Simulation Books

This book is one of the two main books used in Caltech's Neural Computation class (the other is Introduction to the Theory of Neural Computation by Hertz, Krogh, and Palmer). This book covers a wider spectrum of learning models than most books, including Hertz, et al. It is still fairly mathematically rigorous, although not as much as Hertz, et al. It is ideal for somebody who wants a fairly mathematically rigorous description of the subject, but also wants something more comprehensive than Herts, et al.

Fifteen years ago I did research in this area and had just completed a math degree. I thought it would be interesting to get back up to speed.
I found the book fascinating, tremendous work has been done in this field and this is a good broad treatment of it. For anyone who is into computer science but has never studied the brain it will be a tremendous eye opener.
But boy, was it hard work. I found I had to read & re-read sections just to understand some of the math involved. In fairness the book does cover everything you need but if you have never done college level math, or you have forgotten most of it, then don't tackle this book when you are tired!

The book "Modeling and Simulation with Scilab/Scicos"
is well written and understandable to
readers with the basic signal processing and programming
background.
The reader can refresh/improve the knowledge of
some basic control theory material, while at the
same time learns how to apply Scilab/Scicos at simulation and
modeling problems.
I worked with Matlab for many years before and I found
Scilab/Scicos a very powerful alternative to Matlab/Simulink
and is free!
I recommend strongly this book to any scientist/engineer that
plans to explore the benefits of the excellent open
source Scilab/Scicos environment.

I like the book. It is one of the only Scilab/Scicos books available. However the back cover and the publishers review says "All codes used in the book are made available to the reader" There are not any Scilab codes that are available and the ONLY available codes are Scicos examples for chapter 7. It looks like the authors of the Scilab part of the book thought it was too much effort to include any code on the books web page.

Comments on
"Modeling and Simulation of Aerospace Vehicle Dynamics"

Here we have a modern Flight Dynamics treatise!

Dr. Zipfel presents his book as an account of Modeling and Simulation techniques; in fact, it is much more: it is, as we just said, a modern, exhaustive and deep Flight Dynamics treatise.

In the first six chapters, where Dr. Zipfel presents the theoretical foundations of Flight Dynamics, he introduces the reader to the very powerful, elegant and concise Tensorial formulation (which is uncommon except in very few, specialized reports), which is elevated to an axiomatic level ("from tensor modeling to matrix coding", in his words). This formulation, when applied to the Rational Mechanics and Modeling chapters(2 to 6), should allow the undergraduate (or recently graduated) student to see and enjoy the power and beauty underlying in these old physics branch. These chapters could configure an excellent text as part of a Mechanical or Aeronautical Engineering graduated level Rational Mechanics course (which we will intend to verify in the following course at National University of Córdoba, Argentina).

The second part of the book (which we should define as the "Aerospace" part), is devoted to Aerospace System simulation itself: beginning (in Chapter 7) with a blow of fresh air on our old, loved Perturbation Equations introducing the reader in the specificities of the Flight Dynamics (i.e. Aerodynamic forces and moments modeling), Dr. Zipfel leads with the most awkward part of Dynamics Analysis: The modeling of complete vehicles (regardless they are planes, missiles, launch vehicles or spacecrafts), in which the range of subsystems, and links between them, involved may feel sick to the beginner (and, sometimes, to experienced engineers). Again, beginning with basics (3-D.O.F. modeling), the reader is conveyed in a simultaneously strict an pleasant way to the deeps of full 6-D.O.F. simulations, including items such as Control, Guidance and Navigation Systems, Seekers, full non-linear aerodynamics and stochastic effects. The specialized engineer will find these Chapters as primary reference for any concrete modeling task.
The primary tool used by Dr. Zipfel in his task is CADAC software (Computer Aided Design of Aerospace Concepts), which we see as one of the bests Aerospace Simulation open codes available worldwide. Its modularity, documentation and completeness allow the reader to quickly understanding, as well as to perform modifications to suit it to specific needs. This software is highly valuable both for students and specialized engineers needed to develop simulation tools.

In brief, we found Modeling and Simulation of Aerospace Vehicle Dynamics a great book for both engineering students and specialized engineers; everybody will enjoy reading it, because its elegant and concise notation and its deep and rigorous mathematical treatment, as well as the powerful tools that Dr. Zipfel puts in the engineers' hands. This book should be on the desk of any simulation engineer as a primary reference in his day-to-day job.

Eduardo Zapico Professor, Aer. Eng., National University of Córdoba, Argentina, Scientific manager, Nostromo Consulting, Córdoba

Marcelo Martinez Manager Aerodynamics ,Nostromo onsulting ,Cordoba -Argentina

This book is mostly THEORY with less emphasis on application. The title should be "Theory of Modeling and Simulation of Aerospace Vehicle Dynamics". It does do a great job on the theory but simulations are software and require code and there is very little coverage of this in this book. The simulation code the book uses is Fortran. I don't even believe they teach Fortran at the universities anymore.

I actually had the honor of having George McGuire, one of the authors of this book as my professor for a course in Nonlinear Physics.

This book was quite solid overall. Sometimes the questions asked go far beyond the methodology and theory taught. (Typically these were questions he'd ask to make sure no one got an A+. ) It also is hard to tell sometimes if you've gotten the right answer, as there are no answers in the back of the book.

In certain sections the theoretical derivations were a bit limited. Otherwise it was quite good. The labs in the textbook also are great for showing nonlinear behavior and make for interesting ideas for future research.

I should add this book isn't hard to use (at all)to teach yourself. George's methodology for this course was very hands off, mainly we (the students) worked on the problems in class and would ask him for help. He maybe did 3-5 actual lectures the whole semester.

Nice book for professionals and first-year students. Nice graphics (via Maple). Good introduction to advanced non-linear applications - students should be able to find lots of interesting areas to explore. (be first!)

This book presents case studies of married women who gained weight. It even has a story of a woman who lost weight (yes really) and then faced with marital difficulties, put the weight back on !

With overweight and obese women so prevalent today in the United States, this book is a start at looking at the psychology behind this phenomenon as relates to married women.

I wish the authors had gone further with their premise and looked a tiny bit at history and sociology as well. It would be fun to see if the authors believe that full-figured women are going to actually end up being in vogue, as they are today in Africa and Polynesia, or were during the Renaissance. What is behind the weight epidemic in our country ... high-fructose corn syrup? Laziness? Relying on technology? A new beauty norm? An informal signal of marriage status?

This is an intriguing topic well deserving of a followup from the authors.

Wonderful! This book finally explains the 'how' and 'why' of weight gain. Discussing everything from the struggle to failures, success to acceptance, the authors guide us to a better understanding of our options and choices. Explaining why we gain, and why we fail at our weight loss attempts, they take us through a personal self-discovery to lead us to our goals; be they weight loss or acceptance of our physical selves. Well-written with many examples of women from all walks of life. Strangely, the best thing I got out of this book was NOT hope; it was better than hope - self-love.

After reading several books written by three Amigos, I find this book do the good job of teaching you how to develop OO systems using UML.

It distills the goodies of the OO Process chapter by chapter. Finally, two cases are used to illustrate the concepts and techniques presented.

Take this book if you want to equip yourself with OO technology.

After reading several books written by three Amigos, I find this book do the good job of teaching you how to develop OO systems using UML.

It distills the goodies of the OO Process chapter by chapter. Finally, two cases are used to illustrate the concepts and techniques presented.

Take this book if you want to equip yourself with OO technology

A good book on sigma-delta converters, even though it is a compilation of chapters by different authors. It is obvious that they collaborated, because you really don't get the impression that multiple authors are involved. Theory and practise are discussed to a reasonable depth. Make no mistake though - it would still be difficult to rush off and design a working prototype and expect a spice simulation to agree with theory. The illustrations are good, and the book is well written. I take off a star mainly because it is expensive.

it is real good books. easy to understand the sigma modulators and good for people who interested to know the derrivation of the equations.

This is NOT a book for people looking to learn SQL, or some other dialect of a database. It is a data centric design book on the low level parts of those database engines you currently use.

Did you ever wonder WHY heap files and B-Tree files are used in databases? This is the book to give you the why behind a lot of the lower level design decisions in databases today.

I enjoyed the why discussion of almost all of the topics, but it left me feeling a little light on the implementation. There is not much in the way of practical discussion in the book. While a discussion about index types is very well thought out it never completes the thought from an implementation standpoint. I was actually left with a lot more questions to low level implementation than I started. When to use one of these algorithms is totally left as an excercise to the reader. And in many cases the actual algorithm itself is also left to you to research. I guess they are outside the scope of the book, but I would have enjoyed it so much more with some simple pseudocode or a sample project concept to put them to use.

The book is a great reference to get you thinking about the lowest level of database implementation and make you really think about the way in which SQL Server, DB2, etc all work. But you are not left with a lot of substance on why one implementation would be better than the other for your specific application or problem domain.

This book fills a gap in the marketplace that has needed to be filled for some time now. Oh, there are a lot of good books on each individual DBMS and there are some very good books on logical database design and data modeling. But until now, there has not been a good book that provides a comprehensive treatment of the physical side of database design from a DBMS agnostic perspective.

Actually, the last book that I can recall to tackle the subject well was Handbook of Relational Database Design by Fleming and von Halle (Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-11434-8); but that book was published way back in 1989 and it is a bit long in the tooth.

Physical Database Design is co-authored by three database design experts: Sam Lightstone, Toby Teorey, and Tom Nadeau. Lightstone is a Senior Technical Staff Member and Development Manager with IBM's DB2 product development team. Teorey is a professor emeritus in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and Director of Academic Programs in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. And Nadeau is the founder of Aladdin Software and works in the area of data and text mining. So it is no surprise that the book has a solid technical foundation.

The book offers comprehensive coverage of how to design the physical structures and environment for the most popular database management systems. After reading Physical Database Design you will come away with a better understanding of how the choices you make during physical design affect the performance of your systems. The specific examples, guidelines, and best and worst practices included by the authors are instructive and enlightening, as well as being helpful across the spectrum of popular DBMSs. Examples and code illustrating the major concepts of physical database design are depicted for IBM DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and even sometimes for Informix. It might have been useful to also cover MySQL, but that is not a major criticism as the three most popular DBMSs are nicely addressed by the authors.

So what types of issues are covered within the book? Well, of course, it offers guidance on how to create the objects needed to support a database; tables, indexes, etc. The book also deals with the nuances of setting up more complicated database structures such as partitioning and clustering. And performance issues are covered in some depth as well; in fact, two of the first four chapters are on indexing methods and issues.

One of the more interesting sections of the book is the chapter on automated physical database design. Over the past few years the major DBMS vendors have been adding more autonomic features to their products and the authors address the autonomic physical design aspects quite nicely. These features include the IBM DB2 Design Advisor, the Microsoft SQL Server Database Tuning Advisor, and Oracle's SQL Access Advisor.

If you are interested in how database systems interact with hardware the chapter titled "Down to the Metal: Server Resources and Topology" will be instructive. It discusses CPU architectures, client/server architectures, SMP and NUMA, server clusters, storage and RAID, resource balancing, and availability issues. This is an area where many DBAs lack in-depth knowledge, so this chapter should be welcome reading.

Another very nice feature of the book is the "Tips and Insights for Database Professionals" that end each chapter. These highlighted sections cover the primary ideas that were presented in that chapter in the form of tips you can follow to improve your database design.

As good as this book is though, it is not perfect. Unfortunately, the authors make the cardinal mistake of sometimes using the words "always" and "never." It is almost never a good idea to use "always" or "never" when talking about database design and performance. For example, the authors offer the following advice on page 28: "Indexing should always be used for access to a small number of rows for queries." Now this advice may sound reasonable, and it would be if you just remove the word "always." For example, if you only have a small total number of rows in a table then just scanning the table is likely to be more efficient than going through an index because that would add I/O.

Putting small quibbles like that aside, Physical Database Design is a well-written and researched book that should prove useful to any DBA or developer looking to improve their skills in creating efficient and effective relational database implementation. Consider adding it to your library.

This is a really good game,the strategy guide helped me a lot and it could help other people

Im dennis johnson, i revewed pro pilot'99. this stratagy guide has every thing you would want. It only lackes in helping you fly. this helped me with everything. it is a great guide. This is also a great game. I hope everyone loves this quide.

This is great book for Computer Science students which studies Probabilistic Methods course. The book is selfcontained. Well explained. Has a lot of interesting and complecated examples.

Martingales, using of tail inequalities, many other tehniques covered in this book.

I taught according to this book and highly recommendet it.

I was very disappointed by this book. While it does an excellent job of presenting and analyzing the THEORY of various kinds of probability models, it says almost nothing about how to apply these models to the problems of computer science. For example queueing theory is incredibly useful in many areas of performance modeling, but Ross doesn't mention any of them. Instead, he presents queueing theory as if it fell from the sky one day -- pristine and beautiful, not to be tarnished by having any actual purpose. The presentation reminds me of the way some "pure" mathematicians take offense when a physicist even hints that their beautiful equations might be used to solve an actual problem. If you're interested in applying this stuff, take a look instead at Trivedi's "Probability and Statistics with Reliability, Queueing, and Computer Science Applications, 2nd Edition." It's a much better book.