Computer Science Books

Excellent book for graduate student or anybody interested in TCM. The book covers all aspect of TCM. What makes this book different from other books is its briefness and being to the point. With a minimum knowledge of Coding you could get a lot from the book.

This is a very comprehensive book on code design for fading channels.

As an IT consultant, I found this book an indispensable guide for anyone who needs to quickly familiarize themselves with a new language/technology. While you might think that a single book covering 20 technologies is an overly ambitious scope, it is in fact the brevity of each topic that is this book's strength. The book assumes that the reader is well versed in some technologies and computers in general and then cuts right to the heart of each specific skill-set. Rather than 20 books of 300-500 pages each, this book summarizes the basic framework and essential knowledge required to quickly become productive in some of the most widely used techonolgies. I've often found myself wishing I could just get a "Cliffs Notes" version of many of the 5 pound books I end up needing to read quickly for work - this is finally it.

This book is a wonderful companion and reference guide for many of the programming languages a technology professional might encounter.

Each programming language is broken into a chapter and begins with a short synopsis of the language, a few facts (which serve as excellent reminders of a languages essential characteristic), and a short program with an explanation of what each line means.

Reading this book won't make you a subject matter expert in any one of the programming languages it covers. However, the book is an excellent reference tool that will help you understand the basics of many programming languages and help you remember the syntax and structure of a language you haven't used recently or are only vaguely familiar with.

The Swiss army knife approach taken by the author's to cover as many languages as possible is done quite well, making this book a bible for any technology consultant.

This book is the ONLY one I use for tutoring.

In the 1990's, my daughter took College Algebra from Texas Tech University Distance Learning using this book. With only limited tutoring from me, she completed the course quickly and made an "A". Then, in the eleventh grade, she proceeded to tutor five classmates through the same course; they all made A's and B's. Nowadays, she has a Master's in Mathematics from LSU and has taught Mathematics at the community college level. It's on her reference bookshelf.

College Algebra is designed for self-learning. My older daughter, who was stumped on a problem in her regular College Algebra course, picked up this book, went to the correct section, worked through the problems and then completed her assignments with no difficulty at all. Then her little sister took the Texas Tech course using the same book with the same results. What a value!

The first few chapters pick up what we call "Introductory Algebra" and the move you right into the more advanced work with very clear explanations, more than adequate examples and progressive practice problems.

By the way, after 34 years to complete my degree in Fine Arts, I'll be teaching 8th grade Math this fall. Since my daughter took this book with her when she moved out, I'm getting my own copy. I'm sure it'll influence another generation or two.

I am a Math teacher in Malaysia. I own Bittinger's "Elementary
and Intermediate Algebra" and also "Trigonometry". Judging from
the books I am using as teaching materials, I can say that the
Bittinger's team has written some of the best Algebra/Trig/
Precalculus textbooks. The explanations are straightforward,
clear and the format neat. Their exercise sets are excellent,
enough for drill-practice purposes and also challenging ones.

In my country American math books are way too expensive because
its the bad economic condition we are having in my country that
buying of American books is a luxury. I am not able to acquire
Bittinger's "College Algebra" yet, hopefully I will be able to
see a copy in the future. In their series, the Bittinger team
has produced their Intermediate Algebra text worth using and I
believe this "College Algebra" title would guarantee that the
team has produced a text that will not disappoint us.

I would strive to get a copy myself one day and I am very sure
I will not regret owning it anyway.

Petchers has written a well researched, definitive guide to CHP.

To those considering the CHP Handbook ----

I had the opportunity to hear the author, Neil Petchers, discuss the book at New York Institute of Technology at an AEE Meeting. To say that Neil has mastery of the subject matter is an understatement. The "Handbook" is a high powered, well written work that covers many aspects of energy management and distributed generation, including:
Generator types
Cycle types
Fuel costs
Economic considerations, including utility rates
Switchgear and types of operation (islanded, grid interconnected)

As a practicing engineer involved with the electrical aspects of utility interconnection, the information on other subject areas was welcome to broaden my understanding of the complete CHP issue.

Well done Neil !

This book receives my highest rating as a world-class work on the subject.

Respectfully submitted,
Wayne Hartmann

Good reading for those who are interested in the field of quality. And would like to learn more.

This book cuts through the fog and confusion surrounding the three of the four main approaches to software quality (the fourth is Software Process Capability Determination, a.k.a. SPICE).

My goals in reading this book were to find the best framework with which to apply to service delivery, and to integrate this framework into application delivery. Since these terms are ambiguous in the software industry here are my definitions: service delivery encompasses the maintenance, operation and support of applications after they have been released into production. Application delivery is the analysis, design, construction and testing of applications prior to release to production.

This book compared and contrasted each quality approach and provided some surprising facts. For example, until I carefully read this book I was under the impression that the SEI CMM was the most process-oriented approach. As it turns out ISO 9000 (specifically, ISO 9000-3, which addresses software and services) is more heavily oriented towards process. Another surprise was discovering that the SEI CMM places more emphasis on leadership than the Malcolm Baldridge approach. Each of these facts were easy to discover because the author did an excellent job of correlating criteria of each of the approaches and displaying results in graphs and charts.

Prior to reading the book I was confused and frustrated by the competing standards and frameworks. This was exacerbated by the fact that there is a large body of knowledge devoted to each and these bodies comprise thousands of pages of dry material. After reading this book I felt as though I had a grasp of the focus of each approach, and their relative strengths and weaknesses. More importantly, I was able to determine which of the three is best suited to service delivery and its integration with application delivery (the Baldridge approach appears to be the best choice).

I appreciated the author's efforts in clearly outlining the what's and why's behind each approach, and the succinct manner in which each was compared, contrasted and correlated. This is an extremely valuable book for individuals and companies trying to sort through the buzzwords and assumptions on quality frameworks to select one that is most appropriate for their goals and objectives. I strongly recommend this book for software engineering managers, including members of program management offices (PMOs) and software engineering process groups (SEPGs), as well as service delivery professionals (production services, tier 1 and 2 support, etc.).

The contributions to this work are all excellent, well written articles by the most respected experts on the leading edge of antitrust analysis.

With all the various information available concerning the Microsoft monopoly, it was wonderful to find an objective source that followed the events before and during the Microsoft case, analyzed the monopolistic tendencies of the software market in general, and compared this information with previous monopolies. The best characteristic of this book is that it explains the events and legalities of the case in such a way that it is not at all difficult to understand.

It is a good book to read and understand. I would strongly recommend that a prospective reader read Muchnick's book before this if he/she is new to optimising compilers. Readers with some basic understanding of the structure of optimising compilers can read this book and get a good deal out of it. These books would complement each other well. I have read only a few chapters and I felt that it is also fairly deep in content (atleast to me as a novice compiler writer).

Excellent. This book, despite the usual red flags--multiple authors, huge breadth of coverage--is precisely organized, and the prose itself is consistently economical and clear. In fact, the only obstacle to absorbing the material is inherent to the field itself: compilers for modern silicon tend to be tremendously sophisticated systems.

In my case especially (I only write compilers once in a while), it is immensely valuable to have a publication that attempts to cover recent developments, such as handling deeply pipelined architectures, while still covering the fundamentals, such as register selection techniques.

Working programmers are the book's primary audience. As an illustration of that, this is the only compiler book that I've seen that actually mentions which techniques are still covered by software patents (Chaitin's original application of graph coloring to register selection is one such case, unfortunately for the state of the art).

This is an outstanding summary of research (as of 2001 or so) in leading techniques for compiler optimization in performance computing. There's not much here for the typical software developer, even those who write applications compiled for massively parallel systems. Most compiler writers won't find much of immediate use either - if you haven't mastered Optimizing Compilers for Modern Architectures and Parallel Programming With MPI, you're in for a rough ride. These techniques all apply to parallel systems, with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of processors acting together. And laugh if you want: many of these researchers address the needs of Fortran programmers. Anyone who laughs at Fortran just doesn't understand the performance computing market or the recent advances in that venerable language.

If you're deep into compiler development on that class of machine (or something similar enough) this collection presents 21 chapters, a bit under 800 pages, of cutting edge analysis and algorithms. Topics cover every level, from the micro-level checking of dependencies between one array element and another in a looped computation, up to macro-level OS level constructs for distributing and synchronizing coarse-grained tasks.

Even specialists will find only a few chapters that address their immediate needs. Specialists at this level, however, are used to that. Commercial gold mines today yield one gram of gold per tonne of useless tailings. The ratio is better in this case, but even readers with the greatest interest will skip parts of this goldmine of information. Still, if this is your area of interest, you may well find something of value. Highly recommended to the right reader.

-- wiredweird

Scalable parallel systems or, more generally, distributed memory systems offer a challenging model of computing and pose fascinating problems regarding compiler optimization, ranging from language design to run time systems. Research in this area is foundational to many challenges from memory hierarchy optimizations to communication optimization.
This unique, handbook-like monograph assesses the state of the art in the area in a systematic and comprehensive way. The 21 coherent chapters by leading researchers provide complete and competent coverage of all relevant aspects of compiler optimization for scalable parallel systems. The book is divided into five parts on languages, analysis, communication optimizations, code generation, and run time systems. This book will serve as a landmark source for education, information, and reference to students, practitioners, professionals, and researchers interested in updating their knowledge about or active in parallel computing.

I'm very impressed with "Complete Digital Design" (2003) in that it covers all aspects of modern digital design (with the exception of CMOS IC electronics). The coverage isn't superficial either- the author is very concise but still insightful in his overview of digital logic and computer architecture.

Unlike nearly every other digital design book, the author also covers basic analog electronics, signal integrity and system design in general. This book should be considered the new bible of digital design since it's much more up to date and useful than the far better known "Art of Electronics" (1989).

The only drawback to this book is the very small font-size of the text! If you're curious how a book that's only 460 pages can cover so much material, well there's your answer unfortunately :(

Ah, I wish I'd found this book two years ago. Back then, when I just started working as an EE, the benefit I could gain from the book would be huge. Today, knowing at least 90% of what is has to say, I'm still very much impressed.

Mark Balch takes a unifying approach I haven't seen in other books. Deciding to focus on the complete spectrum of digital/electronic design is a great decision, since most of the books out there either pay attention only to logic and assembly or only to leakage currents in diodes and bode plots of filters. Often, an EE has to work closely with both worlds, which is what the author of this book understood and filled 460 pages with valuable information.

On one hand this book teaches digital logic (with nice practical aspects, for example the 7400 family), computer architecture, memory, communications (with a great section explaining all the nuts-and-bolts of the omnipresent RS232/422/485 family of
standards), networking, state machines, FPGAs and CPLDs.

On the other hand, it doesn't neglect the low level stuff. A good overview of basic electronics is given, including information on diodes, transistors, op-amps and ADC/DACs. It doesn't stop there and discusses the practical aspects of design I haven't seen described in other (non-textbook) books - clock distribution, power regulation/distribution, signal integrity and various debugging techniques.

What I liked especially is that the author doesn't get into the topics too deep - there's textbooks and data-sheets for that. He gives theory when needed, focuses on the practicals and refers to other sources of information. In particular, the section that explains how to read data-sheets and what to pay attention to while reading is a gold-mine for young engineers.

I think this book can be very useful for fresh engineers - to get quickly informed of the wide spectrum of design practices or even for students of EE - to see the bigger picture. To seasoned professionals it won't provide much new knowledge.

I have never read such a nice book detailing so much of multi-vendor interoperability issues. It helps you with the protocol knowledge itself and practical knowledge with router configurations. My colleague in PS, Hannes really knows what this is all about.
This book, while pours much theorectical knowledge though, doesn't put me to sleep.
Actually anyone who are interested into large-scale SP network design should read that, at least 3 times. It helps you grow in the telecom field.

Walt is one of the most prolific networking authors in the industry, and Hannes is one of the few true IS-IS experts in the world. Friends and colleagues both, I am delighted that Hannes and Walt have pooled their extensive experience to produce what is destined to be a classic volume for IP engineers. Going far beyond the basics of the protocol, Hannes details the many design touches--both subtle and not so subtle--that go into creating a real-world IS-IS implementation. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand IS-IS at a deep level, from network architects wanting to understand how to design a large-scale IS-IS network to software engineers wanting to write carrier-class IS-IS code to CCIE and JNCIE candidates who need to understand the protocol but have had little opportunity to work with it in a production environment. And despite the technical deep-dive, the book is written in a friendly, readable style with frequent flashes of humor. I cannot over-emphasize the importance of this book to anyone wanting to truly understand IS-IS.