Computer and Science Books

This book gives a very good overview of Enterprise Application Integration(EAI) and about the methods and the techniques for approaching EAI successfully. The main thing is about the role of CORBA as an EAI-enabling technology and the domains where EAI needs. The later chapters explains the latest additions in the evolving CORBA technology apart from some precious real world examples towards its goal. It is a very useful book for those who are to use CORBA as a viable integrating technology.

Excellent! Worth every penny. I especially liked the chapter on security...

Real world IT managers are usually faced with a mish-mash of new and old systems, tight budgets, and demanding customers. "Rip and replace" solutions are often neither possible nor desirable.

JP's work provides an easily digestible roadmap that shows how IT decision makers can leverage existing corporate information assets in building surprisingly new and powerful functionality. Starting with the importance of understanding data, Enterprise Information Integration provides useful insights into how emerging technologies and practices such as SOA can build "composite" applications merging what-already-works with what-is-needed.

The book is well organized and written. It's also a useful communications tool that IT managers can use to explain these concepts to senior corporate executives.

Dan Grosz
Director of Technology
VIP Parts, Tires, & Service

This book bridges the gap between management summary/overviews and tutorial/how-to books. It starts out with an introduction to the basic concepts and differences between EAI, EII and ETL. The book later explores issues associated with the "single view of the customer" problem and metdata management. The book includes several case studies and ends with a step-by-step review of how a model driven approach could be utilized to address a classical EII problem. Highly recommended.

This manual is full of real examples and practical information (including a ton of statistical citations), and the detail and quality of the explanations are excellent. I have found it immensely useful, both for using the software and for providing suggestions and descriptions of statistical methods.

This is the best-written software user's manual I have ever seen

People today jumping writing OO code without understanding what is an OO methodology. A must read if you want to understand what is OO and its root. A must read for programmers who claim suddenly that one programming language is purer than other OO language(without knowing what is OO itself.) If you really want to achieve a "nirvana" or "wisdom", please read it.

I've used the ideas presented in this book with great success across a wide range of products from embedded applications to OS design. My company has dramatically reduced development time and bug counts as a direct result of implementing object oriented principles across all languages -- not just C++. Read this book, use it as a reference, and use it to teach the Jr. Engineers as they get hired. No other book makes the whole concept of "Object Oriented" more clear and more useable.

Computers have revolutionized the workplace in many industries. However, healthcare is just beginning to grapple with the many opportunities that integrated computer systems can provide. With the quickening pace of computer innovation, many clinical healthcare workers cannot and do not have the time to sift through all the various aspects of how computers and medicine interact. Essentials of Computers for Nurses provides a strong foundation for busy professionals, researchers, and administrators in health care organizaitons. I found the book fascinating with each individual contributing author having insightful comments valuable information in their area of expertise. The overview of how medical informatics is used throughout the world was particulary helpful where we are and where we are going. The last chapter was especially welcome and has enhanced my view of how computers will impact the every day delivery of healthcare. Overall, Essentials of Computers for Nurses is an excellent book and should be a part of a professional library for not only nurses but also informatics specialists throughout the healthcare industry.

The third and latest edition of Saba and McCormick's text is almost completely unrecognisable to those familiar with the second edition, published only five years previously, and perhaps rightly so. This reflects, at least in part, the advances within nursing informatics over that time, one aspect of which is the increasing difficulty of any one or two individuals being able to cover, with the necessary degree of detail and expertise, all of the field. If any two people could cover the whole of the field, it is probably the editors of this volume, but they have adopted a sensible and pragmatic approach and brought in additional contributors to provide address many of the specialist subsets within the domain that is nursing informatics.

With over 500 pages, and 46 contributing authors, the contents page reads like a veritable who's who of nursing informatics, or at least, of US interpretations of nursing informatics. The book does, however, as befits the international involvement of the editors, draw on expertise from around the world, and includes contributions from all parts of the world, particularly in addressing the international perspectives.

The book is divided into 11 sections, and begins with an overview of the development of nurses' use of computers and of nursing informatics. It then covers informatics theory, practice, administrative, research and educational applications, as well as some of the international perspectives and emerging areas such as consumer health informatics.

I would recommend this book to all who have an interest in nursing informatics. It provides a valuable introduction to the field as a whole, and to specific applications, and good references to further reading.

This is a practical book that teaches the "how-to" on device reliability. Before reading this book, I thought "Applied Reliability" by Tobias and Trindade was the best introductory book in this field. Similar to Tobias and Trindade, this book is short and straight-forward. There are absolutely no fillers and it provides a lot of original concepts (e.g. AT&T Tech J vol64), industrial practice (e.g. chap 8 device qualification), and intuitive thinking that are hard to find in other similar books. Books like "statistical methods for reliability data" by Meeker and Escobar or "Accelerated Testing: Statistical Models, Test Plans, and Data Analyses" by Nelson tend to be dry and contain too much information that may confuse readers. Reading Nash first may help clarify the confusion and reinforce the fundamentals before exploring other alternatives.

I also find this book supplements well with "Reliability and degradation of semiconductor lasers and LEDs" by Fukuda and "Reliability and Degradation of III-V Optical Devices" by Ueda. The only shortcomings of this book is its expensive price.

Most reliability books end up being very dry, and filled with equations with little explanation of WHY each of the distributions are used, or how you can go wrong. This book is very different. The author brings up concrete examples of mistakes which are routinely made by inexperienced engineers. He explains clearly which distribution is reasonable for various types of applications. The book is interesting to read, for the most part. (Okay, it still has a few boring chapters at the start, which I recommend skipping.) He even uses the example of human mortality to clearly illustrate concepts of "failure rate" in a way which gets rid of confusion. Finally, the book concludes with a case study for qualifying a high-reliability laser for use in undersea fiber optic communication links. While Franklin Nash's short course is the best I've ever taken, short of seeing him in person, reading this book is the next best thing. (In fact, I'd recommend the book even if you were going to attend the short course.) I've read it several different times in my job as a reliability engineer, and have obtained an understanding of the field that I haven't seen explained as well anywhere else. I give this book my strongest recommendation.

This is a not too technical book, introducing you to evolutionary robotics. It covers a lot of interesting work done in the field over the last few years.

Using genetic algorithms it is possible to construct the brain of a robot ( Neural network ), and even (though harder) the hardware itself. The book gives an introduction to genetic algortihms & artificial neural networks, but the reader should still be somewhat familiar with these concepts before buying this book.

After reading this book, I did one of the experiments mentioned in the book. While I only did this with a freeware Kephara robot simulator, it was still fun.

This is a not too technical book, introducing you to evolutionary robotics. It covers a lot of interesting work done in the field over the last few years.

Using genetic algorithms it is possible to construct the brain of a robot ( Neural network ), and even (though harder) the hardware itself. The book gives an introduction to genetic algortihms & artificial neural networks, but the reader should still be somewhat familiar with these concepts before buying this book.

After reading this book, I did one of the experiments mentioned in the book. While I only did this with a freeware Kephara robot simulator, it was still fun.

My library holds many books on using Excel and programming in Excel VBA. Billo's book has brought valuable hints and techniques that have enhanced my VBA programming skills. The book offers a well balanced coverage of numerical analysis and statistical regression topics. While the examples are more geared for the chemists, they should not be a turn off for readers who are in other scientific and engineering disciplines.

Billo offers an interesting approach to using VBA code and shows you, throughout the book, how to write functions (in modules) that you can use as "custom functions" in your spreadsheets. Excel invokes these functions automatically whenever you alter a cell value and trigger automatic recalculations. This technique frees you from having to repeatedly invoke VBA macros to recalculate values in a spreadsheet. The "custom functions" you learn to build become a custom extension to the Excel library of built-in functions.

I highly recommend this fine book and congratulate the author on his clever work. Billo's book stands out among other Excel VBA books.

Excel for Scientists and Engineers: Numerical Methods
I am very pleased with my purchase of this book. This book is the REAL DEAL.....if you are looking to do advanced numerical math with an Excel spreadsheet. Many other "Excel books for Scientists" simply offer elementary methods on error detection, lists of items and simple math like rounding off, etc. This book is completely different. It starts of on doing matrices with Excel, then goes through Interpolation, differentiation, Integration, Simultaneos Equations, Partial Differential equations, then finishes off with both Linear as well as Non-Linear Regression techniques and Curve Fitting.

In and of itself, even if it didn't show methods to do these things with an Excel spreadsheet, the book would be well worth the read simply as a refresher course in these topics. However, it does show lucid, well-thought out examples of implementing complex numerical methods with standard Excel spreadsheets.

The only thing that this book is lacking in, is a coverage of normal level usage of VBA. It does start off in the very first few chapters with a cursory coverage of VBA, but that is pretty much all that we hear of VBA throughout the rest of the book. However, this is not too much of a drawback, because there are many volumes of other books which cover VBA in wonderful detail. What would be a marriage made in Heaven would be this book with more step-by-step integration with VBA, showing advanced programming techniques in Excel with regards to the great coverage of numerical methods.

B.R. Frieden and R.A. Gatenby (Eds), Exploratory Data Analysis using Fisher Information (Springer, London 2007)
For some years now, Roy Frieden has been exploring the consequences of studying physical phenomena on the basis of Fisher information and extreme physical information (EPI). From the very beginning, the results were spectacular. From the slenderest beginnings, many of the fundamental equations of physics emerged from these EPI principles: the Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations of quantum mechanics as well as the Schrödinger equation; Newton's second law; Maxwell's equations; many of the equations of general relativity; and this does not exhaust the list. These ideas, gradually developed in a series of publications in very respectable and severely refereed scientific journals, were brought together in Physics from Fisher Information (1998) and its successor, Science from Fisher Information (2004).
It was clear from that work that the approach should not be limited to physics but the extent to which it has shown itself fruitful, charted in Frieden's latest book, is a revelation. This is not a monograph but a collection of essays, edited by Frieden and R.A. Gatenby, a life scientist, on a very wide range of topics, all of which are shown to benefit from the use of EPI. The book begins with an introduction by Frieden, in which the reader is told what Fisher information is and how to use it, employing the EPI approach. Eight chapters follow, contributed by the editors and 11 other authors, on financial economics (Frieden, R.J. Hawkins and and J.L. d'Anna); tissue growth and cancer (by the editors); statistical mechanics and `thermal physics' - not very different from what I was taught to call thermodynamics (A. and A.R. Plastino); astrobiology (by Frieden and B.H. Soffer), which is described as a unification of biology and astrophysics; encryption (R.C. Venkatesan); the management of sustainable environmental systems (A.L. Mayer, C.W. Pawlowski, B.D. Fath and H. Cabezas); ecology (by the editors); and to conclude, `Sociohistory: an information theory of social change' (M.I. Yolles and Frieden).
This makes for a very adventurous book, all of which makes fascinating reading though some chapters are more readable than others and occasionally, the authors seem unnecessarily on the defensive, as though they expect readers to have a red pencil at the ready. The list of chapters already gives a good idea of the diversity of the contents and even within individual chapters, the coverage is often surprising; thus Chapter 7 (Environmental systems) ends with a section on `Sociopolitical data', in which "state failure", the risk of a "catatastrophic collapse of a nation's governing body" is examined and illustrated with a histogram showing the stability of five countries, Sweden, France, Argentina, Sierra Leone and Haiti. The Fisher index based on eight criteria is very high (indicating great stability) for Sweden, low for Argentina, Sierra Leone and Haiti and only marginally better for France (in the years between 1961 and 1995)! The concluding chapter (Sociohistory) is the most difficult for readers from the exact sciences, unaccustomed to Kant's notion of the noumenon, the Hegelian doctrine of the dialectic and the autonomous holon, though the authors have tried hard to render the vocabulary of the sociologist palatable.
The very different nature of the topics examined makes it less easy to appreciate the remarkable role of EPI than in the earlier books, addressed to physicists in language with which they were familiar, however revolutionary the theory presented. I imagine that readers of this latest offering will peruse only the chapter that deals with their own particular interest. I therefore wish to emphasize that the truly original feature of this book - apart from EPI itself - is precisely its broad coverage; its demonstration that such a simple principle, easily grasped, is capable of yielding valuable results in such a wide range of fields of enquiry. I found Frieden's earlier books immensely original and intellectually thrilling and this one adds yet more weight to that opinion.
P.W. Hawkes
(M.A., Ph.D., Sc.D., Cambridge; emeritus Director of Research, CNRS)

In a simple-minded way Fisher information can be expressed in one dimension
as an integral of (P') squared over P where P is a suitable probability density.
For example P could be the square modulus of a quantum wave function.
Many action principles for physical systems in quantum mechanics or
relativity involve extremizing a Lagrangian which contains such Fisher information
(FI) terms. The book applies such ideas to a huge variety of physical, biological,
economic, ecological, social, game theoretical, and informational systems.
One uses FI in a unified approach to statistically based science called
EPI (extreme physical information). This leads to a program (EPA) of
exploratory data analysis whose inputs are real or Gedanken data and whose
outputs are the natural laws governing a system. The results often appear in the form of
differential equations. Here one thinks of the
universe as information-dominated and "participatory", of Harrison type,
allowing maximum
information gain at each observation and "favoring" the intelligent
observation of information.

One speaks of three levels of solution for EPI,
depending on the three levels of prior knowledge categorized by the
19th century philosopher C. Pierce. These are
(A) The highest level
or "abduction", giving exact (quantum) solutions; (B) The next highest level
or "deduction", giving accurate but inexact (non-quantum) solutions of
classical physics; and
(C) The lowest level or "induction" using merely empirical data giving approximate
but smooth solutions.
The exact type (A) solutions of EPI require a measurement space connected
via unitary transformations with some other space having a physical reality.
In this event one arrives via EPI at the correct dynamical equations for the
measurement space. There are two earlier books in these directions:
(1) Physics from Fisher information, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998 and
(2) Science from Fisher information, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004, both
by B.R. Frieden.

The present book is is a collaboration by H. Cabezas, J.L. D'Anna, B.D. Fath,
B.R. Frieden, R.A. Gatenby, R.J. Hawkins, A.L. Mayer, C. Pawlowski, A. Plastino,
A.R. Plastino, B.H. Soffer, R.C. Venkatesan, and M. Yolles. The topics include (1)
A tutorial on FI and background mathematics plus chapters on
(2) Financial economics from FI, (3) Growth characteristics of organisms,
(4) Information theory and thermal physics, (5) Parallel information phenomena
in biology and astrophysics, (6) Encryption of covert information through a
Fisher game, (7) Applications of FI to the management of sustainable
environmental systems, (8) FI in ecological systems, and (9) Sociohistory:
An information theory of social change.

There is much to reflect on here and strong evidence that this is indeed the
way to go. I personally have used and exploited the Fisher information theme
in numerous papers related to quantum mechanics and relativity, in particular
via relations of FI to the quantum potential. I would even say that this theme
seems to have "cosmic significance" and in the present arena of information
technology, processing, retrieval, and distortion the book should be considered as
must reading.

Robert Carroll, Emeritus Professor, University of Illinois

I was a former teaching assistant this past summer for a lower division computer science course at UC Berkeley. We used this book as our primary text. From several semesters of teaching introductory computer science courses I can say that this book has proven to be an indispensible item for me. Ranging from concise writing to thought provoking questions, it is an excellent introduction to future computer scientists. I recommend this to anyone.

The first part of this book will give the basic programming `how to' knowledge: Common abstractions and basic program design.

The second part introduces Computer Science and will show you what others have been doing with the techniques explained in the first part. It will give a panoramic view of modern CS: databases, operating systems, artificial intelligence, compilers, `soft-computing', etc...

Only the chapter on compilers seems a bit confusing, everything else is clearly explained.

You won't need a good background in maths to follow it.