Simulation Books

If you are a freelance professional or a student of 3D you are going to find this book very useful. Every year I have to review several books to try to find a teaching tool that is clear and concise. This book hit the spot.

The book fills two vital needs. Not only will you learn to use the color and lighting tools in your program, but if you need to get up to speed on the other software packages that are covered, this book is the answer. The book covers Maya, 3D Studio Max and Lightwave!

If you work for various clients you will find this is a great reference to help get going regardless of software used in most of the production studios you would encounter. If you are a student or have just graduated, this is a wonderful tool to keep handy and help convert from one package to another, fast. There is just enough background or theory to let you understand what you are doing with the tools, as well as actual useful examples that reinforce the instructions in the book. But, wait, that is not enough, what I really appreciate, is that Mr. Summers actually talks about the "Gotchas" and traps that seem to be inherent in all 3D packages. These are the little undocumented software "features" that usually take hours or days of experimentation, e-mails to colleagues, or digging through the underbelly of the internet, to uncover or understand.

Now two things that bother me about the book, and hence the four stars instead of five, are the name of the book and the errors found in it. Now, the errors are all minor and I never found an error that was so bad as to make a lesson unusable (like I have found in so many other books and online tutorials), but I would believe that by now publishers should be able to find good technical editors. Which leads me to the title.

The title just does not do justice to the material. There is so much more in the book then just texturing. I find the book more of a good instructional manual or reference for color and lighting in general. For example, in one lesson Mr. Summers covers not only how to use and make layered textures, but also how to create and control displacement maps and backgrounds, without being overwhelming, dryly technical, or worse, confusingly abbreviated, like so many online tutorials.

The book is not a guide on how to paint textures, there are plenty of... well I call them "efforts" to cover that arena. I suggest you find a way to carefully review those books if that is what you are after. Instead, Mr. Summers has provided a way to form that mental map of the software that will allow you to use it or learn it effectively. In today's fast paced job market and in the everchanging academic environment, this could be the edge you need to succeed.

I love to paint textures, so I looked forward to this book. I just want to straighten that out for texture artists.

This book has a lot of theory on mapping, shaders, procedurals maps and so on. But no information on painting textures. If you are looking for a more theoretic reader on this subject rather than an artistic book, then it might be of use to you. As such I guess programmers would also benefit in part from it.

The funny thing about this book with TEXTURING across the cover is that it seems to cover everything *except* what I'd consider texturing. It has a really good discussion on basic art design principles, then extensive coverage of lighting, color, materials, shaders, and even UV mapping, but nothing on actually creating textures!

In any case, I still recommend this book. All the materials it does cover it covers well. There are really nice color pictures throughout the book, which really helps given the topics.

One thing to note though is that after presenting some topic, the book generally tells you how to accomplish that in Max, Maya, and Lightwave. If you use one or more of those tools, then great, if not, then I think the discussion will still be useful, but obviously you'll get a little less out of it then those who do use those tools.

If you can only have one book on texturing/shading this is the book you would want. As a teacher I look for information on how to do things but more importantly, why. This is an amazing book with depth and breadth to suit the novice, the adept and the expert. You will discover the roots of the science and art of texturing in addition to the how-to.

i, being a veteran of x-wing the game, think that this is an excelent guite to tie fighter. the game is better than x-wing because there are more ships and more shooting. the guide is the best cause i cheated with it

"We have seen the end of bad gaming, we will soon see the end of the rebellion." This game is a high strategy game with enough firepower to destroy a computer! Using digital sound and lighting, a 2-D and 3-D effect blend, and amazing controlled colors and handling, this has become one of the hottest games around.

An excellent guide to an excellent game. Very detailed analysis of the mission strategy, craft data, weapons, tactics, aso. that may kill you (could have been a bit less though). An innovative idea that makes this book a bedside novel one is the short story that links each after action report (for each mission) to a plot with a lot of characters of acceptable depth, but narration and plot wise this short story lacks (as expected so this is not really a flaw). The problem here, again, is the damn colour. Please we need some, we are not colour blind. All pages in black and white is a bore to the eye for a STAR WARS epic game. It's the same mistake PRIMA did with other strategy guides of superb graphic space combat simulations (see my other reviews). All and all a very good book that guides only for the basic game (up to Campaign Seven), needs its supplyment (Balance of Power guide), offers bedside excitement and bores you to death with black and white pages (I'm not racist but...)

I bought this book after I had already beaten the game. I only bought it because I am a Star Wars collecter, I wouldn't normally have bought a game guide. I was reading through it, and to my surprise it was written basically in the form of a first person novel. I really enjoyed the fresh perspective of a civilian worker (Maarek Stele) on a Star Destroyer, and this book is well worth reading.

This book provided at least a possible way to beat the first three tours of duty presented by X-Wing. I beat these missions before I bought the book, but I bought it anyway. The book has an interesting story line to go along with it's tips. If the computer reacts in the manner that the strategy guide presents then you will easily beat the game, but if the game uses a different scenario, and it does happen, you can be overwhelmed. Overall, it is a good book.

This is a really nice book. It includes extremely detailed information on EVERY mission (TODs 1-3), and winning strategies. Plus the storyline doesn't disappoint. If you fly X-Wing very often, or are in the Rebel Squadrons, then you need this book.

This book provided at least a possible way to beat the first three tours of duty presented by X-Wing. I beat these missions before I bought the book, but I bought it anyway. The book has an interesting story line to go along with it's tips. If the computer reacts in the manner that the strategy guide presents then you will easily beat the game, but if the game uses a different scenario, and it does happen, you can be overwhelmed. Overall, it is a good book.

The X-wing Collector's CD-ROM Official Strategy Guide is one of the best game guides ever compiled, mainly because it goes way above and beyond simply giving up the secrets and offers a treasure trove of material to any Star Wars fan. This book has the typical stats for every ship and setup for every level that is in any strategy guide, but on nearly every page there is a high-quality CGI image illustrating what's going on. Additionally, before you even get into the game, the author gives a ton of background not only on what's been established about Star Wars characters and situations before, but he writes a whole story about the character you play in the game. And it doesn't stop there. Between every mission, every training mission, between campaigns, the story of your pilot, not told in the game, unfolds in prose form. Even though DeMaria isn't exactly the best author in the world, this book is great even just to flesh out the game by giving its characters and situations some personality and depth. You get detailed walkthroughs (Farlanders after-action report), sometimes with sidebars suggesting even EASIER ways to do things, which actually tie-in and work together with the story, as well as a clear breakdown of mission goals and whatnot. Unfortunately, all this story stuff ends with the original game. For the walkthroughs of the two expansions, Imperial Pursuit & B-wing, you just get straightforward walkthroughs. But hey, that's what this is -- a strategy guide, not a novel. It's easy to forget. This is definitely a book worth buying whether you're stuck on a level in the game or if you just can't stand the long wait between Star Wars novels. Heavily Recommended.

The second edition is a much-improved version compared to the first one. More details are added -- which makes it easy to follow. Anyone who is doing system simulation or performance analysis should have one around. I would have rated it a 5-star if the authors should have included some of the algorithms in a CD to save reader's time.

A great reference for those involved with signal-level simulations of communication systems. Provides superb coverage of both the fundamentals and advanced concepts associated with this "artform."

It's an essential part of a Communications Engineer Library. You just can't do without this book.

This is a modern advanced text on econometrics emphasizing dynamic models including the ARCH/GARCH models that have practical application in finance. What makes it a little different than most texts is the Bayesian approach. The authors include coverage of MCMC methods which make the Bayesian approach more realistic. This book provides a very modern treatment of econometrics

This is a modern advanced text on econometrics emphasizing dynamic models including the ARCH/GARCH models that have practical application in finance. What makes it a little different than most texts is the Bayesian approach. The authors include coverage of MCMC methods which make the Bayesian approach more realistic. This book provides a very modern treatment of econometrics

This is an outstanding introduction to the application of Bayesian statistics to the problems encountered in macroeconomics and finance. Bayesian inference it's becoming a critical tool for researchers and practitioners with an interest in empirical ecnomics and to date this is the first book on Bayesian time series econometrics. The sections on nonlinearities and on numerical integration are especially valuable. Having the book it is a must for researchers and professionals interested in modeling and forecasting the state of economy and financial markets.

Prompt shipping, Book not in the best condition as expected

Brands : A Marketing game consists of a manual and software for playing this marketing simulation game. To be played in teams with each team ideally consisting of about 4-6 students. Brands is a comprehensive marketing game which teaches its users in a unique way all the skills required to sell its products in a competitive market.The teams initially have to formulate a product whose ingredients are decided by each team individually.The formulation is based on the customer's preferences for the ingredients. Each team has to enter there values for variables like Sales force strength, salary and commission, expenditure on advertising, R&D and promotion on which their performance is judged. The team which has the best marketing mix of all these parameters emerges as a marketing leader. The game goes on for a number of quarters and can extend over several years. This gives the teams a sense of competition and the learning of how to compete and get ahead in the market. The game also generates the equity share price of all the teams. There is also a provision to order various market reseraches like by the teams for the areas they wish to. Some of the typical market researches are like Customer Preferences, Customer Awareness, Dealer Promotion Awareness, Availability of Dealers, Brand formulation [ if any team wishes to reverse engineer the formulation of any other team],Industry Statistics ,Regional Summary Analysis, Sales Force compensation etc.. Just like the real world nothing comes for free and the teams have to pay for the Markeing Researches being ordered by them. Although the software is DOS based still it gives the players a good opportunity to get a first hand experience on how to produce and manage a brand. As part of the course cuuriculum at the School Of Management, IIT Bombay, India, the game has taught us how to manage our own product,brand and how to react to competitor's moves. Ideal for students of Management colleges and product/brand managers.

Brands : A Marketing game consists of a manual and software for playing this marketing simulation game. To be played in teams with each team ideally consisting of about 4-6 students. Brands is a comprehensive marketing game which teaches its users in a unique way all the skills required to sell its products in a competitive market.The teams initially have to formulate a product whose ingredients are decided by each team individually.The formulation is based on the customer's preferences for the ingredients. Each team has to enter there values for variables like Sales force strength, salary and commission, expenditure on advertising, R&D and promotion on which their performance is judged. The team which has the best marketing mix of all these parameters emerges as a marketing leader. The game goes on for a number of quarters and can extend over several years. This gives the teams a sense of competition and the learning of how to compete and get ahead in the market. The game also generates the equity share price of all the teams. There is also a provision to order various market reseraches like by the teams for the areas they wish to. Some of the typical market researches are like Customer Preferences, Customer Awareness, Dealer Promotion Awareness, Availability of Dealers, Brand formulation [ if any team wishes to reverse engineer the formulation of any other team],Industry Statistics ,Regional Summary Analysis, Sales Force compensation etc.. Just like the real world nothing comes for free and the teams have to pay for the Markeing Researches being ordered by them. Although the software is DOS based still it gives the players a good opportunity to get a first hand experience on how to produce and manage a brand. As part of the course cuuriculum at the School Of Management, IIT Bombay, India, the game has taught us how to manage our own product,brand and how to react to competitor's moves. Ideal for students of Management colleges and product/brand mnagers.

In Business Intelligence Using Smart Techniques, business intelligence consultant Charles Halliman emphasizes the analysis of business information already gathered by corporate researchers, managers, and policy makers. Halliman presents an informative introduction to the performance of environmental scanning using "text mining" techniques, and utilizing scenarios and manual simulations to perform competitor analyses. Readers will learn to convert business information into business intelligence for sound marketing strategies and production policies, showing how potentially profitable actions can be taken based on gathered information drawn from today's highly competitive local, regional, national, and global marketplace. Highly recommended reading for business students, entrepreneurs, policy strategists, and corporate marketing executives.

Any business owner or corporate executive looking for competitive opportunities or an effective way to avoid being blindsided by competitors' activities or trapped by unfavorable trends should think about applying the business intelligence system clearly laid out in Business Intelligence Using Smart Techniques.

Charles Halliman's pragmatic approach is perfect for our times. While so many are desperately trying to keep afloat, thinking their only choices are to sink or swim madly, Halliman suggests a manageable process to uncover possibilities for breaking out of the doldrums. It's a challenge to divert resources to efforts like developing business intelligence, perceived to take extraordinary amounts of time and offer payoffs only in the long-term. But Halliman shows this does not have to be the case.

Halliman not only presents very straightforward tools for analyzing and using business intelligence to develop actionable ideas, he shows how text mining techniques can reduce the time and resources needed to turn large amounts of information about competitors and business environment trends into manageable business intelligence.

While the neatly packaged system Halliman describes can be used to more accurately assess a company's current situation and identify immediate tactics, its bigger return will be realized when used as part of an ongoing program of identifying success strategies for the ever-unfolding future. Even the near-term future holds opportunities, in the economy's turnaround. Now is the time for a company to ready itself.

Better yet, why not put the company on the leading edge of that recovery now, by being better informed about the business environment and competitors' activities? If they're in a holding pattern...imagine the possibilities!

The book provides an easy-to-follow, structured method of presenting information. Halliman employs review and preview techniques, so the reader can understand the context of new information, each step following logically from the last, with summaries that describe a progressively growing, but comprehendible and manageable system. Real examples give the reader hands-on experience as the system is built and then comes together to yield realistic actions.

The data mining techniques and methodologies presented by Charles Halliman work. Whether your focus is research, marketing or consulting you would be wise to invest in "Business Intelligence Using Smart Techniques".

I was very pleased with my purchase. The book was in excellent condition, and I received it in an appropriate time. I would definitely recommend this seller to future buyers. A+++!

I received my book in perfect condition and I
i erceived it within a ccouple of days.

A great refresher course for any teacher of Language Arts. The book uses the CLOZE technique, so you're learning as your filling in the answers (very active and involved learning). The reviews at the end of each chapter are a double check to see if you know the information presented. The pretest and posttest really assure you that you've learned something - which I did!

Minus the cost, of course, the book was a good purchase. I found it easy to read and helpful when it came time to write papers and site examples. This is definitely a good reference book to have around.

This is a text book for use in undergraduate courses on international political economy. Currently, it is the top choice of many instructors because it provides a thorough but readable historical account of how the world economy has been managed since the end of World War II. The book is organized in chapters about the international monetary system, foreign direct investment, and trade in both the developed and developing countries. In addition, it contains chapters about world oil politics, theories of economic development, and economic transitions in the formerly communist countries.

As the last reviewer, who appears to be the author, said, this is a good book for undergraduate courses on international political economy. It does a great job of explaining the basic concepts and is a very readable book. It was an assigned reading for a course I took on international political economy and it provided an excellent structure and basis for the course.

The only downsides are a few bad examples and minor factual details. It is nothing that seriously affects or hurts the book as a whole. Also, the book has a slight slant to the neo-liberal perspective on political economy. Marxism, as a serious alternative theory, is short-changed a bit in the text, although most other texts have an even larger bias in this area. Overall, it is a good text.

After spending 25 years practicing, lecturing, writing about, studying, and teaching data modeling, I was thrilled to discover new insights and gain more clarity in this field due to Dr. Simsion's diligent work that is shared in his latest book, "Data Modeling Theory and Practice". Like many data modelers, I have strong views on this subject and it was interesting to be able to see the broad range of opinions, experiences, and even to be able to see some of the diverse models produced in the research contained with this book. One of my views is that the more perspectives you can see, the greater the clarity. So, regardless of your views on data modeling, if you are interested in furthering your understanding of the discipline of data modeling, then I would highly recommend reading this material as I give my "two thumbs way up" to this revolutionary book.

I found this book to be a valuable sequel to the beginner and intermediate modeling texts, such as Data Modeling Made Simple and Graeme's first book, Data Modeling Essentials. This book provides a great mix of both academic and practitioner approaches to data modeling. I have been an analyst and modeler for a number of years and found the side by side comparisons of experts' believes and approaches to be fascinating. While reading this book, I found myself asking questions on my own beliefs and approaches to modeling, and this really helps improve the consistency of my modeling decisions. This is an intermediate to advanced modeling text that is extremely well-written and provides valuable insight into how we do data modeling.

To me, this book's value is a bit like children being warned not to accept lollies from strangers; it's a pity we even have to give such warnings, but it's absolutely essential we do. I wish to congratulate Simsion for bravely tackling a subject of much heated controversy, and in a manner that obviously reflects both a solid practitioner's hard-won lessons, but that is supported by rigorous academic research.
So what's this important message? Simply that data modelling is a creative exercise, where multiple "solutions" may be generated, each with relative merits. The importance lies in practitioners consciously and deliberately generating alternatives. Without this open-minded view, I have personally witnessed heated debates where one modeller defends his/her model because they know it can be made to work, and therefore assumes anything different must be "wrong". But even more significantly, modellers may stop looking as soon as one "workable" model is tabled, and hence miss out on alternatives that may prove beneficial in a given business context.
And why is it even controversial? Apparently, some academics teach data modelling that way. Maybe because it's easier for them to have one "correct" answer to a problem so marking assignments is easier? Or maybe that was what they were taught, and any students who pass through their ranks and end up teaching without encountering real-world modelling may perpetuate?
One warning, though. This book is not the first text to be read by those interested in data modelling. I would recommend Simsion & Witt's "Data Modelling Essentials for such people, followed by one of many excellent books on "patterns". David Hay got the patterns topic going in the data modelling community, and Len Silverston's two volume series has taken it much further. And the object-oriented community also has contributions to make on patterns.
A minor criticism - Simsion largely dismisses the use of the Unified Modeling Language's class modelling notation, in part arguing that "Class diagrams are intended to represent data structures which might be directly implemented using an object-oriented database" and goes on to correctly note the struggle of such databases to gain significant database market share that their vendors initially might have predicted. I would simply comment that there is a difference between using a subset of the class modelling syntax to represent what is truly a data model, as compared to using class modelling notation to represent classes which, in some cases, may never have "persistence" i.e. may never have their data values stored in a database of any kind. And even if class diagram notation is used (some might say misused?) just to represent a data model, I have seen this approach used quite effectively. So on this point, it looks like Simsion and I have slightly different views. But at the very heart of his book, he encourages open debate on alternative views, with the understanding that all views may have something to contribute.
So let's thank Simsion for offering his views, and encouraging others to offer theirs. Well done, it's a great reference book (probably not easy reading for those not exposed to research styles - but don't let that put you off), and one that hopefully bridges the gap between academics and practitioners, and gives the practitioners "permission" to be creative as most know is the way to generate alternative solutions for consideration.