No comments about Argentina - The People (Lands, Peoples, and Cultures).

1 comments about Mathematica for Scientists and Engineers: Using Mathematica to do Science.

1. Since this book was published, Mathematica has come out with version 4.1, which makes the book somewhat dated, since it is written in 3.0. However, it could still be of benefit to someone who wants to use Mathematica for more specialized tasks in science and enginnering. Some of the Mathematica code in the book is given for problems that are not usually discussed in books on Mathematica. It could serve as a supplement to a course in Mathematica if one is willing to put up with its being out of date, since there are many interesting exercises assigned at the end of each chapter. It would not be too difficult to update the book to Mathematica 4.1. Practicing scientists interested in using Mathematica for visualization could use the book as a handy reference.

   Chapter 1 begins with a short review of how to use Mathematica and then the author jumps right into the Riemann zeta function. He gives a fairly lengthy discussion of this function, complete with graphics and Mathematica code. He uses both his own code for the function as well as the built-in function Zeta to illustrate the properties of the Riemann zeta function, particularly its zeros. He shows how the choice of grid spacing can hide the singularity structure of this function, if not chosen finely enough.

   Chapter 2 is an overview of numerical methods in Mathematica. He begins with the problem of numerical integration by calculating the specific heat of a crystalline lattice using Nintegrate. The ability of Mathematica to integrate numerically nasty integrands, such as sin(1/x), is then investigated, with the problems with the singularity and convergence discussed in some detail. He also discusses numerical contour integration, which is not usually done in Mathematica books. The Duffing oscillator is treated as an example of solving differential equations numerically using Mathematica. Most importantly though the author shows how to solve partial differential equations numerically using Mathematica. Although performance issues in solving PDEs will appear in using Mathematica to do this, the author uses the built-in function NDSolve to show how one might gain insight into the behavior of solutions. He treats the case of sound waves in a pipe and the elastic string with fixed ends subjected to a constant transverse force. Then after a brief look at numerical sums and products, he treats the quantum mechanical problem of a particle in a one-dimensional well. The chapter ends with a consideration of the 3-body problem, including the restricted 3-body problem. The author's treatment is pretty good but he fails to discuss in detail the numerical instability of the orbits at large times.

   Symbolic manipulation, the tour-de-force in Mathematica, is treated in detail in chapter 3. He gives as an example a very interesting simulation of a cyclotron, and shows how Mathematica can be used to efficiently do the algebra in this problem. He then illustrates how to use Mathematica to manipulate series, with series solutions of ordinary differential equations given the emphasis. Most helpful is his discussion on how to treat residues in complex analysis using Mathematica. The author also shows how a cavilier use of symbolic integration can cause problems with some integrands. Such a discussion is very useful in it flags the first-user of Mathematica or to the mathematics student who might be careless in using the built-in function Integrate. This is followed by a fairly detailed discussion of how to differentiate symbolically using Mathematica and how to do vector calculus. Anyone who has done the calculations in the solution of the Schroedinger equation for the hydrogen atom will appreciate the ability of Mathematica to make the arithmetic less painful, and the author shows this in this chapter. Then after a brief discussion of matrix algebra and simplification using Mathematica, the author moves on to a topic that is usually not treated at all in Mathematica books, namely integral transforms. He shows briefly how to deal with the Laplace and Fourier transforms. He also introduces the ability to do local scoping of variables using the Module command.

   Chapter 4 covers Mathematica's powerful graphics capability. Most of this material can be found in other books, and in fact the absence of color in the book is somewhat disappointing given the author's heavy use of color directives when plotting functions in this chapter. He does however give a useful short discussion on how Mathematica samples a function to be plotted. A fun example of how to create a Smith chart using Mathematica is detailed by the author. In addition, he treats a physical problem of the spinning top. This is a problem that cries out for visualization when learning about it for the first time, and the author does a fine job of explaining its motion, including the Mathematica code for doing an animation. Unfortunately he does not discuss the solution of the spinning top using elliptic curves nor the case of the spinning top without a fixed point, which involves the use of hyperelliptic curves. Mathematica can be used effectively I have found to deal with these cases.

   The last chapter is oriented more to matters in computer science, as the author treats data structures, namely lists, in Mathematica. He gives the reader hints on how to program in Mathematica efficiently, and how to use the built-in function Compile to improve program performance in Mathematica. He also illustrates the very powerful ability of Mathematica to do rule-based programming via an example of generating fractal images. Most importantly, he shows how to use Mathematica to solve partial differential equations using finite differences, another topic usually not done in other Mathematica books. A brief discussion of how to do tensor manipulation ends the chapter.

1 comments about Game Interface Design.

1. As a game designer and art director, I was hoping to get some insight into the psychology of designing user interface for optimum usability and effectiveness. Instead, I got tutorials for optimizing web graphics in Photoshop. This book is strictly and completely for beginners, another collection of tutorials aimed at capitalizing on the market of aspiring designers that would like to make games, if only they knew how to code and draw. And, as usual, the book falls short even for them. It should go without saying that if you can write the code for a whole game in Flash, you don't need someone to teach you how to write the code for a button. Fox, however, devotes several pages to coding a simple button in Flash.
   
   There is some professional insight in the book- i.e. making more important buttons stand out by increasing their size or their contrast in color value- but even that is all more or less common sense. Skipping past pages and pages of introductory photoshop tutorials just to learn that players don't like to read text in video games feels like a waste of time, and a waste of money.
   
   To be honest, I can't think of anyone that would benefit from all the information in this book. Even someone who's never used Flash before would be better off learning from Adobe's built-in tutorials.

No comments about Russia (Tintin's Travel Diaries).

5 comments about OpenGL SuperBible, Second Edition (2nd Edition) (SuperBible).

1. I found this book went into the great detail explaining how the examples they give work, but there's so much more to OpenGL than the examples they give. I found myself asking "Wow! That's a great example of that function working in that example, but how do I get that function to do what I want it to do?" I was left with no clue. I suppose I could infer it painstakingly through studying the contexts of the sample code, but I thought the book was supposed to just teach me. I don't have that much time!

   I eventually started skimming over entire chapters that lost me in a barage of techno-geek jargon and explainations of advanced math, etc. I'll have to go back and read those again. This is the trouble with learning from books. The author has no idea if you actually understood his explaination of one thing before he moves on to another. It makes sense to him, so he goes on to the next part.

   On the plus side, I found the basics were covered quiet well. The authors got you going on your first OpenGL baby-steps within a few chapters. That was actually fun. But then they lost me in assuming I knew things they hadn't adequetly discussed.




2. This book provides a decent introduction to many OpenGL techniques, but falls short in providing guidance on avoiding the many pitfalls that 3D graphics programmers can stumble into.

   Movement and positioning in 3D space, using multiple windows and camera/eyes viewing from various locations and angles, is downright complex. I found more useful information in 7 pages of "Linux Game Programming" (p96-102) than five readings of the 30-odd pages the SuperBible devotes to the subject (ch5).

   I was also very annoyed that the SuperBible publishers don't allow for online download of their sample code, very little of which is actually printed in the book. If you lose or scratch your CD (I did), then the book suddenly becomes an overlarge paperweight, filled with short snippets that won't compile and have fatal dependencies on variables and matrices set or modified "elsewhere".

   I wanted to like this book for personal reasons: the author teaches at a school very near me, used to work at my same company, and a friend of mine used to be one of his teaching assistants. Moreover, I'd already paid for it, and wanted to get some value out of the purchase :-/

   Nonetheless, it failed to provide answers to the real-world problems I've encountered, which other books have shown to be easily anticipated and simply resolved.




3. If you are looking to learn OpenGL on Windows, then this is the book for you. Each chapter gives an excellent description of the concepts learned. The authors writing is clear and concise.

   The book uses GLUT for most of the programs. This is great as you can spend the time learning on program in 3d as oppossed to OS specific code. GLUT takes about 10 minutes to learn(Window,keyboard,and mouse functions), but you can do A LOT with it. You can make lots of small games and demos with it. Once the code works, remove GLUT and use your OS code.

   This is a book on programming 3d graphics. You most likely wont understand it if you've never gone past algebra in school. This is not the authors fault. You need to be able to understand some trig and linear algebra. If your math education is somewhat lacking, you should be able to understand it. He explains it a lot better than most math teachers do.

   Overall, I highly recommend this book. The examples are somewhat boring, but this is not a game programming book. It is a graphics book. You should have no problem taking what you learn and apply it to a game. If you are looking for an OpenGL Game Programming book, then buy the book with same title from the guys at Gamedev.net. It's very good.




4. A very good introduction for the opengl newbie who doesn't want to mess up with 3D theory and math right from the start. The price to pay is some of the explanations end up being rather superficial. I like the practically oriented attitude of the book and the wealth of examples, from basics to more complex. Do not expect this to be a book that will transform you from a complete openGL newbie to a master... but it a very good introduction for somone who needs to make sense of openGL and see it at work. It uses GLUT as a library to interface with OS specific command like showing windows or getting keyboard input to shield you from having to deal with the dreaded windows API or any other OS dependent functions. If this is a good or bad thing , you decide. You will have to "treasure" the CD coming with the book as you will have no chance to download the source code form the web. I find this EXTREMELY annoying! The third edition is coming out so watch out for it!



5. Using this book I was always expecting to have good experience in learning. Especially whether the essential data tables are listed in a suitable position so that it can be used as a reference.

   However, this book places function list in many chapters that once I want to look for relevant information I found I rather look for it from the internet. I don't doubt it as a good intorduction, but I won't say this book to be very good, because its codes are not well documented and not continuous as a whole project. Therefore users have to get familiar to many new codes in each chapter, and they are mostly unrelated.

   Another weakness of this book is the index. I think if I am not too stupid that means this book does not organise its index very well.

No comments about Flash & Director: Designing Multiuser Web Sites StudioLab.

No comments about Package Structure and Mechanism Design with SolidWorks 2006.

2 comments about Practical Optimization Methods: With Mathematica Applications.

1. Practical Optimization Methods - M.Asghar Bhatti
   
   This is my favorite optimisation book. I recommend it to anyone interested in the application of optimisation techniques, in particular for those in industry. This book has been a constant companion in my optimisation adventure and unlike other books; it has helped me firmly establish a solid foundation and understanding on the various optimisation techniques and the theories behind them. Believe me, I can even read those books which I have shelved in the past because they were complicated with too many cryptic mathematical statements. They don't scare me anymore.
   
   Bhatti wisely used Mathematica as the teaching platform and the accompanying OptimizationToolbox software allows one to brush aside the cryptic mathematical statements. The reader can now concentrate on the concepts, relegating the mathematics manipulations to Mathematica and the functions of the OptimisationToolbox. What I like about this book is that it also shows how the Taylor Series, the Quadratic Form and convexity requirements are put into practice to create an iterative scheme to solve a system of non-linear equations. The OptimisationToolbox and the internal Mathematica functions seamlessly pace the reader through the mathematical preliminaries. By the end of Chapter 3, the reader should now be a good shape to go to the more serious stuffs.
   
   Chapter 4 deals with the subject of optimality conditions starting first with the optimality conditions for unconstrained optimisation problems. These conditions, albeit slightly more involved in computation, are essentially the same as the optimality conditions for single variable functions of the high school days. The "slightly involved" computations are those of the Grad (1st Order and Necessary Condition) and the Hessian (2nd Order and Necessary). Mathematica graphics are put to great effect to help visualize the meaning of these conditions.
   
   The additive property of constraints, which was dealt with in graphic detail, extends the earlier ideas behind the optimality conditions for an unconstrained optimisation to that for constrained optimisation problems.
   
   The introduction to Chapter 5 gives an excellent overview of issues in solving unconstrained problems. Basically, all solution schemes covered in this chapter involve two steps. The first step is a simple iterative scheme, which requires a direction and a step length. The second step is a termination condition, taken as when the gradient of objective function, which should be zero at the optimal point, is sufficiently close to within a specified tolerance to zero.
   
   The process of computing the step length in for a particular search direction is known as the line search. The line search methods (including Mathematica algorithms) covered include analytical line search, equal interval search, section search, the Golden Section search, the Quadratic Interpolation Method and the Approximate Line Search based on Armijo's rule.
   
   As for the search direction, one obvious choice would be along the direction of greatest negative change - the Steepest Descent Method. The performance of this method can suffer badly as it zigzag search scheme slows down to a crawl as it approaches the optimal point. One improvement would be to retain some potion of the previous search direction, so the resultant search pattern is not successively perpendicular to each other but somewhere in between. This approach of adding some potion of the previous direction is known as the Conjugate Gradient Method. The two "some previous direction potion" schemes covered and included as Mathematica functions are the Fletcher-Reeves and the Polak-Ribiere schemes. Other numerical methods covered include the Modified Newton and the Quais-Newton Methods. One drawback of latter approach is the computation of the Hessian Matrix at each iteration step. The Quasi-Newton Methods do not require the computation of the Hessian Matrix. Instead they use some inverse Hessian update methods. Two such methods covered are the DFP (Davidon, Fletcher, and Powel) Update and the BFGS (Broyden, Fletcher, Goldfarb, and Shannon) Update. Don't be intimidated by all these jargons, Mathematica functions including graphic functions are provided to provide a step-by-step explanation and presentations of the various concepts are provided.
   
   The section on Linear Programming is extensive, in comparison to other chapters. I was tempted to skim over this LP section because the technique is well known and there are many industry standard LP algorithms on the market so why spend too much time on it. However, my curiosity got the better of me and I must confess that the combination of the accompanying OptimisationToolbox and Mathematica Graphics makes the revision on Linear Programming entertaining and interesting. The section started with an overview of issues involved in solving an underdetermined system of linear equations; going over the Gauss-Jordan, LU decomposition and introduction of slack variables to convert the LP problem into its standard form. The simplex algorithm is introduced in three styles: Simplex Tableau, Basic Simplex and Revised Simplex. The first two simplex styles, as Mathematica functions by the way, are intended to show the sequence of steps of the simplex algorithm. For large problems, however, the above LP methods may take a long time and researchers have developed better search methods such as the interior point method. The interior point method, as its name implies, starts from an interior feasible point and takes appropriate steps alone descent directions towards the optimal point.
   
   Chapters 8 & 9 adequately covered the subject of quadratic programming and constrained nonlinear problems. However, they concentrated only on local optimisation techniques. Inclusion of global optimisation methods such as Simulated Annealing (SA), Genetic Algorithms (GA), Discrete Gradient Methods (DGM), Hooke-Jeeves, Nelder and Mead, and Powell methods would have made the book a complete guide to practical optimisation.
   
   My favorite Optimisation Book - Clear and Useful



2. I have not yet had any formal training on optimization so this book took a little getting used to. Once I got passed the basics, the text read well however. I imagine it would be an easy read if you've had any training in optimization. I now use it as a reference to look up similar problems I'm faced with; the author provides many general examples that are easily altered for more specific questions.

5 comments about Advanced Animation with DirectX (Focus on Game Development).

1. First of all the retail price of the book is too much. The last section (video on texture and cloth simulation) which he thinks are the most advanced are just pretty lame. He could have better described how to export a skinned mesh better. The ragdoll effect as given is not combined with an animated model making it a bit less useful. The book does cover a lot on using skeletal animation that was definately not covered in other books that I've bought on the subject. I'm also glad that it has no intro to DX section. PS: Who wrote the 5 star review, the author?



2. Advanced Animation with DirectX is not a good book at all. The author did a terrible job on the skinned animation parts and the later parts of the book is just plain bad. The beginning was ok but the code was not right. I tried to implement some of the stuff at the beginning and it didn't work. When I sat down and thought about the problem at hand and how to do it, I got everything working smoothly without using anything that was done is the book (which means the book was a waste of money). Who ever gave this book 5 out of 5 stars must be the author or a friend.



3. There are new helper functions in the D3DX library that eliminates parsing X files manually. Parsing X files is not really related to the book's topic, and yet you are forced to learn it because it's used throughout the book. Even worse is the fact that the code for parsing X files, which the book's examples are tightly coupled with, are no longer working with the newer releases of the DX9 SDK. So unless you go back to an older SDK release, none of the book's samples will compile. Even if you do use an older SDK, you will be wasting time learning functions and interfaces that have been deprecated. Bottom Line: The book's is very implementation orientated and the code are outdated, therefore it's best to stay away from this book to avoid frustrations.



4. I would only suggest this book if you have a lot of patience and determination to make sense of the authors code. The source code has bugs, and many many memory leaks. It isn't even formatted correctly. In order to make sense of it, I had to tab and format it correctly. Not fun. There are much easier ways to do animation than what the book describes. If you really want to know how X files work then get this book, otherwise skip it.



5. I buy this book because I can not find another book whit animation on direct x, but you need install the direct x sdk 9 to run the examples, and a good video card, if you not, show you many error of memory, in some cases this book are helpfully if you not have any idea how to made an animation or cloth simulation, I recommend this book for a start into direct animation, the book only help you to take a path to start into game develop, because are very hard to find a book how to show you made animations, there is many things and ideas you can save from this book to use like a guide for a start.

No comments about Venezuela in Pictures (Visual Geography. Second Series).