Software Books

The best book you can ever get in General surgery. If you really want to enjoy surgery while you are reading, get Greenfield's. The sub specialty sections are awesome as well, you don't have to look elsewhere when you get this book.

i found this book the best surgical book covering
basic scince,general surgucal and subspescility topics including
anatomy,pathophysiology of surgical dieases and managment in details.

I came across this book back in early 2002, and since my best friend had the Sabiston and we were on a budget, i bought this one. This is deffinetly the best and the most complete book i could have bought on general surgery. It takes you from anatomy trough physiology in each pathology you read upon. Would recomend it to anybody, either finishing medschool, or starting your residency in General Surgery.

i'd rate in terms of comprehensibility &modern thinking greenfield>sabiston>schwartz

I happened to pass through this most wounderful book by mistake, but when I read through it,Ii felt really sorry for not depending on it as an additional but essential referrence during my college and postgraduate years, the chapters are well organized and deeply written easily read, the illustrations are very clear and informative, although I might suggest a second more expanded chapter on infections being one of the most serious sergical enemies infections. ..I really want to thank the editors and contributors for the enormous effort they have put here and all the knowledge I found in this great book.

This is by far the best SAS book I own (and I have a whole shelf full). I have made use of it repeatedly. The examples are excellent. This is definitely a methods book, not a theory book, but the presentation of the statistical concepts is clear and easy to follow and apply.

If you have data that fit the general category "time to event," and are not suitably analyzed by repeated measures ANOVA, you are probably looking at doing a survival analysis (also known by several other names). If you are working largely on your own, and you learn best by doing, you cannot--as far as I know--do better than Allison's book. Of course it all but locks you into using SAS for analyses, but his explanations of proportional hazards and other models are the best I've found among a dozen textbooks and stats package manuals (some of which made sense only after reading Allison). What makes this book so good is that it will have you running your analyses in just hours. The examples are superb take-off points. I was not a SAS user before reading the book and therefore took a little extra time to figure out dataset manipulations and such in SAS, but that was minor effort compared to the rewards of having Allison's clearly written book as a guide. The price of this book represents only a fraction of its value.

This book is well-written, well-organized, and very practical. I found it invaluable in conducting my research. My only recommendation for the author for his next edition is to include a chapter on dealing with correlated event times, like time-to-promotion and time-to-quiting in his policemen example (pg 249).

I've used a number of this author's books and they all share in common lucidity, utility, and rigor. This book makes it easy to grasp complex ideas, provides comprehensible examples, gives sample SAS code so that implementing the methods is as straightforward as possible. Plus, it is clear that the author is a subtle and first-rate methodologist, who innovates in this area as well as teaches it.

So far, this book has been a useful reference for survival analysis. It is clearly written and the xplanatins are understandable and helpful. It would be nice to have a newer edition that addresses changes in later versions of SAS.

Computers have been a part of our schools for about two decades now. Many people believe that computers are the solution to the problems of American education; however, it is pretty clear that they have not been the magic bullet many thought they'd be. The questions then arises: why? Why haven't computers fulfilled the promise they seemed to have in their early days?

In The Technology Fix, William Pflaum tries to answer the question. Taking a sabbatical, he travels the country and visits a number of schools, trying to get a sense of the impact computers are actually having. This book is mainly a report of the visits he made and the different ways he sees computers being used (or, more than likely, not being used) in the classroom. He then gives some of his interpretations of what this means and suggestions for how technology might be used better.

What impact this book has it has through its observations on what is actually happening in schools. As a consultant for schools on technology, I have seen many of the same things Mr. Pflaum has: computers sitting unused, resources managed inappropriately, focus on computer bells and whistles over curriculum content, etc. I agree whole-heartedly that computers have yet to fulfill their promise and I find Mr. Pflaum's categorization of implementation on the basis of commitment and focus to be very revealing. On the other hand, despite the depression I feel sometimes after visiting a school where technology, if it is being used at all, is being used poorly, I maintain my belief that technology is the future and we can use it more effectively. Mr. Pflaum seems more pessimistic.

Within his descriptions of what he's seen in schools, Mr. Pflaum has some useful insights; however, when he tries to build these into universals at the end of the book, he is less powerful. Not that his suggestions are necessarily lacking merit. Instead, some are so obvious as to not be worth the effort of a book-length study. Use computers for assessment? I would think so. Use computers to align standards, instruction and assessment? Of course. Coordinate computer skills across grade levels? I hope so.

This is not to say that schools are actually doing these things. Many aren't. But he's pointing towards obvious best practices here that just need to be implemented. His one controversial suggestion--that computers be target towards those that can use them most as opposed to spreading the wealth equally--is practical but also a sign of his pessimism. We aren't committed enough to do what we should so we should at least do what we can.

In his book, Mr. Pflaum has provided valuable insights into what is actually going on in schools today per their use of technology. This alone makes the book valuable. Though his suggestions for improvement are a bit short-sighted, they have their place and could open the eyes of some administrators and teachers. Still, his bleak view clouds the possible bright future and growing impact technology could have if we are willing to have commitment and focus. I hope readers won't let his attitude bring them down.

For anyone who has grappled with the question of why technology hasn't lived up to its promise in schools, this book is a must-read. Pfaum's observations are fresh and candid, and he examines the question of the "technology fix" of schools without an axe to grind or pre-formed conclusions. This very readable book will ring true to those who have spent time in classrooms and have wondered why technology has not had a greater impact on improving student achievement.

This is a wise and thought-full book. Unlike many books about technology in education that are often too theoretical, too empirical, too uninformed, or too polemical, this book is anchored in real classrooms. Rather than starting with a breathless vision of the future or a cranky rant about the imagined glories of the past, Bill Pflaum begins with what is happening in classrooms right now. He gathers his data first hand - not from surveys, focus groups, or aggregated data but from a year-long personal journey through classrooms all across the country. His careful, thoughtful (and often entertaining) observations are neither completely unexpected, nor completely predictable - instead they explode with authenticity. From such a solid foundation, both personal and universal, he reflects carefully on what is working and what is not working - and offers thoughtful suggestions for a better future that is both reachable, and worth reaching. I liked reading this book.

This book is a must read for decision makers at every level.

Data rules in the age of standards. This is the only book that I have read that discusses educational technology with a genuinely human voice. Pflaum takes a refreshing welcome approach to the task of thoughtfully examining the use of technology in America's schools. Instead of recycling mountains of data from research studies, he visited classrooms across the country and talked to students, teachers, principals, and technology co-coordinators who are on the frontline of the problem.

For educators, like myself, who deal daily with the problems and the blessings of technology in the schools, the book is raw opportunity to view the problem outside of the boundaries of their state and local district.

Pflaum ends his book with some clear, realistic guides for future directions, but the real value of the book is in its rich, constantly thought-provoking portrayal of things as they are now.

Too many books are either all for technology in schools or completely against it. Neither kind of book is very useful for teachers who are trying to figure out how to use technology intelligently in their classrooms.

This author takes a walk through 20 or so schools, and describes what he observes with the insight of a seasoned educator. He does a very good job of spotlighting the intelligent uses of technology, and an equally good job of uncovering the dreary, wasteful uses. I found the book is a wonderful way to hone my own thinking.

Moreover, the book is a fast read, and very engaging. Pflaum writes with an uncommon honesty and humanness, and he has that wonderful ability to draw pictures in your mind. I'd recommend it to both teachers and parents who have input in the way schools are run.

This is a well written book, code is easy to download, and a number of topics. All in all though, the writing is clear and easily understood so it's well worth the money...

Text mining is one of the most exciting subjects of the web, and too few books are dealing with it. This one is one of them, and it gives quite a few examples of text mining applications, like spam filters or search engine ranking algorithms. The style is easy to follow, and the concepts easy to understand given some maths background.

However, I expected more details, and a richer content overall, thus the four stars. This is still a good book.

I am a Java web/search programmer who wanted to "get into" text mining. I found this book an excellent resource for this. Text Mining is a field in which active research is still going on, and other Text Mining books I have looked at reflect this - the authors expect you to have a certain degree of mathematical background to understand what they are saying. This book explains briefly the math behind each of the approaches, but it focuses more on the algorithms that result from the math, so it is easier to read.

Of course, a side effect of this is that the approaches described are not necessarily the state of the art for solving any given problem, but once you get the basic approach to solving a problem, it is relatively easy to find and understand the documentation on the web for the more advanced approaches, since you now know what you are looking for and how it differs from your basic solution.

The book does have a (fairly long) chapter where it covers the math background necessary to get started with Text Mining. If you understand the stuff in there, you will actually be able to think up solutions to text mining problems that are unique to your own situation.

The algorithms in the book are in pseudo-code, but the book comes with a CD (or download from the author's sourceforge project textmine.sf.net) where you can see working Perl code.

Overall, I think this is one of the most useful books that I have purchased in a while. It should appeal most to programmer types who have programmed in their language(s) of choice for a while in areas other than text mining, wants to get into text mining, and doesn't want to spend a lot of time relearning high school and college math before starting off.

Software developers learn how to mine information on the Web and turn it into valuable data; but developers need to understand how data mining works. For a programmer's application-oriented review, Text Mining Application Programming is the item of choice: it reviews text data, how it's found, and how search engines locate and gather it. Next, it teaches how to build spiders to crawl the Web, how to use the information, and how to monitoring it. Perl developers will find its Perl-based code useful, but it's not necessary to know Perl to run the software herein. An excellent guide to mining the Net.

There is an old expression that half of knowing anything is knowing where to find it. And there is little more frustrating to be looking at 'My Computer' trying to find what you know you have stored in a file somewhere. Well, perhaps just as frustrating is to go to one of the search engines and try to find something that you know is there but just don't know the proper words to find it.

In this book Dr. Konchady talks about how to go find data that is in text form on your system, on your network or out on the web somewhere. It talks about search engines, but also about other techniques that can be used only by programming.

The CD that comes with the book contains several Perl software snippets that help to find named entities, parts of speech, phrases and gives a summary of text documents. This area includes developing web crawlers that can be adapted by individual users to go out and find specialized information. It further contains an Open Source software package called Text Mine that is designed for mining operations. In addition it has utilities to build and enhance Text Mine and utilities to build and manage MySQL database tables. This is an excellent book on everything from the basic hints and types through some of the mathematics that underlies text mining.

His section on the nature of an English language Question and Answer system is the best I've ever seen.

I've found this book to be a terrific resource. It's comprehensive, practical and approachable. Kathy and Catherine take you through a wide variety of usability methods, explaining why and when to use each one. Highly recommended.

This is, in my opinion, one of the best books on usability ever written.

I originally read it when I had the opportunity to interview for an internship with one of the authors. Although the internship didn't materialize, I still feel that I have spent many late nights in focus groups and requirements gathering sessions with the authors, through the comprehensive and crisp detail of this book.

My big gripe about many usability books is that they often consist of overgeneralized research-based claims presented as broad truths rather than the personal opinions that they are (e.g. Nielsen). Other usability books don't even attempt to ground their knowledge claims in scientific or other substantive scholarship (e.g. Kuniavsky).

Baxter and Courage avoid both of these perils. What makes this book most valuable to me is that it's grounded not only in sound theory and research, but also in the extensive experience of the authors -- and the authors present a wealth of background to enable you to independently assess the rigor of their arguments. You don't have to turn off your brain and take their word for it.

I have relied on this book in my later work as a usability researcher, and have always recommended it to our consulting clients interested in better understanding how qualitative user research works. It's also a worthwhile introduction to give insight into what we do as researchers -- it's accessible without being oversimplified, and intellectually rigorous without being off-putting.

Finally, the visual communication used throughout the book is exemplary, making the book easy on the eyes and especially scannable -- a big help in those late nights preparing for a usability session.

Courage and Baxter did an amazing job writing this book, thank you! I really liked the fact that this book is based on years of realworld experiences from commerial high technology company.
They have very good examples from real projects - which is a plus. Like the book said, it's very practical! You can use it out of the box from day 1. As a product design professional with years of experience in this field, book confirmed some of the techniques and approaches that I have been using (but I couldn't share it due to commerical reasons). It also covered topics that I wasn't very familiar with. I especially enjoyed reading the section on group task analysis.

Book is organized very well, high quality paper, with great visual examples and photos!

I would also highly recommend this book for product managers, so hopefully they can write better requirements and specifications.

Courage and Baxter have assembled an extremely thorough, practical, and readable guide to a diverse array of user requirements methods available to the usability and design professional. "Understanding Your Users" will surely be an valuable addition to your bookshelf, but don't be surprised if it spends more time in your hands than on the shelf.

Baxter and Courage provide a rich, accessible toolbox of diverse yet interrelated usability methods that will enable a designer (UI, UE, IA, etc.) to understand user goals, values, and purposes. As a design professional without a human factors background I find this incredibly useful at the office! A handy reference guide with case studies and sample projects, there is also an undercurrent of strategic thought in terms of how to approach and intepret usability methods, thus complementing the designer's iterative art. This book should also benefit design students and educators, who may be seeking a robust compilation of methods that speaks to the "real world" of adroitly performing usability to advance a design's evolution.

Reader would learn a lot about Unicode and many unique problem of different scripts. For example, it is not one glyph for traditional "character" nor one code for one traditional "character". I also recommend readers also read source code of pango library and manual of freetype library.

This book is an outstanding companion volume to the Unicode standard. In fact, if you had to pick one, you'd quite possibly be better off owning this book INSTEAD of the standard. The author display an impressive knowledge of the world's writing systems and of the inner workings of the Unicode standardization process.

Part I of this book starts with the history of character encoding standards, from Morse code to today. It then presents a thorough review of the Unicode architecture and associated standards. The information presented was mostly excellent, although I found the section describing SCSU a little bit too sketchy (and the actual code in part III not entirely satisfactory to fill in the gaps).

Part II gives an overview of the various writing systems and character ranges represented in Unicode. Even for a nontechnical audience, this part would be fascinating with all the typographical and historical trivia it presents.

Part III discusses various algorithms applicable to text processing in a Unicode context. I must admit that I found this part a bit of a letdown. Many of the algoritms are only sketched out because discussing them in detail would be beyond the scope of the book. Quite possibly, the pages dedicated to these algorithms would have been better spent presenting examples of code using the various existing APIs for handling Unicode (Java, ICU, Perl, Windows, MacOS X).

This does not take away from the fact that this is a great book that any programmer interested in Unicode should own.

The book has three main parts:

(1) Unicode in essence: an architectural overview of the Unicode standard (six chapters) where you also get bits of terminology and history.

(2) Unicode in depth: A guided tour of the character repertoire (six chapters) where you get a lot about writing systems that can be represented in Unicode, and less about the Unicode characters.

(3) Unicode in action: implementing and using the Unicode standard (five chapters) where you get information aimed at computer programmers that wish to implement parts of the standard or write applications dealing with multilingual text.

Though this book is very long (~800 pages) it is still shorter and a lot more clear than the Unicode standard itself (over 1000 pages).

Code examples are in Java but they are not ment to be complete solutions and so there is no accompanying website or a CD.

Professional programmers are the target audience of this book. The reader is faced with many topics in linguistics, history and data structures. Readers with computer science background would probably appreciate how classic traditional algorithms were adapted and how data structures are used in character sets with a significantly larger number of character than 256.

The author of the book states that the book is about "representing written language in a computer", which may be misleading to some readers. The book is about the Unicode standard. Obviously, there are many other ways to represent written language other than the methods described in the book. As chapter 2 teaches... There are always more ways (sometimes better ways) to represent your data.

Part 2 of the book will not cover every writing system of the world. A better book for that would be "The world's writing systems".

Part3 is probably the most interesting and useful part for programmers (though the first part is important, in my opinion to those who want to UNDERSTAND Unicode).
You can learn about a lot of things and skip many too (depending on your interest and need). I believe that most readers will skip most of the topics.

This is not a book that is read lightly, but it is hellovalot easier and more fun to read than the Unicode standard itself. It appears that once you read this book and get what you want from it, you will end up going to read the Unicode standard only to see updates, hopefully, not for clarifications.

I am dealing with Natural Language Processing and being a Hebrew speaker I also have a lot of text in Hebrew (almost all the time it is Hebrew with other languages too, e.g. documents that contain Hebrew with some English). This book helps understand the difficulties, the current implementations and give you a solid ground to start thinking how you can make things better. Current infrastructure for Hebrew is either poor or not perfect and in most cases the better solutions are proprietary. There seems to be always problems representing 'plain' text in more than one language without stepping into the trap of the soup of different ways to do it. Unicode is one way to do it (arguably, not the best, yet it is alive and growing) I hope this book can help more people understand what they are up against, clear the fog and help people do better implementations.

I find this book extremely useful!

This is almost three books in one. The first part provides a very good introduction to Unicode in general. The middle is really useful for all sorts of people, from linguists to content authors who want to understand the scripts encompassed by Unicode. And the last part is extremely helpful for programmers who want to understand how to implement many text processing techniques using Unicode.

Throughout, Rich's style is easy and enjoyable to read, and yet quickly gets to a wealth of useful information.

Great job! Highly recommended.

Unicode Demystified is a great manual and a good read. It earns a place on the bookshelf of programmers who deal with modern text processing, which is based on the Unicode standard. It is a great resource for anyone involved in software internationalization and localization.

Gillam provides a lot of useful details, history and explanations for the structure of the character set, and shows how to use it. The book is a companion to the print and online resources of the Unicode standard itself, and provides the glue to many of the pieces, the how-to's and basic data structures.

For example, the Unicode encodings UTF-8/16/32 (and BOM) are explained very well, bidirectional text is discussed with a lot of insight, and the family of Indic scripts with their special features is presented with examples for how to encode Indic text.

The book is excellent. I used it and understood it very easily. I would recommend it for anyone desiring to learn Microsoft Access.

Enjoyed using this book a lot! I would reccomend this book to all of my friends and neighbors.

Great book for a novice or one with more experience. Answered many of my questions quickly and easily. Highly recommended.

Great book for MS Access XP. Well written.

Well written with excellent illustrations. Easy to follow and excellent for anyone learning Access.

Great book for those who want to see a brief explanation or review of all the math involved in vector calculus. I bought the book to gain insight into the vector calculus integral theorems (Green's, Stoke's & Gauss'/Divergence). Though the book culminates in these theorems, what I found particularly helpful was a review of the the multivariable concepts (which in most books on vector calculus is usually used without much commentary)which comprise 6 of the 10 programs (chapters). In particular, the ubiquitous multivariable differential:
(df=[part.f/part.x]dx + [part.f/part.y]dy + [part.f/part.z]dz)


I also like the balance it strikes being not as verbose as a text but not assuming the material is familiar to the reader. The concepts are presented in a visual manner, the diagrams and examples are well thought out and helpful. It is ideal for self study with many exaples worked out and many exercises with an answer key.

Though it did not suit my original purpose, of providing a deeper understang of the vector calculus integral theroems, I feel much better prepared to find a text that will.

Overall a very good text to learn the basic concepts of multivariable calculus and the mechanics of the vector integral theorems.

In a sentence or two: this is a pedagogically sound and well motivated work. It offers a lot of well paced and well guided learning to the student looking to further their skills in vector analysis. It is VERY good. How can step-by-step instruction be bad?

How it teaches, or the algorithm is:
* provide learning objectives
* provide a motivating, easy to relate to reality example
* generate theory based on the example in a methodical and well explained manner and in BITE-SIZED pieces
* provide some fully worked examples
* provide the student with some questions
* provide fully worked answers to the aforementioned examples after the questions
* make the questions harder
* generalize the results
* provide questions with fully worked solutions using generalized results
* provide end of chapter quiz type questions with solutions
* repeat for each chapter!

This is a book that explains and continually reinforces your learning. The questions are probing with answers provided. This book will not leave you floundering or wondering how they got from one place to another. These guys really know (Dexter Booth)/ knew (K.A. Stroud) how to teach mathematics: take the student from what they know to what you want them to know in clear, manageable steps, providing guidance where required. I really like this book because of that. And it is reasonably rigorous to boot (but nowhere near as terse as a Springer book).

Audience: gifted high school student (having done some calculus) or 1-2nd year physics, mathematics, engineering student. I wish I had had this book when I did vector calculus. Also, take a look at Div, Grad, Curl, and All That: An Informal Text on Vector Calculus, Fourth Edition (Paperback) by H. M. Schey (ISBN 0393925161) for another seriously good book on this topic.

Another book book by the same authors, Stroud and Booth is also worth casting your eye over is: Differential Equations (ISBN: 083113187X). Chances are if you're doing vector analysis then DE's can't be too far away. And this is the second best value DE book I have seen (you can't beat Tenenbaum and Pollard's: Ordinary Differential Equations ISBN: 0486649407 , for value and content)

So in summary Vector Analysis represents excellent value with a quality teaching program and pedagogy and perfect for any student with the will to learn Vector Analysis (given some mathematical ability of course). And Autodidacts will really prosper with it!

While it may not have the content of those $120 books, but where's the point if you can't get a grip on the basics? This book will really value add to that $120 wonder by ensuring you do get the basics and well and thereby are in a better position to transition into the more arcane depths of that $120 hefty. Definitely two thumbs up!

Potential bias first: I teach mathematics and physics and have an engineering degree so my mathematic know-how is apparently well above average. This may color this review.

I have used this book as revision material after finishing my degree six years ago. I have found it really easy to read and the material is very well presented. I would recommend the book to undergradutes and anyone who is trying to understand how to use vector analysis without the proofs. There are plenty of worked examples to help you through the book.

This book is written in the classic Dexter and Booth style - very similar to their immensely popular Engineering Mathematics series textbooks.
It is great for brushing up on forgottenn skills and solution methods.
On the other hand, don't expect any rigorous proofs or extensive references. As I mentioned in the title, this is a workbook NOT a textbook.
Nevertheless, I used this book as a refresher for a Turbomachinery grad course and it was highly useful. Its main merits lie in the fact that everything is "user - intuitive" and you can build up from scratch without almost any previous knowledge on the subject (assuming that you are familiar with basic college-level calculus). It is not very advanced and only focuses on the main techniques and pathways for solutions. No specific or special cases here.
Although, you WILL learn and learn fast with this book.Higly reccomended for the applied science student or for brushing up on forgotten math skills.

I am a practicing system engineer in the aerospace industry and have several vector analysis books on my shelf. Mathematical modeling in the core skill of my discipline and theoretical mathematics is my passion. As such I spend a great deal of time going line by line though the proofs in my theoretical books, but I also have to pay the bills by producing product in the form of mathematical models of physical realizations. As such Stroud's book helps me to both produce better product in career and to validate and strengthen my understanding of my theoretical readings.

I would highly recommend this book as a companion book to anyone trying to learn vector analysis for the first time, reviewing the material, or expanding their understanding of applied vector analysis. The book has well written, well organized, and would be an excellent addition to anyone's bookshelf.

This book is awesome. It is exactly what I have been looking for.

I have been coding in VB.Net for a couple years now and I'm comfortable with the standard features of VB.Net and Visual Studio.Net. I needed a book that would take my skills to the next level and help me take full advantage of the more powerful capabilites of the .Net programming environment.

Make no mistake, this is not a beginner's book. It does not rehash the same old instructions on how to do the basics. What it does, and does very well, is take you straight into the advanced topics of interfaces, delegates, reflection, attributes, multithreading, COM Interop, remoting, custom components, smart clients, web services, and much more. I can see how this information will help me build awesome applications that I would not have otherwise been able to do.

Paul Kimmel's writing style is concise yet friendly. The examples truly help clarify the lesson at hand. The size of the book is small enough, 700 pages, that you can take your time to understand the material and still expect to complete the book in a reasonable amount of time.

I know that I will be writing and delivering better software as a result of reading this book. It is exactly what I was looking for in a "Level 2" book. I don't know if there is a "Level 3" book or not, but I can only hope that if there isn't one, that Paul Kimmel is in the processing of writing it.

This book covers a grab bag of topics around the .NET platform. Topics range in obscurity from reflection (which it starts with) to just above basic, using ADO.NET with stored procedures. Threading, which is always a difficult topic to explain, was covered in a well written fashion, but lacked illustrations, which I think would have brought a lot of clarity to the subject. Other topics were given some illustrations, but overall the book used screenshots for most of the graphics. Remoting was another area that could have used illustrations.

Overall well written, but could have been better organized and illustrated. Definitely worth a look over if you find that it covers topics of interest.

To start this book review I can only say one thing ... this book is AWESOME! I actually sat
down and read the whole book in just over a week. I couldn't put it down. The way Mr. Kimmel
writes will keep your attention GLUED to each page as you read and learn about Visual Basic
.NET programming advanced topics. His sense of humor comes shining through in his examples and
writing. It is a book that I could just not put down. I'd come home from work, grab a bite to
eat and it was off to the reading room for me. I spent many a night this past week staying up
late because I didn't want to close the book for another night.

Mr. Kimmel did what a lot of books have tried to do, but in my opinion have come up short on
all too many occasions. He started out in Chapter 1 explaining the differences between Visual
Basic 6.0 and the new, improved Visual Basic .NET programming languages. He drilled down into
the changes more than any other book I have read and made it so easy to understand the
differences. This is also something that he did throughout the text. This was to give the
reader a look back at the Visual Basic 6.0 language and then explain how it works now in the
.NET world. That is something that many books have tried to do, but in my opinion, Mr. Kimmel
NAILED the explanations to the barn door. He made is so easy to understand the VB.NET language
now and the advanced features that are available to us as developers.

I have spent the past three years teaching at the Community College of Aurora as an Adjunct
Instructor in the Computer Sciences Division. I have had the opportunity to teach Visual Basic
6.0, Advanced Visual Basic 6.0, and Java programming languages. I have read and used many
different textbooks in my tenure. Going forward, I'm going to be telling my Visual Basic .NET
programming class students that this is the book they need to read after they have finished
their Advanced VB.NET book. The textbooks that are available for instructors are all fine, but
I believe that Mr. Kimmel's book will be a much higher benefit to my students who are serious
about learning VB.NET and the power that it now has. I have already contacted some of my
previous students who are Visual Basic .NET developers and have advised them to get their own
copy of this book.

My favorite chapters are 10 & 11, ADO.NET and Advanced ADO.NET. In my years of developing
projects I have done A LOT of database programming, as most of us have. I found that ADO.NET
is a subject that has MANY, MANY different books written about it. Most are very intricate and
very technical, which is good for some people. For the rest of the folks out there, it's best
to get a GOOD grounding in the basics before moving on to the heavy technical stuff. I believe
that Mr. Kimmel found the secret of how to give us that understanding of ADO.NET that we can
now go forth and build upon.

That is how I feel about the entire book. There is enough technical expertise to keep the hard
core developers interested, but at the same time there is a good balance of information for
folks who are just stepping out of a college level advanced VB.NET course who are looking for
a good reference book to help them get a better understanding of VB.NET. Mr. Kimmel covers
Visual Basic .NET like no other author I have found yet. Very concise information is shared in
the pages of his book. There is no "fluff" that you find in some books. No, not in this book.
He drills into Visual Basic .NET like no other author that I've read thus far. I feel very
enriched by having had the opportunity to read this book and plan on having this located on my
bookshelf within EASY reach while I'm developing projects.

I feel fortunate in that I have been extended a hand by what I believe to be that of a
gentleman who is a person I consider to be extremely knowledgeable in both the technologies
and helping others understand the technologies. I received an e-mail from Mr. Kimmel just a
short time after sending a thank you note to the publisher's representative who donated this
book to the Denver Visual Studio User Group, Denver, Colorado, where I selected this book for
a review. I was shocked when I opened my e-mail and I saw the address being Mr. Kimmel's. When
I opened the e-mail what I found was a gentleman who can only be described as an individual
that I hope to keep in contact for years to come. He had a genuine interest in me as a person
and a developer. We have shared a few e-mails since then and I sincerely hope that he will
consider revising his book and writing a 2nd Edition for Visual Basic 2005. I know that there
are going to be many upgrades, changes, additions, subtractions, etc. that are accomplished by
Microsoft and I would really appreciate it if Mr. Kimmel could be the one to lead the charge
as the new technologies are released. He has such a tremendous understanding of the
technologies and how to put them into words that makes it easier for us developers to
understand and then use the knowledge that he shares with us to help build our foundation on
which we build our empires of knowledge.

Thank you to Mr. Paul Kimmel for writing such a true work of art for those of us who are mere
students of Visual Basic .NET and who seek the wisdom of the Masters! I truly believe that
this book could be considered a book written by a Master of Visual Basic for the Ages!

As a professional programmer with almost 2 years experience with the .NET framework, this book is a breath of fresh air. Finally, a book on .NET that goes beyond the basics and shows some of the more advanced and interesting capabilities of the framework.

Highlights for me include a discussion on value and reference types, delegates for multithreading, reflection, attributes, COM interop, remoting, custom components (including UITypeEditor) and implementing Extender Provider controls (like the ToolTip control).

I discovered many details of the framework that had eluded me. For example, did you know that all value types inherit from the ValueType class? how to add custom properties to all controls on a form? or how to use COM interop to provide a smooth path for the migration of VB6 application to .NET?

On the down side, the chapters dealing with the subject of ADO.NET, which is itself in need of a few advanced books, only describe the more basics aspects of the technology. Also, there is no chapter on XML.

Overall though, Kimmel does an excellent job of putting together a wealth of advanced subjects in a compact package.

There are endless books for beginners trying to learn .NET. This book is for people yearning for more. His discussing on Asynchronous operations is worth the price of the book alone. So is his discussion on No touch deployment. If you want to take your VB.NET knowledge up a level, this is the book for you.

This is one of my favorite VC++ books. It has great examples and easy to follow explanations of the subject being covered. I have really learned from this book. Excellent.

The book is full of skills that helps programmers solve common problems when programming in MFC. Some problems exist: I found one "How-to" appeared twice in different parts of the book. Also, some programs on "Toolbars and Status Bars" have bugs. For example, the "ProgressMeter" application should derive CMeterBar from CStatusBar instead of CStatusBarCtrl. These are minor problems that can be easily corrected - I hope the authors have already done that. Besides all these problems, I still think this is a very good book on MFC programming. It prevents you from reinventing the wheel (many times).

If you have to code in MFC you need this book in addition to the Microsoft documentation and at least one other VC++ book. Scott's book uncovers techniques that are well hidden in the MFC documentation and not covered in other books but necessary in real applications. Usually if I am trying to do something slightly different from the standard look I find the answer in Scott's book or it gives me enough hints to figure out a solution. Many are not covered in the other VC++ books. Some important examples show how to change some properties in forms using MFC that are simple to change in VB but would be almost impossible to find in the MFC documentation or figure out by yourself.

An amazing amount of topics covered. Very thorough, and concise. No fluff. I constantly refering to it. One bad point: The index is not tabulated correctly, it can be difficult to find subjects. Overall the best book on Visual C++ I've seen yet.

Almost all of the programming books I have ever bought that are specific to a particular language product are worthless. They spend 550 of 600 pages describing the product's menu options and toolbar buttons then 40 pages of trivial worthless sample programs and 10 pages of index. This is not one of those books.

This book is 650 pages of pertinent and valuable examples and I have used it many times to help me solve many real world problems. I specifically liked that fact that it is the first book I have ever read that described the WM_GETMINMAXINFO message as a method of making CFormView based applications look the way they should. For the record, every other programming book I have that relates to MFC in any way gives naive CFormView examples that look stupid when running and behave stupidly when used.