Software Books

This one is the best book i've had so far because it's just as the title says. hands on training books are perfect for learning

As an educator who teaches Digital Imaging on the college level, I have become familiar with hundreds of training texts through the years. This book is excellent in that, unlike so many others, it starts at the beginning. I am not entirely sure why training books and digital courses so often pick up somewhere near the middle when we are all trying to encourage others to surrender to the digital age.

After completing 3 books on Adobe After Effects 7, I think I have a fairly good view of the types of instruction books that are available. "Classroom in a Book" by Adobe, this one by Fahs & Weinman, and "Creative After Effects 7" by Taylor.
My earlier rating of "Classroom in a Book" should probably have been at least 4 stars since it's the best of the 3 (for beginners) that I've read.
This one by Fahs & Weinman is straight forward and easy to follow, but isn't quite detailed enough in comparison to the "Classroom" book.
The book by Taylor mentioned above is so filled with typos that it's virtually unreadable and that's why I rated it poor and is definitely the worst of these 3.
After Effects is a very complicated video software effects program and has a steep learning curve on par with the still image processing program Photoshop. The more time you spend with it and the more instruction you can get, the better.

when you are done with this book, wade into the massive haphazard stew that is the Meyers books. Start with this one though, it starts at the beginning, tells you what you need to know when you need to know it, breaks it down just right. AE is a fairly vast program, and it's easy to become overwhelmed and discouraged, so getting the right book can be the difference between sticking with it or not.

This book was great. Awesome review huh? Just kidding? I ahve watched quite a few tutorials, and read a great many books on how to design websites. None of them ever did more than barely touch on how to do it using Photoshop other than take a image, add words, make them links, now make rollover links, "wow doesn't that drop-shadow look great". Whatever they were all crap.
This book on the other hand takes you through several real-world applications, although they are ficticious sites. Anyway, the techniques you will be shown, and the subsequent workflow, along with the fact that the author explains to you why you are doing something before you think it necessary amke this book very easy to follow.
What I mean by this is you are laying out in photoshop, and all the while he is explaining how this will relate to dreamweaver later. It's not a book written with the premise of do as I say or you will be sorry later. It is written under the premise of make things easier on your self cause we are going to need this for when we use css to bring it into dreamweaver. The stage has already been set, and your mind is already working on the eventual task.
GREAT BOOK!!!!

This book covers Adobe CS3 in Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash..etc. Before I selected this book, I ever went to B&N and Borders so many times but just can't find ANY book with Firework CS3 (They may have Firework 8 from Macromedia). Anyway, the contents are well organized and printing quality is super. I have read more than 50% and followed the instructions step by step. Readers can download examples from their website.

So far I have read through the first two chapters with no knowledge of AS 3.0 or OOP (Object Oriented Programming), and this book has helped tremendously. Still working my through it but everything is pretty clear and to the point. Definitely suggest this to anyone with some previous AS2 knowledge trying to get updated to AS3 and OOP.

Wow. I just finished chapter 2 and am completely impressed with this book. Rarely do I care enough to write a review. Actually, this is my first review ever, for a book. I knew nothing about Photoshop, except for the common train of thought that Photoshop is an industry standard, is powerful, and is not "easy" to use.

This book is a big step-by-step tutorial on how to create a web-page mock-up (something that should be done before creating the actual web page). Mock-ups are analogous to designing a computer program before implementation begins.

For under $30, it's cheaper than taking a class and is a breeze to follow through.

Perhaps the most pertinent question answered by the book is what are the differences between Elements 2 and 3. If you are an existing E2 user, is there enough incentive to migrate to E3? Huss devotes considerable space to squarely address your concerns.Of the changes, the most useful is Photo Organizer. A huge improvement over File Browser, which is what E2 gave you. PO is well suited for collections of hundreds or thousands of photos. Many people who take photos regularly will run into the scaling constraints of File Browser. PO lets you attach metadata to a photo, in the form of keywords which you can choose as succinct descriptors of the photo. Then, later, if you search for a keyword, PO will return a set of thumbnails of the photos with that metadatum. Picking a thumbnail gives the original image. Very simple to use.If you know HTML, the metadata in PO maps to the tag that can be used in any HTML page.

Serious collectors should welcome PO. The only drawback is that it does not exist in the Mac version of E3; only in the Microsoft version. Huss speculates that Apple's iPhoto is too close in functionality for Adobe to economically develop a Mac version.

What a great book! What separates this book from all the others is the downloaded pictures that you work with as you make your way through the book. I kept the pictures in their chapter folders and put them in a folder called Elements 3: 50 Cool Ways. Then after practicing with them, when Adobe asked me if I wanted to save changes, I said no - so I could practice again and again. I must be slow because I have needed to practice them again. Thanks Dave, for a wonderful book. Will you be doing the same for Elements 4?

This book is not only a pleasure to read, it also was superbly reproduced and technically accurate (not all books are!). Dave Huss goes the extra mile to provide an excellent selection of real world (read: useful) tutorials that cover in detail how to retouch and correct common digital photography problems (color cast, wrinkle removal, panorama assembly, red eye, perspective correction). It also covers common challenges associated with managing digital photo libraries (album assembly, photo cataloging, image management). The photo projects are perfect for newcomers to digital photography (like me) and expose many of the features of Photoshop Elements I needed to get up to speed on fast. Well worth the investment.

This is the most user friendly book that I have ever held in my hands. The great thing about this book is that Dave works with you one on one by having you download the pictures that are the examples in the book! This way you work on the same picture step by step and you can see what your picture should look like through the edit process. This book is very FUN and INFORMATIONAL! Buy it you won't be sorry!!! And you will do things with this program that you didn't know you personally could do!!!

Adobe Camera Raw Studio Skills is a great resource for CS2 users. Each Chapter is written by an expert in that particular area. Yet each chapter is equally easy to read and follow. One of the bonuses of this book is that it integrates Adobe Camera Raw with Bridge and Photoshop, so there are tricks and instructions that incorporate all three to get your desired results.
Along with through instructions of all the Adobe Camera Raw tools, it covers workflow, HDR, blend modes, black and white conversions, advanced use of free transforms and a host of others.
The name suits it well-Studio Skills. After reading it, you may feel as if you do have your own studio!

Unbelievable what Charlotte K Lowrie managed to realize with in my opinion the best book on the subject.She brings together eleven of the best widely known top photographers who share their techniques & tips with you to achieve your skills;
This wonderful illustrated book is a MUST on your bookshelf!!
The layout is fantastic,the photos beautiful and the tutorials from each of the specialist tremendous.
Camera Raw is taking back the control that photographers had in the black-and-white darkroom and "Studio Skills" brings you in the darkroom of this eleven gurus.What pleased me especially is that in 348 pages I could deal with the know-how from these artists.From Workflow and image evaluation(section 1 page 4-61)to Image processing techniques(section 2 page 66-268)to end with Add finishing touches in ps(section 3 page 276-295)all you ever wanted to achieve is explained.An overview of each photogapher-contributor(including Charlotte Lowrie)is given at the beginning of the book with his/her speciality,clients,career and the techniques they demonstrate in this book referencing the page where you can find them.Thanks to the editor's permission you can search inside the book this is a great advantage to make a decision before buying this bestseller!
An handy format,glossy paper,great photograps and above all extremely useful techniques(look at the resume above what's on the back-flap)

The appendix A explains in detail Adobe Bridge(page307-316)Appendix B Getting to know Camera Raw (page 317-329)Appendix C all about updates and downloading Camera Raw plug-in update(page 331-332)Appendix d a variety of professinal organizations offer support a selection by category(page 333-336)
Finally the advantage is that you'll deal with several"visions"from the best professinals on the stage!!!!!
Charlotte we 're asking for more books on this high level.

Being a Raw enthusiast I have read many books and articles concerning post processing using the Adobe Camera Raw Converter.
Even though this book only uses Adobe Photoshop CS2 as the basic Raw converter there are gobs of information that will help guide you through the Camera Raw process from Raw capture to final printing. When and if you upgrade to CS3 the additions to the Raw Converter can be easily be integrated into your workflow.
This book is broken down into three major sections with chapters that provide step by step techniques by various professionals on How to use - Adobe Camera Raw. These major sections are: Workflow and Imaging Evaluation, Image Prtocessing Techniques and Add Finishing Touches in Photoshop.
The presentation used by the author is excellent and should be in my opinion,very helpful to anyone considering using the Adobe Camera Raw Converter. With that said, I highly recommend this book.

Adobe Camera Raw Studio Skills is a MUST for anyone using Adobe Photoshop. Charlotte Lowrie has assembled a host of great contributers, including herself, and has compiled a vast array of knowledge. The book is written in a very logical format, and covers just about everything you want or need to know about Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw. The appendices at the back of the book include information about Adobe Bridge, Camera Raw, How do download and install plug-ins for Camera Raw, and finally, websites for variety of professional organizations that can provide additional training and information. This book really does belong on any digital photographer's reference shelf.

This is definately the book to get to get up to speed with powerbuilder. I just picked up the advanced book in this series. by the way, newer versions covering powerbuilder versions thru 10.5 are available from the author/publisher, [...] And you won't have to pay more than the list price, which is what some used copies are listing for.

The intro book was excellent, so it was a no-brainer getting the advanced book. The advanced book provided excellent help for me as a new PowerBuilder user. As soon as you open the book, you're already learning plenty of tips that will help you later. Yes, this info is in PowerBuilder help, but here it's all in a nice, consise 'get-to-the-point' format. This book is used in the company's actual advanced class, so you also get a disk with exercises and solutions. The price may seem a little much for some, but for someone having to learn this quickly, which makes sense economically - 1)spend a couple of thousand in some 3 day 'quick' class or 2)spend a couple of hundred and get what you need without leaving your desk? This book is definitely worth it. The chapters on the datawindow report presentation styles (tabular, grid, etc) are excellent!

This book realy help me in construction of classes and objects using the PowerBuilder 7. It's desvending and show the secrets. If you want a way to mastering PowerBuilder, this is the right way.

If there was ever a book teaching Powerbuilder 7 advanced secrets then this is it. A must have for all developers of Powerbuilder. What you learn in this book is invaluable

Well, so Hillier's first book on SharePoint wasn't enough for some readers! Apparently, he found demand for explanations of broader, more advanced usages, that he furnishes here in this book.

Perhaps the more important of these are discussed in the second half of the book. Microsoft has developed several other intricate applications, independently of SharePoint. But consider how it integrated the various parts of its Office suite, so that you can easily go from Excel to PowerPoint, say. In similar wise, Hillier explains how SharePoint is compatible with Information Bridge Framework, Business Score Cards Accelerator, BizTalk Server 2004 and the Content Management Service. Granted, none of these is as successful and widespread as something like Excel. These packages are far more specialised and their usages might often involve some programming effort. Thus too, using SharePoint with them also necessitates programming.

Ok, there are parts where you might pass an XML data file to an application, where this file tells it much of what you want it to do. And the XML approach is declarative, not procedural, so it minimises your programming effort. But typically, there are places where you still need the latter.

My impression of what Hillier describes is that Microsoft is not done with further refining of this integration. There are simply too many low level programming steps to be currently dealt with. No fault of Hillier's, naturally. He's calling it as it is. But let us hope that Microsoft continues improving these products.

"Advanced Sharepoint Services Solutions" is the second book by Scott Hiller, on Sharepoint Technologies. The first one was about building basic web parts. This book is for developers who have good knowledge of Sharepoint technologies. It is also assumed that you have already built some web parts and also have good understanding of .NET development. If you are looking for basic Sharepoint stuff, refer to his other book "Microsoft Sharepoint Building Office 2003 Solutions".

The Advanced book is not a complete reference on Sharepoint technologies. Instead it contains 8 chapters, which covers widely different areas. There are few chapters which are not covered by other Sharepoint books. This book is good source for CAML, Information Bridge Framework, Business Scorecard Accelerator, Sharepoint and BizTalk Integration, and for Sharepoint and Content Management Server Integration.
Since these topics are usually not covered in regular Sharepoint books, it becomes good source for these topics.

The book has good amount of source code (in C#) along with the text and provides some great ideas for system integrations. But as I said before it is not a complete reference book, just some great solutions for customizing and integrating Sharepoint technologies.

Scot Hillier is the best SharePoint author - period.

For example: developers need to write web parts. Web parts are custom controls. Can't view a custom control at design/development time, right? Need to install it into SharePoint, run it, test. Right?

Wrong! Scott shows you how to design, develop, and debug at design-time. This little tidbit alone is worth the price of the book.

All of his books will help you become the best SharePoint developer out there.

Sharepoint is so confusing when you get into the backend and this book answered almost all of my questions. Best book I've found. You can tell the author spent a lot of time digging around in the guts of SP and was probably as frustrated as most of us are trying to figure out how to do the simplest of things. Small book, high price. WORTH IT.

This is a great book for anyone interested in modeling dynamic systems. The authors provide wonderful background theory as a basis for building computer simulations. The simple step-by-step instructions guide you through the process of creating your own simulations using StarLogo. This book is an interesting, easily understandable beginner's manual and comes with all the software you need. It's a great way to teach yourself or other people how to program a simulation. I love the turtles!

This book is a great guide to taking the somewhat difficult ideas explored in Mitchel Resnick's book "Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams" and implementing them with students. Adventures in modeling can be used alone but, for any teacher who wants to use this book in a computer class, it is helpful to read the other book first. The activities and challenges here are reasonable for students from college down though middle school. I know of one teacher who has even successfully used these activites with pre-teens.

The book is good overall but I felt they need to use more carefully thought out examples and not try to push an 'agenda'.
It is as if the author(s) are trying to make an issue over creation vs evolution. In the very beginning chapter, they make an invalid example by comparing evolution vs creation to central control vs decentralized systems. This is a quote from the book, "This tendency to assume centralized control, which we call the centralized mindset, makes it difficult for people to understand the workings of many phenomena in the world. The recurrent questioning of evolutionary theories is another example: When people see complex living systems in the world, they assume that someone or something must have explicitly designed them; instead, these livings systems are the products of millions of incremental changes over time."

This is a great book for people intereted in modeling systems behavior. The authors give an excellent background summary of the theory involved in StarLogo. The program given with the CD is easy to install and use. The book takes you step by step through thinking about and creating your own computer simulation in an easy to understand manner. There's lots of support for any technical difficulties you might have and good examples of what you can do with the program. I highly recommend it to everyone.

I have been using this book as a second reference in my Algorithm
Engineering class during the whole semester. I found it extremely useful for its nice structure, content and diversity of subjects treated, especially the ones in computational geometry such as Geometric Sweeping and Voronoi diagrams, for instance. I believe this book should be useful to any student taking algorithms class for its structureness, clearness, and completeness.

This is a great book overall, but I give it 4 stars as it lacks the mathematical explanations that I personally was looking for. I am graduate student in Computer Science and a E-Commerce Consultant by profession. This book is more detailed than the Sedweick (I can't spell his name) in the sense that it has some more of a mathematical approach. It lacks the level of explanation that the Sedweick book provided. It has some math, but overlooks some steps thus targeting someone with a pretty solid math background, not someone with sophomore level undergraduate math background.

Overall.. if you're a student taking an algorithms or advanced algorithms class (especially a graduate class), you might want to invest in this book.

I have studied both undergrad and grad algorithm courses from this book at KFUPM. For a beginner, the author provides a moderate level of mathematical analysis which helps in building a solid foundation, but avoids minor details that may obscure the overall grasp of the subject. The Exercise sets at the end of each chapter vary from easy to challenging....

The book represents a well written, consistent and easy to follow view on the area of algorithm analysis. It gives an excellent overview of various mathematical and computer science areas, including but not limited to combinatorial geometry, NP-problems, complexity theory, graph theory, algorithm analysis, dynamic programming and even computational geometry.

Most of the chapters are intended for a senior level undergraduate and graduate student, but some (such as part 4 devoted to complexity problems) are more suitable for "mature" audience and require some preliminary knowledge in the area.

I found chapters on sorting, data structures, recursion and functional programming well written and structured, and examples to be practical as well as informative.

Sections on amortized analysis, randomized algorithms, approximation algorithms and iteration improvement deal with current directions in the algorithmic research and provide an excellent overview of the "state-of-the-art" in these areas. I also enjoyed reading through the section on greedy algorithms (shortest path and minimum spanning tree problems).

Section on computational complexity and analysis of the relationship between complexity classes seems to be a bit complicated, those who are interested in this area should probably do some preliminary reading.

The last section on computational geometry (my area of expertise) and applications of Voronoi diagrams could be extended, but even in the current state it givs a pretty good idea of what computational geometry is all about.

Overall, I give to this book a "5 star" review and recommend it for anyone who is seriously interested in learning exactly how algorithm design and analysis work. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and can only wish that author would write more books like that in the future!

this is a okay book about mashups. I was hoping for more technical details, but a great start at conceptualizing mashups used by Amazon.com.

The book covers more than the Amazon APIs so I recommend it if you are interested in mashups in general. I'm very keen on JSON right now and was pleased to find that covered as well. I think the author is a very good programmer who has many clever ideas like using XSL to transform XML into JSON (although using Yahoo! Pipes is easier). I'd have to say that this is one of the few programming books I've read that presented some really ingenious solutions and creative project ideas. Most books just provide uninspiring "Hello World" examples.

If you want to build applications and mashups using the Amazon E-commerce and S3 APIs this book from Francis Shanahan is a great place to start. It begins with a good overview of the ECS services and then covers useful topics like XSLT, Ajax, JSON, and mobile. Good coverage of both the Amazon SOAP and REST APIs. Includes mashup examples using primarily Microsoft tools like C# that mix with Yahoo Maps, eBay, and YouTube.

One thing you'll get here but not in a lot of other comparable books are architecture diagrams for each project. This is particularly helpful for mashups where there's often lots of integration happening at multiple layers. The illustrations help solidly conceptualize what happens where.

If you want to learn the various ways in which you can use Amazon's Web Services, this is an excellent starting point. Shanahan goes beyond "mashups" in the strict Web 2.0 sense of the term; he looks at the various ways of supporting wireless devices, and the use of the S3 storage service. The only nits (so far - I'm still working through some of the material) are that he assumes the use of Microsoft tools, and he identifies the term "JSON" with one particular style of mashup using script retrieval. (JSON is a serialization scheme which can be used for many different use cases, including RESTful interactions.) But these are minor points; this is an excellent book - and a lot of fun, too.

The book was band new just like the seller said and arrived in a timely manner. I would buy from this seller again.

I used this book in my introductory level computer science course. I found this book to be an essential tool in my early undersanding of how computer works in general and more importantly how to develop working algorithms. This book is well designed and easy to read and easy to understand. This book comes with a CD ROM. I believe this is the key feature to this book. On the CD ROM there are emulators of various computer operations. (eg. Compiler tree breakdown, and many other emulators. An Excellent book!

Deckers gives you a concise tour of computer science. Not enough to turn you into a programmer, given the space limitations of the book. But he covers many key ideas in the field. Including Usenet, email, virtual communities [think Second Life], and the World Wide Web. Naturally, he has to explain HTML, as the graphical language of the Web. HTML is so simple that he essentially explains all its important points. Including the crucial hyperlink tag.

The book then segues naturally from HTML to XML. Where you can now write your own tags. Immensely flexible and popular.

It is only after this, that the book goes into the traditional topics of computer science. The explanations of what makes a programming language. He uses JavaScript as one example of such a language. So you learn about constructs like for loops, if-else and while statements.

The book is really dominated by the Web. The pedagogy stresses this.

This book is one of the two texts in FSU's COP 3502: "Introduction to Computer Science" course (a required course in their Computer Science degree). As the authors state in the preface, they "wanted to design a 'CS 0' course that was a true survey course." They did an excellent job. Basically, they start with the assumption that the reader has never turned on a computer in his life and take him through its history, how to use it, what programming is about, and how the hardware works. They even teach a bit of HTML and JavaScript. There's very little I can say that is bad about the book. It comes down to some typgraphical errors, an incorrect web address for the online portion of the book (easily figured out from the page their web address takes you to), and my belief that they took out too many steps in describing computer switches, gates, and circuits. Frankly, I'm amazed that they reasonably went from a neophyte level to a fully-grounded level in one book. I rate it as 5 stars out of 5.