Internet Books

This book prefaces itself in that its intended purpose is not to cover all types of firewalls (e.g.corporate), but just personal firewalls. There are some great dives into previously unanswered questions I had:

1. Would I run a SW firewall if my DSL router already says it has a firewall built-in (answer is yes for a home LAN or a DSP WAN connection, no for low-speed dial up...)

2. How do various SW products (McAfee, BlackIce, ZoneAlarm) compare.

3. How do various HW products compare (DSL modems vs. Cable modems).(From a security viewpoint, there is a clear winner--you'll have to buy the book to find out though or else if I told you Time-Warner would send out someone to unplug my cable in retaliation)

4. How do I test these things once I get them installed? This topic was worth the price of the book alone...he emphasizes doing both Before & After tests to verify that insecure connections just become changed to secure connections. How many people might just install the SW or HW & then wonder "Did it really work? "What's different now than before?")

Overall, more useful information than I ever expected to find in this little book!

In the current environment where cyberbaddies are lurking everywhere, anyone who connects to the Internet without protection are a direct danger to themselves and an indirect danger to everyone they communicate with. There are many ways in which a user can find protection, and one of the primary ways to be protected is to install a firewall on your system. A firewall is either a software or hardware device that scans traffic to and from the system and flags or blocks any that is deemed suspicious.
Written for the beginner, the technical level occasionally rises up beyond what the absolute beginner can be expected to understand, but that is not a negative. As most system administrators will tell you when they are overcome with a fit of honesty, the ignorance of users is the greatest single security threat. Therefore, in my opinion, if a user cannot reach the point where they can understand all of the material in this book, then they are a threat and a prime target for a cyber attack. I consider the material in this book to be an expression of the minimal level of competence and commend the authors for being right on the mark.
The initial segment of the book is a set of explanations of what firewalls are and why they are needed. In the second segment, some of the most widely used personal firewalls are described in detail, including how to install and configure them. The third and final segment is a discussion of general security concepts and tools you can use to test the security of your system.
An excellent introduction to the critical role of firewalls in securing computer systems, this book should be read by anyone who does not know the basics of protection using firewalls.

This books leaves a mixed impression. First of all, although the book is called "for absolute beginners", it is not written as a book for housewives who never saw a computer before. It is interesting, informative, and the reader is assumed to be knowledgeable and capable of making informed decisions. In fact, one has to have a certain understanding of Windows (yes, it is not oriented towards Mac users) and TCP/IP to understand what the author is talking about. The author obviously has very extensive knowledge of internet security, and the book includes much of his practical knowldge. The negative side is that less than 1/3 of the book is generic and applicable to any firewall, i.e., discusses why home networks need to be protected, and where are the potential areas of vulnerability. The rest is step by step description of how to install and configure several commercial firewalls. Frankly, I do not understand who needs all these details since installation/setup guidelines are always included in the software manual which one gets in printed or electronic form together with the purchased program, whereas it is an obvious fact that any particular version of the program gets obsolete very quickly. I doubt that any of the descriptions of software from the book remains relevant two years after the book came out in 2001. I would rather prefer to see more generic (and less dependent on the software version) discussion of how to take advantage of the features present in most firewalls (blocking certain protocols, applications, IP addresses, etc.). All this said, this book is "beginner's guide" only because it does not get into too many details of what exactly firewalls do, and how they do it. However, those few items which are discussed are covered in significant depth and on a good professional level.

If you have a high-speed always-on cable or DSL connection then you need a personal firewall to protect yourself and your computer or home network from Internet hackers. This book covers both hardware and software based personal firewalls, including ZoneAlarm, BlackICE Defender and McAfee. You'll also learn how to lock down Windows security and test your computer's defenses by using any of a number of free Internet scanning services. Best of all, with this book you don't have to be a security expert or even know what a personal firewall is to get started using one. Highly recommended reading!

I have a new three level house and wanted to connect all the family computers onto one network. Drilling holes in the floors and running wires all over the place is definitely not my thing, so I started to look around for another solution. After learing about wireless networking (wi-fi), I can't imagine why anyone would use anything else.

This wi-fi book answered all my questions. Even though I was nervous about opening up a computer and putting a wi-fi card in, this book took me through it with steps and pictures. I've looked at the other wi-fi books at the bookstore, but this one definitely stuck out. Lots of good pictures and directions.

I read this book knowing little about wireless networking, but over the course of the book I learned not only about how to set up my PC and my home for Wi-Fi, but also something about the technical details of Wi-Fi and where it will be going in the future. Although I knew enough to know that I wanted Wi-Fi in my home, reading this book definitely helped me choose the right products and learn to make the most of them. Thanks Harold -- without this book I'd still be working within a twelve-foot radius of my cable modem!

It was with a little trepidation that I decided it was time to go Wi-Fi. Being a Harold Davis fan for some time, I picked up a copy of his book. Good decision! To start with he helped me decide whether to get a wirelss card for my old faithful laptop, or to get a new one. I went for a new machine (SONY VAIO TR3A). Setting it up was easy. With his book's step-by-step instructions, it was almost as though I had the author at my side. Highly recommended.

If you want to find hotspots, connect to hotspots, or set up your own wireless network, all using Wi-Fi technology, this is the best book for you. Everything in this book is very simple, but you find information here you will not find elsewhere. So this book is useful and also lots of fun. I highly suggest.

As a novice web page designer, this manual provided detailed, hands-on instructions that were easy to follow on everything from basic page creation to adding more complex design elements. The manual's format and structure is easy to follow and was valuable both as a primer becoming familiar with the software, and as a reference tool now that I've become more comfortable with the software. A great, practical resource for anyone using Dreamweaver.

As a graphic designer who does web sites only occassionaly, I use my manual extensively when I forget a Dreamweaver technique. It's easy-to-understand, clear content is a great guide.

I've used this manual extensively to create my own website and I refer to it over and over again for quick reminders on the Dreamweaver application. I had first purchased "Dreamweaver the Missing Manual" and "Dreamweaver Visual Dictionary" but found this Noble Desktop manual easier to follow. It has concise instructions and tutorials that are very useful and needed knowledge when designing in Dreamweaver. Whether you are looking for just a basic intro or a more indepth look at some of the bells and whistles of Dreamweaver, this manual is a must have.

the book gives you step by step (hence the name) commands to work on your own to create your own web sites. I was able to do it, although the complexity of the program precludes it from being effortless (would that it were). And the manual didn't have dummies in the title. Boy did i feel smart

I was also able to attend a tutorial session by the folks at Noble Desktop and I have to say that they are very thorough and consise in their direction for people like me who have always had a problem with this particular program. I was even able to go home and follow the easy step by step directions that are illustrated in the training books. They are highly recommended.

This workbook is a great learning tool if you're just starting out in flash. There is a cd included that has files and activities for you to work from. The book is very clear and gives you helpful tips throughout. You'll learn the very basics from using the tool palette to applying sound and inserting video. Overall, well worth the money.

Just like the classes given at Nobledesktop, the training manual is straightforward and easy to understand and follow. The exercises are practical, giving you the tools to get up and running quickly and to accomplish tasks that you will use daily in real life Flash production. Heavily illustrated. Gives instructions for both MAC and WINDOWS users.

After struggling forever with Flash, I just wanted a book that explained everything in a straightforward manner. I didn't want to read a 500 page manual to get what I wanted. This book was exactly what I needed. It's not that long, and just tells you what to do to make a simple animation. Basically it walks you through a lot of great examples and once you're done you can go do your own stuff. I feel like I *finally* get this program!

"Advanced Sharepoint Services Solutions" is the second book by Scott Hiller, on Sharepoint Technologies. The first one was about building basic web parts. This book is for developers who have good knowledge of Sharepoint technologies. It is also assumed that you have already built some web parts and also have good understanding of .NET development. If you are looking for basic Sharepoint stuff, refer to his other book "Microsoft Sharepoint Building Office 2003 Solutions".

The Advanced book is not a complete reference on Sharepoint technologies. Instead it contains 8 chapters, which covers widely different areas. There are few chapters which are not covered by other Sharepoint books. This book is good source for CAML, Information Bridge Framework, Business Scorecard Accelerator, Sharepoint and BizTalk Integration, and for Sharepoint and Content Management Server Integration.
Since these topics are usually not covered in regular Sharepoint books, it becomes good source for these topics.

The book has good amount of source code (in C#) along with the text and provides some great ideas for system integrations. But as I said before it is not a complete reference book, just some great solutions for customizing and integrating Sharepoint technologies.

Well, so Hillier's first book on SharePoint wasn't enough for some readers! Apparently, he found demand for explanations of broader, more advanced usages, that he furnishes here in this book.

Perhaps the more important of these are discussed in the second half of the book. Microsoft has developed several other intricate applications, independently of SharePoint. But consider how it integrated the various parts of its Office suite, so that you can easily go from Excel to PowerPoint, say. In similar wise, Hillier explains how SharePoint is compatible with Information Bridge Framework, Business Score Cards Accelerator, BizTalk Server 2004 and the Content Management Service. Granted, none of these is as successful and widespread as something like Excel. These packages are far more specialised and their usages might often involve some programming effort. Thus too, using SharePoint with them also necessitates programming.

Ok, there are parts where you might pass an XML data file to an application, where this file tells it much of what you want it to do. And the XML approach is declarative, not procedural, so it minimises your programming effort. But typically, there are places where you still need the latter.

My impression of what Hillier describes is that Microsoft is not done with further refining of this integration. There are simply too many low level programming steps to be currently dealt with. No fault of Hillier's, naturally. He's calling it as it is. But let us hope that Microsoft continues improving these products.

Scot Hillier is the best SharePoint author - period.

For example: developers need to write web parts. Web parts are custom controls. Can't view a custom control at design/development time, right? Need to install it into SharePoint, run it, test. Right?

Wrong! Scott shows you how to design, develop, and debug at design-time. This little tidbit alone is worth the price of the book.

All of his books will help you become the best SharePoint developer out there.

Sharepoint is so confusing when you get into the backend and this book answered almost all of my questions. Best book I've found. You can tell the author spent a lot of time digging around in the guts of SP and was probably as frustrated as most of us are trying to figure out how to do the simplest of things. Small book, high price. WORTH IT.

The book was band new just like the seller said and arrived in a timely manner. I would buy from this seller again.

I used this book in my introductory level computer science course. I found this book to be an essential tool in my early undersanding of how computer works in general and more importantly how to develop working algorithms. This book is well designed and easy to read and easy to understand. This book comes with a CD ROM. I believe this is the key feature to this book. On the CD ROM there are emulators of various computer operations. (eg. Compiler tree breakdown, and many other emulators. An Excellent book!

Deckers gives you a concise tour of computer science. Not enough to turn you into a programmer, given the space limitations of the book. But he covers many key ideas in the field. Including Usenet, email, virtual communities [think Second Life], and the World Wide Web. Naturally, he has to explain HTML, as the graphical language of the Web. HTML is so simple that he essentially explains all its important points. Including the crucial hyperlink tag.

The book then segues naturally from HTML to XML. Where you can now write your own tags. Immensely flexible and popular.

It is only after this, that the book goes into the traditional topics of computer science. The explanations of what makes a programming language. He uses JavaScript as one example of such a language. So you learn about constructs like for loops, if-else and while statements.

The book is really dominated by the Web. The pedagogy stresses this.

This book is one of the two texts in FSU's COP 3502: "Introduction to Computer Science" course (a required course in their Computer Science degree). As the authors state in the preface, they "wanted to design a 'CS 0' course that was a true survey course." They did an excellent job. Basically, they start with the assumption that the reader has never turned on a computer in his life and take him through its history, how to use it, what programming is about, and how the hardware works. They even teach a bit of HTML and JavaScript. There's very little I can say that is bad about the book. It comes down to some typgraphical errors, an incorrect web address for the online portion of the book (easily figured out from the page their web address takes you to), and my belief that they took out too many steps in describing computer switches, gates, and circuits. Frankly, I'm amazed that they reasonably went from a neophyte level to a fully-grounded level in one book. I rate it as 5 stars out of 5.

I think it is a much needed and valuable item that every Internet connected animal lover should own. This book gives greaet Internet addresses. It has everything you need to spend many hours of fun and discovery on the Internet with other animal lovers!

The Animal Lover's Guide To The Internet includes nearly 600 Web site addresses and decriptions. In addition, Bonnie included several chapters in the book to help newcomers. The first time I attempted to get on the Net, I felt like I was lost in the twilight zone. Nothing made sense and the books I read on the subject just confused me more. This book is written in simple, easy to understand language and is focused on getting you up and running quickly and painlessly!

An excellent reference guide for animal lovers to the world of Internet in six easy steps to the site of general interest, health, chats, newsgroups and on-line publications about birds, cats, dogs, fish, rabbits, reptiles, horses and even dinosaurs.

First of all, the cover illustration by Bonnie Shields is adorable. Aptly depicted animals gathered around a computer monitor are a visual treat. Look for the cat that is curled around the monitor's base. He is shown rather true to form. The inside illustrations by Sharon Redfield are charming and show an eye for detail. This is a great gift for the animal lover in your family or circle of friends. More so if that animal lover is yourself. Happen to have one or more grandchildren or a niece or nephew with a computer? Animal lover or not, this book would constitute a wonderful study tool. As a comprehensive, yet easy to understand manual for everything from choosing the right computer, accessing the Internet, to fossil hunting, this book excels. The author's words are friendly, warm and serve as the wisdom of a knowledgeable friend. I feel this makes for a perfect package. Well organized, with more than 500 Internet addresses for you to explore, you will find the material broken down into easy to understand classifications. Have fun reading and exploring. I did!

Hopkins' Applescripting QuarkXPress - It's really nice book including a lot of good examples. And I think there's no applescript book specially relating to quark. So I can tell this book is really cool choice to make script for quark. But it's not good for beginner. If you have experience in programming, you can refer applescript manual from web site with this book. You can do something like me.

It doesn't get any better than this. I even learned some things about AppleScript that I didn't know before. Between the instructions and examples in the book and the scripts on the CD, you should be able to AppleScript anything that's scriptable in Quark with this book. I also like chicken and tacos, but not chicken tacos.

If you want to script quark then this is THE book to own. I hadn't done any scripting before and the literature from quark is pretty useless for beginners. This book has taken me in wonderfully easy and well explained steps, from a beginner to an extremely proficient user. For quark it is invaluable, and by working through it also helps you understand how applescript structures itself,making it much easier to learn how to script other applications. To put it in a nutshell, this book was for me what the discovery of making fire was to the cavemen.

I found this book to be an excellent source to Applescript in QuarkXPress. It gives tons of examples along with a CD. Without this book I wouldn't have been able to figure out the sentence structures in Script Editor for the goals I wanted to accomplish. Thanks Shirley!

It goes into the basics of bandwidth calculation, leading up to the technologies used to support the different kind of services.

If one were to look for a good read, this book is a good start for a newbie.

This book could be used as a pre-cursor to an indepth research into new technologies.

ADSL, ATM, ISDN is mentioned in the book.

Lastly, this book is not drab and has some humour in it.

Before I started reading this book I had some idea about ATM. Author explains from scratch giving good background about basic communication systems and then starts with why ATM? ,ATM protocol ,reference model and AALx. Finally covering the current trend in home computing . In generally this book is good start for the people who knows IP and whats to know about ATM and this is a good self study book.

I am an Telco engineer implementing adsl and cable modem networks for broadband access service in China. The book came just in time for me because my company is in the stage of building an ATM network providing service like Internet surfing and experimental vod etc via adsl and cable modem. And this book has given us quite clear an infrastructure for the practice.

I am a teacher and consultant to the telecom industry. I bought the book to sharpen my skill set and increase literacy. I was most impressed with Mr. Kwok's ability to take a highly technical subject and break it down understandably. The end result is that both the "techno-literati" and the "average Joe" are well-served. Mr. Kwok apparently is one of us "techies" who also paid attention in writing class. Kudos for an excellent reference work.

Don Gilbert M.S. DG Consulting

I bought this book knowing a good bit about regular ASP and how to communicate with databases, hoping to learn how to do the same thing with ASP.NET. I was not disappointed. The book walks you through step-by-step in creating database connections, command objects, stored procedures, etc... It doesn't dwell too long on topics that it shouldn't be covering (like database design, and web site design). The instructions within the book identify software that is free, so there are no unpleasant surprises. This book will be a great reference and has really helped me make the jump from ASP to ASP.NET.

This book does a good job explaining how to work with databases. The one thing I didn't realize is the only language used for examples is C#. It would be nice if VB examples were also included.

I really liked this book because it shows step-by-step how to do things and then has a "How does it work?" section. Great book! Well written and seems quite comprehensive.

Almost every book with ASP.NET 2.0 in the title will tell you something about the Grid View, Detail View, Form View, SQLDatasource and the SQL 'Select' statement; this one will too. While the other books provide a rudimentary overview of these topics then move on, "Begining ASP.NET 2.0 Databases: From Novice to Professional" takes you way beyond the SQLDatasource and the 'Select' statement, delving deep into ADO.NET.

Just as bread & butter go together ASP.NET and databases go together; and there is a lot more to the database side of the equation than is brought out in most ASP.NET books, which tend to limit themselves to the use of the controls, getting into databases only enough to have something to show in the controls. with this book it is the other way around; the reason for the controls is to display and maninpulate data in a database, and there are several ways to access and manipulate databases with ADO.NET besides the SQLDatasource. Along the way you will learn to use the controls with all the different data access formats and how to use the controls and their events to manipulate the data, which is what it's really all about.

If DataReader, Command Object, DataSet, OLEDBDatasource and ODBCDatasource are not familiar terms to you, and you want to develop ASP.NET web sites you need this book. If you don't know when not to use the SQLDatasource (there are some definite situations when it won't work), or don't know how to create a server side data cache and why you would want to, you need this book.

The book is easy to read and has numerous small exercises titled "Try It Out", after each exercise is a "How It Works" section where the code in the previous exercise is explained, line by line in most cases. Not only does Damien take you through DataReader, Datasets and Commands he also covers stored procedures, which you will want to use rather than queries in code shown in most of the other books.

While the book primarily uses SQL Server 2005, MYSQL 5.0 is also covered at the same time, everything from installing and configuring to using with stored procedures, parameters and transactions.

If you want to build ASP.NET web sites you will work with databases, if you are not intimately familiar with ADO.NET this book should be on your bookshelf readily available.