Computer Science Books

abbo waxaan joogaa pakistan waxaa

abbo waxaan joogaa pakistan waxaa

I ordered this book, not knowing what to expect...whether it would be aimed at a general audience or (like his Physics Lectures) something even professionals have to work hard to master. As I started reading it my first reaction was, groan, I've been programming for over fifteen years and this is definitely for total beginners. He gives a brief introduction, a "file clerk model" and then introduces "instruction sets". With his first exercise you begin to realize this is not going to be bedside reading. If you try to think the problems through it is definitely uphill, but once you get to the peaks the sight is exhilarating... This book is demanding but ranks among the best to have come out in a long time (but then I happen to like the three major aspects of the book, math, physics and computer science so maybe I am just a bit biased).

I know I'm not supposed to discuss other reviews, but I would like to point out that the previous review is for a different book! It is for the Feynman Lectures on Computation! And that is an excellent book which is very useful (although probably insufficient) for anyone taking (or teaching) a class on the theory of computation.

This book is quite different. It's a collection of intriguing articles, as well as some reminiscences about Richard Feynman. Feynman had a tendency to tell fascinating stories. It was part and parcel of his style. And it's generally fun to see more of his stories and more stories about him.

The book is divided into five parts. The first is related to the Feynman course on computation. It includes a nice article on neural networks by John Hopfield (I wish some of this material had been put into the "lectures on computation" book!). And an interesting article showing that the motion of Pluto is chaotic. The next section is on reducing the size of computers, which includes scaling of MOS technology and theoretical limits on size reduction. After that comes the "quantum" section. That has an article by Feynman on simulating physics with computers, followed by rather instructive articles on quantum robots, quantum information theory, and quantum computation.

The fourth section is on parallel computation. And the final section is on "fundamentals." This includes an article by John A. Wheeler (Feynman's thesis advisor at Princeton) who asks what quantum physics and information theory can tell us about the question, "How come existence?"

I enjoyed this book very much.

Apenas he empezado a leer los primeros capítulos de este libro, y he encontrado que su contenido es de altísima calidad y bastante claro de entender.

Se lo recomiendo a quien quiera tener un conocimiento más profundo en lo que son y cómo funcionan los distintos buses de campo más importantes.

For years I've listened to talk about the wonders of fieldbus. Claims for this technology ranged from "less wire and maintenance" to "world peace and prosperity"! It's now such a relief to have an unbiased book that explains in simple terms some of the most common fieldbus technologies. Hopefully, this information, combined with the growing availability of fieldbus products, will make it possible for me to improve the control system in my plant.

If you think you have to study finite fields and related discrete mathematics for some reasons, then you will love the style and organization of this (almost classic) book simply because the author always carefully selects an example and takes step-by-step refinements with detailed explanations unlike most other textbooks containing theorems and theorems and theorems. If you think you are an engineer working on discrete mathematics and coding for digital communication systems, this book will provide a down-to-earth introduction and some pretty advanced results on finite fields and their applications to designing codes as if you listen to the author's lecture in a classroom face-to-face.

It starts with some preliminaries on Euclidean domains and algorithm to construct finite fields, and then develops some abstract properties of finite fields, discusses factoring polynomials and trace functions. All these materials are very well-organized with lots of self-exercises to support the theory of linear recurrences over finite fields, and finally, m-sequences and problems of designing sets of binary sequences with good correlation properties for CDMA applications, which is one of the fundamental theory supporting the current widespread digital cellular telephone systems technology.

To communication engineers this book provides some practice on advanced materials in discrete mathematics and coding, and to applied mathematician it provides a good connection between his/her background and where-to-start a technical research in the area of codes and sequences for digital communications.

I read this book as a learning tool to help my study of coding theory, and I find this book to be very well written and very helpful.

McEliece excuses himself for covering only what he considers the 'dry' part of finite fields, but the exercises in this book do a great job in giving examples of the more engineering applications of the theory presented in this book.

An interesting side note is that several of the graduate students listed in the preface are now well-known professors in digital communications, including Jim Lehnert at Purdue and Wayne Stark at Michigan.

Since this text is fairly old, this book is highly recommended as an introduction to coding theory based on classical constructions. To my knowledge there are no good textbooks published that covers graphical codes to this date (year 2000). If you are interested in graphical codes (such as LDPC or Turbo Codes), see McEliece's excellent "The Generalized Distributive Law" paper on the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, March 2000.

A first book of C, is a very good book for beginners because it breaks a program down. For instance, the book take each line and tells you exactly what the program is trying to do and how it will use that line in the program. I need this book so will you please help me!?

Being a self-taught programmer, I've had opportunity to peruse many C/C++ tutorial books. In my estimation, this one tops them all in terms of clarity and readability. It was the first publication which really made the concepts "click" for me. An excellent work! I highly recommend it!

This book is very technical, which is exactly what I was looking for. It is filled with architectual diagrams, opcodes, and even code fragments from the earliest computers. Some of these machines even predate World War 2.

The book opens with discussions on the taxonomy of these primordial computers. This section is the weakest part of the book. External references are mentioned, when they should have been described in detail. Another typical problem is on page 8, where a family tree is printed in a micro-fiche font.

The remainder of the book is divided into sections for the US, UK, Germany, and Japan. This is the bulk of the text, and the reason why you would want to buy it. I must stress again, that the articles are extremely technical. They will be hard to follow without a background in digital design, some knowledge of system architecture, and maybe some assembly. But for those who can appreciate it, it is absolutely fascinating.

This is my favorite book that none of my friends would appreciate!

This is a series of papers stitched into a book, and without exception they are all well written, provide lots of technical detail, and are a joy to read. I highly recommend this book if you have any interest in the history of computing machinery and electronics. The only thing lacking is a story line or a plot - many books will detail the genius of a specific person or technical team (e.g. Seymour Cray, or the Macintosh developers), then take you through each phase of the development and success (or failure) of one or more products. This book, by contrast, is focused on the technical nitty-gritty, and the personalities and financial success/failure of the business is generally ignored.

Prompt delivery, book was in great shape. I'd buy my next textbook this way!

The greatest quality of this book is that all the author expects the reader to have is a basic mathematics background (a Discrete Structures background of basic Set Theory). It contains consise explanations and straightforward proofs to all the essential theorems of the subject,but, fortunately, is NOT too elementary that it loses its true mathematical appeal. To top it all, it is chock-full of excellent applied problems in communications, image transmission, and even a party trick here or there (oh yes, friends WILL be impressed when you can error-correct an ISBN!).
In short, I think this book serves as a wonderful textbook into introductory Coding theory. And as for the subject of Coding Theory in general, maybe to spark a bit more interest in some potential customers, a thorough study of the theory will bring together all types of Mathematics (from algebra, calculus, number theory, set theory, finite geometry, and linear algebra).
All will be revealed!

A great overview of the intersections of games, linear stories, and interactive artworks. This book almost inevitably leaves you with a richer perspective, because the range of articles (the uses of voice synthesizers to the Sims) makes it unlikely that you are familiar with all the terrain. The commentary discussions parallel to the main text give a feeling like chatting with your smart friends about some brilliant lecture you just saw. Thought provoking and fun.

What has particularly excited me is the opening chapter on "Cyberdrama"... it discusses approaches to story, game play and engagement in terms that echo what we are trying to achieve in Drama education. Throughout the book (and this is from preliminary browsing) there are discussions about narrative and simulation and disticntions being drawn bewteen perceptual positions of players ... the writers that have contributed to this book have a very clear sense of the notion of "role" and I am starting to think that this book may well serve as the basis for investigation into the role of technology in Drama ( and possibly other) education for the next few years. Other promising looking chapters include such discussions as "Moving Through Me as I move: A Paradigm for Interaction", "Unusual Positions: Embodied Interactions in Symbolic Spaces", "Narrative, Interactivity, Play and Games: Four Naughty Concepts in Need of Discipline", " Videogames of the Oppressed: Critical Thinking, Education, Tolerance and other Trivial Issues", "A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama and Games"

The authors contributing to this book are well known to anyone who's started looking into Drama and technology - Janet Murray , Espen Aarseth and Brenda Laurel are all there, alongside more familiar "drama' voices such as Richard Schechner...

As a high school drama teacher, I have a keen interest in new media applications in Drama education - it seems that many of our number are still focussed totally on their Drama classrooms and while they have an interest in technology are not actually making much headway with developing knowledge in the area - this retards developing discussions when there isn't a common language and some basic concepts upon which to build our discussions and investigations...

I think this book "First Person" is probably as good a starting point as is available at the moment. It provides a broad overview of the scope of "new media" interactions and there is definitely what I would call a "drama sensibility" contained within it.

The other book I've just started looking into is Marie-Laure Ryan's "Narrative as Virtual Reality"

Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media

What looks promising here is Chapter Nine: "Participatory Interactivity from Life Situations to Drama". I've yet to properly digest the chapter - I've been intrigued by some of the statements I've encountered, for instance "For interactivity to be reconciled with immersion, it must be stripped of any self-reflexive dimension"... I'm not sure that is exactly what we are trying to do with Drama (or any form of) education - we are generally trying to become aware of the symbolic forms we are engaging with... although in a Stanislavskian sense, it might just be that this ne dimension of building belief is somehow well placed in Drama... I tend to think the Brechtian requirement for distance might be better suited... but that can be a discussion for another day... for the time being we need to start to come to grips with some key concepts in the new paradigm we have the opportunity to define...

Once again... as Drama people we know the need for social constructivist approaches... I'm hoping we can live that rather than just posit it....

We are trying to establish a special interest group called DramaPlayShop.org... you're welcome to drop in!

Prevailing e-commerce and e-business applications are form-based, i.e., the user interaction with the systems is via a set of forms. This book presents a formal yet practical integrated solution to the design, analysis and specification of such applications. The formalism presented in the book draws on intuitive understanding of form-based systems in which the form allows interaction via message passing. The formalism allows abstraction from unnecessary details and focusing on the design and analysis of the business logic and its effect on the form.

On the practical side, the book presents a host of diagrams such as formcharts, page diagrams and screen diagrams to deal with different aspects of form-oriented design. Considering the limitations of diagrams, the authors also present a domain specific language called Dialogue Constraint Language that extends the Object Constraint Language (OCL) to accommodate the specification of dialogues in form-based applications. Relying on such a wealth of modeling artifacts, the book proposes a set of methods for the modeling of the data and communications between the different components of a form-based system.

This is a must have book for the professional analyst, modeler and programmer involved in the design, specification or development of form-based projects. The book provides the methods and the artifacts to better model form-oriented systems.

Kyriakos Anastasakis and Behzad Bordbar

This is a book that has been needed for a long time. There have been studies in the past, indeed a body of knowledge even, on the design of paper based forms. The problem with computer based forms such as those for ordering a book from Amazon is that the forms tend to be generated by programmers, not forms specialists. In fact in this book the examples being used are from a hypothetical on line book store.

At one point the authors are giving an example of a book page of an online bookshop. On it they give an abstract of their own (that is this) book. It reads: "What is the business logic of n enterprise system? How do I specify it in such a way that I know how to transform it into a running system, by skill and by automated tool support? This book gives a self-contained introduction to the modeling and development of business logic for enterprise systems."

In practice, the authors develop a couple of new technologies for the modelling of such forms. Page Diagrams are analagous to flow charts that show what a page does in terms of its interactions. From the home or Welcome page you can go register, go login, look at suggested books, do a search, etc. What links to what? What logic applies (bad password for instance, or is this user logged in). The page diagram is a way for the non-technical manager and the programmer to define exactly what a page or screen is supposed to do. It can become part of the specification that the programmer uses to produce what management wants.

The next concept the authors develop is the Form Storyboard. The storyboard shows pages with respect to the actions they cause in the server.

Other models such as information pages, and data interchange complete the description of the forms related system. For the most part, HTML based web sites are used as examples in this book. But the same kind of modelling is equally applicable to form/database related system such as accounting, payroll or other business applications.

Using the approach developed by these authors is the best way I've seen to document/specify/design a forms based interactive system.

Not for programmers. With a highly theoretical content. Knowledge on Formal notation is required (logic, inference, et al). It could be useful for comercial compiler implementation or comercial JVM implemetation. It covers: Java Formal Grammar, Type Soundness and Type Safety proofs,and so on. Have a lot of bibliography.

Not for programmers. With a highly theoretical content. Knowledge on Formal notation is required (logic, inference, et al). It could be useful for comercial compiler implementation or comercial JVM implemetation. It covers: Java Formal Grammar, Type Soundness and Type Safety proofs,and so on. Have a lot of bibliography.