1 comments about The Inventor Toolmaker: Extending Open Inventor, Release 2 (OpenGL).

1. I think the reference manual is important because of the hierarchial nature of the class structures. Unless, you can visualize a map of all the class relations and there properties this book is a necessity. Open Inventor uses many default parameters for fields and attributes, but you may want to customize the node behavior. The reference manual explains each class, its fields, and the effects of applying various enumeration types.

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 Mathematica - A System for Doing Mathematics by Computer.

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.

1 comments about Exploring Mathematics With Mathematica: Dialogs Concerning Computers and Mathematics.

1. This book uses the powerful "Mathematica" tool, to present mathematical issues. Most of them are very interesting subjects, which include Sounds, chaos, ... The idea of discussing the subjects in dialogs, contributes a lot to the discussion. I really enjoyed the book, and it is suitable for everyone who likes mathematics, especially those who have "Mathematica".

3 comments about Pro J2ME Polish: Open Source Wireless Java Tools Suite.

1. I searched for something like that so long. The tool is definetely already state of the art to enable Developers producing professionell applications under the J2ME Plattform. This book supplement the already existing and good documentation and explains everything from higher perspective.
   
   Very Well done !



2. When you first learn J2ME, you learn about this fantasy world where all devices follow the J2ME specification to a tee. But in the real world, because of the interpretive nature of the specifications, no two devices really implement the specification exactly the same. So this requires either targeting a particular device or have many versions of you app to run on different devices.
   
   Man what a pain. But that is where J2ME Polish comes to the rescue. J2ME Polish provides pre-compiler directives to allow you to write code such that J2ME Polish's build script can automatically create different versions for you on the fly however you want. There is a lot more to J2ME Polish than just that, but this is a book review.
   
   So let's get to that review. Well, first Robert Virkus is J2ME Polish, well he is the architect and lead programmer for J2ME Polish. Who better to write a book about it? Consider this book the hard copy of the manual for J2ME Polish. If you are going to use J2ME Polish, then this book is a must. It is the reference book that you will need to find anything you need to know about J2ME Polish.
   
   Now, it isn't really a read all the way through the book and you can be J2ME Polish expert. You really need to be actually using J2ME Polish at the time, to better grasp what is being explained. The book can be hard to understand, not because of the writing, but because J2ME Polish is feature rich and there is lots to learn.
   
   I highly recommend using J2ME Polish and buying this book if you will be developing for more than one device, and also to get their cool looking GUI screens, rather than MIDP 2.0 High Level GUIs.



3. I'm a serious J2ME developer. I bought this book because it claimed to solve the 600 phone problem. It also promised to do some fancy GUI which are otherwise completely lacking in J2ME.
   
   However, right out of the box the first demo, the menu sample, fails utterly. Ant crashed because I didn't put an Ant jar file in the any classpath then the menu sample didn't work. I had to search some forum to find there is a bug in the latest RC4 download. Apparently no one at Enough caught or fixed it. To fix it I had to patch a css file deep inside the project. If that wasn't enough the actual menu demo looked horrible on WTK 2.5. Couldn't see the menu highlights and it scrolled incorrectly.
   
   Then I tried the roadrunner game. But the game didn't fit on the screen properly--isn't this the 600 phone issue? Ultimately, when I tried to exit, the game (or emulator) crashed. I looked at the jar file size and it was a whopping 462 KB on just 1,433 lines of source! Unreal.
   
   I tried the tabbing demo which looked decent and worked well enough but it was 430 KB on just 200 lines of source. This is awful.
   
   J2ME Polish depends on Ant and preprocessing of #ifdefs which were recognized a bad idea when C introduced them 30 years ago. C++ introduced const (and Java, final) partly for this reason. Actually, in J2ME Polish (and NetBeans) they're not #ifdefs but //#ifdefs because Java never bothered, and rightly, with this silliness--and here they are back again. They make the code less readable and they're virtually impossible to debug.
   
   Then there's this matter of integration of the IDE (I use Eclipse) and Ant. I mean, why bother with an IDE if you must still use Ant? Throw in some .css files, too, for good measure. I just don't get it.
   
   Indeed, I'm returning the book for a refund. I had enough from Enough.

5 comments about Bryce 4 f/x and design: Discover What's Behind the Coolest Effects from a Respected Bryce Professional.

1. I have a real problem that I have been aching to get fixed and that is....

   In the Bryce 4 F/x book on Page 312 is a tutorial about making a flying device fly. It is called "Wild Ride" (chapter 7)

   I viewed the quicktime video which displays the flying device turning corners while flying.

   The first thing that the author tell me is to import is the"Between 8 and Mobius Ribbon Path" in the document. That lets the flying device move along a path. The path is a figure 8 type pattern, but when ever I try to get the flying device (a kind of an eggshell with a hole in it) to turn the corners, it won't.

   I cannot for the life of me figure out why I can't make the flying device turn so I can set the animation further along the path. It mentions simply to drag the flying device to were you start. But you are supposed to set two key frames I believe, one to start and the other at the finish. So I try to follow all the instructions to the letter of the law but the darn flying eggshell will under no circumstances obey my command to turn around the bend of the figure eight type corners. The whole figure eight Mobius ribbon path turns with with flying eggshell:(.

   Because the instructions in the book are not clear I can't get both seperated were one is independant of the other so I can move the eggshell seperately.

   In other words, this book is filled with areas were he leaves out key steps in order for one to do the projects. I am have not gone over all the tutorials, but I find that this book is not a real great step by step "learn" type book!

   I bought one of his other books and I found it to be some what the same way. there is some neat drawings of bugs etc. I don't feel it would be right for me to knock his artistic talent. But I craaaaaaaaaaaaave a well written (with nice pics) book on things I love to learn. And I swear, I believe this book does not deliver this. This is coming from a newbie at animation. But I believe I know a good tutorial type book when I see one. One such example is Adobe's Classroom in a Book. I bought the Premiere 5.1 book and it delivers big time. Øf course this is coming from a newbie at that as well.

   But never-the -less, you get a feel for a good book. I just hope somebody that will be writing a book on Bryce well glean out something of what I am saying. Because it is so true, beginners NEED good books to learn from! Step by step tuorials with plenty of photo's and images, .mov's of what they are trying to get across. They shouldn't leave out steps, that is vital to the life and blood of a good tutorial book. Ever single step should be accounted for,. O how I crave a good tutorial book! Calling all Bryce 4 writers! We need you!

   William Furner




2. Ignore this book. Buy the Susan Kitchens book (published 31 October 2000) instead. I haven't yet seen Susan's book, but I'm still using her Real World Bryce 2. Mortier's book is supporting a broken table leg.



3. This book was a waste of money. Not only were the tips and tricks vague and largely incorrect, judging from the Authors images, he did NOT spend any time learning this program. He did, however, manage to acquire images from the Bryce list from some of the better Artists. Personally, if I had been employed with Metacreations, I would have paid him NOT to publish this book. Save your money, buy Susan Kitchens book



4. I see many people have put this book down. I have had to wonder if they were expecting a beginning guide or tutorial. I got exactly what I was expecting out of this book. That was a better understading of Bryce 4 and tips and tricks that I was unaware of.



5. I'm afraid the only part of the book that I found any use for was the part not written by Shamms Mortier. I'm talking about the section where various artists comment on how they created the pictures in the colour plates section. Unfortunately even this section is mostly made up of pics by the author, and I'm afraid I do not share his tastes in colour, among other things.

   I have often noticed how people will look everywhere for information on a software, except where they should start: the manual. The Bryce 4 manual is certainly not perfect and there are a lot of advanced features that are not covered, but it is a great introduction to Bryce and 3D in general. You won't find anything in this book that you cannot find in the Bryce manual, except for the occasional mistake.

No comments about Computational Science and Its Applications - ICCSA 2008: International Conference, Perugia, Italy, June 30 - July 3, 2008, Proceedings, Part II (Lecture Notes in Computer Science).