Software Books

I have had this book for a couple of years now and it has helped out a lot. Pretty well written and covers most questions. Binding is not good as pages will come out. For those starting out with Elements it is a good buy.

this would have to be the most comprehensive organizer i have seen .i was most impressed by the quality and size of the book. with this book you need look no further,top marks. signed. errol

If you are one of the many people who are feeling overwhelmed by your files of digital photos this book is a must have! Michael Slater's new book, "Organize Your Photos with Adobe Photoshop Elements 3" will help you take control of your digital shoebox of photos. In my opinion, Photoshop Elements 3 is the easiest way to do so and this book makes using the program a no-brainer! The book even reveals a hidden trick on how to clean up the Photo Review feature in the Organizer section of the software.

This is a good book with lots of info and great ideas on how to organize your photos.

This book concentrates on the Organizer side of PSE 3 and does an excellent in depth job of showing the various ways to organize and find all your photos. It has different degrees of organization depending on the photographers needs. You make a very enlightened choice!
There are also very good chapters included on editing both with the Editor and Quick Fix. Sharing photos, printing and making creations all have their own chapters.
The book is extremely well illustrated with plenty of colour screenshots and photos.
If you only buy one book on PSE 3 this should be it!

As a student at Yale Law School planning to go into estate planning, I found this book very helpful. Highly recommended for anyone who needs to plan their estate or for law students taking estate tax or planning courses. This book is easy to understand, well organized, and provides a good amount of detailed information, not just vague ideas. Highly recommended.

This book provides an easy to understand overview of estate planning plus easy to understand detail on many special circumstances. It is very easy to understand which estate planning techniques are right for you, and there are many examples that illustrate how the techniques work. Approximately half of this book is relevant to everyone. The other half gives clear, common sense explantions of advanced planning techniques that are typically reserved for those fortunate enough to be planning a high net worth estate (lets say $1M+). The advanced techniques are not for do it yourselfers, but the book gives you a good understanding of the issues and lets you converse intelligently with an attorney.

Now in a newly updated and expanded seventh edition, Plan Your Estate is a resource provided by attorneys Denis Clifford and Cora Jordan which is packed from cover to cover with everything anyone needs to know to ensure their worldly goods are promptly willed to loved ones. Written in no-nonsense terms that the non-specialist general reader can readily grasp, individual chapters clearly address wills, how to avoid probate, living trusts, property-control trusts, naming guardians for children and leaving property to children, estate taxes, living wills, how to reduce estate taxes, and much, much more. Especially recommended for individuals who own a business or who have children from a former marriage, Plan Your Estate is a "must-have", "do-it-yourself" legal resource, which is applicable to all American states except for Louisiana. Even those who prefer to let a professional handle the whole process of estate planning would be well served to read Plan Your Estate cover to cover, before stepping into an attorney's office where time is money and the clock is running.

Great for law students taking an estate planning course or an estate and gift tax course. Also good for people wanting to learn about estate planning in general. I would recommend this book.

This book is a must buy resource for persons interested in estate planning. Whether you are planning to do-it-yourself or use a lawyer, it is good to know what your options are. I am much better informed after reading this book.

As described on the cover page, this book is cookbook style so I went through the programs on the CD before reading the chapters. I like this book for two reasons.

First, the book is easy to read. A bunch of equations may not always be helpful to understand a problem. What confuses readers most is how an implementation/program corresponds to those equation(s). This book explains the image processing techniques in a plain language and gives you an hand-on experience with those techniques.

Second, to practice image processing, clicking a button on windows or just calling a built-in function, e.g. process(image), will not be enough. When you go to the directory of programs on the CD, you may find out every details. Each program is relatively independent to each other. You will not be stuck by a function call, which you never know or find. Each program is well commented and can be easily modified and incorporated into your program.

This book is good for those who are new to image processing, because it helps you understand what image processing does. It is also good for an experience practicer, because you can find well-organized stuff to build your own applications. It is a must-have book for your shelf of image processing.

Searching for an easy plug & play solution for simple imaging tasks?
No time for programming & debugging things yourself?
No interest in crawling through literature to figure what & how you should program "the methods that solves all your problems"?

Here's a book that deals with most of the elementary - and most used - approaches in image enhancement and analysis. The CD offers a collection of ready-to-play-with programs, both in C source as in executables.

I appreciated the book set-up: each section describes one single task, describes the problem, gives an example, discusses a solution given in literature, and presents the input / output / options for the C code.
- If you want to know more: get the recommended references.
- If you want to modify the program: why not? (well, perhaps because the code is good enough!)
- If you don't care about the scientific background and/or programming: just plug & play!

I have found this book to be extremely useful as a reference for my class on document image analysis. The book discusses (with software which is a bonus!) a whole bunch of image processing techniques that are very useful.

Students can now find in one place- a reference for techniques such as gabor wavelet analysis, convex hulls, moments, fourier descriptors, thinning, hough transform, and chain coding. This allows me as an instructor of an advanced document recognition course to let the students self-study these image processing techniques while I can focus on the recognition topics.

The authors have done a great job of picking examples from a wide range of applications such as outdoor scenes, fingerprints, and documents. The book is "easy to read" and requires just basics of linear algebra to follow.

I already knew image processing when I bought this book, so I am not sure how it would appear to the novice seeking a textbook on the subject of image processing and analysis, but I imagine it could be somewhat confusing. I always recommend Gonzales and Wood's "Digital Image Processing" for those seeking a clear read on image processing and analysis from the ground up. Where Seul's book comes in is with clear descriptions and working code for many basic - and some not so basic - image processing and image analysis algorithms. The book is also very good at explaining the applications of the various transforms. One of the little things that the author of this book does that authors of other books similar to it don't bother to do is to realize that when you are working in image processing you likely have an image as an input and you want an image as an output. Thus the author has built his code libraries so that they work that way. You are not left with arrays of pixels that you have to figure out how to store and manage. In the end you have a nice functional toolbox of working image processing and analysis subroutines that you can chain together and make just about any type of image transform tool you could think of. I'm mainly interested in image effects, and I know this book has been useful to me. The accompanying CD-ROM contains all of the C source code for the algorithms so that you can port them to another language or tinker with them if you so desire. Highly recommended.

The title of this book corresponds to its content, the tutorial gives an excellent overview of basic key points to those readers who are unfamiliar with the subject (as I was). The book can not be used for rigorous study of even simple things but rather kicks you with essentials that are easy to understand with high-school background. This book, written for non-specialists in "image field", gives them techniques for their practical needs and concentrates exactly on image analysis, not on image processing. If you have no time to go through more complex (and deeper) books, take this one to discover basic principles in short form with no attempt to explain the fundamentals. The authors just put you into the facts, so that is why I would characterize the "Practical Algorithms" book as being "handbook". The good point is that the areas of applicability of these facts are explained, the drawback: you have to go to other books to get more details on image processing roots, e. g., to R. Gonzalez and R. Woods' "Digital Image Processing". I bought both, and use them as good annex to each other. The "Practical Algorithms" has lack of some significant areas, like snake algorithm and image binarization (thresholding) techniques but e.g., the cellular processing is quite well highlighted.
Surprisingly, the CD that comes along with this book gave me almost 80% examples that I was able to recompile instantly, and only several examples have failed, mainly due to image file format issues. The source code is not both elegant and bugless, but it is very transparent and portable and can easily fit, e.g., a 16-bit microcontroller.
Overall, this is good book for fast start. You can get real output and pick up ideas on practical side of image analysis. Just remember, the most book examples came from the medicine world, so they are quite specific and may not be implemented directly in your particular application.

Not having every used WF, I have to say that Bukovics makes reading this book a breeze. He covers the aspects of the subject very well. I'm only about 1/4 into the book and I can't find any errata on Apress' website. There are a few examples I need to go through again because I am getting compile errors. However, since I'm actually typing the code straight into the IDE, I may have made some mistakes. I love the fact that all the code is presented in the book and every part of it is explained. I'm confident that thanks to Bukovics, I should have a solid grasp of WF when I'm finished with this book.

After spending more than one year on writing workflows in SharePoint 2007 environment, I am currently working on a project using Workflow in .Net 3.5 and a Window Forms environment. In this project, I have to write my own tracking and persistence services, etc. As you might know, SharePoint takes care of those services for you.

I pick up this book trying to leverage the latest technology development in .Net 3.5. After I read the first 10 chapters, I believe I did the right thing. I am really impressed by Mr. Bukovics's knowledge and insight in workflow. I also believe he is an excellent trainer.

He explains concepts clearly. The examples are simple enough so the readers do not get lost in the details. Also, he solves problems using different approaches, and then evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of those approaches. I really like this kind of methodology. I also like the style of source code printout.

I really enjoy reading the chapters about ReplicatorActivity, Local Services, Event-driven Activities, and Correlation.

In Chapter 3 Activities, the author introduces how to use NUnit to test the Custom Activities, which is very interesting. There are also quite a lot of tips like this in other chapters.

As I said before, his examples are simple enough so the reader can understand the technical feature easily. From another angle, that also means the examples are not fancy enough. To make up for this, you can also buy Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation Step by Step by Kenn Scribner, which has some interesting examples such as ATM, GPS Truck tracking, Leakage Control System. I believe that these two books complement each other.

I rate this book five stars without hesitation!

I make my living as a consultant software architect/programmer and usually self-educate on newer technologies through books like this one. I've often found Apress titles to be of great value and this one does not disappoint. In Pro WF, the author takes a logical textbook approach (introducing what you should expect to learn, teaching the material, reviewing what you should have learned) as he guides you from a broad foundational understanding of the workflow framework and components through advanced topics such as persistence, serialization, web services and wcf integration. What makes this book stand out is that the author does a great job of inserting practical tips that highlight nuances of the framework that someone without prior experience would not intrinsically know.
I'm very pleased with this reference. I think you would be too.

This book was absolutely fantastic! It was incredibly well written and ALL of the examples worked, without a hitch. As difficult as it is to keep current these days, Bruce has a writing style that is extremely forgiving to the reader who is constantly juggling a few different tech books at once; he is constantly reminding you about things that you have read in chapters that you may have not touched in weeks or even months. I personally like this approach, as it allows me to pick up the book and get back into it as if I'd never put it down.

In addition to his writing style, I'm very thankful of the WorkflowInstanceManager that he created and referenced throughout the book. Even though I feel that it needs more threading support, I have found the manager to be easy to use and easily extendable.

Perhaps the most valuable portion of the book was the workflow designer host that Bruce created in the final chapter. On initial skim, I never really understood how serialized workflows and a workflow designer host could benefit me. But after getting his long (but worth it) code sample up and running, it opened my eyes to many application design possibilities within my organization. The customizable designer is an invaluable tool and has saved me countless hours of R & D time.

Thanks Bruce!

I'm somewhat bewildered as to why such an important technology (WF) has produced an astounding dearth of good books on the subject. Thankfully, we have Mr. Bukovics' offering which would be a stand-out even if the book marketplace was full of options.

With this newer version of his book (yes, I did purchase the 3.0 version), we get very important information on (1) the two new additions to WF offered in 3.5 (2) WCF-WF integration and (3) advanced topics on Services. These topics smooth out the rough edges of WF 3.0. Comprehensive discussions of these topics, and others, are not readily available from any other source.

Therefore, this newer version of the book is a must-have; even for those, like myself, who purchased his first version.

My first edition copy of this book is dog-eared and full of bookmarks. This is an excellent tutorial on installing and using qmail. It includes step-by-step instructions for each task involved in setting up and administering (as well as customizing) qmail. Great text. Highly recommended. You don't need to be a Linux expert to install qmail if you follow this guidebook.

Dave Sill did an excellent job of showing how to setup email server. If you know some Linux commands, you'll have no problem setup your first Linux email server. I personally prefer Dave's Qmail handbook to John Levine's Qmail (I got as well). Levine's Qmail is an great second book.

Best Linux book I ever bought!

Everything you need to know about Qmail from installation and complete configuration. There is no other book.

After a month, and hours of installing and reinstalling FreeBSD and Qmail, I finally got the mail server working right! This was my first attempt at a mail server which I use for my family members and a few friends. There are a few errors in the book in some of the scripts which did cause me many problems. That was a pain. But, even at that, I don't think I would have been able to get Qmail running without this book. It is a great book for a person like me who is always doing something a bit over my head.

I just finished setting up a mail server at home and this book really made it simple. I'm not a novice, so I can't speak to it's ease of use, but the steps were simple, and a bit verbose and repetitive, but overall the book was invaluable.

I also needed DNS and BIND to get everything working just the way I wanted, so I'd buy them both.

Tim

After reading this book over the holiday, I decided to give it a try on my new project. I applied the authors categories to business plans I needed to prepare. I have to admit that her approach made an improvement that even impressed my managers. Her questions in the appendix were also extremely useful in helping me think of more needs than I had originally thought were important. Her chapter on the parts of a requirement helped me supply the details that I would have omitted previously. Bottom line, the author makes you think allowing for better definition of product needs.

When trying to understand what information architectures are all about, this is the only book I have come across that answered all of my questions and placed the field in context with modern technologies. Unfortunately, most books on information architectures fall into two categories that miss the mark:

1. There are books written by IA experts before the internet, and the terms and viewpoint used require considerable on-the-fly translations to modern technologies.

2. There are books written by IT experts who couldn't spot an IA if it bit them on the leg. These books are fat with useless lists of IT technologies and acronyms.

Fredinandi's book is worth reading cover-to-cover, and more than once.

This is the first book about Requirements Pattern. You can easily understanding your problems after define all project's requirements. This book also provides a completes framework to categorizes and organizes the different types of requirements, forming a requirements set. It makes our project done on time and within budget. Thanks to Pat for this excellent book.

This book servers as an excellent source for gaining insight into the field of requirements engineering. Developers, Managers, Requirements Engineers and Testers could all benefit from reading this book. In addition to providing important information about requirements engineering in general, the book presents a requirement pattern framework targeted for e-business and web based applications.

This book servers as an excellent source for gaining insight into the field of requirements engineering. Developers, Managers, Requirements Engineers and Testers could all benefit from reading this book. In addition to providing important information about requirements engineering in general, the book presents a requirement pattern framework targeted for e-business and web based applications.

I enjoyed every topic covered. It opened my eyes a little more on QB. It truly is the next level up from your ordinary QB programming.

The Revolutionary Guide to Qbasic is by far the best book out there for programming games in basic. It is filled with chapters on sound and graphics that nearly every other book on the market neglects to include. I make games in my spare time and until now have been picking apart other games and asking more experienced programmers how to write complex sections of code. Well, no more! This book has it all: 3-D scrolling, tile based gaming, creating music, and more. Why buy another book about how to make a loop or print data to the screen? This book it truly the best way to advance your hobby in Basic programming.

Very, very nice. Forget the petty nitpicking, this is a GREAT book for people serious about using QBasic as a programming language. If it had a true introduction to QBasic for beginners it would be the one-stop-shop for the language. As it is, though, you need to be somewhat familiar in order to appreciate just how good this book is!

This book is great. Despite one person's comment on the authors' English it is not bad. I understood it perfectly. No book will make sense if you carefully select a part that needs another paragraph to make sense. The book has a great disk of code along with info on advanced QB topics. Great book! Buy it!

This book, I feel, is the greatest QBASIC tutorial/reference ever written. It is definitely considered to me a sequel to all the other QBASIC books on the market, in that it seems to take you not only one, but many more steps ahead. I have been looking for a book with even just a little bit of advanced graphics and sound programming. Buying this book got all that and tons more. I pity all those who don't own this title!

I have over 50+ Oracle books from the last 5 years and have also taken all of the Oracle 8i/9i DBA training courses at Oracle. I have to rank this book even though it covers Oracle 8i it still is applicable, after all 99.99% of customers and companies with Oracle are STILL on Oracle 8i and have not even touched 10G yet I would definitely get this book along with Practical Oracle 8i: Building Efficient Databases by Jonathan Lewis, Oracle One on One by Tom Kyte and Oracle 8i DBA Handbook then you can become a real Oracle guru. No other book covers such a wide range of topics on Oracle in the clear succint method that this author does. Now cant wait for an Oracle 10G title soon.

A very rare book which explains Oracle internals, more practical than academic. Advanced topics like latch contention etc are explained lucidly. This is the only book that explains hashing technique with a simple yet neat example.

This book is not just for those interested in leraning about the way in which an oracle database can be designed for being scalable, but also for those who want to learn about oracle architecture.
If you are about to build your first big oracle based application, the reading of this book will help you saving a great amount of time and money.

Excellent book that highlights the fundamental building blocks of any VLDB from all perspectives. Instead of dwelling on information that is already available in the manuals, it highlights all components for architecting a large system and is a definite read for anybody who wants to understand not only the oracle but all the building blocks that make it possible namely, OS, hardware and storage.

Now a days there are lot of Oracle books which confuses the readers with inaccurate information. But this book gives 100% accurate and pracical information. And James knows about the topics he is talking. Not that just cut and paste from Oracle documentation or some metalink notes.

Great book and I have already recommened to most of my friends.

This classic on what your daily walk should be like as a Christian is as relevant today as it was in 1728, when the book was first penned. Some terms and wording reminds one that this work is almost three hundred years old, but it nails so many issues that are dealt with today, that it just shows what a timeless work this is.

It is revealing and sobering. Not a light read. You have to be serious about your walk with Christ or it will be a total waste of time.

Here is the clarion call to a true life that
glorifies God. Put the lies of culture aside
and learn the real truth.. and live it!!

If you're looking for a challenge in your spiritual walk - this is the book for you. Law's classic book was the transforming resource in the lives of the Wesley brothers as well as abolitionist William Wilberforce - just as it changed their lives, this book will not leave you the same!

I've read an abridged and edited version for the modern reader by John Meister (158 pages) - but it wasn't enough - I had to order the small type 317 page version! This is not an easy read - on the difficulty scale of 1 - 10, this would be a solid 9. I wouldn't suggest this book to anyone in high school or even college - Law deals with real world issues and a little seasoning in life is necessary to get the full effect of his challenge. This is a perfect book for the Christian man who wants more than a Purpose Driven Life, the man looking for a profound, insightful, and challenging read that will deeply impact the core of his being!

You can find these books online. The longer version is a Vintage Spiritual Classics edition and retails for around $13.00. Rare will be the person that will want this book - but if you're the one, don't pass this one up! I give this my highest endorsement and recommendation.

Law deals directly with the concept of devotion to God - and asks some difficult questions about where man places his true devotion in life - in the things of this world, or in the Kingdom of Heaven? Law argues that a wise and reasonable man will wholly devote himself to the things of the Lord for they are far superior to the temporal and worthless things of this world. In fact, Law says that a lack of this devotion is a clear indicator of gross ignorance! The book gives several practical elements necessary for a devoted life including prayer, study, humility and confession. But it is not the elements about which Law writes, it is the manner in which he presents them to the reader that makes this book so exceptional - Law raises the bar and challenges the follower of Christ to live an exemplary life, a life worthy of their calling, a life comparable to the great saints who have walked before us or even to angels who minister above us!

wow - what an inspirational, hard-hitting, right on read this has been. I'm still in the process of reading it but I already love it. This should be required reading for all Christians. Then perhaps the church would live differently than the world and perhaps we'd have less scandal.

So far I can see that there needs to be a balance. One could easily tend towards legalism and a justification by self-works type of mentality. Perhaps he'll cover in later chapters how it's the Spirit of God that now creates the will to do differently and also empowers us to do so as we allow him to lead us in all areas of our lives.

But as long as one is aware of this work of the Spirit in a believer's life, then this book can do nothing but stimulate one to self-reflection and love and good works.

The fact Pastor John Piper in some of his books, "Don't Waste Your Life" and "A Hunger for God" quoted Law in this book several times intrigued me to read it personally. As I went through the chapters, however, it is clear to me and will become clear to the readers as well that Law sounds eerily close to a Roman Catholic minus the devotions to the rituals. Despite many deep, excellent, stinging, uncomfortable, soul-searching reflections and illustrations on the Christian life contrasted against the futility of a self-centered life that I believe are profitable for Christians, particularly to defy the preaching of prosperity gospel that seems to "prosper" more than the true gospel, sadly Law embraces the fatally erroneous doctrine of justification by works. In his view, Christians need to practice the principles of piety, self-denial, generosity, meekness, simplicity of life and all the Bible, particularly the New Testament teaches, the best they can in order to be saved that sounds all too familiarly popish. What he mostly brings up from the Bible is the wonderful teachings of Christ. There is no mention of poverty of spirit, dependence on God's grace to live a sanctified life or to desire to live for him to begin with, let alone the cross, justification by faith, sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, and perseverance of the saints.

Well, the immediate questions that arise are of course, aren't Christians saved already, and that they are saved by grace on the basis of the finished atoning death and resurrection of Christ on the cross, and not by works? How does one know that he has done his best? What is the standard? Whose standard is it to use to determine whether one has done his best, man's or God's? If it is man's standard, which one? The Pope's? How can we be so sure if it is his standard to be used, not someone else's? If it is God's, where is it in the Bible that says God commands us to do the best we can and not rely on him for everything without excluding our responsibilities? Where is it in the Bible that God's standard says we are saved as long as we do the best we can? This is unquestionably deadly because in the end, it points to the perfectionist demand of the law where no one can meet, which is warned against by the Apostle Paul in his epistles, particularly to the Romans and Galatians. The meat of what Law talks about is all about doing and there is no mention of child-like dependence and trusting on God's grace in Christ through the Holy Spirit to enable us to follow what Law, in some cases, biblically and exquisitely exhorts to embrace and practice. To properly describe what Law offers here is a mixture of rich food and poison. The rich food is his biblical heart-piercing warnings, rebukes, reflections, illustrations and encouragements, specifically about prayer, fasting, simplicity, modesty, generosity, humility and self-denial that I must admit are too good, too important, and too bitter-sweet, eye-opening of an exposure and remedy to my own weaknesses to be overlooked as well as too precious to be neglected in practice. The poison is his constant insistence of justification by works. For the fullest benefit to be reaped, enjoy the rich food. Let it purify our souls and reform our lives, but spit the poison out. Instead, embrace and enjoy the even richer food of justification in Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone, and to the glory of God alone for these are the fountain that enables all true piety.

This is possibly one of the best derm book for student/resident. It's clear, concise, & well organize. Enjoy this book much better than Fitzpatrick. I especially love the appendix that include differential diagnoses per body region.

Excellent book, good pictures. I like the grouping by body part and specific classifications of dermatologic disorders.

Fantastic book, I absolutely love it. Lots of nice pictures,the book was much better than I had expected - a great buy!

The pictures were excellent, each disease also had a differential and there were small bonuses regarding pediatric patients. Book is well organized and easy to read. Perfect for a med student, and even for residents

This is an excellent book! I'm using it in NP school. It provides a 1-2 page explanation of the skin disorder along with pictures.
thanks