Universal Design Books

This book is probably not for the extremely faint-of-heart--it's not of the "For Dummies" variety, but covers a huge variety of working JavaScript routines. The CD is well organized and cross-linked, and each section starts easy and builds on the previous knowledge. It is probably most useful as a library of good routines (and thoroughly tested on 2 browsers and 2 versions of each--I was one of the beta testers), but there is plenty of instruction on the CD as well.

C'mon now, let's be fair. This CD is not intended as a learning vehicle for Javascript. Rather, it is a resource for programmers who need solutions to specific problems. I have run quite a few of the sample scripts on this CD, and I am impressed at both the quality and the complexity of the code. These are scripts that ACTUALLY WORK, a refreshing change from the hundreds of amateurish scripts on those archive sites, 90% of which are buggy, crash your browser, or worse. I was able to cut-and-paste code from this CD into my web page, and get it working (AND doing something useful!) in just a few minutes. My only complaint is that there could have been a few more business-oriented applications (such as a shopping cart).

I bought this CD tutorial recently and found it difficult to learn via the CD. The contents the topics are very basic and they do not fulfill my thirst of learning Javascript. There's basically nothing that I could really use to produce an interesting personal web site. But then, maybe coz I'm not a CD learner. I end up printing almost every single source of code on the CD!

This was a great addition to my library, and was worth every penny. Great amount of detailed info.

The authors other cd roms were also VERY helpful.

I am an Architectural Engineer and just love to learn more every single day. I just bought this Architectural Elements CD and didn't find the Autocad drawings very much helping me for interior detailing projects.It wourth getting this Architectural item,but I don't belive it wourth its price for now.That's why I only gave it two stars.

While some of the clip art is of good quality, it is difficult to find what I want within in. It is very limited.

I have used the liturgical clip art books from Liturgical Press for more than ten years. They are fabulous, clear, and cover a broad range of seasonal liturgical needs. The art items are presented in a variety of combinations and sizes, so if you don't have a copier that reduces, it helps. These volumes and also those by Placid Stuckenschneider are among th best any where commercially available.
Ken Suetterlin, central Iowa U.M. Pastor

Book arriving in good status. But it's the wrong book:
I ordered a book on Universal Serial Bus System Architecture,
instead I received a book on PCI System Architecture. Did they ever check before shipping items ?

Not happy at all !!

I was handed the task of testing a USB port on an embedded system. I decided to port linux code (usb-uhci) to the embedded
platform and this book provided a handy reference to fill in the cracks. I did not read it from cover to cover but for what I used it for ( hey, what the hell is that? )it was excellent.

The USB specification can be downloaded from USB ORG web page free. This book contains a part of the spec. If you want to start design USB hardware and software then I would suggest "USB Design by Example" written by John Hyde. "USB Design by Example" is an excellent book.

I don't recommend this book for someone who has no idea what USB is, but its really useful if you need to refer to something when your working on a project. A lot of times when I need to know the definition of a word, or maybe the purpose of a certain byte in stream, it comes in handy. It also gives real-life examples for different areas fo the USB spec. (ex: usb class, subclass ID's) which helps.

I bought this book on the strength of recommendations of other MindShare books. Big mistake. This is a terrible book. I've never written an Amazon review before but this book's has so many problems that I feel obligated to warn others.

DON'T BUY THIS BOOK!

Here's a list of some of my gripes.

o Which version -- The authors can't decide whether it wants to be a USB 1.x book with a USB 2.0 addenda, or a full USB 2.0 book. So in some places you get USB 2.0 deltas, and in other places you get an explanation of how USB 2.0 works with a parenthetical remarks about USB 1.1.

o Basic concepts are assumed before they are explained -- I read this book from start to finish and so I really notice this sort of problem. For example, Table 4-3 (page 86) is an extract from Table 19-9 but a) you have to go back two pages to the text on page 84 to even find out that it's an extract, and b) you have to manually search for the full table because neither the text nor the diagram reference it.

o Bad English -- For example, page 204 says "Resume is signalled to all downstream ports that are enabled and back to the suspended port." A classic example of passive voice resulting in unparseable English. It's the hub doing the signalling! This is just a small example of an endemic problem.

o The diagrams suck -- They look like they were taken from a PowerPoint presentation (which they probably were) but it's worse than that. There's little consistency about how tables and diagrams are organised. For example, I expect that every diagram that illustrates a USB packet interchange would use the same basic format. Not so! Take a look at Figure 7-20 and Figure 8-5. They explain a roughly similar concept but with a totally different type of diagram. Finally, some of the diagrams are just weird. For example, are Figures 12-12 and 12-13 state diagrams (which is what they look like), or pseudo-frowcharts? I still can't decide.

o Lack of smooth layer-to-layer transitions -- My particular problem was with the various requests on the control endpoint (endpoint 0).

- There's no up-front listing of all of the possibly requests on a control endpoint.

- Values are referenced inconsistently -- In the text on page 354 it's "GetDescriptor" but in the Table 19-6 it's "GET_DESCRIPTOR". And, better yet, sometimes we just leave out the numeric values of symbols so that you can't correlate between the inconsistent identifiers (for example, the bulletted list on p 379).

- Table 19-6 describes the packaging of the request but then fails to describe how the response is packaged. Table 19-7 lists the structure of the response, but there's no description of how that structure is embedded in the packets on the control endpoint. Or maybe there is. I'm still not sure whether the "Data" field in Table 19-6 is the response or something left over from the SetDescriptor request, which uses the same format.

o The authors have no network experience -- Coming from a network background it's obvious to me that you can draw a bunch of analogies between USB and standard networking terms. For example, USB's data toggle is simply a one-bit sliding window. Somehow this has escaped the author's attention.

o 'Small' things -- Like every figure reference in the text includes a page number, rather than saying "on this page" or "on the next page". And the fact that the index is woeful. Look up some basic USB concepts in the index and see what you get. For example, "endpoints" has a single reference to page 19, which is the wrong page (should've been page 18) and doesn't recognise the fact that endpoints are discussed in many other places in the book. On the other hand, the reference for "descriptors" points you to page 376, which is within 20 pages of the in-depth discussion of descriptors on page 353, but *completely ignores* the introductory material on page 60. Or try to learn moreabout "Think Time", shown in Table 20-12 but not even listed in the index!

I could go on, but this is taken too much time.

Unfortunately, this is the first USB book I've read so I can't recommend a better book. However, other reviewers have provided some alternatives and I strongly recommend you explore them. My guess is that reading the USB standard would be more productive than reading this book!

The preface to this book says it is suitable for a college student or an engineer trying to get up to speed with real time systems. An excellent overview.

The preface to this book says it is suitable for a college student or an engineer trying to get up to speed with real time systems. The latter is nonsense. It may work for a college course where a skilled instructor is adding material but it is far too cursory to apply. The first 6 chapters are basic material for any curriculum on programming. The chapters that follow mention difficulties but give no techniques that can be applied. Nothing in this would enable a person, previous unprepared to do so, to write a real time system.

This book says it eschews mathematical formalism for practical utility. What it lacks is both a formal foundation and practical utility. The exercises (completely without sample answers) are terribly thought out. The description of difficulties of real time job scheduling are a list of known problems and some references to other papers. Sample code included is too specific to be general, and too general to be directly applicable.

I think that this is an excellent introductory book that covers a broad range of items related to Real Time Systems. Unfortunately, I am not sure that it warrants the steep price.

I am VERY VERY disappointed that IEEE publishes this book. IEEE usually has very high standard in publishing books under its name. However, it does not happen in this book. I have no clue why IEEE decides to publish this book. This book has a collection of VERY superficial knowledge that you can find from all entry level undergraduate books. It does not help engineers AT ALL as the book title claims. It misses LOTS of important real-time theories. Some theories mentioned in the book are either too superficial or even incorrect. As another reviewer states, the most important and widely used real-time scheduling theory, the rate-monotonic, is mentioned in the book by ONE single sentence. Can you believe this book is a real-time system book? Again, I am very disappointed this book get published. All my classmates believed this book is terribly BAD and we told our instructor. Don't spend your money on this expensive and useless book. If you want to know the practical aspect of real-time systems, check Mr. Simon's book "An Embedded Software Primer". All my classmates love this book. If you want to know the theory aspect of real-time systems, check Dr. Jane Liu's "Real-Time Systems" book published in 2000.

There's not enough material to warrant the price. The book is easy to read, but the author repeats himself far too much. As justus@acm.org notes, the book is full of of filler sentences, paragraphs, and chapters.

The title of the book seems incorrect, since the real-time portion of the book is skimpy. Rate-monotonic analysis, synonomous with real-time in academia, is only given a sentence. Ada, "the" real-time programming language, is barely mentioned. While Ada's pros and cons can be debated, it is almost completely skipped. On the other hand, software engineering practices, design methodologies, and testing have their own chapters.

I didn't hate the book, but felt cheated after paying [the money].

Why bother with the CD when the book is such a pleasure to use?

The BOOK rates SIX STARS. The CD rates NO STARS. Get the book for half or a third the price of the CD. It's worth it.

The cd contains many raster scans of tables from the book and links to commentary that you can find elsewhere in greater detail. The links to industry aren't anything special, considering you can find them many other places for free. The interface is clunky, and hard to read. Access to the data is read-only off the CD rather than allowing you to load it and access it from the hard drive. The vector CAD drawings are simplified and generic - suitable for instruction, but certainly not for real work. You won't save any time trying to use them for anything but reference, so why bother? This CD is worth 1% of its list price and should just come with the book at no cost. Don't be taken in by the hype.

The figures of this book are very useful for details in professional drawings. On the other hand, it gives simple ideas to solve common problems on construction.

This book presents down-to-earth information that is needed by anyone who is designing a web site for their business, and wants to present as professional a web site as possible. Every page is packed with information that is of immediate use. Web site design is complex, but because this book presents its information in easy to learn chunks, designing a web site that sells is far easier than it would otherwise be.

This book is horrible. I was very very disappointed. This book does not live up to the title at all. Don't waste your time or money.

If you're tired scanning the web for sample javascripts, this is a handy reference specially for beginners. It has good coverage on text handling/validation, math scripts, calculators, calendar and multimedia scripts enough to make your website interesting.

I rarely take the time to review something that I don't like. I am a very busy professional, and I prefer using my time to recommend what I've found really great, not really bad. In this product, I can't help myself but warn future purchasers to stay away from this product.

I have found that the authors were very lazy when it came to their scripts. It is considered by many to be poor programming practice to leave of the trailing ';' at the end of each line in JavaScript. True, it isn't required by browser JavaScript interpreters, but is is poor form. This is just one example.

If you think paying for these scripts will get you out of those pesky and cluttering copyrights that programmers what left intact in their code found on the internet, it won't. You are required to leave the 15 line copyright notice in if you are using the script--even on simple 2-3 line scripts!

The scripts are anything but complete. For example, if you look up the form validation scripts, you'll get an example script that uses a single input form as the example. Not only is that not helpful, it's useless if you have multiple forms in a single page, or if you want to use the script AS IS for different input fields on a single form.

If you are a beginner to JavaScript, don't buy this CD. If you are a moderate level JavaScript programmer, you might find it useful on that very rare occassion, but you REALLY need to know enough JavaScript to mold the example to your needs--and be prepared to do all that work, while giving credit to the lazy authors of this CD.

I think the Home Planner folks gathered up a bunch of existing designs that could possibly be engineered to become UD. Most of the floorplans are simply open plans. Some of the bathrooms they have included are not really well-designed. Don't get me wrong, this book has a lot of good designs - if you're building new construction.

I like having this book. I dream about all the modifications I'd make to really make the floorplan liveable. It's inexpensive, has a very nice opening section with lots of beautiful photos of adaptations. I'm glad I have it, but it's not a real tool for modifications. It is indeed a nice planner for new construction. On that level I recommend it. It doesn't purport to be a manual for modifications. If that's waht you want, I'd suggest looking elsewhere.

The title defines the scope of this book. It is a list of home products (cabinets, appliances, hardware, etc.) which support universal design. It also contains a number of plans which demonstrate UD (Universal Design).

The list of products shows which UD aspects each product features. The list of products is pretty good, but had several lapses that I noticed right away.

The plans tend to be on the high end. The plans are good but not extremely creative. They are not very diverse in style either.

Since the book is not expensive it is probably worth the investment for the useful information in it. Don't look for many idea photos--they aren't here. Although the author has featured numerous, nice photos of one very high end showpiece UD house, it is not the kind of house most of us will ever come close to building.

If you have made the decision to go the UD direction, this book could help with the details.

Easy to understand! Endless amounts of extremely important information that enable one to understand exactly how the net search engines work, and how to use that information to one's advantage.

Some good advice but very low on content. No step by step instructions. Doesn't even come close to SEO for Dummies by Peter Kent. Peter's book is what you need.