually get a few more customers from outside the USA.

Probably not worth buying these days, but borrow it from a friend or check it out of the library if you do see it

If you're new to HTML, don't buy this book. Instead, buy "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating an HTML Web Page" by Paul McFedries. If you're familiar with HTML and are looking for something new under the sun, don't buy this book either. I don't have any recommendations for that type of book as I am still searching.

This book boasted that it was for everyone from beginner to advanced. I found this to be completely untrue. I have a limited knowledge of html and was totally unimpressed. The CD also claims to have hundreds of templates. I found the templates boring.

I'm not a web developer or designer by any stretch of the imagination, but I do a lot of HTML page development and maintenance, with some light javascript programming thrown in on my own web site. I started in January 2000 with an account for a personal page, Notepad.exe and a quick reference card. I learned basic HTML in the process, but also created an eyesore. As my technical skills evolved the ugliness of my creation remained the same. I swallowed my pride and got this book. It was one of the best purchases I ever made.

For a total beginner this is a good first book because it steps you through creating your first page, then adding features and using advanced HTML as you progress. For someone who is already proficient with HTML and has developed a few pages, you may find something useful in the advanced techniques and will certainly receive an education in good web page design. Some of the highlights of the authors' approach to design are in the examples. The accompanying CD ROM has every example in HTML format so you can see how they will display in your particular browser brand and version, and you can look at the code and play with it to see how your changes will display. This alone is a real time saver, and it makes this book all the more useful.

If you are a technical writer the examples for web pages that provide how-to procedures, troubleshooting procedures, on-line lessons and survey forms reflect good page design and the example files on the CD ROM can be immediately used as templates.

The only thing that detracts from this book is that it's woefully out of date. Some of the tools provided on the CD ROM are ancient, as are the discussions on various desktop operating systems. For example, Windows 95 was not even on the market when this book went to press and the authors' discussion on network issues were educated guesses. Now the network facilities built into desktop operating systems are so transparent that this section of the book can be safely ignored. However, we also live in a world where HTML has evolved to version 4, cascading style sheets are used on many sites (not to mention Macromedia Flash, Active Server Pages, more sophisticated java and javascript, etc.), rendering a lot of the technical aspects of this book quaint. On the other hand, that might not be such a bad thing since the best web pages are simple and more focused on design instead of a bunch of technical razzle-dazzle. But, I would love to see this book updated to reflect contemporary tools and techniques for web page design because I like the way the authors' impart their knowledge. This book would make an excellent text for a web design 101 class, and is one of the best for those of us who play around with this stuff. I'm subtracting a star because the book sorely needs to be updated, but am still giving it my highest recommendation.

This book is an excellent choice for individuals hell-bent on implementing a website. It details the elements of website creation in a clear, cookbook fashion. Those looking for advice or information on the process one goes through in successfully developing and implementing an e-commerce website need to look elsewhere. Anyone wishing further information regarding this book, or small business websites in particular, should feel free to email me at Robert@rpdesign.com - Robert Davidson

I got this book, after reading into the first 6 chapters, I decided to try the sample codes. The book claims that the codes are downloadable from www.sybex.com, but when I went there, there is no download link for this book, what a disappointment! I want my money back!

Kanglin Li's "Effective Software Test Automation" which is subtitled as "Developing an Automated Software Testing Tool" fails to deliver what it promises to be, a solution to automated software testing.

The core emphasis of this book is on reflection based correctness evaluation and showing a .NET implementation for this. It gives a brief introduction to commercial testing toolkits available for instance Compuware's DevPartner Studio, Parasoft's Insure++, Mercury's Interactive, Object Tester, IBM's Rational Suite, Segue S/w, Testworks as well as open source tools like Ant (not a testing tool by the way), Junit, Jprobe Cactus and HttpUnit. In the meantime, it conviniently leaves out Nunit which essentially does the same thing explained in this book and in a much better and more efficient way. Test scripts are easier to write, automate and it's open source with a VS.NET IDE plug-in.

An optimist's note; it discusses usage of Excel automation and XML manip from from C# which provides some good code recipes with explanations. Also the early phase test scripts for test driven development / XP practices is a good overview. It's just that this is not the core purpose of the book.

I found this book serving little purpose for developers test automation solution provision since there are several existing open source / commercial tools available in market which provide a better feature-set. However, if you are interested in learning reflection, want to extend an existing in-house testing framework for .NET, want to learn how test cases be created against assemblies etc, it might worth a read.

If you want to learn about a few classes in .Net only you can buy this book for fun. Actually in MSDN you can almost get all the information and this is a entry level book. If you read any .net programming book for about 1 week you get all the information written in length in this book already.

Look at the page 119 function ConvChar, he even copied everything from MSDN decoder class, even the comments! That is outrageous!

This book fits our current and future projects and provides enough material to complete our tasks. Our group likes this book because:
1. It is easily to read. The topics are well presented and clearly defined. The examples are designed to solve problems from real world software development projects.
2. It presents software test basics in the words of programming languages.
3. The book introduces the test concepts and uses C# .NET as examples to develop a tool to do almost all the tedious jobs for software testing, which the other tools can not do, and the other books never mention.
4. It explains how and why each line of code is used to achieve the software test automation instead of specific programming technologies of a language.
5. It is not a software test dictionary (or a bible), or an inventory of available software testing tools. I don¡¯t like to read a book which degrades the works of the others.
6. It repeats little content the other books, web pages or sources cover. The testing functions are effective and different from the available testing tools as I know of (Winrunner, Rational Test)
7. It helps developers produce good code, helps testers conduct the test with ease, and helps managers setup a high code quality standard.
8. Finally, it helps us to get a really and completely automated testing tool.

This book is NOT generic to all types of platforms as it purports. In fact, if you are not programming in an Windows environment you will get very little from this book.

The test tool created is only one and claims, on the jacket cover, to be a great replacement for the major vendor tools. While I agree the major tools aren't all they claim to be, neither is this one. It's limited in usage to very specific kinds of tests and is definitely not the silver bullet the jacket would have you believe. In fact, it's a similar subset to some of the vendor tools.

There are even more areas in which the .Net platform can be used for testing. Some key areas such as debugging and tracing are missing from this text. How about the use of nUnit? What about using .Net to access databases? This is not a thorough treatment, but it's fine that it's not. It's just that it claims to be more than it is.

After all is said and done, this book is worth buying for Windows test professionals, so that's why I give it 3 stars. I just resent being told, again and again, that someone has the "answer" to software testing. Get with it folks, software testing takes discipline and rigor and there is no way to "microwave" your project through a thorough software test process. This book does provide valuable knowledge for your Windows test project and great info on .Net to ADD to your existing test expertise.

I would like to know if there is a scanner out there that you can scan a letter lets say and you can change the wordings, fonts, etc. If there is any body out there that can tell me the answer please let me know.

I bought this book feeling that it would take the mystery out of scanning. It did not. The problem is that that the autor uses terminolgy that is never referenced in your run of the mill scanner manual. The author talks about SPI and other terms but my scanner manual only references dpi. This book will be a disapointment to those trying to gain some basic knowledge of how to scan.

I reference this book every time I scan a difficult photo. I think it is an excellent guide for designers, especially those working with small clients who can't afford professional photography. The book has advice on how to work with common "problem photos", which is a great help when you need to get a usable image out of a snapshot with poor lighting.

I see the other reviewer's point about too much space being taken up by discussion of various types of scanners. It would have been nice to see less about scanner types no one uses and more space devoted to techniques for improving scans. Still, the information that is there is very useful.

The information is directed at print designers, but many of the tips are useful for the Internet in a general sense. It would be nice to see specific advice for online images, but maybe that's for another book. All in all I found it a very valuable resource and have recommended it to several other designers.

I have several books on scanners and scanning, and I don't think any of them come close to matching this one in the clarity of the text and the illustrations used to make the point. The only drawback I could find was that I do wish the authors would all get together and use the same terms when talking about dpi, spi, lpi, and ppi. It makes it pretty difficult for us right-brain folks to be able to sort it all out. However, I still consider 'Make Your Scanner a Great Design Tool' to be very useful and a worthwhile investment, particularly if you are getting into doing any sort of image-tweaking for optimum results. I have recommended it to several artists who want to scan their work.

For four years now I have made reference to Make Your Scanner a Great Design & Production Tool, and it's previous version, in my Scanning Basics non-credit classes at a local community college. I refer to the page for finding the sweet spot on your scanner because it explains how "noise" can be introduced into a scan. That, and some other technical information, has been useful to me in preparing for my class. The target audience of the book is graphic artists/designers; I believe it meets the needs of that group. However, my classes are attended by family members doing geneologies, librarians, or small business owners who want to scan for the internet. The book does not contain enough examples geared to their needs.

You would think that a PHP book that actually mentioned "Extensions" as part of the title would cover extensions wouldn't you? Well in the case of this book you would be wrong. The index has exactly 1 entry for 'extensions' and even that is a 1 sentence footnote! Compare that to the 45 pages devoted to the subject in George Schlossnagle's book "Advanced PHP Programming" and you can get an idea of actually how deficient this book is in this aspect.

I bought this book with high expectations.

It is a very good book, well written, and David Sklar really has done a good job writing it. However, I didn't find it that useful. It wasn't even remotely close to comprehensive about what it covered, and made only footnote mention of other tools that are out there.

I ended up returning it -- something I rarely do. I didn't think it was worth the money. Most of this info is available for free online anyways.

This book does alert you to many useful modues, extensions and accelerators and given that many of these are open source and their documentation can be skimpy, it's good to have examples and documentation from another source.

However, this book is not comprehensive in it's coverage of said modules, extensions and accelerators and in areas where it covers material already explained in the documentation, I preferred the original documentation's style and explanations. The book does mention things that the original documention does not, but the original documentation talks about things that the book does not.

In short, I had to read both the documentation and the book to fully understand the code.

This is really only for advanced PHP programmers. If you are one, it maybe will render in 5 star.

I have found HTML & Smarty chapter very useful. You will also find other chapter useful if you have to work on them in real life projects. Overall very practical book.