Software Books

We've had this book for a long time and we still bring it out every now and then.
I think we enjoy the nostalgia of reading a favorite book together and we still
like seeing Marvin's adventures in the city and trying to remember where the
emu and the cat are. It took us years actually to find the emu on the subway.

This is an awesome book. I used it with fourth graders to teach the organization trait in the 6 traits writing. The kids loved the story and suggested we write a spin off of the book. They did an awesome job and made their stories into books and illustrated them. Highly recommend it to get students motivated to write.

I had never heard of this book before my son received it as a gift. He was about 9 months old and would insist that we read it again and again. He is now 4.5 and still likes it. And his little brother has enjoyed it just as much. The illustrations are fantastic and its fun to search for Marvin on every page. I highly recommend this book. I also love the language - it uses fantastic, descriptive words. My soon was 2 and used the words mesmorized and exhilarating because he learned them from this book.

My preschoolers love this book, not just because of the vivid illustrations that go with an easy-to-follow text - they love locating the hidden ostrich, police officers, and black cat tucked into nearly every single page. Check out the clouds...they look like fish, dinosaurs! Can you find Santa Claus hidden in Yankee Stadium's crowd of thousands?

I confess - my husband and I love finding the hidden pictures, too. Its also our favorite birthday gift for my kids friends. Get the book and scan the illustrations closely! Fun!

My three-year-old son enjoys this book so much because it lends itself to active participation. It is fun for him to spot Marvin, the escaped ape, in various settings ranging from a subway train to a ballgame to a ledge on a building. He also enjoys finding the two policemen who look for Marvin as he moves from locale to locale. I don't mind re-reading this book because of the clever illustrations and appealing New York City backdrops. And after reading the book for the first time, we have make a joke of finding Marvin--I say "Where's Marvin?" and he'll jokingly point to other animals or objects. His enjoyment of this book won't last forever, but it's been providing amusement for a few weeks now.

I couldn't put this book down until I finished it. Kerry does a great job of taking the reader behind the scenes at Fox.

It looks like I'm one of the few reviewers that didn't work for Fox Software. However, I have used and developed in FoxPro a lot over the last 15 years. It's still the best RAD tool that you can buy despite its treatment by Microsoft.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I think that anyone who has worked in software or worked for complete butthead would also like it and relate. It's so well written that I just wish it were longer.

Recently, I read Mr. Nietz's book while on vacation and found it to be very interesting and hard to put down. Within a couple of days I was finished with the book. This book is for all audiences and you don't need a degree in computers to enjoy it. I highly recommend this book and I look forward to reading other books by Kerry in the future.

Once I began this extraordinary book, I could not put it down. It's a page turner with a story that will appeal to all readers. I worked at Fox Software with Kerry for over 4 years. This story of Kerry's experience at Fox Software is a wonderful reminder that how you get to the top is more important than how high you get.

There have been many stories of what the inside of the high-tech business looks like from the most famous and successful business leaders. Most of these stories are attempts to write history and promote themselves. This story is about a hard working and honest guy who wants to work hard and make something of himself by joining a small software company. After reading this book you can tell that Kerry wrote this book to just share his experience. He is not trying to promote himself, and by doing so he tells a story that so many people can relate to, and he records for all of us a fascinating story of a small software company at a time when the industry was growing exponentially.

This story has a happy ending, despite all of the obstacles presented in the book, Kerry and others continued to work hard and were rewarded years later at Microsoft. I am looking forward to more great books from Kerry.

FoxTales is an excellent read. Once I got started, I simply could not put it down. As an employee that actually worked in the offices of Fox Software, I always felt that Fox Software was a company that succeeded more in spite of its uppermost management, rather than because of it. At times Fox was an exciting and awesome place to work and at others, it was humiliating and torturous. Kerry does a great job of presenting the experience as a whole and of wrapping up a series of somewhat loosely related events into a very entertaining story. It's nice to see someone tell the outside world what it was like at Fox Software.

If nothing else, Dr. Fulton had an excellent eye for talented developers and he certainly did manage to assemble an incredible team. It's great to see how Keary and others were eventually rewarded by Microsoft for their efforts and perseverance.

I have a virtual calculator called the DIY Calculator that accompanies my own book "How Computers Do Math" The Definitive Guide to How Computers Do Math : Featuring the Virtual DIY Calculator.

I recently added a "Conundrums, Puzzles, and Posers" section to the "Programs and Subroutines" page on my DIY Calculator website ([...]) and I've started to build a collection of simple puzzles for people to play with.

One of the first problems I posed was to count the number of ones in the 8-bit accumulator and to present the result as a binary value. I thought I had discovered the best-possible solution, until someone pointed me in the direction of the "Hacker's Delight". (In this context, "Hacker" refers to a hero who is manipulating code; not a nefarious rapscallion who breaks into other people's computer systems.)

I immediately ordered a copy from Amazon, and took delivery just yesterday as I pen these words. This book is fantastic - I kid you not - on the first page of Chapter 2, for example, I discovered at least five or six capriciously clever tricks that blew my solutions out of the water!

I highly recommend this book.

My first introduction to binary operators wizardry was in a 1st year, 1st semester course in Digital Systems at the Technion, IIT. I thought it was fun. While I was trying to write a computer program to compute Karnaugh Maps for me, I run into performance problems, and then some binary hackery helped me get back on the horse.

Since then, whenever I come across some binary trick I write it down with a few examples of usage and sometimes with some reasoning why it works.

Then came "Hacker's Delight" and I felt compelled to buy it.

I wasn't disappointed at all! Not only it contained all of the tricks that I have collected, but also it contains a lot more in depth examples of how these tricks can come in handy when trying to squeeze performance from an implementation or save a few more bytes and bits.

The book also gave me a fresh perspective on the implementation of some well known algorithms with the twist of binary arithmetic. This was very enlightening.

I read the "BASICS" chapter (chapter 2) with a single breath of air, and just couldn't leave it down. Not only it was nice to have all these tricks summarized in one book, but also I liked some of the reasoning and the "so-called" proofs.

Remaining chapters were, as I mentioned before, a fresh look for me on known algorithms. This fresh look was through the glasses of binary arithmetic.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who feels comfortable with binary arithmetic and/or computer organization -- even just for the fun of it!

I'd recommend the book to developers who don't necessarily have a sympathy to this topic, but would like a Copy&Paste solution to some problems they have to tackle.

I really enjoyed reading this book, and I will probably reference it from time to time.

The term "hacker" in this book means someone who enjoys making computers do interesting tricks regardless of whether it turns out to be useful, not someone who is intent on circumventing computer security. Plus, how relevant would those kind of tips be coming from a book that was written in 2002? Don't let the author's definition of a hacker fool you, though - the tricks in this book are very useful.

This book is a collection of small programming tricks on various subjects. The presentation is very informal, and the methods use very basic computer math. You should know your binary number system backwards and forwards before you start this book. Either C or assembly language is used to demonstrate the hacks in code form. When assembly language is used, it is that of a fictitious machine that is representative of RISC computers. That is because the tricks are meant to be platform independent.

After disposing of basic arithmetic operations early in the book, the author turns his attention to more complex math problems such as calculating square roots. His discussion of the subject is both complex and simple. First, he explains Newton's method of computing square roots through a page full of equations that require some effort to follow. Then he gives an implementation that requires fewer than twenty lines of C code. This is followed by another method that is longer and more cryptic but executes faster, by using a binary search algorithm. Whether you are interested in the equations or merely need the C code to do your job, these solutions are efficient and elegant.

Other topics addressed include Gray codes, the Hilbert curve, and prime numbers. Gray codes are a method of arranging the integers from 1 to N in a list so that each number can be visited exactly once by flipping only one bit at a time. The Hilbert curve is a similar idea expressed geometrically: a single continuous curve which, given a space divided into a grid of squares, touches every square exactly once and does not cross itself. In each case, both the mathematical discussion and the code to solve the problem are provided.

The chapter on prime numbers is the most challenging mathematically but also one of the most interesting. It starts with a concise overview of various mathematicians' efforts to devise ways of finding prime numbers. The author is one of those people who periodically become fascinated by some problem and devote themselves to learning more about it and searching for a solution. The chapter ends not with the usual code sample, but instead with an invitation to continue the search for interesting solutions to the problem.

Clearly, the author views this book not as a finished collection, but rather as a snapshot of work in progress. After decades of interest-driven research, the author has amassed a collection of studies big enough to fill a book, and it is fortunate for the rest of us that he has written one.

They don't make them like this anymore. Amid the "Learning XXX in 21 days" and various other computer book for which depth is almost non existent (and are read like eating peanuts), this is a refreshing book that talks about solutions to sometimes common (IMHO) coding problems.
If you enjoy programming gems, or remember that beyond your C code there is a machine that executes your program, this is the book for you. For example, think how would you count the 1 bits in a 32 bit integer - the book has an elegant solution in log(n). Aside from this, the book has about 50 or so problems, with their solutions (and proof).
Bottom line: fine book, worthy to be near my Knoth, R&K and Stroustrup books.

This book is an absolute essential to the right reader. That right reader is either a low-level coder, a high-level logic designer, or someone who builds tools and libraries for same. In other words, not a lot of people. This is hacking at its bit-level finest, though. If you're among those few, or think you might be, or want a good laugh at the people who are, dig in.

It's good for things like counting the number of 1 bits in a word-length integer (hint: if you count the bits, you're doing it the hard way). It's good for things like fast division by an integer constant, or mod to a constant integer modulus (hint: if you perform division by dividing, you're barking up the wrong tree). If you can look into a 32x32 bit multiplication and see a convolution going on, you're way ahead of the game. The only tricks I know that didn't appear here are A) for purposes that almost no one has or B) for machines that almost no one has.

Warren presents the coolest collection of slimy coding tricks ever collected, with full attention to the number of machine cycles and the compiler-writer's unique needs. I've seen a lot, and this is by far the biggest and coolest collection around. I have two complaints, though, a small one and a really big one. The small one is that the author didn't score a direct bullseye on my somewhat offbeat needs. Well, he never tried to - that's just me griping that he didn't write a different book. The big complaint is that pages, lots of them, just fluttered out of this pricey book and onto the floor. GRRR. This takes nothing away from the content of the book, until some critical page flutters off never to be seen again. Still, if you can keep a rubber band around it, this will be one of the deepest mines of coolness in your uber-geek library.

//wiredweird

As a dotNet Developer, I am often called upon to write my own database code or maintain existing db code. I am also called upon to diagnose performance problems or set security. Sometimes on lightly staffed projects, I am a defacto DBA.

I have always strived to have a comprehensive understanding of the technologies I use. However, my level of understanding of SQL Server was more limited then my understanding of the other technologies I use.

I purchased this book based on existing Amazon recommendations. In particular, I was interested in the Performance and Security sections, as well as what is new. It did not disappoint. The depth on items like Indexes was exactly what I was looking for. The discussion of new items was enough to get we to a working level.

So it definitely fulfilled my needs and expectations.

However, the book seems aimed at DBAs. Given the number of topics covered in the book, I suspect it could not be comprehensive enough to take an intermediate DBA to the Advanced stage.

But for someone like me, who is often called upon to be an 'acting' DBA it serves as an excellent reference; in addition to providing a tutorial on the topics mentioned above.

Even for a beginner like me. This is a great book as a reference or if you learn by experimenting and need a book to look up things here and there. I'm not an expert with SQL Server but it really seems like this book is a must have if you're dealing with SQL Server setup, management, etc..

I used this almost every day now for the past couple months. I used it as a reference with developing in SQL SEVER 2005. It answers about 80% of my questions. Must books answer a little more then half - so I give this five stars.
If you write a lot of code in SQL, I highly recommended this book.

Very valuable when it comes to referencing all the functionality SQL Server 2005 has to offer.
Microsoft(R) SQL Server 2005 Unleashed

There are a lot of typos and grammar errors in the book. Like "or" instead of "for", for example.

This is definitively a must have in the bookshelf of all .NET AD Developers. I have been working with ADAM since .NET 1.1 and have always struggle to find answers to simple questions like how to make an LDAP query to run efficiently or how to define complex queries; this book has that and a lot more.

This book is everything I was hoping it would be. I'm working on a project where I need to get computer accounts from AD (TENS of THOUSANDS of them) and move, delete, enable, disable and set account expiration dates. Everything I need to know is in this book. The AD paged search, useraccount properties, etc. Some of the routines I was able to use as-is (the VB versions from their web site download). These guys do a great job of explaining all the stuff I couldn't find anywhere else. Highly reccomended!

This book is great for anyone who does AD programming with .NET it covers everything from the basics to some pretty advanced stuff and even some undocumented stuff.. a must have for AD Programemrs!

If you are or may be in the future, doing directory services programming then this book is a must have. It also suffices a quick reference as it has code sprinkled around so that you can get up to speed quickly.

If anything, it is sort of lacking on other LDAP directories. It does have the history of LDAP and does show where the differences are between AD and the others.

If your primary focus is other directories, this may not be the end all book for you, but should still suffice as a reference.

If AD is your main focus, buy this now, you won't be disappointed.

This is a very good book for[...] developers who wants to program against Active Directory. There are some good examples in this book that can be very handy. Other than examples in pieces, there is not a project or Web Site codes that a beginner could use.

I already read many Oracle books from Oracle Press & other publications. They are very good. This book takes different approch of How-to Style content which is very much practical & solves day to day administrative needs. Topics are covered in detail. Most importantly examples given are from grounds up. Excellent! This book is also helpfull for all who know a little bit of Oracle Database & want to know more in depth

We all know, especially here in Brazil, the money that one pays to have a good Oracle trainning. If you already have a little knowledge of Oracle and its jargon and are self estimulated, this book will take you to high level of expertise without a pain . Want to know Oracle ? Start with it.

Among all the Oracle reference books, I found this one to be the most useful and practical book. This book is very well written and has an easy to read format. The detailed step-by-step instructions in Q&A section helped me solve problems quickly. This saved me much time and effort than going through piles of other reference books and trying to pull pieces of information here and there together to get a complete picture. I highly recommend this book to Oracle DBA's in all levels.

As an Oracle Instructor and DBA I've had the opportunity to review numerous Oracle texts for DBA's and have to say I've been quite disappointed with most of them. Mr. Yuhanna's book however is an exception. Out of the many DBA texts I have on my shelf this is the one I goto most frequently. Unlike other texts which spend excessive amounts of time covering uncommonly used features and little to no time covering commonly used features this books covers almost all the basics in a hands on approach. The book is setup in a step by step how-to format. Although it doesn't discuss concepts much that is not its purpose and the best concepts book is the Oracle Documentation anyway. I've have yet to see a good how-to DBA book until I came across this one. As a consultant/instructor I recommend it quite frequently.

The book is very useful for both new and experienced DBAs because it has a lot of practical examples. I especially like its Q&A format with scripts which makes reading very interesting.

I've read quite a few of Jim's works over the years, and he has never failed to impress me. This book should be required reading for any project manager!

My initial pre-read perception of this book was that it was going to be just another perspective of agile methods. I was wrong. Coplien and Harrison have dissected development teams to identify the key criteria leading to successful efforts and high-performing teams. Beyond process, this book identifies the organizational structures required to make the processes work.

From an organizational perspective, roles and responsibilities within your development teams are a primary success criteria for your agile (or any other process) adoption. This book presents how and why key roles within your teams work and why teams without these key roles don't work. The way they have presented the material provides for a quick cross-reference when you are looking for solutions to help your teams.

Beyond the organization patterns themselves, I believe some of the richest material in this book is presented in the last few chapters as they present the history and importance of organizational structures, roles and responsibilities in applying process - "Process emerges from structure, and structure emerges from values". There is great value in this book beyond most software development process books.

As project managers, most of us who've been in the field working for a while come to realize that successful project teams are more the result of "good" ongoing social engineering of one sort or another rather than just dumping an almost randomly selected group of people together, coming up with an MS Project Plan and saying "do this" (the Death Star approach, all to common in large traditional process-driven IT shops). After this has happened to you, painfully, you begin to come to the realization that perhaps there's more to project management than the mechanistic "people are interchangeable resources" PMBOK-style approach.

If it hasn't already, it begins to dawn on you that the "soft" side of project management (client relationship building, communication within the team and between teams, team dynamics and team morale, motivation, empowerment, commitment, a human-style of project management) are as important or even more important than the technical work and the technical skills required. Most of us have run across teams with prima-donna's who think they're the cat's whiskers, be they project managers or technical personnel, who have the personal graces of a warthog and who are incredibly destructive to team morale and team performance. They continue to exist, sadly, and because they often deliver, albeit at the expense of everyone who works for them or with them, they continue to survive in "Death Star" style IT shops where delivery is all important and the style of successful delivery means nothing or is short-sightedly disregarded. OK, so that's my rant.

Now for the book. We've all seen successful projects and successful teams (or at least, I hope we all have). Some teams gell and perform way above the norm. What this book does is distil over 100 successfully applied organizational patterns of one sort or another from real projects in real software development groups. These patterns are broken down into logical groups (Project Management Patterns, Piecemeal Growth Patterns, Organizational Style Patterns & People and Code Patterns) which are dissected and explained, with examples provided. What the authors have done is to identify and describe key organizational patterns which are used by successful teams - not processes, but organizational structures of various types that are needed to make processes work successfully. A large amount of practical experience has gone into the content - over ten years of research experience from the authors alone.

I've read a lot of books on Agile, but this is the first I've come across that sets out organizational patterns - and does it so effectively that you'll wonder why all the stuff in here never occurred to you before. As you read through the book, you'll see patterns that will make sense, the kind of "ah-ha, that's what the problem is and this is how I can dom something about it" sense. You'll find this book useful in that the contents can be taken and applied right away. It's easy to pick what is most useful for your team, what can be applied immediately and what would be nice later on, once some of the basics are in place. The content is practical in that you can easily identify what your problems are and what pattern would help fix it, why the pattern is intended to fix it, and there's good advice on how to introduce new patterns.

With over 100 patterns, there are a lot, but they're set out concisely, a page or two to each pattern. There's no fluff, it's well-written, there's no appreciable bias, there's a lot of material, including some good coverage of the importance of effective organizational structures in applying process. As we all know, all the process in the world will not a great project team make. The book's structure is coherent and well-organized, the patterns described can be used individually or as groups and the authors give you some pretty good ideas as to what's immediately useful.

And the pictures all the way through the book are great! A nice humorous touch that helps make the point each time. Overall, I'd recommend this book very highly as a resource to anyone managing a project / team, whether Agile or not. There's a wealth of practical advice in here that any project manager could take and use, although the orientation is towards Agile Projects. An added bonus - unlike many technical books, this one won't date quickly - organizational patterns that work don't change much over the years, unlike programming languages. From a practical point of view, I've applied some of these patterns to teams I work with and the results have been positive - I've also shared the book with co-workers and they've all found it both illuminating and useful.

This book has to be The Grand Unifying Theory of Software with respect to managing the people and processes involved in software production.

To anyone who has worked in the software industry, this book is clearly the product of an enormous amount of practical experience in both management of people and projects as well as the development of software.

Coplien and Harrison have written a book which both the project manager and software engineer will understand and will immediately be able to apply to their respective work environments: This is because the book cunningly captures essential organisational concepts using a framework that is familiar to software engineers. Thus, the concepts will be by recognised by staff trained in business as well as those trained in software and systems.

I strongly feel that the material covered in this book can achieve a common communication basis between managers and engineers, and can help business developers understand the nature of their people and organisation.

If I could insist that all people in software read this book I would; but without the policing power, I can only highly recommend this book to those involved in all facets of software.

OK, I have to admit, this is the first book review I've ever written on Amazon and having read a lot of good books I should probably get off my a** and write more :-)

As a former developer and now a software development manager, I have come to realise that the "soft side" or sociology of software projects (communication with clients, communication with teammates, project management, team dynamics, cultural issues, morale, division of work, remote collaboration, etc) is considerably more complicated than the programming work itself.

Over time, you start to see patterns emerge such as "start a large project with a small experienced group and gradually phase people into a project as time goes on". This book does by far the best job of cataloguing and explaining dozens of these patterns related to (1) software project management (2) structuring, building and nurturing software project teams and (3) organization and division of development tasks to maximize the effectiveness of the team as a whole.

Highly recommended to anyone involved with software development at both the management level and in the trenches. Have fun!

Till I saw this book and Bert Monroys website my imagination and creativity for minimally very finite. Its amazing how he shows what can be done using image editors like photoshop. Its just blows you away. My wife thought the pictures in his books are photographs and when I told her bert monroy created them in photoshop, there was no sound from her. She was quite amazed. This book is well recommended. Authors like Bert Monroy truly amazes with their talent and give us additional thoughts and inspiration on how to improve our work.

I found this book very useful, very well illustrated, as Bert Monroy describes his technics. He teaches methods that opened my mind to the power that Photoshop CS has. While he covers many aspects of the program he dos not indulge in the usual rehash of every photoshop feature, focusing on specific projects. His reputation for a graphics artist and teacher are well deserved. Wonderful examples, just enough detail to convey the point without beating you over the head. Included color photos are well laid out, his teaching method couldn't be better. The tone will particular instruct the novice or intermeadiate user, but everyone will find something of use here. If you are looking for blow by blow 'how to' for every feature, look at Photoshop CS Sudio Techniques, or the Adobe Class Room in a Book. I only wish this book had more samples, examples. If you can't buy it, hope your local libray has or will. Do this for its artistic voice.

This book will get your imagination going. Some great tips.

The only reason I don't give it 5 stars is that there could have been more content.

Bert Monroy is probably one of the most talented Photoshop users there is. If you've ever seen him on TechTV, you've seen how effortlessly he uses PS.

This book is full of amazing artwork Bert has done with Photoshop, along with a lot of tips and techniques from the master himself. You'll have a hard time believe that this book isn't just a collection of photos. Bert style is so photo-realistic it's jaw-dropping.

Definitely a must-have book for any PS enthusiast. Even if you don't plan to use PS for Photoreal artwork, there are techniques here that are applicable to other uses for PS but the book itself is worth the price just for the awe factor of Monroy's work.

Bert is a great artist and teacher. I took a class from him, and learned so much, but couldn't absorb it all at once. This book allows you to learn his techniques at your own pace, and will give you the confidence to start creating images from scratch in Photoshop, or add painting techniques to your image manipulation. Highly recommended for intermediate to advanced Photoshop users and all artists.

Issues specific to Open Source are well-covered in this book. I found the section titled "Handling Difficult People" especially useful; his advice in this dodgy area is to act eloquent and keep feedback directed at the problem, not the person. If the person *is* the problem, nip in-public issues in the bud and contact the person directly to resolve the personal issue(s).

Fogel presents lots of down and dirty day-to-day details on how to create excellent software. Not just Open Source, either... the transparency built into the processes he describes are also useful within a company firewall.

Fogel places a huge emphasis on development by random unsalaried people, but I feel that most important and rapid development is due to corporate sponsorship.

Overall: excellent. Read it cover to cover, refer back to it often.

If you are thinking of starting/managing a project in an "open-source" model, this is the book you MUST read.

The book is very well written and goes over lessons learned of others that created their own open-source projects. Believe me... every step so you don't have to guess anything!

How to start, how to document, where to deploy the project, what people to invite, whether or not coding standards are necessary, democracy versus dictatorship, all of these questions are answered inside.

A friend of mine has told me that much of the information in this book can be seen for free in video in Google. It's worth looking for.

I read the book in 5 hours and i think my time was very well invested. I now believe that this model is not only suitable for small projects but to larger projects. The complexity of the system will not the an issue if you apply the rules in the book. I still have to try it though... ;-)

Just yesterday I was talking to a friend about this book and we discovered each other very glad with it. First of all, the author has a lot of experience with the theme in question. Furthermore, Karl Fogel is very compelling with words. He knows how to write down his experience in a way that is pleasant, certainly due to a lot of writes he had made through plenties of open source projects.

With this book you will be in touch with topics like the needed infra-structure to setup open source projects, the dinamics of the open source community, strategies for packaging and releasing software, common issues that arise in open source daily development and how to workaround then, a brief about licenses (with properly links for more information on this topic); just to highlight some aspects.

This book was the first hand someone land me into the open source world. It's helping me in three ways: to extract more from open source softwares that already exist, to start my own open source project, and to look at software development through a new, different, and till now better perspective.

Hope this review helps you!

If you have already read pretty much everything that there is to be read about why you'd want to start, manage, fund or participate in an Open Source project, but want to know everything about how best to do it, then Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software is the book for you.

Drawing from his extensive experience with the Subversion project, Fogel provides in this book a comprehensive overview of all aspects of Open Source software development, covering technical, social, political, economical, legal, and managerial aspects.

While the book is more aimed at medium-to-large scale projects, especially those involving some kind of corporate entity, there is much in it that is applicable to most projects, excluding maybe only those little, one-man efforts that rarely become successful. But if you are the originator of one of the latter and, should it suddenly attract a wide following, you'd better be prepared to face the unavoidable problems that popularity brings.This book will come in handy in this case.

Here are, in my opinion, the strong points of the book:

* Providing a concise, yet comprehensive, overview of all aspects of Open Source development. This is really the manual of open development.

* Demonstrating that there is much in open development that is similar to more traditional, corporate-style software development (you cannot always rely on good will and volunteers), but also much that is different, in motivation, rewards and objectives.

* Putting the accent on the human aspect of development: mutual respect between participants is often the deciding factor in determining whether a project will thrive or fail. Since even the best of intentions sometimes are not enough to foster a peaceful, productive and collaborative environment, Producing Open Source Software contains a lot of useful, practical advice that you can follow if you want to keep developers happy and motivated.

It's easy to make the mistake of viewing this book as "too fluffy" or perhaps too soft to be of any use to the practical user or developer of open source software. Nothing could be further from the truth: in a classic open source way, the author has compressed man-centuries of OS community experience into a practical working guide for anyone who wants to do something serious in this area.

If you want to understand programming the Flash Communication Server and it's capabilities this is a good place to start.

Although I'm using Flash Media Server 2, this book is still highly relevant as not much has changed. The core objects and language is the same so I would not hesitate to recommend it for anyone looking to use FMS.

This book is all about the design of applications using Macromedia's Flash Communication Server MX. FCS MX enables the building of media-rich web applications by taking care of the basic tasks required in the networking of the applications. Thus, you can focus on the application itself rather than worrying about low-level communication details.

Since this book is concerned with situations where multiple Flash applications will be executing on the same server simultaneously, there is going to be considerable effort involved in coordinating events, which is addressed by this book. You should already have FCS installed and running on your server and you should also have Flash MX available on the client. The following is description of the book by chapter:

Chapter 1, Introducing the Flash Communication Server - Acts as an introduction to FCS and an overview of the whole book.

Chapter 2, Communication Components - How the FlashCom communication components encapsulate commonly needed features such as chat, video recording and playback, bandwidth control,and user configuration. These components implement many basic building blocks for your application.

Chapter 3, Managing Connections - This chapter covers connections in more depth past the SimpleConnect component, including how to write custom code to handle various changes in the connection status as well as different errors.

Chapter 4, Applications, Instances, and Server-Side ActionScript - This chapter describes how to write Server-Side ActionScript and work with the objects that control application instances and the Flash movies that connect to them.

Chapter 5, Managing Streams - Offers a somewhat oversimplified but complete example that shows the basic steps in publishing one live stream and subscribing to a second.

Chapter 6, Camera and Microphone - This chapter explains how to use both the Microphone and Camera classes to record live streams. These classes are at the heart of most communication applications involving multimedia.

Chapter 7, Media Preparation and Delivery - This chapter covers many details for compressing and streaming audio and video.

Chapter 8, Shared Objects - This chapter starts an entirely new subject - shared objects, which provide a mechanism for the transmission of data between client and server.

Chapter 9, Remote Methods - This chapter also shows how to broadcast method calls to every movie and application instance connected to a shared object or stream, or send them to and from individual movies using RMI.

Chapter 10, Server Management API - Discusses the Server Management API and its applications, including monitoring a FlashCom Server, gathering statistics on application instances, and managing the log streams.

Chapter 11, Flash Remoting - Demonstrates how Flash Remoting can be used to add data connectivity to FlashCom applications. Flash Remoting can access web services, server-side scripts, CGI applications, XML files, or the local filesystem with the help of an application server such as ColdFusion.

Chapter 12, ColdFusion MX and FlashCom - Teaches some specifics involved in using Flash Remoting with ColdFusion MX and FlashCom. There are some practical working examples shown that demonstrate how you can leverage the benefits of Flash Remoting in conjunction with FlashCom.

Chapter 13, Building Communication Components - This is the first step in building complete applications, and is demonstrated through an extensive example.

Chapter 14, Understanding the Macromedia Component Framework - How to modify an existing component and how to create a new one. Also discusses server-side framework code and its core features and data structures.

Chapter 15, Application Design Patterns and Best Practices - Describes some of the best practices available to application developers. This chapter provides some useful design options, patterns, and best practices that will help you build better applications.

Chapter 16, Building Scalable Applications - Deals with building multi-instance and multiserver applications that don't bog down as the number of client connections increases.

Chapter 17, Network Performance, Latency, Concurrency - Traditional network design issues affect FCS also.

Chapter 18, Securing Applications - Specifically this chapter examines the three A's of security - Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting.

Excellent book, stuffed of examples very well explained, easy to read and to understand, essential for who desires initiate or even though to profound itself studies on FlashCom.
Obligator reference in projects involving FlashCom, either for fast consultations and advanced tasks.
Excellent approach of subjects as Design patterns and security, yonder a perfect demonstration about audio, video and much more.

If you're a developer looking into real-time server communication using Adobe Flash, this book is a must-have. It guides you thru various levels of application development in an easy to understand format, and provides well documented pieces of code to assist you in the learning process of putting together your project:

Topics covered include:

- learning about components and how to use them
- establishing and managing client connections
- publishing live and recorded streams
- local communication with clients
- remote communication with outside applications

The book also shows how to build and integrate your own custom components, and how to scale your application using the components that you've created. Other highlights include information on how to use shared objects and server management API, as well as ways to improve both design and performance.