2 comments about Mathematica ® 3.0 Standard Add-on Packages.

1. Certainly, this book talks about the most powerful feature of Mathematica. It talks about the part of the sotware, that makes it the best mathematics programm that has ever been made until our days. Without the contents of this book (Mathematica Packages) Mathematica becomes a common software like many others that exist today. It will surely help any person to use all the facilities of Mathematica. If you have ever wanted Mathematica to do something for you and people said that it was not possible, you should take a look in this book.



2. Like main book "The Mathematica book", this is also paper version of help which is included in the program. But, many people like take a book rather then reading from monitor. The main "The Mathematica book" together with this one, is a complete set for using the program.

   I can say that this book is useful. It briefly describes all add-on packages of the program, following by several easy-to-understand examples.

   Add-on packages much improve an already powerful program, so using them increase efficiency of every serious task. This book helps one to do this!

1 comments about Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems.

1. Like any edited volume, the chapters are hit and miss. There's a great chapter by Peter Taylor and Ronald Johnston that indicts a data-led geography as having a corrupted practice of research. I recommend it to any person interested in a philosophy of geographic information technology.

5 comments about Macromedia Flash MX Video.

1. I'd just about given up with Flash and video, the time and effort to import any vid content into Flash 5 killed any fun it might have been.

   With MX I could get the video in, but it wasn't until I read this book that I had any idea what to do with it.
   As well as scripting, the book has a whole bunch of tricks you can do to your video clips just within flash - masking, rotating, coloring!!

   I'm still working my way through the last chapters, but I've learned so much already & I've created my first video website!




2. This book is a great resource for anyone getting into editing video for the Web. The authors did a great job of presenting the information so we designers can follow, understand and absorb it. And thanks to the authors for including info on Sorenson Squeeze, another necessary tool for putting video on the Web. I had been searching for a book like this for a long time.
   -LN



3. Inspiration, code and compression - this book covers it all.
   In a simple step-following format the writer takes you from editing your clips to putting them up on the net, and gives you plenty of ideas of what you can do in Flash.

   If you can ignore the 'cool' skateboarding example video (or use your own!) then get this book!




4. This book has plenty of errors. Page 80 says import to library streaming.fla (file provided on their website). FlashMX chokes.

   I was hoping to pick up this book and write a crude web based non linear editor with FlashMX within a few hours, but this book is disjointed.

   By the way, page 58, MPEG is Moving Pictures Expert Group.




5. Kristian and Hoss waste no time in their book, they get you and your film into Flash straight away - and show you how to control it.

   Other MX books waste too much time explaining Scripting techniques, this one gets you going right from the start. All the Actionscript is in thier, as an when you need it & is explained from a real users point of view - not from a coders!

   Fast & Friendly - just like they say.

1 comments about Rich Media StudioLab: Video and Sound in Flash - with Premiere, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Cubase, Quicktime, Acid, Sound Forge and more. (with CD ROM).

1. This book will do exactly what they said wasn't possible by illustrating how video and sound can be integrated into your Flash presentations, placing you at the extreme edge of creative web design. The application of such tools as AfterEffects, QuickTime, SoundForge and Wildform test the boundaries of Flash and suggest ways to take sound and video beyond Flash and into the realms of Shockwave.

   Showing you how to break your site down and incorporate video and sound, the techniques covered in this book capitalise on the capabilities of Flash whilst tackling its limitations head-on. It will then look at how to take web ideo and sound a step further with Shockwave presentations.

No comments about Adobe Creative Suite Keyboard Shortcuts.

5 comments about Professional Development with Visio 2000 (Other Sams).

1. David Edson expects the user to be fluent with the elementary Visio features and VBA. The book builds upon this premise and imparts a comprehensive and incremental teaching of Visio. While the examples and illustrations are chosen well, the accompanying CD was missing a few examples, and came up blank. Overall, I strongly recommend this book to help for automation using Visio.



2. Having now read most of this book, I can say that I learned far more than I got from the Microsoft PDF files that shipped with Visio Pro--but I can't say I enjoyed it. If a writer with an ego bothers you, find a different author. If errors bother you, find a different publisher. As if to make a page quota, whole paragraphs are repeated, changing only a letter: "PosX is the X coordinate...{6-line paragraph)" followed by "PosY is the Y coordinate...(SAME 6-line paragraph)". This cut and paste goes on for pages in places. Examples and exercises almost never yield a useful product, though they are carefully explained. David knows a lot of history of the tool, which would have been pretty interesting except for the thread of vanity that sewed the stories together.



3. This book is a very good book for advanced VBA development with Visio. This book is not for the faint at heart. If you are looking to do serious development using Visio then this is one of the books that you need.

   I admit that there are some typos in this book, but this doesn't detract from the value and advanced concepts that this book teaches. You are not going to be able to find very many books that have this depth. You need to be a senior level developer to appreciate the content of this book.

   I recommend this book for serious VBA Visio Automation.




4. I have read both of the books (and others) and I find that Graham Wideman's book Visio 2003 Developer's Survival Pack is far better than Edson's. Wideman also has the same book for Visio 2000 and 2002. Wideman's book has far fewer errors (and his corrections are online), and far more useful samples/examples. Just a lot more meat, frankly. Amazon may not have Wideman's latest book - google it or go to diagramantics.com. It's worth the cost for real visio developers.



5. When I started to read the book, at first I was overwhelmed by all the information. I found that it was hard getting through some explanations especially when finding that there are many typos in this book. The books that I read before on advanced usage of ConceptDraw were clearer but much easier concerning the programming part. This book is 100% for advanced Visio users.

No comments about Graphics Programming in Icon.

No comments about Haiti In Pictures (Visual Geography. Second Series).

5 comments about Foundation Flash 5.

1. I've been working through this book for almost a week and I love it! The writing is clear and the concepts are explained very well. The authors include hands-on tutorials for each concept, and their step-by-step instructions walk you through your first try at each new skill.

   They are also very good about teaching you the keyboard shortcuts for common actions as you go along (and reminding you to use them!) Knowing the shortcuts for adding a keyframe, breaking apart a graphic, converting a graphic to a symbol etc. makes your project work go quickly and really builds your sense of competence.

   At the end of each chapter you practice what you learned in that chapter by using the new skills to add on to your ongoing "case study" website.

   This is one of the best tutorials on a program that I have come across and one of the few technical books I have ever read cover to cover. I have many technical books and usually end up using them for reference instead of actually working through them. If you want to gain competence in Flash in a week or two, get "Foundation Flash 5" and work your way through it. It's easy!




2. This book was ok in the fact that it spent the entire book building on one real project. However, I thought the book was a tougher read than the Teach yourself Flash 5 in 24 hrs book. I guess it's really a matter of preference. I found this book to be adaquate, but not anything close to the other book. Teach yourself had a unique way of teaching you that really hammered the techniques home. I guess I didn't feel this one accomplished that.



3. This book is not a reference to flash 5.

   This book goes through step by step how to make flash movies from the ground up. It assumes nothing; which is great for most beginners.

   I was definitly not a beginner when i bought the book. (i got it at the time of release because it was hyped up quite a bit).

   At the time i understood, and fast tracked through it to get at the good stuff to find out that it never really got any "great" stuff. Some of the examples are done very well, and are great in the tutorial sense, but i was disapointed that i didn't learn anything new. (or little).

   This is flash 5. You could learn flash just as well with tutorials online at any of the bigger flash websites. If you're new to flash: this is a great start. But if you have the least bit of flash knowledge then i can see someone getting bored with this qucikly.

   Bottom line:
   Great place to start. Not a reference by any means. Remember its flash 5. Flash MX is out, and much more fun than flash 5.




4. First of all the authors of this book and the series of books they have written are brilliant, they have a great way of making even the most complex subjects very simplistic.

   This book starts off slow and in the very basics of flash and gets quite extensive towards the end, I believe they stop right at actionscripting for which there is a whole other book (quite needed!)

   I am (was) actually a Flash instructor at a college here in OC, the college provided or recommended their own book but I never used it and I told my students that purchasing that book was not necessary. I actually tought out of this book! And on the first day I told everyone they didn't have to buy it but if they did they would find it very helpful throughout the couse and later on, it's also definately a good reference book to go back to if you don't use Flash all the time and happen to forget.

   Anyway needless to say every class I tought loved this book and loved learning flash. I even took some example/exercises out of the book. Everyone learned the full contents of the class and found it very fun. The illustrations and sample projects help a lot, if you are learning on your own I recommend you do them. Anyway I've had this book for years now and as a user and instructor I would say there's no other book I would turn to.




5. This one should be one of the best instructional books ever written. Of course now is a little outdated (some of the Actionscript commands are now deprecated) but I remember how much I enjoyed it and how I discovered the FOED books. The Foundation series RULES!

5 comments about X Window Programming From Scratch (Jesse Liberty's from Scratch Programming Series).

1. I am a complete beginner, so I hoped this is the book for me.And yes. it is, but...
   First part of the book, about 100 pages, contains intro to UNIX/Linux, C cmpiler, make, programming and C language. Very short, more a review than introduction.
   Then it explains the basics of X Window System, widgets + some background. Follows a part containing the math stuff needed for the real drawing program, which is then implemented.
   At the end the book contains more then 9000 lines of Vector Font Deefinitions (contained among others on the CD), which is almost 200 pages.
   The book is still pretty good, but you are buing not a 800 pages book, but a 500 one, don't forget it.



2. The book provides a great overview of Linux, C, and Makefile then leads you through an excellent introduction to X Window programming including the mathematics necessary for writing a viable graphics editor!! The appendices are a little long (and exist on the CD) but the book is full of content! Even has a bonus chapter on PostScript for adding a print driver to the project.



3. It has been said that a specialist knows everything about nothing, while a generalist knows nothing about everything. This is a generalist book.

   The title of this book is completely misleading, except, perhaps the "scratch" part: After reading it, I am scratching my head, and asking, so how do I write programs for X Window???

   The author is spreading himself too thin. He assumes you do not even know how to edit a text file, you do not know how to program at all, you do not know what a linked list is. This is ridiculous. Obviously, if I want to learn about X Window programming from scratch, I do not know how to program for X Window, but I do know how to program in general. Alas, the book tells very little about X Window programming. It talks about Unix shells, about computer graphics, about make, about trigonometry, etc. But when it comes to X Window programming, it just breezes through it very fast. There is no systematic explanation of a basic structure of an X Window program. Instead, it offers the code of a vector image editor, completely confusing to an X beginner.

   One thing the author excells in is self-praise. For example, chapter 13 says, "Chapter 1 provides an EXCELLENT introduction to ..." (emphasis mine). Give me a break!

   I feel I was had. I feel I wasted both my money and my time. Don't waste yours!




4. This book reeks. It's poorly written, and organized so badly I was tearing my hair out after the first few chapters.

   Buy "X Toolkit Cookbook" - it's so much better, it defies description.




5. This book is very poorly written. Yes, there are usable things in it, but you're better off buying the X Toolkit Cookbook (if you need a tutorial approach), or the Motif Programming Manual (Volume 6A from O'Reilly).