5 comments about A Little Pigeon Toad (Bright Ideas).

1. This book is a wonderful guide to literal humor. I have read it to my all my classes, ranging in age from 1st grade to 5th! Everyone enjoys it! After reading it, children often want to create their own literal humor!



2. One of the masters of illustrating the ridiculousness of English, Mr. Gwynne has done it again by taking common idioms and interpreting them literally. The reader accompanies a young girl through all sorts of different, funny English sayings and phrases and takes them all literally. In the one that is the title of the book, she stand off in a field looking at a strange animal that has the body, legs and wings of a pigeon, but the brown, bumpy head of a toad. On a beautiful 2-page spread are three grizzly bears wearing kilts and tams dancing to the music of a fourth bear who plays the bagpipes. The text reads, "Grandma says our four bears came from Scotland." Meanwhile, Daddy wants a pool table and there are three feet in a yard.

   As a teacher, I love to use this book to illustrate how funny and confusing English can be, even for a native speaker! When reading the book I tell them about the time when I was in elementary school and listening to the news reports of "gorilla warfare." Usually I ask students to compose and illustrate their own literal interpretation of common phrases ("hit any key to continue" is a perennial favorite).

   Readers who enjoy this book may wish to check out some of the other, similar play on words books by Mr. Gwynne, such as "A Chocolate Moose for Dinner" or "The King Who Rained." Another excellent author readers may enjoy is Jon Agee and his books like "Who Ordered the Jumbo Shrimp? And Other Oxymorons." Beautifully illustrated and very funny, this book is highly recommended.




3. One of the masters of illustrating the ridiculousness of English, Mr. Gwynne has done it again by taking common idioms and interpreting them literally. The reader accompanies a young girl through all sorts of different, funny English sayings and phrases and takes them all literally. In the one that is the title of the book, she stand off in a field looking at a strange animal that has the body, legs and wings of a pigeon, but the brown, bumpy head of a toad. On a beautiful 2-page spread are three grizzly bears wearing kilts and tams dancing to the music of a fourth bear who plays the bagpipes. The text reads, "Grandma says our four bears came from Scotland." Meanwhile, Daddy wants a pool table and there are three feet in a yard.

   As a teacher, I love to use this book to illustrate how funny and confusing English can be, even for a native speaker! When reading the book I tell them about the time when I was in elementary school and listening to the news reports of "gorilla warfare." Usually I ask students to compose and illustrate their own literal interpretation of common phrases ("hit any key to continue" is a perennial favorite).

   Readers who enjoy this book may wish to check out some of the other, similar play on words books by Mr. Gwynne, such as "A Chocolate Moose for Dinner" or "The King Who Rained." Another excellent author readers may enjoy is Jon Agee and his books like "Who Ordered the Jumbo Shrimp? And Other Oxymorons." Beautifully illustrated and very funny, this book is highly recommended.




4. This is a delightful book to read to and with children. It introduces them not only to some of the idiosyncracies of the English language, but also to verbal humor. Fred Gwynne was not only a wonderful comic actor, but he was a great artist as well; the pictures in these books are soft and playful augmenting the confused phrases in the young girl's mind. Kids love this book and it is a joy to read.



5. A Little Pigeon Toad is a humorous picture book written as a series of single sentence vignettes that take place in a little girl's mind. Homonyms are used throughout this story and they confuse the little girl who interprets what her parents say differently than what they meant. Gwynne's book illustrates our ridiculous English language; for example, "Daddy wants a pool table," shows a table with a pool in it and everyone's swimming. The illustrations are literal interpretations of what the little girl thinks her parents are saying.
   The words, easy to read, short and very simple, are intended for an audience between grades 3 and 5. But, adults or older readers would also enjoy this book.
   Gwynne wrote and illustrated 13 other books: The King Who Rained, A Chocolate Moose For Dinner, The Sixteen Hand Horse, The Kings Trousers, and Easy to See Why. He attended Harvard and worked as an illustrator before starring as Herman on the TV show "The Munsters". Gwynne died in 1993.

No comments about Teach Yourself Flash MX (Teach Yourself).

5 comments about Wavelets for Computer Graphics (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics).

1. This is a fine introduction to wavelets for computer scientists, with many fun applications in computer graphics. Easier than other introductions I've seen, in part because it avoids the frequency domain. I'm using it in a graduate course, but it would be easy to use by yourself or in a special seminar for undergraduates in CS or math.



2. I shall be brief and skip saucy words and go to the main point: Why you should acquire this book? 2 Reasons. 1)Michael Lounsbery, Tony D. DeRose and Joe Warren, "Multiresolution analysis for surfaces of arbitrary topological type" 2)"Multiresolution curves", Adam Finkelstein and David H. Salesin.

   The authors offer their knowledge in an early stage and this honour them in the largest extent! This book provides an expleantion for these two papers and their branches(papers originating from these theories).




3. I noticed that Tony DeRose, one of the authors of this book,
   was a project lead in Pixar's wonderful film "Monsters".
   Computer graphics, especially at the cutting edge practiced
   by Pixar is deeply mathematical. This is certainly reflected
   in this book.

   This book covers a number of areas that are not covered outside
   of journal articles. For example, there are chapters on
   interpolating wavelets (e.g., wavelets built via splines or
   polynomials). The coverage of interpolation and splines to
   construct wavelet is good, but the authors quickly gloss over
   the other critical half of the problem: how to construct a
   scaling function for a given interpolating wavelet. I have
   read over this material several times and I have not found the
   answer. I have come to doubt that the answer is there, at
   least in a complete form.

   This characterizes much of the book. The authors cover
   important material, but if you are not already deeply
   familiar wavelet mathematics, it may be difficult or
   impossible to implement an algorith from the coverage
   provided in this book. Many practical issues are missing.
   For example, many wavelets calculated on a finite data set
   like an image can have edge effects. There is little
   in this book on minimizing edge effects.

   If you are already familiar with wavelet algorithms and their
   implementation, this book may be a great reference for wavelet
   applications in computer graphics. But it is by no means
   an introduction for the novice.




4. This is an easy to read book covering simple wavelets relating to computer graphics. This book also provides a very easy and fun explanation of subdivision.
   
   This book is primarily aimed at the application of wavelets, it contains simple and easy to follow illustrations of key concepts, and is very light on proofs. While I may be slightly biased, in that I have a degree in Computer Engineering, I really can't imagine an explanation of wavelets being any easier to read than this book is.
   
   Overall, the authors did an excellent job creating an introductory book on wavelets relating to computer graphics.



5. I'll start out by saying that I am a complete idiot who does not know the first thing about calculus, but I do have 10 years worth of software engineering experience and have no trouble following complicated data processing concepts when they are explained in terms of procedures rather than terse, obfuscated, squiggly equations. The introduction in this book looked promising in that it seemed to be taking a step-by-step "this is how you need to juggle the pixel values around" approach to the concept of wavelet transforms, but as luck would have it, the very next page AFTER the freely available sample is chock full of everything I can't read and didn't want. Of course, my own ignorance is neither the book nor the author's fault, but a better description and/or lengthier excerpt from the publisher could have saved me a lot of trouble ordering and returning this item since it's not something a lot of brick and mortar stores carry on their shelves. The price tag is also more than a little steep for its size, but I suppose the book's target audience is college kids who are used to throwing away hundreds of dollars on whatever their professors tell them to.
   
   I've no doubt that mathematicians will find humor in (and possibly be enraged by) my folly, but maybe this will save a fellow stupid code monkey a little time and money.

5 comments about Flash Enabled: Flash Design and Development for Devices.

1. This is truly one of the few books on the market that looks at Flash from various perspectives and nails it. The contributors to this book keep the chapters focused, provide examples in context and realize that most folks out there aren't "code" geeks; there are both creative designers and innovative developers. The number of devices and platforms commented on and "tips and notes" are great.

   You might ask "Where is the CD in the back of the book?", well better than that they have a website for the book and the list of useful URL's in the back of the book is awesome and helps everyone grow their skills when it comes to developing for these evolving platforms. As a Macromedia evangelist I recommend a select few books to the customers and end-users this is one of them.




2. I can't put the book down. Making your own applications to run on your pocket pc is future.



3. the GOOD and BAD:

   First, THE BAD:
   I want to make DVD menus with flash. I thought this would show me how, but instead it was a case study of a company called ... that used Flash and a C-Programmer made a connector from Flash to the DVD-OBJECT controller. no code for that. That ..... Don't buy it if that's what you hope to find.

   Same with the Interactive Television stuff: Mainly a case study with no practical hows. Kind friggen lame.

   There could have been a section on how to create 1 flash file that works on any handheld, desktop, etc. It would have been long, but there are those of us who bought the book and were really disappointed.
   I think they were trying to publish the book before this one came out:

   amazon.

   BUT
   Great Branden Hall stuff. that guy is who I want to be. He's amazing. other info on templates and stuff are excellent. top notch.

   I'd wait and NOT get this book unless you walk into a bookstore and leaf through it.




4. This might not be the sort of application the authors envisioned, but the book certainly helped us! We run a small online casino off the coast of Britain, TheGoldCasino (dot-com), and our development staff is fairly sparse (we're aimed primarily at users of e-gold, so we're not a big operation). We wanted to experiment with mobile games, but we assumed the cost would be prohibitive. Flash Enabled brought our current Flash developers from a state of knowing nothing about the PocketPC to having functional Flash-client prototypes in a shockingly short period of time! I don't know of higher praise for a book like this than: "It changed our business and made us money".

   Obviously, it's not yet clear how large the universe of PocketPC gamers with e-gold accounts will be, but this book at least compressed our development time to the point where it is quite easy for our mobile games to be profitable. Great stuff!




5. Nice book, but it only touches some aspects of Flash for devices, never going into much detail, specially when it comes to videogames.

No comments about Explore Antarctica (Explore the Continents).

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

1 comments about Animation Techniques in Win32.

1. I think that this book is best ulitized by game developers.
   This book is useful in learning 2D cell animation principles, such as double buffering, dirty rectangles, and phased sprites. It is biased to 8-bit graphics with good coverage of the palette issues of Windows.
   
   It is easy to follow, and is a good read. You can code directly from the examples without too much problems. A good companion for coding DIBs is Spells of Fury by Norton. Also showing its age.
   
   However this text is steeped in MFC to the point that trying to avoid MFC is a major mental investment. The fact is MFC is rarely used by game developers. Current coders will want to concentrate on 8, 16 and 32 bit per pixel modes.
   
   Additionally, the major high-performance API described (CreateDIBSection which is used by the obsolete WinG library), has been displaced by the DirectDraw API. One can develop a 2D framework that selects one at run-time (my current project) but most new work will benefit from DirectDraw exclusively.
   
   There are some errors such as not Deleting some GDI objects, but they are easy to spot with practice.

No comments about Explore Asia (Explore the Continents).

1 comments about GIS in Organizations : How Effective Are GIS In Practice?.

1. An excellent research on integration of technology and organizations was done and described in this book by the author.

   The authors did discuss the problematic processes for an organization to adapt a new technology. However, the features of GIS-common functions, possible programings, were not fully described. Subsequently, solutions on the integration of GIS and organizations was not developed.

   On the other hand, the issue which the authors want to bring about is indeed the bottle neck of implementation of GIS. It needs more attention and research on the human aspect when we try to apply the GIS technology. Otherwise, the new technology GIS would be finally "irrelevant" instead of "invention".

No comments about Mathematica Computer Manual to accompany Advanced Engineering Mathematics, 8th Edition (Advanced Engineering Mathematics).