Simulation Books

I ordered this product from Amazon along with the "bonus" part 2 book, for which I paid an additional $20, but despite emails and telephone calls have never seen the "bonus" part 2

I got the book very quick, at the best price available. I am very happy with my purchase.

Found this among the hundred of books on database modeling in the stacks of a large university library, this one caught my eye for being a recently pubblished book. For comparison with the other books, looked for a couple of specific problems I recently experienced while designing databases. While not the best book in terms of illustrations, probably due to space considerations, this book does give an overall coverage to many different topics. It kind of provides a blue print and smashboard collection of ideas, but it is the up to the reader to actually individually research and try out the concepts and fine tune into developing a specific implementation. So I give credit to this attempt in laying out ideas, but less credit for actually providing real-life implementations. Can't do everything, I guess.

I'm a data architect at a small tech company, now working mostly with data warehouses, and was looking to refresh my data modeling skills. After reading Amazon reviews about different modeling books I chose this one and have not been disappointed. Rather than reading it from front to back, I read the first couple hundred pages and am now skipping around and reading sections that interest me.

The book is logically put together, and has a very detailed contents index, which makes finding relevant information easy. The sections I have read not only explain the theory but also give good examples putting the theory into practice. However, they sometimes seem to place too much emphasis on a theoretical approach that would never be used in the real world.

Overall I find this book very useful and have marked it up with sticky notes for sections I'll revisit for my next database modeling design.

While this book contains useful concepts, the author keeps getting ahead of himself. Every few pages an advanced concept is introduced with the phrase "chapter 6 will cover this in detail, but for now". What follows is a sketchy summary of an advanced concept requiring a full chapter. This is a hopelessly confusing way of organizing material. I either have to jump ahead to chapter 6 to figure out what in the heck the author is talking about and hope I could understand that chapter without reading previous ones (I couldn't), or simply skip it for now and hope it wasn't important (it was). I tried both, and neither method worked.

I keep asking myself why other reviewers praise this work. Why does every computer book written in the past couple years have at least 4 1/2 stars? Publishers hire professional reviewers to write glowing reviews. Don't fall for them, or for this book!

This is a very complete and technical book. It has over a hundred approach charts and many american enroute chart. Você tem que comprar este livro!(You have to buy this book!)

If you are willing to take the time to read this book and practice with the sim, you are in for a lot of fun. Microsoft Flight simulator is no doubt the best flight sim that you can buy. I've used it since day one when it was not much more than stick figures. I've use a few books and have not seen one that gives you as much info as this one. My advise if you are really serious about this simulator. GET THIS BOOK. Be able to do the things that you would never be able to do with out it. I give it five stars

This is a wonderful book that covers all aspects of the Microsoft Flight Simulator98 program as well as a HUGE amount of additional information. This book is very interesting and well written. Although there is a large number of equations in this book, each equation is followed by a solved example that makes the information crystal clear.

The text contains MANY errata. Fortunately the author has set up a web site where you can download the corrections and software patches/updates.

ENJOY!!!

This book is a masterpiece! Having also bought other flight sim books, they pale into insignificance compared to this effort. Quite how long it must have taken to write, I've no idea. But I do know there's tons of useful information - all well written, clear and accurate. I'm just reading it all again for a second time - it's that good. The CD also contains some excellent programs. In particular the moving map display is excellent.

Don't bother with any of the inside moves books - get this instead!

This book is excellent, it will benefit both theorists (like myself) and those who are dying to get their planes off the ground. I think a baisc knowledge of the physics of flight is absolutely essential to be a pilot, good or not. Although formulae such as those for calculating moments of intertia of rigid bodies, would be beyond most readers, on the whole this book is the absolute best in it class! A note to critics of this book who think all they need is a 15 page manual full of keyboard short cuts to become a (virtual) pilot - It will never happen!

If you already believe in creating building prototypes, don't spend the 213 pages. There are 190 pages that just say: big companies that succeed by building and iterating prototypes, and so should you. And yes, be sensible:
- don't create "full scale" prototypes and start "living the prototype"
- look at the results even if they prove something you didn't want
- don't show early protos to top management.
- remember the law of diminishing returns - stop prototyping when the value-add is small

Apart from that is has some nuggets:
- Don't plan a lot, start by building prototypes (Ready. Fire! Aim.)
- Prototypes create a conversation space, use that
- Dare to use prototypes to discuss with customers
- Create prototype driven specification and not vice versa

This book gave me a very good and new insight of how to manage prototyping. It is enlightening for not only it explains and lists the topics that are important. It also gives us lots of practical examples of implementations.

Here's the best review I can give Michael Schrage's "Serious Play": Three years on, it's consistently the first book I pull out of my bookshelf when I'm looking for ideas for presentations, thoughts on introducing new products or services, etc. His commentary on "mean-time-to-payback" is something that will stick with you for years. It's brilliant stuff, written in clear, concise terms. And, surprisingly, very little of it is dated. Unlike many books from that era, there's no .com or Enron fixation for the author to be embarrassed about. Schrage's examples are pulled from health care technology, animation, theater...in short, an eye-opening spectrum of ideas. I consider "Serious Play" one of my best purchases ever.

I am enjoying this book. I like the title "Serious Play", but I dislike the sub-title "How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate". Companies don't innovate people do is my thought. I think the author could have taken this concept one step further. That is tie in the concepts of how innovation relates to chaos theory and fractals and larger concepts. The author's ideas are not that new to me because I am a project manager in a software engineering environment where prototyping and iterations is the name of the game. We have at most 3 months to make a difference, to deliver and then we are swept into the ocean of change. You have a small window of opportunity before both the game and the players change.

I think that the world may be on the verge of moving so fast that we begin to see things like the wiki, open source culture in that it takes all of us innovating collectively in serious play. Long term I wonder if you are not free, workable and now, you are not in the game.

Some concepts for me are:
1) Importance of being able to improvise in the moment
2) Prototyping both reveals the underlying power cutural structures and changes them.
3) Human beings are relationship morphing entities.
4) the importance of shared collaboration space that invite clever interactions between people.
5) Treating prototypes as conversation pieces
6) Watch for the underlying feeling of geniune fun
7) The importance of the challenge or obstacles to the game
8) We shape our models, our models shape us
9) "In order to have actionable meaning, the fuzzy mental models ... must be externalized in representations in ways... that can be grasped"
10) Prototypes force individuals to confront the tyranny of tradeoffs (i.e. difficult decisions)
11) "All models are attempt to manage the complexity by making it simpler and more accessible"

While the text is very readable I had trouble pulling out the underlying structure of the book. But I felt redeemed when I read the User's Guide at the end of the book. Interesting you would think a User's Guide would go at the beginning. Fortunately I do not read sequentially so I found that chapter fairly quickly.

This is a good book for someone to read if they are skeptical of the benefits of prototypes. However, since I already know the value of interactive prototypes I became quickly tired with the book.

Other critiques: it felt like the author had a bunch of cool little examples lying around and finally got the idea to put it together, surrounded by some fluffy text to make it thick enough to sell as a book, and put it on the market. Lots of space is taken up by these excerpts, as well as big text in the margins summing up "important points," which I would usually find useful but instead gave the impression of just taking up space.

Also, the author makes repeated use of similes to the point that it got annoying; "Just like a is to b, c is to d."

At one point, the author brings up the difference between a "simulation" and a "prototype," and just when you think the core of the matter is going to be distinguished the author backs out, leaving you wondering why they brought it up in the first place if they weren't going to take a stab at defining and differentiating them.

Sorry, but given the hype I was sorely disappointed. Read the first chapter or so in a bookstore before actually buying this.

It's just amazing how such a 473-page book could cover wide range of AI subjects, and at the same time could deliver easy-to-understand explanations without throwing PhD maths at you. It is just superb how a tech book with minimal math could explain everything!

Every chapter covers one kind of AI, one or two real-world applications and a list of other applications. There're more than enough illustrations for people like me who hate text-only book. A picture is worth a thousand words buddy. Here's my list of AI fields I remembered from the book: Genetic Algorithm, Neural Network, Ant, Particle Swarm, Simulated Annealing, ALife, Pathfinding, A-Star, ATR1, Classifier systems, Rule-based Aystems, Agent-based Software, NLP, Bigram, and Fuzzy Logic.

Examples are written in C language. Comments are plentiful. The codes, though short, pack a lot punches; a whole stack-only virtual machine (VM), for example, was written in less than 100 lines to illustrate how Genetic Algorithm works. Although I'm a VB.NET programmer, I could understand them quite easily.

I recommend this book to any programmer who like to get a big picture of artificial intelligence, who doesn't know where to begin or which algorithm is the right choice. This book should be the first-to-read but not the last, because it touches not far from the surface. I'd say this is the best precursor.

The code is fairly easy to read, and (to date) I have not found any errors in example code... but in terms of the author's ability to write properly, that's a whole different story. Formulas are missing halfs, inconsistencies in variable usage, it's seriously bad. Maybe I got a bad edition (didn't buy from Amazon), but it looks exactly like the one listed (softcover, 2nd ed)..

If you're fairly proficient at C/C++ code, however, you should be able to follow the book ok... just expect to be reading more of the source code than the actual writing, half the time.

It was a required textbook for a class.

It is the best introductory book on AI. As you can read from other reviewer's with low rating, it's not in depth. But if you know programming already, and want to know AI, this is a good start.

One of the challenges in learning AI are the foundational requirements in mathematics. This book provides an excellent introduction to AI, where the "hacker" or hobbyist can sit-down and be writing simple AI applications in the matter of minutes. If your looking for a practical hands-on AI book I would start here.

This book covers a good range of topics but fails to deliver the topics in a clear and concise manner. Not to mention there are many typos (including incorrect and incomplete equations). He also tries to give large examples where a small example would be more suitable. He also does not finish some of the examples (such as the A* method example).

This publication, which, though apparently outdated, is still informative and relevant to understanding modern data model constructs. It is only outdated in the area of object-oriented data models. The author is a master in the field. I rate the book a worthy 4 stars for its ability to help a newcomer to the field understand data modelling concepts in relational databases.

This book gives a concise summary of elementary data modeling concepts that can be found in practically any textbook on the subject. It may do for a beginner in a hurry, but for someone at all familiar with the topic, it simply rehashes very, very familiar material.

In fact, I could have titled this review "The One-Idea Book," because the only original (?) idea I found was the suggestion to implement optional 1-to-many relationships by using a composite table.

Well the book is certainly short - I finished scanning it over a weekend. By the first hour I realized that I didn't really want to read it carefully.

Overall the book reads like it was designed as an undergraduate text book -- an academic view of data model with little of use to a professional.

Most of the treatment is very outdated. The E-R diagrams are like nothing modern I've seen and the book apparently is pre-UML.

I guess if you need a very basic introduction, this book might be useful, otherwise, stay away.

In my opinion most IT books fail in one of the following two parts:
1) The author does not master the concepts thoroughly enough
2) The author cannot explain the abstract concepts in a simple way

On the contrast, this book's author impressed me a lot on those two parts. I rate this 1995 book as 'classic' in my reading list.

As an experienced developer, sometimes I am confused how to design database schema even though I know the SQL queries and the three normal forms; how to map OO class/object into relational tables even though I have advanced knowledge on OOP.

This book answers all those questions I encountered before during my 5 years experience as a OO developer.

The only problem is that, this book uses some outdated annotations to explain the ideas. Anyway you will find it not difficult at all to digest a 146-page book with some special annotations.

The book seems to have been conceived as a textbook, and some of the pages devoted to general IT discussion seems a little redundant to me (especially considering that the book is quite short).

Despite this, I consider it a very useful book on the subject, and the advice on how to structure data is very well presented and convincing.

What surprised me is to find some very good hints and rules of thumb on practical aspect of Data Modeling, which usually you don't find in this kind of books.

I've not yet been able to try out the data design methodology detailed in the book, but I'm more than willing to give it a try next time I have to participate in specifying an application DB.

All in all, a good buy. It short enough that reading it cover to cover is not a daunting project, and after having read it once you will probably want to use at least part of what you found in it. I'd really like to see a similar treatment for other IT ideas and problems, like OO design, for example.

If your into Building Things, Aimee Weber's "Creating Your World: The Official Guide to Advanced Content Creation for Second Life" would be a good choice. She and her co authors reaquaint you with the Editing box and have a breif introduction to Scripting. There are numerous tutorials and links to cool things others have done. The book comes with a free CD with the Tutorials and some extras but some of the contents match that of Second Life:The User's Guide.

I found the tutorials very easy to use and learn.

Got to admit this one is a whole lot better then the first. Pass on the first and buy this one

This is a very useful book for people who have gotten used to the basics of Second Life. It gives helpful information on a variety of areas. I have recommended it personally to a number of people and am about to buy a second copy for my office.

Finally, a one stop book that tells me everything I need to know to improve and expand my experience with Second Life. While the Second Life tutorials online are okay this books clearly explains both the simple and complex options for customizability and expansion with excellent examples and sample code that is effective and clearly stated. If you are looking for the ideal reference for beginners and experienced users you can't get much better than this book.

I got quite alot out of this book. There are a lot of resources that you wont find in world. Templates, textures, tutorials, and advice. All of it good. I just wish that there was a little bit more detail. It seems that no matter how much I learn from books, websites and in world I am always still behind the eight ball. So buy it YES for sure but be prepared to go right back to your search for more knowledge. Hopefully someone will write a tome on just the art of building and designing Structures someday soon.

Granted you can find most of this info elsewhere but still this is a great read. Well written, a nice collection of material, and downloadable source code. I found it to be a very inspiring book.

This is an excellent book. I've been reading it for weeks. The chapters are not long, but the content is amazing. The author combines explanations and equations in a format that is demonstrative and repeatible. This is a very good book to study yielding the understanding necessary to penetrate many other advanced books on complexity theory. The author starts by examining whole numbers and real number problems. Next, he examine Godel's incomplete theory of predicate logic showing that no formal language is complete. Next, he examines fractals, self-similar patterns, low ordered with high compression and high order with low order compression, L-systems, and Juliet and Mandel-brot fractals. Fractals open up an emmense study into the complex pattern from simple rules and recursion. Next, he examines equations of strange attraction, chaos, and demonstrates stability behavior within complexity. Next, he looks at small universes created by running CA. NNs and GAs are examined in the last chapter. I was excited to write down many of the authors processes and run them using OpenGL and C. I believe this book to be an excellent book for college students. The material is easy to understand and the content very demonstratible. Cause and effect are very cohesive in this book. Even though the book seems simple, it covers an vast amount of topics necessary to understanding AI and AL.

I recently became interested a lot in Nature. Especially, being someone in the field of Computer Science, the computational aspect. And this book is by far one of my favourite among all the "How Nature Works" kind of books I've read.

This Computational Beauty of Nature (CBofN) covered a lot of topics. Ranged from brief introduction to Computation Theory, Fractals, Chaos, Complexity, Adaptation. (See the Table of Content for more details).

All topics are written in surprisingly clear and very understandable manner. With as little Math as possible. (From my opinion, these topics cannot be completely understood without Mathematics -- The Language of Nature). Therefore, it is also accessible to layperson.

This book does not, however, go so deep into each subject. (You won't expect it to do that with its less-than 500 pages, don't you? :-) Instead, it does give nice backgrounds, fundamental knowledge, and important ideas for each. So, if you are interesting in any of the subjects presented here, you can go on to the more specialized books on your own.

One of the nicest feature of this book, which can hardly be found in other text, is that the it does show how things work together, where and why. For example, natural phenomena like adaptation, evolution, computation, and some other things else related to each other. How can one view this from that perspective, and vice versa. etc.

One other nice feature of this book is, you can really play with almost all concepts using a number of computer programs. All the programs are downloadable (with source code, under GNU license) from the book's homepage. So, you can reproduce almost all the figures from the book.

However, for one thing, the homepage address given in the book, in the edition/printing I have is incorrect. Maybe MIT Press had changed the structure of their website or something...

...you can still search for it using your favourite web-search engine.

About the website, all the good things are there as well, including errata. (Of course, Perfect things are very rare in Nature... So, books with some errors are ok. The thing that matter is the authors know it/admit it and tell the readers or not).

Conclusion: If you want to understand "How Nature Works" from the computational point of view. If you interested in Chaos theory, Fractals and Complexity. Then, make no mistake, you can't go wrong with this one. (And, get the hardcover edition, because you will read it, read it, read it again, and keep refering to it. So the paperback edition probably can't endure that :-)

I want to give it more stars if I only could. This book will always get the highest rating possible from me wherever and whenever I review it.

Nature herself is so beautiful. So, it's time to get to know her, to learn about her and to understand her! And this book just did it, in such a way that can hardly be better!

Good book, [X] bucks is a bargain, it's worth twice that easily.

Favorite things about this book
Covers L-systems and also gives the rules for how to make some interesting plants. Also this book touches on some aspects of AI like game-trees and neural nets. The author discuses "boids" and self-organization with autonomous agents that act together, and shows simulations of ants and a flock of birds using this concept.

This is a good introductory textbook for college undergraduate mathematics and computer science students that attempts to combine the theory of computation with some mathematical concepts and in the end, manages to model virtual life by explaining basic concepts in chaos, adaptation, fractals, and complex systems. There are better books on all of these subjects, but few others do such a good job of tying together key concepts from each discipline into the one theme of this book. However, there is only enough room to outline the included subjects rather than investigate them thoroughly.

Also, the mathematics is elementary enough to be accessible to a mathematically mature high school student. The mathematics is concisely explained as it is needed, with just a page or two for each of calculus, linear algebra, affine transformations, complex numbers, vector calculus, and matrix algebra. Thus, the included mathematics makes a better refresher than a tutorial for the novice even though the author states in the preface that he wrote this book for a younger version of himself. This book teaches its subject matter mainly by demonstrating concepts through simulations that are expressed in dozens of programs which illustrate the points being made. Instructions on using the programs are scattered throughout the book. The source code is available for download on the web, along with selected excerpts from the book.

I would recommend this as a first book for those interested in simulating natural concepts, but it should not be your last if your goal is to truly grasp the concepts presented and produce simulations of your own. However, an even better book on this subject is "Mathematical Models in Biology", although it is an advanced text. A very accessible book that is also more advanced than this text is "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry and Engineering". It clearly explains the mathematics while tying it into key concepts in nature. "Chaos and Fractals" by Peitgen is a good book on the subject for the layperson with a fascination for mathematics presented in some depth. The book also has various Java programs that illustrate key concepts.

AL is popular science writing of the first order: informative, clear, fascinating, and entertaining. My only disappointment is that it was published in 1992, and thus does not touch on developments in the field since then. I'd love to know how these have panned out, and whether scientists remain enthusiastic about the possibilities of A-Life. Judging from the textbooks on A-life that have been published since 1992, the field is alive, at least, and I can only assume it is well to boot. I'll have to hunt for bibliography elsewhere. My thanks to Levy for sending me on this hunt. AL is a book to fire the imagination. I'd give it 10 stars!

A note on the metaphysical material in AL that bears on the question of whether present iterations of 'artificial life' are, or whether future iterations may one day be, sufficiently complex that they should be considered true LIFE: throughout, Levy stresses the essential link between an (')organism(') (wet or dry) and its environment. Yet, it seems to me, in discussing the question of the LIFE-status of in-silico 'organisms', he considers the 'organisms' alone. I wonder whether this apparent preference reflects his own bias, or a bias on the part of the scientists he profiles? From the perspective of emergent behavior and the capacity to evolve, etc., AL 'creatures' self-evidently bear a striking resemblance to biological creatures. It strikes me, however, that a key consideration in the wet-life as LIFE versus dry-'life' as LIFE argument -- is that wet-life organisms express emergent behavior and evolve, etc., in environments that are, throughout, rife with other life, whereas dry-'life' 'organisms' do the same in environments that are otherwise sterile (by the standards that A-Life scientists themselves would apply). Some consideration of how environments contribute to the LIFE-status of particular (')organism(')s, and of any definition of LIFE (wet or dry) itself, seems to be of the essence. Yet another thought to pursue -- though doubtless ethologists, philosophers, and A-Life scientists have beaten me there. Proof positive that AL is a highly thought-provoking book. Read it!

I just loved this book. It gives the novice a very good sampling of the future of Artificial Intellegence and Artificial Life. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the discovery of machine virus'. Somewhat dated, but an extremely good read.

I have read this book.

It is about artifical intelligence. If you have a computer you will know exactly what I mean. When you hook up a computer, it acts alive, and you gotta interact with it like it is artifically intelligent.

Like when I hook up the voice-recognition thing where you speake into the mikerofone, it acts like it hears you too, and does what it is told to do. Sometimes that is to write a letter, or to tell it to go onto the net.

I told my computer to go onto the net once thru the mike, and it did it, as it was spoken and said what to do.

So if you read and buy this book you will learn to do this, and hook it up yourself. The book has plans and charts to do all this stuff. When you read it, pass it onto a friend, and they may help you once they read it themselves.

I gave this book 5-stars, because it was a very good one, and I will now know how my computer is so smart. I told it what to do, and it help me with this revue to. So buy it but just one time, because a friend and other people will be able to read this for free, once you give it to them.

Engines are my hobbie, and so are electronic power supplys, so I plan to use this book for that to. I will design new ones that are faster than sound, and my computer will be smart and help me with that.

So buy this book, once, and you will like it along with all the friendly people that you knowe.That's my revuiew, but I will do anew one when a new adition of the book comes out to the press.

I do recomend that you buy this one time for the people who wanto know about how artifical intelligent computers get smarter and help you with life-things you need to do, but not all by yourselfe, but with a computer.

I read this more than three years ago, before I started my undergraduate studies. I knew I was going to study computer science, but after reading this book I knew I would forever be drawn to the multidisciplinary fields of biology and computer science. From the question of the origin of life to intelligence, the book convinced me that a new approach is needed to solve these old mysteries.

It's not a masterpiece of literature, but it was interesting enough to forever change my research career.

While the concept of artificial life has been around at least since humans developed self-awareness, the commensurate decline of religion and rise of the scientific method was necessary for it to become a point of real debate. However, it was not until September 1987 when the event occurred that established a-life as an academic discipline, namely a conference devoted to its study. This work uses that event as a starting point, and does a superb job of presenting nearly all perspectives, including historical.
Like its counterpart, artificial intelligence, the discipline of a-life suffers from a lack of definition. There is no agreement on what life or intelligence are. Additional disagreement arises over the following distinctive descriptions of life.

(a) Objects such as rocks can be assigned a life (intelligence) value of zero and as we move upward to humans and beyond, the measure of life (intelligence) characteristics is described by a smooth, continuous function where the first derivative never becomes very large, but is always positive. There is no clearly discernible boundary between life and non-life.

(b) Starting from the same initial position as (a), the derivative stays close to zero for some time, and then suddenly becomes unbounded, as the matter now possesses the fundamental essence of life (intelligence). That point of the vertical derivative is the boundary point between animate and inanimate objects.

Much of this book deals with cellular automata and the algorithms used to create them. Like so many new, perhaps revolutionary disciplines, the major players tend to be free spirits. Many of the people described here bounced around before finding their ecological niche in a-life. With the exception of the originators, John von Neumann and John Horton Conway, those who established the study of cellular automata as an academic discipline were academic outsiders who literally created it from nothing. The explanation of that is very well done. While most of the work has been done by computer, no previous knowledge is necessary to understand the text.
One item could have been better handled, but that is largely due to the problems with definitions. Like the workers in chaos, a-lifers tend to see what they want to see. For example, simple rules are used to create an image that either looks or acts like something known to be alive and this is used to argue that life is being created or that the rules that create life are simple. Which is an extremely weak argument. What is being created are items that human eyes interpret as looking like life, and as all psychologists know, the human brain processes images with a bias towards previous experience. The devil's advocate against is a shadow here. However, it is difficult to argue in the negative when you are aiming at a nebulous target.
Whatever your interest in a-life, you will find something of value in this book. Biologists and philosophers who teach general education courses will also find a good deal of discussion material. The hypothetical qualification has been removed form the debate, as there are now objects to argue about.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission

Great book for helping an experienced developer get ready for the SCJA exam. I failed the test once but now after reading the book I'm certain I will pass the exam when I take it again.

There are however, a lot of problems with this book. First of all, the author clearly published the book without actually reading it cover to cover and running a spell check on it. He doesn't know how to spell asterisk, confuses backslashes with forward slashes, in an exercise asks you to replace a blanked out line when there's no blanked out line in the sample code. In the sample questions, many answers refer to information that was not covered in the chapter material.

In the JDK section he mentions in the beginning that it's very hard to locate and install the development kit when in the chapter he repeatedly calls it by a name different than it's referenced on Sun's web site (SDK when Sun calls it a JDK) then never makes any mention of how to avoid the problems he alluded to in the beginning of the chapter. Just install the software then add the bin folder to the path environment variable - all problems solved.

Don't be fooled thinking its a serious book when you see it's 400 pages, it's really only about 3.5 inches wide, so 400 pages goes a long way when the book is so small.

I'd read a few two star reviews of this book, but decided to pick it up anyways, as it was only one of two SCJA books on the market. Well, apparently it was a new 'printing' of the book that I got, because the book didn't have any of the problems other reviews had mentioned.

The book has over 400 pages of exam questions and detailed answers. The questions are arranged in a way that test you, but also help you learn by pointing out subtle differences between code snippets, technologies, and product implementations. Each question is asked, and then later answered, with fully in depth answers that not only help you learn, but give you a laugh or two as well.

I also went through all of the code snippets with a compiler, just to prove to myself what works and what doesn't. I'd suggest people make sure they use a JDK 1.5 compiler, the one the exam is targeted to, or else you might get some incorrect results. When using a JDK 1.5 compiler, I didn't find a single code based question that was answered differently to what my own compiler produced.

The book is broken down in a way that is very conducive to learning. Each objective section is given about 25 questions. This is great for planning to go through each objective a day for about a week.

Then, there are 3, 15 questions exams, that cover the three broad ranges of questions on the exam, with those being Object Oriented Programming, Java Fundamentals, and Client and Server technologies. These exams are tough, but totally like the actual exam. I suggest taking a day for each of these exams, and going over them again several times before taking the exam.

There are then 3, 20 question exams, that simulate the actual variety of questions on the exam. These exams are good to do in a single day, and get a feel of how prepared you are for the final.

There are a few other mini-exams based on equals and assignment operators, and Java 1.5 concepts.

There is also a final exam of 51 questions that will tell you how prepared you are for the real thing. If you can get a good 75% on this exam, you'll be good for the real thing.

The fact is, this is a complete and total resource for getting SCJA certified. If you can answer all the questions in the book, I really can't see how you can't pass the SCJA exam with a killer score. I used the book myself, and have passed it around to a few friends in my class, and it helped all of us pass the exam the first time around. Everyone scored in the high 80's or low 90's.

As I said, it's a total resource for getting SCJA certified. If you want to really get prepared for the exam, this is the one book you need.

Overall, the book is good as an indicator of the knowledge areas with which you need to be familiar in order to prepare for the exam, however, many of the questions are poorly stated or ambiguous, and quite a few of the answers are just plain WRONG!

Many of the code snippets have very fundamental errors or omissions, even though "Will cause a compile-time error" was said to be an incorrect response.

In a nutshell, I don't think the book was proofread, (misspellings, typos, etc.) and the code was obviously not tested.

This book is exactly what you need if you want to pass the SCJA exam.

There are hundreds of questions, which are very much in line with the difficulty of the actual exam. But better than the questions, which exhaustively cover all of the SCJA objectives, are the answers. All of the questions are answered in extreme detail, not only telling you where you were right, or where you were wrong, but they totally help you understand Java and the Java technologies at a much, much deeper level.

I really don't think I would have passed on my first write if I didn't have this book. I knew the topics pretty well, but this helped me polish off my skills, and really, really prepare me for the real thing.

Get this book if you want to pass.

I've written alot of certification exams (Cisco, MCSE, Novelle), but the SCJA exam was the hardest to study for because of the huge amount of content to cover. The exam covers a huge number of topics, from client server technologies, to Java programming, to OOA & OOD. How can you cover them all? And how do you know when you've gone too far in depth, or not deep enough at all?

This Questions book really lets you know when you've studied too much, or not studied enough on a particular topic. Each exam objective is covered in depth, with loads of questions, and then progressively larger and larger mock exams help reinforce the toughest, and most important, concepts.

There are over 350 questions in this book, and they are all answered in great detail, and with the same humor and writing style as the SCJA Certificaiton Guide by the same author. Both books together were the key reason I passed my certification. The SCJA is a tough exam. I couldn't have passed without these great certification books.

Totally recommended!

I also recommend this book if you want to learn the material quickly:

SCJA - Sun Certified Java Associate Certification Study Guide for Java 5, J2EE and J2ME Technology from ExamScam.com - The Pre SCJP, Programmers Certification

When I order from Amazon I expect prompt and accurate shipments.
This met those expectations.

I recently bought this book to revise my RF theory and design RF circuits for my projects and i'm happy that i bought this book. This book is well written and each component of wireless communication system is explained clearly with least amount of maths. The CD with software applications also helps you to design your wireless application. Overall good text.

It is a great invaluable book, it is an anatomy of the wireless building blocks and should be in the library of all engineers interested in the RF field but if you are a beginner or advanced engineer this book may not fulfill your interests, this book covers a lot of topics in between these two levels. even if you are a beginner buy it for future refrence.

At last, a good RF book. Sure, it's not perfect, but it puts the others I've read to shame.

Yes, a book that doesn't consider 30MHz "really high". That's progressed beyond vacuum tubes. Hell, it even discusses them newfangled ICs. In fact, digital radio is probably given more coverage than analog! This is modern pro quality, not stuck in 1970s tinkerer's-land.

The most shocking thing is the complete omission of Smith charts. Though after reading this, learning to use these charts should be a lot easier.

Also, it's quite hilarious (or sad) when the author starts to discuss the enclosed Puff program, and the tone of the work jumps back about 20 years ("the program will work with CGA and EGA, but **VGA** is recommended because the text can be smaller", etc)!!!

A fair bit about layout and PCBs is discussed, though I would have liked even more detail. Also, some sort of summaries or decision trees would be useful for the more complex design areas like matching networks.

Complete wireless design was a very useful book in developing an understanding of wireless systems, filters, matching circuits, microstrips etc...

For those who have a sound knowledge in Electronic engineering and wish to develop their knowledge in RF design, this is a great book to start with. If you have already studied RF or have a modest knowledge within this field then this probably isn't the book for you (could be used as a reference).