3 comments about Biometric Systems: Technology, Design and Performance Evaluation.

1. Biometric Authentication has become a first-class, full-fledged, field of study with its own diverse composite of foundational technologies at its core. As is the case with any "highly-interdisciplinary" field, the challenge for textbook authors is to present a body of work which provides an adequate scope of material while at the same time providing adequate detail for that body of knowledge.. Wayman and company with this current work have met that challenge admirably.
   
   This book provides a wealth of pertinent information, results, and lessons learned along the way in the research, development and deployment of biometric systems worldwide. The contributors include researchers and practitioners who have been involved in the field since the very beginning. All of the popular person recognition modalities are examined including fingerprint, face, speaker, and iris, as well as large scale system design and integration issues. Also covered are evaluation, testing, and the all important societal privacy issues from both the US and European perspective. The text comprehensively and coherently addresses the material at a surprisingly accessible level; the majority of the material can be readily understood without an advanced background in higher mathematics or computer science.
   
   I highly recommend this book for beginning and intermediate level biometrics professionals requiring comprehensive knowledge of this relatively new field. It also provides a wonderful jumping-off point for further study and exploration.



2. This book provides a good coverage of the technology,
   methods, and the core ideas of four leading biometric
   systems. The various real-world applications for these
   systems, the performance, current state of art are also
   described in details. It also discusses the benchmarks
   for comparing the performance and for system
   improvements.
   
   This book is easy to understand for readers who are
   completely new to world of biometrics. It provides
   user an overview of each system, their practical
   drawbacks, providing the reader an idea of what
   technology to choose for a particular type of
   application and enough information where he can
   relatively make a choice of which technology to invest
   in taking into consideration the time of deployment,
   cost etc.



3. This is primarily an algorithms book, though perhaps the authors might resist such a characterisation. By this I mean that there are detailed descriptions of how various biometric systems do pattern matching. These vary from iris recognition systems to fingerprint matching systems and face recognition methods.
   
   The iris and fingerprint methods seem well established. Certainly, fingerprint matching is now a mature discipline. Where automated methods not only speed up searching of millions of fingerprints, but they also remove a lot of subjectivity.
   
   Face recognition is still a work in progress. Much harder. The idea of a "face space" arises - the set of all possible images of faces. Where these might be three dimensional. Though much effort is expended on two dimensional images, since these are what the vast majority of cameras produce.
   
   Considerable space is devoted to testing the above methods. Important in order to assess efficacy of new methods and to measure any progress in these fields.

1 comments about UDDI, SOAP, and WSDL: The Web Services Specification Reference Book.

1. While this book was quite up to date when it was published in 2002, the advances in the understanding of Web Services since then suggest that you consider a more recent text.
   
   Specifically, there has been a buildout of Service Oriented Architecture, due to significant interest by many developers. Also, a new language has emerged - Business Process Execution Language. This was in response to people using WSDL and finding that while it adequately described a given Web Service, it had a harder time with more involved business logic. And with trying to aggregate multiple Web Services into a larger, dispersed entity. While one method might have been to upgrade WSDL, instead, BPEL was chosen. Starting afresh. But using WSDL and the ideas learnt from it.

5 comments about 3D Studio Max F/X: Creating Hollywood-Style Special Effects.

1. Dear Sir. Congratulations for the magnify book 3DSMAX FX, I am already acquiring to 2th version for MAX 2-5. With the help of this book ( 1th versionm )I created a video where I could try all the special effects used in the modern movies, electronic scale models, virtual sceneries and human characters in virtual Landscapes. In beginning it was a game, later The project it grew and after three months of hard work, and a lot of nights without sleeping, The Hollywood FX is ready. The success among the friends is being very big and appeared a need of the showing this job for the other people, it is not an unpublished work, more it will be an incentive for those that dream in doing a film and doesn't have many resources. Well, as my objective it was to test the Special Effects and to gather them everybody in a small history, I took advantage of some examples of the book, as well as the adaptation of some scenes, because I didn't have enough money to finance the time of production as well as the creation of the models. This work doesn't have trade ends and yes Educational and Artistic aplications, therefore I would not like of The showing this work without your previous authorization, as well as also if it was possible you to help me disclose it , or to indicate me the way. Of course all the credits will be given . As I do to send a copy of the film for its evaluation, please specify the where, media type etc. Knowing that can count you, I'll be waiting a answer Thanks very much Allan Bispo León Denis Produções

   address: estrada dos Bandeirantes 449 - Jacarepagua - RJ Brazil ZIP CODE: 22.710 - 570 fone/fax: 021 - 342.6456 E_Mail gap@ccard.com.br for Allan Bispo




2. This book was interesting and imformative, if you have 100million dollars to dedicate to a project. Contrite alliteration and pathetic ogies lead to an uninspiring read. It would benifit from practical imformation and instructions



3. This book was very good at pin-pointing very useful special effects, from underwater effects to space. Laid out very logically, this book easily steps you through what had to be hundreds of trial and error hours experimenting and tweaking. It generalizes in all the right places. Thanks go to the Author for reaching back to the rest of us and making it fun.



4. This book is definately a book that will give you a spark of imagination. It will also tell you how to put on the screen. This book is a major asset to my Graphics collection and definately worth the money. Buy it and you won't be dissapointed!!



5. This book shows new ways of building 3D effects. It opened my eyes to a hole new way of using MAX that comes to use in all kinds of projects. If you allready know how to use the max, this book gives you a little extra, that other books does not. This is an extra book, that supliment the inside collection greatly.

5 comments about Building Dynamic HTML GUIs.

1. This book covers a lot of nice material. I find myself referencing it all the time. Just about anything you'd want to do with javascript / HTML is here.

   However, this book is not for the javascript novice. It also, is NOT a javascript tutorial by any means. In addition, a complaint I had is that the code isn't on a Cd, you have to download it from their site. Also, the routines they use to manipulate objects are wrapped in their javascript code and it appears what they are calling, is native javascript code. This was unnverving until I figured out you had to include a 30K include file. I also found some of the examples didn't run nicely on all browsers (not surprising with DHTML).

   However, this book does cover a lot of ground and prepares the developer for the arduous task of creating DHTML pages. They do some very cool things with it and it is worth checking out.




2. There is on thing I like about this book. It got me to think about web sites as applications rather than online brochures, and to design interfaces based on user goals. Otherwise, it reminds me of a really bad college text book, like one that's only being used because the professor wrote it.

   The first half of the book contains endless rambling with occasional insightful points. I found this especially annoying because I'm familiar enough with user-interface theory to know it can be presented in a very interesting way, but the authors manage to make it very boring, and to keep this up for a couple hundred pages.

   They go on and on about how server connection waits destroy the user experience, and the importance of connecting with the server only when absolutely necessary. I waisted a lot of time trying to put this theory into practice, only to discovered that server connection delays are just one point to consider, along with download times, site manageabiliy, compatibility with older browsers, etc.

   I was happy to reach the second half of the book, thinking that finally I would get to the meat and potatoes. I was very disappointed to find out that all the remaining chapters were based on using their javascript wrapper. When I went to their web site to download it, I spent some time trying out the sample applications. They took way to long to load, and crashed when I tried to use them (in MSIE 5, Win98). There was some comment about "hoping" the wrapper works. I downloaded the wrapper to try it, but it added too much overhead to consider using it. I gave up on the book at this point.




3. With a title like this, I was expecting a book full of cut'n'paste mission-tested cross-browser code - real meat. Not so, sadly. Most of it is way back down the knowledge chain, with around half the book being a resume of interfaces, CGI, DOM etc. This part is written as if being explained to a newbie web author - much more a history than a coder's reference (explanations of what ASP and SSI is, for example). Nice read, but mostly old news to anyone technical.

   The second part of the book moves into the code. Sadly, I found the demos neither particularly useful (much is made of a DHTML fridge-magnet game) nor particularly reliable cross-browser. The acid test is this: have I used any of the code in real-life projects, and do I regularly pick up the book to glean good stuff? The answer to both is no. This is not an O'Reilly-style bible that ends up dog-eared from use. It's got some nice ideas in the cross-browser code libraries, but nothing you couldn't download yourself from siteexperts.com, bratta.com or the usual resources. Sorry, guys, you've put a lot of work into this, but you don't seem to know who your audience is.




4. This book is a good place to start for beginners or non-programmers. The coding examples are good only if you are going to use their wrapper code to build your DHTML. Being a programmer myself, I need to know how things work and just can't rely on someone else's code to magically do it for me. So, if you're looking for a quick way to get into DHTML this is the way to go. If you're looking for the "guts", this isn't the place.



5. I guess there aren't different editions to this book. i can see why. I bought this book in 1999, thinking it would be great along with my javascript:The definitive guide and HTML:The complete reference, because i thought that DHTML would take me a step further and I would find something new and different than either HTML or Javascript, and I got a little bit of a sense of it, but but only every 100 pages or so. The book is divided into countless titled sections, in which you could skip entirely because what the author tries to tell you could be said in a lot less space. If you are absolutely brand new to any kind of web developer, or programmer, or anything other than just a computer end-user and you would like a first book ever to give you some kind of foundation to base your new endeavors into learning about computers from a programmer's viewpoint, this book may be for you. There is something to learn from it, but it definitely could tell a lot more. My copy is old and falling apart and I think today I'm just gonna throw it out. The little sense i got was that it's geared towards making you a creative thinker rather than just showing you how to code. I'll buy a CSS book next to replace this one.

5 comments about Server-Side Flash: Scripts, Databases and Dynamic Development.

1. A massive treasure trove of information that has just saved me countless hours of messing around with Flash. I've read through the first 5 chapters and went through the included examples and that alone has been enough to make me feel comfortable selling backend integration to my clients now, and being able to deliver a Flash site that does more than just look and sound good. There's no ColdFusion here but at five grand for Cold Fusion Sevrver, I'll take the PHP/SQL,ASP,and Perl solutions detailed in this book any day of the week over a book trying to sell me on CF.

   I've got Flash MX too and the data transfer and handling model is still the same - you've got to know how Flash, the server, and the browser all integrate in the process, and this book puts all that knowledge well in hand. Thank you Sanders and Winstaley.




2. This book is awesome; it explains how to use Flash integration with the most common used server-side programming languages (PHP, ASP and Perl)...

   All separated by parts, and it explains some of the functions and methods of the programming languages, just for letting the reader who doesn't deal with certain server-side languages more confortable to understand it.

   Really good book, it solved all my problems with database and server integration with Flash.




3. When I buy a book, I want a little depth. This book is a decent summary of the Flash backend, but it's nothing you can't readily find on the web. I HIGHLY recommend a more specific approach--e.g Foundation PHP for Flash by Webster .



4. As a graphics person, I've tried for months to understand scripting and databases with no success, I was just about to throw in the towel and literally go back to the drawing board when I found this book. The authors make these subjects easy to understand and the tutorials are excellent for bridging the graphic person's need to see the concepts in action. I've never written a review before, but this book has finally made me understand and given me the tools to move forward.



5. This isn't a criticism of the book, but pay attention that it's from 2001 and covers Flash 5, NOT the latest Flash MX and its available Flash Remoting technology which offers far easier server-side integration.

   Still, the info in the book still has value today to those who have not yet bought Flash MX. Indeed, even if you have Flash Mx, if your server is Perl, PHP, CF5, etc, then the approaches here will work since the new Flash Remoting only works on CFMX, ASP.NET, and select J2EE platforms.

   Then again, MX users who do get the book should check out the newer LoadVars object as an alternative to the older but still supported LoadVariables. The approach to processing XML is also vastly improved in MX.

   Of course, the book can't be faulted for having come out prior to MX. It's just that since the title doesn't say Flash 5, if you buy the book thinking it's about the latest and greatest ways of doing Flash/server integration, you'd likely be disappointed. Just offering this as a caution.

5 comments about Flash ActionScript for Designers: Drag, Slide, Fade (VOICES).

1. As others have stated, this book has errors, and what's worse those errors are not even pointed out on the book's website. The least the author/publisher could do is keep the website up-to-date.

   The good part is this book does contain some interesting effects with ActionScript, but this is not a book for ActionScript beginners. It is for people with either some background in ActionScript already, or with JavaScript. Otherwise, you will be frustrated very quickly. The quality of the physical publication is quite high with excellent paper stock, full color throughout and long book width. New Riders, to their credit, rarely produces cheap physical products.

   In all, this book has some good meaty content, but poor technical editing to catch the errors mars its overall usefulness; hence the mixed review.




2. This book is great for learning how some of the great Flash tricks are done. I'm not a designer or Flash programmer by trade, but after perusing this book I was able to employ my knowledge of similar ECMA languages to ActionScript and create sliding and fading effects as well as a few others.

   Highly recommended for someone trying to expand their ActionScript toolset.

   -Steve Parks
   Macromedia Certified Instructor
   Macromedia Certified Advanced Cold Fusion MX Developer
   Cold Fusion Developer's Journal Contributing Author




3. This book claims to take the fear out of programming but it jumps right into writing raw code in "Advanced" mode as opposed to coding in "Normal" mode which I would assume to be the logical first step.

   The author does a good job of introducing the ActionScript language by using metaphors but failed to get me to actually program anything.

   This book is not for designers, maybe it is for programmers but, I would guess that programmers would require more depth than this book provides.




4. I was very disappoointed when I bought this book. I was learning flash and I wanted to get a good basic understanding of actionscript. When I started reading the book, I knew this wasn't it. There were errors and as I quickly discovered, this is definitely not a book for beginners. There are better books out there. Save your money!



5. Be warned. If you are intending to download the resource files and follow along with the excercises....or want to look at finished projects with finished code.... The web site and resources that the book refers to NO LONGER EXISTS. I emailed both the publisher New Riders, and the author Brendan Dawes and have still not heard from them after two weeks. May have some useful information for you but if you want to follow along as the book suggests.... BE WARNED. I would be extra careful with any titles by New Riders or Brendan Dawes. Do research about the resources BEFORE you purchase.

No comments about GIS Environmental Modelling and Engineering.

No comments about Explore Tibet.

No comments about Learning Media Design.

1 comments about Computer Graphics for Design: From Algorithms to Autocad.

1. This book presents the basic concepts of Computer-Aided Design. The author wrote a book which should be understandable to everyone who wants to learn the basic aspects of the Computer-Aided Design thoery. However, i doubt if this book is helpful for an advanced reader or a graduate student who is looking for more specialized or analytically represented concepts.