Computer Science Books

Though in places a bit heavy-going for a non-specialist readership, SDIMM is a first-rate introduction to the information sciences. As an overview of state-of-the-art technology, SDIMM may be dated, but the problems it describes are timeless -- and fascinating. Anyone interested in how information is measured, moved, and translated to the media of minds/brains and computers, would do well to read this exceptional book. Here's hoping RL makes future contributions to the popular science literature.

This is a popular computer book about data compression and data representation. It was first published way back in 1989 and now eleven years later it's not in the slightest bit out of date. How many popular computer books can you say that about?

Althought this book has been written 20 years ago, it is still very
fresh today. The bandwidth with which we communicate, and
our capacity for storing information have increased in the intervening
years, however the fundamental questions that are addressed here
have not changed much. In the first couple chapters, the author starts
with a very precise definition of what information and capacity mean.
This part is merely 50 pages in length, but makes this book worth
owning on its own - I wish somebody gave it to me when I was
learning about information theory.

The remainder of the book is devided into chapters dealing
with different aspects of information: text, speech and pictures,
including problems associated with their storage, processing
and intrepretation. The presentation is insightful, informative,
and, given that it is addressed to an audience of non-mathematicians,
surprisingly precise. Each chapter ends with a ligh-hearted essay,
some of which I found to be deceptively deep and insightful.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I'd strongly recommend this book for anybody interested in how things have evolved in computing. Great insight into stuff we take for granted like compression algorithms, error correction.

I read this book over and over and love it every time. It covers topics that I teach from the standard texts, but it covers them in a way that makes it all make so much more sense to my students. This truly is an amazing book!

A superbly written book on fabrication of silicon integrated circuits.Chapter 2 provides a gentle yet fairly detailed introduction to the overall process and each item touched therein is expanded subsequently.The language is clear and figures convey their intended meaning,overall its a wonderful starting point for further study in silicon integrated circuits technology.As has been pointed out in one of the reviews here, this book has been adopted in many US universities.The link embedded in this review is one such instance and as such can be used to obtain more information and benefit from a full set of audio lectures, assignemnts and other supplementary material as a part of MIT's open course ware program.The instructor is Prof Judy Hoyt.
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Before this book was published, Wolf & Tauber's book was the only good reference I had. Plummer's new book has a thorough review of basic principles, very well updated parts on current manufacturing equipments (Wolf's book also has extensive coverage in this respect). The best part in my opinion is oxidation & diffusion parts where the authors are one of the leaders in current research. The book not only focuses on the specific details, but also gives an integrated view of the whole CMOS fabrication process, which I enjoyed a lot.

I strongly recommend this book for students who want to learn basics of IC fabrication and also professional engineers who needs a good and well updated reference.

I've read a number of books in this field - Plummer, Wolf, Campbell, Sze, Madou. Each book has its strength, and Plummer's book stands out in terms of its broad, in-depth coverage of modern silicon CMOS technology. It doesn't cover MEMS or other exotic nanofabrication.

Many students who've read the book said that Chap 2, where a modern CMOS process flow is described step by step from the substrate to back-end, was the best part. By doing so, the authors teach us that not only unit processes but their collection, i.e. process integration, is the key in successful CMOS technology.

Overall, the quality of the content and attention to small details are superb, as one can expect from a book written by one of world's foremost researchers in the field (Plummer is the Dean of Engineering School at Stanford). In particular, I liked chap2 for integrated description of CMOS flow, the lithography chapter which covers optical systems, details of photoresists, phase shift masking. Also, diffusion and ion implantation parts are second to none, since the authors made numerous contributions to the research field. It's such pleasure to learn about the latest in silicon IC processing from the Silicon Valley authority at Stanford!

The book has been adopted by many US engineering schools already, and I see it on many bookshelves belonging to IC engineers. If you need an authoritive, well-organized reference for modern silicon IC processing, I strongly recommend this book.

The best part of this book is that it covers modern fabrication technology. I expecially liked the approach of introducing the complete CMOS fabrication flow in the beginning. It puts a context to following chapters. It is what I call system level approach for slicon fabrication. There is also emphasis on measurement and simulutions that are missing from traditional books. Both these are essential to modern technology. Also, I was very happy to see details on manufacturing choices - e.g. LOCOS vs STI. Explanations are clear.
This is a text book, therefore at times may seem too dense, but definitely worth it if you are a process engineer.

if your an electrical / process engineer, this is one of the must have books.

This is a terrific book on what it takes to make web applications really work (both for users and for the businesses that create them). Managers of web design projects should read this book for its eminently practical advice on documentation, workflow, and pitfalls to avoid. Highly recommended.

If you're new to building web applications and want a balanced perspective on the engineering challenges involved -- from understanding user needs to data modelling to scaling gracefully -- this book is a great place to start. It's mostly language-agnostic, so it'll be a good starting point for a few years but won't update you on the latest technology. Nevertheless, I know very few web developers who wouldn't learn something important from a careful reading of this book.

Where this book really shines is as a bridge from the world of college Computer Science to the world of actually building applications people use. This transition encompasses understanding your users, making flexibile designs, considering security, aesthetics, and a host of other issues one does not actually learn in a normal college CS curriculum. Thanks to its project focus, this book (and the course curriculum it implies) seeds an awareness of these many issues that can later be developed through experience. Other "software engineering" books over-emphasize theories, but this one will actually press you to get stuff built.

It's not easy to build a really good online community website. There are a lot of things to think about, and many of them have little or nothing to do with technical programming skills.

Buy this book, read it, step through it, and learn from some of the best teachers on the subject. And then when you've learned what they have to say here, take your new-found skills and build your own online community site. Using the methods in this book, your web sites can be more useful, successful, and profitable.

To Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, I learn of this new chapter in Mr. Greenspun's (et al) effort to encourage the Web to be all it can be. This volume is plainly a text book, designed as a practicum, and with its completion my understanding of how to achieve what's possible now and conjure the future of the Web will be greatly furthered. I'm finding it inspirational in the process of designing; expand your dream's horizons!

This book is helpful for programmers as well as people who work more generally with technology. I'm using very specific, technical information from the "Adding Mobile Users to Your Community" chapter for a web application I'm building, while using concepts from the chapter on discussion forums for a research project on how discussion tools are used at my university. If you build web applications, or work with people who do, I highly recommend this book.

If you find yourself working in an RF-related field but don't have much of an "elmer" to "show you the ropes," get this book! It takes the theory you learned in school about distortion, modulation, impedance mismatches, etc. and ties them all together with practical examples of why you care (e.g., from IP2 or IP3 it's trivial to estimate harmonic power levels) -- and oftentimes some historical explanations of why common standards/techniques are the way they are when, given contemporary technology, it's no longer obvious.

I like the level of math used in this book... if you haven't gone through the "hard core" RF classes in school, they're enough to motivate the results without getting bogged down in lengthy derivations, whereas if you go through all the math in school, you'll find many "old friends" that have been somewhat simplified to keep the analysis only complicated enough to obtain useful results. (E.g., there's little point 99.9% of the time worrying about distortions models above say, 3rd order.)

I had this book on my shelf for several years before I had a chance to sit down, crack it open, and prepare myself for a dry (albeit useful, based on prior recommendations) tome. I was pleasantly surprised to find just how readable the book is -- Witte is a gifted author, being able to clearly explain sometimes-complicated topics.

This book is a must-read for the engineer who needs to better understand the theory and basics of spectrum and network analysis. The nice thing is that the author starts off with detailed theory of the measurements; but with just enough math to properly ground the reader with the measurement basics. The concepts are easy to grasp and the examples are plentiful. Detailed usage of spectrum analyzers and network analyzers follow with many examples of how to make specific measurements. This is the ideal book for the beginner or advanced engineer who needs to measure in the frequency domain. Highly recommended.

This book was a joy to read. When I recommended it to co-workers who have been working with lab equipment for years, they still found it very useful and immediately bought it. It is amazing how the author can simplify the concepts and with minimum math explain the essence of various lab measurements. Every EE should understand every page of material covered in this book! In some sections the book might have benefited from more rigor and sometimes it's a little sloppy, but for a short introduction to the subject it's hard to beat this book.

This is a repeat of an old review under the name "A reader"

This book was a joy to read. When I recommended it to co-workers who have been working with lab equipment for years, they still found it very useful and immediately bought it. It is amazing how the author can simplify the concepts and with minimum math explain the essence of various lab measurements. Every EE should understand every page of material covered in this book! In some sections the book might have benefited from more rigor and sometimes it's a little sloppy, but for a short introduction to the subject it's hard to beat this book.

This book does a fine job of explaining the theory behind spectral analysis and relating it to real measurements. The book connects mainstream electrical engineering concepts such as Fourier analysis, distortion and modulation to practical results. There is enough math, but not too much. It is good to see this classic book back in print.

If you are as clueless about SPSS as I am, you must buy this book. It has clear, concise instructions in language a layman can understand. If you want a more advanced manual because you already know the basics, you may want to look elsewhere (Tabachnik & Fidel's book would be the next step up from this one). This would be a great textbook for a Statistics course at either the undergrad or graduate levels. It also explains each type of statistic clearly with great examples. It covers t tests, ANOVAs, regression, and much more. It was great for me to be able to review the statistic I was going to use to ensure that I understood it.

If you want to go from a stupid to savvy about statistics, this is the book for you. No jargon, no obtuse references, just simple explanations and directions. I secretly credit this book with getting me through my Ph.D. Also,Darren George's willingness to answer questions and offer help via e-mail was invaluable. This book makes things so clear, that I am now able to explain statistics to others -- something that once would have seemed as likely as inventing a calorie-free shake. A must for any researcher in the social sciences.

I am a grad student working on my dissertation. I searched everywhere for an excellent and simple SPSS book. I was lost until I found yours. I have some of the others listed in the category; they are missing the step by step examples. I knew what I wanted to do, but did not know how to put into SPSS. They examples are CLEAR. There is even information about the statistics, so if you are unsure about assumptions for the type of test, you can check. Simple instructions and EXAMPLES FOR THE SCREEN. I love it.Thanks for putting together an excellent reference tool.

The book is extremely well written and is essential reading for anyone who wants to learn SPSS. It has great coverage of all major SPSS procedures except survival analysis. I highly recommend it!

Paul Mallery (my co-author) and I have gone to excruciating efforts, particularly on the first 16 chapters of this book, to create a tool that makes SPSS absolutely clear to the beginner. In the final 12 chapters our book explores more complex statistical procedures (log-linear models, factor analysis, discriminant analysis, multi-dimensional scaling, and others) in the identical format as the earlier chapters.

The comments by the individuals from Iowa and Minnesota reflect the many e-mails we have received on this book from, literally, all over the world. While we routinely recommend that anyone who uses the book first take a course in statistics, for anyone with reasonable math aptitude, the first 16 chapters should be understandable without ANY statistical background. If you are looking for a book that is comprehensive yet ultimately understandable for fundamental statistical procedures (data entry, data manipulation, frequencies, descriptives, chi-squares, t-tests, correlations, ANOVAs, simple linear and multiple regression analysis, graphs) but includes excellent coverage on the more advanced procedures we suggest that this book was made for you.

We, the authors, welcome your comments. These are considered carefully as we create new editions of the book.

I have been an information assurance professional for over 40-years. This is the only book that ties it all together and provides so many additonal bonuses that you cannot go wrong for the price.

What I found best about the book:
1. Great price for all the pertinent and up-to-date information, including references and URL's,
2. Complete, concise, focused; no wandering down memory lane,
3. A great study reference guide in preparation for the CISSP examination (I used it, I took the exam, I am now certified as an Information System Security Professional),
4. The book will be a solid reference for years to come,
5. The author knows her subject and presents it in such a logical manner that it is impossible not to grasp the concepts presented.
6. Can use the author's web site for this book so that you maintain your currency (who else offers this?),
7. If your on the security profession career path this book is mandatory, and
8. Where in the hell (heck) was this book 10-15 years ago.

I am the network manager at a mid-size Chicago company and have been tasked with the job of developing a formal security infrastructure for our organization. I have read many of Mandy's InfoWorld articles and eagerly awaited the release of this book. Needless to say, I was not disappointed. Surviving Security is a great resource for understanding the components of a security infrastructure, how they fit together, and how to analyze and select the best approach for your environment. She covers all the basics (security policies, firewalls, IDS, remote access, OS hardening, network architecture, etc.)

In addition, there's a great chapter on authentication techniques. She also discusses the issues most people forget or do not really think about until it is too late: keeping up-to-date with patches, monitoring systems and logs, creating incident response teams, developing secure applications, etc. Most sections have "For More Information" boxes that give resources (books, websites, etc.) where you can go for more detailed information. I thought these were a great feature. She provides insightful information and commentary based on her experiences and then refers you to places where you can find more information. This book does not try to be all things for all people.

The companion website is a great way to keep the content up-to-date. As long as the author keeps the information and links current, this will be a good resource for security information. The product reviews give an independent, third-party opinion that is sometimes hard to find.

For those looking to develop a complete security infrastructure, this is the book to read. Surviving Security gives you an excellent "big picture" look at security that I have found lacking in other security books I have looked at.

Surviving Security is a really good book for someone needing a thorough introduction to information security.

The book covers all of the most important security technologies and processes. After completing the book, the reader will come out with a good understanding the components of an information systems security infrastructure.

All of the chapters contain loads of valuable information. Two extremely valuable sections are (Page 358) �Sample Audit Checklist� and (Page 399) �Assessing Your Needs�.

The Sample Audit Checklist contains over 30 pages of technology items that require security. Assessing Your Needs details all of the items required for an effective incident response team....

For those people needing an effective and easily readable reference about computer security, Surviving Security is an excellent resource.

Thousands of years ago, a geometry teacher informed his royal subject and student that there was no royal road or shortcut to the understanding of geometry. That statement also holds true for computer system security. Like the steps in a geometric proof, any shortcut taken in security has the potential for invalidating the entire structure. Furthermore, developing a sound security policy requires that many of our deeply held social and legal attitudes be set aside.
In the American legal structure, any person is entitled to the presumption of innocence until their guilt is proven. However, to create and maintain an adequate computer security policy, everyone must be assumed untrustworthy until it has been proven otherwise. This creates an enormous potential for hard feelings, leading some to bypass the controls as a form of protest. Sound security policies also erects barriers that often reduce the efficiency of everyone accessing the system, creating an ongoing dent in the company bottom line. With all of this social, technical and economic baggage, it would appear that constructing an effective security system would be impossible. While constructing an impenetrable system is impossible, one can always reach a best possible level, and you see how to do it in this book.
All of the problems in computer security, from the initial meeting to regular audits are covered in this book. As the title implies, the emphasis is on the integration of the many parts that interact to build a secure system. Knowledge of human psychology is important, as the users must be treated with an iron fist wrapped inside a fuzzy velvet glove. The coverage is thorough in the broad sense, but shallow in the depth sense. This is not a criticism, just a statement of fact. Each section has links to resources that provide the depth of explanation that may be needed.
Security puts another level of complexity on top of the very difficult task of writing software that works. In the past, getting software to work took priority over getting it to work in a secure manner. Those days are gone and it is very difficult to conceive of any scenario where that will change. No one knows when it occurred, but several years ago, the cost of paying for security fell below the cost of repairing the damage caused by lax security practices. To get on the right side of this critical curve, read this book and follow the advice.

One of the few technology books that is actually under-priced based on the value you'll get from it. Content is very good and it's an easy read. You don't have to already be a security wiz to understand. There is also some unique treatment to process issues that I haven't seen elsewhere... Highly recommended.

This book should be in the library of anyone involved with DC-DC converters. The book covers the theory of converters and the SPICE applications are very helpful. I used the Top Spice demo to simulate the buck converter and was quickly running simulations.

This book is a must have for the power supply designer! I own about every book written on the subject, and this ranks with the top 5. I feel that it is especially valuable to the reader who has studied the subject reading other top books in the field.

Each simulation problem is well resolved with examples and a brief of theory is also included in each. Very good for Spice users but not to much useful for others simulation package users.

Once in a while a book comes along that covers a subject in such detail and yet is chocked with examples that are easy to prove and use by students and designers in the field as this one. It is evident that Mr. Basso went to great lengths to make sure that users of different spice software platforms were included by supplying a CD with models and demos for all the major platforms. I don't know of another offering that deals with closing the feedback loop in the detail as this book does. I think any serious graduate program should consider including this book as a text. Money and time well spent; it is my second reference for serious SMPS work.

Charles Denton
Custom Engineering

Christophe Basso worked very hard giving years of his life to produce the best Switch-Mode Power Supply book available, by far. I have a large collection of books on SMPS and although many are very good books, they are not nearly as complete or practical as Basso's book. He derives all his equations and then shows many real world example designs from start to finish. In my opinion and the opinion of many power electronics professionals and power electronics college students, the averaged switch model is the easiest to create and most intuitive to understand and use. Basso has digested the best information from the best references and then creatively enhanced many models and invented new SPICE models/sub-circuits you need for large and small signal analysis and simulations with the SPICE of your choice. His knowledge of creating analog behavioral models (ABM) that perform just like the real components or circuit functions, is amazing. He created ABM PWMs from individual ABM components. Everything he creates, he verifies. You buy this book at a bargain price and get a CD with all the models/sub-circuits you need to check your existing designs and start new designs with the highest confidence. Once you look at his ABMs, you will want to create some of your own because it is so much fun. In a short time, I've used his models/sub-circuits and his techniques with PSPICE to identify lack of or no phase margin in Switch-Mode Power Supplies for a huge corporation. I have many more power supplies to analyze/simulate and several new ones to design.

I've worked as a power electronics engineer for many years and I'm so thankful to Christophe Basso for working so hard and smart to produce the best Switch-Mode Power Supply book ever written. Very thorough and very practical. Get this book and apply Basso's knowledge, techniques, and SPICE models/sub-circuits to your designs and you will never have another unstable Switch-Mode or Linear Power Supply.

That's an exciting and useful book in all synthesis manner: almost no gate-level circuits inside, as in modern EDA tools it don't need to.

A lot of algorithms (eg. log, sin, sqr...) which is beyond fast adders or one-cycle multipliers that can be easily found in many DSP hardware books. In fact, we make and sells a DSP state-machine chips in almost a million pcs that certain arithmetic circuit blocks is inspired by the book.

This book is quite original in its presentation. The selection of implementations is of interest.
The theoretical foundations are sound and presented in a well organized way.
The applications cope with the actual technology: especially in what concerns programmable devices.
It is a good book for advanced students and a must have tool for the professional designer.

The presentation of arithmetic theory and applications is innovative. Some of the topics are inedited; they present new approaches for both algorithmic and implementation aspects. It is a very interesting reference book for what refer to computer arithmetic in general and special purpose arithmetic circuit in particular.

In the part dedicated to general algorithms, very interesting new presentations or generalizations, made this work attractive at the theoretical point of view. Extensions of booth algorithms and generalizations to base B operation make the work innovative at the mathematical point of view. At the implementation level there is very good and innovative ideas towards special applications in FPGA (mainly Xilinx oriented). It would have been desirable to cope with some other technology, but the book may be considered self containing anyway.

There's a lot to like here. It goes over all the low-level stuff you could hope for, including creative number system, carry-lookahead, Booth encodings, and SRT division. It addresses some of the needs of crypto people, with discussion of finite-field arithmetic. It even gives enough intro to residue number systems for the desperate developer to gain a toehold - 10,000 digit addition or subtraction can be done in a few-digit time, as long as the expense of getting into and out of RNS are amortized.

That's all good for someone who can't trust their synthesis tools for good carry chains, or for someone headed way into the weirdness. The ranges where I live get distressingly little attention. If you need a dot product of two vectors, this will do a great job on the multiply and add steps as long as you can work out all the pipelining implications for yourself, but those were never the problem - it's the parallelism (how many multiplies can you run? how deep is your adder tree? or do you have something better?). It's the memory bottleneck (what do you mean you read "a word" from memory? I want 100). It's the numbers that number-crunchers use, i.e. IEEE 754, which get a moment of mention at the beginning and at the end. Those start turning strange with NaNs, signed zeroes, and denorms, then go totally off the rails when things like Intel (not always IEEE) compliance arise from the deep.

This could be a good text for a mid-level practitioner or student, fluent with logic design but blissfully ignorant of numerical analysis. If that's your trajectory, you'll spend some amount of time where this book lives. Then you'll advance, and it will no longer serve you. That's not a criticism, since every level has its own needs, but the prospective buyer should weigh needs to be met against needs that this meets. Not all readers will find a match.

-- wiredweird

This book has a great knowledge of all things computer related, DOS, WIndows, Hardware, and more.

It is an awesome resource for all people who work with computers. It has great DOS, Windows and hardware information, and more. It is like a bible to me.

While this is a very good reference, it leaves a lot of room for disappointment. Perhaps its time to replace the resistor color code tables with summaries of the IEEE and ITU standards, certainly something more needed in the 2001 world of PCs. When was the last time anyone changed a resistor in a PC other than at the component manufacturer site? And it doesn't yet contain a power supply wire color code, which would be far more useful than resistor codes. There is info on Win98 but not on Win2K or ME (or even NT). The processor and socket list is hopelessly out of date. Fixed disk drive lists are way behind the times with only the most minimal information to help keep the confusing IDE/SCSI/EIDE PIO 1/2/3/4/5 ATA33/66/100/133 drive, BIOS, MB chipset and cable standards straight.
This is a good book for troubleshooting, repairing and maintaining the older PC, but it is not even treading water well in a world of P4 or Thunderbird processors, multi-gigabyte drives or 400Mhz RIMM memory. Still, I have to give it four stars (would be 4.5 if Amazon allowed) because there simply is nothing better out there except keeping file folders full of manufacturer specs, white papers and web page printouts.

I am a 14 year old and have usued this book to help me build everything from forts to computers, it's GREAT and I would recommend it to everyone!

When I first open this book I thought I was looking at an larger copy of the Pocket PCREF, after reading through it I found that while most of the information included is exactly like the Pocket version there is was more information included.

Large in size and over 875 pages, this reference book includes everything in the Pocket PCREF plus a very extensive glossary, printer control codes and a much larger pc phone directory. Overall a much better value that the Pocket PCREF book.

The material covered is broken down into categories and each category is covered well. The authors take a great deal of time in making sure the information presented is accurate and well documented. For the money this might be the one to have on your desk.

While this book won't fit in your back pocket, it will fit very nicely in a briefcase. An excellent value for the dollar. You might find similar books on the market, but you'll be hard pressed to find any one better. Well Done Sequoia Publishing.

THIS WAS A SWEET BOOK! . Must read. 2 thumbsup. THRILLING. I recomend you read the first two books and the last who knows how many after that!

I don't have much to say about this book accept that it is AWSOME and a MUST HAVE if you like this series or John Peel, the author. I haven't read the 5th book - MELTDOWN - yet but out of the first four i think this one is the best. I look forward to reading MELTDOWN and can't wait to read other books by John Peel.

this was a great book in john peels (fear the year 2099) series. I dont think this was the best bok in the series. But it still was a great book

I just finnished reading this book. I loved the first two so I decides to try this one out. I was amased that this author can write so many good books. This book is his most thrilling and cool yet. I got this book from my teacher at school in first period. I kept reading this book through homeroom 1st period 2ed period 3ed period till finaly my teacher told me to put it away. Lucky for me she did not take it away. At lunch all I could do was read this book. I complettly forgott to eat lunch. Tristan has the most exciting adventure in this book than in any of the other one I have read. He team up with Genia and they try to break out of the "Ice" do they make it?how do they make it? Read this wonderfull book to find out.

Tristan has been wrongly accused of setting loose the deadly Doomsday virus. Now he's in Ice -- the only prison in the world, in the cold and treacherous Antarctica. Surprisingly, a punk rebel girl named Genia, is in nearly the same situation as Tristan. She makes several shocking discoveries about herself in Ice, and storms into action trying to escape. The two may not be friends , but they realize if they're going to get out, they're goinig to have to be on the same side. Can the impossible be possible?