3 comments about Poland in Pictures (Visual Geography. Second Series).

1. It is very good as a small present for somebody who never heard about Poland and has no time to read big books.



2. The book was a gift. The picture of the book and info on it was a little deceiving. I expected a large book for the price ($27.00). The paper-backed book was much smaller than expected and not many pages. It was formatted more like a magazine than a book. The info inside the book was not so much an issue as was the high price.



3. I bought "Poland In Pictures" to put away until I have a grandchild. My son-in-law was born and raised in Poland, and this book will bring his home to his future children in the U.S. Until there is a child to look at it, my daughter will enjoy, just as well.
   
   The book gives a comprehensive overview of the geography and history of Poland, illustrated beautifully, liberally depicting the gorgeous castles and cathedrals that make you want to visit the country.

3 comments about Opengl Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning Opengl, Release 1.

1. I am an experienced graphics programmer an I have found this book to be the absolute bible for OpenGL programming. To all the readers I would suggest to pay an special attention to chapter 3. The camera analogy made by the authors conatins perhaps the most clarifying paragraphs along the book. This book covers all aspects about 3D application programming and OpenGL. It is so easy to go through it in a progressive fashion that no one should find any difficutlties in becoming a real expert 3D programmer. The chapters devoted to avanced rendering techniques make things to appear so simple... So lots of ins for the whole book. The only out I have found along it, is that it looks pretty much like the OpenGL specification, and for those readers without a good background of programming and windowing might be a little difficult to understand how opengl relates to X windows or Windows NT. Anyway, thanks to the authors for this text. I guess that Mr Kempf isn't going to have the things easy with his 'Official Guide to learning OpenGL release 1.1'. I wish him the best luck in the world. Javier Velasco (SPAIN)



2. Regardless of what other OpenGL books you get, the Red Book is the place to start. Get the latest version for OpenGL 1.1. Comprehensive review of entire API, and how to do all the basics.



3. This book is a fantastic reference to OpenGL, Glut and Glu APIs. Even if you didn't want to do Computer Graphics with OpenGL - the Glut and Glu APIs are fantastic in their own right. This book rocks - what you can't figure out directly is given in clear and meaningful examples.

   What says it best: At the end of the semester I didn't try to sell it to the college bookstore!

1 comments about Encyclopedia of Graphic Communications.

1. Ok, it's a big and heavy book but there is no other book that I know that cover graphic communications history as well as "Encyclopedia of Graphic Communications". It's a must of you're into that part of graphics. But also if you just want a great book to look through to get ideas. I loved the parts about termoly of printing, paper, ink, typography, color etc...

1 comments about Mastering Mathematica, Second Edition: Programming Methods and Applications.

1. 7.24.99 SJW *****

   This is something of a book review, but also a commentary on the Mathematica package. My background is a recent MS in Computer Science. My interest in Mathematica is as a thinking tool for Programmer/Analysts or R&D Prototypers.

   John Gray's book comes with a CD-ROM including the entire text of the book (the book was produced using Mathematica) as well as help files which can easily be integrated into the resources of the Mathematica Help Browser.

   The book is well laid out (see the Table of Contents at amazon.com) topically, starting with very basic usage of the math abilities, and the user interface, then moving on to programming styles using Mathematica and methods of representing information in Mathematica. (All major commands in the Mathematica package are searchable, topical resources are available via documentation chapters on that topic, and explanatory text is hyperlinked in html format.)

   The book's style is absolutely functional, and is targeted at users who have at least a threshhold knowledge of modern programming. Much of the material somewhat assumes that the reader has read enough using the Help Browswer with its on-line manual to be able to operate the notebook interface. Examples are given for almost every topic (the examples are executable in Mathematica, as the text of the book is in the form of a Mathematica notebook), although the specifics of each example are not necessarily explained.

   As a programmer, the most amazing revelation of Gray's book is the degree to which the Mathematica package is programmable. Of course, procedural commands are built in to allow the coding of procedural algorithms (these commands have the form of generic pseudocode commands, or "near-C"). But Gray gives examples of programming using functions (recursion is allowed), as well as instructions re o-o and constraint (rule-based) styles of programming. (Note that Mathematica has built in pattern matching notations--especially useful for rule-based programming.)

   In short, not only is Mathematica a completely integrated symbolic/numeric advanced math utility with integrated graphics and statistical packages, but it also has its own virtual operating system (full file i/o controls), and it allows the user to write rule-based programs (such as LISP or Prolog interpreters) which have full access to all of the built in Mathematica abilities, and to custom compiled components which the user has written.

   Because all Mathematica's abilities are integrated, data can easily be displayed graphically, allowing visual debugging of difficult algorithms, or analysis (or reports). Gray provides a few examples of the visual display of algorithms.

   The bottom line is that Mathematica is an astounding prototyping tool, as well as being the best graduate CS math utility I have used. And John Gray's book opens up these possibilities to the reader. Savor the possibilities!

1 comments about The Grammar of Graphics.

1. A good book with lots of actual graphical examples to illustrate the different concepts. Coverage of many different kinds of graphs and how they are related and transformed into each other.

2 comments about Radiosity and Realistic Image Synthesis (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics).

1. This is a good radiosity text for a professor to reference a skilled student to (say a very advanced undergraduate or a graduate student). It's very physically based, and will teach you a great deal about how radiosity techniques reflect the behavior of the actual light, in some ways down to the photon level; a reasonable background in physics is helpful, and a strong background in math is necessary.

   It's a very definitive and a very well-written book on radiosity, but if you don't know or care what radiosity is, or if you don't program renderers, then you don't want this book.




2. The Book "Radiosity and Realistic Image Generation" is dedicated to only one realistic image generation method, the radiosity method. And nothing else. The authors were very much involved in defining the radiosity method and they have developed and published some of the basic techniques and a lot of the advanced algorithms for the radiosity method and it shows. The book covers all aspects of this image generation process in great detail.

   This book is very well structured and explains the radiosity method in a very illustrative way. In order to understand the radiosity method, one has to appreciate the mathematical and physical fundaments of this elegant image generation method, and the authors do a great job in carefully defining and introducing all of these fundaments. The radiosity method is quite complex and requires and a lot of acceleration techniques have been introduced during the late 80s and early 90s. This book covers them all.

   I don't see any negative aspects about this book. Yes, it is quite mathematical, but there is no other way to cover all details of the radiosity method. This book is the reference.

No comments about Visual Languages and Visual Programming (Languages and Information Systems).

1 comments about Visualizing the Semantic Web.

1. If you are analysing various XML-encoded data, and am overwhelmed with the sheer mass of it all, you have probably wondered about displaying it. The problem is that there are an infinite number of ways to display data.
   
   This book can only describe a small, finite number of display ideas. But it may well be worth your while to at least quickly thumb through the chapters. Various authors offer different takes on their data sets. The book also has some nice colour plates showing results.
   
   In the book's title, you can ignore Semantic Web if you so choose. The key thing is supposedly that you have XML data. But it turns out that even this is not a necessary restriction. One way to read this book is to look for different data visualisation ideas. If you find one that is promising, you then have to reimplement it for your data structures.

1 comments about Essential Gimp for Web Professionals.

1. Everything in this short Web graphics based book for GIMP showcases graphics that would have been used back in the 20th century. I get the feeling GIMP is a more powerful photo editing and manipulating program than it's Adobe rival Photoshop, especially a version from the 90s. This book was no help to me at all as a Web professional. It's a shame there isn't a lot of resources out there in book form for GIMP, as I do prefer reading from left to right (ie. reading a book), rather than up in a vertical direction (reading a screen). Look for the Official Handbook, and look for more books to be released in the future.

No comments about Advanced Spatial Analysis: The CASA Book of GIS.